That Lonely Section of Hell

by Lori Shenher

  19

  Post–February 5, 2002

  • • •

  “I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.”

  FRANZ KAFKA, THE METAMORPHOSIS

  THAT DAY IN February 2002 when Mark paged me and told me the Pickton farm search had begun, my back immediately seized up and I could barely get around, let alone run or work out. In a few days, it improved, but my overall health had been declining from as far back as the POI 390 investigation. I couldn’t sleep deeply, and when I did, nightmares tormented me. My digestive system was constantly upset, I wasn’t eating much, and even my workouts and running, which had always given me so much solace, were lethargic and uninspired.

  In early February, I was putting the finishing touches on a huge investigation I’d been working on, and the report was nearly a hundred pages long. I’d booked off sick from work for a couple of days after Mark told me about the search, because my back was so frozen and I was in shock, but I had to come back and get the work done, no matter how terrible I felt.

  I dragged myself out of the office for a run the day I returned to work, hoping the exercise would clear my head and loosen up my back. Normally, I could run six or eight miles with ease, but I ran a couple of miles along the ocean and my chest squeezed tightly around my ribs and my legs felt dead. I stopped, fighting for breath. What the hell is the matter with me? You haven’t even done anything. Get moving! The thought of running again seemed impossible; walking was all I could manage, and I slowly trudged back to the office, berating myself because I didn’t even need a shower, so little had I perspired. I went back to my desk.

  Crown counsel required several copies of the report, and I’d been editing and proofing to get it just right. There was one large Xerox machine outside the FCU office on the fourth floor and another on the third floor outside Homicide/Robbery, where my old Project Amelia office was. Neither machine offered reliable photocopying, and completing even a small job without a jam was a rarity. Copier malfunctions were reported, but technicians took weeks to respond.

  I took small sections of my report to the copy machine outside the FCU, but after months of jams, I decided to venture down to the Homicide/Robbery machine. I slid the first stack of twenty or so pages through the document feeder and listened to the satisfying click, click, click of each page sliding nicely through, until the inevitable clunk when everything stopped and the readout told me a jam had occurred. My blood pressed hard against the walls of my chest. I felt seething rage. I opened the lid and stared at the glass for several moments. This fucking chickenshit place. Nothing works. Nothing.

  I wore my gun most places throughout my workday; I’d been executing search warrants daily and couldn’t go out without it. I imagined how it might feel to fire a bullet into the glass. I walked through the entire scenario in my mind. I imagined the feeling of unholstering my weapon, the click as I undid the snap, the feel of pulling cool metal out of the leather holster. It felt so good to picture it. Like the best sex or food fantasy, multiplied by ten. I visualized myself pointing the gun at the glass. Slowly squeezing the trigger, the glass shattering, the machine emitting a low whine as it quivered and died in front of me. I want to do this so bad.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  Images of the bullet and glass ricocheting back at me entered my mind, and I felt like an idiot. What if I inadvertently shot myself trying to kill the photocopier? What a moron. I envisioned winning a Darwin Award. I imagined not being hit by the bullet or fragments but standing there as my colleagues ran to see what happened. Would they tackle me to the ground? Would someone shoot me as I stood there, .40 cal in my hand, Xerox machine bleeding out in front of me?

  The most frightening aspect of this fantasy was this: even after intellectually understanding it was a bad idea, I still wanted to do it. This will help me feel better. Sanity prevailed to some degree. I did not rule out shooting the copier in the future, but I decided that today wasn’t the day. I ripped my jammed papers from the feeder, knowing kicking the machine would not come close to satisfying my frustration and anger.

  For the next three days, I tried to photocopy my report on the Homicide/Robbery machine, only to have it jam each time after a few precious seconds. Before venturing down the hall, I considered leaving my gun in my desk, but somehow carrying it made me feel powerful, as though I could shoot it if I wanted to. The choice was mine. I also had the choice to try the Financial Crime machine again, but it was no better, and something about the Homicide/Robbery copier drew me to it. I could not shake this desire to put a cap in the glass.

