Only a few months after arriving, Lydia met a young man. They quickly fell in love and moved in together; within a year, the couple had a son. The relationship continued to flourish, and Lydia’s boyfriend frequently proposed marriage, but she held back. Lydia just wanted to take life one day at a time; and he was willing to wait.
For Amber Borowski, the shift to “square” life wasn’t quite so smooth. Determined to live near her elderly foster parents, with whom she had become increasingly close during Jay MacDonald’s trial, she resisted task force officers’ advice and decided to stay in Halifax. The job she found in a gift shop at a local shopping mall only lasted for a few weeks; a pimp she’d once worked for managed to find her. She wasn’t threatened, but the man started dropping in to visit her regularly, teasing her and flirting with her in his “subtle” effort to get her back into The Game. She quit in order to escape his attentions, but it wasn’t until August 1994 that she changed her mind about staying in Halifax. Amber was with some friends at the annual Buskers’ Festival on the waterfront when a cousin of Jay’s, drunk and obviously angry, came up to her, threatened her openly, and followed her through the crowd when she turned away.
A week later, Amber left Halifax; almost overnight, her problems ended. Like Lydia, she settled in a small town and quickly found all the necessities of life—a gentle, unhurried pace of life, a decent job, and a rewarding relationship with a well-established and hardworking young man. Indeed, her biggest challenge was learning to accept not only that her boyfriend made more money than she did, but that he insisted on turning his pay checks over to her. She was much more accustomed to financial arrangements conducted the other way around.
Of all the girls involved in the task force’s war on juvenile prostitution, the one whose case launched Operation Hectic showed the most distinctive response to her experience. Not only did Stacey Jackson refuse to enter the witness protection program—despite the advice of her respected and beloved case worker, John Elliott—but she decided to offer her help in educating teenagers about the realities of prostitution. The task force had begun visiting secondary schools across Nova Scotia to promote a clearer understanding of The Game’s dangers, and Elliott knew Stacey Jackson would be an asset to that program.
The very notion of speaking on-stage in front of a crowd would have been unthinkable to Stacey a year before her first “gig,” in the late winter of 1994, at a school in Colchester County, north of Halifax. Her self-doubt would have made such an appearance impossible only two years ago. Yet here she was, accompanying the task force’s Darrell Gaudet to face a few dozen students who, she knew from experience, would be using the presentation as an excuse to lounge in their seats and chat for an hour or so. There they go, she thought sourly, as several of the students in the auditorium started talking and clowning around during Gaudet’s talk; others were looking bored and yawning. Then it was her turn. Ignoring the wave of stage fright she felt as she began to speak, Stacey let her anger at the students’ indifference fuel her description of the life she had led as a prostitute in Halifax and Toronto. The disruptions stopped immediately, and Gaudet was afraid even to shift in his seat, lest he break the spell she had cast. At the end of Stacey’s twenty-minute speech, the teenagers were hushed, almost awed; she had reached them, and Gaudet knew they would think about what she’d said.
Shane Kirk, the Sullivan House counselor who first welcomed Stacey to the safe house, was also at the school that day and he saw something Darrell Gaudet did not. “It had a dramatic affect on Stacey, it was like she was working through her own problems—really coming to grips with her experience—as she spoke to those kids. She did reach the students but I think she gained more from those school visits than anyone else.”
Stacey’s life changed in other ways, too. Like her friend Amber Borowski, she lost custody of her child; her son Michael was adopted by her ex-boyfriend’s parents. In 1995, she had a second child with her new boyfriend and was content to spend all of her time with the baby boy. She took an apartment in north-end Halifax, and insisted on staying in touch with some of the girls she’d once worked with who had decided to stay in The Game.
In August of 1994, the task force was told of the death of Keri Sherwood, the teenager Mitch Ginn had spotted on the Hollis stroll more than a year before, but could not persuade to spend more than one night in the safe house. Her pimp Eric Conrad, true to form, had tired of the teenager, who moved on to another pimp, then another city. From Montreal she travelled to Calgary, where her prospects brightened—she was befriended by a police officer who, like Ginn, tried hard to help her break away from prostitution. She vanished again before he could reach her. She called the officer in Calgary just one more time, in August 1994, from Montreal; she wanted his help and would be returning to Calgary soon. Later that month, a businessman en route to a meeting in Laval saw an unusual looking pile of clothes in a field near the furniture store where he was headed—he went to have a look, and found the mud-encrusted body of a naked girl, bound with wire at the ankles and wrists. Keri.
It was going to be almost impossible to track down Keri’s killer; her belongings weren’t found near her body, so police were unable to find out where she lived and locate a clue to her pimp’s whereabouts. Then there was the strong possibility that Keri had been slain by a bad date, in which case there would have been no chance of solving the murder. The Montreal police turned to the Operation Hectic officers, but all they had was the photograph taken the night Ginn met her. In short, Keri’s murder would probably never be solved. Her case, like many police files on murder victims involved in prostitution, presented not even a single clue to help officers track down their murderers.
