by Lori Shenher
9
Project Amelia
(the Missing Persons Review Team)
• • •
“Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?”
VIRGINIA WOOLF, A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
IN MAY 1999, we formed Project Amelia, the Missing Persons Review Team (MWRT), and I was thrilled. The spring and summer of 1999 proved to be the most dynamic period during my time searching for the missing women, and it felt as though we were making real progress. We were actively investigating the information we had about Pickton, investigating each of the women’s files individually, liaising with the coroner’s office, and tracking unidentified human remains through the RCMP. I became the administrative lead, or file coordinator, in addition to the lead investigator, both roles that, according to the tenets of the Major Crime case management system, were never intended to be performed by one person.
The VPD of 1998 did not employ the major case management system. Indeed, only one member of our department, Doug LePard, had even been trained, and none of the principles were addressed in VPD policy at that time. I had no training and no idea each role was to be filled by a different investigator. The B.C. RCMP developed this system in the late ’90s, and it was primitive in comparison with the well-oiled major case machine police use today. Because our victims were missing but not known to have been abducted or murdered, the cases never fit the requirements for consideration as a “major case.” Ridiculously, under these old or nonexistent definitions, their risky lifestyles were not considered when assessing their vulnerability or applicability as a major case.
The file coordinator is essentially the overseer of the investigation, responsible for setting up administrative systems to collect, manage, and process all the information and evidence brought into the investigation in a manner acceptable for court. Their role is to take a long view of the case and troubleshoot any legal and investigative concerns to ensure everything is as per proper police procedure. The lead investigator determines where the evidence is leading and oversees the other detectives as they track down leads, interview witnesses, and interrogate suspects. The file coordinator conducts a more administrative function, whereas the lead investigator performs more of the hands-on sleuthing. Together, they chart the strategic course for the investigation.
Following the advice from Axel Hovbrender, I asked for help and documented everything. He was the first supervisor—besides Peter Ditchfield, my former Strike Force Inspector—who shared my sense of doom about this case. Axel had been around long enough to know that the right things weren’t just magically going to happen and the most I could do was try my best for these women and try to protect myself.
In spring 1999, I made an official request for personnel, and Detective Constable Alex Clarke, Constable Dave Dickson, Detective Constable Mark Chernoff, Detective Ron Lepine, and Sergeant Geramy Field were assigned to help in our search. Robbery clerk Dorothy Alford would be our support and data entry person. Finally, there seemed to be an acknowledgment of the seriousness of this case and the need for more resources, so now we could make a concerted effort to solve these disappearances. Once again, how naïve I was and how sadly misguided my optimism.
Alex Clarke would help me with the file coordinator’s role and partner with me should we need to go out on the road to conduct follow-up work. Mark Chernoff and Ron Lepine were partners normally assigned to Homicide, and their first task would be to review the unsolved murder files of several Downtown Eastside women whose bodies had been found in outlying RCMP jurisdictions: Tracy Olajide, Tammy Pipe, Mary Lidguerre, Carrie Gordon, and Victoria Younker.
Dave Dickson remained a VPD patrol constable and longtime Downtown Eastside soldier well known for his work with sex workers and children. Over the years, Dave had built an excellent rapport with and reputation in the community and gave our group some much-needed credibility on the street. He would be available to us half time; the other half he would devote to his duties working closely with social workers and children’s advocates to keep young people from joining our growing list of victims in years to come.
Geramy was one of the two homicide sergeants and would be our supervisor under Inspector Fred Biddlecombe and Staff Sergeant Brock Giles. Unfortunately, Geramy, Mark, and Ron would be expected to continue their duties in Homicide and could easily be pulled away from Project Amelia at any given time if they were assigned a new murder case. Initially, I didn’t foresee the problems that would be caused by the fact that several of us were essentially doing two jobs, and the stress placed on those of us working with inadequate supervision weighed heavily. This lack of departmental commitment to our project meant that we couldn’t properly investigate the women’s disappearances and would contribute greatly to the failure of the project.
I had requested nine additional investigators and received what was effectively two, considering that only Alex and I were assigned full time to the project. I was told we would be getting two more people soon, but they had not been identified. I had envisioned that we would receive two people of the caliber of those working in the Home Invasion Task Force, originally headed by Sergeant Doug LePard, the only VPD member at the time who had received any formal training in major case management. Doug put this group together—an investigative dream team—and once they were up and running, he returned to his position supervising the Domestic Violence and Criminal Harassment Unit. Detective Constable Tom McCluskie, another highly experienced investigator, took over as the acting sergeant supervising the Home Invasion Task Force.
