by Lori Shenher
During Missing Women Commission of Inquiry testimony, I found it exasperating that Jason Gratl, the lawyer for the Downtown Eastside interests, continued to portray Fisk and Myers as the only detectives who subscribed to the “serial killer theory” and were seriously concerned with finding a serial killer, while the rest of us supposedly poured cold water on their efforts to solve the murders. The truth was that these two officers took valuable time and energy from the team and our efforts to find the killer of the missing women. They also withheld vital witness photo identification of Pickton that would have spurred a renewed attempt to press the RCMP to ramp up its investigation of Pickton.
In April 2000, Fisk and Myers showed a pile of photos to women on the Downtown Eastside, including photos of POI 390 and Pickton. I expressed my concerns to them at the time that this was not a proper photo lineup and, as such, would not be admissible in court if they used the photos to make identifications and they later became evidence to support criminal charges. Fisk and Myers laughed off my concerns as well as my offers—and the offers of our administrative assistant, Dorothy—to make them a proper photo lineup they could use on their rounds that would be admissible in court. I was afraid that Pickton would end up being our killer and the identifications would be inadmissible, and I told them so.
They later testified at the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry that I didn’t want Pickton’s photo shown, which was never my intent at all. What I wanted was for Pickton’s photo to be shown on the street in a proper photo lineup. It had to be done correctly. I wanted women in the Downtown Eastside to identify Pickton, and we needed that ID so that we could take it to our supervisors and fight for more resources by showing we had proof he was frequenting the Downtown Eastside. At this stage, we had little recent evidence that Pickton was spending time in the Downtown Eastside, yet I felt certain he was. Still, I would later learn that Fisk and Myers continued to include Pickton’s photo in their pile of photos, and women picked him out.
In 2002, when a public inquiry was likely to be pending, Doug LePard was tasked with investigating and documenting the VPD side of this investigation. I met with him in late November, and he interviewed me over two days. At one point, I was reviewing my experience with the work of Fisk and Myers.
“You know women ID’d Pickton from the photo they [Fisk and Myers] showed in their street interviews.” It was more a statement than a question. I didn’t understand what he was saying to me. It was inconceivable to me that women could have picked Pickton out without my knowing, without Fisk and Myers telling me.
“What?”
LePard went on to tell me that Fisk admitted in his interview with LePard that women on the Downtown Eastside had recognized Pickton from the photo they had shown them. I couldn’t process this shock for several moments. Why? Why hadn’t they shared this with the team? When I regained my ability to speak, I told LePard they had never made the rest of the team or me aware of this identification. LePard said he knew that.
“He said he told you and put it in his notes, but admitted he might not have,” LePard said.
“He never told me that! Never!” I could barely control my rage.
“I know. He allowed that he might not have told you.” He sounded sympathetic to my position.
“Why wouldn’t they tell me that? I just don’t get it.”
“I don’t know.”
“That would’ve been a game changer,” I whispered.
“I know,” LePard answered.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“I was alive to anything, anything, that would link him to the Downtown Eastside and get us on that farm.” I felt my throat closing. I swallowed hard, determined not to cry.
“I know you were.”
I sat there, thinking how, especially after the bitter disappointment of the Ellingsen interviews, we were desperate for more information we could use to reinvigorate the Pickton investigation. I was completely stunned that Fisk and Myers apparently kept this information from the team.
Again, my gut feelings had been valid and my sense that Fisk and Myers were secretive and withholding valuable investigative information from the rest of the team appeared accurate. Once again, I felt deep dismay that I couldn’t have pressed harder at the time to bring these two guys in line with the rest of the team, because I do believe they had energy we could have harnessed for the good of the investigation. Unfortunately, they didn’t trust us, and in turn, we didn’t trust them—and their actions turned out to be unworthy of our trust.
I also believe the VPD of the time bears some of the responsibility for this. Fisk and Myers should never have been assigned to our team, when everyone up to our inspector and in the Internal Investigation Section knew of their shortcomings and history. Or, given the knowledge of their alleged past actions, they should have come to us under close supervision so that they could be managed and their energy directed properly.
Secrecy and questionable tactics were how these two rolled, in my view, and no one was surprised when they quickly became a cancer in our investigation. I tried so hard to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they just couldn’t seem to work with the team.
I also had reason to believe they were offering to test other jurisdictions’ DNA samples on the VPD budget, but I refused to spend my time investigating my own supposed teammates rather than continuing to search for the women. I advised Geramy of my concerns about the DNA testing, and she said she couldn’t deal with them at that time. The role of Office Tattletale was wearing on me, and I began ignoring Fisk and Myers’s behavior as best I could and stopped going to Geramy with my concerns until the POI 390 debacle made that impossible.
