by Lori Shenher
That same day, we held a meeting about Pickton with members of the Provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit, the Coquitlam RCMP, and the VPD Major Crime and Missing Persons units. We decided to take the unusual step of conducting a photo blitz with the Downtown Eastside sex workers to see whether any of them recognized Pickton from his photograph. Several VPD members completed this assignment after the Coquitlam members were called away on an emergency investigation and were unable to work with us.
We showed Pickton’s photograph to eighty sex workers and asked whether they knew him, had dated him, or had any dealings with him of any kind. The answer was always no, no, and no. Later, members of Project Amelia, the Missing Persons Review Team (MWRT) formed in 1999, repeated the procedure at the WISH Drop-In Centre for sex workers and spoke to another fifty women, with the same results. No one batted an eye looking at the photo—an excellent likeness of Pickton and one certain to be recognized by anyone who knew him. Nothing.
It seemed inconceivable to me that none of these women knew Pickton or had been to his property. How could it be that not one would risk blowing the whistle on a killer, even if he did own a great place to party, make some money, and score free dope?
In the meantime, Hiscox’s personal difficulties with substance abuse and the law continued, and he told me he was not in touch with the people on the Pickton farm. I realized he would not be of much future help to the investigation if this continued. We were to meet that day at a trailer on a Surrey property, and as I pulled my car up on the dirty, heavily wooded rural lot on the edge of the Fraser River, a chill passed through me and I questioned my decision to come here alone.
I parked several yards from the decrepit office trailer—not unlike the trailer on Pickton’s farm—and as I walked toward it, the door opened. Two very rough-looking Indo-Canadian men and a hard-bitten Caucasian woman stepped out and stood in front of me, arms crossed, scowling. They were all in their late thirties or early forties, poorly groomed and dressed in dirty nondescript clothing. I imagined they could be brewing moonshine and breeding fighting dogs out behind the trailer.
“Oh, hey,” I said. “I’m looking for a guy named Bill. Is he around?” They stared at me. Scenes from Deliverance flashed through my mind. No one moved. I knew it wouldn’t do Hiscox any favors if I let these people know we were working together. “Okay, here’s my card. Can you have him call me if you see him? I need to talk to him.” I stepped toward the nearest man and held out my card. He didn’t raise a hand, didn’t even look at it, just held his cool gaze on me. I let the card float to the dirt. “Tell him it’ll be better for him if he calls me.”
I turned and walked back to the car. Within about ten minutes of leaving the property, I received the first of a series of bizarre pages in which a male spoke of a person named Mercury. He also mentioned the name of a very violent and dangerous man I had arrested in the Downtown Eastside in my first years on patrol, and hearing this name after all these years both baffled and unnerved me, so random and seemingly unrelated was this information. The caller referred to the pig farmer and dirty cops, and I felt dismayed because it sounded a lot like Hiscox. He mentioned an RCMP inspector working in Richmond, but his voice cut out on the name and it wasn’t clear what his involvement was.
Hiscox had either gone off the rails or was trying to pass me a message in some convoluted way. I also suspected that someone from the trailer was unhappy about my visit and had contacted him. Just as I was about to give up and head back to Vancouver, my pager went off again. It was a voice message from Hiscox letting me know he’d been arrested and was being held in Surrey pretrial and we could meet there. I turned the car around.
When I arrived at pretrial, I asked Hiscox who Mercury was and he feigned shock that I would know the name. The meeting was not a good one, and I questioned his mental fitness. He looked rough, and he told me he’d been injured during his arrest. I wanted to forget about the strange Mercury messages because I suspected they weren’t relevant to the investigation and I needed to remain focused. But I couldn’t rule anything out, no matter how far-fetched it seemed, until I was certain the information wasn’t germane.
The Mercury red herring became a strange and annoying detour for a few weeks and left me even more concerned that Hiscox was no longer credible because of his paranoid mental state. I couldn’t confirm that he was behind the strange pages, but I did not feel confident about involving him in any future undercover operations or introductions and worried that this would further limit our ability to get closer to Pickton and Yelds. I was disappointed, but I continued to look for ways to get on the Pickton farm.
That was the extent of my dealings with Bill Hiscox until February 2002, though I made regular attempts to check in with him. Whenever we spoke, he was eager to try to help, but he had no new information to offer.
7
The Missing Women
• • •
“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
CHARLES DARWIN, THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE
IF THEY WERE from Kerrisdale or UBC, you’d be doing more to find them.
Repeatedly, this cry arose from various sources—sometimes as an observation, more often as a direct criticism. I responded to it with force, vigorously denying—both inwardly and outwardly—that we would ever make such a distinction between the people we served.
There’s no difference; we treat all people the same. We have to because it’s the right and just thing.