  On the fourth day, I decided shooting the copier was a sound idea. It would make a statement, a pivotal moment for detectives at the VPD. Maybe my colleagues will wish they had been the ones to shoot the Xerox machine. I’ll be the Howard Beale of the VPD, mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. The Norma Rae of detectives.

  As I gazed at the machine, in that pregnant moment before something life-changing happens, I saw an old friend walking down the hall smiling at me. I hadn’t seen her in a long time and couldn’t help but smile back at her despite my diabolical plot. I knew then I didn’t want to shoot the photocopier in front of her or hurt her in the process.

  “How are you?” she called out from a few yards away. I set my report down and stepped away from the Xerox machine.

  “Good,” I said. “I’m good.” I managed to conceal my mania from her. After we chatted for several minutes, I walked back to my office and immediately booked off on stress leave.

  Rennie Hoffman, my sergeant, was supportive and suggested I complete a Workers’ Compensation Board (WCB) claim form, which I did. The full gravity of my Xerox plot terrified me, and I fought to make sense of my thoughts.

  Within days of the beginning of the Pickton farm search, the VPD Human Resources Section decided to arrange for a critical incident debriefing for those of us who had worked on Project Amelia. Normally, these are held a day or two after a serious incident, such as a police shooting or the death of a child. Members are encouraged to share their feelings about what they saw and how it affected them.

  I later learned that several former Project Amelia members had booked off on stress leave at the same time, leading Human Resources to fear that they had a problem on their hands. When one of my Project Amelia teammates told me about the plan, I became incensed. Carol Tarnowsky, an acting sergeant in Human Resources at the time, called me at home, excited to be organizing the debriefing. I tore into her, telling her this was “a day late and a dollar short,” alternately venting my rage and frustration and apologizing for shooting her, the messenger, when this wasn’t her fault or decision and she had no idea about the lack of support from the VPD for those of us working on Project Amelia.

  I had no intention of attending a critical incident debriefing, even if I was ordered to do so. I failed to see how it would benefit any of us. I knew all I would do was rail against the VPD, and that wouldn’t be helpful to my colleagues. I conferred with a therapist I knew, and she supported my choice. She told me that critical incident debriefings had been in vogue a few years earlier, but that the latest research, in 2002, found that they did more harm than good and the workplace culture did not facilitate open sharing of people’s true emotions. I had no intention of sharing my feelings, and I did not attend, even though Geramy and Alex implored me to come. I felt guilty, but I knew I was too bitter to be among the others.

  I was at home on sick leave on February 12, when VPD Homicide Detective Steve Pranzl paged me. Steve and I were friends and had worked together on the Forensic Interview Team (FIT), where he was known for his high level of skill as an interviewer and interrogator. His assignment on the Pickton file was to interview several of the higher priority witnesses—many of whom had not yet been ruled out as potential suspects—and help develop interview strategies.

  Steve began to tell me about his interview with Lisa Yelds the day before and h
ow he had gone in cold, knowing nothing about her, and she had basically stonewalled him about Pickton. He said he discovered afterward that I had done extensive research on her, but no one could find it before the interview. I felt terrible, knowing he hated to conduct an interview unprepared and he had wasted a golden opportunity for an interview with a key player.

  He asked me to reconsider joining the team, because my knowledge of Pickton was sorely needed, if only to find the vast information about him we had accumulated over the years. I felt torn, but ultimately this request changed things for me. I reasoned it was one thing for me to sit at home, shell-shocked, bitter, and useless but quite another if my being there could help the investigators in their quest to find our women. If I could save everyone a step here and there, I had to suck it up and pitch in. I couldn’t let my depression stand in the way of helping the families get answers more quickly. I agreed and asked him to arrange it for two weeks, no longer. He said he’d take care of everything and get back to me.

