The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

by Nigel Cawthorne

  “I was seeing Carlito in front of me,” he said.

  The killings were so brutal and the inaction of the local police so shocking that the Organization of American States launched a campaign to pressure local authorities into more rigorously investigating the cases. Several foreign and Brazilian human rights groups also petitioned the federal government to intervene in the investigation.

  As result, the police in the northern state of Maranhao announced that Francisco das Chagas confessed to the mass killing of 18 boys around Sao Luis from 1991 to 2003. They believe the bicycle mechanic may have killed three others during the same period. Police in neighbouring Para state want to question him concerning the whereabouts of 10 youngsters who were either killed or disappeared there.

  In spite of the concerns from human rights groups, the state’s attorney general said the detailed evidence provided by Chagas showed “strong signs” he was responsible, based on his own confessions. But there are concerns. The Organization of American States criticized the state government for failing to cooperate with their inquiry. Children’s rights activitist Pereira da Silva said her organization would focus its attentions on identifying the officers responsible for the imprisonment of Roberio Ribeiro Cruz, who was sentenced to 19 years after supposedly admitting to killing an 11-year old in 1998, and the arrest of two others who are awaiting trial for the slaying of another child in 1996.

  According to the police Chagas has now confessed to the killings of 30 boys in Maranhao state and 12 others in Para state between 1991 and 2003, but then retracted his confession again. If convicted of all murders, Chagas would be Brazil’s most prolific serial killer. However, most people involved in the case have their doubts that he is guilty of all the murders he is charged with and are concerned that other child killers are at large.

  Brazil’s Killer Beach

  Brazilian police said they are hunting another serial killer who has tied up, raped and repeatedly stabbed four women before dumping their bodies in a field close to a motorway. Sergeant Marcelo de Jesus Bispo said officers found the four corpses in Itabuna in the northeastern state of Bahia, 282 miles south of the beach resort of Salvador.

  Then in 2005, the police in Maranhao began combing the state’s beaches for more clues to the identity and whereabouts of a middle-aged man suspected of killing two women, from Spain and Germany. A Brazilian woman was also missing, believed she could be a victim of the same killer.

  “Everything indicates we are dealing with a serial killer,” Maranhao’s public secretary, Raimundo Cutrim, said. “The women were travelling alone, were beaten to death and were found buried.”

  Police said the tourists had all been seen with a man answering the same description.

  The body of 27-year-old Nuria Fernandez from Spain was found on an island off the coastal city of Sao Luis on 25 March 2005. Eight days before, the body of 46-year-old German Marianne Kern was found at a nearby beach. The Brazilian Valeria Augusto Veloso disappeared from the same place at around the same time.

  On 26 March, police arrested a man who allegedly used Kern’s credit card after her body was found. He said he got the card from a man whose description fitted that of the suspected killer.

  Canada’s Beast of British Columbia

  In a series of letters to 27-year-old Thomas Loudamy of Fremont, California, accused murder Robert Pickton asserted his innocence and praised the British Columbian judge for dropping 21 of the 27 murder charges against him. He has pleaded not guilty to the remaining six and has expressed his concern about the expense of the investigation which he claims is an attempt to make him a fall guy for all the missing women in British Columbia. There are at the very least 65 women missing from Vancouver’s Downside Eastside alone, the area where Pickton is said to have selected his victims.

  The ten blocks of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside comprise not just the poorest area in British Columbia, but the poorest in the whole of Canada. They call the neighbourhood “Low Track”. At its centre is the intersection of Main and Hastings, called “Pain and Wastings” by locals. Its shabby hotels, rundown bars and dilapidated pawn shops are home to 5,000 to 10,000 at any one time. Crack cocaine and heroin are supplied by Asian gangs and bikers who are frequently involved in turf wars. Most of the women addicts support their habits by prostitution, giving Low Track the highest HIV infection rate in North America.