Not only did I desperately want to believe this, I did believe it, deep in my heart. Anyone who said or thought we would make this distinction didn’t know us, didn’t know the way we worked. It was only as the investigation wore on that I saw that only some of us worked that way and that there were whole institutions, an entire justice system, an economic and political system that did not see the victims in the same light as UBC students or young women living in the upscale communities of Kerrisdale or Point Grey or Kitsilano.
For the first eight months, I fell into the role of unofficial spokesperson for the VPD on this investigation, partly of my own initiative because our media spokesperson, Anne Drennan, was busy and it took more of my time to brief her fully than to simply talk with the media myself. This was in no way a criticism of Anne, but we worked in different buildings, we were both very busy, the investigation was complex, and meeting to discuss it was difficult.
Repeatedly, I would answer this criticism with an earnest explanation of all we were doing to find these women. And I believed it. I believed we were doing all we could because I was working harder than I had ever worked in my life to determine what could have happened to these women and why women kept disappearing. I explained that with other women we would have homes to search—offices, date books, PalmPilots, and purses to sift through for clues. We would interview coworkers who worried when the women didn’t show up at the office, spouses who expected them to walk in the door with the groceries for dinner, children left standing in front of school waiting to be picked up. All baffled by these disappearances that would be totally out of character and had never happened before.
The victims lived on the fringes of what many viewed as normal society, and although they were known and valued in their Downtown Eastside community, their lives looked very different from the lives of UBC students or Kerrisdale women. Days could pass without friends or street sisters seeing them, and boyfriends might not hear from them for a week or two and assume they were in jail or had found a situation with drugs and a couch where they could pass some time. Street workers and nurses might miss them for a few days, but they rarely became alarmed until more time passed. Cell phones weren’t common among sex workers in the late 1990s, and they made calls on pay phones or from a friend’s place. Not even family members the women called regularly would worry if one or two expected calls didn’t come. After years of worrying needlessly, they rarely became alarmed if they didn’t speak for a few days
or even weeks. Many of the missing women continued to manage calls to family on special occasions, however, and when these stopped their children, sisters, and mothers knew something was wrong.
Even though I was searching for people comprising part of the highest risk group in society, my investigation was not subject to scrutiny or oversight. No one demanded I report regularly on any progress; every bit of information I passed up the chain of command was of my own initiative, rarely in response to any query from above. I was given the assignment to assess the missing women cases but little guidance beyond that.
One afternoon in late 1998, Detective Ron Lepine of the Homicide section entered the Missing Persons office and sat down. I didn’t know him well then—this was before he would join us on Project Amelia the following spring. He always said hello, and he had a warm paternal bearing, a kind face and a slightly nasal voice. He was probably five years away from retirement by then but remained energetic and enthusiastic.
“What do you think has happened to these ladies?” he asked as he looked at their photos above my desk.
“Well, Ron, I just don’t know,” I began. “My list keeps getting longer, and no one seems to know why. No even seems to keep track of sex workers, they just fall through the cracks and no one seems to think that’s a concern. But they haven’t picked up their checks—some of them for months and months—and that makes me think they aren’t alive anymore.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “You know, before Homicide, I worked in Vice for a long time.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “The sex trade has changed a lot in a very short time. Mostly because of crack, I think. These ladies used to work circuits, like the Calgary Stampede, Klondike Days. Some even went to Hawaii occasionally to work. They could sit on a plane for five hours without fixing. They could function at that kind of level. But the low track has evolved into something where they aren’t going anywhere and the bosses, especially if they’re old Vice squad guys who haven’t kept up, they don’t understand that. They still think these ladies have pulled up stakes and moved somewhere, and I just don’t see that happening in this day and age.”
“That makes sense, because no one seems to think their going missing means much. No one seems to think they’re really ‘missing,’ you know?” I said.
He nodded again. “And if they don’t think that, they won’t treat this like the crisis it is. You can’t change these old dinosaurs’ minds easily,” he said.
Ron was right. This mistaken knowledge of our victim demographic contributed greatly to our inability to garner support and resources for the investigation. I couldn’t seem to gather the proof I needed to show this was a crisis and women were dying.
Most of the victims had gone missing before for varying lengths of time. During these periods, many were never actually missing—some had gone underground to hide out from a violent ex or a ripped-off drug dealer or had entered detox for another attempt at getting clean. Others simply left town for a while and hadn’t thought it important to tell anyone because no one had cared what they did or where they were to this point, so why should they now? However, for many this time proved different. They were missing for growing periods of time, none was showing up alive or dead, and the numbers were unusual and rising.
Slowly, I would begin to see that the critics were right. If these women were from any other walk of life, there would be total outrage—search parties, volunteers, roadblocks. If they were a group of loggers or accountants, the hunt would be on to find them. But they were sex workers, drug addicts, and somewhere in all of this, that bell continued to ring—They chose this life, they chose the risk. On a very deep level, a large segment of society and the policing community didn’t feel these women were worth searching for, and many people questioned whether they even wanted to be found. The sense in many circles was they knowingly put themselves in harm’s way. They were on their own. Many of my colleagues felt this way:
They’re like bad pennies. They’ll turn up.
