January 27,2012 YES, a complete design is coming to the
Highway of Tears. I am working with a College Student for
redesign and this will take to about April for a complete
update. So Patience is a Virtue :)
IMPORTANT NOTICE I would like to
advice you,
due to unforeseen difficult circumstances there will
be no further updates on the Highway of Tears
website until further notice. I have and will always honour
those Families who have Missing Loved Ones and whom
I have tried to be there for
since 2005. Please check back for further information.
First - I would like to reaffirm
that the RCMP is committed to fully cooperating with the
Missing Women Commission of Inquiry.
We are
in the phase of the inquiry where investigators directly
involved in the investigations are scheduled to testify.
Recently, it came to my attention,
that during the examination of an RCMP witness, Commission
Counsel raised the issue of an RCMP apology. It is
clear to me that the issue of an apology remains in
question.
In August 2010 Deputy Commissioner Gary
Bass, the Commanding Officer for the RCMP in "E" Division,
at the time, issued a statement in which he expressed deep
regret that the RCMP was unable to gather the evidence
necessary to lay a charge against Robert Pickton sooner than
it did. Let me be clear. As the Commanding Officer
of the RCMP in British Columbia I believe that, with the
benefit of hindsight and when measured against today's
investigative standards and practices, the RCMP could have
done more.
On behalf of the RCMP, I would
like to express to the families of the victims how very
sorry we are for the loss of your loved ones, and I
apologize that the RCMP did not do more.
We
look forward to receiving meaningful recommendations that we
can apply as a whole to improve our policing services to
communities in BC and to refine and improve how we
investigate and solve complex major crimes.
Vancouver
police Const. Lori Shenher attends missing women inquiry, in
Vancouver on Monday, January 30, 2012. By NEAL HALL, VANCOUVER SUNJanuary 30, 2012 5:25 PM
Photograph by: Glenn Baglo, PNG
VANCOUVER -- The first Vancouver police officer
assigned to investigate the missing women case testified
today that when she received informant tips suggesting
Robert Pickton may be a serial killer, she felt the
information was very credible.
"I was thinking 'This is what a serial killer looks
like," Const. Lori Shenher told the Missing Women inquiry,
which is probing why the serial killer wasn't caught sooner.
She said she was told by informants that Pickton
lived on a farm, had the means to dispose of bodies and had
bags of women's bloody clothing, identification and purses
at his home, located on a farm in Port Coquitlam.
One of the informants said Pickton had said he had
a meat grinder to dispose of bodies, she said.
"When I heard about the meat grinder, I thought,
'Bingo. This is the kind of guy we're looking for'," Shenher
testified.
Another informant said she was told by a friend
that she stumbled on Pickton one night butchering a woman's
body in a barn.
The informant said one woman had escaped in 1997
and Pickton was wanting someone to lure her to the farm so
he could kill her.
Shenher said she talked to Coquitlam RCMP Cpl. Mike
Connor about Pickton's 1997 knife attack on the Vancouver
prostitute who survived.
She tracked down and interviewed the woman on Aug.
21, 1998. At the time, the woman was in jail after stealing
a police car and crashing it in Gastown; Shenher heard about
the incident over the radio and heard the woman's name.
She found the woman's story about the Pickton
attack very credible, she told the inquiry.
The woman, whose named is banned, recalled that
Pickton stabbed her after he tried to put handcuffs on her
and she resisted and fought for her life.
The woman stabbed Pickton, then ran to the street
and flagged down a passing car.
Pickton was charged with attempted murder and
unlawful confinement but the charges were dropped by the
Crown in 1998.
Shenher recalled the woman said she never got a
chance to testify because the Crown felt she wasn't credible
because she was a drug addict.
"I found it incredibly frustrating that her
evidence was never heard," Shenher testified.
She recalled telling the woman: "I think you're the
only one who got away."
The woman agreed, suggesting Pickton "must have
done this before," Shenher said.
She also told the woman, based on the informant
information, that Pickton tried to get others to lure the
woman to the farm so he could "finish her off."
Shenher recalled that the woman who survived the
knife attack by Pickton actually died on the operating table
at hospital but was revived.
"Had she died, we probably would have had a slam
dunk murder conviction," she told the inquiry.
Shenher said she passed along the information to
Connor, a seasoned investigator who had handled a number of
homicides.
She testified when she was first assigned to the
Missing Person unit in July 1998, a detective told her: This
could very well turn into a serial killer investigation."
Shenher recalled she had previously tried to
develop relationships with prostitutes when she was the
liaison officer working with the street sex trade, which
also involved posing undercover as a prostitute in
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside as part of a "John" sting
that targeted prostitution customers.
One night while working undercover, posing as a sex
trade worker, she recalled getting a scare as she was
grabbed by a man in a car.
The man wouldn't look at her while he talked to
her, Shenher said, and when they had negotiated sex for $50
through an open window of the man's car, she recalled
looking away to signal other officers nearby working as her
"cover team" when the man grabbed her arm.
It shocked her, even though she had a gun under her
coat, she said.
When the man was arrested, police found the man had
a gun on the front seat of the car and was wanted on a
Canada-wide warrant for robbery, Shenher said.
She also talked to many of the women working the
street sex trade.
"It's a very lonely life, a very difficult life,"
Shenher recalled about street prostitution. "Standing in the
shadows in industrial areas."
Most women working the survival sex trade become
drug dependent "because of the day to day horror of this
work," she told the inquiry.
Shenher said she developed relationships with some
of the women working the streets, including Angela Jardine
and Sereena Abotsway - two of the women who disappeared.
"When the two of them went missing, I knew very
definitely that we had a problem," she testified
By August 1998, she wrote a memo to then
detective-inspector Kim Rossmo, a geographic profiler and
expert in serial crime.
In her memo, Shenher suggested the women who had
gone missing may have met foul play and the person
responsible "has the means to dispose of bodies."
She testified that she tried to relay her concerns
about a possible serial to her superiors, who felt the
missing women would eventually show up.
The male police managers had an outdated view of
the sex trade in Vancouver, believing the women worked a
circuit in Western Canada, Shenher said.
But she told the male managers that the missing
women hadn't cashed their welfare cheques, hadn't contacted
their children and "they weren't at the Calgary Stampede."
She was asked what would have happened if she had
banged on the table and told her bosses "There's something
serious going on here."
"I've thought about that for 13 and half years,"
Shenher said.
She said she didn't want to be dismissed as a
zealot and felt she had to work hard to try to find the
evidence.
She also saw how Kim Rossmo was treated when he
wanted to issue a public warning that a serial killer may be
responsible for the dozens of women who had gone missing
from the Downtown Eastside.
Rossmo, a former Vancouver police serial crime
expert now teaching at Texas State University, testified
last week that the inspector in charge of major crime, Fred
Biddlecombe, who also oversaw the major crime squad, which
included the missing person unit, had a temper tantrum when
Rossmo wanted to issue his press release.
Instead, Biddlecombe directed Shenher to locate the
missing women.
Shenher said she felt she would be treated the same
way as Rossmo because she was not very experienced, so
continually consulted with more seasoned homicide
detectives.
"I probably drove the homicide detectives crazy,
running things by them," she told the inquiry.
Shenher worked on the case tirelessly until she was
granted a transfer in 2000 out of the missing person unit.
Women continued to go missing until Pickton was
arrested on Feb. 5, 2002. He was eventually charged with 27
counts of first-degree murder.
Pickton, who now is serving a life sentence, once
admitted to killing 49 women.
Vancouver police Deputy Chief Doug LePard, who did
an analysis of the police failures in the case, blamed
senior managers for not taking the case more seriously and
devoting more human resources.
The VPD had repeatedly apologized for not catching
Pickton sooner.
Last Friday, the commanding officer of the RCMP in
B.C. apologized for the Mounties not doing more.
Two key RCMP investigators - Connor and Don Adam -
are expected to testify this week.
Photograph by: Glenn Baglo, PNG
RCMP Assistant Commissioner Craig Callens speaks to media on
Friday, December 9, 2011 in Vancouver.
VANCOUVER - The RCMP apologized today
for the first time for failing to catch serial killer Robert
Pickton sooner.
"On behalf of the RCMP, I would like to express to
the families of the victims how very sorry we are for the
loss of your loved ones, and I apologize that the RCMP did
not do more," Assistant Commissioner Craig Callens said at a
news conference at RCMP headquarters in Vancouver.
"Let me be clear," he said. "As the commanding
officer of the RCMP in British Columbia I believe that, with
the benefit of hindsight and when measured against today's
investigative standards and practices, the RCMP could have
done more."
Callens said the former commanding officer of the
B.C. Mounties, Gary Bass, had expressed his deep regret in
August 2010 that the RCMP was unable to gather the evidence
necessary to charge serial killer Robert Pickton sooner.
But it recently came to his attention "that the
issue of an apology remains in question."
Callens said he plans to meet with families of
Pickton's victims to offer a personal apology on behalf of
the force.
The Vancouver police has repeatedly apologized,
saying the VPD could have and should have done more.
Alberta RCMP Supt. Bob Williams, who was asked to
do an independent review of the force's investigation of
Pickton, declined during his testimony two weeks ago to
offer an apology on behalf of the RCMP.
Williams deferred the decision to the senior
managers of the RCMP in B.C.
Callens pointed out that the RCMP remains fully
committed to cooperating with the Missing Women inquiry,
which resumes Monday.
The inquiry is expected to hear next week from two
key RCMP investigators — Mike Connor and Don Adam — in the
Pickton case.
The first witness scheduled for Monday is Lori
Shenher, the Vancouver police constable who handled the
first tip about Pickton being the possible killer of dozens
of women who had disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown
Eastside.
Women continued to disappear until Pickton was
finally arrested on Feb. 5, 2002. He was eventually charged
with 27 counts of first-degree murder.
The inquiry has heard that Vancouver police
regarded Pickton as the prime suspect after receiving tips
about Pickton in 1998 and 1999.
Vancouver police investigated the information,
including a claim that a woman saw Pickton butchering a
woman in a barn on the Pickton farm.
The VPD passed along the information to the RCMP
because the allegations were that Pickton had killed women
at his farm in Port Coquitlam, which was the policing
jurisdiction of the Mounties.
Coquitlam RCMP had previously investigated Pickton
for a 1997 attack on a Vancouver prostitute at the farm.
The women survived a knife attack after running to
the street and flagging down a passing car.
Pickton was charged with unlawful confinement and
attempted murder, but the Crown dropped the charges in 1998.
The reasons for the Crown staying the charges will
be examined later at the inquiry, which is probing the
systemic problems that prevented police from catching
Pickton sooner.
Pickton, now 62, once admitted to killing 49 women.
Police found the DNA of 33 women on Pickton's farm.
He was convicted of six counts of murder at his
first trial in 2007. After exhausting all appeals, the Crown
decided not to proceed on a second trial involving another
20 murders.
One charge was stayed by the trial judge because
the victim, known as Jane Doe, was never identified.
nhall@vancouversun.com
Statement issued by Assistant Commissioner Craig
Callens, Commanding Officer of "E" Division
Good morning.
First - I would like to reaffirm that the RCMP is
committed to fully cooperating with the Missing Women
Commission of Inquiry.
We are in the phase of the inquiry where
investigators directly involved in the investigations are
scheduled to testify.
Recently, it came to my attention, that during the
examination of an RCMP witness, Commission Counsel raised
the issue of an RCMP apology. It is clear to me that the
issue of an apology remains in question.
In August 2010 Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass, the
Commanding Officer for the RCMP in "E" Division, at the
time, issued a statement in which he expressed deep regret
that the RCMP was unable to gather the evidence necessary to
lay a charge against Robert Pickton sooner than it did.
Let me be clear. As the Commanding Officer of the
RCMP in British Columbia I believe that, with the benefit of
hindsight and when measured against today's investigative
standards and practices, the RCMP could have done more.
On behalf of the RCMP, I would like to express to
the families of the victims how very sorry we are for the
loss of your loved ones, and I apologize that the RCMP did
not do more.
We look forward to receiving meaningful
recommendations that we can apply as a whole to improve our
policing services to communities in BC and to refine and
improve how we investigate and solve complex major crimes.
An RCMP apology for failing to do more to catch
Robert Pickton sooner has been dismissed as meaningless by
families of women murdered by the serial killer.
“I don’t accept the apology,” Dianne Rock’s sister,
Lilliane Beaudoin, said on Friday after B.C.’s top Mountie
issued the statement. “We need apologies from the officers
who did wrong,” she said, adding that she will be waiting to
see if the officers apologize when they testify at the
inquiry into the investigation.
Marnie Frey’s father, Rick Frey, said an apology
was not enough. “We all know they could have done more,” he
said. “I don’t think you have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to
figure that one out.”
An apology should go to RCMP officers who were
stymied by their bosses in investigating Mr. Pickton in the
late 1990s, Mr. Frey said. Reviews of the RCMP and Vancouver
Police Department investigation have revealed that beat cops
and detectives believed a serial killer was preying on women
in the Downtown Eastside, but senior managers did not.
“Officers were trying to get [senior managers] to
wake up, they had a problem. They should apologize to their
people, that they did not listen,” Mr. Frey said. He also
wanted to know what the RCMP are now doing differently.
Earlier Friday, RCMP assistant commissioner Craig
Callens offered the apology for the fact that the RCMP did
not arrest Mr. Pickton before February, 2002. The statement
came 18 months after Vancouver Police Department issued its
own apology.
Vancouver police and the RCMP received tips
pointing to Mr. Pickton as a serial killer in 1998 and 1999.
Mr. Pickton was arrested in 2002 and convicted of killing
six women, three of them in 2001. He was charged with
murdering 11 more women between December, 1999, and 2002,
but the charges were stayed.
Assistant commissioner Callen told reporters at a
news conference that the RCMP, “with the benefit of
hindsight and measured against current investigative
standards” recognizes they could have done more. “On behalf
of the RCMP, I would like to express to the families of the
victims how very sorry we are for the loss of your loved
ones, and I apologize that the RCMP did not do more,” he
said.
The apology was made at this time in response to
events earlier this month at the missing women inquiry, he
said.
RCMP Superintendent R.J. Williams, who conducted an
external review of the RCMP Pickton investigation, had been
asked at the inquiry to apologize to the families on behalf
of the Mounties. He said he was not the appropriate person
to apologize and it was up to RCMP management in B.C.
Assistant commissioner Callens said he was recently
told about Supt. Williams testimony. The RCMP in August,
2010, expressed “deep regret” that the RCMP was unable to
gather enough evidence to charge Mr. Pickton sooner than it
did, he said. The proceedings at the inquiry made it clear
that the issue of an apology remained in question, he said.
The RCMP approaches serial-murder investigations
much differently than in 1998, he added. The RCMP is looking
forward to the inquiry’s recommendations to improve how they
investigate and solve complex major crimes, he said.
The inquiry was appointed in the fall of 2010 to
look into why Mr. Pickton was not arrested before February,
2002. Marnie Frey had been reported missing by her
stepmother Lynn Frey on Dec. 29, 1977, and her remains were
found on Mr. Pickton’s farm after he was arrested. Dianne
Rock’s blood and DNA were found on Mr. Pickton’s farm, but
Crown counsel stayed a murder charge against Mr. Pickton
related to her death.
Former
VPD officer Kim Rossmo arrives at Federal Court in Vancouver
to testify before the missing women inquiry on Tuesday,
January 24, 2012.
Photograph by: Glenn Baglo, PNG
VANCOUVER - A former Vancouver police officer
testified today at the Missing Women inquiry about the
"classic mistakes" made in serial killer investigations.
"One of the classical mistakes is not involving all
the agencies that need to be involved, Kim Rossmo told
inquiry Commissioner Wally Oppal.
Not involving other police agencies and community
groups leads to missing pieces of the puzzle, he explained.
He said he was first asked in August 1998 to look
at the growing number of women going missing from
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES).
He said two inspectors at the time, Gary Greer and
Doug Mackay-Dunn, who were in charge of District Two, which
included the DTES, were concerned that a serial killer may
be responsible.
Rossmo, a serial murder expert who at the time had
a PhD in the field, analyzed the data and wanted to issue a
public warning in September 1998 about a serial killer
preying on DTES women.
But his bosses wouldn't allow him to issue the
warning, saying there was no evidence of a serial killer.
Rossmo wanted the community to know "we were taking
these concerns seriously and were investigating the
possibility of a serial killer," he said.
"We also had a duty to warn the public," he said.
Rossmo said the officer who kiboshed the press
release being issued was Insp. Fred Biddlecombe, who was in
charge of homicide and the missing person unit.
"He had a small temper tantrum," he recalled of the
meeting where the news release was discussed, which was
attended by VPD members and the RCMP.
"He didn't like what we were doing," Rossmo
recalled.
"I found him arrogant and somewhat egotistical. He
wasn't interested in a discussion. He was angry and
unreasonable. He didn't want to work with us."
Rossmo added that Biddlecombe's negative attitude
effectively killed the working group that Greer and Rossmo
had assembled.
Instead, Biddlecombe wanted Detective Lori Shenher
to continue working to try to locate the dozens of missing
women who had been reported missing.
Rossmo said he didn't like Biddlecombe and had
never worked with him before, but felt Biddlecombe honestly
believed a serial killer wasn't responsible for the missing
women.
Now retired, Biddlecombe will testify later at the
inquiry.
Despite Biddlecombe's negativity, Rossmo said he
tried continue working on the missing women case but had
difficulty getting any data from major crime.
"The level of communication/coorperation was not
good," he testified.
"I was somewhat frustrated in my efforts to obtain
more data or information."
He said he didn't receive the data until months
later, when he prepared a report on Feb. 9, 1999, which
concluded that the number of missing women took a dramatic
jump in 1995.
Rossmo recalled there was a meeting to discuss this
report with Biddlecombe, Insp. Brian McGuinness and a
sergeant from major crime, Geramy Field.
"The meeting was somewhat strange in that
Biddlecombe acted like I wasn't in the room," he added.
Biddlecombe was dismissive of Rossmo's report,
saying the missing women would be found eventually.
"I said, Let's find out how long missing people
stay missing," Rossmo recalled of the meeting.
"Insp. Biddlecombe was very angry at me for keeping
this thing alive."
Rossmo said Vancouver police managers at the time
were involved in internal infighting and failed to take
ownership of the missing women problem.
He said Vancouver repeatedly gave the excuse that
it had no bodies of murder victims so couldn't investigate.
That's like the fire department saying, "I see
smoke but I don't see fire," so firefighters don't attend to
investigate.
He said police managers refused ownership of the
duty to protect all its citizens.
The investigation suffered from "group think" and
continued to deny the serial killer theory, he added.
Similarly, there was limited political pressure put
on the RCMP investigating Pickton, so the Mounties failed to
properly investigate the serial killer, Rossmo said.
"The marginal social status of these victims
minimized political pressure and allowed police managers to
remain disengaged," he told the inquiry.
"One of the common mistakes made by police is the
initial denial that there is a serial killer," added Rossmo,
now is a professor at Texas State University, where he is
the director of Geospacial Intelligence and Investigation.
He served 20 years with the Vancouver police,
including two tours of duty in the Downtown Eastside, which
he referred to as Skid Road.
He said the area was a vibrant community, despite
have a high rate of crime, violence and disease.
In his last five years at the VPD, he was a
detective-inspector in charge of the geographic profiling
unit, which assisted in serial crime investigations of rape,
robbery and murders.
