by Lori Shenher
The tension in the air was unmistakable as Lean and Paulsen told Fisk and Myers they were tainted and no longer to be involved in the POI 390 investigation or to interact with him in any way. They were dumbfounded. As we continued to discuss strategy for the pending interview, the tension in the polygraph suite mounted. Fisk and Myers were defensive and belligerent, unable to understand how they could be criticized for their flawless arrest and investigation.
Lean did not back down, telling them directly that they had screwed up and would be lucky if we had any investigation at all at the end of the day. Lepine and Chernoff were sent to collect POI 390 from pretrial and escort him back to the VPD polygraph suite. When they returned empty-handed, our worst fears had been realized. POI 390 was so befuddled by the Lethbridge interviews, he refused to be interviewed again. On the advice of his lawyer, he would not be taking part in any interviews with any of us.
I wrote a very pointed memo to Geramy outlining my concerns about the POI 390 investigation and requesting that the case be immediately transferred to the VPD Sexual Offence Squad for follow-up and completion. I requested a meeting with her for the following day and demanded that Fisk and Myers be removed—not only from the case but also from Project Amelia, as I believed their actions would greatly undermine the credibility of the team and our ability to investigate the missing women files.
Geramy met with me the following day, and I told her the only thing to do was move the file to SOS and get Fisk and Myers out of Project Amelia. She felt trapped, helpless because the former deputy chief constable—Brian McGuinness—had placed them in Project Amelia. I told her that didn’t matter to me, because either they had to go or I would. Her choice. But I would not further threaten my own professional integrity and reputation by working alongside those two people. I hated pushing her like this, but I was done.
We met again the next day, and Geramy asked whether it would be acceptable to me that Fisk and Myers be allowed to remain in Project Amelia until they had completed the POI 390 investigation. I looked at her as though she’d lost her mind. Had she not heard a thing Sergeant Lean had said? No, that would not be acceptable. I reiterated all of the points on my memo of the previous day—the problems with their integrity, their lack of information sharing, and their demonstrated incompetence. She nodded her head. She knew it was a bad idea for them to remain on this file. This was challenging for Geramy, because she had only ever supervised competent and self-sufficient people.
Geramy agreed to speak with Inspector Barb Morris of the Sexual Offence Squad and have the file transferred to an experienced detective there. In the meantime, I sent a fax to the officer in charge of Vancouver pretrial, asking that no one be allowed to interview POI 390 without first clearing it with me and to advise me if anyone tried. I feared Fisk and Myers would try to talk to POI 390 again.
On May 4, Geramy drafted a memo to Fisk and Myers explaining that it was anticipated that Project Amelia would be winding down, that the POI 390 file was now assigned to Detective Constable Sean Trowski of SOS, and that their services would no longer be required. They reacted strongly to this news, and I tended to agree that the idea that we were winding down was hard to fathom. Again, I met with Geramy and suggested that this half-truth, probably designed to spare their feelings, was misguided. She met with them and told them there were concerns with their handling of the POI 390 arrest and that was the reason they were being transferred out. They argued, saying this was the result of persecution by jealous members of Project Amelia. They asked for time to complete their notes and wrap up their tip files, and Geramy complied with this request, against my wishes.
A date for their leaving was never set. On May 9, they said they would leave at the end of the week and proceeded to spend that entire week locked in a Homicide interview room, with one telephone and a piece of paper taped over the peephole, coming out only to photocopy the volumes of files they had taken from the Project Amelia office.
When I told Al Boyd they were photocopying files, he shrugged, saying there was little he could do. I asked him what they could possibly need Project Amelia files for if they were leaving the team and had been ordered to stop work on this investigation. He shared my sense of bewilderment but did nothing. I suspected they were planning to continue investigating POI 390—this was their style and reputation at the VPD—and I advised Gord Spencer of my concerns. He warned the two in writing that they were to cease and desist working on the POI 390 investigation.
The remaining days were tense; the Project Amelia office small enough when people were cordial was much smaller when the mood was hostile. Fisk and Myers drafted a long-winded and bizarre letter to Chief Constable Blythe complaining of their dismissal and asserting that without them this investigation was destined to failure. They cited the myriad suspects they were pursuing—many I had never heard of. They criticized Project Amelia members for everything from lack of work ethic to lack of arrests.
They showed a complete lack of understanding of this investigation and the various roles of the people on Project Amelia. Their memo to the chief included a page of footnoted references to various true crime novels and amateur criminal profiler paperbacks in an effort to bolster their self-professed expertise in the investigation of serial killers.
It was bizarre and amateurish, and the chief did not respond other than to criticize them for circumventing the chain of command. He asked me to respond to their allegations, and I did so gratefully, welcoming the opportunity to address their criticisms point by point and outline all of the ways they had ruined the POI 390 file and poisoned the work environment through their incompetence and ignorance. Sadly, this was probably the best report I would write in my time working on this case.