My stomach problems and nightmares continued to worsen, and I took a week off in the middle of April 2000 in an effort to get some time away. When I returned on April 18, I was surprised to discover that Fisk and Myers were not in the office. I was alone and ventured out to Geramy’s desk in Homicide to find out where they were. She told me they had gone to Lethbridge to arrest POI 390 on sexual assault charges—the charges they had taken nearly a year to prepare. I was surprised. They had made no previous mention of their plans to me, but she said they had approached her late the previous week—the week I was away and unable to comment or make suggestions to them—and she thought I had known, so she approved the travel.
There had been no team meeting, no discussion of interview strategy, and—what would normally be done prior to the arrest—no discussion of a media strategy. Although I couldn’t prove it, I felt certain that they had intentionally waited until I was away to avoid any such conversation or planning. In allowing them to handle this arrest, Geramy had made the assumption that they were competent, but the errors they made exposed the extent of their incompetence.
POI 390 was arrested a couple of days later. Fisk and Myers were difficult to reach via phone, and Geramy received little information from them on their progress. On April 21, they called the office and I spoke to Myers, who could barely contain his excitement. He told me how he was certain that POI 390 had killed the missing women and how fabulous the taped interviews were. As desperately as I wanted to believe this, I couldn’t help feeling sceptical. They would be back the following week.
On April 25, they bounced into the office and presented me with eight videotapes—some fourteen hours long—of their interviews with POI 390 in a Lethbridge jail interview room. I found it hard to believe they had the right man, but I knew I had to keep an open mind, and I felt a stir of excitement that we may have found our answer.
POI 390 was still in Lethbridge, awaiting remand and transport to the Vancouver Pretrial Centre. Fisk and Myers were insistent that I watch the interview tapes—which I had every intention of doing—because they insisted that POI 390 “practically confesses” in the interview. I could not imagine what they could contain that would last fourteen hours. I took the tapes to the RCMP headquarters to be copied, then returned to the office. That afternoon, I
began to watch, hoping my fears would be unfounded, hoping he was indeed our man and the search was over. Maybe we had our guy. Maybe we could forget the disappointment of Pickton and be certain we had our serial killer.
17
Salvaging Project Amelia
• • •
“The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.”
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
I HAVE NEVER been as ashamed to be a police officer as I was that day. The first tape began with both Fisk and Myers sitting in the Lethbridge interview room with POI 390, telling him how certain they were that he was the killer and demanding to know where the bodies were.
There was no recorded or documented reading of POI 390’s charter rights, and there was no recorded or documented explanation of the difference between the sexual assault charges and the disappearances of the missing women—which is a very important legal distinction. An investigator cannot piggyback a charge onto another arrest or criminal charge and use that to interview a suspect on a different case without very clearly defining that for the subject and explaining to him that he is well within his rights to refuse to take part in such questioning. If they had done this, it wasn’t on the tape, and that would be a problem for us in court. This wasn’t an interview; it was an inquisition. Fisk and Myers spoke over each other and over POI 390 and lacked any sort of plan or direction, and when they did allow POI 390 to speak, they wouldn’t let him finish.
Within the first few minutes, Myers told POI 390 that a first degree murder charge could probably be dropped to second degree if POI 390 would just tell them where the bodies were. This was a blatant inducement, which is entirely the domain of the prosecution—it is not within a police officer’s power to make any such promises in return for a confession. I cringed at this exchange. Here we go.
When POI 390 didn’t immediately confess, as Myers expected him to, Myers then said he doubted POI 390 would be charged with anything at all if he gave up the location of the bodies, because all anyone was really interested in was finding them. Oh my God. It was worse than I could have ever possibly imagined. Oh my God. My mind reeled—how were we going to recover from this if he was the killer? I left the room to find Geramy and Al Boyd.
I explained to them what I had seen, and they agreed that this was not good. I asked them to view the tapes also. Neither one was able to view them at that time, so Geramy asked me to take them home and watch them in their entirety and report to her on the contents. I bumped into Myers in the hallway, who hollered an excited Whadya think? at me. I just walked past him; I could not deal with him after what I’d seen.
I took the tapes home the night of April 28 and watched them from start to finish. It was at times shocking and at other times tedious; always, it was excruciating. POI 390 was not an easy interview, and Fisk and Myers became convinced that the way to get a confession from him was to have him hypnotized. POI 390 was so tired after hours of “interrogation” that he began saying he didn’t remember killing anyone, but he agreed with the idea that they could hypnotize him to be sure.
They had somehow secured a Lethbridge psychologist and his young assistant to carry out the hypnosis, calling them out in the late hours of the night. The following several hours were a bizarre combination of amateur interrogation, quasi-psychotherapy, and hypnosis attempts. POI 390 kept telling them he could not be hypnotized and tried to convince the psychologist he was trying, but somehow it just didn’t work on him, as though he were some sort of rare subject. It didn’t “work” because he was exhausted. I don’t know if anyone in the room knew what it might look like if he was hypnotized. I know I kept waiting to see some Amazing Kreskin-esque behavior, but nothing happened—hardly surprising.