At its peak, the Home Invasion Task Force had between eight and twelve investigators—all highly competent detectives normally assigned to various sections of the Investigation Division. This group received funding and equipment from several outside sources, including B.C. Tel, all of which provided them with cell phones, call display office phones, extra vehicles, and a video display terminal for use at local malls as a public information booth both warning of the dangers of home invasion and showing video of suspects in the hope that someone could identify them.
Granted, the two investigations were markedly different, and Project Amelia did receive office phones when the Home Invasion group downsized from two offices to one, enabling us to occupy that first project room. As time passed, I would peer into their office longingly, trying to imagine how different our investigation would be if we had the same type of support from management, if we had the same type of enthusiasm and full-time commitment from experienced investigators, if we had the same engagement and commitment from the community. New detectives dreamed of being asked to join the Home Invasion Task Force; those same people avoided Project Amelia like the plague, uninterested in searching for a bunch of missing “whores,” as several referred to them. It was particularly discouraging to see the bandwagon-jumping that occurred once the search on the Pickton farm began in earnest in 2002.
Suddenly, many of these same investigators scrambled for invitations to work on “the farm,” and what was previously thought to be the Siberia of investigative work was now considered the sexiest case out there, a career maker. I happened to overhear Tom McCluskie speaking with some other members in the building a few days after he had been seconded to Surrey to work on the Pickton file, describing it as “a great investigation.” He was right, of course. The old me could have easily been that person calling it a great investigation. It had always been a great investigation for an eager detective. Where were these people when we needed them? Investigators who didn’t know I had been the lead investigator of this fiasco for more than two years would say things to me like You should try to get out to the farm. It’s the case of a lifetime, or This would be a great place for your career. You should try to get out there. I just stared at them, glassy-eyed, mumbled something to the effect of You can have it and walked away. How greatly these two years would change me.
When Project Amelia was being set up, I wa
s concerned that I lacked the experience of a Tom McCluskie or a Doug LePard, but I began to feel a certain degree of confidence in my knowledge of this investigation and the things I had learned over the past year. I felt that with the right people involved, Project Amelia could be successful, and I had high expectations of finding our victims and making arrests. What Alex, Dave, and I lacked in Homicide experience, Mark, Ron, and Geramy could provide, and I naïvely assumed the two new people coming in would be competent. Little did I know that Project Amelia would have no mandate from management, no budget, and little guidance, just a token show of VPD support for a project that no one cared about and even fewer felt any long-term responsibility for.
My immediate concern was to establish a case management system to maintain and analyze what I knew would be volumes and volumes of information collected by Project Amelia. I had only ever put together individual case files, and now I needed to know how to document, collect, and store complex information in a way that could be easily analyzed, searched, and presented in court—because from the start I envisioned that we would arrest someone and that the case would be brought before the courts. We had to be ready. Otherwise, why were we here?
Biddlecombe had been negotiating to purchase a computer system called SIUSS—Special Investigative Unit Support System—that was billed as the latest and greatest in criminal case management systems. I was told it would have the capability to track and link information about suspects, vehicles, locations, investigators, and evidence and prepare it in a comprehensible manner for presentation in court when the time came. The RCMP had used SIUSS successfully in a murder case in Abbotsford, but I would later learn that investigators had had concerns about SIUSS and ended up designing their own system, Evidence and Report I (E&R I), which the RCMP and other departments would use for all such cases.
The VPD purchased several SIUSS licenses, and training began for the people chosen to operate the system. Three VPD detective constables in other departments were the only investigators to receive the training, because they were all currently working in analyst positions. I requested the training because I felt it was important as the file coordinator to understand the system, but my admission was denied because of the cost. Our administrative person, Dorothy Alford, and Sexual Offence Squad administrative assistant Emer Fitzgerald also received training, because they would be involved in data entry using SIUSS, but theirs was a cheaper lite version and not very comprehensive. Dorothy would become the person we most relied upon for SIUSS entry, yet her training was far from adequate and hardly fair to her.
I made the mistake of trusting in and relying heavily on this system to collect all of the information gathered over the next year and a half, as well as store what had been collected in our victim files in previous years. The promised support contract that supposedly came with the system never materialized, and when SIUSS changed the platform for the program we were not notified. One morning, our staff logged in and found a completely foreign system. Little follow-up training was ever provided.
We had a huge backlog of information from the twenty-some victim files that formed the foundation of our case and needed to be entered in SIUSS. Without this vital information, we might miss a link that could be key to solving the case. Dorothy, who was working hard to enter information into SIUSS, assured me that this would be done, but she later told me that the data entry team had decided to only enter the “bare bones” victim information and return to those files later to enter the rest more completely. At the time, the lack of SIUSS personnel assigned to Project Amelia was at the root of this problem, and over time, this vital victim information did not get into the SIUSS system.
