The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Linda Jean Coombes was reported missing twice – once in August 1994 and again in April 1999. However, she had died of a heroin overdose on 15 February 1994. Her body arrived in Vancouver’s morgue without identification. She was so wasted that her own mother did not even recognize a photograph of her. But she was eventually identified in September 1999 by DNA and removed from the list.

  Karen Anne Smith was reported missing on 27 April 1999, but was removed from the list when it was discovered that she had in fact died of heart failure in hospital in Edmonton on 13 February 1999. Twenty-four-year-old Anne Wolsey was reported missing by her mother on 1 January 1997. In March 2002, her father called from Montreal to tell police his daughter was alive and well.

  Although five names were removed from the list of missing women, more were added and it became clear to the task force that some of the women must have been the victims of foul play. The police then began to look for suspects among men with a history of violence against prostitutes. Suspicion fell on 36-year-old Michael Leopold, who had been arrested in 1996 for assaulting a Low Track streetwalker. He had beaten her and tried to force a rubber ball down her throat, though was scared off when a passer-by heard the girl’s screams. Although he told a court-appointed psychiatrist about his fantasies of raping and murdering prostitutes, more went missing while he was being held. He was eventually absolved of any involvement in the disappearances, but was sentenced to 14 years in prison for aggravated assault.

  Another suspect was 43-year-old Barry Thomas Neidermier, a native of Alberta. He had been convicted of pimping a 14-year-old girl in 1990, which seems to have left him with a grudge against prostitutes. In April 2000, he was arrested for violent attacks on seven Downtown Eastside prostitutes. The charges against him include abduction, unlawful imprisonment, assault, sexual assault, theft and administering a noxious substance. While none of Neidermier’s victims appeared on the missing list, he was considered “a person of interest”.

  Then there was the unidentified rapist who attacked a 38-year-old woman outside her Low Track hotel in August 2001. During the attack, the assailant boasted that he had raped and killed other women in the Downtown Eastside. And there were others. The Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society compiled a daily “bad date” file, recording reports by local prostitutes of “Johns” who attacked or threatened them.

  Towards the end of 1998, 37-year-old Bill Hiscox told the police of the goings on at the pig farm in Port Coquitlam just outside Vancouver owned by David Francis and Robert William “Willie” Pickton. The brothers also owned a salvage firm in Surrey, southeast of Vancouver. Hiscox got the job through a relative who had been a girlfriend of Robert Pickton in 1997. He had to go out to the pig farm to pick up his pay-cheques and described it as “a creepy-looking place”.

  After reading newspaper reports on Vancouver’s missing women, Hiscox grew suspicious of the Pickton brothers, particularly as Robert Pickton was “a pretty quiet guy” who drove a converted bus with deeply tinted windows. The brothers also ran a registered charity called the Piggy Palace Good Times Society. A non-profit society, its official mandate was to “organize, coordinate, manage and operate special events, functions, dances, shows and exhibitions on behalf of service organizations, sports organizations and other worthy groups”. In fact, the Piggy Palace – a converted building at the hog farm – was a drinking club for local bikers which featured “entertainment” provided by Low Track prostitutes.

  Police were already aware of the Pickton brothers. David Pickton had been convicted of sexual assault in 1992, fined $1,000 and given 30 days’ probation. Pickton attacked the victim in his trailer at the pig farm, but she managed to escape. Soon after Piggy Palace opened, the Port Coquitlam authorities sued the Pickton brothers and their sister, Linda Louise Wright, for violating local zoning laws. Their farm was designated for agricultural use, but they had converted a farm building “for the purpose of holding dances, concerts and other recreations” that drew as many as 1,800 persons. After a New Year’s Eve party on 31 December 1998, the Picktons were served with an injunction banning future parties and the Piggy Palace Good Times Society was stripped of its non-profit status.

  Robert “Willie” Pickton was charged with attempted murder on 23 March 1997 after Wendy Lynn Eistetter, a drug addict and prostitute with a wild and reckless past, was rescued from the roadside by a couple driving past the pig farm at 1.45 a.m. She was partially clothed, had been stabbed several times and was covered in blood.

