by Lori Shenher
You and your family—Maggie; your mom, Pat; your aunt Jean; Jeanie; Ben—are all so inextricably tied into these years for me. I feel in many ways you are—or should be—the poster child for this tragedy. You are every daughter, every person’s schoolmate, every young girl’s best friend from Brownies—perhaps you represent just how vulnerable we all are, our children all are. And it scares us, doesn’t it? We don’t want to say, Look what happened to Sarah. She came from a good neighborhood, went to a good school, had two parents at home, every advantage—look what happened to her.
More than with any other family, I have wanted to open up to yours. Perhaps it’s because yours is a family of writers, or because I’ve found them to be so even, so thoughtful and balanced, even in their assessment of this case, this heartbreak, this world. They are phenomenal women, your mom, Jean, Maggie, Jeanie. I often bump up against that keen awareness that I must walk that line between speaking from the heart and speaking as a part of this goddamn investigation that makes us all walk and talk like automatons.
When I called your mom to tell her about Pickton’s arrest, she was out and your aunt Jean answered. You’d get a kick out of this, I know. Her first question to me was What are you reading these days? And we entered into a lengthy discussion of the latest mystery writers—not really my thing, but she assumed as a cop it would be, and I was just thrilled to talk to someone about something other than this horrible man and the horrible things he’d done. Maggie was equally warm, wanting to know how I was after I had just given her this oddly bittersweet news. In her quiet voice she whispered the words to me I will never forget: This is that man you had told me about, isn’t it?
When I think of you, I think of that fit, well-groomed young woman rollerblading around the Downtown Eastside, grooving to her Walkman—you always reminded me of those images we often see from war-torn countries of children playing a game of soccer or basketball in the midst of mass destruction and total disarray. It was as though you were able to transport yourself away from that filth, back to Kits Beach or UBC. Back to somewhere supposedly safe.
You touched a great many people. I think those people have a difficult time accepting you didn’t survive your journey. I think everyone expected you would be someone who would hit bottom, then bounce back to do amazing things and teach others what you had learned about yourself and this often harsh world. In the back of my mind, I guess I felt about you the way some parents feel about a favorite child—that you more than anyone would be okay, that you would turn up, that in some way, I wouldn’t have to worry for you the way I did the others because you would make it.
I still half-expect to see you come rollerblading around the corner, world tuned out, earphones on.
8
Looking for Links
• • •
“Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.”
MICHEL FOUCAULT, LIBÉRATION
ONE OF THE first things I set out to do was link as many of the missing women’s files as I could. I scanned each one, hoping to find a name, a place, a contact each of the women might have shared, but the only name was drug addiction, the only place the Downtown Eastside, and the only shared contacts an endless parade of men in cars and on foot buying their bodies by the hour or by the act.
Common sense dictated that victims sharing a lifestyle, a neighborhood, and an occupation were linked. But something inside me strained against the assumption that these three things completely defined any of these women. To lump them together simply because they were “junkie hookers” would be to ignore potentially relevant details. I knew I had to examine their individual circumstances and personalities—their uniqueness.
File by file, I read about the families they were estranged from and marveled at how long it took for anyone to file a missing persons report. I would learn of all the reasons for this: the women were transient, they often did not keep in touch with loved ones, and those who did file a missing persons report would often receive inconsistent information and face indifference from the police. It was like a giant game of pass the buck. Families assumed the girls were just in transition, police assumed they didn’t want to be located for various reasons, and street workers in the Downtown Eastside community who knew these women best wrung their hands in frustration because they knew something was wrong and no one was listening. It was a vicious cycle, and precious time was wasted.
My work delving into the women’s files ran parallel to my ongoing investigation of Robert Pickton, and I searched to find places where the victims might have connected with him. Left home at thirteen. Four children before the age of twenty-five. Sexually abused by some variation of parents, adoptive parents, stepparents, foster parents, siblings, relatives, family friends, and strangers. Criminal convictions for everything from prostitution to drug possession to assault to break-and-enter to robbery. Infected with HIV, AIDS, hepatitis, tuberculosis. What the files did not contain were words like bright, intelligent, athletic, tough, resourceful, artistic, talented, sensitive, funny, afraid.
I read and reread the files—nearly twenty at that time. I began to notice that none of these women was under the age of twenty at the time they went missing. Each was known as street-smart and was a relatively longtime resident of the Downtown Eastside. When I was a new constable working in the area, a social worker told me that the average life expectancy of a person living on the Downtown Eastside was seven years. Many of these women had been down there four, five, six years or more. These women had not survived this long by being stupid; they obviously had skills and savvy.
Each of these women was seriously drug addicted, sick to such an extent that to leave the heart of an area where drugs and services were readily available caused them panic, anxiety, and emotional and physical breakdown. They seldom strayed from the core of the Downtown Eastside other than for a rare visit with family, to attend detox, to escape the threat of an angry boyfriend or someone they had ripped off, or to party where drugs would be a sure thing. They were sick, addicted, dirty, and scarred, and they knew they were not marketable anywhere but on the filthy, desperate streets of the Downtown Eastside.
