That Lonely Section of Hell

by Lori Shenher

  I began with “My name is Lori Shenher and I—” and I couldn’t go on. My throat choked shut with emotion. I pulled the umbrella lower over my head as tears sprang to my eyes and big wracking sobs welled inside me and overflowed, forcing me to cover my mouth to muffle the noise. I wordlessly handed the talking stick to the next person, turned, and slowly walked away from the group toward the parking lot. Lindsay Kines of the Vancouver Sun followed me.

  As I approached my Jeep, Lindsay called out to me.

  “Detective Shenher?”

  My first thought was oh damn. I felt sick, not myself in any way, and deeply embarrassed at my public breakdown. I’m sure I would have been mortified to learn this wouldn’t be my last. I turned to see Lindsay standing behind me.

  “Are you okay?”

  Looking back, I think that’s the split second I knew I would be able to trust Lindsay. He was kind and not mining me for a good quote or a scoop. I felt he actually cared whether I was okay. I think he knew I wasn’t okay.

  “I’m sorry, this just isn’t a good time for me to talk. I hope you can understand,” I said, still sniffling.

  “I understand. Off the record, completely.” He smiled sheepishly and I found myself joining him.

  “I’m just incredibly frustrated. I can’t say more than that, but this is really wearing on me.”

  “Is there anything you can say on the record?” He paused. “I understand if you can’t.”

  “Only that this is so frustrating to not be able to give the families some closure.” I sighed. “All I can tell them is where they aren’t. As far as where they are, we haven’t got there yet.” I told him I just couldn’t say any more. He told me if I ever wanted to talk, he was there, and I thanked him. And, with that, I walked away.

  15

  Finding Four Women

  • • •

  “Hope is the thing with feathers

  That perches in the soul

  And sings the tune without the words

  And never stops at all.”

  EMILY DICKINSON

  OUR TEAM LACKED hope. After we had trudged through late 1999 and early 2000, there was little to be excited about. The Project Amelia members had been working on several avenues of investigation concurrent with the Ellingsen tip investigation. We were deluged with useless tips from the America’s Most Wanted show and stuck in the tight confines of our project room with Fisk and Myers, without much to call leadership. Chernoff and Lepine were busy working fresh homicides and trying to shore up the Lynn Ellingsen information off the side of their desks, while Alex and I were wading through the mountains of paper that made up our investigation as we moved from completing the obvious follow-ups to tackling the more obscure, in addition to dealing with the RCMP.

  In the midst of the Ellingsen investigation, we added two new women to our list—Lydia Chase* and Kendra Sparrow*. Lydia Chase was a young woman with a bachelor’s degree in biology and a diagnosis of schizophrenia who had gone off her medication, winding up addicted to heroin and occasionally working the Downtown Eastside low track to pay the bills. She had been missing since 1994 but somehow hadn’t been entered in our system. I later found letters written to our office by her mother, Pamela*, over the years, and it seemed a detective or Missing Persons clerk had investigated the case and determined it closed several years before. It was disconcerting how difficult it was to even try to analyze what went wrong with Lydia’s investigation, so I focused my energies on finding out what happened to Lydia, and Alex set out to find Kendra.

  Kendra Sparrow was a young Indigenous mother who had been missing for some time as well. Her family and friends thought she was in Edmonton, whereas others believed she was in Vancouver, and no one reported her missing. Her file was extremely frustrating. Progress was slow, as she was estranged from her family, and they didn’t seem to believe that she was missing. We had very little information of value in her file, and, as with Lydia, little investigation seemed to have been done.

  Throughout spring and summer of 1999, Alex and I were delving into the health care system, trying to obtain medical records of the missing women, with the help of Chief Coroner Larry Campbell. I had done some preliminary work on both Chase and Sparrow, but each seemed to be very cold trails. They both had boyfriends at the time of their disappearances, but our efforts to locate them proved difficult.

