“You sure?”
“Listen, Leo, I know you are only doing your job, but off the record, I am a little worried about you.”
“Worried? In case you haven’t noticed, I’m doing a hell of a lot better than I was last year. I probably need a new place to live, but other than that, things are gangbusters.”
“I know that, and I congratulate you for battling your demons and doing what you can to make your life better. But about this serial killer, I know you believe you have some evidence suggesting such a thing, and though I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, are you sure your … uh, I don’t know … your personality isn’t making this thing bigger than it really is?”
“What the hell are you talking about? I’m fine, I told you that.”
“Yeah, I know, but you have a tendency to chase after things that don’t need to be chased after. Remember Charlie?”
His comment hit me like a punch in the stomach, a hard one in which the breath is knocked out of you and you feel like you’re never going to take another one again. Charlie was a friend of mine from the time when I was a street person. He was one of the smartest people I had ever known, a former law student I had met in one of the many homeless shelters in the city. I was reading a newspaper and he came up to me, surprised that I was actually reading the newspaper and not flipping through the pages, glancing at the headlines and searching for the comics.
He was native like me, but unlike me, he looked it, had the darker skin, the long straight hair, the higher cheekbones, slightly broader nose, and almond-shaped eyes. Charlie also suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and from time to time, he would disappear, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, sometimes longer.
One day a couple years ago, after realizing that Charlie had disappeared, I went in search of him. I met Whitford when I filed a missing person’s report about Charlie and he was investigating the death of a man who matched his description. In fact, my little room in the basement used to be Charlie’s.
“What the fuck does Charlie have to do with this?” I demanded.
“Did you find Charlie?”
“No.”
“And why was that?”
“Fuck you,” I hissed into the phone, trying extremely hard not to slam it down when I hung up on him.
21
Whitford’s comments about Charlie pissed me off so much that I went into “I’ll show you” mode. The story about the serial killer was not like my search for Charlie. Someone was out there killing street prostitutes, I was sure of it. The list of cases and names did not lie. And if the EPS wasn’t willing to accept the evidence and admit the truth, then I would find someone who would.
I went through the police-beat Rolodex and found the names of a few professors of criminology at the local U. The first two were actually sociologists who specialized in other areas and both suggested a professor whose name was at the bottom of my own list. His name was Blake Creighton. When I explained who I was, and outlined what I was looking for and wondered if he was the correct person to talk to, he said he was, quickly outlining his knowledge to confirm.
He first asked to meet me in person so he could get to know me and possibly explain himself better, but I nixed the idea. This was a straight-up hard news story and I didn’t need any of the descriptive bits that I included in the longer piece on Grace. I just wanted his comments, so there was no need to meet him in person.
And it was already late afternoon and I wanted to get this story into the next edition. I had no time to drive to the southside, look for a parking spot near the U so I could meet some professor in a coffee shop or his office for an interview that I would have to transcribe from my notes once I got back to the office a couple hours later.
Besides, I was still feeling the aftereffects of being beaten up. My head throbbed constantly, my vision was fuzzy, and there was still a red tinge to my urine. Just getting to work was a struggle in itself. I didn’t go into those gory details with the professor, I just told him I was on tight deadline for this and didn’t have time to meet in person.
I outlined the information I had, told him of my serial killer theory, and asked him for an opinion.
“From a criminologist’s point of view there are too many coincidences to deny the likelihood of a link here. When you have a number of dead women being found in and around in the city, usually in similar locations such as farmers’ fields, ditches, and such, and these victims have been murdered in a similar fashion, it is not unreasonable to speculate that there is a very strong possibility that a serial killer is operating in the Edmonton area,” he said matter-of-factly.
At my desk, I raised my fist in victory and in my head I shouted, Yes! With that comment, I not only had my story, I had my fuck you! for Whitford’s comments about Charlie. As the good professor continued, I began typing the lead to my story: “Despite repeated denials from police, a serial killer is mostly likely operating in Edmonton, says a prominent criminologist.”
“That’s not to say that all of these women were killed by the same person, but there’s a good chance there’s one person responsible for a number of them,” he went on. “And by definition, that’s a serial killer, someone who kills more than three people over a long period with a cooling-off time in between the murders. The murders are usually committed in the same fashion and the victims usually have something in common such as gender, race, occupation.”
“So the killer is actually looking for female Aboriginal street prostitutes?”
“Possibly, but the sad fact is that a large number of prostitutes in Canada happen to be Aboriginal. So mostly likely, this serial killer is targeting street prostitutes and it’s just the odds that a majority of them are Aboriginal.”
“I know it’s an obvious question, but why prostitutes?”