A very small number of the victims seemed to work or live in the Mount Pleasant area, in those days a sort of drug addict’s bedroom community south of the Downtown Eastside that has since become a trendy and much more expensive area. Many of the drug users in Vancouver lived there and came to the Downtown Eastside to work the streets and buy their drugs. The area was cleaner and safer and resembled many of the areas of East Vancouver, with a mixture of low-rise apartments and run-down houses split into rental suites.
It was a short, often perilous walk or bus ride along Main Street from the Downtown Eastside to Mount Pleasant. Along the way, there were several cheap beer parlors and hotels, each with its own subculture and cliques—all potentially dangerous for a woman who might owe money or anger the wrong person at the wrong time. The remainder of the victims seemed to live right down in the five- or six-square-block area surrounding the heart of the Downtown Eastside—Main and Hastings, or Pain and Wastings, as many locals referred to it.
We had no information that any one of the missing women had disappeared from a particular location or even a certain area of the city. Aside from Inga Hall and Sarah de Vries, we were unable to pin down disappearances to a specific day, and in many cases, the last cashed welfare check was our best indication of when they had last been safe—a window of a month.
Inga Hall had been working the street with her daughter Violet* early one morning in 1998. Violet returned from a trick and was keen to go home to their East Vancouver apartment and fix, but Inga wanted to hold out for one more date, so Violet went home without her. Violet never saw her mother again. When we began seeking out the families of the victims to provide DNA samples, Violet was Inga’s only immediate family member. I had been in contact with another family member who had been searching fo
r Inga to give her an inheritance, but when she learned of Inga’s disappearance, she gave up her investigation.
My heart broke when I met with Violet. She was thin, wasted, and heavily addicted. Her mind virtually gone, she had trouble following our conversation. She agreed to give me a buccal swab for DNA testing, and I met her in her room, thinking it was lucky I had reached her when I did because she wouldn’t be alive much longer given her current health. She had no concept of what DNA testing was or even that Inga wasn’t coming back. I worried that Violet was probably incapable of consciously consenting to provide me with her saliva sample, but she signed the form and I took the sample anyway, believing that what I was doing was for the greater good.
Three locations kept popping up in my work—the corner of Princess and Cordova Streets, the Astoria Hotel, and a run-down rooming house on East Hastings that doubled as a brothel and a shooting gallery for heroin users. Still, all I knew was that many of the women had been to these places or had ties there.
This would prove typical of this investigation—all sorts of arrows would point in a certain direction, but then there was nothing more, despite my digging and looking into potential leads and possible links, nothing to indicate I was on the right track and should carry on with a particular track. Each lead would just fizzle out and dry up no matter how much I struggled to make it into something—anything—of value. Each lead floated like a gigantic cartoon balloon over my head emblazoned with the words YEAH, SO? So many times, I would have to decide whether to continue what seemed like flogging a dead horse or to move on to some other seemingly more promising lead. Without the time, personnel, or resources to go down every rabbit hole, I moved on.
All I could confirm was that each of these women had at some time frequented at least one of these three places, but that was hardly unusual for residents of the Downtown Eastside with drug addictions and was comparable to saying that each of the women had a drug problem or lived in poverty. The community was small and fluid; many of the residents moved from one rooming house, hotel, or corner to the next, spending varying amounts of time in a particular spot. The bottom line was each of these women was no more likely to meet someone dangerous in one of these locations than anywhere else on the Downtown Eastside—they were at risk everywhere, and a chance meeting with a predator could go unnoticed in the strange drug-and-alcohol-addled parade that went on twenty-four hours a day.
I learned that even among the low-track workers of the Downtown Eastside there was a pecking order, and I was dismayed to hear about what are known as “beer whores” in the skid row area. These poor women worked in the relative safety of the beer parlors and scummy bars in the three or four blocks surrounding the notorious Balmoral Hotel, hanging around men they hoped would buy them glasses of draft in exchange for sex acts in the bar washrooms or the rooms of adjoining hotels.
As I looked at the women’s lives individually, I hoped to find someone with an axe to grind, an unresolved child custody dispute, past convictions for violence against them—anything to warrant an interview with an actual person who might have had a reason to want to harm any of them. This was a path that had to be explored, despite the question nagging at me: If they were killed individually by different men, why weren’t we finding bodies? None of the so-called suspects who warranted an interview were particularly sophisticated; nor did many of them have the means to dispose of a body—or twenty to thirty bodies—without someone seeing or knowing something. It is not an easy thing to commit a murder and not leave a body that will eventually be found, even after elaborate attempts to dispose of it, as even reportedly highly intelligent killers soon discover.