Rossmo testified that street prostitutes in the
DTES were vulnerable to extreme violence because they would
get into cars with complete strangers and would be driven to
dark alleys.
"Street prostitutes are the perfect victims," he
told the inquiry, which is probing why it took so long to
catch serial killer Robert Pickton.
Rossmo said his analysis in 1998 showed 27 women
had disappeared from the DTES since 1978.
There was a dramatic increase starting in 1995 and
it continued in subsequent - five women went missing in 1997
and 11 disappeared in 1998.
"Something is going on," Rossmo explained as he
showed a bar graph at the inquiry.
"We have an outbreak. This is a warning to us."
Rossmo also studied the data of when missing people
tend to show up.
""Most people are found within two days," he said.
"After three weeks, 93 per cent are found."
Rossmo also did research and found no other city in
western Canada had a similar problem of women prostitutes
going missing.
"I thought the data could only be explained by the
possibility of a serial killer," Rossmo said.
He passed along his conclusion and analysis to his
superiors but it seemed to fall on deaf ears, he said.
One senior officer told him that Vancouver police
didn't have the resources to investigate.
"I think it's a dramatic example of a massive
investigative failure," he said of the VPD's denial that a
serial killer was at work in the DTES.
"If these women would have gone missing from
Vancouver's west side, it would have had a very different
outcome," Rossmo said.
He said the media and politicians would have
reacted and put more pressure on police if the women
disappeared from wealthier neighbourhoods.
The fact that the women disappearing were sex trade
workers didn't get the attention it deserved, he said.
This problem was compounded by the fact that
Pickton was a stealth killer who picked up the women in
Vancouver and killed them on his farm in Port Coquitlam,
which was the policing jurisdiction of the RCMP.
"It caused real investigative problems," Rossmo
said of the cross-jurisdiction murders.
Pickton took advantage of these weak points in the
system, he said.
Pickton admitted to killing 49 women from
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
Inquiry Commissioner Wally Oppal said this morning
that he believes systemic failures within the VPD and RCMP
were the real cause behind the failures in the Pickton case.
"What happened here can never happen again," Oppal
said.
The commissioner said he plans to make a number of
recommendations to government to prevent another tragedy
such as the Pickton case.
Serial killer warning blocked by cop's 'temper tantrum,'
missing women inquiry hears By Suzanne Fournier,
Postmedia News
January 24, 2012 Former VPD officer Kim Rossmo
arrives at Federal Court in Vancouver to testify before the
missing women inquiry on Tuesday, January 24, 2012. VANCOUVER — Geographic profiler Kim Rossmo told
the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry Tuesday that his
1998 bid for a working group to investigate a possible
serial killer was shot down in flames by a senior Vancouver
police officer.
Former Vancouver Police Department Det. Insp.
Rossmo, now an academic in Texas who consults for police
agencies across the world, said mounting concern about the
growing numbers of missing women led to a September 1998
meeting between himself, Vancouver Police Department
frontline officers and Insp. Gary Greer, and RCMP officers
from B.C.'s Fraser Valley, where three prostitutes had been
found murdered.
Rossmo had drawn up a "blueprint" which he said
aimed to determine if "reports of missing women represent a
crime problem." He wanted to find out if the women should be
considered victims of crime, if police should be looking at
lists of sexual offenders and if the disappearances were
linked to a particular known offender.
At the time the first police officer in Canada to
earn a PhD, Rossmo said his focus was "environmental
criminology," a discipline that studies links between crimes
and locations. But his skills were not in high demand by VPD
top brass, Rossmo testified, because finding a serial killer
is challenging for a police force and requires a commitment
of time and resources the force may not possess. Police
typically don't want the public pressure and fear that comes
from a police alert that a serial killer may be active,
Rossmo added.
Rossmo suggested as early as fall of 1998 to VPD
superior officers then that it might be a good idea to
"inform the public" through VPD media spokeswoman Const.
Anne Drennan that police were looking into the dozens of
reported missing women and would be investigating whether a
serial killer might be on the loose.
But the plan went awry at the second meeting of the
missing women working group on Sept. 22, 1998, when senior
Vancouver police Insp. Fred Biddlecombe, who had been on
vacation during the first meeting, showed up and had a
"temper tantrum," Rossmo said.
"He didn't believe the serial murderer theory and
he was upset about the draft press release," Rossmo told the
inquiry in direct examination by Commission Counsel Art
Vertlieb.
Rossmo said Biddlecombe also accused him and
frontline Downtown Eastside Const. Dave Dickson of "leaking"
information to the media. "I found (him) to be inaccurate
and quite inflammatory," said Rossmo, noting he didn't even
possess the information Biddlecombe was accusing him of
leaking to the press. It was also "embarrassing," said
Rossmo, because officers from other agencies, including the
RCMP, were present for the "tantrum."
VPD Insp. Gary Greer, who had supported the missing
women working group, "folded like a house of cards" in the
face of Biddlecombe's wrath, said Rossmo.
"There was no way we could continue without his
co-operation," he added.
Rossmo said that he didn't believe, however, that
Biddlecombe was "indifferent" or had a "negative attitude"
toward marginalized or missing women — in fact, he said,
Biddlecombe was "very dedicated and very compassionate"
toward victims of violence.
"My opinion was he honestly believed there was no
serial murderer and we were just wasting his people's time,"
said Rossmo.
Rossmo didn't give up, however. He co-operated with
VPD Det-Const. Lori Shenher, who was working hard at the
community and street level to find out what had happened to
the missing women. Rossmo went to then-deputy chief Brian
McGuinness. And when Shenher spoke to anxious and grieving
friends and relatives of the missing women in early 1999,
Rossmo asked for her data to prepare a profile of who was
missing and what might have happened to them. He found a
"bulge" of missing women in the late 1990s and agreed with
Shenher that they were likely victims of foul play.
Rossmo concluded the women in the survival sex
trade who had gone missing were not really "transient" as
they didn't have cars or money for plane tickets and
whatever they earned "went into their arm" since they were
heavily drug-addicted. He concluded that someone who had the
means or money to transport the women out of the Downtown
Eastside had to be involved, since no bodies and no evidence
of murder had surfaced.
But in December, 2000, the VPD refused to renew
Rossmo's contract as a geographic profiler and offered him a
reduced rank. Rossmo left, and since then has had a solid
career as an outside and academic analyst of police
behaviour.
Missing Women Inquiry Commissioner Wally Oppal
served notice, however, that he will be focusing on
"systemic failure" and the "inter-jurisdictional" breakdown
in communication between police agencies.
"Sadly, grotesque serial crimes have happened
before in B.C., in Canada and in many other countries,
including the U.S. and the U.K.," Oppal noted in a brief
address at the opening of the inquiry on Tuesday.
Quoting an Ontario public inquiry commissioner,
Oppal noted: "Virtually every inter-jurisdictional serial
killer case, including the Yorkshire Ripper . . . in
England, Ted Bundy and the Green River killer in the U.S.,
and Clifford Olson in Canada, demonstrate the same problems
and raise the same questions.
"And always the answers turn out to be the same —
systemic failure."
Oppal pledged, however, that he will deliver some
answers in his final report, to be handed in by June, 2012,
that will make sure "what happened here must never happen
again."
Hearings at the inquiry continue daily until the
end of April.
There are now about two dozen lawyers representing
the VPD, the Vancouver police board and union and several
individual officers. The RCMP is represented by federal
lawyers, with all of those lawyers being paid out of the
public purse.
Community and women's groups have complained they
were shut out of the inquiry due to lack of funding for
lawyers, although independent lawyers Jason Gratl and Robyn
Gervais are acting for Downtown Eastside women's and
aboriginal groups.
Lawyers Cameron Ward and Neil Chantler represent
the families of 25 women murdered by Robert Pickton, who is
serving a life sentence for the murder of six women but
claimed to have killed 49 in total.
VANCOUVER - Vancouver police could have investigated serial
killer Robert Pickton rather than simply leaving him to the
RCMP in a neighbouring city, the public inquiry into the
case has heard.
Deputy Chief Jennifer Evans of
Peel Regional Police, who conducted an external review for
the inquiry, contradicted the Vancouver police force's
long-standing insistence that Pickton was the responsibility
of the Mounties in Port Coquitlam because that's where he
was killing women.
Evans said Thursday when
Vancouver police received information in 1998 and 1999 that
Pickton may have been picking up sex workers in the city and
killing them at his farm, they should have opened a criminal
investigation.
"Due to the number of women that
had gone missing, it was my opinion that investigators could
have come to the conclusion that Pickton was targeting women
in the Downtown Eastside, and he was going in looking (for
victims), so the offence would start in Vancouver," Evans
told the inquiry.
She said Vancouver police could
have opened investigations into the offences of kidnapping
because Pickton appeared to pick up women with the intent to
kill them. Another possible charge would be administering a
noxious substance because informants told police Pickton
used alcohol and drugs to lure women.
Instead, the case was spread over
several separate investigations involving two police forces,
which Evans has said was a key factor in the devastating
failure to catch Pickton.
The Vancouver police department
investigated the disappearances of sex workers, primarily as
a missing person case rather than a criminal investigation.
When they received information
pointing to Pickton, they would forward that to the RCMP in
Port Coquitlam, because officers in Vancouver believed they
didn't have jurisdiction over one of their top suspects.
Meanwhile, the RCMP looked at
Pickton as a suspect in the missing women case. The Mounties
had already investigated Pickton in 1997, when he was
charged for an attempted murder for an attack on a sex
worker, although Crown prosecutors declined to bring that
case to trial.
Sean Hern, a lawyer for the
Vancouver Police Department, told Evans that policing
conventions in B.C. dictate that in missing persons cases,
the department where the report was made investigates, while
homicide investigations are handled by whichever force has
jurisdiction over the location of the victim's body.
Hern suggested Vancouver police
were acting properly leaving Pickton to the RCMP, which had
adequate resources to conduct a proper murder investigation.
Evans said that may have been a
reasonable approach until late 1999, when the investigation
in Port Coquitlam appeared to "languish" as the detachment
struggled to keep up with several other major cases and
lessened their focus on Pickton.
At that point, Evans said
Vancouver police had a responsibility to ensure that Pickton
remained a priority, either by putting pressure on the RCMP
or offering to take over that investigation themselves.
"If they (Vancouver police)
recognized that the RCMP weren't giving it priority they
should have, I think they should have done something to make
it their own priority," said Evans.
"That (could) be going up the
chain of command in the RCMP, or there was nothing stopping
them from conducting an investigation, whether they contact
the RCMP saying, 'OK, you're now saying it's not your
priority, so we're going to follow up.'"
Eventually, the Vancouver police
and RCMP joined together for what became known as Project
Evenhanded, but that was yet another investigation with a
separate focus. The project was looking at links between
missing women cases, but it was premised on the incorrect
theory that the disappearances had stopped.
Evans has said chasms between
those investigations were large.
New reports of missing women in
Vancouver didn't always reach investigators in Port
Coquitlam, she has testified. It took months before Project
Evenhanded investigators realized women were still
disappearing but they were reluctant to shift focus even
then.
Tips were slow to move between
police forces, too. Evans has noted that RCMP officers who
followed Pickton to an animal rendering plant in August 1999
were unaware that, days earlier, an informant had told
Vancouver police that Pickton disposed of bodies by bringing
them to an unnamed rendering plant.
And most importantly, Evans has
complained there was no central, overarching structure to
guide the investigation and co-ordinate between officers in
different cities. Senior management in each force was slow
to take the case seriously, and, even when they finally did,
took even longer to communicate with each other to
co-ordinate their strategies.
Vancouver police, while initially
slow to react, eventually did treat the case with urgency,
Evans has said, largely in response to intense pressure from
the community and the media. But RCMP in Port Coquitlam were
not facing the same pressures from local residents, which
allowed the detachment to give the case lower priority.
Pickton was arrested in 2002
after a Mountie obtained an unrelated search warrant
following a tip about illegal firearms. Members of the
missing women investigation went along, and immediately
found the belongings and remains of missing sex workers.
Pickton was convicted of six
counts of second-degree murder and is serving a life
sentence.
The remains or DNA of 33 women
were found on his farm. He once claimed he killed 49 women.
By SUZANNE FOURNIER, The Province January 19, 2012
A flood of accurate tips about Robert Pickton in 1998
plus his attempted murder of a prostitute in 1997 should
have galvanized the Vancouver police and RCMP into joining
forces to hunt him down, a police expert testified on
Thursday.
The best time to pursue a
homicide investigation is when information is “fresh,” yet
it would take another five years and a dozen more women’s
deaths for police to halt Pickton’s killing spree, Peel
Regional Police Deputy Chief Jennifer Evans told the Missing
Women Commission of Inquiry.
Evans, asked to review the police
investigation into Canada’s worst serial killer said the
ball was dropped in those two pivotal years, due to the
absence of “a strong dedicated and engaged Senior Management
Team” in either the VPD or the RCMP.
Evans agreed with lawyer Darrell
Roberts, acting for the mother of one of Pickton’s victims
that Vancouver police “should have and could have exercised
a search warrant then for Pickton’s Port Coquitlam farm,” as
early as 1998. Police would have quickly found human remains
and hundreds of Pickton’s “trophies” collected from the
women he brought to the farm and then slaughtered.
Evans testified Vancouver police
should have realized from what sources were telling them
that Pickton was either kidnapping or “luring with drugs and
alcohol” the women who were going missing from the Downtown
Eastside.
In her lengthy report to the
inquiry, Evans’ documents that the VPD got it’s first
reliable tip on July 27, 1998 from Bill Hiscox, a man who
had done some work for Robert “Willie” Pickton and his
brother Dave Pickton, in their demolition business P & B
Salvage.
In many subsequent phone calls
and meetings with VPD Det-Const. Lori Shenher, Hiscox told
that “Willie” Pickton was picking up prostitutes in
Vancouver and transporting them to his Port Coquitlam farm,
where he had “trophies” of women’s purses, clothing and ID.
Hiscox told both the VPD and
later Coquitlam RCMP in a Crimestoppers call that Willie had
been heard to say that he put bodies through a grinder and
either fed the material to his hogs or disposed of bodies at
a rendering plant.
Hiscox also knew that Pickton had
tried a year earlier to kill a Vancouver Downtown Eastside
sex trade worker, who fought back and got away. Hiscox, and
other sources soon to emerge, warned police that Pickton was
“trying to hire people to find (the woman) and bring her to
the farm where he would finish her off like her should have
the first time.”
Shenher got in touch with
Coquitlam RCMP Cpl. Mike Connor, who corroborated what
Shenher’s source was telling her and confirmed that Pickton
had been charged in 1997 with the attempted murder of a
Downtown Eastside woman who broke free from handcuffs at
Pickton’s trailer, got into a knife fight with him and fled
naked from the farm. The woman, known to the inquiry as
“Victim ‘97” or “Ms. Anderson” actually died at hospital but
was revived. RCMP collected Pickton’s blood-spattered
clothing, a used condom, handcuffs and bandages but never
had them tested for DNA. The inquiry is looking into why
charges against Pickton stemming from the 1997 attempted
murder never went to trial.
Over the next year, 1998, a flood
of details emerged about Pickton’s butchering of women on
his farm, with eyewitness Lynn Ellingsen describing to three
people a horrific “gutting” of a woman in Pickton’s barn.
Those three people also went to police. Leah Best, Ross
Caldwell and Ron Menard, all hangers-on at the Pickton farm,
could not stop talking to police about Pickton’s savagery
toward women, particularly Vancouver sex trade workers,
Evans notes in her report.
“The information that various
police officers received regarding Pickton was specific,
unique and incredible,” Evans said in her report. On
Thursday, Evans testified she stands by those conclusions,
saying that junior officers in both police forces tried hard
to act on the information they were getting, but got no
support from senior managers.
Evans concluded that the “while
(junior) investigators grasped how dangerous Pickton was,
“someone in authority, either in the RCMP or the VPD needed
to champion a coordinated effort to these investigations.”
In Feb. 2002, a rookie RCMP
officer wrote up a firearms search warrant for the Pickton
farm and police discovered massive evidence of the missing
women. Laden with human remains and the missing women’s
belongings, the farm was subjected to a lengthy forensic
search.
The dates discussed at the
inquiry today are especially poignant to Lori-Ann Ellis, who
broke down in tears outside the courtroom. The blood of her
sister-in-law Cara Ellis was on Pickton’s stained jacket
that was recovered by police in 1997 but never tested for
DNA. Tomorrow, Jan. 20, is the fifth anniversary of Cara’s
disappearance. Police believe Cara, who would be 39 this
year, was killed by Pickton on that day or the next night.
Cara’s DNA wasn’t sent for DNA
testing to RCMP labs until 2004 and her family finally
learned of Cara’s fate in 2006.
Two months after Cara Ellis’
blood was splashed all over Pickton, he picked up the woman
on March 23, 1977 whom he almost killed. Had police tested
for DNA then, they would have found Ellis’ blood and that of
another missing woman Andrea Borhaven.
“The inquiry can get bogged down
in details and forget that we are talking about the lives of
real people, women like my sister-in-law Cara, who didn’t
have to die in such a horrible way,” said Ellis, who lives
in Alberta but has attended much of the inquiry proceedings.
“I can only pray that Cara was
unconscious when she was killed by Pickton and that she
didn’t suffer,”said Ellis.
“What a police force did back in
1997 may not seem like a big deal but testing for DNA would
have saved Cara’s life.”
The inquiry is sitting Monday to
Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. until the end of April,
with Commissioner Wally Oppal pledging to hand in his final
report by the end of June, 2012.
By Suzanne Fournier, Postmedia News January 18,
2012 VANCOUVER — An Ontario deputy police chief told the
Missing Women Commission of Inquiry Wednesday that if
British Columbia police leaders had "taken ownership" of the
issue, "many women's lives may have been saved."
Deputy Chief Jennifer Evans of
Peel Regional Police concluded in her 2011 report to the
inquiry that "the (Vancouver Police Department) and the RCMP
initially failed to recognize the missing women issue. When
they did identify the problem they failed to act
appropriately and accept ownership."
Evans was asked by Cameron Ward,
lawyer for the families of 25 murdered women, if senior cops
didn't "take ownership" because they didn't care or were
"disengaged" or uninterested due to the victims' social
status as sex trade workers.
"Could those deaths have been
avoided had there been a recognition of the problem and had
senior (police) management taken ownership much earlier?"
asked Ward.
Evans agreed that "commitment" by
top cops could have prevented deaths.
Ward asked: "In the case of as
many as 49 women whom Robert William Pickton is presumed to
have killed, they didn't get the opportunity to change their
lives for the better because their lives were snuffed out?"
Evans replied: "I would agree."
After Pickton was finally
arrested in February 2002, a forensic search of his Port
Coquitlam, B.C., farm found the DNA of 33 missing women.
Pickton, serving a life sentence for the murder of six
women, boasted he had killed 49 women.
By 1999, the Vancouver police and
RCMP had multiple informants and many junior officers who
believed Pickton was an active serial killer.
But RCMP Project Evenhanded, set
up in late 2000, stuck to reviewing files for a lengthy
period in which as many as 12 women died at Pickton's hands.
Ward asked Evans if Vancouver
police and RCMP managers didn't care about the missing sex
trade workers because of their perceived low social status.
"I don't think they understood .