  Earlier in the evening, Pickton had picked her up and driven her to the pig farm, According to a police report, Pickton then “did attempt to commit the murder of Wendy Lynn Eistetter, by stabbing her repeatedly with . . . a brown-handled kitchen knife”. She has been handcuffed at the time, but had managed to grab the knife, stab Pickton and escape. He later showed up at Eagle Ridge Hospital, where he was treated for one stab wound.

  A provincial court judge released Pickton on a $2,000 cash bond with the undertaking that he stay at the farm and not have any contact with Ms Eistetter.

  “You are to abstain completely from the use of alcohol and non-prescription drugs,” the judge ordered.

  “I don’t take them,” Pickton replied.

  A trial date was set, but the charges were stayed before the matter went to court because the attorney-general’s office decided “there was no likelihood of conviction”. Despite the grievous wounds Wendy Eistetter suffered, she was a prostitute and, therefore, an “unreliable witness”.

  Though Pickton had walked free, the stabbing had convinced Hiscox that Pickton was responsible for “all the girls that are going missing . . . [Pickton] frequents the downtown area all the time, for girls”. Hiscox told the police: “All the purses and IDs are out there in his trailer.”

  However, when the police searched the pig farm – three times according to press reports – they found nothing. While the Pickton brothers would remain “persons of interest”, their farm was not put under surveillance. Meanwhile the list of missing women grew longer. By the year 2000, it had expanded to more than three times the number of missing women first listed in 1998. This was not just because women had continued to vanish from Low Track. Other women who had disappeared earlier were now coming to the attention of the authorities.

  Forty-two-year old Laura Mah was last seen on 1 August 1985, but was not reported missing until 3 August 1999. Nancy Clark – aka Nancy Greek – was 23 when she was last seen on the evening of 22 August 1991 in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia on Vancouver Island across the strait from the city of Vancouver itself. Concerns about Clark’s well-being were raised one day after her disappearance because she had failed to return home to look after her two daughters – aged eight years and eight months – which was out of character.

  “It was the birthday of her child that day and, for a sex street worker, she was a bit of a home-body,” said Victoria Policeman Don Bland. “That’s what was suspicious at the start, because she would never have done that.”

  However, Officer Bland expressed her doubts that Nancy Clark should be on the Low Track list as she had no connection with Vancouver and only worked the streets of the capital.

  Elsie Sebastian, another Native American, was 40 when she went missing on 16 October 1992. Leigh Miner, a 34-year-old heroin addict and prostitute, phoned her sister to ask for money on 17 December 1993. That was the last time anyone heard of her. She was reported missing on 24 February 1994. Seventeen-year-old Angela Mary Arsenault was last seen on 19 August 1994 and reported missing ten days later. Thirty-six-year-old Frances Ann Young was missing on 9 April 1996. Last seen leaving her home three days before to go for a walk, she was suffering from depression at the time of her disappearance.

  Fifty-two-year-old Maria Laura Laliberte – alias Kim Keller – was last seen in Low Track on New Year’s Day, but was only reported missing on 8 March 2002. Forty-two-year-old Cindy Feliks was last seen on 26 November 1997 and reported missing 8 January 2001, while Sherr
y Leigh Irving was last seen in April 1997 and reported missing the following year.

  Ruby Anne Hardy, mother of three, disappeared at the age of 33 some time in 1998, but was not reported missing until 27 March 2002. Native Americans Georgina Faith Papin and Jennifer Lynn Furminger vanished in 1999 along with Wendy Crawford, but did not make the list until March 2000. Thirty-year-old Brenda Ann Wolfe, who went missing on 1 February 1999, made the list a month later. Tiffany Louise Drew was 27 when she disappeared on 31 December 1999, but she was not reported missing until 8 February 2002.

