I was also assigned to the provincial and federal courts and the police beat for years. Besides murders and missing persons investigations, I covered rapes, home invasions, youth homelessness, drug use and trafficking, biker gangs, violence against women and children, prostitution, robberies, fires, car accidents, drownings, and stabbings. It is disturbing to reflect on it all.
How can a person hear, write, and talk about traumatic cases and experiences, in detail, over many years, and not be affected, touched, or moved? At this stage of my research and career, I do not believe it is possible. We are human beings no matter our training, experience, and profession.
When I say “affected,” let me be clear. I have not been diagnosed with PTSD or anything else. That does not mean journalists are not diagnosed, as Phonse Jessome’s foreword and legacy letter reveal. Phonse is a dear friend, as well as a respected author and journalist. He not only lives with PTSD, but advocates for others, discussing his own journey to find help. He is one of the bravest and most talented people I know. Phonse Jessome is the creator of the first legacy letter which appears in this book.
One thing I have learned, over years of research, is that people who work around trauma are a tough and caring breed. Being resilient helps, but being human trumps everything. You cannot escape your own humanness, and why should we want to? Despite all the training and experience in the world, there is no textbook that can precisely pinpoint, for example, how a police officer will react after delivering a devastating next-of-kin notification. How do emergency aid or relief workers deal with what they must endure seeing, hearing, and smelling after responding to a mass casualty scene? What steps should firefighters take to protect their mental health after detaching a mangled body from a car crash so a family can grieve? How do we support ER staff when a child dies, despite the valiant efforts of an entire medical team? How can we support the professionals, family physicians, dispatchers, social workers, counsellors, therapists, journalists, researchers, writers, and others who repeatedly listen to trauma?
One incident can affect millions of people, as is the case with the joint attacks of September 11, 2001.
People who experience death, trauma, and loss deserve answers, solutions, and, ultimately, retribution, if needed. But what if the answers never come? What if a missing person is never found? What if a homicide case remains unsolved? The files remain open. Cases go cold. Cold case investigations have become popular series on television. What may be entertaining for some is devastating for others.
As reporters, photographers, and journalists, we try to be as objective as possible and build upon years of on-the-job-training. We do not forget certain scenes and conversations, some of which never make it into public consumption because the details obtained through our own investigative work can be disturbing. It can also be unethical and damaging on many levels to report them. These details can be inflammatory, sensational, result in defamation, or serve no real purpose. Journalists must be careful not to damage a police investigation or court case with what news organizations put out for public consumption.
Prior to spending time at CTV Atlantic to view my old reports, I went online, researching and reading other journalists’ stories about the Andrea King and Kimberly McAndrew investigations. I knew all the older material inside and out because I had also reported about both young women until 1999, when I left television news. I have never stopped thinking about them or their loved ones.
I have also listened to, read, and watched everything about what has happened since 1999, over the eighteen years since I stopped working at CTV. Working on this book has forced me to look at why, after eighteen years, I still often think about them and the other victims.
When I arrived at CTV’s front door that morning at ten a.m., staff welcomed me warmly. I took my coat, purse, lunch, and notepad downstairs to where Leo had created a work station for me. He had also gathered together all the archival tapes housing my news stories.
I was floored by the actual physical number of my old library tapes; there are forty-seven in total and forty-six of them were packed in big cardboard boxes. The first one in the series was missing. Each library tape contained approximately twenty to twenty-five stories. That means, from 1991 to 1999, when I left CTV, I completed approximately 940 to 1,175 stories that are still in the library morgue. There are four years the tapes were not kept for my work: from when I joined ATV in 1987 to 1991. During those four missing years, I would have produced approximately 400 additional stories, prior to the start of my work being archived. That means from 1987 to 1999, the twelve years I worked at ATV, I would have filed, at minimum, 1,340 to 1,575 stories.
I had always wondered how many television news stories I had written and produced. Now I know. A great percentage of my old stories involve some form of crime, accident, emergency, or other trauma.
On that first missing tape, which started in 1991, there were four stories I wanted to see. How do I know they were on a tape that is missing?
Every archival tape has one or two sheets of lined paper enclosed with it which are logged by hand and catalogue the name of the story, its air date, and the “time code” or time on the tape where the story is located.
Leo, who is highly organized, had photocopied all the log sheets for me so I could read and scan them and determine which stories I wanted to view, instead of having to physically search through more than 1,000 stories on forty-six tapes to find specific items.
Since a lot of time had elapsed since I left CTV, I was not 100 percent certain of what I would find, or what the impact would be on me of revisiting the old stories.
I arrived at ten in the morning to begin the arduous research task. Seven straight hours of viewing and note-taking later, I left at five in the afternoon, just as CTV News at 5 was beginning to broadcast from the newsroom above me.