“Prostitutes, by the nature of their profession, and the fact that they are willing to climb into an unknown vehicle driven by a stranger, are easy targets for a serial killer,” he said. “And these women, who live what police call high-risk lifestyles, are not known to be as reliable in their comings and goings as members of regular society. So when one of them doesn’t show up at work the next day, nobody’s phoning her at home to check if she’s sick or filing a missing person’s report because she hasn’t shown up for a couple of days or even weeks.
“It’s usually only when a family member realizes that they haven’t heard from so-and-so for a while that the police are made aware that someone might or might not be missing. And by then, if something of a heinous nature has occurred, odds are police will have little or nothing to go on because even if a body is found, the trail is really cold. Much of the evidence is lost, disturbed, or has been washed away by the elements. I don’t envy the police in these situations.”
“But why are police so unwilling to admit there is a serial killer? I’ve given them the same evidence that I’ve given you but all I get is repeated denials, ‘there is no serial killer operating in the Capital Region,’ over and over again.”
“It doesn’t matter where you go in the world, police are always unwilling to admit that there is a serial killer at work,” Creighton said. “It’s a highly explosive term, conjuring up images of Hannibal Lector, Jason from Friday the 13th, Ted Bundy and all that, when in reality most serial killers, despite the acts that they commit, are for the most part loser misfits who like to prey on the vulnerable for whatever reason. So you can understand why the police won’t just come out and admit there is a serial killer on the loose in the streets of Edmonton.
“The term strikes terror into the heart of the average citizen and that’s one thing the police don’t want. They want people to be vigilant about crime but they don’t want people to live in fear. At the same time, it puts a lot of pressure, political and otherwise, on the police to apprehend a suspect. When they don’t do so as quickly as people hope and expect them to, that can have repercussions, not just throughout the police service but in all of their political dealings, such
as with the local police commission, and their dealings with the general public, be it writing out a ticket for speeding or directing traffic. Quite simply, the public could lose faith in their local law enforcement and that would be a bad thing.”
“But wouldn’t it make more sense for the police to go public and suggest that there might be a serial killer at work? Wouldn’t that make all those who fall into the high-risk category take precautions and also spur the public to provide tips that may lead to the killer?”
“Let me explain a couple of things Mr. Desroches. First off, they call it a high-risk lifestyle for a reason. That said, I have no doubt that street prostitutes are already aware of something happening and are taking whatever precautions they think are necessary.”
I told him what Jackie had said about the yellow pickup truck and the warnings that were given.
“There you go. Frontline workers are already more aware of what’s happening than those who are supposedly in charge. But to your comment about tips from the public, that’s good but only to a point. If the Edmonton Police Service announced that they were looking for a serial killer and wanted tips from the public, do you know what will happen?”
“They’ll get hundreds of them.”
“More likely they’d get thousands. And while many would be made in good faith, there would be some provided for nefarious reasons, to get back at a brother-in-law someone doesn’t like or at a neighbor who lets his dog bark too much. But even out of those made in good faith, only a few will actually lead somewhere and most likely they won’t lead to the specific case at hand. Despite what Hollywood shows us, the majority of serial killers are caught because of luck. They forget to pay their parking tickets, like the Son of Sam, or they get pulled over in a routine traffic stop, like Ted Bundy. It’s very rare that law enforcement officials capture a serial killer through their typical investigative processes. It does happen, but those kinds of cases are still quite rare. And that’s not a slight against the police, it’s just the way it is.”
“Okay, having the police telling the public that there might be a serial killer may not be the best solution, but shouldn’t they, at least internally, admit to themselves that there might be serial killer and establish some type of task force to deal with the problem?”
“Oh, no doubt there are probably some members of the Edmonton Police Service who do suspect that there might be a serial killer at work and are quietly working on it. There’s nothing official and I bet there’s a good chance that they haven’t said anything about it to their superiors.”
“Why the hell not?” I asked, a little too loudly.
“Well, that’s just typical of any major public institution with a large bureaucratic side to it. The frontline workers may know what’s really going on but on the higher and administrative side, nobody really wants to go out on a limb and admit something bad may be happening.”
“But what if they are right, but they didn’t say anything?”
“Well, they can admit that they didn’t know at the time, that they didn’t have all the facts or that the evidence at the time didn’t reveal as much, and now with the new and correct information at hand, they are ready to move forward,” he said with a laugh. “That’s just basic politics. I’m surprised, Mr. Desroches, that with you being a journalist, you weren’t aware of that.”
22
It was the kind of story that journalists live for. A giant headline:
Serial Killer on the Loose?
with a subhead of:
Bodies of 16 Women Found in Capital Region
Brent was assigned to help me by going through the list of sixteen names and writing a side piece with their names in chronological order starting with the first victim, Lydia Alexandra, who was found in 1988, to the most recent, Grace Cardinal.