She probably found love and has gone off to start a family.
No doubt she’s ripped someone off again and is hiding out somewhere.
They come and go from the reserves all the time, that’s where you’ll find them.
Have you checked detox? Lots of ’em go to detox, you know.
I’d respond to these comments with the questions: Then why aren’t they calling their families? Why aren’t they picking up their welfare checks? I’d get a shrug in return. Don’t know. Don’t care.
Years later, we would learn that several more were actually missing at that time, but we were not yet aware of them because they hadn’t been reported missing by anyone, the missing persons reports were filed in jurisdictions outside of Vancouver, or our own Missing Persons office had misfiled, misplaced, or otherwise mishandled the case. This posed an obvious problem: the police agencies in the Lower Mainland, B.C., and Canada were not linked by any reliable information management system at that time. One of the first things I did, in July 1998, was send out a CPIC message to all Canadian municipal policing agencies and RCMP detachments.
I explained I was investigating the mysterious disappearances of women who worked on the street. I asked that they contact me if any of these agencies carried any similar files in which the last known location of their victim was Vancouver and we could determine if that woman belonged on our list. I also asked whether any other jurisdictions had a missing sex worker problem. The responses—when I received any response at all—were shocking.
Many of the agencies were confused by my request because they didn’t keep statistics on such people, since they went missing all the time and led very transient lives. The Toronto Police Service said they didn’t classify their missing people by “occupation” and therefore could not say whether they had a particular problem with missing sex workers. The intelligence officer there told me they didn’t search for missing street people and would only be alerted to a problem if the media discovered one. The media. I began to get a sense of what I was up against, or so I thought.
I saw no indication among most experienced police officers that they felt these missing women—who numbered in the high teens at that point—were missing as a result of foul play. The unofficial but pervasive feeling within policing circles was that they had gone on one of several prostitution circuits, met men known as “marks” who were willing to take them away from street life, left the life of their own accord, or just picked up sticks and moved on to another location.
I began my career working on the Downtown Eastside in both patrol and in the now-defunct Prostitution Task Force and got to know several of the women on the list. For six months in 1992–93, I stood on a cold lonely corner of the industrial district and turned tricks to arrest johns as an undercover operator. I wasn’t an expert, but I knew in my gut none of these scenarios represented what was really going on. But what was? Just because my victims engaged with their community differently from a university student or suburban housewife didn’t mean they didn’t engage. They moved throughout their community and availed themselves of various services; they just weren’t always predictable or dependable, which made tracking them more difficult.
Through my CPIC search, I did find two files I determined fit our victim profile: women, survival sex workers, with serious drug addictions living in the Downtown Eastside. Survival sex work is exchanging sexual acts for money to sustain and support one’s basic survival needs. Many underage runaways and drug addicts use sex work to support themselves and avoid homelessness. I requested these files be sent to me for inclusion on our list. They were Marnie Frey and Taressa Williams.
Marnie was from Campbell River, B.C., but had been a resident of the Downtown Eastside for years. Her stepmother, Lynn Frey, had reported Marnie missing to the Campbell River RCMP in 1997, after Marnie uncharacteristically failed to call home as she had regularly done, despite her troubles. Taressa was a woman from the Semiahmoo First Nation in White Rock, B.C. A runaway from the age of
fourteen, she seemed to have no one searching for her other than a concerned and conscientious Mountie who felt certain she had met with foul play, but his investigation had hit a dead end.
I felt a great deal of unease surrounding the victims. Were there others out there we were unaware of or had written off for some reason or another? I lost sleep wondering whether that one unknown woman might hold the key, but I moved forward with the files I had. Once I felt reasonably sure we had as many victims as we could possibly be aware of on our list, I began to review their files yet again, looking for links or anything I might have missed the first time through.
A Letter to Sarah de Vries
• • •
DEAR SARAH,
I feel as though you and I have somehow been partners on this strange journey. We both came to this investigation in 1998, you a couple of short months before me—the mentor, a big sister of sorts, much in the same way you were one to so many of the girls on the street.
I had known you on the street but not nearly as well as I would come to know you after you left. You were a writer, a gifted, educated, articulate young woman defeated by a world that seemed unable to allow you to just be—to be a woman of color in a white family, to be different and beautiful and yet not be seen as some sort of commodity or jewel to be had, possessed. You struggled valiantly, but in the end, your pain brought you to the Downtown Eastside, and it was that pain that made you such a compassionate friend to so many.
The men who used you, the men who purported to love you—it was nearly impossible to tell the difference between them. Could you? Did you ever know which to trust? I had always got the sense you saw above and beyond the bullshit. You knew who was giving you a line and who really wanted to see you do well—you worked the middle ground and got what you needed without giving up too much of yourself. Was that how it was for you?