My hand ached for days after the constant handwriting of thirty pages of notes. I still hand-write all my notes; I commit them to memory better than if I type them on a computer.
I ended up having to stand towards the latter part of my research session. My hand hurt so much, I had to record some of the stories on my phone for future reference because I could no longer physically sit down and write. The initial physical effects were expected, but what was not as clear-cut was the emotional impact of the process.
It is hard to express how drained I felt after watching hours and hours of my previous work, but the word “sorrow” comes to mind. The sheer amount of trauma I had been around as a young person was significant.
In the cases of archival videotapes, there were plenty of light-hearted and uplifting stories I had covered in those twelve years. Many of them were basic news items and annual occurrences – like snowstorms, power outages, gas prices, budgets, and other day-to-day news coverage that, over the years, tend to slip from memory.
I did not come to view them.
I came to watch the stories about the families and investigations that have lingered.
It was jarring to view and listen to those stories, and to watch the footage discussing missing or murdered young women, the crime scenes, if there was one, and to see my younger self covering those stories.
There were many victims whose faces popped onto the viewing screen as I made my way through the mountain of library tapes. As each name appeared, a flood of memories came rushing back: Shelley Denise Connors, Andrea Lynn King, Carla Gail Strickland, Jean Hilda Myra, Kimberly Ann McAndrew.
The first four women are victims of unsolved Halifax murders which I covered between 1989 and 1993. Kimberly McAndrew is still listed by Halifax Regional Police (HRP) as a missing person. Her disappearance was the first major police case of any kind I can remember covering.
During my time in daily news gathering, I always took the task of interviewing people to heart and did my best with the life experience and knowledge I had at that time, being only young myself. People often spoke to me on the condition their identity be protected, because they feared
for their lives. In a few instances, without anyone’s knowledge, I would even take raw videotapes home with me for fear some crucial interviews, where I had promised anonymity to sources, would be edited improperly when I was out of the office. In the unedited footage, you could see people’s identities plain as day. I never felt comfortable leaving them behind when I left the station. I always returned the videotapes to work, because they were not my property. I apologize to my former employer for doing this, without approval.
The only people who knew I did this were my parents, but only years after I had left television. It made my mother nervous, which is why I did not tell her when it was happening.
In editing, I would work with an editor to alter or distort the faces of the people being interviewed or even change the sound of their voices in post-production, before the stories aired publicly, to protect the people speaking with me.
The complexity of the stories and criminal cases, as well as the physical risk to the interviewees, or possible damage to court cases, was significant. I did not want to be responsible for someone being hurt or killed, or a case being thrown out of court. No story is worth that risk.
The night production crew was always able to use my edited versions of the stories and clips when I was not in the office. Those were the versions where the faces and voices were changed.
This concern over my videotapes especially happened during murder investigations and cases involving young Nova Scotia women and a prostitution ring which involved sex trade workers from Nova Scotia being moved, with the use of force or coercion, by pimps to Toronto and Montreal. A Juvenile Prostitution Task Force, which was set up in the 1990s to combat the issue, received local, regional, and national media attention over many years. I covered it almost non-stop.
I interviewed many people who told me a variety of reasons why they worked in the sex trade. I valued meeting and speaking with them, many of whom granted me interviews on the condition their identities remain protected. Their faces were not shown and in some cases their voices were altered. They would have been harmed or killed for speaking out.
One of the key reasons people talk to journalists during or after a traumatic incident is because the interviewees want to help others avoid experiencing the kind of pain they have, or to learn from that pain. And speaking with members of the media can also lead to tips which could solve a case.
During this time, I also interviewed a pimp who was serving time in a Nova Scotia prison. The interview was done under strict prison supervision in a general meeting room at the correctional facility. One of my male colleagues in the newsroom accompanied me to the interview, but did not speak. He was there in a supportive role, which I appreciated.
It was one of the most difficult interviews I have ever done. I grappled with whether to give the man a platform and a voice, given why he was serving time. In the end, I decided to proceed with the interview in order for people to hear about the world of prostitution from as many viewpoints as possible, even if one of those participants made money off the backs of other people. It was a tough call. This is one example where being objective and ethical as a journalist is tested.
The pimp did not hide his face like the prostitutes who spoke to me felt they had to for their safety. Admittedly, it was difficult to be impartial with him, but I tried my best. He was polite. He was well-spoken, even charming, if you can use that kind of descriptor for someone in his work. Our conversation gave me a better understanding of how he and others can manipulate people.
During this time frame, in the 1990s, I also visited the Red Light District in Amsterdam, while travelling in Holland, for anecdotal evidence about the sex trade in a city world renowned for it.