  Lydia’s mother, Pamela, was a fascinating woman with whom I greatly enjoyed working. She was in her sixties and lived alone in a small seaside community in Washington State nestled on the Canada/U.S. border about an hour south of Vancouver. She had been living in the southeastern U.S. when Lydia disappeared, which partially explained why the file had fallen by the wayside—often, without a family member to advocate and pressure our office, files gathered dust. Now that Pamela was closer to Vancouver, she felt better able to revisit what might have happened to Lydia.

  Pamela was extremely helpful to us without ever becoming overbearing or frustrated by our lack of progress and the apparent previous mishandling of Lydia’s case. She accepted that and we moved on. That was her way, to just carry on with what she had, accepting that the past is the past. She could have easily become bogged down in all the ways Lydia had been failed—by the health care system, by police, and by inadequate medication and support for the mentally ill. Yet she refused to lay blame, preferring instead to view it all with a wry cynicism honed by a lifetime of accepting that this was simply the way of the world sometimes.

  Since 1998, I had been working closely with Chico Newell, identification specialist with the Forensic Identification Unit of the office of the chief coroner. Chico is a brilliant and driven man, highly committed to the identification of human remains found in the province. Through him and Sylvia Port of the RCMP’s ViCLAS Section Missing Persons/Found Human Remains office, I learned a great deal about what happens to unidentifiable bodies and body parts found in B.C. In 1998, Sylvia was just beginning to set up a database of found human remains, complete with DNA profiles. There were—and still are—several hundred sets of unidentified remains, and the task of conducting DNA testing on all of them was monumental, but at least it had begun in earnest and would help future families find answers.

  In March 1999, Chico provided me with a list of all the unidentified complete bodies of women who had died in B.C. It was easy to narrow the list even further to get only those closer in age to our group of missing women, including Chase and Sparrow. I found a 1994 overdose victim who I felt could have been Lydia Chase based on the physical description and on the fact that she had been found dead in a bowling alley washroom on Commercial Drive—a street where aging Old World immigrants, young artists, rich, poor, capitalists, anarchists, soccer fans, LGBTQ, straight, and everyone in between mixed and coexisted—just a short distance east of the Downtown Eastside and a popular destination for many of its inhabitants. The bowling alley was also a short walk down Commercial from the Kettle, a drop-in center for the mentally ill. I had a strong sense that this victim was Lydia, and Chico agreed to try to track down an autopsy photo for me to look at. In the meantime, I showed this list to the people in our office, and both Mark and Alex agreed there was a good chance that this was a match.

  Autopsy photos are never ideal for identification because the face is often distorted or contorted, and there is usually bruising, either from an assault or lividity—the postmortem pooling of blood—or sometimes as a result of the autopsy itself. These photos often pose a dilemma for investigators: Do you show such a disturbing image to a loved one, knowing how dissimilar it may be to the living person? All we had for a photo of Lydia was a shot taken of her in a wedding party, but I thought the nose was the same, the hair color was close, and the ears were very similar. Alex concurred, and we agreed we had to show the autopsy photo to Pamela, certain that if anyone could handle something as difficult as this, she could. We had Pamela’s DNA and could access Lydia’s PAP smear DNA if necessary, but we felt if Pamela could make a positive ID, it woul
d save her several more weeks of not knowing and save us the cost of the lab work.

  Pamela had told me that Lydia had had a greenstick fracture to an arm as a child, possessed an extra rib, and sustained a broken nose later on that Pamela suspected was the work of a violent boyfriend. With the assistance of Larry Campbell, I was able to obtain a coroner’s order to seize—a document with seemingly sweeping applications and fewer limitations than any search warrant I had ever seen. After some digging, I found several sets of X-rays taken of Lydia over her years in Vancouver and the number of visits to the emergency room that unfortunately all too frequently come with a life of addiction and poor mental health on the Downtown Eastside.