Investigators interviewed many of these men when the women were first reported missing. Others were dead, and a small number had never been interviewed for reasons unknown to me. One by one, I began to locate and interview these men, and after each interview, I would conclude that several were disturbed, with histories of violence, but there was no evidence to take me any further, no real motive to indicate they had killed or contributed to the disappearances of these women. They had their own problems, their own addictions, their own sorry lives to deal with, and I found that man after man, no one stood out to me as having anything obvious to hide or any need to be bothered with killing anyone. Still, they had to be ruled out, and I certainly couldn’t do that based on one interview.
Scouring file after file, I saw no clear indication that any more than two or three of these women definitely went missing from within the confines of Vancouver. For all anyone knew, they could have disappeared from Vancouver Island, from the U.S., from the Interior of B.C.—there were no clues and no information saying so-and-so was last seen in such and such a place. None of these women told family and friends they were going anywhere. I knew they probably had gone missing from Vancouver streets, but I couldn’t confirm this and, therefore, had no logical starting point for any type of search or canvass, no place to begin collecting surveillance videotapes or speaking to business owners who might have seen something. Nothing.
I also had little idea of what date any of them disappeared, with the exceptions of Sarah de Vries and Inga Hall. A good example was Helen Hallmark, who we later determined through her welfare file had disappeared sometime around August 1997 but was not reported missing until September 1998. Most of the other cases were less extreme, but the window of time was usually wide—often several months passed between the time a family member had last spoken to a woman and the time the police were notified of her disappearance. There was really no one to blame—the families were used to this sort of sporadic contact and had long ago learned to worry in solitude, since the girls always showed up eventually. How were they to know that this time they wouldn’t show up? That those lost hours and days would be precious if there was any hope of finding them?
Checking rooming house records proved much less helpful than looking at welfare files. Many of the hotels on the Downtown Eastside fudged records, double-booked, and charged extra to allow drug dealing and prostitution in the rooms. Typically, the management was not strong on documentation, and lists of occupants were kept in a hodgepodge, with just enough detail to satisfy a police beat team who might ask to see them but hardly the type of log to help track someone down. Many of the lodgers used false names and identification to avoid detection by either the police or creditors. When occupants failed to show up for a few days, they weren’t missed, but management usually tossed their belongings out to make room for new paying residents. Few stopped to wonder where an old tenant might be, and if the belongings weren’t claimed within a few more days, they were sent to the dump.
These missing women were on their own—those who did stay in touch with family often only told them the good news and spared them the sordid details of their lives, such as who was looking to lay a beating on them, what despicable thing a bad date had done to them last night, where they were getting their money, and who their friends and boyfriends were that week. By attempting to spare their families, these women isolated themselves even further.
Yet another obstacle was our inability to access medical records. This was part of a larger problem. Since we could not prove that any of the women had been victims of crime, they were considered missing and as such government agencies and hospitals treated this as a privacy issue, refusing to release any information without the victims’ consent. I made attempts to have the families request this information, but this was not acceptable for a variety of very understandable reasons again relating to privacy law. I began to wonder if some of these women had died—in hospital or extended care facilities somewhere under aliases—and we simply hadn’t been notified because no one had made the connection and fingerprinted them.
I found an ally in provincial chief coroner Larry Campbell. Together, we decided in mid-1999 to enlist the broad powers of the Coroners Act to investigate these women’s medical histories and see whether there might be some reason why they had not been located. This enabled
Larry to assert our belief that the women had been the victims of foul play and that they were probably dead. In this way, Larry could argue that these files were the responsibility of the Coroners Service because they had a duty to try to identify them if they were deceased.
Many of the victims had been known to use aliases to avoid arrest for outstanding warrants, but we were only aware of what some of those names were. I began to investigate what steps hospitals used to identify patients who were admitted unconscious and without identification. The results were not encouraging. I could not convince anyone I spoke with in the provincial government to go on the record for my file, but several officials advised me that hospitals were not in the business of identifying people. Essentially, if someone came in with a library card, B.C. Identification Card, or something similarly lacking official standing bearing the name Sally Smith, the hospitals would be satisfied this was Sally Smith. If this woman died in hospital, the police would not be called to fingerprint her as is the procedure when someone dies without any identification—she would die as Sally Smith unless someone came forward to say otherwise, which was nearly impossible considering no one who knew this woman would be likely to know she was in hospital in the first place.
Hundreds of people die indigent every year in British Columbia. Several agencies deal with these deaths—the Ministry of Children and Family Development, the Public Guardian and Trustee, the Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation—but they all work under the assumption that the deceased is the person they believe him or her to be. Often it is impossible to locate next of kin, so the deceased is interred by Glenhaven funeral home in Vancouver. Some of the missing women could have died in hospital using false identities and no one would ever have known what became of them.
This situation poked one potentially gaping hole in my assertion that body disposal was very difficult for a criminal: if some of the victims died through noncriminal means and fell through this crack, we would never be informed. I couldn’t imagine that this scenario accounted for all the victims. Nor could it account for the sudden spike in numbers of missing women specifically; if women were dying and falling through this crack in the system, surely men would fall victim in the same way consistently over time. Yet we had no similar problem with men missing from the Downtown Eastside.