  Geramy called me immediately; she was thrilled I was joining the team. I agreed to start on February 15—a Friday—and work until March 1. I made demands—a car, no overtime—and I would remain in the office as a resource person, nothing more. No fieldwork, though I had no idea why I didn’t feel I could do it. I wouldn’t carry my gun for fear I’d do something insane in the office.

  How much things had changed since my first day in Homicide/Missing Persons in 1998, when I was like a kid on the first day of school with the big boys, eager to begin a new life. Now I was simply terrified—of changing my routine, which included riding my bicycle to work at 5:00 AM and coming home at 3:00 PM; of seeing less of my young family, which formed the center of my life; of coming face-to-face with the reality that these women were really, truly dead, and we could have stopped the killing sooner. Although I had loudly voiced my belief that the women were dead, I had somehow harbored a faint hope that we would find them the way we had found Paulette Adamson. That was another thing I had to come to terms with. They were at that farm.

  As I embarked on my new role, I felt a familiar mixture of excitement and dread. It was gratifying to know that after all the work and thought that had gone into Pickton when I was in Project Amelia and before that, something was finally happening. It was also sickening to know how many women had disappeared since the summer of 1999, and I dreaded finding those bodies the most. Every victim on that farm would represent a waste, a failure of someone, somewhere—but each woman from 1999 onward represented a complete travesty, and I felt we were responsible—all of us.

  Mark Chernoff and his partner, VPD Detective Bruce Wahl, picked me up and we drove to the Project Evenhanded offices in Surrey. We arrived a couple of minutes late for the morning meeting. Detectives and higher ranks filled the room, and several people spilled out into the doorway and the adjoining lunchroom, straining to hear Staff Sergeant Don Adam, head of the project, speak from the head table. The sheer number of people involved struck me—at least forty-five by my estimate—as did the progress they were reporting. Every single person had something interesting and relevant to add to the case, and each update provided information the others could use and act upon. Things were happening.

  I felt a stab of regret as I scanned the room, looking at all of these keen, committed faces. Many were people I recognized. Where were they when we needed them? Where was all this money, where were all these resources when we had none? Why had this taken so long? Everyone was to report on their progress in that afternoon’s meeting, scheduled for five o’clock, and with that, Adam sent the team off to see what the day would bring.

  After the meeting, several of us went for coffee, as would become our custom, and it was there I would learn the little tidbits of what was really going on and what kind of evidence we had on the farm. Part of Adam’s strategy to limit information leaks was to keep forensic investigators on the farm separate from those who were out running around doing interviews and chasing down tips.

  During the first few days after the warrant had been executed, Adam read the riot act to the team, concerned that leaks to the media would be the case’s undoing, and no one was to talk to the press or each other about any discoveries. Only the senior managers were privy to knowledge of what the searchers found, and they would then decide what and how much information would be disseminated to the team. It was an excellent strategy and a necessary one—cops love to talk, and it only takes one person to tell the wrong person before information ends up in the wrong hands and evidence is ruined or a family ends up hurt. I thought back to my call to Lindsay the night of the search with a pang of guilt, but I knew I hadn’t spilled any secret beans.

  I met informally with investigators and began to assess the management and accessibility of the information from Project Amelia that Geramy and I had sent out to Surrey for the “review” months ago. Very little of it was on computer, and much of the original information about our thirty-plus victims remained solely in our hard files. SIUSS data entry was still incomplete—the same old problems persisted, despite my efforts to make them known. I was concerned that a name or person from the past would come up in the Pickton investigation and no one would know the relevance. We could miss linking it to something relevant, which could be crucial. Much of Project Amelia’s information was inaccessible, and I would never set eyes on many of the tip files I had created. In late 2011 and early 2012, as I prepared for my Missing Women Commission of Inquiry testimony, it would become clear that so much of our work had been lost or misplaced. I knew what we had and what had been lost, because everything had passed through my hands as the file coordinator.