  Low Track became famous for its “kiddy stroll”, which featured prostitutes as young as 11. Some underage girls work the streets; others are kept by pimps in special “trick pads”. New “twinkies” – runaways lured by the bright lights – arrive every day. Over 80 percent of the prostitutes in Low Track were born and brought outside Vancouver. A survey in 1995 showed that 73 percent of the girls had started in the sex trade as children. The same percentage were mothers with an average of three children each. Some 90 percent had had their children taken into care. Most did not know where their children were. In 1998, on average, there was one death a day from drug overdoses among these women.

  But there were other dangers. In 1983, women began to go missing from Low Track. The police did not notice the trend for nearly 14 years. That was hardly surprising as most of the inhabitants were transients, and runaways change their names and addresses regularly. Some simply moved on. But by 1997, the police began to fear that more than two dozen had been murdered. It was then that they began to compile a list.

  The first of the 61 names to be put on the list was that of 23-year-old Rebecca Guno, a prostitute and drug addict last seen alive on 22 June 1983. She was reported missing three days later. Such rapid reporting is unusual. Forty-three-year-old Sherry Rail – the next on the list – was not reported missing until three years after she disappeared in January 1984.

  Elaine Auerbach, aged 33, told friends she was moving to Seattle in March 1986 but she never turned up and she was reported missing in mid-April. Teressa Ann Williams, the first First-Nations woman on the list, was 15 when she was last seen alive in July 1988, but was not reported missing until March 1999. Thirty-year-old Ingrid Soet, a schizophrenic on medication, disappeared on 28 August 1989 and was reported missing on 1 October 1990. The first black woman on the list was Kathleen Dale Wattley. She was 32 years old when she vanished on 18 June 1992 and was reported missing 11 days later.

  There was then a three-year hiatus. But in March 1995 47-year-old Catherine Gonzales, a drug user and sex-trade worker, disappeared. She was reported missing 9 February 1996. In April 1995, 32-year-old Catherine Maureen Knight went missing. Her disappearance was reported to the police on 11 November. Dorothy Spence, a 33-year-old First-Nations woman, vanished on 6 August 1995. Her disappearance was reported earlier on 30 October. Then 22-year-old Diana Melnick disappeared two days after Christmas and was reported missing two days later.

  There was another hiatus until 3 October 1996 when 22-year-old drug user and prostitute Tanya Holyk disappeared. Her family knew something was wrong when she didn’t come home to see her son, who was about to turn one, after a night out with friends. Pickton has since been charged with her murder. She was reported missing on 3 November. Olivia Gale Williams, aged 21, disappeared on 6 December 1996 and was not reported missing until 4 July the following year.

  Twenty-year-old Stephanie Lane left her two-year-old son with her mother along with an uncashed welfare cheque, though she continued to call on birthdays and holidays. Then on 11 March 1997, she was released from hospital after an episode of drug psychosis. She was last seen alive at the Patricia Hotel on Hastings Street later that day. She has not been heard of since.

  Twenty-two-year old Helen Mae Hallmark was last seen alive on 17 June 1997 and reported missing on 23 September 1998. Her sister wrote a poem to her memory.

  Janet Henry, who also went missing in June 1997, came from the KwaKwaQueWak Nation in Kingcome Inlet in British Columbia, the youngest in a family of thirteen. She had a happy childhood until her mother fell ill and her father died. The children were sent to residential s
chools and foster homes, losing all ties to their native culture. Her sister Lavina was raped and murdered when she was 19. Another sibling killed himself.

  A bright young woman, Janet graduated from high school, became a trained hairdresser, married and had a daughter, who she was devoted to. But when the marriage broke up in the late 1980s, her husband was given custody of their daughter. Janet was devastated and her life went into free-fall. She moved to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and begun attending parties where she exchanged sex for drugs.

  She had already had one brush with a serial killer. In the early 1980s, she met Clifford Olson, who drugged and raped her, but her life was spared. Olson pleaded guilty to 11 murders in 1982. All too aware of the dangers of her profession, Janet would phone her brothers and sisters frequently to let them know she was okay. She was reported missing on 28 June 1997, two days after her last contact with her siblings.

