That Lonely Section of Hell

by Lori Shenher

  We were all in each other’s back pockets, and privacy was nonexistent. This would have been fine under normal circumstances, but both Fisk and Myers seemed to think they were speaking to the South Pole every time they got on the phone and their booming, guffawing voices made it impossible to concentrate on anything else. Often, the detectives outside in the Homicide section would close our door to try to silence the idiocy, but we were trapped inside with it.

  Mark Chernoff and Ron Lepine occupied desks on the other side of Alex and Fisk, but they avoided the project room whenever possible, working outside at their Homicide desks and coming in only for meetings or to talk to me when Fisk and Myers were on the road. Chernoff and Lepine were suspicious of Fisk and Myers, and Fisk and Myers considered Chernoff and Lepine Homicide Squad prima donnas. It was hardly the beginning of a cohesive, cooperative team.

  In our first meetings, after I had had extensive discussions with people conversant in major case management principles, I explained how information would be organized and stressed the importance of proper documentation for court. I also provided the team members with handouts detailing how information should flow into the office and how it should be handled and formatted so that I could see and read everything and then prepare it for entry into SIUSS. This instruction was not necessary for Chernoff and Lepine, both highly organized and conscientious investigators, and Alex and Dave were learning quickly and wouldn’t be a problem. However, Fisk and Myers rolled their eyes and showed little indication that they would stray from their normal routine, which appeared to consist of conducting informal “street interviews” of witnesses and keeping few, if any, notes.

  As we sat discussing how searches should be documented for SIUSS, they inexplicably began telling Alex, Dorothy, and me about their days working the Vietnamese dial-a-dopers in the Downtown Eastside and Mount Pleasant. They laughed uproariously as they described searching the apartments of these men and dumping flour on suspects’ heads during their searches for drugs, telling the men, “There you go, now you know what it’s like to be white!”

  They did not understand how anyone would find this a blatant and offensive disregard for these men’s rights and personal dignity. What drugs they did find were often tossed—by their own admission—into the nearest Dumpster or storm drain after the search was completed, and it seemed that little Fisk and Myers did was ever documented or ended up before the courts. These lapses proved to be a dark predictor of the future.

  I was amazed that they apparently hadn’t been disciplined for any of these so-called searches and that each of them—Fisk especially—had secured relatively comfortable positions in specialty squads over the years, despite several internal investigation complaints. It looked as though they had somehow managed to create their own reputations as knowledgeable investigators, but had anyone ever looked further into their work, they would have found this was nothing but smoke and mirrors. Neither had the kind of knowledge or tact one would expect them to gain in nearly thirty-five combined years of policing.

  Geramy asked me to name the project—it was customary to use a word beginning with the letter V for any Vancouver Police Department project, but I couldn’t think of anything I liked that wasn’t Vanish or Vixen or some other flippant reference to these women. I chose Project Amelia, in homage to Amelia Earhart, the world’s best-known woman who had disappeared without a trace. That she had not been found bothered me somewhat, but I felt confident that we would find our Amelias somewhere, somehow.

  But, like that ill-fated flight, Project Amelia began with high hopes and little indication of how very wrong things could go.

  10

  Other Cases, Other Avenues

  • • •

  “What is wanted is not the will to believe but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”

  Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

  IN MID-JUNE 1999 we met with investigators from Spokane, Washington, in what would prove to be a valuable two days. They generously agreed to Geramy’s invitation to come to Vancouver and share their experiences with us, which helped us understand our case and how under-resourced it was on many levels. Spokane had several missing and murdered female sex workers—close to fifteen at the time their investigators met with us. Their task force was grappling with both the Spokane murdered sex worker cases and Seattle’s Green River Killer case, in which victims’ bodies were found dumped along that waterway. The absence of bodies in our cases put us in a different position, but I felt certain we could learn from these investigators.

  The Spokane case sparked the formation of a task force drawing from law enforcement agencies and FBI across the state. We paled in comparison; their members were shocked we were not a task force. We learned they had developed their own case management system specific to the case, their own dedicated media liaison, and a specific strategy for both using and manipulating the media when necessary to the case. Staffed with numerous seasoned homicide detectives, some of whom were brought out of retirement to assist, they were highly organized with full managerial support from each agency.

  We spent two days behind closed doors at the VPD, sharing suspect information during the day and war stories over beer in the evening. I learned so much from those hours, and both Geramy and I felt a renewed sense that we were on the right track with Pickton after discussing him with the Washington detectives.

  Some months later, their task force’s hard work would pay off and they would arrest Robert Lee Yates, a U.S. Army National Guard helicopter pilot and family man for several of the Spokane murders. Shortly after that, Gary Leon Ridgway would be arrested for the Green River murders. He was ultimately convicted of the murders of forty-eight women and later confessed to killing nearly twice that number. Task forces worked.