And not only was our coverage a scoop, it made its own news. All of the local media outlets ran stories on it, using the information in the paper for their own story, but at the same time acknowledging that it had come from us. And the resulting blowback meant there were several follow-up stories, press conferences, and all the other fun things that reporters live for. Even though I had started the story, it had taken on a life of its own and all I had to do was keep riding it until it wore itself out. Every day for about a week I was writing something new related to it. Not of all of the stories were groundbreaking and some of them were just follow-ups on info broken by other media outlets—including a TV bit about how police had a list of sixty-three women who fit the profiles of the other victims and had been reported missing over the past fifteen years.
But through it all, the Edmonton Police still claimed that they were not investigating the possibility that a serial killer was on the loose. The media relations people, now the only police officials commenting on the story, kept to their talking points: “Despite the perceived similarities in these crimes, the Edmonton Police Service are not investigating the possibility that there is a serial killer operating in the Capital Region” and similar comments, reworded and reframed over and over to sound fresh but to mean the same thing.
After a week and a half, it was over. With all the media in the city clamoring for the story, we finally beat the horse to the ground and the ride ended. The story wasn’t dead, it would linger in the background, but it would only start up again if the police arrested someone or another body was found.
And in that lull, I made the call that I had been thinking about for a couple of months. A few weeks ago, I had actually dialed it a couple of times before hanging up, but this time, I made it through until the first ring. After that happened I knew I couldn’t hang up and let it go.
“Hello, Joan,” I said when the phone was answered after the third ring.
There was a pause on the other side, maybe I heard a sigh, or I was just imagining it.
“Leo. I was kind of expecting you to call,” Joan said, her voice showing no emotion, although she had plenty of reasons to be emotional about a call from me.
Joan was my ex-wife. We had met almost two decades ago when I was the editor of a small-town newspaper and she was the vice principal of the local elementary school. We married after a three-year courtship and stayed together for about seven years, producing two children, Eileen and Peter.
In the years of our marriage, I had two falls into gambling. The second one occurred not long after we moved to Edmonton so she could take an administrative job at Alberta Education. We almost lost our home. Both times she took me back, although following the second incident she took total control of our finances.
There would have been a third transgression into gambling for me in our relationship but I left before that could happen. She didn’t chase me, not even for payment of child support, because she was smart enough to realize that she wouldn’t get it. Sometime, somewhere in the haze of my fall, she divorced me and put all her efforts into raising our children.
“That’s kind of unusual, isn’t it, expecting me to call?” I said, trying to sound as casual as I could. At the same time, the hand that wasn’t holding the phone was shaking and my bowels started clenching in nervous tension.
“Actually it’s kind of obvious. I’ve been seeing your byline for the last few months, and then once checks started to arrive, I’ve been wondering when you would actually call. Thanks for the checks by the way, completely unnecessary, but any little bit helps, you know.”
No, I don’t know. You were the one who raised the kids, I thought. Out loud, I said, “Yeah, now that I’m working, I figured I should do something. I know it doesn’t make up for missing payments all those years, but…” The tendons in my throat clutched, cutting off my words.
My relationship with Joan had been the most intimate one of my entire life; she knew everything, she knew all that I had done and all that I was capable of, for better and worse. And for years, she accepted it, forgiving the worst and putting all of her being into trying to help, trying to keep me on track with our life. But there’s only so much a p
erson can keep on their plate and she realized she had to choose between helping me or raising our children, and as per usual for her, she took the wisest course. I knew it probably hurt her dearly to cut me loose but I knew it also came as a relief.
Once again, she saved me by getting to the point. “So is this just a ‘Hey, how ya doing?’ call or do you have a purpose for conversation?” she asked.
“A little bit of both, I guess.”
“Well, I’m doing good, the kids are doing good, and I see that you are doing good. What else?”
“That’s it? No details? No catching up on what’s been going in your life?”
“No,” she said firmly. “That’s all you get at the moment. State your business, Leo.”
“That’s pretty cold, Joan.”
“Well, we do live in Edmonton. You should be used to it by now. But really, seriously, Leo, I’m glad you are back on track again and I really do appreciate the checks, I really do, but don’t expect anything more out of me. I don’t have it.”
“Well, I was expecting something small,” I said tentatively.
“Then get it over with and ask.”
“I was hoping, now that I’m back on my feet and respectable again, I could see the kids, you know, maybe take them out for lunch, a movie, something like that.”
There was silence for a long time. Joan was a great mother and great mothers are extremely protective of their children. I imagined her pacing the room with the phone in hand, imagined her giving the phone an angry look and a silent scream. Finally she came back. “That’s a big thing, not a small one.”
Fall from Grace Page 13