. . or appreciated what they had on their hands," said
Evans, which she agreed was puzzling given by 1999 the many
media stories, community outcry, women's marches and
grieving families.
Evans said she found "no
evidence" that police "didn't care" about the missing women
because they weren't university students or missing nurses.
She did admit that a senior VPD
officer dismissed the missing sex trade workers as "just
hookers" and that some officers used the term "hooker task
force" to describe the VPD-RCMP joint Missing Women Task
Force.
Evans also agreed with Ward that
of the 56 people she interviewed for her review of the
missing women investigation, all but two were police
officers.
"You didn't speak to me, or to
any of my clients who are the families of 25 murdered
women?" asked Ward.
Evans admitted she also didn't
talk to anyone knowledgeable about Vancouver's sex trade
workers or any of their issues.
Evans also admitted she had many
frustrations in getting police documents that she needed for
her review.
"Did you feel that the VPD and
the RCMP, Canada's national police force, would have had
better files of Canada's largest serial killer
investigation?" Ward demanded.
Evans said she did not, since she
once did file management for Peel police.
But she admitted she wrote
"RIDICULOUS" in her own notes about RCMP excuses for not
providing her in a timely manner with full disclosure.
"That must have been on one of my
more frustrating days," said Evans, who is slated to testify
all this week.
Inquiry commissioner Wally Oppal
has promised to conclude hearings by April and hand in his
final report to government by the end of June.
And even if he did, lawyer Cheryl
Tobias said, he likely wouldn't have left identification of
missing women lying around.
"We'll never know because she
never tried to get his consent," Peel Regional Police Deputy
Chief Jennifer Evans responded at the inquiry, which is
probing why it took so long to catch Pickton.
In her report, Evans was critical
of an interview of Pickton done on Jan. 19, 2000, by RCMP
Constables Ruth Yurkiw and John Cater.
One of the problems with the
interview, Evans found, was that the officers allowed
Pickton's friend, Gina Houston, to sit in on the interview
and interrupt the flow of the questioning.
During the interview, Pickton was
asked about an informant's claim that Pickton was seen one
night butchering a woman in a barn on his Port Coquitlam
farm.
Pickton, claiming he had never
hurt anyone, told the officers they could search his farm
and even take soil samples to search for DNA.
"I ain't got nothing to hide,"
Pickton said at the time.
But the officers never took
Pickton up on his offer.
In her report, Evans wrote: "The
worst case scenario was that Pickton would refuse them
entry; the best case scenario, we will never know."
The RCMP's lawyer suggested to
Evans that a consent search would only be legal if all the
owners of the property -- the Pickton farm was owned by
Pickton, his brother Dave and their sister -- consented.
"It would be a wise thing to do,"
Evans agreed about getting a written consent from all the
siblings.
The RCMP lawyer, during
cross-examination, tried to downplay the possibility that
Pickton would have consented or have left incriminating
evidence lying around for police to find.
Evans said the officers should
have at least followed up and tried to get written consent
for a search.
"But they didn't do anything
following the interview," Evans told Commissioner Wally
Oppal.
She testified that police already
had "shocking" suggestions made by informants that Pickton
had killed at least one woman on his farm.
"There were multiple suggestions
that he was responsible for the missing women," Evans
pointed out.
Evans is expected to continue her
cross-examination until Friday.
On Monday, the inquiry will begin
hearing the testimony of a number of current and former
Vancouver police officers, tentatively scheduled in this
order: Dave Dickson, Al Howlett, Doug MacKay-Dunn, Kim
Rossmo, Gary Greer and Lori Shenher.
Evans testified earlier that
there was a systemic communication failure that prevented
the VPD and RCMP sharing information sooner.
Senior managers with the
Vancouver police and the RCMP also failed to take ownership
of the investigations, failed to provide proper supervision
and failed to make sure there were enough human resources to
do the job, she said.
On Nov. 21, 2000, a joint forces
investigation involving Vancouver police and the RCMP was
started but it was slow going for many months in early 2001
while investigators conducted a file review to get the full
scope of the missing women problem.
Initially, it was believed the
women reported missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside
were historical cases but police eventually realized one or
more serial killers were actively preying on women.
Evans testified that
multi-jurisdictional investigations require someone with
major case management training and computerized information
system that can be accessed by all investigators in the
region.
VPD interviewed three informants
in 1998 and 1999 and passed along the shocking information
to the Coquitlam RCMP, which was investigating Pickton for
the alleged murders of missing women.
Coquitlam RCMP had investigated a
1997 attack of a Downtown Eastside prostitute at Pickton's
farm -- the woman was stabbed several times but escaped and
ran to the street to flag down a passing car.
Pickton was charged with the
attempted murder and unlawful confinement but the Crown
dropped the charges in 1998.
The inquiry will probe why the
Crown decided to stay the charges. Pickton wasn't arrested
until Feb. 5, 2002, when a rookie Mountie executed a search
warrant on Pickton's home for illegal guns in an unrelated
Investigation.
Police quickly discovered some
identification and possessions of missing women.
Police had to return to court to
get a new search warrant for a homicide investigation.
The exhaustive farm search, which
took 18 months, found the DNA of 33 missing women.
Pickton, who once admitted to an
undercover officer that he killed 49 women, was eventually
charged with 27 counts of first-degree murder.
He was convicted at his first
trial in 2007 of six murders. After Pickton exhausted all
appeals, the Crown decided not to proceed on a second trial
on another 20 murder counts.
nhall@vancouversun.com
Click here to read Jennifer Evans' analysis of the
Robert Pickton investigations done by the RCMP and Vancouver
Police
Peel, Ont., Regional Chief Jennifer
Evans — shown here in a 2008 file photo — told the Missing
Women Commission of Inquiry on Monday morning that she
discovered a breakdown in communications between police
forces, no system for tracking tips, and a lack of police
management dedication and follow-up that allowed Robert
Pickton, like Paul Bernardo to "fall through the cracks" and
continue killing.
Photograph by:
Daniel Ho, Mississauga News
VANCOUVER — The Ontario police officer who
critiqued the investigation into Robert Pickton said serial
killers like Pickton and Ontario rapist Paul Bernardo can
still escape detection by operating in multiple police
jurisdictions.
Deputy Chief Jennifer Evans of Peel Regional Police
told the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry Monday that
both Pickton and Bernardo "fell through the cracks" and were
able to keep killing due to poor police communication.
Evans, who reviewed Bernardo's case for an Ontario
public inquiry, said she found "many unfortunate parallels"
with Pickton.
Even though police pledged that
multi-jurisdictional problems would be fixed after Clifford
Olson killed 11 children all over British Columbia's Lower
Mainland in the 1980s, Pickton was able to pick up women in
Vancouver for decades and kill them at his Port Coquitlam
farm, just down from the Coquitlam RCMP.
"Systemically, there were similarities" between
Bernardo, Pickton and Olson, Evans testified on the stand
Monday.
She noted that although junior Vancouver police
officers and Coquitlam RCMP officers shared tips and
suspicions about Pickton as early as 1998, no police leaders
or chiefs "picked up the phone" to speak to each other.
Asked by Commissioner Wally Oppal if regional
policing would work better, Evans replied that it has in
Peel, an amalgam of five city police bodies.
Along with strong tips about Pickton from informant
Bill Hiscox in 1998, three more people came forward in 1999
to tell police that Lynn Ellingsen had graphically described
seeing Pickton butcher a woman in his barn.
But it wasn't until 2001 that a joint VPD-RCMP task
force was set up and even then it was primarily a paper
review. Project Evenhanded Staff Sgt. Don Adam took the
position that the missing women homicides were "historical"
and that investigating possible ongoing murders would be a
distraction.
Evans testified that police made mistakes, but she
did not find any "neglect of duty, deceit or corruption" by
individuals, nor was that her goal.
She emphasized Bernardo and Pickton "fell through
the cracks" and were able to keep killing women due to
"systemic weaknesses and the inability of law enforcement
agencies to pool information."
In fact, Evans noted that a student hired in 2001
to summarize "missing women" police files, astutely warned
homicides were likely still happening.
Brian Oger, then 22, asked "what if the serial
killer who we thought was dormant, dead, or in jail, is
still out and about, killing at will?"
Meanwhile, VPD and RCMP managers could not agree on
whether a serial killer existed or even whether to polygraph
key eyewitness Ellingsen.
Ellingsen became a very convincing eyewitness who
helped convict Pickton.
Pickton was finally arrested in February 2002, when
very junior RCMP Const. Nathan Wells wrote up a firearms
search warrant for the Pickton farm and multiple evidence of
the missing and murdered women was soon discovered.
Evans' appearance as a key "review" witness Monday
marked a new phase in the inquiry, with a horde of top
criminal lawyers suddenly showing up.
Many individual police officers, who have been
criticized, will testify.
Seasoned police lawyers like David Crossin, Richard
Peck, Tim Dickson and Sean Hern for the VPD and some
officers, were joined by lawyers Ravi Hira, David Butcher,
Kevin Waddell and Greg Del Bigio.
Commission counsel Art Vertlieb said he couldn't
confirm whether several police officers have received new
notices of possible "misconduct" findings.
Such notices were sent out during the Braidwood
Dziekanski public inquiry.
Hearings at the Oppal inquiry continue until April
and Oppal has pledged to hand in his final report by June
2012.
The investigation of serial
killer Robert Pickton suffered from the same kind of
systemic failures as the investigation of Ontario serial
killer Paul Bernardo, the Missing Women inquiry was told
Monday.
Peel Regional Police Deputy Chief
Jennifer Evans, who was asked by the inquiry to provide an
expert analysis of the Vancouver police and RCMP
investigations of Pickton, said there was a systemic
communication breakdown between Vancouver police and the
Mounties.
There was a similar problem in
Ontario with sex killer Bernardo, she said, recalling that
Bernardo was a multi-jurisdictional serial rapist. When he
stopped committed sex assaults in one community, police
would make it a lower priority, but Bernardo was still
active in other communities.
In the Pickton case, the women
were going missing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and were
being killed at Pickton’s farm in Port Coquitlam.
Vancouver police were
investigating missing women and Coquitlam RCMP were
investigating possible murders, but the two police forces
did not share enough information and resources, Evans said.
There was initially good
communication between Vancouver officers and Coquitlam RCMP,
she said, but senior police managers failed to take
ownership of the investigations and make sure adequate
resources were allocated.
“There was a breakdown in
communication at the management level, which is not good for
an organization,” she told commissioner Wally Oppal.
Police managers should have
ensured information was being shared, Evans said.
For example, she said, the RCMP
thought the missing women were historical cases and were not
made aware soon enough that women were still going missing,
suggesting there was an active serial killer preying on
women.
Evans said Vancouver’s police
chief could have picked up the phone and called the chief of
the Coquitlam RCMP to form a partnership sooner.
“Police leaders need to be
accountable not only for their authority but for the
community they serve,” she testified.
Senior police managers should
have been properly supervising the investigation to make
sure it was moving forward, Evans said, but the
investigations became stalled and tasks that were set out
were not completed.
For example, police surveillance
followed Pickton to West Coast Reduction in east Vancouver,
but no one followed up and investigated what was in the
barrels that Pickton was observed dumping at the rendering
plant, she said.
Evans said commanding officers
needed to fully understand the missing women problem and
make sure investigators had enough tools to do the job.
She pointed out that former
Vancouver police chief Bruce Chambers seemed “shocked” in
February 1999 when an officer told a community meeting in
the Downtown Eastside that women who had disappeared had
likely met foul play.
Evans said VPD management refused
to endorse the serial killer theory and kiboshed the idea of
former detective inspector Kim Rossmo, who wanted to issue a
press release saying police were looking at the possibility
of a serial killer.
“I saw no reason why they
wouldn’t put out a public warning,” she said.
In 1998 and 1999, three
informants told Vancouver police that Pickton bragged that
he used a meat grinder to get rid of bodies and had women’s
ID at his home.
One informant said he was told by
a woman who had been on Pickton’s farm that she saw Pickton
butchering a woman’s body in a barn.
Vancouver police passed along the
information to Coquitlam RCMP.
The inquiry is probing why it
took so long to catch Pickton, who was arrested on Feb. 5,
2002.
A number of senior lawyers turned
up Monday morning at the inquiry to represent senior
Mounties and VPD members.
Pickton, who once admitted he
killed 49 women, was convicted in 2007 of six counts of
murder.
RCMP should have asked for Vancouver police help sooner:
senior Mountie
By Neal Hall, Postmedia News January 13, 2012 RCMP in Coquitlam, B.C., should have
asked for help sooner from Vancouver police to investigate
allegations that serial killer Robert Pickton was killing
women on his Port Coquitlam farm, Alberta RCMP Supt. Bob
Williams testified Friday.
Photograph by: Ian Smith - PNG, The Province
VANCOUVER — RCMP in Coquitlam, B.C., should have asked for
help sooner from Vancouver police to investigate allegations
that serial killer Robert Pickton was killing women on his
Port Coquitlam farm, a senior Mountie testified Friday.
Alberta RCMP Supt. Bob Williams told the Missing
Women inquiry that not enough "resources," meaning officers,
were assigned to the investigation by April 18, 2000.
He said the Coquitlam RCMP detachment was very busy
with other homicides and investigated Pickton when it could,
but should have asked for more detectives from RCMP
headquarters in B.C.
"They would investigate, stop and would go to
another priority, stop and go back to the Pickton
investigation," Williams told inquiry Commissioner Wally
Oppal, who is probing why it took so long to catch Pickton,
who admitted he killed 49 women and DNA evidence has
connected him to the deaths of at least 32 others.
"I would have sought resources from wherever,
including the Vancouver police department."
In 2002, Williams was asked to take part in an
"external review" of the RCMP investigation of Pickton to
prepare for lawsuits filed by families of Pickton's victims,
who believe police didn't do enough to solve the case and
allowed Pickton to continue killing until his arrest on Feb.
5, 2002.
The witness agreed under cross-examination by
lawyer Tim Dickson, representing Vancouver police, that
little was done by the RCMP after two officers interviewed
Pickton in January 2000, when Pickton denied killing anyone
but offered to allow police to search his farm, which was
never done.
A joint forces operation with Vancouver police,
code-named Project Evenhanded, didn't begin until Nov. 21,
2000.
But Evenhanded spent many months reviewing paper
files and trying to determine whether Pickton was linked to
three other serial murders in the Fraser Valley.
Police eventually learned Pickton's DNA didn't
match the forensic evidence from the Valley Murders,
Williams said.
Police also began looking at other suspects, with
the suspect pool eventually reaching a peak of 60 men, which
took considerable time, he said.
Williams, however, said there was no negligence on
the part of the RCMP or Vancouver police, adding it was a
difficult investigation, given the circumstances — police
had no bodies, only information from three informants who
told Vancouver police that Pickton had killed one or more
women at his farm.
In a surprise move Friday, lawyer Janet
Winteringham appeared at the inquiry to cross-examine
Williams.
She told the inquiry she is representing Don Adam,
the retired RCMP officer who was team commander of the joint
forces Pickton investigation.
Adam, who is expected to testify later at the
inquiry, interrogated Pickton and got him to make
incriminating statements following his arrest in 2002.
Neil Chantler, who is co-counsel for the families
of 25 murdered and missing women, objected to Winteringham
being allowed to question Adam.
He said the inquiry has imposed time constraints on
lawyers to question witnesses and he was concerned that each
of the 42 witnesses might have lawyers appear to represent
them.
"Has there been notice of misconduct?" Oppal asked
commission counsel Art Vertlieb.
"That's confidential," Vertlieb replied.
The inquiry took a short break so Vertlieb could
discuss the matter with Chantler.
When the inquiry resumed, Oppal said he would allow
Winteringham to question the witness because of allegations
made at the inquiry.
Under questioning by Winteringham, Williams agreed
that the RCMP offered to assist Vancouver police to review
the missing women files when the VPD investigation was in
its infancy, but the VPD never took the RCMP up on its
offer.
At the time, Project Evenhanded began, Williams
said, Adam and others believed that more than one serial
killer was operating in Vancouver.
"Yes, they believed there were two serial killers
operating in Vancouver," said the witness, who finished his
testimony before noon Friday.
On Monday, the inquiry will hear the evidence of
Peel Regional Police Deputy Chief Jennifer Evans, who was
asked by the inquiry to review the Pickton investigations
conducted by the RCMP and Vancouver police.
By SUZANNE
FOURNIER, The ProvinceJanuary 12, 2012 7:08 PM
An RCMP officer who paid a “social visit” alone to
Robert Pickton in 2001 tipped the pig farmer that two
informants had accused Pickton of “killing people and doing
all sorts of horrible things.”
But RCMP Supt. Bob Williams refused to say on the
stand at the Missing Women Inquiry Thursday if naming those
informants put their lives at risk or undermined what was
still an active serial-murder investigation.
Williams interviewed the officer, Cpl. Frank
Henley, for his 2002 report on whether the Mounties could be
liable for civil lawsuit compensation to the families of
women murdered by Pickton.
“Snitches are not welcome in the criminal
underworld, in fact they are probably often killed?”
demanded lawyer Jason Gratl, a lawyer acting for Downtown
Eastside aboriginal and women’s groups.
Pressed by Gratl to say if revealing sources was a
“breach of discipline . . . or a firing offence,” Williams,
the first senior Mountie to take the stand, protested,
“that’s going pretty far.”
Williams testified that one of Henley’s reasons for
his “visit” to Pickton may have been that the Mountie might
have been curious, “trying to get a handle on what makes him
[Pickton] tick, that sort of thing.”
Williams noted Henley also visited Pickton “on his
mistaken belief that the police investigation [into Pickton
as a serial killer] had shut down.”
Aside from curiosity, Williams was at a loss to
account for Henley, protesting “it would be better if he
explained his reasons” to the inquiry.
Henley gave Pickton the names of informants Ross
Caldwell and Lynn Ellingsen, whose eyewitness evidence later
helped convict Pickton.
Pickton was at the time of Henley’s visit a key
focus of the joint RCMP-Vancouver police Missing Women Task
Force.
Asked if Henley’s perception was “odd,” Williams
shot back, “There’s lots of oddities in this investigation.”
Williams, a 44-year veteran Mountie, said he as a
leader would not have condoned the visit by Henley.
Several lawyers at the inquiry, as well as victims’
families, are pushing for the inquiry to call front line
investigators, instead of “armchair experts” or top officers
like Williams and Vancouver Police Department Deputy Chief
Doug LePard.
Next Monday, however, the inquiry will hear from
another “review” witness, Peel, Ontario Region Deputy Chief
Jennifer Evans, who last year conducted an exhaustive review
of the Pickton investigation for the inquiry.
Hearings at the inquiry will continue until the end
of April, with Commissioner Wally Oppal pledging to hand in
his final report by June.
VANCOUVER - A senior Mountie told the Missing Women
inquiry today that RCMP managers should have done more to
ensure that serial killer Robert Pickton was properly
investigated.
Alberta RCMP Supt. Bob Williams, who did an
external review of the RCMP investigation of Pickton,
testified that more work should have been done with a
witness who had told a friend that she saw Pickton
butchering a body on his farm.
The woman, Lynn Ellingsen, was interviewed by two
senior officers but Ellingsen denied making the statement.
She also denied telling two other people, who also
became Vancouver police informants, that Pickton had bragged
he could dispose of bodies and that he had "trophies" at his
home that he kept as keepsakes of one or more murders of
women he had committed.