  Again, we were dealing with conflicting and incompatible information systems. All of the new Pickton information was going into E&R, the RCMP evidence and reports database, which did not speak to SIUSS. The administrative staff was working hard to enter everything into one system, but with all the new Pickton data to be entered daily, it would be months until the staff would be able to go back and enter the old information and make it accessible in an automated format.

  I was dismayed that so little of what we had done in the past was easily accessible to investigators, and I tried to impress on the senior managers the need to improve this situation. They agreed, though I don’t believe they truly understood the problem. I questioned how much of the work we had done had even been reviewed by Project Evenhanded investigators, and I worried that they had begun Evenhanded determined to start fresh from where we had left off. My feeling had always been that knowledge was power, and the more you knew about your file, the better prepared you were to assess the relevance of new information coming in.

  I resigned myself to the fact that I probably held the most information about Pickton in my own head, and although it was duplicated in the files, no one was going to bother looking at it, aside from someone like Steve Pranzl as he prepared for an interview. All I could do was keep my ears open and hope to guide someone to those files if they needed something.

  I alternated between feeling that no one knew who I was and how far back I went with this file to feeling everyone was looking at me and whispering behind my back about my being the one who “quit,” the one who refused Don Adam’s offer to work on Project Evenhanded back in 2001, “the one who couldn’t handle it.” I knew how irrational and egocentric this was, but I had felt so much ownership for Project Amelia. I couldn’t help feeling judged for its inadequacy and for the failure of the VPD to devote the proper time and resources to these women. I struggled with whether that made it my failure.

  Don Adam made a point of greeting me that morning, saying he was glad I had reconsidered and joined them, but my insecurity made me ask myself, Really? Was he just saying that? Did he think I was crazy for refusing to work on such a great investigation? I wasn’t normally given to such strong and sustained periods of self-doubt, but this investigation and my feeling of failure overwhelmed me.

  At the end of that first day, Geramy and I made our way to
the afternoon meeting early to ensure a place at the large square of tables that accommodated forty people. Again, it was standing room only. As we made our way around the table and each investigator summed up the day’s events, I sat gobsmacked, unable to believe the progress that had been made from eight o’clock in the morning until now, a mere nine hours later. So many people working so hard, solely on Pickton. In Project Amelia, we didn’t make this kind of headway in six months. I thought of Fisk and Myers and all of the assignments I had given them that sat untouched and uninvestigated for months on end, still sitting there when they were forced to leave the team.

  At seven thirty, when the meeting was over, I sat in my car and cried.

  Hundreds of tips flowed in daily and the team followed up on several leads. The most pressing one involved Dinah Taylor, a Downtown Eastside sex worker, drug addict, and longtime associate of Robert Pickton’s. She had lived in the Roosevelt Hotel on Hastings Street—an address that would become synonymous with betrayal and death. Taylor’s name continued to come up in connection to Pickton, and she had lived on the farm at various times over the past seven years.

  She was alleged to have steered women out to the farm, and according to sources, Pickton would pay her for this service at the rate of $100 per woman. By all accounts, she was mean, violent, and self-serving. Dan Roy, a French-Canadian sergeant on loan from the RCMP in Quebec, was assigned to manage Taylor and set her up for an introduction to an undercover operator. She was typically unreliable, and instead of meeting with Roy at the prearranged times, Taylor would be out allegedly threatening potential witnesses on the Downtown Eastside, warning them not to talk about Pickton to the police or they would end up beaten or worse.

  Taylor personified a major problem that would recur throughout this investigation. So much of the anecdotal “buzz” around many of the players in this case seemed to indicate that others beyond Robert Pickton had knowledge of and participated in the murderous activities on that farm. Pickton himself would indicate many times throughout his February 23, 2002, interrogation that there were several others involved, yet no one else was ever charged. At what point should “witnesses” be treated as suspects and arrested and charged? Would the RCMP offer immunity from prosecution to potential co-accused persons to secure statements implicating Pickton?