  I traveled to Tacoma, Washington, a few weeks later to attend a meeting of law enforcement from around the Pacific Northwest to discuss the details of the case and gather information about Yates’s timeline to determine whether he had spent much—if any—time in Canada. It didn’t appear that he had. Two members of the RCMP’s Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System (ViCLAS) Section also attended the meeting, and I asked them what was happening with the Pickton file. Police officers are required to complete ViCLAS reports on serious violent crimes, including unsolved homicides and child abductions, as well as missing person cases. ViCLAS matches suspect modi operandi, DNA profiles, and other common elements to find linkages and solve serial crimes. RCMP ViCLAS members worked closely with the Serious Crime Section and the Behavioural Sciences profiling people. I told them I didn’t know who was assigned to the file or what was happening with it, but as happened so often, everyone agreed that it should be looked at and that Pickton was an intriguing potential suspect. I couldn’t count how many such conversations just like that one I’d had surrounding the Pickton file over the years.

  The last case I came into contact with was in Poughkeepsie, New York, in the late 1990s. The police in that small town estimated they were aware of approximately seventy sex workers—and eight had gone missing. Like us, they had no bodies, no trail, and no evidence for several months. Speaking with their lead investigator felt like coming home to me—finally someone who understood the frustrations of working on such a file.

  The detective I spoke with was sympathetic and offered some advice based on his department’s success. His team ultimately caught their suspect through information about the street from the women themselves. They created a sex worker questionnaire and asked every woman on their strip to fill one out with an investigator. The questions ranged from recent bad dates to what sorts of acts would the women do and what would they never do to when they work to how well they knew any of the missing women.

  What arose from this were repeated mentions of a man many of them—fifty out of seventy-two—had been out with on repeat dates. They said the man wasn’t particularly violent but was known to “flip out” occasionally. Several of the women mentioned that he would offer the
m more money if they would accompany him to his home, but most said no and he would drive them back to the strip without a problem. Many of the victims were known to never go to a john’s home, but investigators discovered that if the price was high enough, some would.

  Eventually, police set up surveillance on this man and legally entered his home—a large house he shared with his mother, father, and sister in a pleasant middle-class area—and found all eight victims dead in the rafters. Inexplicably, although the house was filthy, the family swore up and down they couldn’t smell the badly decaying bodies. His parents were professionals, yet they lived in complete and utter filth. It was a bizarre scenario.

  I decided we needed such a questionnaire for our sex workers and a well-orchestrated plan to help as many of them fill one out as possible. Later, during the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, this questionnaire would be criticized and perceived as an abuse of the women’s rights and privacy. We treated those women who agreed to fill out our questionnaire with the utmost respect and sensitivity, and no one was pressured to participate.

  The Project Amelia members struggled to get the questionnaires filled out or even present them to the women. We made trips to the WISH safe house and did our best to blanket as many of the women there as we could. I knew there were at least four hundred women working the Downtown Eastside, but we only collected sixty questionnaires. I implored Geramy to help me impress upon those members of the team who were on the street most to use this tool, but it just didn’t fly. Everyone agreed it was potentially useful, but only Dave, Alex, and I used them. The other suggestions Poughkeepsie investigators provided all involved forming a multi-jurisdictional task force and assigning vast increases in manpower the VPD was simply unwilling to provide, despite my repeated requests.

  When Project Amelia was formed in the spring of 1999, Alex agreed to go to Glenhaven funeral home to search manually through the thousands of records of indigent deaths in the hope that we might find some women who matched the victims. Alex had experience as a patrol officer on the Downtown Eastside, and her firsthand knowledge of many of the missing women proved invaluable to our team.

  Since searching by name would be useless, Alex broke every death down by age, gender, date, and physical description—an incredibly tedious task that took her several days because none of the records were automated, much less computerized. The only saving grace was that there were relatively few young women of the missing women’s ages in the records—most were elderly—and Alex felt satisfied that if anyone seemed to be a possible fit with one of the victims, she would have been able to determine if it was her. No such luck.

  One daunting part of this process was that Glenhaven only dealt with indigent burials in the Vancouver area, and we couldn’t be certain that one of the women hadn’t died in some other area in the Lower Mainland, the rest of the province, or the entire country. Without the resources to expand this aspect of the search, it died in the water. The best we were able to do was enlist Larry Campbell to search each province’s Coroners Service records for the names on our list and confirm that none of them had died. But, again, we weren’t able to search for aliases we didn’t know.

  If nothing else, examining the women’s medical records was helpful in narrowing the window of time in which the women had disappeared. Several of the women had visited a hospital or a doctor sometime between the time someone last saw or spoke to them and the dates their last welfare checks went unclaimed. I encountered several sympathetic doctors who were able to at least confirm that the women weren’t in dire physical shape on their last visits and hadn’t been admitted to hospital for lengthy stays, even though many of them suffered from HIV, AIDS, hepatitis, or tuberculosis. Nearly all of the women seemed to have used their own B.C. CareCards for medical treatment before they disappeared—a strong indication that they were unlikely to have started using a fake or stolen card in that short time. Still, I couldn’t place my full confidence in that likelihood.