When interviewed by police in August 1999, Pickton
denied making the statements to the three police informants.
"I would have done some more work," Williams said,
adding a manager should have looked at taking another
strategy with Ellingsen.
"I personally would have taken other steps to
satisfy whether she was telling the truth or not telling the
truth, the witness told inquiry commissioner Wally Oppal.
"I would have pressed her on it," Williams added.
"It wasn't sufficiently managed to the extent that
I would have handled it," said the officer, who has been
with the RCMP for more than 44 years -- the second longest
serving Mountie in Canada.
Williams said he would have put a team together,
including a female officer to create a bond with Ellingsen.
"I would have gone a long way to build a
relationship with her," he told the inquiry.
He also said more planning should have been done
before the first RCMP interview with Pickton in 2000, when
the serial killer told police they could search his farm,
but the Mounties failed to do so.
Williams said he was asked to do an external review
of the RCMP handling of the Pickton file to prepare for
civil litigation against the RCMP in B.C.
He said he began the review Sept. 16, 2002 and
completed his report on Nov. 6, 2002.
Williams only interviewed senior Mounties who were
"decision-makers" on the file but did not interview anyone
from Vancouver police.
His report concluded the the RCMP acted
appropriately and followed up investigative leads.
Williams was asked by commission counsel Art
Vertlieb if he held the same conclusion 10 years after
writing the report and knowing new information that has come
to light.
"I would say there was some room for improvement,"
Williams told the inquiry about the RCMP's handling of the
case.
"Do you concede that If some of those things had
been changed, Pickton would have been arrested sooner?"
Vertlieb asked.
"Perhaps," Williams replied.
He is expected to continue testifying until Friday.
Next Monday, the inquiry is expected to hear a new
witness - Peel Regional Police Deputy Chief Jennifer Evans.
Evans was asked by the inquiry to review the
Pickton investigations done by the RCMP and Vancouver
police.
Williams is the first RCMP officer to testify at
the inquiry, which began Oct. 1 and resumed today after
taking a three-week break.
The inquiry, which is probing why Pickton wasn't
caught sooner, was initially supposed to deliver its report
to B.C.'s attorney general by Dec. 31, 2011, but has been
given a six-month extension.
Pickton was arrested on Feb. 5, 2002 and was
eventually charged with 27 counts of first-degree murder of
women who had disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown
Eastside.
An exhaustive 18-month search of Pickton's farm in
Port Coquitlam found the DNA of 33 missing women.
Pickton confided to an undercover officer that he
had killed 49 women and planned to kill more.
The murder charges were divided into two trials by
the trial judge.
Pickton, 62, was convicted at his first trial in
2007 of six counts of murder.
After exhausting all appeals, the Crown decided not
to proceed on a second Pickton trial, which upset many
victims' families.
Williams testified an supervisor should have asked
for more officers to investigate whether Ellingsen was
telling the truth.
Or the detachment commander could have asked RCMP
headquaters for more resources, he said.
Williams also said the officer who called Pickton
to arrange an interview should not have accepted Pickton's
brother suggesting the brothers were too busy and police
should wait for the rainy season.
A supervisor should have caught that, he said.
When the Pickton interview finally happened months
later, Williams said, police should not have allowed Pickton
to have his friend Gina Houston with him during the
interview.
The inquiry heard earlier that Pickton was the
prime suspect of Vancouver police after three informants
supplied shocking information about Pickton in 1998 and
1999.
The Vancouver police department passed along the
information to the RCMP, which had jurisdiction to
investigate because Pickton lived in Port Coquitlam, where
the murders allegedly occurred and the area was policed by
the RCMP.
James Keller, The Canadian Press
Jan 11, 2012 18:26:00 PM
Supt. Bob Williams attends the missing women inquiry in
Vancouver, B.C. Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2012. Williams testified
at the inquiry into the Robert Pickton case Wednesday and is
expected to be at the inquiry for the rest of the week. THE
CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward
VANCOUVER - A senior Mountie who reviewed the
force's investigation of serial killer Robert Pickton
acknowledged Wednesday that it's possible the serial killer
would have been caught sooner if officers had done things
differently.
But Supt. Bob Williams, who
authored an internal review of the force's work on the
Pickton file, was quick to offer explanations for many of
the criticisms levelled at RCMP investigators, suggesting at
a public inquiry there were no major mistakes.
Williams, then an inspector
working in Alberta, wrote a report in 2002 in response to a
civil lawsuit filed by relatives of Pickton's victims.
The 28-page document offered a
relatively positive review of the force's investigation,
concluding officers acted appropriately and wouldn't do
anything differently if they had to do it over again.
A decade later, Williams revised
his assessment slightly, conceding there was "room for
improvement."
"Do you concede that if some of
those things had been changed, Pickton might have been
arrested sooner?" asked commission lawyer Art Vertlieb.
"Perhaps," replied Williams.
That careful answer appears to be
the closest anyone from the RCMP has come to acknowledging
there were deficiencies in the way the force handled its
investigation of Pickton in the late 1990s and early 2000s,
first on its own in Port Coquitlam and then as part of a
joint investigation with the Vancouver police.
In contrast, the Vancouver police
has offered a number of apologies, including at the ongoing
inquiry, and released an extensive internal report in 2010
that identified problems within the Vancouver department and
the RCMP.
Vertlieb walked Williams through
a list of alleged mistakes that others have suggested
hampered the RCMP's investigation and allowed Pickton to
kill sex workers for years until he was finally caught.
In nearly every instance,
Williams said he would have done things differently if he
was involved in the case, but rejected Vertlieb's
characterization that officers made "mistakes."
For example, several tipsters
contacted the Vancouver police and the RCMP in the late
1990s claiming an associate of Pickton's named Lynn
Ellingsen told them she saw Pickton skinning a prostitute in
a barn on his farm on Port Coquitlam, east of Vancouver.
The RCMP contacted Ellingsen, but
she denied ever telling the story. After initially agreeing
to take a polygraph test, Ellingsen changed her mind.
Investigators believed her, and discounted the informants.
Williams said he would have done
more to determine whether Ellingsen was telling the truth
and to convince her to co-operate with police and take the
lie-detector test.
"That's my opinion of what I
would have done, I don't know if I would say it was a
mistake or not," Williams told the inquiry. "That was the
determination made by the investigative team at that
particular time."
Ellingsen later became a star
witness for the Crown at Pickton's trial, and told jurors
about the time she walked in on Pickton killing a sex
worker.
In September 1999, when
investigators decided they wanted to interview Pickton, his
brother Dave asked them to wait until after the rainy
season. The officers agreed, and didn't interview Pickton
until January 2000.
Williams said it's not what he
would have done, but: "I wouldn't say it was a mistake."
There was one problem with that
interview, said Williams, because officers allowed Pickton's
friend, Gina Houston, to sit in and watch.
"Is that a mistake?" asked
Vertlieb.
"I would say so," said Williams,
who still appeared willing to give the officers the benefit
of the doubt.
"If you make every effort to
remove that other person but there was no other way (to
conduct the interview) then I perhaps you might let them,
but if you ever allowed that, then you would have to set the
ground rules. Personally, I wouldn't have allowed it."
In August 1999, a surveillance
team followed Pickton to a meat rendering plant and watched
him drop off several metal drums, but officers never got out
of their vehicles to see what was in the drums. Days
earlier, an informant told Vancouver police Pickton was
disposing of bodies by bringing them to a rendering plant.
Williams would have had a look,
but he told the inquiry not to blame the officers who
didn't.
What about the disagreement
between officers involved in the case about whether there
weren't enough staff dedicated to the file?
That's just a matter of opinion,
Williams said, pointing out that some members of the
investigative team felt they had adequate resources.
In 2001, a corporal with the RCMP
visited the Port Coquitlam farm and interviewed Pickton
without telling anyone involved in the investigation or
bringing another officer along.
That was surprising, acknowledged
Williams, but "he obviously had a reason for going there."
Pickton wasn't arrested until
2002, when a junior officer who wasn't involved in the
missing women investigation obtained a search warrant for a
tip about illegal firearms. He brought members of the
missing women investigation with him to the farm, where they
immediately stumbled upon the butchered remains and
discarded belongings of missing women, setting off a massive
search of the farm.
Pickton was eventually convicted
of six counts of second degree murder and sentenced to life
in prison with no parole for at least 25 years.
The remains or DNA of 33 women
were found on his farm, and he claimed to have killed 49.
Too Little, Too Late?
Brian Hutchinson,
Comment From Vancouver; National Post
· Jan. 11, 2012
More trouble is brewing
for Wally Oppal, the former B.C. attorney general who is
presiding over the province's Missing Women Commission of
Inquiry. He has already clashed openly with commission
lawyer Cameron Ward, representing families of 25 women who
vanished from Vancouver's crimeriddled Downtown Eastside.
Dozens more women
disappeared before a suspect long known to police was
finally arrested at his suburban pig farm in 2002. Robert
"Willie" Pickton was eventually charged with 26 murders.
Among other things, Mr.
Ward says, the inquiry is moving too slowly. Testimony
resumes Wednesday after a long, holiday season adjournment,
and the issue now on everyone's mind - Mr. Oppal's included
- is how to fix the process. Because it isn't working.
Time is running short.
Some women and men who have waited years to present
evidence, or to just relate their experiences in a formal,
public setting, could lose their day. Other potential
witnesses likely will be turned away. There is fear the
inquiry may not get to the bottom of things, after all.
"I'm concerned that
we're not moving quickly enough," senior commission counsel
Art Vertlieb conceded Tuesday, echoing comments from Mr.
Ward, other inquiry lawyers and participants, and the
commissioner himself. "Our witness list, which is tentative,
has about 50 names on it. At the rate we're moving, we won't
fit in all of them."
Problems appeared
before hearings began in October, months behind schedule.
Critics called the inquiry inadequate and compromised. It
has been protested and shunned by aboriginals and First
Nations groups. Mr. Oppal's appointment as commissioner has
been criticized. The province's decision to not directly
fund more parties, including families of the victims, has
been slammed.
But its mandate is
strong. It's meant to examine how police conducted
investigations into dozens of cases of women who vanished
from the Downtown Eastside. Most were sex-trade workers.
Just as important, the inquiry is supposed to determine what
led B.C.'s criminal justice branch to stay charges of
attempted murder, forcible confinement and assault against
Pickton in 1998.
A year earlier, Pickton
had nearly stabbed to death a local prostitute, whom he'd
plucked from the Vancouver streets. The charges laid against
him were stayed, and he walked free. By 2000, Pickton had
been placed under loose police surveillance - and street
workers continued to vanish.
A pair of RCMP
constables interviewed Pickton; this was unproductive. "It
should have been planned better," one of the constables
would later recall. "I look back and I know I flubbed it."
Pickton did give the two Mounties consent to search his
property. Incredibly, they did not take up his offer.
After his arrest in
2002, Pickton claimed responsibility for 49 deaths. He was
tried in 2007 and convicted on six murder charges. Twenty
more charges were eventually stayed.
Why was Pickton not
prosecuted a decade earlier, after his initial arrest? Why
was his property not searched when police had an
opportunity? What went wrong with parallel Vancouver Police
Department and RCMP investigations into missing women, and
who is responsible for their shortcomings?
We still don't know. As
lawyer Cameron Ward notes, the inquiry still hasn't heard
from police directly involved in the investigations.
Only a handful of
witnesses have testified to date, and of those, just one was
related to a missing woman. Patricia Johnson disappeared
from the Downtown Eastside in March 2001. Her mother, Marion
Bryce, told the inquiry in December that when she hadn't
heard from her daughter, she went to the VPD. She said she
was brushed off.
Ms. Johnson was among
the 26 women Pickton was accused of killing. The charge was
stayed after his trial.
"I reported my daughter
missing and [the person with whom I spoke] told me that,
'Oh, she will show up. She's just out there partying because
she's a working girl,'" Ms. Bryce testified. She made
several more visits to the VPD, and was offered the same
dismissive response each time.
A lawyer representing
the VPD at the inquiry apologized to Ms. Bryce for the way
police had treated her. VPD deputy chief Doug LePard, in his
testimony before Mr. Oppal, also apologized for his police
force.
More police are
expected to testify this month. Alberta-based RCMP
Superintendent Robert Williams is scheduled to appear at the
inquiry Wednesday. He wrote an internal RCMP report in 2002
that defended how its officers in B.C. conducted their
missing women investigation.
He is to be followed by
Peel, Ont., deputy police chief Jennifer Evans, who wrote
for the inquiry a scathing 800-page examination of both
police investigations. Also expected to testify soon is RCMP
Corporal Catherine Galliford, who acted as spokeswoman for
the RCMP during the missing women period. Cpl. Galliford,
who claims she was sexually harassed on the job and is now
on medical leave, has told reporters her evidence before Mr.
Oppal will be "explosive."
Mr. Oppal has until
June 30 to hand in a final report to the province. The
inquiry's hearing phase is to conclude April 30. Not much
time. Before testimony resumes Wednesday, the commissioner
is expected to discuss with inquiry lawyers how the whole
process might be streamlined.
Jeff Vinnick for
National PostFiles Critics say an inquiry into police
handling of the case of missing and murdered women — some of
whose bodies were found at the Pickton farm — is proceeding
too slowly and may not get to the bottom of matters
More trouble is brewing
for Wally Oppal, the former B.C. attorney general who is
presiding over the province’s Missing Women Commission of
Inquiry. He has already clashed openly with commission
lawyer Cameron Ward, representing families of 25 women who
vanished from Vancouver’s crime-riddled Downtown Eastside.
Dozens more women
disappeared before a suspect long known to police was
finally arrested at his suburban pig farm in 2002. Robert
“Willie” Pickton was eventually charged with 26 murders.
Among other things, Mr.
Ward says, the inquiry is moving too slowly. Testimony
resumes Wednesday after a long, holiday season adjournment,
and the issue now on everyone’s mind — Mr. Oppal’s included
— is how to fix the process. Because it isn’t working.
Time is running short. Some women and men
who have waited years to present evidence, or to just relate
their experiences in a formal, public setting, could lose
their day. Other potential witnesses likely will be turned
away. There is fear the inquiry may not get to the bottom of
things, after all.
“I’m concerned that
we’re not moving quickly enough,” senior commission counsel
Art Vertlieb conceded Tuesday, echoing comments from Mr.
Ward, other inquiry lawyers and participants, and the
commissioner himself. “Our witness list, which is tentative,
has about 50 names on it. At the rate we’re moving, we won’t
fit in all of them.”
Problems appeared
before hearings began in October, months behind schedule.
Critics called the inquiry inadequate and compromised. It
has been protested and shunned by aboriginals and First
Nations groups. Mr. Oppal’s appointment as commissioner has
been criticized. The province’s decision to not directly
fund more parties, including families of the victims, has
been slammed.
But its mandate is
strong. It’s meant to examine how police conducted
investigations into dozens of cases of women who vanished
from the Downtown Eastside. Most were sex-trade workers.
Just as important, the inquiry is supposed to determine what
led B.C.’s criminal justice branch to stay charges of
attempted murder, forcible confinement and assault against
Pickton in 1998.
A year earlier, Pickton
had nearly stabbed to death a local prostitute, whom he’d
plucked from the Vancouver streets. The charges laid against
him were stayed, and he walked free. By 2000, Pickton had
been placed under loose police surveillance — and street
workers continued to vanish.
A pair of RCMP
constables interviewed Pickton; this was unproductive. “It
should have been planned better,” one of the constables
would later recall. “I look back and I know I flubbed it.”
Pickton did give the two Mounties consent to search his
property. Incredibly, they did not take up his offer.
After his arrest in
2002, Pickton claimed responsibility for 49 deaths. He was
tried in 2007 and convicted on six murder charges. Twenty
more charges were eventually stayed.
Why was Pickton not
prosecuted a decade earlier, after his initial arrest? Why
was his property not searched when police had an
opportunity? What went wrong with parallel Vancouver Police
Department and RCMP investigation into missing women, and
who is responsible for their shortcomings?
We still don’t know. As
lawyer Cameron Ward notes, the inquiry still hasn’t heard
from police directly involved in the investigations.
Handout Patricia Johnson, who was last seen March 3, 2001
Only a handful of witnesses have testified to date, and of
those, just one was related to a missing woman. Patricia
Johnson disappeared from the Downtown Eastside in March
2001. Her mother, Marion Bryce, told the inquiry in December
that when she hadn’t heard from her daughter, she went to
the VPD. She said she was brushed off.
Ms. Johnson was among
the 26 women Pickton was accused of killing. The charge was
stayed after his trial.
“I reported my daughter
missing and [the person with whom she spoke] told me that,
‘Oh, she will show up. She’s just out there partying because
she’s a working girl,’” Ms. Bryce testified. She made
several more visits to the VPD, and was offered the same
dismissive response each time.
A lawyer representing
the VPD at the inquiry apologized to Ms. Bryce for the way
police had treated her. VPD deputy chief Doug LePard, in his
testimony before Mr. Oppal, also apologized for his police
force.
More police are
expected to testify this month. Alberta-based RCMP
Superintendent Robert Williams is scheduled to appear at the
inquiry Wednesday. He wrote an internal RCMP report in 2002
that defended how its officers in B.C. conducted their
missing women investigation.
Felicity Don/Reuters A court illustration of Robert
Pickton
He is to be followed by
Peel, Ont., deputy police chief Jennifer Evans, who wrote
for the inquiry a scathing 800-page examination of both
police investigations. Also expected to testify soon is RCMP
Corporal Catherine Galliford, who acted as spokeswoman for
the RCMP during the missing women period. Cpl. Galliford,
who claims she was sexually harassed on the job and is now
on medical leave, has told reporters her evidence before Mr.
Oppal will be “explosive.”
Mr. Oppal has until
June 30 to hand in a final report to the province. The
inquiry’s hearing phase is to conclude April 30. Not much
time. Before testimony resumes Wednesday, the commissioner
is expected to discuss with inquiry lawyers how the whole
process might be streamlined.
Laurie Odjick is at a loss to
explain what happened to her daughter Maisy and the teen’s
best friend, Shannon Alexander.
They vanished on Sept. 6, 2008,
from Alexander’s Maniwaki, Que., apartment outside of the
Kitigan Zibi Anishnabeg First Nation, an Algonquin reserve
about 145 kilometres north of Ottawa.
Both teens — Maisy was 16 at the
time of her disappearance and Shannon was 17 — left behind
their purses and most precious personal belongings —
wallets, clothes, IDs and medication.
It is as if they disappeared off
the face of the Earth, just like 600 other missing or
murdered aboriginal women and girls from across Canada in
the past 20 years.
For years, the Native Women’s
Association of Canada, First Nations groups and Amnesty
International have tried to sound the alarm on the high
number of aboriginal women who have disappeared in this
country.
They say Ottawa has turned a
blind eye — a charge the Conservative government denies.
But in late 2011, the United
Nations Office for the High Commissioner on Human Rights
signalled to the world that not everyone is blind.
The UN has initiated an “inquiry
procedure” regarding the missing women.
In a statement released Dec. 16,
2011, it said if it receives “reliable information
indicating grave or systematic (rights) violations, then it
will invite the state to examine the information it has.
The UN inquiry procedure is being
handled by the committee on the elimination of
discrimination of women (CEDAW), a global group of 23
experts.
The federal government told the
Star that, at the moment, no official inquiry has
started. The UN is trying to figure out if they should
proceed with an inquiry.