  Chico provided me with the autopsy X-rays, and I asked each radiologist to compare them with those of the unidentified dead woman. Three hospitals and several radiologists later, no one was willing to sign off with absolute certainty that they were the same person, though there were several points of comparison that perfectly matched up. It’s fascinating that a profession that is so seldom successfully sued for malpractice has developed such a deep-seated fear of lawsuits, but I found very few people willing to go on the record with a finding. That is not to say they weren’t helpful—most medical people I dealt with speculated freely and were often able to give us opinions with certainties of 80 or 90 percent. But no one would commit to those opinions on paper. They all strongly encouraged us to find someone else to concur or back up their findings with some other proof of identity so that theirs wouldn’t have to stand alone. Regardless, we were still faced with having to show Pamela the photos.

  Alex and I made the drive to the U.S. one sunny morning in July 1999. Pamela met us at her home, a newly built, tiny bungalow on a small acreage. It was an odd meeting; it felt social, but each of us knew we were engaged in a task of deadly seriousness. It was quite possible that Pamela would discover for certain that Lydia was dead. I explained what we had found to date and that we believed the woman in the photograph was quite possibly Lydia. I told Pamela we were going to show her an autopsy photo, and she assured us she was able to view it.

  She looked at it long and hard, commenting that the hair didn’t look like quite the same color, which Alex and I agreed with. Pamela said she knew Lydia changed her hair color often, so it could be her. It was obvious Pamela had the same struggle we did—it was close, but without seeing the eyes and with the distortion around the mouth, it was impossible to say for sure. I explained that there was no pressure to make the ID, that we still had the DNA testing to fall back on, but it would take a couple of weeks. Pamela apologized and said she just couldn’t be 100 percent certain. Both Alex and I reassured her that we felt exactly the same way about the photo, that we wanted to give it a shot, but regardless, we would have an answer soon. We stayed for quite a while, chatting while Pamela showed us around her home and garden. We left, assuring her that we would initiate the DNA testing immediately.

  Several weeks later, we had our answer—Lydia was a match for the unidentified woman. The testing gave astronomical odds against it being anyone other than Lydia, and the PAP smear sample was the clincher. I told Pamela of our findings with very mixed feelings—elation at having solved a mystery and provided some closure but also a deep sadness, knowing we had to tell a mother she had outlived her own child. There was also a feeling of disappointment at no longer having a reason to speak with Pamela. Both Alex and I felt that loss and would speak of her often in the coming months. Finally, something we had done felt like it had gone the way it was supposed to—leads led to more leads, trails went somewhere instead of to dead ends, and science had provided the confirmation of what we had strongly suspected. Finding Lydia had seemed so simple a process, so straightforward in comparison with the others. Where were they? Could we find twenty-seven more women this way? It didn’t seem likely.

  As part of our effort to expand our search to areas of the country we hadn’t previously had access to, I began doing a province-by-province driver’s license check on each of the missing women. I had done this for the newer files, but it had not been done on many of the older files, perhaps because of the erroneous assumption these women were not capable of driving or could not afford a vehicle. Regardless, it was important to run this check, if only to be able to say we had done it and were unable to find them this way. I planned to run the names through every six months in case there were any new entries.

  As all of this was going on, I was also working closely with Larry Campbell to search the coroners’ and medical examiners’ databases for each province, including their departments of Vital Statistics, to ascertain whether any of the women had died, used health care services, or given birth in another province. Surprisingly, two of the names on our list showed up in the Ontario medical records—Lily Jones*, missing since October 1991, and Paulette Adamson*, missing since 1978.

  Finding Lily Jones was embarrassingly simple. From her medical records, I was able to contact a physician who had seen her and explain my predicament. He agreed to look at a faxed photo and confirmed that this was the same woman that he had seen only a short time ago. I asked him if he would phone her and have her contact me, and he agreed to do so. He called me back a short while later and said that Lily was indeed alive and well but that she didn’t want to speak with me, since she had left her life in Vancouver behind and did not wish to be reminded of it. I conferred with Geramy, and we agreed this was more than enough to satisfy us that Lily Jones was fine and should be taken off our list.

