by Lori Shenher
This same week, Alex obtained some information that indicated Kendra Sparrow had possibly died in an Edmonton hospital. She was still working hard to confirm this with the Alberta branch of Vital Statistics, and there were some issues regarding the possibility that Kendra had died under a different surname. Keith Kilshaw was also trying to find her ex-boyfriend on the reserve in Saskatchewan, where he was apparently raising their son.
Alex and I didn’t exactly broadcast it around the office that we had a psychic coming in that morning—Fisk and Myers would have laughed themselves hoarse, and we didn’t need to hear any more of their old boy cynicism and true crime paperback policing theories. They were incredibly closed-minded, and it was easier to keep them out of the loop than listen to them mock us for entertaining someone they would surely have branded a quack.
The psychic was not what we had expected. She was very professional and unassuming and said all she could promise was if she didn’t sense anything, she would tell us that. We gave her a binder of the photos—one per page, with no names. We had inserted Lydia Chase’s photo as a test, even though at this time we were awaiting the DNA results and were almost certain that she was the deceased woman from the Commercial Drive heroin overdose. Paulette Adamson’s photo was also included as a test because we’d found her and closed her case.
Slowly, the psychic looked closely at each photo. With some, she admitted to feeling nothing. With others, she had a vision of where she saw the particular woman last in her mind. One woman was seen near a gravel pit—we had no idea if the woman had been near a gravel pit but made a note of each observation. Another was pictured on Vancouver Island, where we had never heard of that woman being, so we were sceptical. As the psychic continued, many of her observations were interesting but disappointingly vague and virtually impossible to follow up on because she couldn’t identify any of the locations.
Then she looked at Lydia Chase’s photo. She said this woman made her feel cold, and she feared she was dead. Alex and I looked at one another, practically gulping.
She continued without much to say about the remaining women until she came to Paulette Adamson. She told us she saw this woman in a city—she told us the name, but I am omitting it here out of respect for Paulette’s privacy—which was very close geographically to where we knew Paulette was living. This location had never been mentioned in the press or to anyone outside our office. The psychic said she was alive. Alex and I were encouraged—now we needed to hear something we didn’t already know.
When she came to Kendra Sparrow’s photo, she was visibly shaken. She said she was very cold and she saw her laid out on a stone, perhaps a marble slab or something in a mortuary—she couldn’t say for sure. She told us this woman was dead and very much alone. Chills ran up and down my spine. I watched the color drain from Alex’s face. Shortly after this July 1999 meeting, Alex determined that Kendra Sparrow had died in an Edmonton hospital of complications arising from her drug use. There is absolutely no way the psychic could have known that.
The psychic finished, and we talked briefly. We didn’t mention whether any of her observations had been close, only that she had been of help and we appreciated her time. She apologized for not being able to do more but said she would let us know if she thought of anything else. After she left, Alex and I just stared at each other, unable to get over those observations we knew to be accurate. Unfortunately, there were the others that were off base enough to keep us from getting too excited, but still, it left us both with a new appreciation of people with this sort of gift and reinforced for us the importance of maintaining an open mind. We felt we had done the right thing in not dismissing anyone who claimed they had had visions of any of the missing women. Unfortunately, those others we spoke with were not of the caliber of this woman.
In the space of a few weeks, we had gone from thirty-one missing women back down to twenty-seven, and this hint of success was both inspirational and daunting. The relative ease with which we had found Adamson and Jones—alive, no less—caused me to rethink the entire investigation to ensure that we weren’t missing any other obvious sources of information or making assumptions about the victims that had prevented us from pursuing avenues that might be fruitful. This was a healthy fear and provided a much-needed infusion of enthusiasm and motivation at a time when I sorely needed a boost.
16
Investigating Person of Interest (POI) 390
• • •
“If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless.”