But Canada has been informed the
matter will be discussed by the UN at the next session,
which begins on Feb. 13, according to a foreign affairs
department spokesperson.
Canada has been asked to submit
all relevant information to the UN.
“Canada will, of course, work
with the committee as it proceeds to consider the request
for an inquiry,” the foreign affairs source said in an
email.
CEDAW investigates only the most
serious allegations of female human rights abuses. Its last
high-profile case in North America involved the brutal sex
slayings, murders and disappearance of an estimated 800
women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, since 1993.
Many of the murdered women’s
mutilated and tortured corpses were found on the outskirts
of the desert city near the border with Texas. Mexican
authorities blamed the killings on everything from drug to
organ trafficking to crimes of passion, domestic violence,
vengeance and sex. Most of the murdered were poor workers or
students and the cases were scarcely investigated.
The UN slapped the Mexican
government for “extremely inadequate” responses to the
crimes, according to a 2005 inquiry report.
While Mexico did commit to
regularly reporting on the steps it is taking to stop the
murders, the UN noted the situation in Ciudad Juárez is
“highly complex, tragic, prolonged and full of unacceptable
uncertainties, suspicions and horrors.”
Ontario Aboriginal Affairs
Minister Kathleen Wynne says she expects Canada to work with
the UN but the problems surrounding violence and aboriginal
women are not easily solved.
“This is an issue on a bunch of
levels — there is an enforcement issue, a policing issue,”
Wynne says. “But I think overarching it is the same kind of
issues we have been talking about — education and social
fabric issues.”
Canadian native leaders say it is
a national “shame” that they needed the UN to draw attention
to the problem.
They argue police do not take the
disappearance of aboriginal kids or women seriously. While
the official number of missing or dead is 600, it could be
as high as 3,000, they add. Without funding to track the
cases, no one knows for sure, according to the
Montreal-based website Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.
“It is disappointing and
frustrating when we have to go outside our borders to seek
attention or get help to address an issue that has been on
the table, probably since the 1950s,” says Mike Metatawabin,
deputy grand chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, which
represents 40 Cree and Ojibwa communities in northern
Ontario.
“I know in my community, Fort
Albany (along the James Bay coast), we’ve had women go
missing . . . and there was no justice.”
A common complaint is that police
authorities “don’t seem to care,” adds Metatawabin. “There
is no officer or unit assigned to follow up on all of these
files,” he says.
If these women were non-native
and had gone missing in large urban centres, special task
forces and investigations would be struck immediately, noted
Patrick Madahbee, grand council chief of the Anishinabek
Nation, which represents 39 Indian communities.
“What do you call this kind of
lack of response?” he asks. “Is it apathy? Is it racism?
What is it? There are two types of treatment going on in
this country — one for the ordinary citizen, for the most
part, and the other for First Nations.”
Madahbee adds he can’t recall
ever seeing an Amber Alert — immediate messages broadcast on
radios and on electronic highway signs when a child is
feared abducted or has disappeared — for a missing
aboriginal teen.
Shannon Alexander’s father Bryan
wants to know why it has taken so long to get any attention
regarding Canada’s missing women.
“There are more than 500 missing.
What took the UN so long? Are they like Stephen Harper —
they just walk away?” he asks. “I don’t know what to do.”
The Surete du Quebec says there
are no leads or recent confirmed sightings. The teens
haven’t attempted to reach out to anyone and could be
anywhere, according to Sgt. Ronald McInnis.
“If we get information then we’ll
follow up,” he says. “The investigation isn’t finished yet.”
Kitigan Zibi
is a community surrounded by dense bush and water. Nearly
1,000 people live on the reserve.
Maisy’s mother, Laurie Odjick,
feels the investigation into the girl’s disappearance was
botched from the start.
The last day she saw Maisy was
Friday, Sept. 5, 2008. Odjick was returning a pot to her
mom’s house up the street.
“Maisy was standing there with
Shannon, I just said, ‘I love you, talk to you later,’ and
then I hugged her and that was it,” says Odjick, an
addictions counsellor.
By Monday, both families were in
full panic.
“I honestly think something has
happened,” she says after a long pause. “I know my daughter.
I am sure she would have called home.”
At first, the cases were split up
— aboriginal police services looked for Maisy and Quebec
police searched for Shannon because she lived off the
reserve.
Only after her pleading were the
cases put together under one provincial investigator, Odjick
says.
“My daughter’s rights were
violated. She did not get a proper investigation from the
beginning,” she says.
When aboriginal police responded
to the call, they labelled the girls runaways, she says.
As a result, there was no
immediate search for the girls. “Nobody went looking for
them, I did that. The first search was done by my family and
friends. The second search was done by the reserve.”
The volunteer group Search and
Rescue Global 1 conducted a third look of the area with
nearly 100 people and a canine unit.
At this point it was almost a
year after the girls disappeared and the professional
searchers told Odjick nothing could be found.
“There was no help for me. I am
fighting this on my own.”
Odjick’s family has started a
website, www.findmaisyandshannon.com, and
raised money for a reward and to put up a giant billboard
outside the reserve.
When Odjick found out the UN was
making inquiries into what is happening in Canada, her first
though was, “Why now?”
“Way before Maisy went missing
this was happening. Why now? Is it because of the spotlight?
I believe we’ve been treated differently, from the media, by
everybody.”
A few months after Maisy went
missing, so did Brandon Crisp, a 15-year-old Barrie boy who
ran away because his parents took his Xbox video console.
The community and police came
together even though Crisp was deemed a runaway. He was
found dead three weeks later.
“My daughter was also called a
runaway from the beginning and we didn’t get a minuscule of
the attention the boy did,” she says. “All we want is
answers.”
A UN inquiry can’t help with
justice for hundreds of Canadian families, she says.
“Are they actually going to come
and meet with us? Sit down and ask us what happened?” she
asks.
Odjick says during the
investigation into Maisy’s disappearance, no one ever met
with her. “I was never interviewed by police. I was never
asked to take a lie-detector test. Nothing happened. Nothing
was done right for my daughter.”
Reports to police dismissed, says mother of Pickton victim
Updated: Fri Dec. 16 2011 15:42:13 The Canadian Press
VANCOUVER — The mother of one of serial killer Robert
Pickton's victims says she tried repeatedly to report her
daughter missing, only to be told by an employee at the
Vancouver Police Department that the young woman was
probably just out partying somewhere.
Marion Bryce testified at a
public inquiry Friday that she didn't know the name of the
woman she spoke with a decade ago, but her account is
similar to other family members who said a clerk at the
force's missing persons department was dismissive, rude and
racist.
The police department has been
attempting to portray that clerical worker as someone whose
scornful attitude didn't reflect the culture of the force or
its officers.
Bryce's daughter, Patricia
Johnson, disappeared in the spring of 2001, and her absence
was noticed almost immediately.
She said Johnson was a caring
mother who always made a point of calling on her two
children's birthdays and Christmas. But there was no phone
call on her son's birthday in March that year.
Bryce said she went to the
Vancouver Police Department's station in the city's Downtown
Eastside the next day and eventually ended up on the phone
with someone in the missing persons unit.
"I reported my daughter missing,
and she told me, 'Oh, she'll just show up, she's just out
there partying because she's a working girl,"' Bryce told
the public inquiry.
Bryce returned the following day
with photos of Johnson, but she said the clerk in the unit
refused to see her and instead instructed her to leave the
photographs with the front desk and repeated her earlier
comments.
"The same thing, 'She'll
eventually show up, she's out partying, she has a drug
habit, she'll eventually show up,"' Bryce said.
"She was very nasty on the phone,
very snappy."
Johnson's remains were eventually
found on Pickton's farm after police executed a search
warrant in February 2002. Pickton was charged with Johnson's
murder, but that charge was among 20 that were stayed after
Pickton exhausted the last of his appeals last year.
Pickton was convicted of six
counts of second-degree murder, but the remains or DNA of 33
women were found on his farm. He claimed to have killed 49
women.
Bryce said she called police
several more times after her initial attempt to report
Johnson missing but didn't hear from the force again until
June, when she was contacted by a detective after Johnson's
sister made a missing persons report of her own.
She was interviewed several times
by different detectives, but she said those conversations
didn't go well.
"Because the questions I was
being asked, I felt like I was being interrogated," Bryce
said.
"They weren't doing anything for
any of the girls."
A lawyer for the Vancouver Police
Department suggested the force's officers did take Johnson's
case seriously once a formal missing persons file was
finally taken in June.
Tim Dickson noted investigators
spent months looking into Johnson's case and following up on
leads.
Dickson said they ordered
photographs of Johnson, checked her welfare and driving
records, and looked her up on the Canada-wide police
database.
He said an officer visited a sex
worker drop-in centre in Vancouver to pass around Johnson's
photo and followed up on tips that she was living in either
Montreal or Mayne Island, B.C., or had been killed and
dumped in a sewer but none of those tips proved to be true.
The file was eventually passed to
a joint investigation involving Vancouver police and the
RCMP looking into missing women files, and Johnson's name
and photo were added to a poster of missing women later in
2001.
Bryce said she wasn't aware of
everything police did.
Dickson finished with an apology,
similar to apologies the force has issued during the past
year.
"Allow me to say on behalf of the
Vancouver police that they are very sorry for your loss,
very sorry that Mr. Pickton was not caught sooner, and very
sorry that you found your interactions with the department
to be intimidating and frustrating," Dickson said.
The inquiry is now on break until
Jan. 14, when it will hear from an official with the RCMP
who conducted a review of that force's work.
Supt. Bob Williams' report paints
a relatively positive picture of the RCMP investigation,
concluding Mounties worked well with their counterparts in
Vancouver and that "nothing would have changed dramatically
if those involved had to do it over again."
The RCMP has never publicly
acknowledged failings with its investigation, or offered an
apology like the one issued by Vancouver police.
After that, an officer with
Ontario's Peel Regional Police who conducted an external
review will appear, followed by officers who were directly
involved in the investigation of missing women and Pickton.
B.C.'s missing women's inquiry hearings saw a pointed
argument between the lawyer for families of Robert Pickton's
murder victims, and beleaguered commissioner Wally Oppal –
leaving several of the families enraged and the inquiry
increasingly in question.
David P. Ball -
Vancouver Observer
Posted:
Dec 15th, 2011
Photo of Cara Ellis, whose remains
were found on Robert Pickton's farm. Image sourced from
Missing Persons website.
B.C.'s missing women's inquiry hearings
saw long-time tensions boil over yesterday in a pointed
argument between the lawyer for families of Robert Pickton's
murder victims, and beleaguered commissioner Wally Oppal –
leaving several of the families enraged and the inquiry
increasingly in question.
Oppal's reluctance to
allow new witnesses to be called – amidst concern for the
inquiry's length, as it has already been extended to April
30 – was met by Cameron Ward, the lawyer for 25 families. He
criticized the entire process, a frustration shared by
several victims' families with whom the Vancouver Observer
spoke.
“Frankly, I'm getting really sick of
getting re-victimized by this system,” said Lori-Ann Ellis,
whose 26-year old sister-in-law, Cara, was murdered by
Pickton, although charges stemming from her death were among
the 20 stayed by the Crown.
“It's very tilted
towards people in power – police, the RCMP, court lawyers.
Anyone who's dealing with sex trade workers and impoverished
people isn't getting a fair time in there.”
Another family member expressed deep
dissatisfaction with Oppal, whose appointment was widely
criticized by victims' families.
Longtime tensions spilling over
in court
From day one of the inquiry, some
families and friends have held drum circles blocking the
Georgia and Granville intersection, laying down quilts in
memory of the missing women. But concerns are now spilling
over into the courtroom.
The Missing Women's
Commission of Inquiry, which is in its final week of
meetings until January, was established to investigate why
police took years to investigate serial killer Robert
William Pickton, who admitted to murdering up to 49 Downtown
Eastside women – but was only charged with the second-degree
murders of six.
When the Vancouver Observer asked Ellis
what motivates her, she said she is motivated by a
commitment she made to seek justice for her sister-in-law.
Cara Ellis, 26 when she died, was close to her two brothers
and her half-brother, even after years of absence. She had
run away at age 13, Ellis said, but when she returned “she
hugged them with all of herself, it was like the gap never
existed.
“Every day I wake up and think,
'What do I need to do today to bring her justice and help
her rest in peace?'” Ellis said, recalling how she returned
to her Calgary home after the Pickton case with only a small
bone fragment to remember Cara by.
“I brought a little piece of her bone
home, but I think I need to bring her dignity back.”
Interruptions and denials
What was supposed to be a procedural day
escalated into a heated exchange, after Oppal challenged
Ward's request for three new witnesses to testify – all of
whom had direct connection to the police's botched Pickton
investigation – because of concern the trial would go on too
long and the witnesses would only repeat existing police
information. In response, Ward said if police's account of
themselves were accepted wholesale, there would be no point
in the inquiry at all -- and alleged that victims' families
were increasingly frustrated, a fact Oppal denied outright.
“I'm going to tell you right now, Mr. Commissioner: my
clients, the families of 25 missing and murdered women, have
been watching this proceeding – are following it – and they
are extremely unhappy with the way it is being conducted,”
Ward told Oppal. “They and their advocate are getting the
same treatment today in this inquiry room as they got when
they took their concerns (about Robert Pickton) to the
authorities back in the years before 2002.
“They are
not being listened to, they are not being respected, and
they are not being appreciated.”
Cutting Ward off,
commissioner Oppal countered the lawyer's claims of falling
support from the families of Pickton victims and rebuked
him.
“Let me interrupt you there, Mr. Ward,” Oppal
warned. “First of all, your clients have been
treated with respect.
“The families came here, we
heard about the pain and suffering they've gone through, we
listened carefully to the way they were treated by the
authorities, in fact they were treated with so much respect
that nobody cross-examined them – in fact the lawyers got up
and apologized to them. The fact is, we are most grateful
for them to come forward and they have been heard for the
first time... For you to stand up here and say that they've
been disrespected is wrong, and you know this as an officer
of the court.”
A "cruel, mean, vindictive bully"
Another murdered woman's family reacted
with fury to Oppal's claim that they had been treated
fairly, and accused the commissioner of lying in asserting
that the families had not been cross-examined.
“The
way they treated me on the stand was totally ludicrous,”
said Lynn Frey, whose 25-year-old daughter Marnie, was one
of the six murders Pickton was charged with. Marnie had a
daughter, Brittney, who is now 19.
“When I was on the stand, I was the first
family member up there – they weren't supposed to cross-exam
us but they did – they made me feel I was a victim all over
again.
“Wally (Oppal)'s saying we're happy, he's
never even talked to us families. He's full of shit. There's
not one family member who's happy.”
Ellis agreed, and accused Oppal and the
inquiry of bullying the families -- a particular betrayal
since he had assured concerned families early in the inqury
it would be a fair and impartial hearing.
“For him to say that is just a bald-faced
lie, or he's just inattentive to what's happening in the
room,” she said. “It was untrue – I was cross-examined by
Vancouver Police Department lawyers, who tried to put words
in my mouth I didn't say.
“When this inquiry is
over, in the mind of the families, (Oppal) will be known as
a cruel, mean, vindictive bully.
"We already dealt with Pickton, who's a
bully – do we have to go through that again when our lawyers
can't even get a word in without getting interrupted? The
very words he used today show a lack of respect for the
families; he, as well as the system, is again victimizing
us.”
The heated courtroom
exchange came after Ward put forward a list of new witnesses
to testify at the inquiry in the new year. Three of the
list's most prominent names on the list include Bill Hiscox
(a former Pickton employee who offered to help police in
1998, but was turned down), Bill Ritchie (Pickton's lawyer,
who pushed the Crown to stay its 1997 charges against
Pickton), and a woman referred to by the alias “Jane Smith”
(a sex worker who claims Pickton confessed his killings to
her in 2000 but who said she was ignored by the police).
Oppal argued that the witnesses would be “repetitious”
-- and furnish no new evidence not already revealed in
deputy police chief Doug LePard's testimony. LePard takes
the witness stand again today, his last day on the stand,
after testifying last month that the investigation was
hampered by police attitudes in Vancouver's missing-women
unit – where officers referred to sex trade workers as
“whores” and “hookers” -- but that there was no systemic
bias across the Vancouver police.
UN inquiry request
shot down The Oppal-Ward spat
came as the United Nations acknowledged receiving a request
from Canadian Indigenous groups for an inquiry into the
country's missing and murdered Aboriginal women – which the
Native Women's Alliance of Canada (NWAC) has listed at
nearly 600 women. However, the federal government said today
that no UN inquiry will take place.
Since the
inquiry started in October, all but one of the community
groups and national organizations have pulled out of the
hearings in protest over their legitimacy and fairness –
particularly the provincial government's refusal to fund
legal counsel for the organzations, which include Amnesty
International, the Assembly of First Nations and the
Downtown Eastside Women's Centre. Only the Vancouver Area
Drug Users Network remains in the federal courtroom where
the inquiry is unfolding, and their representative expressed
frustration with the process.
Asked what the
families would like to see at the Missing Women's Inquiry,
Frey responded without hesitating:
“I want our
lawyers to be treated with respect,” she said.
“I want them to get the
cops who were there (involved in the investigation at the
time) – I don't care where they've gone – get them there.
(We want) the truth of what really happened ...I want to be
told exactly what happened and why these women weren't found
on the farm.”
Photos and names of missing women
are displayed during a protest in front of federal court
where the Missing Women Commission Inquiry is underway.
Photograph by: Arlen Redekop, PNG
The United Nations is holding an
inquiry into the hundreds of murdered and missing aboriginal
women and will send representatives to Canada to inerview
victims’ families and government officials, two Canadian
women’s groups announced Tuesday.
But Canada’s minister for the
status of the women said in Parliament Tuesday that the
inquiry has not been called.
“At this stage we’ve received a
letter from the committee at the United Nations, and we’re
responding to that,” Rona Ambrose said during Question
Period. “They (committee members) will be discussing this
issue in February, but at this point, there is no inquiry.”
Her statement was in response to
a question from NDP MP Linda Duncan, who accused the
government of “doing nothing” to address violence against
aboriginal women and children.
“Now the UN has to step in to do
the government’s job,” said Duncan.
Ambrose told the House Ottawa has
launched a strategy to deal with the underlying issues of
racism and poverty affecting aboriginal women, including a
new RCMP centre for missing persons and a national website
for public tips to help locate missing women.
Ambrose wasn’t available for
comment and her spokeswoman referred questions about the UN
committee’s letter to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.
The Province is currently waiting
for his call.
The two women’s groups issued a
press release Tuesday detailing that the UN was holding the
inquiry into a documented list of more than 600 aboriginal
women and girlswho have been murdered or disappeared over
the past 20 years.
The groups’ spokeswomen said it
was just a matter of time before the UN investigated the
issue.
“We know that it’s happening and
we’re ecstatic that it’s happening,” said Merritt-based
Sharon McIvor of the Canadian Feminist Allicance for
International Action.
Claudette Dumont-Smith of the
Native Women’s Association of Canada said: “We have heard
from very reliable sources that this will be happening.”
The groups requested the UN
Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against
Women, made up of 23 independent experts from around the
world, investigate what the groups believe to be “very
serious violations” of the UN’s convention on the
elimination of discrimination against women.
McIvor and Dumont-Smith said the
letter sent to the federal government is the next step in
having the committee come to Canada to interview victims’
families, government officials and non-government
organizations.