Constable Gary Martin, who had taken over as media liaison officer for the task force, contacted local reporters after hearing of Keri’s death, hoping the publication of her photograph and an account of her tragic death might generate leads for investigators in Montreal. Instead, articles bearing such headlines as “Halifax Hooker Found Dead in Montreal” appeared in the papers—no mention of Keri’s dream to become a writer, or of the poetry that filled her journal; she was just a dead “hooker.”
For Stacey, this coverage was exceptionally frustrating. She acknowledged that the media had played a vital role in bringing the problem of juvenile prostitution to the public’s attention—thus prompting the formation of the task force—but she wanted to see more articles and TV coverage about the challenges faced by young women struggling to get their lives under control—young women like herself. Stacey, like many others, adults and teenagers alike, denounced the use of words like “hooker”—like Judge Kimball’s “whore”—it was completely inappropriate. Throughout 1994 the Halifax media had carried the stories of terrorized young teens who had broken free from the prostitution game but for Stacey it was not enough.
Stacey’s anger turned against the police as well as the news media over the murder of Kathy Armstrong, a twenty-seven-year-old woman whose body was discovered in an alleyway in the early winter of 1995. Her throat had been cut. Armstrong had spent much of her adult life working as a prostitute in Halifax. Stacey had met her several times, and knew she was several months pregnant and was suffering from a crack addiction that not only kept her on the street, but also forced her to resort to robbery and other petty crimes. Stacey was horrified to learn of her death, as was her friend Amber, who found out about the murder during a telephone conversation with her foster mother. Just as Annie Mae’s death had turned Stacey away from prostitution and inspired her to keep her promise to testify against her former pimps, Amber was similarly determined to stick to the straight and narrow. She had met Armstrong years before, on the crack stroll, and the two had become fast friends; Amber would not betray her memory by returning to the old life. Stacey, however, wasn’t content to leave matters there, nor perhaps would Amber have been if she had been in Halifax to watch the story of Kathy Armstrong unfold—or, rather, to watch the story disappear from media reports almos
t as quickly as it made headlines when the murder occurred.
Stacey complained to anyone who would listen. Her frustration exploded into outrage a few months later, when the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl, unconnected to prostitution, remained a top news story for days and prompted the RCMP in Lower Sackville, where the body had been discovered behind a local school, to deploy a team of investigators around the clock in an effort to find her killer.
Where was the team investigating Kathy Armstrong’s murder? Stacey called John Elliott to try to find out more; it turned out that the Halifax police were facing problems similar to their Montreal counterparts: the victim could have been killed by any number of suspects—drug dealers, pimps, bad dates—and the investigation was making little headway. A few days later, the Lower Sackville RCMP announced an arrest in the sixteen-year-old’s murder, and John Elliott told his persistent former witness that the man in charge of the investigation was none other than Brad Sullivan, who had left the task force for a posting as a lead investigator.
Stacey called and left a message for the former task force officer. Brad Sullivan did not know what Stacey wanted when he received the message. He was very busy building a case and collecting evidence, but he took the time to find a phone and call Stacey. That response was a result of a habit most of the task force investigators had developed. It did not matter that Sullivan and some of the other original task force members had been reassigned, they still felt a sense of responsibility toward the girls they had worked with in the battle against the pimps.
Sullivan knew Stacey could be volatile at times but he was shocked by the level of her anger and frustration. Stacey was in tears as she berated Sullivan for what she felt was his sudden change of heart. She wanted to know why he wasn’t trying to solve the Halifax murder and would not accept the answer that it was not his jurisdiction. Stacey accused the former task force officer of abandoning the girls he had promised to help. She did not understand that by returning her call Sullivan had demonstrated a commitment to that promise. At the end of what turned out to be more of a lecture than a conversation, Stacey stated flatly that it was clear no one cared when a prostitute was murdered but if someone’s daughter, a real person, was found dead the whole world had to stop until that case was solved. Not satisfied with the explanation given by Brad Sullivan, Stacey phoned Shane Kirk and went to meet with her former case worker. Kirk also tried to soothe Stacey and explain the differences presented by the two cases. In the end he realized Stacey was not looking for explanations, “the whole thing touched her a little too closely. It reminded her of how close she had come to being murdered that day in Toronto. Stacey thought that she would have been nothing more than a dead prostitute and it scared her, a lot.” Stacey wanted comforting and Kirk provided it, letting her cry through her frustration.
The reprimand from Stacey was frustrating for Brad Sullivan who, despite being reassigned, still worked the Kimberly McAndrew file. Sullivan had changed his mind about McAndrew being abducted into the world of prostitution by an aggressive pimp. The years working on the task force taught him that this rarely, if ever, happened. While at first the police believed many of the girls had been abducted, they learned through investigation the girls were usually conned by conniving pimps. Kidnapping was not their style. Sullivan still felt McAndrew had been picked up by a pimp who tried to work her, but who panicked when he realized she was a police officer’s daughter. Brad Sullivan believed Kimberly McAndrew had been murdered and he refused to let the case die with her. In fairness to Halifax police the case was not dead. The investigators in Halifax had a very different theory about what had happened to McAndrew, and they continued to investigate the possibility that she had been killed by someone she knew, not a stranger or a pimp.