DARRYL F. ZANUCK
WAYNE MYERS AND Gary Fisk joined Project Amelia in July 1999 utterly convinced Person of Interest (POI) 390 was responsible for killing these women. Although their conviction and tenacity were admirable, this certainty was based on nothing more than the hair on Myers’s neck. I wondered if I wasn’t the same in my interest in Pickton. I felt we had more solid evidence that indicated Pickton could be our guy, but on bad days I wondered if I wasn’t just like them, hanging my hat on nothing more than my gut feeling.
Repeatedly, they would tell anyone who would listen about the time Myers and his patrol partner pulled POI 390 over in a Downtown Eastside traffic stop, about the sick feeling Myers got from the man, and about how that made him their number one suspect in the missing women investigation. There was no other evidence that elevated POI 390 to this status or made him any different from the hundreds of other men who used and abused the women on the low track on any given day. Still, Fisk and Myers would ride POI 390’s considerable back into this investigation and bring what semblance of a team we had to its knees.
POI 390 was an interesting subject, no question. The adopted son of recently deceased elderly parents from Lethbridge, Alberta, he led a strangely nomadic life, driving exotic sports cars often fifteen or twenty hours nonstop between Lethbridge, Calgary, and Vancouver, selling contraband cigarettes and picking up sex workers. He was an extremely large man—almost a giant—with a rock star hairstyle and piercing eyes. He had a huge crack habit and would flash a bag full of rocks or a wad of money at the girls on the street, enticing them to come along for the ride. He was a regular on the bad date sheets—regular newsletters published and distributed by the Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society (DEYAS) to warn sex workers of known bad dates—more often for bad driving and not paying for dates than for violence.
The rest of us on Project Amelia tried to maintain open minds where suspects were concerned. We were desperate for someone to pursue. I was growing so tired of dead ends and leads that went nowhere. Still, POI 390 remained nothing more than a sex offender with no evidence to suggest he had killed anyone, and Fisk and Myers were assigned to find out whether he could be responsible for more. POI 390 dated the same sex workers repeatedly and had a long-term relationship with a woman outside of the sex trade. His DNA would later match that found in the sexual assault examination of a North Vancouver sex worker who had since died of AIDS. Still, there seemed to be nothing to link him to any of our victims.
Constable Paul McCarl was an RCMP Serious Crime investigator generally assigned to homicide cases outside the major urban centers of the Lower Mainland, such as the Fraser Valley. He and I attended many of the same information-sharing meetings over the years, and we spoke often because the three Agassiz homicides—Tracy Olajide, Tammy Pipe, and Victoria Younker—were Paul’s cases. Paul worked extremely hard with us while maintaining a great sense of humor and a compassionate attitude toward the victims. He was invaluable to me and opened his files to Project Amelia whenever we asked.
Fisk and Myers pressed McCarl to allow them to present POI 390 to the RCMP as a viable suspect in the missing women investigation and the Agassiz homicides and to ask for the RCMP’s help with surveillance. I felt this meeting was premature and that the VPD stood to be embarrassed for requesting it. I expressed the feeling, both to the team and to Geramy, that POI 390 was no more a suspect in these missing women files
than any of the hundreds of other men we had in our database who were sex offenders, violent to sex workers, and the like. I explained that we needed more information about POI 390 beyond Myers’s gut feeling. Geramy and I agreed that if this surveillance gave us more information, we could hope to rule POI 390 in or out as a suspect, and we would just have to risk the possibility of embarrassment.
A meeting was arranged for October 27, 1999, at the RCMP E Division Surrey satellite office and Geramy, Fisk, Myers, and I attended to represent the VPD. The RCMP had several members there, including Superintendent Gary Bass, Corporal Marg Kingsbury, Constable Paul McCarl, Sergeant Bob Paulson, Corporal Nicole St. Mars, Sergeant Bill Thordarson, and Norm Libel, representing the B.C. Coroners Service.
Initially, the air was full of expectation—obviously, because of whatever Fisk and Myers had told McCarl, the Mounties were expecting to hear some solid evidence against POI 390 and to be asked for their assistance. Instead, Fisk told a rambling account of what a terrible person POI 390 was and how his poor personal hygiene somehow translated into his being a serial killer of prostitutes. Slowly, eyebrows around the table rose.