They said Canada will be expected
to co-operate with the committee’s investigation.
McIvor said the list of 600 women
is growing every day, adding that the number indicates an
aboriginal women or girl is killed or has gone missing on
average once every two weeks or less for the past 20 years.
“If anything, that number is
low,” she said.
NWAC said it has documented all
600 disappearances and murders but can’t release a list of
names or the ratio of murders to disappearances.
“This is out of respect to the
families who we’ve worked with, as well as to honour the
memory of our aboriginal women and girls who remain missing,
or sadly, who have been found murdered,” said Irene Goodwin.
McIvor said the government and
police aren’t doing enough to protect aboriginal women and
girls, who are vulnerable to attack and abuse because
“agencies turn a blind eye” toward them because they’re
native.
For instance, she said, the
missing woman case that got the most attention of the three
dozen missing mostly native women in Northern B.C. over the
years was Nicole Hoar, a white treeplanter.
NWAC said Canadian aboriginal
women “experience rates of violence 3.5 times higher than
non-aboriginal women and young aboriginal women are five
times more likely to die of violence.”
The committee looked at similar
violations in Mexico five years ago and members were invited
to the country to interview victim’s families, government
officials and non-government organizations.
Its report spelled out the steps
that Mexico should take regarding the individual cases and
the systemic discrimination underlying the violations.
Mexican women’s groups say the
report helped to spur government action.
“We hope to see the same result
here in Canada,” said McIvor.
12/13/2011 The Native Women's
Association of Canada says a United Nations committee will
conduct an inquiry into the murders and disappearances of
aboriginal women and girls across Canada. The U-N
Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women
is made up of 23 independent experts from around the world.
The Native Women's Association and Canadian
Feminist Alliance requested the inquiry earlier this year.
Spokesperson Jeannette Corbiere Lavell says violence against
aboriginal women and girls is a national tragedy but the
Canadian government has failed to take effective action.
The U-N committee investigates discrimination
against women and conducted a similar inquiry in Mexico five
years ago.
The Native Women's Association of Canada says it
has documented the disappearances and murder of over 600
aboriginal women and girls in Canada over about 20 years and
it believes there have been many more
Several dozen of those disappearances and murders
have occurred in Northern B-C, including along the so-called
"Highway of Tears".
The sister of one of the “Highway of Tears” victims
is thrilled with the announcement.
Brenda Wilson, whose sister Ramona was killed 17
years ago, says the announcement is a good thing, as it
brings international attention to an issue her family has
been dealing with for so long. “It brings a little bit of
comfort and hope that hopefully something will be done,
that we’ll be able to find answers, and um hopefully find
the murderer of some of these girls that have gone missing
or been murdered along highway 16.”
There is no start date set for the inquiry by the
U-N Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against
Women.
L-R) Lindsay Mossman, Susan Martin
and Richie Allen hold up pictures of aboriginal women who
were victims of violence. They were among the dozens of
people turned out for a candle lit vigil for National Day of
Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women, at Minto
Park in Ottawa on Dec. 06, 2011.
Photograph by: David Kawai, The
Ottawa Citizen
VANCOUVER — The brother of a woman believed to have
been murdered by serial killer Robert Pickton welcomes a
United Nations committee’s plan to probe the allegation that
600 aboriginal women have been murdered or have gone missing
over the last 20 years.
“You would think both Ottawa and its national
police force, the RCMP, would have taken action on these
deaths and disappearances years ago,” Ernie Crey said
Tuesday.
“Now the inquiry has been announced, Canada will be
expected to cooperate with the committee’s investigation.
Canada failed to take any action, so I am not surprised the
UN, through its Committee on the Elimination of
Discrimination against Women, stepped to the plate.”
Crey is the older brother of Dawn Crey, who
vanished from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in November
2000. Her DNA was found at the Pickton farm in Port
Coquitlam, but Pickton was never charged with the murder.
The proposed UN investigation, which would need
federal consent to proceed, was announced by the Native
Women’s Association of Canada and the Canadian Feminist
Alliance for International Action. The UN committee is
formed by 23 independent experts of women’s issues.
“The response of law enforcement and other
government officials has been slow, often dismissive of
reports made by family members of missing women,
uncoordinated and generally inadequate,” NWAC president
Jeanette Corbiere Lavell said in statement.
“FAFIA and NWAC requested this inquiry because
violence against aboriginal women and girls is a national
tragedy that demands immediate and concerted action.”
The groups say first-nations women in Canada are
3.5 times more likely to be victims of violence than their
non-aboriginal counterparts and five times more likely to
die from violence.
The committee was lobbied by the groups twice this
year — in January and again in September, after the NWAC
decided to boycott the Missing Women inquiry in B.C. —
before reaching its decision.
NDP MP Linda Duncan said after question period
Tuesday the federal government must give consent before
representatives from the UN inquiry could come to Canada for
their work and that the NDP has “called on the government to
cooperate fully so this independent review can proceed
expeditiously.”
Earlier in the House of Commons, Status of Women
Minister Rona Ambrose said “at this stage we have received a
letter from the committee at the United Nations and we are
responding to that. It will be discussing this issue in
February, but at this point there is no inquiry.”
Ambrose said in the federal government’s response
to the UN, “we will make sure it is aware we have launched
the murdered and missing aboriginal women’s strategy that
has a number of components that deal with all of the issues
we believe is necessary to deal with the systemic issues of
not only racism, but poverty affecting aboriginal women.”
NDP interim leader Nycole Turmel said the
announcement further highlights the need for more serious
action at the federal level.
The NDP noted the inquiry is only the second of its
kind from the United Nations committee, with the first
taking place in Mexico.
“Mexican women’s groups say the committee’s
intervention helped to spur government action and we hope to
see the same result in Canada,” Sharon McIvor of FAFIA said
in a statement.
VANCOUVER -- The Missing Women
inquiry plans to sit three days this week and hear from two
witnesses.
The inquiry, which is probing why
it took so long to catch serial killer Robert Pickton, will
reconvene Wednesday to hear applications by lawyers to sort
out the remaining witnesses to be called when the inquiry
resumes full-time on Jan. 16.
It will also sit Thursday for the
continued cross-examination of Vancouver police Deputy Chief
Doug LePard, who has testified for 11 days.
The inquiry is expected to finish
the cross-exam of LePard and begin hearing the testimony
Friday of Marion Bryce, the mother of Patricia Johnson, who
was last seen in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in 2001.
Pickton was charged with
Johnson's murder, along with the murders of 19 other women,
as part of a second trial that was never held.
Pickton was convicted in 2007 of
six murders of women who disappeared in Vancouver's Downtown
Eastside. After the serial killer exhausted all appeals, the
Crown decided not to proceed on the second trial, which
disappointed the victims' families.
In 2006, the trial judge decided
to divide Pickton's 26 murder counts into two trials, ruling
that one large trial would be too much of a burden for a
jury.
The remains and DNA of 33 women
were found on Pickton's farm in Port Coquitlam after he was
arrested on Feb. 5, 2002.
Pickton, 62, confided to an
undercover officer that he killed 49 women and planned to
killed more.
Vancouver police received tips as
early as 1998 that suggested Pickton was responsible for the
women going missing in Vancouver.
Vancouver police passed along the
tips to Coquitlam RCMP, which had Pickton under
investigation since a March 1997 knife attack of a Vancouver
prostitute, who slashed Pickton with a kitchen knife, ran
from Pickton's farm onto the road and flagged down a passing
car, which took her to hospital. She survived the attack.
Pickton had been charged with
unlawful confinement and attempted murder of the woman but
the charges were later dropped by the Crown.
The reasons the Crown stayed the
charges will be examined next year at the inquiry.
The inquiry will also hold policy
forums starting May 1 to hear submissions from organizations
and individuals about recommending changes to how police
conduct investigations of missing women and suspected
multiple homicides in B.C., including homicide
investigations involving more than one police jurisdiction.
For more information about the
policy forums, contact policy researcher Elizabeth Welch at
(604) 681-4470 or by e-mail: ewelch@missingwomeninquiry.ca
After nearly two months of testimony,
the sister-in law of one of Robert Pickton's victims says
she is hopeful, but pessimistic that something positive will
come out of B.C.’s missing women inquiry.
Lori-Ann Ellis says her doubts mainly
come from how long it’s been since – 14 years – she looked
for her sister-in-law, Cara.
"For instance, I wanted to see pictures
of items that were found at Pickton's farm because I can
identify things that belonged to my sister-in-law. I've
never been able to see that. Although I was promised 10
times, to this moment, I've yet to see that."
Ellis says she is looking forward to the
New Year when the commission will hear from beat officers
with the Vancouver police and RCMP who actually dealt with
the Pickton case.
She says her family is grateful to the
lawyers who she says have been fighting hard to get the
truth.
The Missing Women
Commission of Inquiry will be holding Policy Forums in
Vancouver beginning on May 1, 2012. The Policy Forums will
provide an opportunity for interested individuals and
organizations to make submissions to the Commission on
issues within the advisory and policy aspects of its
mandate.
The Missing Women
Commission of Inquiry was established to inquire into the
initiation and conduct of investigations of missing women
and suspected multiple homicides. Formal hearings are
currently being held to inquire into the investigation of
women missing from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver in
1997‐2002. The Policy Forums are separate and distinct from
these evidentiary hearings and will focus on two of the
Commission’s terms of reference:
4. c)recommend changes
considered necessary respecting the initiation and conduct
of investigations in British Columbia of missing women and
suspected multiple homicides; and
4. d)recommend changes
considered necessary respecting homicide investigations in
British Columbia by more than one investigating
organization, including the co‐ ordination of those
investigations.
The Commission has
identified four major policy themes arising from its
mandate:
1.Police protection
of vulnerable and marginalized women;
2.Structure and
organization of the police force in British Columbia,
including the issue of regionalization in the Lower
Mainland;
3.Policies and
practices in the investigation of missing persons and
suspected multiple homicides; and
4.Police
relationships with the community and media.
The Commission will
be publishing policy discussion reports on these themes by
January 31, 2012. The purpose of these reports is to
facilitate public input and to assist in deliberations on
potential policy recommendations. The identification of
these policy themes is not intended to limit submissions:
individuals and organizations are free to make submissions
on any policy issue within the Commission’s mandate.
Individuals and
organizations interested in participating in the Policy
Forums must provide a written submission setting out their
policy recommendation(s) and discussion to the Commission by
March 31, 2012. Details regarding the venue, number
and format of these sessions will depend upon the number and
range of submissions received. Invitations to participate in
the forums will be announced in April 2012.
For further information, please contact Elizabeth Welch,
Policy Researcher: ewelch@missingwomeninquiry.ca
or 604.681.4470.
An Edmonton woman
whose daughter was slain along the notorious Highway of
Tears has begun a long trek to Alberta’s capital city to
raise awareness.
Audrey Auger-Keyesapamotoa has begun
pushing a cart along a highway for her daughter Aielah who
was killed along a notorious stretch of Highway 16, dubbed
the Highway of Tears, as part of a memorial walk.
She was planning to do the walk back in
August, but emergency surgery forced her to postpone it.
Auger-Keyesapamotoa started the 415-km
walk from Gift Lake a few weeks ago.
“I cannot stop thinking about how Aielah
left,” said Auger-Keyesapamota, 47, after taking a break in
Driftpile, 320 km northwest of Edmonton, along a stretch of
Highway 2.
“It’s hard for me every time the snow
falls because that’s when she disappeared along the
highway.”
Went to the mall
The last time Auger-Keyesapamotoa saw her
daughter alive was on Feb. 2, 2006, when Aielah left her
home in Prince George, B.C., to go the mall with her
siblings.
Two weeks later, a passing motorist found
Aielah’s body just east of Prince George, near Tabor
Mountain, on the Highway of Tears where dozens of women have
been slain or went missing dating back to the 1990s.
Most of the cases, including Aielah’s
killing, are still unsolved.
“The pain never goes away,” said
Auger-Keyesapamotoa.
“It’s important for me to do this walk
because I need to make other communities aware of this. They
need to be aware of what happened.”
While the family is not raising any funds
for the walk, they are asking for donations to be made at
the Boyle Street Community Centre at 10116 105 Ave.
That’s where Auger-Keyesapamota will end
her walk sometime next week.
For more information about the walk,
check out www.highwayofhope.yolasite.com.
The stepmother of a woman killed by
Robert Pickton says she is appalled by an attack on her
credibility at the Pickton inquiry.
Lynn Frey says she stands by the
testimony she gave at the Missing Women Inquiry last month
about a phone call she made to police in 1998. She testified
that she wanted to let them know about Robert Pickton’s pig
farm after going out to the property in Port Coquitlam,
B.C., in September, 1998.
Vancouver Deputy Chief Doug LePard, who
conducted an internal review of the Vancouver Police
Department investigation in the Pickton case, testified
Tuesday he did not find any evidence of Ms. Frey calling
police with information about the Pickton farm.
He found a reference to Ms. Frey
speaking to Vancouver police Constable Lori Shenher about a
wood chipper, which was subsequently located in a hotel
basement. “But no such information regarding Pickton,”
Deputy Chief LePard said.
Constable Shenher at that time was
vigorously pursuing leads in the missing women case, he
said. “[A call about the Pickton farm] would have been
extremely important information and of great interest to
her,” he said.
In an interview later, Ms. Frey said she
was shocked. “I know what I did. I am not stupid,” she said.
“We phoned her and told her what we found out.”
Ms. Frey’s stepdaughter, Marnie, was
last seen in September, 1997. While searching for her the
following summer, Ms. Frey met someone who had a tape
recording of a woman saying that the missing women from the
Downtown Eastside would never be found. Ms. Frey told the
inquiry that the voice on the tape recording said: “Willie’s
got them and he has a pig farm.”
Ms. Frey testified that she drove out to
the farm with Joyce Lachance, who knew where Willie, the pig
farmer, lived. Ms. Frey recalled trying to climb a fence
around the Pickton property and being chased away by dogs.
Ms. Frey said she phoned Constable
Shenher the following day to tell her about the farm. Ms.
Frey said she was told not to play cop and she should not go
to the farm.
Her husband, Rick Frey, said he expected
the inquiry will hear evidence later that will bolster Ms.
Frey’s testimony.
Ms. Lachance, who has not testified at
the inquiry, said in an interview she also recalled the
phone call to Constable Shenher on the day after going out
to the farm. “For [Deputy Chief LePard] to say that, that
really hurts me,” Ms. Lachance said.
“It just tells me, these women meant
nothing to them … no one cared,” Ms. Lachance said.
At the inquiry, Deputy Chief LePard also
challenged testimony indicating that Vancouver Constable
Dave Dickson ignored calls to look for missing prostitute
Tiffany Drew after she disappeared. Elaine Allan, who worked
at a prostitute’s drop-in centre, testified she was certain
her conversations with Constable Dickson were in 1999, not
in 2000.
However, Vancouver police spoke to Ms.
Drew on Mar. 10, 2000, according to a report that Deputy
Chief LePard said he had seen. Ms. Drew went missing in
March, 2000, and her DNA was later found on the Pickton
farm. Mr. Pickton was charged with first-degree murder of
Ms. Drew and 19 others, but the charges were stayed.
Deputy Chief LePard also contradicted
testimony of prostitute Susan Davis that police failed to
respond to a call after she was raped around January, 1991.
He said he did not find any records of a 911 call from Ms.
Davis in a review of all 911 calls related to a sexual
assault from November, 1990, to the end of February, 1991.
The
inquiry was appointed to look into the police investigation
in the Pickton case from 1997 to his arrest in February,
2002. Mr. Pickton was convicted of the second-degree murder
of Ms. Frey and five others in 2007. The inquiry hearings
are expected to continue into next spring.
By NEAL HALL, VANCOUVER SUN
November 21, 2011 1:38 PM
VANCOUVER -- Senior management of
the Vancouver police department failed to take ownership of
the missing women investigation and failed to provide
adequate resources, the Missing Women inquiry heard today.
Inquiry commission counsel Art
Vertlieb, during questioning of VPD Deputy Chief Doug
LePard, read out portions of a new report that was highly
critical of two successive VPD chiefs and three deputy
chiefs.
The report by Peel Regional
Police Deputy Chief Jennifer Evans concluded that no one in
the VPD's senior management and executive provided direction
on the missing women investigation.
Evans said it was the job of the
deputy chief at the time, Brian McGuinness, to ensure proper
resources were provided to the investigation, which was
plagued by staff shortages.
Evans also found McGuinness
failed to properly supervise then Insp. Fred Biddlecombe,
who was in charge of major crime and the missing person
unit.
LePard testified that McGuinness,
if he could do it over again, probably would have done
things differently.
But at the time, he said, police
didn't realize they were dealing with an active serial
killer preying on women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
Still, LePard agreed that the
police executive should be held accountable.
He also agreed with Evans'
criticism of former police chief Bruce Chambers and Terry
Blythe for failing to give enough attention to the missing
women problem.
""I believe he did not recognize
and take ownership of the missing women issue," Evans'
report said of Chambers.
"I believe he failed to take
ownership of the issue,'" the report said of Blythe.
"It was such a concern to the
community that it demanded attention and action," the report
added.
Evans was also critical of then
deputy chiefs Gary Greer and Al Unger for not ensuring
Vancouver police asked earlier for a joint forces operation
with the RCMP.
Evans report did single out Lori
Shenher for her "heroic" efforts to try to investigate the
case and get more officers assigned to the missing women
investigation.
LePard said a full-time sergeant
should have been assigned to the missing women
investigation.
"It would have made a huge
difference," he told the inquiry.
The sergeant should have been the
one advocating more resources, he said.
Instead, the investigation was
overseen by Sgt. Geramy Field, who ran the homicide section
and tried to oversee the missing women case "from the side
of her desk," LePard said.
"It was completely unreasonable
and unrealistic," he said of the additional demands made on
Field.
LePard said he was impressed by
the Evans report, which he said was "98 per cent" consistent
with his own report, released last year.
The Evans report has not been
made public but was leaked to a TV reporter last Friday.
Missing Women inquiry
Commissioner Wally Oppal said he was upset over an "ethical
lapse" that led to a report being leaked to the media.
"I find it reprehensible," Oppal
said as the inquiry resumed Monday after a one-week break.
"I find it upsetting and I'm
disappointed," he said of the report being leaked Friday to
a television outlet, which passed it along to Toronto-based
newspaper.
The inquiry asked Evans to
provide an expert opinion and analysis of what went wrong
with the Vancouver police and RCMP investigations of serial
killer Robert Pickton.
The Evans report was filed today
as an exhibit for identification only, meaning it won't be
made public at the moment, because of an objection by lawyer
Cameron Ward.
Ward, who is representing 20
families of Missing Women, objected because he wants to
challenge Evans being tendered as an expert witness.
Evans is not expected to testify
at the inquiry until January.
The inquiry is probing why it
took so long to catch Pickton, who was arrested in 2002 and
was eventually charged with 27 counts of first-degree
murder.
The inquiry has already heard
testimony of families of Pickton victims, who said police
didn't take the reports of missing women seriously enough.
LePard testified that police
initially believed that the women who had gone missing were
historical "so it didn't raise the level of urgency that it
ought to."
It didn't become apparent until
mid 2001 that an active serial killer was preying on women
working as street prostitutes in Vancouver's Downtown
Eastside.
Vancouver police received tips
about Pickton in 1998 and he was the VPD's prime suspect.