They left the team without providing me with proper notes of their activities or time spent on behalf of the team, including their admitted procurement of sex workers’ identifications of the Pickton photo. The POI 390 case was delayed because the Crown counsel report they had written on his arrest had to be rewritten almost completely. It was unacceptable for Crown counsel in the state Detective Constable Trowski, who took over the file and rewrote the report, received it. They failed to provide Project Amelia investigators with many of the contact names or numbers of the investigators they had supposedly dealt with in Calgary, Edmonton, and Lethbridge.
I would come to learn that Fisk and Myers continued to be in contact with these investigators even after being directed to stop and turn these contacts over to Project Amelia. Myers pressured one of Project Amelia’s admin staff to give him bad date sheet information contained on floppy disks, but she managed to put him off and report the incident to me. I notified Boyd, but nothing further was done. Obviously, under normal circumstances, having more people working on our case was preferable to fewer, but not people who worked at cross-purposes to the team, failed to disclose information, employed unsound methods, and failed to acknowledge their mistakes. These actions often formed the basis for mistrials, and we couldn’t afford one if we finally caught our killer.
POI 390 went on to be convicted on some of the sexual assault charges against him and served significant prison time. I believe that if the charges against him had been handled correctly, two things would have resulted. One, we could have had more victims who would testify against him, potentially giving us more charges. Two, I believe that a proper interview conducted by skilled interrogators would have given us a far better indication of whether POI 390 had ever killed and of whether he had any involvement in the disappearances of any of the sex workers.
I will say this in Fisk and Myers’s defense: the VPD of that era was not strong on training and mentorship. They were the products of a time and culture in which young patrol constables were encouraged to run with their own investigations and in which innovation and creativity were applauded. These are all good things, and perhaps the current era could use more of this energy. However, constables of Fisk and Myers’s vintage quickly went from junior constables to tho
se guys the junior constables looked to for guidance.
Fisk and Myers joined the VPD just as or shortly after the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms was passed into law, in 1982, and they were trained by many of the old-school cowboys who still held fast to abusive tactics and a Wild West mentality, eschewing the virtues of or need for a new charter that addressed things such as human rights, even for bad guys. Indeed, Myers’s father was a VPD constable before him, and young Wayne learned how things were done in those days at his father’s knee and later regaled us with many of these stories in the Project Amelia office.
Through a perfect storm of untrained partners and inadequate supervision, they both quickly reached a point where it would have been embarrassing to admit they didn’t know many of the most basic investigative procedures or were unaware of current case law and rules of evidence. The police culture being what it is, it certainly wouldn’t have been easy for two big, tough, experienced policemen to admit they didn’t know how to prepare a photo lineup or seal a search warrant.
I’m sympathetic to this set of circumstances, but it doesn’t excuse them. Not telling us that our prime suspect had been identified by our victim group was hugely detrimental to a very important investigation. I was willing to help my teammates learn new skills and become better investigators, if only they had asked or taken the help when it was offered to them without judgment. A large part of my bitterness toward Fisk and Myers lies in that they couldn’t admit their shortcomings and their insecurity took so much valuable time and energy away from catching the killer.
18
The Creation of Project Evenhanded
• • •
“I am somewhat exhausted; I wonder how a battery feels when it pours electricity into a non-conductor?”
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE ADVENTURE OF THE DYING DETECTIVE
OVER THE SPRING of 2000, our few remaining team mem bers found their way back to their previous assignments. Only Geramy and I remained on Project Amelia. Gord Spencer asked the RCMP to review our files to ensure we had done all we could to find the women from our end. There was no sense of urgency around this review; Geramy and I tied up those loose ends we could, closed tip files that had gone nowhere, and completed interviews Fisk and Myers had failed to. We met with the leaders of the RCMP Provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit a few times in anticipation of their file review.
This review would eventually morph into RCMP Project Evenhanded, a task force formed in January 2001 dedicated to reexamining B.C.’s cold missing and murdered sex worker files. Project Evenhanded would operate under one very mistaken belief: that women had ceased going missing from the Downtown Eastside. Based on this assumption, Evenhanded functioned mainly as a file review—of old RCMP files and our Project Amelia cases. Evenhanded retained the capacity to shift its focus to more active investigation, but from January 2001 until the Pickton farm search began on February 5, 2002, they operated with little apparent urgency and a huge pool of potential suspects. In this project, Pickton became merely one of more than three hundred men of interest.
Retired RCMP inspector and former Evenhanded leader Don Adam testified before the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry in 2012 that he did not believe the reason for not pursuing Pickton was related to resources. He suggested there were so many potential predatory suspects, to focus on one—even one so clearly linked to our victim demographic and geographic area, and with compelling source information—would be potential disaster for the investigation. I failed to understand what the risk was, but I listened to the testimony of a man I’d come to idolize as an investigator and interviewer, hoping I’d learn something. Adam’s lawyer, Janet Winteringham, asked him, “Did you have a number of different priorities?”