  Publicity surrounding the list encouraged the reporting of missing persons. Forty-two-year-old Dawn Teresa Crey was last seen on Main and Hastings on 1 November 2000 and was reported missing on 11 December. Debra Lynn Jones, aged 43, disappeared on 21 December 2000 and was reported missing four days later on Christmas Day. Twenty-five-year-old Patricia Rose Johnson went missing from Main and Hastings on 3 March 2001 but took three months to make the list. Heather Kathleen Bottomley, aged 24, made the list the same day she was last seen – 17 April 2001 – even though the police described her as a “violent suicide risk”. However, Tricia Johnson’s death had attracted more attention. Shortly before she disappeared she had been befriended by portrait photographer Lincoln Clarkes who was recording the lives of the drug-addicted prostitutes of Low Track for his books Heroines. She took time off from her revolving-door hustle for heroin and sex to talk to him about her world – how she had broken her boyfriend’s heart, abandoning him and their two young children to embrace heroin and crack cocaine instead of the family.

  Throughout the project Clarkes stayed close to Johnson, who was his original “heroine”. They became friends. During that time she tried to quit drugs for the sake of her kids. But her father’s suicide sent her into a tailspin. She had quit rehab and had been repeatedly arrested for breaking and entering.

  The last time Clarkes heard from Patricia was a message she left on his home answering machine in February 2001.

  “Hey, it’s Tricia, Lincoln,” she said in a sing-song voice. “Trying to get a hold of you, trying to find what’s up! I wish I had a number you can call me back at, but I don’t. So all I can do is keep trying.”

  Soon after she stopped cashing her welfare checks, stopped phoning her family and even stopped contact with her two children. Her mother, Marion Bryce, spoke of the terrible warning she had given her daughter who had already survived five years on the streets.

  “She was here on New Year’s Day,” she told reporters, “and I told her, ‘Patty, you’re not even going to see 25 if you keep on – you’ll be missing like those women down there.’”

  Bryce later contacted Clarkes, who gave her a photo of Patricia in shoulder-length hair, wearing a leather jacket, her lips puffy, burned by a crack pipe. Later, to attract attention to the plight of the missing women, Clarkes brought her another portrait, accompanied by a film crew.

  Days after this blaze of publicity, Patricia Rose Johnson was listed as Missing Woman No. 44. After five years working the streets of Low Track, her last known possessions were recorded as “a book (title not given), a comb, condoms, water, a spoon, cigarettes, a lighter, belt, watch, rings and a chain”.

  Weeks after Johnson disappeared, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police joined the case and promptly assembled a team of federal investigators that would grow to 30 members. But that did nothing to stem the growth of the list.

  Thirty-three-year-old Yvonne Marie Boen was listed only five days after she disappeared on 16 March 2001. Her mother, Lynn Metin, began to worry when her daughter, who had three sons, failed to show up in March 2001 for a visit with her middle son Troy, whom Metin was raising.

  “She was supposed to be here that Sunday to pick him up and she didn’t show up,” Metin told the Vancouver Sun in 2004. “She never contacted me. That just wasn’t her. Every holiday, Troy’s birthday, my birthday – it just wasn’t like her not to phone.”

  Heather Gabriel Chinnock, aged 29, vanished the following month, followed by Andrea Josebury, aged 22, on 6 June. Her grandfather Jack Cummer said Andrea was straightening out her life and was providing a good home to her infant daughter in an East Vancouver apartment some time before she disappeared.

  “She was working very hard, she needed a lot of things, but she was doing it all herself,” Cummer told the Sun. “Andrea was worn to a frazzle, but the baby was well cared for.”

  However, he said, social services received a complaint about the well-being of the girl and seized her, which sent his granddaughter back into the downward spiral of drugs and prostitution.

  “The thing is that she lost her whole reason to live,” Cummer said.

  The child was adopted and the Cummers are not able to see her. Andrea, he said, either did not realize or would not accept the finality of the adoption, and would tell her grandparents that she was going to try to get her daughter back.

  “She decided that she was going to straighten up and her prime objective was to get the baby back. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was never going to do that,” he said.

  Twenty-nine-year-old Sereena Abotsway, went missing on 1 August. Adopted at the age of four, she had always been trouble.

  “She was sweet and bubbly but she was very disturbed,” said her adoptive mother Anna Draayers. “She gave her teachers a headache and we tried to teach her at home but there was not much you could do. At that time we did not have a name for the condition, but it is now known as foetal alcohol syndrome.”