Pickton had attacked a woman with
a knife on his Port Coquitlam farm in 1997 and the woman had
escaped naked and bleeding to the street. She flagged down a
passing car, who took her to hospital.
Three informants told Vancouver
police about Lynn Ellingsen witnessing Pickton butchering a
woman in his barn one night, but the RCMP interviewed
Ellingsen, who denied she had seen anything.
She later admitted she was
blackmailing Pickton to keep quiet.
Pickton had offered money to a
person to lure Ellingsen to Pickton's farm, so she could be
killed.
Pickton was finally arrested in
February 2002 after a junior Mountie executed a search
warrrant on Pickton's farm to look for illegal weapons.
After officers found
identification of some of the missing women, it turned into
a homicide investigation and the search of the farm
continued for 18 months.
Pickton's murder charges were
divided into two trials.
A jury at his first trial in 2007
convicted Pickton of killing six women who disappeared from
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
After Pickton exhausted all his
appeals, the Crown decided not to proceed with a second
trial involving another 20 murders, which outraged the
families of the victims.
Pickton confessed to a jail cell
mate - an undercover officer posing as a criminal - that he
killed 49 women and planned to kill dozens more.
A First Nations group of about a
dozen people have formed a circle of drummers and singers at
the intersection of Georgia and Granville, blocking traffic.
The drumming can be heard inside
the inquiry.
A large number of the missing
women were first nations.
VANCOUVER — A former prostitute
described as the only one who got away from serial killer
Robert Pickton won't get the same protections as other
witnesses during the missing women's inquiry.
Commissioner Wally Oppal ruled in
a written statement this week that the woman's annonymity
will be protected, but other provisions of the inquiry's
vulnerable witness protection protocol won't apply.
Oppal concluded she must give her
testimony in person, not through an affidavit, and undergo
cross-examination.
"I emphasize that evidence that
has not been subject to cross-examination cannot be used to
substantiate findings of misconduct or uncorroborated
findings of fact," wrote Oppal.
That's because what she has to
say could be central to the inquiry's mandate of discovering
why Pickton wasn't caught sooner, Oppal said.
One of Oppal's terms of reference
is to inquire into and make findings of fact about the Jan.
27, 1998 decision by B.C.'s Criminal Justice Branch to stay
charges of attempted murder, assault with a weapon, forcible
confinement and aggravated assault against Pickton.
During Pickton's preliminary
hearing, the woman, identified at the inquiry as Person X,
testified that Pickton attacked her in 1997.
She said Pickton picked her up on
a street corner on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and took
her to his Port Coquitlam farm for sex.
She testified after sex, Pickton
came up behind her, caressed her left hand and then slapped
a handcuff on it.
They began fighting and she
testified she slashed Pickton across the throat and she was
also stabbed before the fight continued outside.
She eventually was able to escape
and flagged down a passing car.
Pickton was charged with
attempted murder and aggravated assault and released on
$2,000 bail.
Those charges were stayed in
January 1998 because there was not a reasonable likelihood
of securing a conviction in the case, said a spokesman at
the time.
The woman did not testify at
Pickton's trial and her story was not made public until
after Pickton was convicted.
Critics have suggested that if
the case had gone to trial and Pickton had been convicted,
his murder spree would have been cut short and lives would
have been saved.
Though he claimed he killed 49, a
jury convicted Pickton of six counts of second-degree murder
in December 2007, and in July 2010, the Supreme Court of
Canada upheld that conviction.
Oppal's ruling follows an
application by several lawyers at the beginning of November.
Jason Gratl, a lawyer who was
appointed to represent the broad interests of the Downtown
Eastside, asked Oppal for a publication ban protecting the
identities of vulnerable witnesses called to testify at the
inquiry.
Vulnerable witnesses include
current or former sex-trade workers in the Downtown Eastside
and victims of sexual assault.
He also asked the commission to
allow vulnerable witnesses to submit testimony through
affidavit and avoid cross-examination.
Lawyers for the RCMP, the
Vancouver Police Department and the Vancouver Police Board
did not oppose Gratl's application on the publication ban or
of evidence being submitted by affidavits.
But they did take issue with any
"blanket order" and argued issues should be decided on a
case-by-case basis.
The Criminal Justice Branch also
argued the vulnerable witness protection protocol should not
apply to Person X.
In his written ruling, Oppal
concluded aboriginal women are also particularly vulnerable
and are not likely to testify unless "special considerations
are given to them."
"In my view, nothing short of
strong, clear proactive protection measures sought in this
application will facilitate vulnerable witnesses to provide
their evidence to the commission," he wrote.
Oppal ruled vulnerable witnesses
will be protected by the protocol unless an inquiry
participant applies to limit the measures in a specific
case.
A scathing independent review of the RCMP and Vancouver
police investigations related to missing women from the
Downtown Eastside has pinpointed several failures of senior
management in both organizations to explain why Robert
Pickton was not stopped before killing several women from
1997 to 2002.
The lines of communication between the RCMP and Vancouver
police were non-existent at a crucial point in the
investigation, and police work lacked the required
thoroughness and organization, Deputy Chief Evans wrote in a
report obtained by CTV News. The report is to be presented
to the inquiry when hearings resume on Monday.
Deputy Chief Evans concluded that mistakes were made.
“They were not made out of malice, but rather resulted from
a lack of leadership and commitment,” she wrote. “Someone in
authority, either in the RCMP or the VPD, needed to champion
a co-ordinated effort to these investigations. This should
have involved a multi-jurisdictional approach in the
investigation of the missing women from the Downtown
Eastside and of Pickton as a suspect.”
The severity and totality of the tragedy went
unrecognized by senior management of both the VPD and the
RCMP because neither organization accepted the crisis as its
responsibility, Deputy Chief Evans wrote. “Certain officers
failed to take ownership and ensure the proper resources
were dedicated to the problem.”
Deputy Chief Evans concluded that the decision on whether
to put officers on the investigation was affected by the
assumption that a crime had not occurred if there was no
evidence and no bodies. “The serial killer theory was a
valid consideration that should have at least been
considered from the outset,” Deputy Chief Evans stated.
She also concluded that the police response would have
been quicker and more co-ordinated if one police agency had
jurisdiction over Coquitlam, where Mr. Pickton’s farm was,
and the Downtown Eastside. It was easy for Coquitlam RCMP to
investigate other violent crimes they felt had priority,
Deputy Chief Evans wrote. Also, the Vancouver force pursued
leads but did not investigate Mr. Pickton because it
deferred to the RCMP, Deputy Chief Evans stated.
Deputy Chief Evans had extremely harsh words for
Vancouver police management. “In my opinion, the leadership
and oversight displayed by members of the VPD senior
management during the initial investigation into the missing
women was inexcusable,” she wrote, adding that there was no
leadership by senior management within the missing persons’
unit.
The RCMP fell down by not pressing on when faced with a
deceptive interview by Lynn Ellingsen, who others claimed
had seen Mr. Pickton with a dead woman, Deputy Chief Evans
stated. Ms. Ellingsen’s denial should not have stopped the
investigation, it should have motivated investigators to
prove the veracity of their information by showing she was
lying.
Deputy Chief Evans identified several officers who
recognized something suspicious was going on. Vancouver
Police Constable Dave Dickson on Aug. 27, 1998, submitted “a
compelling report” that suggested missing women had become
victims of foul play and serious action should be initiated,
she wrote. Constable Dickson was never involved in the
investigation of Mr. Pickton.
A clerk at the Vancouver police station who took reports
of missing persons, Sandy Cameron, raised concerns in 1998
about the increasing number of women disappearing from the
Downtown Eastside.
Detective Constable Lori Shenher of the Vancouver Police
“not only recognized but also took full ownership of the
missing women issue,” Deputy Chief Evans wrote, adding that
she worked tirelessly with little supervision or guidance
and tried to push the issues to others within the
department.
“Unfortunately, she lacked the support from senior
management that she needed to get the proper resources and
attention to the missing women issue,” the report said.
Deputy Chief Evans had harsher words for several other
officers. Vancouver police sergeant Geramy Field identified
Mr. Pickton as a suspect for RCMP to investigate but failed
to recognize him as a suspect for the Vancouver missing
women investigations, Deputy Chief Evans stated.
Staff-Sergeant Dan Dureau, who was responsible for the
sexual assault squad and kept informed about the missing
women cases in 1999, did not take any responsibility for the
investigation, the report said. “A passive management style
will not work, as evidenced here,” Deputy Chief Evans wrote.
Writing about a meeting in Sept. 22, 1998, Deputy Chief
Evans wrote that, according to Vancouver police detective
inspector Kim Rossmo, Inspector Fred Biddlecombe “basically
threw a hissy fit or a small-scale temper tantrum . . . he
said there is no serial killer.”
Deputy Chief Evans described Insp. Biddlecombe’s conduct
at the meeting as unprofessional. He did not recognize the
seriousness of the issue, she wrote.
Deputy Chief Evans also criticized Inspector Gary Greer,
Deputy Chief Brian McGuinness, Chief Terry Blythe and Chief
Bruce Chambers, all of the Vancouver force, who she says did
not pay close enough attention to the case. She also was
critical of several RCMP officers, including for Chief
Superintendent Gary Bass, who she said should have acted on
information that he had received.
By SAM COOPER, The Province
November 18, 2011 In an RCMP sex-conduct
hearing Thursday, a North Vancouver RCMP staffer alleged
a well-connected B.C. Mountie tried to rip off her
shorts and pin her down for sex against her will, and
was “criminally harassing” her to the point that she
feared for family members’ lives.
But, she told RCMP lawyers, she didn’t report the
allegations because she didn’t trust the RCMP’s internal
investigation process, partly because the detachment’s
commanding officer had allegedly taken a questionable
photo of her backside.
The woman — who is still employed as a civilian at
the North Vancouver detachment — was cross-examined
Thursday in a hearing involving Const. Susan Gastaldo
and Staff-Sgt. Travis Pearson, who are accused of having
sex in a police car during work hours and exchanging
intimate messages via an RCMP BlackBerry in 2009.
The woman was subpoenaed by Gastaldo’s lawyer, who is
seeking to corroborate Gastaldo’s defence with the
woman’s “eerily similar” allegations. Gastaldo has filed
a civil suit claiming she was raped by Pearson in his
home, but the RCMP did not properly investigate her
complaints.
Gastaldo has claimed she was pressured into a sexual
relationship because Pearson held power over her and
claimed to have powers over his superiors, partly due to
a “snoop” network of Lower Mainland Mounties who would
cover for him because he had helped them in their
careers.
On Wednesday, the North Vancouver RCMP staffer, whom
RCMP adjudicators have asked not be named, described
similar circumstances to those experienced by Gastaldo
in a relationship the woman had with Pearson starting in
2006, when he was professional standards supervisor in
North Vancouver. The affair ran into 2009, when she quit
his “Special O” unit, which conducts surveillance in and
around Burnaby.
She shocked RCMP lawyers with new allegations that
she had not told to an RCMP professional standards
investigator who asked her to make a statement while he
investigated Gastaldo’s complaints against Pearson in
October 2009.
Among the allegations, she claimed that Pearson
pinned her down in his home gym and tried to rip off her
shorts and have sex while she successfully struggled
away and told him “no”; that Pearson “injected” himself
into her family life and told her he could sneak into
her house without her knowing, partly because he had
“gained the trust” of her children; that he parked
outside her home on dark mornings, watching her family,
and then trailed her in the dark; that he trailed her to
an amusement area against her will and took a picture of
her with her child; and that he loaned her $1,300 of his
own money to start a business and gave her a brown RCMP
envelope containing money of his to pay for lunch dates,
when she tried to make an excuse she couldn’t afford to
go out with him to eat.
The woman said she was afraid to cross Pearson
because he said he would make a “shovel call” — what she
believed to be a threat of violence from one of his RCMP
“wingmen” — if anyone hindered their relationship.
On Thursday, Pearson’s lawyer, Const. James Rowland,
asked her why she didn’t report these “huge” allegations
when a Staff-Sgt. Vaz Kassam sought a statement from
her. She said she only consented to an interview at a
North Vancouver Starbucks, but wouldn’t give a full
statement.
“He said if I answered questions it would really help
out Mr. Pearson,” the woman said, adding “I didn’t want
to help [Pearson].”
Rowland pressed the woman on whether she truly
believed that an RCMP member would “put a bullet in the
back of someone’s head . . . or dig a hole in the ground
in the mafia sense.”
He asked why she couldn’t tell Kassam or her
detachment commander about her concerns.
“If I said everything . . . like about the shovel
call and so forth . . . I didn’t know if there would be
retaliation on me or my family,” she said. “I feared for
the life of members of my family . . . his wingmen would
do something.”
The woman was pressed to reveal the detachment head
who she said allegedly took a photo of her backside.
Reluctantly, she named him as former Supt. Gord
Tomlinson who, according to reports, retired in 2008.
Asked if she had ever seen the picture, she said: “I
don’t recall if I saw [the picture] or not . . . he took
the picture and he knew I was bending over . . . I don’t
know if it was intentional.”
A B.C. RCMP headquarters spokesman was asked to
comment on the allegation against Tomlinson and all
allegations in this story, but said the force cannot
offer any comments.
It’s believed Tomlinson is now located in Ontario,
and a number of calls by The Province to residential
directory listings did not succeed in locating him for
comment.
On Thursday, Rowland presented a number of pictures
of the woman with Pearson and their children, along with
an “affectionate” note, and suggested it was a
consensual affair.
She replied that she felt trapped and had tried to
push Pearson away many times, even babysitting for him
in efforts to get him to go out for a romantic date with
his wife.
The answer yielded a dramatic confrontation with her
former boss.
“Don’t shake your head at me! You know I did that,”
she said, blinking back tears. Pearson dropped his gaze
as she stared at him defiantly.
It’s believed that Kassam will be called to answer
the allegation about his efforts to question the woman
and “help” Pearson.
The idea that Pearson is getting preferential
treatment from the RCMP over Gastaldo was also voiced on
Wednesday by Gastaldo’s lawyer, Larry McGonigal, who at
one point lost his temper and made the candid comment,
“Travis Pearson is well represented at this trial.”
The hearing continues Friday. It is expected counsel
for Pearson will call witnesses for testimony on the new
allegations.
Backgrounder: Early Friday
morning, November 11th, the Smithers RCMP along with BCAS
and local Fire Emergency Services attended to a report of an
injured woman laying in a residential street in Telkwa.
Upon the attendance of first responders, they found the
woman with life threatening injuries and immediately
transported her to hospital where she passed away later in
the day while in hospital care. Police are treating the
death as possibly being criminal in nature.
Update: The man who was taken
into police custody Friday morning on police attendance, was
released early Saturday morning. Charges have not been laid
against the individual at this time. The woman’s body
has been flown to Vancouver for a scheduled autopsy
examination taking place on Monday November 14th at VGH.
Investigators are asking anyone with information
regarding this investigation to contact the Smithers RCMP at
250-847-3233 or for those who wish to provide information
however remain anonymous they can do so by contacting
Crimestoppers at 1-800-222-8477.
Cpl
Dan Moskaluk “E" Division Communications Services
Senior Media Relations Officer Southeast/North Districts
c:250-863-7433 Follow Cpl Moskaluk on Twitter @
CplMoskaluk Cpl Moskaluk on SKYPE @ CplMoskaluk Smithers RCMP
investigating death of woman in Telkwa BC
2011-11-11
19:15 - Smithers file # 2011-4792
The Smithers RCMP and North
District Major Crimes Unit are currently investigating the
death of an adult Telkwa woman. Police are treating
the death as being criminal in nature.
In the early morning hours of
Friday morning, November 11th, the Smithers RCMP along with
BCAS and local Fire Emergency Services attended to a report
of an injured woman laying in a residential street in
Telkwa.
Upon the attendance of first
responders, they found the woman with life threatening
injuries and immediately transported her to hospital where
she passed away later in the day while in hospital care.
Police are treating the death as possibly being criminal in
nature and arrested an adult male who was found at the scene
on police arrival. The man remains in police custody,
however no charges have been laid against the man at this
time. Police have confirmed that both were known to
each other.
Investigators are asking anyone
with information regarding this investigation to contact the
Smithers RCMP at 250-847-3233 or for those who wish to
provide information however remain anonymous they can do so
by contacting Crimestoppers at 1-800-222-8477.
Cpl
Dan Moskaluk “E" Division Communications Services
Senior Media Relations Officer Southeast/North Districts
c:250-863-7433
By Neal Hall, Postmedia News
November 9, 2011 6:50 PM
VANCOUVER — RCMP failed to share
information with Vancouver police about the prime suspect in
a serial killer case, an inquiry was told Wednesday.
Vancouver police Deputy Chief
Doug LePard testified that investigators were never told
that the Mounties had interviewed the prime suspect, Robert
Pickton, in 2000.
Mounties also didn't tell
Vancouver police what they learned when they questioned
Pickton, who was Vancouver police's top suspect in the
missing women case, he told the Missing Women Commission of
Inquiry.
"It was obviously of great
interest to the (Vancouver Police Department) and it was
inexplicably not shared with the VPD," LePard said.
The inquiry is investigating why
it took Vancouver police and RCMP until 2002 to catch
Pickton when they were receiving detailed tips as far back
as 1998.
Pickton, 62, is serving a life
sentence for the murders of six women. He initially was
charged with killing 20 more but those charges were stayed
in 2010.
The serial killer has been linked
by DNA to the deaths of 33 women and has boasted to an
undercover police officer that he killed at least 16 more.
LePard told the inquiry Wednesday
that Vancouver police didn't know that RCMP were going to
interview Pickton.
"I'm not sure they had a duty to
take our advice, but it's always good to brainstorm," LePard
told inquiry commissioner Wally Oppal.
"It was a surprise to
investigators that the information wasn't shared," the
deputy chief said.
At the time, Coquitlam, B.C.,
RCMP had jurisdiction to question Pickton because of an
active investigation stemming from a 1997 attack on a
prostitute.
Pickton was accused of repeatedly
stabbing the woman, who fled naked and bleeding from his
Port Coquitlam, B.C., farm and flagged down a passing car.
The woman almost died in hospital
but was revived.
Pickton was charged with
attempted murder and unlawful confinement but those charges
were later dropped by the Crown.
The inquiry will later examine
why the Crown stayed the charges in 1998.
LePard testified that after the
1997 attack, the RCMP seized Pickton's clothes. They were
kept in a storage locker and weren't tested for DNA until
2004 — two years after Pickton's arrest.
Police then learned that the DNA
of two missing women — Cara Ellis and Andrea Borhaven — was
also found on Pickton's jacket and boots.
LePard testified that in
September 1999, an RCMP officer had attempted to call
Pickton to arrange an interview but reached his brother,
Dave Pickton, who suggested they were really busy with work
on their pig farm.
Dave Pickton told Const. Ruth
Yurkiw that she should wait until the rainy season when they
wouldn't be so busy, the inquiry heard.
The interview with Pickton wasn't
done until Jan. 19, 2000.
"Would you have accepted that?"
commission lawyer Art Vertlieb asked about Dave Pickton
delaying the interview.
"No," LePard replied.
At the time, he said, the RCMP
did not make interviewing Pickton a high priority because
the missing women were considered to have disappeared in the
past and it wasn't an active serial killer case.
"They didn't understand that
women were still going missing," he said.