Adam replied, “Yes, we did. We-we felt that we needed to have a Priority 1. Those would be the worst of the worst and those would be the people that we would-we needed to figure out how many there were of them and then-then assess them for which ones would we go on first. But you couldn’t do one without the other. Like, if I described it to you this way: If you walked into a room that was full of files, you-if you reached out and looked at a file and said, ‘Wow, this is a horrible person,’ say Mr. Pickton, you go, ‘This is a horrible person. I’ll go work him.” But if you haven’t looked, how do you know that the fifth file down isn’t worse? How do you know that the tenth isn’t? So you take all of your monsters and you try and put them together and then assess them. And I know that Mr. Pickton has entered this room.
“He’s-he’s really the only monster who has come in here and his crimes have been fleshed out, but I can assure you that the people we are looking at are evil people. And if-if you think of Mr. Pickton as a, like a bright red ball that you’ve brought into this room, you can move that ball anywhere in this room and none of us will ever miss where it is. But if you open those doors and you brought in 30 red balls suddenly and you start moving them around, it’s not so easy. You keep those doors open. By February there are 60 of them. There were right now when Evenhanded has fully assessed everyone, of people that have murdered, attempted murder, brutalized women, at that number one category there are 374 of those balls. And if those balls are in this room, there’s a very different feel to what we were facing. We hadn’t read the end of the book. We were at the beginning and we couldn’t make mistakes.”
Perhaps my experience in Homicide was too limited, but I fail to understand how you solve a serial killer investigation with compelling source information pointing to an excellent suspect by introducing as many less-compelling suspects as possible and then claim that looking more closely at your original suspect will taint the investigation. Pickton wasn’t merely one of many horrible people, he was someone we possessed credible information could be killing our victims. I appreciate that Adam’s task was huge. I am in no way suggesting they should have gone after Pickton as though he were the only one, to the exclusion of all other valid suspects. I simply fail to understand why Project Evenhanded did not treat Pickton as a top priority when it began.
I LEFT MAJOR crime at the end of 2000 and struggled to find work within the VPD that might re-ignite my passion, and I continued to suffer from nightmares and all the other physical and emotional symptoms I’d had since 1999. Eventually, I settled in as a detective in the Financial Crime Unit (FCU).
Lindsay Kines of the Vancouver Sun called me in the summer of 2001. He told me he was doing a series on the missing women and sensed I had some things I might want to talk about. I agreed to meet with him one sunny afternoon on Granville Island, a small idyllic tourist spot on the downtown Vancouver waterfront known as False Creek. I had not decided how much to tell him prior to our meeting, but as we spoke, I found myself telling him the story of Pickton. It was the right thing for me to do personally, but I placed him in an awful position, knowing he wouldn’t be able to use any of it, but feeling someone needed to know this—the public needed to know this. Professionally, I was breaking all sorts of VPD policy and codes of conduct, but I didn’t care. How could I responsibly share this information knowing it could jeopardize an investigation? Because by then there was no investigation.
I placed my trust in him—something I would not grow to regret—and found Lindsay to be a rarity: an incredibly ethical and discreet reporter and person. I told him of the setup of Project Amelia, of the shell game that was the VPD’s and the RCMP’s response to these women’s disappearances, of the couple of incompetent people we were forced to work with on both sides of the house. I told him of my fears surrounding the bungling of the POI 390 investigation. Perhaps if Lindsay’s stories could reawaken the public consciousness to this file and the plight of these women, the RCMP would respond to the pressure and revisit the Pickton investigation. Another aspect of my motivation was my own conscience—I needed someone outside of my own family and close friends to know my frustrations at strongly suspecting Pickton was a serial killer and not having the support and tools to prove it.
Lindsay’s Vancouver Sun
series definitely helped to bring more public awareness to the missing women, and he was able to interview several of my teammates, many on the record, but he kept mum on the Pickton information, because none of us could go on the record with it. His stories won him well-deserved awards and accolades. We all—Lindsay included—held out hope that the RCMP’s Project Evenhanded might be working on Pickton at that very time. Sadly, it was not.
ON FEBRUARY 5, 2002, a young Coquitlam RCMP constable named Nathan Wells would execute a search warrant on the Pickton farm for a weapons offense unrelated to the missing women. He would uncover an inhaler belonging to Sereena Abotsway, one of Vancouver’s missing women, last seen in July 2001. He immediately contacted Project Evenhanded to tell them of his discovery. Within hours, the largest crime scene search in Canadian history was underway, and police discovered forensic evidence indicating many of the missing women were killed on that farm in the months and years the Pickton investigation languished.
Robert William Pickton was arrested on February 22, 2002, initially charged with the first degree murders of Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson. Over the next months, he was charged with the additional murders of Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Marnie Frey, and Georgina Papin. As DNA evidence uncovered through the exhaustive search of the farm trickled in over the ensuing months, the Crown charged Pickton with first degree murder in the deaths of Jacqueline McDonell, Dianne Rock, Heather Bottomley, Jennifer Furminger, Helen Hallmark, Patricia Johnson, Heather Chinook, Tanya Holyk, Sherry Irving, Inga Hall, Tiffany Drew, Sarah de Vries, Cynthia Feliks AKA Mongovius, Angela Jardine, Diana Melnick, Debra Jones, Wendy Crawford, Kerry Koski, Angela Borhaven, and Cara Ellis. They’d been there all along.