What I learned from that 1995 visit and all the interviews is we must see sex trade workers as people; they are human beings. Many of them, who self-identified as female, told me they were supporting their children. Many said they had chosen this profession because being at “home” was more dangerous or abusive. Others were coerced. Drug addiction played a big role in many of their histories and rationales.
Today, with the advent of the Internet, most of the sex trade has gone underground. When I covered it, there were still people working the various “strolls” in Halifax, Montreal, and Toronto, the three Canadian cities about which I primarily reported.
You could walk up and talk with them if you chose to – which I did many times. I was in my twenties and the sex trade workers were about my age. Many were younger. I never considered the impact of that time and experience until much later.
Most of the time, those involved in prostitution readily agreed to speak with me on- or off-camera. I was only threatened and chased once, in downtown Halifax, near Barrington Street. A very tall figure ran at me, screaming, when I tried to approach them. The cameraman and I had to flee or they would have attacked us. Today, reflecting on our intrusive nature, and not knowing their whole story, I cannot say I blame their reaction. That was the only time over many years I was physically threatened by someone on the street, although I have been verbally threatened many times.
Another young person, working down by the Halifax train station, not far from Barrington Street, showed me the knife they always carried with them. It was revealed in a manner that was not threatening. It was shown as the prostitute made a clear point about the dangerous nature of their work and reality.
To try and capture their viewpoints as ethically as possible, I always told the sex trade workers who I was and that I had a cameraperson with me, so they understood exactly what we were doing. I never walked up to anyone with a camera rolling and started asking questions. The camera operator always stayed behind at a fair distance and I would approach people and ask for an interview. Most of the time they agreed to speak with me. At that time, there were not a lot of other Halifax journalists out on the streets at night researching and interviewing to the extent I did.
On one occasion, I was talking with sex trade workers in an area of Halifax, ironically, not far from the police station. One woman, in her twenties, walked sideways towards me in a drug-induced haze. She literally could not walk a straight line. She told me, in a garbled voice, she had a crack addiction and was working to support her children. Given her drug use, which was very apparent that night, I was not certain she understood who I was and what the conversation meant, so I never used her interview. It never saw the light of day.
Another night, a cameraperson and I were invited back to a woman’s residence to talk privately with her. It is one of the most disturbing conversations I have had in my entire career. I have not discussed the following scene with many people. It haunts me.
It was a small apartment up a flight of wooden stairs, on a nice, residential side street, behind the former Victoria General Hospital emergency entrance in the city’s south end. We did not bring our camera. We sat in her small, tidy kitchen as she proceeded to explain, without any emotion whatsoever, what, exactly, people paid her to do to, for, and with them. The list was long and included sex acts that were degrading. I will not name them. I will not be part of her degradation. I hurt for her. I have never used any of our verbatim conversation in any story I have ever told or written and nor will I here. It is not for sale.
Our short time together in her home has had a lasting impact. I will never forget the vacant and distant look on the young woman’s face, or the monotone sound of her voice, as she described other people’s requests and demands. They had paid her to humiliate herself for their entertainment, power, control, and/or pleasure. The price she had paid was obvious. It was so painfully obvious, the cameraperson and I vowed to never tell people the exact details of what was said. She never gave me her name or age but we would have been close in age. The memory of her has never left me.
I hope sharing the pain and hurt with us helped her in some way. She was in control that night. She was in the safety of her home. She basically spoke without being asked much, if anything at all. She needed someone to liste
n and not judge her or ask her for anything.
I am honoured she chose me.
However, no matter our profession, training, or experience, we cannot un-see or un-hear things.
If you could have seen her face or heard her speak, you would have witnessed the impact the trauma she had repeatedly experienced at the hands of strangers has had on her.
We are all affected, to varying degrees, by our work, as wide-ranging as it may be, and no matter our profession or background.
2
Andrea King: Roses in the Woods
My first archival tape is missing, so as soon as I placed Tape 2 into the playback machine, the story which immediately started playing was about eighteen-year-old Andrea Lynn King of British Columbia. Andrea’s face was the first image I saw that day. I immediately pressed “stop” and had to collect myself. The memories started flooding back.
Andrea flew from New Westminster, British Columbia, to Halifax on January 1, 1992, on a work/travel trip to Nova Scotia. She called home from the airport to say she had arrived. It was the last time anyone heard from her.
The Halifax Regional Police website states: “On January 4, 1992, Ms. King’s family reported her missing to the RCMP in Surrey, B.C. Despite a year-long missing person investigation being conducted in both Halifax and New Westminister, [sic] B.C., no trace of Andrea was found and police were unable to positively identify anyone who had contact with her after her arrival in Nova Scotia. On December 22, 1992, the skeletal remains of Andrea King were located in a wooded area in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia, near the Sackville Business Park.”
The Legacy Letters Page 3