There was no evidence of anything beyond the fact that POI 390 was a sex offender who didn’t like to let his dates leave his condo when the party slowed down or the coke ran out. But when asked whether they were aware of anyone who hadn’t got away from POI 390, the answer was a sheepish no. McCarl asked what else they had on POI 390, and Myers raised his voice and asked, “What more do you want?”
He launched into his now-tired reenactment of the vehicle stop and the hair on his neck standing on end at meeting POI 390—as though he had some kind of follicular barometer to register the propensity to kill. He appeared incensed that the others couldn’t see what he and Fisk could. Glances were exchanged around the table. So? And? I looked to Geramy as if to say See? This is why I didn’t think this was a good idea. She just nodded slowly. Bad idea to come here.
Myers stuck his finger accusingly in McCarl’s face and demanded to know why it was taking so long for McCarl to compare the DNA on the Agassiz homicides against that found in the North Vancouver sex worker assault case to determine whether it came from the same suspect. To his credit, McCarl maintained his composure and simply replied that these things took time and it was happening as quickly as it could. Myers was livid, convinced this would prove POI 390 killed those women—and the Vancouver missing women, the victims of Green River, and presumably every other unsolved sex worker homicide in the Pacific Northwest. Finally, Bob Paulson, who would go on to become the commissioner of the RCMP, asked them a question.
“Hair on your neck notwithstanding, what evidence do you guys have?”
Paulson was a highly respected investigator known for his expertise on outlaw motorcycle gang files, and he supervised the RCMP Special O surveillance team. The final decision to grant us their support rested with him. Fisk and Myers hemmed and hawed, referred to the bad feeling they had for POI 390, until Paulson relented and agreed to give them a few days of surveillance in the Lethbridge area. Arrangements were made to conduct surveillance on POI 390 to obtain a discard DNA sample. This sample would then be tested and, if it was a match, it would further the North Vancouver sexual assault case against POI 390 and enable Fisk and Myers to request a DNA sample by warrant.
On the positive side, we all agreed that POI 390’s DNA sample should be obtained and tested against the samples we had from our North Van sex assault victim and the Agassiz homicides. But the disappointment in the air was palpable, and we felt we had lost credibility in the eyes of the RCMP as a result of this poorly conceived meeting. Fisk and Myers pushed their way wordlessly out of the meeting, while the rest of us stayed behind, Geramy and I apologizing to McCarl for Myers’s questioning his work and yelling at him in front of everyone. Good-natured to the end, Paul laughed it off, saying, “We’ve all been under that kind of pressure, I guess.”
The next two weeks were very difficult in the Project Amelia room. Fisk and Myers barked orders to Bob Paulson over the telephone, referring to POI 390 as the “only suspect worth a damn,” oblivious to the rest of us continuing to work on the list of other more compelling potential suspects we had information about, including Pickton. Despite my desire to support the entire team, I found myself for the first time in this investigation wishing that the DNA sample would not match a single thing. Then maybe they would finally see the value in pursuing the only decent potential suspect we had—Pickton. At the same time, I didn’t want to behave like them and dismiss a good suspect, and I desperately hoped something would link POI 390 to the missing women so that maybe we could tie this thing up for these poor families and move on. I realized I didn’t care who our killer was; I just hoped we would catch him and put these cases to bed, finally.
On November 16, 1999, POI 390’s DNA sample came back from the lab. It did not match any of the DNA found on Agassiz victims Tammy Pipe and Tracy Olajide. It did match with matter collected in the North Van victim’s rape kit, enabling Fisk and Myers to proceed with charges in her case, so the effort was not a total loss.
