The Highway of Tears

(Written for Dkos. Crossposting.)

A diary from a few weeks ago on Dkos has had me thinking about missing women and how often enough the response from the media and the authorities seems tied to whether they are white, or not. Rich. Or not. Sex workers, or not. Drug addicts. Or not.
This whole inequity is something that has bothered me for many years. There is a test to see if one if "worthy" of being looked for, and sadly many women and girls fail this test.
Here in Canada, we are struggling with this inequity, and it is finally being talked about through official channels.

Wall of shame? I will take you on an abbreviated tour, starting on the Highway of Tears.

A stretch of road, about 720 kilometers in Northern British Columbia, Canada.

Over the past 41 years, at least 18 girls and young women have disappeared or been found dead along this lonely highway. Amnesty International has named a figure of 32, this number is quoted and attributed to them and I have been looking for the link.

The 18 have been connected formally by the RCMP, possible victims of killer(s). The police have also stated that they do not believe this is the work of a single serial killer.

From the first young woman, whose body was found in 1969, to the most recent additions to the "list"

1. Gloria Moody. Murder. Williams Lake. 1969

2. Micheline Pare: Murder. Hudson Hope. 1970

3. Gale Weys. Murdered. Clearwater. 1973

4. Pamela Darlington. Murder. Kamloops. 1973

5. Monica Ignas. Murdered. Terrace. 1974

6. Colleen MacMillen. Murder. 100 Mile House. 1974

7. Monica Jack. Murder. Merritt. 1978

8. Maureen Mosie. Murder. Kamloops. 1981

9. Shelly-Ann Bascu. Missing. Hinton, Alta. 1983

10. Alberta Williams. Murder. Prince Rupert. 1989

11. Delphine Nikal. Missing. Smithers. 1990

12. Ramona Wilson. Murder. Smithers. 1994

13. Roxanne Thiara. Murder. Burns Lake. 1994

14. Alishia Germaine. Murder. Prince George. 1994

15. Lana Derrick. Missing. Terrace. 1995

16. Nicole Hoar. Missing. Prince George. 2002

17. Tamara Chipman. Missing. Prince Rupert. 2005

18. Aielah Saric Auger. Murder. Prince George. 2006

Although the list has been growing for so many years, it was not really well known until the disappearance in 2002 of Nicole Hoar. She is one of the Caucasian women on the list.
Half are First Nations, or Aboriginal.
Some are sex workers.
The factors that put all these cases together is hitchhiking, and, Highway 16.

Highway 16 is isolated, running between small communities. The lack of a reliable bus service has been named as major issue. Young women who have no other means to get home, or to work hitchhike.
What factors caused this to go unreported for so long? Some point to racism. Some say that it wasn't media worthy. Perhaps a bit of all of that.
Nicole Hoar was the one that got the most media attention, which has led to the police team currently investigating.

The earliest case included in the RCMP’s investigation, Project E-Pana, is that of Gloria Moody, 27, whose body was found beaten and sexually assaulted off the highway in October 1969. By 1974, five more women and teenage girls thought to be hitchhiking were found dead on or near Highway 16. The media paid little attention, even after the town of Terrace held a vigil in 1998, dubbed “Highway of Tears.” The Province, the first major paper to pick up on the title, did not mention it in a news story until 2000. It took another five years for the RCMP to launch Project E-Pana, a homicide unit with a mandate to investigate commonalities between victims’ files and determine if a serial killer was responsible. Meanwhile, the list of cases swelled to nine names, then doubled to 18 in 2007, when the RCMP added similar unsolved cases that had occurred along highways 5 and 97, which intersect with Highway 16.

Given the slow and sporadic media coverage, many have argued that more tears have been spilt on this highway than ink devoted to the story. Journalists, claim critics, only react when a new body is discovered or a police search conducted. The latter took place last August and resulted in a fresh slew of coverage. Over the years, the highway and the women intrinsically linked to it fade in and out of public attention.

Nicole Hoar's family got the attention of the media finally, and the father was outraged when he learned of all the young women who had gone missing or been found dead over so many years. He was able to offer a reward and keep this long running stream of tragedies int the public eye. Finally.

For many years families waited for any news, they are still waiting. These young women were all daughters. Tamara Chipman had a two year old son.

And then there are the missing women of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

How many missing? No one is truly sure. But we do know that many were victims of Willie Pickton, pig farmer.
He claims 49 victims, and has lamented that he could not make it an even 50. Because he got "sloppy".

Willie Pickton was convicted for the murder of 6 women, the crown will not pursue more charges as it is unlikely that he will ever get out.
Now, as horrific as the murders were and are- to truly understand the magnitude of this tragedy? You need to know how many could have been prevented, and how many of these women were resigned to the trash heap by the Police and staff, and by an uncaring public.

Families who tried to file missing-persons reports in the case of serial killer Robert Pickton faced difficulty when they approached police in the midst of a probe plagued by mistakes, says a scathing internal report on the investigation.

The report says inappropriate conduct by staff members, notably by one civilian, “poisoned” the relationship between police and relatives of women who'd gone missing from the Downtown Eastside.

A family who waited four long years says:

“We were told, when we reported Cindy missing, ‘Oh yeah, she will show up. She will be around her usual haunts. Maybe she went out of town,’ ” Ms. Kraft recalled. Police did not put Ms. Feliks on the list of missing women from the Downtown Eastside until 2001.

“That was four years we were in limbo,” she said. “That’s another thing that hurts really bad, the way they talked about the women, like they were third-class citizens.”
Ms. Feliks’s DNA was discovered in ground meat in a freezer on the Pickton farm. However, the prosecution decided to stay first degree-murder charges against Mr. Pickton for the death of Ms. Feliks and 19 other women, saying he has already received the maximum sentence available in the Canadian legal system.