  From what I could gather, the people who reported Lily Jones missing in the first place were not family, and I believe they thought they could get some money if they could locate her. Lily’s appearance had changed radically since her Vancouver days, which is probably why no one who knew her had ever recognized her from our poster or America’s Most Wanted. I had never been able to reach the two people who reported her missing; nor did I have any information about her family. The more I looked at it, the more obvious it became that Lily was never really “missing” to any of the important people in her life, only to these two clowns who reported her missing in the hope that they would be the first to know if we located her.

  Paulette Adamson’s story is one I wish belonged to more of these women—the kind of Pretty Woman boy-meets-girl, boy-saves-girl-from-a-life-on-the-street story I know many people like to think happens to sex workers all the time but sadly does not. She had never entirely fit our profile. She ran with a more upscale, affluent crowd, preferring clubs like the Penthouse to the Downtown Eastside beer parlors. Her drug use was not prolific, and I had a difficult time proving that she was using anything more than recreationally. What had always troubled me about Paulette was that she left behind family—including a young son—without a word. As with our other victims, this factor led me to believe she had not left the area of her own free will.

  Paulette had been missing since 1978—the longest of any of the women on our list at that time—making the simplicity of her discovery all the more embarrassing and somewhat humbling. As part of my nationwide driver’s license search, Paulette’s name was run through each province’s motor vehicle licensing bureau, but we hadn’t known her new last name at the time. Out of all of our missing women, Paulette’s was the only name that showed up—Adamson showing as a previous surname replaced by what appeared to be a married name—with an associated address and telephone number. Again, I couldn’t believe it could be this easy after all these years—was this all we had to do? Check medical records? Rerun a driver’s license check? Check the damn phone book? Why had this not been done when the file was first opened? Why hadn’t I done it when I reviewed the file?

  With a trembling hand, I dialed the number as Alex sat excitedly beside me, also unable to believe that we’d found her. A woman answered, and I identified myself and asked if she was Paulette Adamson. Clearly, she was not comfortable at having been found, but she politely answered my questions and simply said she had changed her life, married, an
d now had a new family and did not want her birth family to know where she was or what her new name was.

  I should have felt on top of the world that we had found her, but my heart was heavy with dread as I called her family member on the file and said we had found her. Naturally, she was upset to learn Paulette did not want contact with the family, but she understood Paulette’s position and thanked me for my efforts. Unfortunately, the rest of the family did not seem to share this person’s gratitude—I received several nasty phone calls and messages from one person berating me for not providing contact information for Paulette and questioning my obligation to protect Paulette’s privacy. I was beginning to think Paulette may have had good reason to run away and not look back.

  Kendra Sparrow remained a mystery. At the same time we were working on identifying Lydia Chase, Alex was busy delving into Kendra’s background, trying to track her down. We had information that she could be in Vancouver or Edmonton or on a reserve in Saskatchewan, but no one could say for certain. Alex had been in contact with Detective Keith Kilshaw of the Edmonton Police Service’s Project KARE, their task force formed to look into several unsolved Edmonton-area sex worker homicides in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Keith was a great resource for us and was helping Alex with contacts on his end but had encountered the same dead ends locating Kendra.

  A woman contacted me who claimed she had seen the photos of the missing women on America’s Most Wanted and felt she could assist our investigation. She was a psychic and provided me with several references from within the law enforcement community in both Canada and the U.S. During the missing women investigation, four or five psychics had reached me on the phone through the VPD switchboard and I’d indulge them for a few minutes before it became obvious they had little to offer the investigation. This woman was different. She told me she had specific feelings about a few of the women in particular, and I felt I could at least spare an hour to hear what she had to say. One thing about our conversation that struck me as interesting was that she asked me to provide a separate photo of each woman so that she could view them one at a time rather than all together on the poster, which she said muddled her perceptions and caused her to be unclear about whom she was sensing. I told her we could do this, and she agreed to come in one morning to meet with Alex and me.