  The Draayers never lost contact with the child.

  “She was our girl, and we loved her a lot,” they said. “She phoned daily for 13 years since she left our home at age 17.”

  And hope was at hand.

  “She had come home in July,” said Mrs Draayers, “and she agreed to come home and celebrate her 30th birthday on 20 August, but she never showed up.”

  Diane Rosemary Rock, aged 34, was last seen on 19 October 2001 by the owner of the motel where she was living and was reported missing on 13 December. Diane, her husband and three children moved to British Columbia in 1992 for a fresh start in life. But in their new home, Rock’s personal problems resurfaced and she was back using drugs again. After a while her marriage fell apart and she was on her own. The last member of the family to see her was her teenage daughter. That was in June 2001 when they met her to celebrate the teenager’s birthday.

  Mona Lee Wilson, aged 26, disappeared on 23 November 2001 and made the list a week later. She was the last to vanish. Her common-law husband Steve Ricks told reporters he had last seen her get into a car with two men.

  “She told me many times she’d like to die,” Ricks said. “She was sick of this hell, all the hooking and drugs.”

  Disappearances had been going on for over two decades now, but even more disturbingly they were getting increasingly more frequent. Detectives looked back at the earlier cases to see if other known criminals could have been responsible.

  The elusive “Green River Killer” had been killing runaways and prostitutes over the border in Washington State for much of the period. On 30 November 2001, 52-year-old Gary Leon Ridgway was charged with murdering four of the Green River victims. Two years later he pleaded guilty to 49 murders. There were reports that Ridgway had visited Vancouver, but the police could make no connection between him and the missing women.

  Dayton Leroy Rogers was abducting, torturing and killing prostitutes in Oregon in 1987. He was arrested on 7 August 1987, after murdering a prostitute in a parking lot in front of witnesses. Only then did it become clear that he was responsible for the murder of seven women whose bodies had been found in a wooded area near Molalla, 20 miles outside the city. Some had had their feet cut off, possibly while they were still alive. But Rogers was soon cleared on any involvement in the earlier Vancouver abductions.

  George Waterfield Russell Jnr – aka “The Charmer”, “The Bellevue Killer” and, coincidently, “The East Side Killer” – was also considered. He had
killed three women in Bellevue, Washington in 1990. But he was discounted because he killed his victims in their own homes and then displayed them in elaborate poses, after he had raped and mutilated their corpses.

  Other serial killers were suspected. In 1995, Keith Hunter Jesperson, a British Columbian, had been arrested in Washington State, for the murder of his girlfriend 41-year-old Julie Winningham. He had strangled her and dumped her body at the roadside. A long-haul truck driver, he then said he had murdered women widely across North America, dumping their bodies like “piles of garbage” along the roadside. At one point he boasted about 160 murders, though he has been convicted for just eight. But, again, the police could not find a link between the man the newspapers dubbed the “Happy Face Killer” and the missing women from Low Track.

  Seemingly mild-mannered US Navy veteran and father of two John Eric Armstrong was arrested in April 2000 for the murder of a number of Detroit prostitutes and promptly confessed to killing 30 women around the world during his time in the Navy. However, his ship the USS Nimitz did not put into port near Vancouver when any of the women went missing.

  Middle-aged father of five, Robert Yates was convicted of killing 15 women in Washington State in October 2000, but is thought to have killed at least 18, most of whom were drug addicts and prostitutes. The earliest killings he admitted to were those of two women in Walla Walla in 1975 and a woman in Skagit County in 1988, both close to the border. However, evidence could not place him in Vancouver at the time of any of the disappearances.

  Vancouver had its own home-grown suspect in the person of Ronald Richard McCauley, a twice-convicted rapist. Sentenced to 17 years imprisonment in 1982, he was paroled in September 1994. In September 1995, he was arrested again after he picked up a prostitute at Vancouver’s Astoria Hotel in July and drove her to Hemlock Valley, where she was beaten, raped and dumped from his truck. The woman reported the incident to police and McCauley was convicted of rape and attempted murder in 1996.