Cindy Felicks went missing in 1997, the same year that Willie Pickton was charged with the attempted murder of a sex worker.
The charges were stayed, and then wiped in 1999.

The woman in the 1997 case — who still cannot be legally identified — alleged that she had been hired for sex by Pickton and was taken to his farm, where he tried to handcuff her and then stabbed her repeatedly, nearly killing her.

The woman suffered stab wounds to her abdomen, chest and arms, lost three litres of blood and remained unconscious in hospital for four days before recovering.

A witness gave the police a tip that may have saved 22 women.
One police profiler tried to sound the warning much earlier too, he faced retribution for doing so.

Instead, Rossmo, a geographic profiler who had consulted on serial-killer investigations around the world, was underused on the investigation, LePard found. Eventually, the department chose not to renew Rossmo's contract, and he sued unsuccessfully for wrongful dismissal.

But while Rossmo says he feels vindicated by the report, any pleasure is tempered by the knowledge that police failed to catch Pickton sooner. "It's hard to feel good for any length of time in this whole tragedy," he said from Texas State University, where he is a professor.

The important thing now, he said, is to learn from the mistakes, and commit to fixing the problems identified in LePard's report.

To read LePard's damning report mentioned above, click here. (It is a PDF.)

Many excuses were constructed when the number of missing women became too numerous to ignore. Finally. Dr Rossmo said in a speech at Simon Fraser University:

Some of the theories put forward by the Major Crime Section were:
The women were only missing, and would eventually be found (this turned out not to be true).
The women were the victims of pimp murders (you do not kill 28 working women to make a point).
The women were the victims of drug murders (the drug trade involves more men than women, so why were there no missing men?).
The women had died as a result of drug overdoses (why were their bodies not found, and why were there no missing men?).
The women had died naturally, but hospitals were not keeping proper records (why had this not happened before, and why were there no missing men?).
The women were the victims of multiple “little” serial killers, but not of one big one (this is just bizarre, as well as incredibly unlikely).

Written off.
Forgotten.
A Vancouver artist has made a series of portraits of the missing women. A Massive project, to help us to remember that all of these women were someones daughter, or sister. Or mother.

'The Forgotten' Project from Pamela Masik on Vimeo.

The most intense and commanding project to date about these women, their stories and their plight is a searing initiative by Vancouver artist Pamela Masik. Believing it is our collective responsibility to support and empower individuals of high risk, Masik is painting each woman on a 8 x 10 foot canvas using a style raw with energy and passion. The cinematic scale by itself is scary. She is taking the tiny faces off the poster and forcing us to see the narratives of sadness, anger and fear.

Stolen Sisters.

According to a 1996 Canadian government statistic, Indigenous women between the ages of 25 and 44 with status under the federal Indian Act are five times more likely than other women of the same age to die as the result of violence. [1] In the process of preparing the Stolen Sisters report, and in the three years that have followed its release, Amnesty International has spoken with countless Indigenous activists, frontline service provides, police officers, court workers and family and friends of missing and murdered women. All have confirmed that in their own experience Indigenous women in Canada face a greatly increased risk of violence in their daily lives.

In so many of these disappearances, there is often little co-operation from the authorities. In some, those that would like to speak up are living under the shadow of addiction or prostitution and do not trust the police.
When a body is found and there is enough evidence to try it in court?

Pamela Jean George was a 28 year-old Saulteaux woman with two young daughters. She was close to her family at Sakimay First Nation, located in southeastern Saskatchewan. Struggling with poverty, Pamela George occasionally worked in the sex trade in Regina.

This young mother of two......Became nothing more than a hooker.

After the men returned from beating Pamela George to death, they reportedly bragged to friends that they had picked up an “Indian hooker.” Both men admitted hitting Pamela George, but said they doubted they had killed her. According to a friend who testified at the trial, Ternowetsky said, “She deserved it. She was an Indian.”

The case was tried before a White judge and all-White jury. Little attention was given to the life of the victim, apart from her work in the sex trade. The Crown prosecutor told the jury that Pamela George lived a life far removed from theirs, and they would have to consider the fact that she was a prostitute as part of the case. [2] Mr. Justice Malone instructed jurors before their deliberations to bear in mind that Pamela George “indeed was a prostitute” when they considered whether or not she had consented to sexual activity. [3] The Court of Appeal decision briefly considered the prosecutor and judge’s comments and concluded they “were not made for the purpose of conveying a negative view of the victim to the jury.”

Look on the right sidebar here to learn more about some of these daughters sisters and mothers who have disappeared or been murdered.

At the end of the day, we are all responsible as a society for not caring enough to look for these women, to get justice where justice is due.
Imagine what the families go through? Waiting forever, or never knowing what happened to their loved ones?
And then knowing that they may still be here if only the police and the authorities cared enough to look into disappearances of women they consider insignificant.......
National call for inquiry into deaths of hundreds of Native women

But we are at least now talking about it. Maybe it can help others.
Finding Dawn. An excellent film on the National Film Board of Canada web site.....

Acclaimed Métis filmmaker Christine Welsh presents a compelling documentary that puts a human face on a national tragedy: the murders and disappearances of an estimated 500 Aboriginal women in Canada over the past 30 years. This is a journey into the dark heart of Native women's experience in Canada. From Vancouver's Skid Row to the Highway of Tears in northern British Columbia to Saskatoon, this film honours those who have passed and uncovers reasons for hope. Finding Dawn illustrates the deep historical, social and economic factors that contribute to the epidemic of violence against Native women in this country.

The film does not seem to embed, so.....please follow that link above if you would like to watch it.