  I ran the victims’ names through this system again months later to find that none of them had received any medical treatment in the intervening months since I had last checked. This led me to two ominous conclusions: no one had stolen their cards and was now using them, and none of these women, all of whom were heavily dependent on the medical system, had received any health care whatsoever after the time we believed they had disappeared. This was another clear indication that they were no longer alive.

  Our miraculous discovery of missing Vancouver woman Amy Guerin* in an Arizona mental hospital in 1999 opened the door to speculation about the myriad other places some of the victims might be. I contacted the U.S. government for lists of all the state and privately run hospitals and mental health facilities in the country. Unfortunately, the U.S. was not much better organized than Canada, and because of the autonomy given each state, no one was able to provide such a list to me, let alone contact information for each facility.

  All we managed to obtain was a growing list of places where these women weren’t but no clearer idea of where they were. Our list of violent men grew almost daily, but again, there was little or nothing to link them to the missing women. None of this represented new information. We considered this information but usually concluded that there was not enough evidence to justify stretching our already taxed resources to look into their activities further. I do know that some of these men were reexamined as potential killers when Project Evenhanded began in 2001. Robert Pickton was another matter.

  A Letter to Janet Henry

  • • •

  DEAR JANET,

  I know this may seem strange, but I’m writing to you to tell you about the amazing spirit that is your sister, Sandie. I think you knew, but you would be so proud of this woman and all she has done to try to find you and lay you to rest.

  Never have I heard of a family that has borne the degree and depth of tragedy that your family has—sadly, your disappearance has not been the only pain they have known, and even as Sandie has coped with your loss, the losses continue to mount for her and your family.

  Where does the pain end? Sandie asked me that once, and I had no answer. This soft-spoken, beautiful, dignified, gracious woman has fought on through the loudest, ugliest, most undignified and ungracious moments a human being can ever imagine. She—more than anyone I have ever known—deserves an answer to that question.

  She is my hero. Sandra Gagnon. Your sister. A warrior fighting for your memory, for your dignity. A truly courageous person. I worry about her daily, hoping her faith and strength will endure, that her life will somehow get easier, that she will find some sort of meaning under this avalanche of pain that has been her existence for much too long.

  Hers is a light that must never go out.

  11

  The Families

  • • •

  “It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been had it never shone.”

  JOHN STEINBECK, THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

  IN MID-1999, WE planned a meeting of the families of the missing women to bring them up to speed and introduce them to the other members of Project Amelia. One of the promises I had made to myself was to do my utmost to keep the families of the women apprised of the status of the investigation, despite how busy we were with the coroners’ investigations, hospital searches, and liaising with detectives from other agencies and task forces. Many of the files I had inherited came with the same complaints from loved ones—no one talked to them, no one returned their calls, no one cared, and no one seemed interested in what they knew about their missing daughter, sister, or mother.

  Although I knew I would have to be mindful of the time I spent in liaison with the families, I felt we owed them at the very least the courtesy of returning their calls within a few days. The more I spoke with them, the more I learned that we had some serious fence-mending to do and trust to earn. Many shared their early experiences, which included hurtful and dismissive comments about their poor parenting and
their loved one’s lifestyle, as well as racism on the part of the Missing Persons clerk. One parent told me she was shocked when this clerk told her perhaps her daughter wouldn’t be missing if she had been a better parent. These interactions would color their perceptions of the VPD and our commitment for years to come. I believe a good part of the difficulties we had in gaining the trust of the families and keeping them from leaking information to the media was the result of this long-standing mistrust—and I couldn’t blame them one bit.

  If we had had the manpower, I would have assigned each investigator to deal with a certain number of the families so that the task could be shared by all of the members of the team and the investigators would still have time to follow up on leads. Because only a few people were available and I only trusted some of them to deal sensitively with the families, I made the first of many classic management errors in dealing with a case of this magnitude, errors that would quickly lead to my own burnout. I didn’t trust anyone else to liaise with the families, and so I became the contact person for all of them. Like many of the roles I took on, I won this one by default.

  Some of the missing women’s families had lost touch with the Missing Persons office long before I’d been assigned in 1998, and I wondered whether this was out of frustration or whether there were other reasons. Like many of the victims, some of their families were troubled and some were transient. Still others simply accepted that their loved one wasn’t coming back or didn’t want to be found and moved on. There was a core of five or six out of the twenty to thirty on our growing list who would remain in regular contact with me, whereas many of the others were satisfied with the occasional call from me to update them on our progress, or lack thereof, every few months.