Management would not reassign additional SIUSS people temporarily or full time, and I was tasked with trying to recruit them on overtime to come in and help us when they could. This situation prevented any continuity or systematic entry of data. Few people wanted to work overtime, especially in a windowless room in summer. As a detective constable, I had no authority to reassign anyone, and no one in management would take the initiative, because they didn’t want to fight with these people’s managers to bring them over from another understaffed unit to help us.
Geramy and Fred told me this was simply how it was, despite my explanation of the obvious problems with this situation. This was one of the many times I should have put my foot down harder and demand that a proper job be done, but whenever I did, I was always told there was no money or no people available and I’d have to understand that this was the way things were. I voiced my concern that what we were doing was tantamount to building a house with only a fraction of a proper foundation, but they merely shook their heads and said that was the best they could do. How were we to find links and common threads when most of our known information—the contents of the victims’ files—was not entered into the database? It seemed ludicrous and incredibly shortsighted to me.
Shortly after setup, we received news that our new investigators would be coming to us in a matter of days. Geramy told me that Deputy Chief Constable Brian McGuinness himself handpicked Wayne Myers* and Gary Fisk* to join our team. I was surprised. Not only did they have even less experience dealing with major files than I had, they brought with them a dubious reputation, both on the street and among their fellow officers. Geramy shared some of my concerns but told me this was who we were getting and we would have to make the most of it. I went to speak to Biddlecombe about my misgivings, and he told me he shared them. He knew the two well from his days leading the Internal Investigation Section and was not happy they were joining our team.
We heard they had a hot potential suspect—Person of Interest (POI) 390, as he became known throughout the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry—and they pitched this guy to the RCMP Provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit in Surrey in an attempt to have themselves assigned out there to work on catching him, circumventing the VPD and the chain of command. Our team had no idea who this suspect might be, and I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t have shared this information with our investigation from the start. This was my first indication that they weren’t team players.
The RCMP told them to take their suspect and their information back to the VPD, since that was where the investigation had originated and where all of the victims seem to have disappeared. They appealed to their only ally in the VPD upper management—Deputy Chief Constable Brian McGuinness—who gave them an audience. After hearing their story about POI 390 and how a routine traffic stop of him caused the hairs on Myers’s neck to stand up, McGuinness was convinced and essentially ordered Biddlecombe to take them on in Project Amelia, despite Biddlecombe’s vehement protests.
In our meeting, Biddlecombe was visibly upset and told me his hands were tied, but he would speak with Fisk and Myers when they arrived and put them on notice that he didn’t trust them, didn’t like them, and would be watching them closely. I walked out of his office crestfallen but trying to keep an open mind. The dedicated team of crack investigators I had imagined assembling was fast becoming a mishmash of well-intentioned inexperienced people or part-timers and problem children, but I remained determined to make the best of the situation. The experienced and professional people we did have were tied up either working homicides or doing administrative desk duty. Still, this had to be better than it had been, working alone with no help and no supervision. It had to be—if not, what were we doing?
We assigned desks and phones to all the team members, and I placed enlarged photos of the missing women on the big white boards that covered the thin walls of the project room. Every day for more than a year, I looked into those sad, tired faces and tried to imagine where they could be, what those eyes had seen that mine could not, and I made those photos a silent promise to stand up for them and advocate for them and find them. I made lists of what had been done, what remained to be done, and who our top persons of interest were. We worked doggedly, crammed into our airless, windowless room.
During that time, one of my homicid
e detective pals gave me a book he said was required reading on Canadian case law and interviewing murderers—Convicting the Guilty by Steve Sherriff, a respected Ontario Crown prosecutor. After I’d finished reading it—and learning a great deal—I passed it around to our team and made sure everyone had a chance to read it. A few weeks after Fisk and Myers joined us, I handed it to Myers, telling him it was the most informative and helpful thing I’d seen on interviewing suspects and the case law surrounding interview techniques. He tossed it onto my desk, where it landed with a thud.
“I don’t need that,” he said.
“Have you already read it?” I asked eagerly. “It’s great, huh?” I was keen to talk about it with everyone, and I fully intended to include him as part of our new team. “If you have, maybe Fisk’ll want to have a look.”
Myers pushed the book farther away from him toward me.
“I don’t need that academic bullshit,” he growled. I glanced over at Alex. Okeydokey. Conversation over.
Alex and I sat at desks beside each other, Myers was directly across from me—so close I could dial his phone—and Fisk sat across from Alex. There was no space dividing any of our desks from the others. Dorothy sat at the end of the room behind the largest of the desks, because she had two computer terminals and needed access to the large filing cabinets we had brought in for the mounting paper files we were accumulating. Geramy had a desk but rarely used it as she was almost always working in the Homicide office at her desk there some forty feet outside our door.