On a balmy evening in August 1995, Darrell Gaudet and Mitch Ginn were out in their unmarked car, cruising around Halifax-Dartmouth—a typical night’s work for the last of Operation Hectic’s original investigators. They were looking for a pimp who was back on the street after being imprisoned more than two years before. The man had earned early release after serving a small portion of his sentence for living on the avails of prostitution. The officers were particularly concerned that he had returned to The Game. That was because the two officers were also looking for a fourteen-year-old girl who had been reported missing by a social services case worker. She was a runaway from a group home, a prime pimping target. They were hoping the two had not found each other; they were hoping the confidence—and budgetary restraint—that had all but dismantled the task force had not been misplaced.
A visit to Hollis Street on any given night would be all that politicians or police executives needed to justify drastic cutbacks to the anti-pimping unit, which now had four members—Ginn, Gaudet, and two newer officers—plus a supervisor. Originally there had been twelve on the team, but that was clearly not necessary now, the visitors would say, noting the slow action on the stroll, where, on average, there were less than half as many prostitutes working than in 1992—and where a juvenile was a very rare sight. Ginn and Gaudet, like the others who had participated in Operation Hectic, were justifiably gratified by the drastic reduction in prostitution activity.
Ginn and Gaudet were also worried. They had heard all the stories from the girls they had befriended about how the task force had forced pimps to stop mistreating prostitutes. Their concern was, how long would that last in the absence of visible deterrence? They also wanted a chance to target the clients. Almost nothing had been done to crack down on the men who bought the service, men as responsible for victimization of girls and young women as the pimps were. Gaudet also longed for the chance to go after the people he first began investigating when he developed an interest in prostitution in the days before the task force: the escort services whose operators could hide the presence of underage prostitutes—and any violent behavior towards them.
As their car descended the hill above the Nova Scotia Hospital, Gaudet glanced at an abandoned building on the grounds. Sullivan House, which once stood as a beacon for the terrorized and brutalized teenagers fleeing the kinds of horrors the officers feared would relapse if the preventive measures the task force provided were not restored. A smaller safe house had been set up in Halifax. The new house remained an integral part of the fight to protect young girls and keep them off the streets. The move was made because the larger facility was too expensive to run, and was not needed after the first year of Operation Hectic when the number of girls needing its services began to decline. The new smaller house in Halifax actually marked an increase in the role played by the community services counselors working with young prostitutes. Those workers had begun to take part in an active outreach program that targeted young girls at risk. To Gaudet though, the closure of Sullivan House just marked another step in the gradual dismantling of the police operation he believed was the most important work he had ever been involved in.
By the time the officers reached the Dartmouth stroll, in the city’s north end, the orange glow was fading in the sky—the start of The Game’s prime time, and another night of frustration for area residents. The stroll had been the subject of much media attention since spring, and a community group, intent on driving the street trade out of the neighborhood, was having its effect. Gaudet and Ginn saw no prostitutes on the stroll—not yet, anyway. The officers knew they would simply come out later, when most of the residents in the area had retired for the night. That way, there would be no angry calls from women who had been accosted by cruising clients. The players always adjusted when they saw the rules were changing, it was just a part of life on the street. At any rate, the officers agreed they wouldn’t find their suspect here—or the girl he might be running. They’d been told he was renting an apartment in a nearby house, so they tried there. No luck, there was not even a car in the driveway. Mitch Ginn swore quietly as the officers returned to their car: seven teenagers were sitting on the doorstep of the house, four of them girls. “Another pied piper,”
he said; the kids, he was sure, were waiting for that pimp.
Maybe they’d have better luck across the bridge; Ginn and Gaudet crossed over Halifax Harbour and drove to Gottingen Street, the main thoroughfare that marks the city’s north-end crack stroll, where prostitutes take their dates into abandoned lots on a lonely side street, or wait on poorly lit corners for a client to come by in a car.
The officers turned off Gottingen and onto one of the side streets. “There you go—it’s never too early on the crack stroll,” Ginn remarked, pointing to one of two prostitutes standing near a garage. “See her? She was still working at eight-thirty this morning, looking for one more high. Christ, look at her!” The emaciated woman had the unmistakable pallor of a crack addict; her hair was stringy and matted, her clothes soiled, her features a death-mask of sunken eyes, skeletal cheekbones, lips blue with cyanosis. As the car approached, she glanced eagerly inside, but when she recognized the men, she turned away and went on chatting with her companion. Ginn smiled and waved as he drove away.
“You know what really amazes me about this place?” Gaudet knew, but he also knew Ginn liked to talk, so he let him. “It’s these stupid fucking dates,” his partner continued. “These guys come down here because they know some of these girls will let them have sex without a condom. They flash a little money, and these girls will do almost anything to get to that next high. Stupid bastards think they’re the only ones doing it. I mean, look at these girls. That’s some serious danger, man—stupid bastards.”
“Who’s that?” Gaudet interrupted his partner as he noticed a new face working the next corner.
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