This information didn’t appear to register with Fisk and Myers in any way. Myers immediately said he wanted to begin dealing directly with Mission Institution, a prison in the Fraser Valley. He wanted to obtain DNA samples from all the men incarcerated there for comparison with the Agassiz homicides. Clearly, that was not Myers’s investigation; it was McCarl’s, and the discard DNA proved it had nothing to do with POI 390. There was no indication that McCarl was dragging his heels or was incompetent in any way—quite the contrary. Clearly, these were not Vancouver cases. Myers’s understanding of federal DNA legislation was severely lacking, but I was no longer shocked by his and Fisk’s lack of investigative knowledge and acumen. I expressed my concerns to Geramy, who agreed she would speak to them.
Over the next two weeks, I tried without success to assign several new tips to Fisk and Myers for follow-up. They continued to do their own haphazard assessment of potential suspects and work on only what they found interesting, ignoring the mountain of tips related to the missing women we still had sitting untouched in the Project Amelia office. This all occurred in the same time frame as the aftermath of the Ellingsen/Pickton debacle of late summer 1999, and I was already disheartened and discouraged. I would have welcomed a new direction had I truly believed we had exhausted the Pickton information and ruled him out as a suspect, but we hadn’t.
My frustration grew from my inability to direct Fisk and Myers in any way, from their apparent unwillingness to take direction from Geramy, and from Geramy’s inability to find the time to direct and manage them. The futility of my position wore on me. As the file coordinator, I was supposed to have largely administrative duties—reviewing files, assessing new information, liaising with other agencies, ensuring that everything each investigator was doing was properly documented, conferring with Geramy, and assigning tips where appropriate.
Daily, I vacillated between running to Geramy with every little concern and trying to deal with problems myself, problems that included the management of two people with their own agenda. Geramy’s investigative skills were in high demand during a violent gang war and her role as a homicide supervisor consumed all of her time. I was not given the title of a supervisor—acting sergeant—yet here I was, coordinating the largest serial killer file in Canadian history, and I couldn’t motivate my investigators to do what needed to be done. I didn’t want to wield power through rank, but clearly these guys weren’t going to listen to a woman with eight years on the job. Something had to change.
In early December 1999, I made a formal written request that either I be assigned as an acting sergeant on the case or that management assign a senior man such as Ron Lepine to that role—someone who would be in that room full time and could see Fisk’s and Myers’s apparent incompetence and unwillingness to cooperate with the others, someone who had the power and authority to deal with them. It was clear Fisk and Myers ha
d little respect for anyone, but women and junior members seemed to rank lowest on their totem pole. Assign a senior man, I asserted, someone who could direct them and hold them accountable should they choose to not complete their assignments. Making Ron that man was my first choice of possible outcomes.
I compared Project Amelia with the Home Invasion Task Force, which represented a who’s who of investigative talent in the VPD; there wasn’t a weak link among the ten detectives assigned at the height of that case. Apparently, victimized homeowners warranted the big guns—missing drug-addicted sex workers did not.
My request was turned down. Lori needs to understand this thing won’t be going on much longer. That was the verbal response Major Crime acting inspector Dan Dureau gave Geramy. I don’t believe I ever received a written reply. This stunned me. How could anyone say this case would not be continuing? Had someone found the victims and neglected to tell me? I failed to understand how anyone thought this could simply be swept under a rug. Who truly believed we could go to these families and say, “Sorry, we couldn’t find them, investigation closed”? Not only did I not get my first choice—Ron as acting sergeant—I wasn’t assigned to the position either, and the status quo remained. There is no problem here.
The next few months contained more of the same. Each week, Fisk and Myers seemed to have some new Best Suspect Ever, but they kept their information close to the vest, afraid the rest of the Project Amelia team would steal their information, make an arrest, and receive all the glory they were certain would be waiting. They didn’t seem to realize that there would be no glory in confirming someone had murdered thirty women—the number we were dealing with at the time. The rest of our team wasn’t interested in glory. They failed to understand that the rest of us had work to do. They also didn’t seem to understand that their suspects held little interest to the rest of us in the absence of solid evidence to link them to the case.