For a week, the arrest of POI 390 was all over the news, and the day he was returned to Vancouver, his photo spanned the cover of the Vancouver Province. As I read the papers, it became clear that they contained a level of detail about his activities and personal information that I found unusual, given he had merely been arrested and was not yet before the court. I feared the worst—that Fisk and Myers had not taken the standard step investigators always take in such cases—that they had not sealed their information to obtain a search warrant in Lethbridge, an administrative step taken by police to keep such information private until it reaches court. If not sealed, a warrant application can be accessed by members of the media and anyone else who looks into the matters on the local police arrest records and court docket.
I had two questions for Fisk and Myers that morning: Why had they not video- or audiotaped the reading of POI 390’s charter rights, and had they sealed their warrant? The first question elicited a blank look from them both. They told me they hadn’t taped the first three hours of the interview because they “didn’t want to go that route.” I asked whether they had chartered him—read him his rights, including the right to counsel, under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They answered no, they hadn’t wanted to “spook” him.
The situation grew worse. All of the taped interviews were going to be inadmissible based on these crucial errors, and if POI 390 was the killer of the missing women—we still couldn’t rule that out—we were in serious trouble. I felt I was in some strange vortex, spinning around with these two guys who had absolutely no idea how to investigate anything of this magnitude and having to explain to my supervisors something I could not understand myself. How could people of this level of incompetence be allowed to handle such a serious file? Did no one else think this was serious?
So we had three hours of an interrogation apparently unaccounted for—defense counsel would have a field day with this. They could allege everything from beatings to inducements—in addition to the taped inducements we had on video—and they would be right to suggest it all, because in the absence of tape, who knows what they said or did to him? I knew the answer to the second question before I asked it, but I still had to. Did they seal their warrant in Lethbridge? Two fifteen-year veterans of the VPD stared at me as though I’d just asked whether they’d been to the moon yesterday. Oh my God. Clearly, they didn’t know you could and should seal warrant applications. I suspected that before this investigation, all they had ever applied for were drug warrants and who cared about those people and that stuff getting into the press? They didn’t know about sealing warrants, because, like everything Fisk and Myers had worked on under an alleged veil of paranoia and secrecy, fearing someone would steal their thunder, they were convinced they knew everything and hadn’t bothered to ask.
Now we had an even greater problem. There was so much information in the news, and it would be impossible for us to test the credibility of any new victims of POI 390 who came forward as a result of hearing of his arrest. There was so much detail out there—where he lived, what kind of vehicle he drove, what his sexual proclivities were, the fact that he had a drug habit—that we would not know whether a new victim knew these things through her own experiences with POI 390 or as a result of reading it in the paper or seeing it on the news.
Still, there were no apologies from Fisk and Myers, no acknowledgment they had made serious errors in both practice and judgment and perhaps needed to start to defer to some of the more experienced and competent investigators sitting mere feet from our office. No sign that they would be asking for advice before undertaking something they were not familiar with. No indication that in the future they would clarify to ensure things they had been doing the same way for years were now being done correctly. No sense that they would begin to check to see if criminal case law might have changed in the past twenty years. For them, it was business as usual. They arrested POI 390. They were heroes.
This was a watershed moment for me. Somehow, I felt strangely galvanized to protect the integrity of Project Amelia. My worst suspicions had been realized, and my instincts had been confirmed. I saw how easily things co
uld go very wrong and how very few people in the organization seemed to care or really understand the gravity of the situation, how truly lacking in direction this investigation was. I again expressed my concerns to Geramy, and she suggested I watch the tapes with Sergeant Bill Lean and Sergeant Dennis Paulsen of our Polygraph Section. They were expert interviewers and interrogators and would be able to assess the interviews for Geramy and Al Boyd.
Lean and Paulsen were as horrified as I was. We watched the tapes together over two days on the weekend of April 29, and they agreed—Fisk and Myers could not be within a hundred miles of POI 390 as we prepared this thing for court, and even then, the damage was probably irreparable. We could probably salvage the sexual assault cases, but anything to do with the missing women would be inadmissible.
We discussed strategy for an interview of POI 390 to be conducted by Lean and Paulsen and began to prepare for that. They spoke to Geramy and echoed my concerns, which I had hoped would provide the push she needed to overcome her own inertia in dealing with Fisk and Myers. Geramy’s heart was with Project Amelia, but it had always been a second job; her plate was piled high with homicide responsibilities. Throughout this crisis, she had seemed frozen, unable to comprehend what they had done and—to an even greater degree—what she should do in response. I began to pressure her to remove Fisk and Myers from Project Amelia.
The interview was planned for May 1, 2000, at eleven in the morning. Lean, Paulsen, Fisk, Myers, and I were present, as well as Lepine; Chernoff; Gord Spencer, my new Major Crime inspector; Geramy; and Staff Sergeant Keith Davidson of the RCMP Criminal Profiling Unit, visiting English profiler Sergeant Neil Trainor, and their protégée, an Australian policewoman.