  Marnie Lee Frey, 27, was last seen alive in August 1997, though she was not reported missing until 4 September 1998. She had a baby at 18 and asked her parents to adopt the child.

  “She said, ‘Mom, this is the only thing I can do for her. I love her dearly, but I know I can’t look after her as a mom,’” her mother recalled.

  Her parents pretended that the child, Brittney, was Marnie’s younger sister but were forced to tell her the truth in the light of the publicity surrounding the case.

  Jacqueline Murdock, aged 26, was last seen alive on 14 August but was not reported missing until 30 October 1998. Thirty-three-year-old Cindy Louise Beck disappeared in September 1997 and was reported missing on 30 April 1998. Andrea Fay Borhaven, aged 25, had no fixed address until she vanished sometime during 1997, it is thought. Her disappearance was only reported to the police on 18 May 1999. Thirty-eight-year-old Kerry Lynn Koski disappeared in January 1998 and was reported missing on the 29th of the month.

  Four more women would disappear before Vancouver police were prompted to take an interest in the case. Twenty-three-year-old Jacqueline McDonnell disappeared in mid-January 1998 and was reported missing on 22 February 1999 and 46-year-old Inga Monique Hall was last seen alive in February 1998 and reported missing on 3 March.

  Twenty-nine-year-old mother-of-two Sarah Jane deVries was last seen on the corner of Princess and Hastings in the early morning of 14 April 1998 and reported missing by friends later the same day.

  “This started when she was 12,” said her mother Pat. “She has HIV, she has hepatitis C. What I do for her now is look after her kids the best I can.”

  When Sarah went missing, her children were seven and two.

  “It’s very hard to tell a seven-year-old that somebody is missing,” said Pat. “It’s something you can’t come to terms with, you can’t work through, because there’s never an end to it.”

  Nobody has seen or heard from her since. This was unprecedented as she always called on her mother’s birthday, Mother’s Day and her own birthday.

  Ex-boyfriend Wayne Leng said Sarah underwent “a lot of turmoil” in her 29 years, particularly as she was a child of mixed parentage adopted by an all-white family on the West Side. As Sarah herself observed in a diary she left behind: “I think my hate is going to be my destination, my executioner.”

  Leng put up posters around the Vancouver’s Downtown East-side carrying Sarah’s picture and details of a $1000 reward. But three phone calls he got on his pager around midnight one Saturday night left him chilled.

  “Sarah’s dead,” said a man’s slightly slurred voice, with music pounding in the background. “So there will be more girls like her dead. There will be more prostitutes killed. There will be one every Friday night. At the busiest time.”

  The second message featured the same voice and had the same music playing in the background.

  “You’ll never find Sarah again,” the man said. “So just stop looking for her, all right? She doesn’t want to be seen and heard from again, all right? So, ’bye. She’s dead.”

  The final message said: “This is in regard to Sarah. I just want to let you know that you’ll never find her again alive because a friend of mine killed her and I was there.”

  Leng said the mystery caller knew things about Sarah deVries not known by many others.

  Sheila Catherine Egan was 20 when she vanished in July 1998. Her disappearance was reported on 5 August. She had been a prostitute since the age of 15.

  In September 1998, a First Nations’ group sent the authorities a list of women they said had been murdered in Downtown East-side and demanded a thorough investigation. The police responded by saying that some of those listed had moved away and were still alive. Others had died from drug overdoses or disease. However, the complaint prompted Detective Dave Dickson to take a second look at the list of all the Low Track women who had simply disappeared without a trace. By now it had enough names on it to persuade Dickson’s superiors to allow him to set up a cold-case task force.

  Throwing its net wide, the task-force started with 40 cases from all parts of Vancouver dating back to 1971. But in an effort to find a pattern, the roster was narrowed to 16 prostitutes from Low Track who had disappeared since 1995. By the time the task force made its first arrest the number had climbed to at least 54 women, who had vanished between 1983 and 2001. By then the task force had swelled to 85.

  In the last three months of 1998, while the task force was compiling old cases, four more Low Track prostitutes vanished. Thirty-one-year-old Julie Louise Young was last seen alive in October 1998 and finally reported missing on 1 June 1999. Drug-addict Angela Rebecca Jardine was 28 when she went missing, but she was mentally handicapped and had the mind of a 10-year-old child. She had been working Low Track’s streets since she was 20. Last seen between 3.30 and 4 p.m. on 20 November 1998 at a rally of around 700 people in Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, she was reported missing on 6 December. Twenty-nine-year-old Michelle Gurney, a Native American, disappeared in December 1998 and was reported missing on the 22nd. Twenty-year-old Marcella Helen Creison got out of jail on 27 December 1998. She was last seen at 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning around the corner from the Drake Hotel and never returned to the apartment where her mother and boyfriend were waiting with unopened Christmas presents. She was reported missing on 11 January 1999.

  The task force’s investigations were given added impetus in March 1999 when Jamie Lee Hamilton, a transsexual and former prostitute who went on to become the director of a drop-in centre for sex-trade workers, called a news conference complaining of the police’s lax attitude towards missing prostitutes.

  First the task force had to decide if there was a serial killer at large in Vancouver. Inspector Kim Rossmo was convinced there was. The founder of the “geographic profiling” later used in the “Freeway Phantom” case, he was then working for the Vancouver Police Department. He mapped unsolved crimes in an attempt to highlight any pattern or criminal signature overlooked by detectives working on individual cases. Geographic profiles work on the premise that most serial criminals operate close to home. By analyzing the spatial patterns of the attacks, it is said to be possible to trace one serial killer to within two-fifths of a mile of his home. The idea came from studying the way African lions hunt, which almost perfectly matches the predations of a serial killer. Lions look for an animal that exhibits some indication of weakness – the old, the very young, the infirm, the vulnerable – then they go to a watering hole and wait, because they know their potential victim will be drawn there.

  “We see that all the time with criminal offenders,” says Rossmo, now a Research Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Texas State University. “They go to target-rich environments to do their hunting. Spatial patterns are produced by serial killers as they search and attack. The system analyzes the geography of these, the victim encounter, the attack, the murder and body dumpsites.”

  In May 1999 Rossmo spotted an unusual concentration of disappearances in Downtown Eastside. However, his superiors dismissed his
conclusions, insisting that some of the missing women had left Vancouver voluntarily. Rossmo resigned, but he went on to establish geographic profiling as a respected technique used worldwide to track serial killers.

  The task force were further hampered by the fact that Canada’s “Violent Crime Linkage System” did not track missing persons unless there was some evidence of foul play – and none had been found in the cases of the missing women so far. And the data was incomplete. In some cases, the police did not even have a date when the woman had gone missing, and prostitutes and pimps were reluctant to co-operate with officers who would ordinarily put them in jail. However, in June 1999, investigators met with relatives of several missing women. They reviewed police and coroners’ databases throughout Canada and the United States, and checked drug rehabilitation facilities, hospitals, mental institutions, AIDS hospices, witness-protection programmes and cemetery records, looking for evidence that women on the list might still be alive or had perished from natural causes.

  Disturbing news came from Agassiz, 60 miles to the east of Vancouver, where the bodies of four prostitutes had been dumped in 1995 and 1996. None of them were on the Low Track list. And in Edmonton, capital of the adjoining province of Alberta, the police believe a serial killer might be connected to the bodies of 12 prostitutes found around that city since 1986.

  Some women who made the list were then discovered alive. Twenty-two-year-old Patricia Gay Perkins left Low Track and her one-year-old son in an effort to make a new life for herself. No one was concerned and it was 18 years before she was reported missing in 1996. She then appeared on the published list of the Vancouver’s missing prostitutes. On 17 December 1999, she phoned from Ontario to tell the police she was alive and drug-free.

  Fifty-year-old Rose Ann Jensen was found in December 1999. She disappeared in October 1991. Reported as missing soon after, she made the list in 1998. The following year, police discovered that she was alive and living in Toronto when they were scanning a national health-care database.