Police later realized that the
number of missing women was escalating at a rate of one
disappearing every six weeks, LePard said, noting 13 women
disappeared after the summer of 1999.
He pointed out that Coquitlam
RCMP was also experiencing staff shortages in 1999.
Vancouver police would have
provided resources, if the RCMP had asked, "but we weren't
given that opportunity," he told the inquiry.
When Pickton was interviewed by
the RCMP, the suspect offered several times to allow the
Mounties to search his farm — which they never did.
LePard said another RCMP officer,
Cpl. Frank Henley, also did a more informal interview with
Pickton, which was described as a "social visit."
During the meeting, LePard said,
Henley revealed the names of two informants, Ross Caldwell
and Lynn Ellingsen.
He said Henley might have put
their lives in danger.
Vancouver police believed
Ellingsen was extorting money from Pickton, who had offered
another man money to get Ellingsen on his farm so he could
kill her.
"I just find it highly unusual to
proceed in this way," LePard said of Henley's visit.
The Pickton case was finally
cracked by a junior RCMP officer who executed a search
warrant on Pickton's farm for illegal weapons on Feb. 5,
2002. The Mounties found identification of some of the
missing women, which turned the case into a murder
investigation.
By NEAL HALL, VANCOUVER SUN
November 8, 2011 6:06 PM
VANCOUVER -- Two Vancouver police
officers wrote memos to their superiors in 1998 raising the
alarm about the growing number of missing women in the
Downtown Eastside, the Missing Women inquiry heard Tuesday.
Const. Dave Dickson, who worked
in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES) for years, wrote a
memo Nov. 5, 1998, expressing his concern about the number
of missing women in the area.
"I feel very strongly that a
large percentage of the women have met foul play," Dickson
said in his memo, which was read out at the inquiry, which
is probing why it took so long to catch serial killer Robert
(Willy) Pickton.
Dickson stated in his memo that
in his experience, women involved in the street sex trade
may disappear for a week or two, then they return to the
streets.
He suggested the missing women
"deserve some attention" from the police department and the
number of women vanishing seemed to be escalating.
Deputy Chief Doug LePard
testified Tuesday at the inquiry that Dickson's concern
wasn't taken seriously enough.
The inquiry also heard that
Constable Lori Shenher, who was assigned in July 1998 as a
second detective in the Vancouver police missing persons
unit, wrote a similar memo on Aug. 27, 1998.
Shenher's wrote that the women
reported missing disappeared under "suspicious
circumstances."
She added: "I believe we're going
to find these cases are related and should be treated as
such."
"They were both raising the
alarm," LePard told the inquiry.
At the time, LePard testified, he
was the sergeant in charge of the home invasion task force,
a well-funded temporary investigative unit that had no
trouble with funding and resources because it was considered
a high priority because it involved elderly citizens being
targeted.
He admitted the missing women
case wasn't given the same priority, mainly because managers
in the upper ranks did not believe there was a serial killer
preying on women prostitutes in the DTES.
"Had management of the day truly
accepted the nature of the problem, it could have been
resourced," LePard told inquiry commissioner Wally Oppal, a
former judge and B.C. attorney general.
As it turned out, VPD loaned 29
officers to the joint forces investigation with the RCMP
after Pickton was arrested in 2002 and police spent almost
two years doing an exhaustive forensic search of the farm --
the largest police search in Canadian history.
At the time, in July and August
1998, Vancouver police had received two tips from the same
man about Pickton being a suspect. The tipster said "Willy"
was a "sicko" who lived on a farm in Port Coquitlam, worked
for P&B Used Building Supplies and may be responsible for
all the missing women.
The tipster also said Willy had
10 women's purses inside his trailer at the farm, as well as
women's identification, and had slashed a woman's throat in
the past.
That was a reference to Pickton's
1997 knife attack on a prostitutes from the DTES. The woman
had fled naked and bleeding from Pickton's farm and had
later died in hospital, but was revived.
Pickton was charged with
attempted murder and unlawful confinement but those charges
were stayed by the Crown in early 1998. The inquiry will
later examine the reasons for the Crown's decision to stay
the charges.
LePard testified the 1998 tips
were passed along to Coquitlam RCMP because it had
jurisdiction to investigate Pickton after the 1997 attack.
He said the Shenher met with the
tipster a number of times and believed the man, Bill Hiscox,
was considered credible but there were no bodies or crime
scene, so Vancouver police had no way to confirm whether
Hiscox's information was accurate.
The inquiry was told Monday that
Kim Rossmo, an expert in serial crime who headed the VPD's
one-man geographic profiling unit in 1998, had wanted to
issue a press release advising the public that police were
looking into the possibility of a serial killer preying on
women in the DTES.
But a commanding officer at the
time, then inspector Fred Biddlecombe, felt the press
release was inflammatory, so it was never released.
LePard testified he thought the
press release should have been released but added even if it
had been released it likely wouldn't have deterred women
from working the streets because of their addiction
problems.
"Shouldn't that choice have been
up to the women who are the potential victims of a serial
killer," commission counsel Art Vertlieb asked.
LePard agreed but pointed out
that the street prostitutes already believed a serial killer
was at work.
He added that between 1993 and
1998, 10 sex trade workers had been murdered, "so it wasn't
a secret that this work was extremely dangerous."
LePard will continue his third
day of testimony Wednesday at the inquiry, which began
hearings Oct. 11.
Police found the DNA of 33 women
on the farm of Pickton, who confessed to an undercover
officer that he killed 49 women and planned to kill dozens
more.
Pickton was charged with 27
counts of first-degree murder, which were divided into two
trials. The first trial ended in 2007 with Pickton convicted
on six murder counts. He now is serving six life sentences.
The Crown decided not to proceed
on a second trial involving another 20 murders.
He must look at multiple
incidents over several years as he heads Missing Women
Inquiry in Pickton case
By Thomas R.
Braidwood, Special to The Vancouver SunNovember 8, 2011
The Commission of Inquiry, which
I headed, into the death of Robert Dziekanski following a
Tasering by an RCMP officer at Vancouver International
Airport in 2007 was an emotional and traumatic experience
for many people, not least of all Dziekanski’s mother Zofia
Cisowski.
It was a long and complex inquiry
involving dozens of witnesses and hundreds of hours of
testimony. In the end, I believe we achieved a measure of
closure for Cisowski and the people of British Columbia, and
our recommendations have been widely accepted.
Now, as I read media reports of
the Missing Women Inquiry into the Robert Pickton serial
killer case, it strikes me that Wally Oppal faces a far more
arduous test than I did.
Unlike the Taser incident at YVR,
which took place over a number of hours, Oppal’s commission
is looking at multiple incidents over several years.
Even before the hearings started,
Oppal faced a barrage of criticism and was squeezed between
the highly charged political environment of the Downtown
Eastside, a provincial government that felt unable to
provide the money needed to allow more groups to be
represented by counsel at the inquiry, and some media
commentators who savaged him for his perceived shortcomings
and suggested that the commission was taking too long and
costing too much.
I am not an apologist for Wally
Oppal; he doesn’t need that from me. I know him as an
experienced jurist who has made a lifelong contribution to
the legal profession and the administration of justice in
B.C.
He is also a sensitive and caring
person who is no doubt hurt by the personal attacks and
suggestions that his commission is dead in the water.
But based on the news reports
I’ve read so far, it’s clear to me that the inquiry is far
from dead and will not be the meaningless, one-sided
whitewash that some critics predict. Contrary to the
perceptions created, the testimony so far shows that the
interests of the murdered and missing women, the broader
Downtown Eastside community, sex workers, drug users and
aboriginal women are represented by experienced and capable
lawyers.
The voices of these groups and
individuals are being heard and will continue to be heard as
the inquiry progresses. I believe their lawyers will ensure
that police and Criminal Justice Branch witnesses are
cross-examined thoroughly and in a manner that facilitates
the work of the inquiry.
I know that time and money are
important. I felt these pressures during the Dziekanski
hearings; the final budget was higher than originally
anticipated and I was compelled to ask for several
extensions of my reporting deadline.
No doubt, the Missing Women
Commission will follow a similar pattern.
This is not unusual. We know from
decades of experience with commissions across Canada that
they are neither cheap nor quick. Oppal’s would not be the
first inquiry to be underfunded at the start; in fact, it’s
quite common.
For example, in her 2005 report
on the Toronto Computer Leasing Inquiry, Justice Denise
Bellamy said the city of Toronto’s budget estimate for the
inquiry was “unrealistically low,” which had unpleasant
repercussions because it raised expectations in the city
council and among the public that were impossible to meet in
the actual circumstances.
In a lecture at McGill University
in 2006, Justice John Gomery, who headed the inquiry into
the federal Liberal sponsorship scandal, said criticism that
commissions cost too much is valid only if one takes the
position that a price can be put upon the search for truth
and justice.
With that in mind, we should look
beyond the obvious to see what real benefit we, as British
Columbians and Canadians, will derive from the Missing Women
Commission.
At its heart is the need to
ensure public accountability and reform public policy.
But there are also other issues
at stake.
In her Toronto Computer Leasing
Inquiry report, Bellamy wrote that while inquiries seek to
ensure that any mistakes uncovered will not be repeated,
they also serve another less obvious, but equally important
purpose: They are restorative.
At the Missing Women Inquiry the
restorative attribute could manifest itself as the families
finding closure; the RCMP, the Vancouver police department
and the Criminal Justice Branch accounting for their
actions; and Oppal recommending improvements to policies and
procedures.
And in a broader sense, it may
even achieve what Justice Peter Cory stated in the 1995
Supreme Court of Canada Westray coal mine explosion judgment
as a purpose of commissions of inquiry: to help restore
public confidence not only in the institution or situation
investigated, but also in the process of government as a
whole.
After a career in the legal
profession, Thomas R. Braidwood served on the Supreme Court
of B.C. and later the Court of Appeal of B.C. and Yukon
Territories. He retired in 2006.
By Suzanne Fournier, Postmedia
News November 7, 2011
VANCOUVER — A senior Vancouver
cop "scuppered" a 1998 news release warning of a possible
serial killer because he thought it was too "inflammatory,"
an inquiry heard Monday.
Vancouver Deputy Chief Doug
LePard testified Monday that police had received detailed
tips about Robert Pickton as early as 1998, the same year
their own geographic profiler urged them to put out a public
warning that a serial killer was preying on women in
Vancouver's troubled Downtown Eastside.
But Vancouver Police Department
Insp. Fred Biddlecombe "didn't believe the theory there was
a serial killer" and refused to issue the September 1998
public warning, LePard told the Missing Women Commission of
Inquiry.
Biddlecombe also didn't accept
the "geographic profiling" of Det. Insp. Kim Rossmo, who was
then Canada's best-educated cop with a doctoral degree in
criminology, he testified.
The inquiry is investigating why
it took Vancouver police and RCMP until 2002 to catch
Pickton when they were receiving detailed tips as far back
as 1998.
Pickton, 62, is now serving a
life sentence for the murders of six women. He initially was
charged with killing 20 more but those charges were stayed
in 2010.
The serial killer has been linked
by DNA to the deaths of 33 women and has boasted to an
undercover police officer that he killed at least 16 more.
LePard's 450-page report on the
Pickton case was released along with a public apology in
July 2010, after Pickton's life sentence was upheld.
He admitted Monday that Vancouver
police did check out a detailed tip in July 1998 from Bill
Hiscox that said a man named Willy, who worked for the P & B
salvage company, had women's IDs, purses and blood on his
farm in Port Coquitlam, B.C.
The tipster made it clear that he
thought "Willy" Pickton was killing women.
LePard said Vancouver police
considered Hiscox's information to be "internally and
externally accurate" and assigned Det. Const. Lori Shenher
to follow up.
Vancouver police passed on the
tip to Burnaby RCMP, New Westminster police and Port
Coquitlam RCMP, but didn't consider it enough for a search
warrant or a public warning, said LePard.
The tipster even referenced
Pickton's 1997 near-deadly assault on a Downtown Eastside
sex worker, who escaped naked and bleeding from his farm,
the inquiry heard.
LePard told the inquiry that he
didn't think issuing a news release about a possible serial
killer would have helped women living on the Downtown
Eastside who were "deeply entrenched in their addictions."
"I don't think it would have
changed their behaviour," he said Monday. "There was no
point raising expectations in the community that work was
going to be done."
LePard testified earlier Monday
that the missing persons unit was ill-equipped to catch a
serial killer in 1997 as it had only one detective and no
computers — using a "manual, paper-based system."
Many of the missing women's
family members have told the inquiry that Vancouver police
refused to take down details of their vanished loved ones or
even to create a file, particularly if she were an
aboriginal woman using drugs.
Several murdered women's
relatives said they gave many details to a female clerk only
to find much later that no file was ever opened.
The clerk's name was Sandy
Cameron and she is expected to testify later in the inquiry.
Vancouver Police officer Doug LePard
during break as he testifies at missing women's inquiry on
Monday, November 7, 2011 in Vancouver.
Photograph by: Glenn
Baglo, Vancuver Sun
VANCOUVER - Vancouver police Deputy Chief Doug LePard
testified today at the Missing Women inquiry.
LePard testified that as of 1997, the VPD's missing
person unit had a civilian clerk and an experienced
detective.
The unit was part of the major crime unit, which
investigated such serious crimes as murder, sex assault and
robbery.
The Missing Persons unit did not use a computer to keep
track of its cases, LePard said.
"It seemed to be a manual, paper-based system," he told
the inquiry.
When Vancouver police realized how many women had been
reported missing, a second detective was added in June 1998
to the missing person unit, he said.
He admitted there was no clear threshold policy of when a
missing person case should be considered a case of suspected
foul play, when it would be investigated by a team of
homicide detectives.
LePard recalled he was asked in September 2002 to do a
review of the VPD's missing women investigation by then
chief Jamie Graham.
"He wanted to find out what happened and if things had
gone wrong, he wanted to fix them," he testified.
"I knew almost nothing about the investigation at that
point."
LePard said he was generally aware of the problems with
the investigation of Clifford Olson, an earlier serial
killer who was killing children while he was a suspect.
LePard added that he believed that a public inquiry would
be called and that the VPD was "ethically bound" to learn
from its mistakes.
Families of victims testified earlier that when they
tried to report missing loved ones to Vancouver police they
were treated rudely and without respect by the civilian
clerk who worked for the missing person unit.
Other families recalled Vancouver police were generally
dismissive about the women going missing.
LePard testified that there had been complaints about the
civilian clerk, Sandy Cameron, in the missing person unit.
He recalled that Vancouver police Sgt. Bob Cooper had
done an investigation of the complaints.
Commission lawyer Art Vertlieb read out a portion of
LePard's interview with Lori Shenher, who was added as a
second detective in the missing person unit in 1998.
Shenher told LePard that the clerk would not take the
calls of a mother of one of the women reported missing.
Shenher said Cameron made racial comments about callers.
For example, Shenher said Cameron was talking one day to
an Asian woman on the phone and told the woman: "Speak
English. This is Canada."
Shenher recalled she confronted Cameron about being
racist.
"She denied it and said, If they can't speak English,
they should go back to their country." Shenher told LePard
in 2002, after Pickton was arrested.
LePard is the first police officer to testify at the
inquiry, which is probing some of the failures in the police
investigations leading to the 2002 arrest of serial killer
Robert Pickton.
Pickton preyed on vulnerable women who disappeared from
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
The inquiry has so far heard from families of Pickton's
victims and experts on street prostitution and drug
addiction in the DTES.
LePard wrote the VPD report on the missing women case,
finding Vancouver police could have done a better job.
He earlier offered an apology on behalf of the police
department.
Vertlieb also asked LePard to read out two tips to Crime
Stoppers about Pickton.
During the first tip on July 27, 1998, the caller, later
identified as Bill Hiscox, said a man named Willy who lived
on a farm in Port Coquitlam and worked by P&B Used Building
Supplies may be responsible for the prostitutes who had gone
missing.
The caller said Willy was a "sicko" who picked up
prostitutes, he had 10 purses, women's clothing and women's
identification at the trailer where he lived on his farm and
he had been investigated for slashing the throat of a
prostitute in the past.
Vertlieb suggested Vancouver police could have used the
tipster information to get a search warrant for Pickton's
farm.
"We're a long way from getting a search warrant based on
this information," LePard said.
He said the information was passed along to the Coquitlam
RCMP officer who had conduct of the 1997 investigation of
Pickton who was charged with the attempted murder of a
prostitutes who had been stabbed by Pickton.
The Crown later decided to drop the charges against
Pickton because the victim was a drug addict and not
considered credible.
The same tipster called again on Aug. 6, 1998. He
provided the suspect's full name, Willy Pickton, and said he
had killed one of the missing women, Sarah deVries, "and may
be responsible for all the missing women."
LePard said Shenher took the information very seriously
and met with the tipster, finding he was credible.
"That was very important information, absolutely, and it
was treated with the seriousness that it should have been,"
LePard testified.
He said the information was passed along to the Coquitlam
Mountie who was investigating Pickton.
The inquiry has heard that another dozen women were
killed by Pickton between 1998 and the time he was arrested
in 2002.
LePard said Vancouver police did not become aware of the
extent of the missing women problem until 1998.
The Vancouver police department's position is that
Coquitlam RCMP was responsible for investigating Pickton
because the murders took place on his farm.
Cameron Ward, the lawyer representing 18 families of
murdered and missing women, earlier suggested at the inquiry
that the plot to kill the women was formed in Vancouver at
the time he picked up the women.
The provincial government ordered an inquiry lasy year,
appointing former judge and attorney general Wally Oppal as
inquiry commissioner.
The inquiry, which began hearings on Oct. 11, was
supposed to finish its final report by Dec. 31 but was
recently granted a six-month extention by Attorney General
Shirley Bond.
The hearings are expected to conclude next spring.
By Suzanne Fournier,
Postmedia NewsNovember 3,
2011
VANCOUVER — Vulnerable witnesses,
including some who may have witnessed events at the B.C.
farm of serial killer Robert Pickton, will be able to give
evidence in sworn documents instead of testifying at a
Vancouver inquiry.
The names of the potential
witnesses — some of whom the Missing Women Commission of
Inquiry has been told fear reprisals by pimps, drug dealers,
other sex workers and even police officers — will be banned
from publication.
Commissioner Wally Oppal, a
former judge, made that ruling on Thursday morning,
following Wednesday's application by lawyer Jason Gratl for
special arrangements at the inquiry to protect sex workers
by banning their names and allowing them to testify by
affidavit.
"We need to make an exclusion
because of the vulnerability of these people," Oppal said.
Pickton, 62, is now serving a
life sentence for the murders of six women. He initially was
charged with killing 20 more but those charges were stayed
in 2010.
The serial killer has been linked
by DNA to the deaths of 33 women and has boasted to an
undercover police officer that he killed at least 16 more.
Gratl, an independent lawyer
representing Downtown Eastside "affected individuals," noted
academic and community surveys have found at least 70 people
visited the Pickton farm and lived to talk about it. Gratl
noted those people, most of them still sex workers in the
Downtown Eastside, likely are very afraid to come forward.
Vancouver Police Department
lawyer Sean Hern had no argument with banning the names of
witnesses but objected to "vague allegations," particularly
against police, that would taint professional reputations
without Hern being able to cross-examine witnesses.
Hern will be able to
cross-examine witnesses whose identities are banned, if it
is deemed necessary.
Oppal granted Gratl's application
to accept evidence by affidavit, but will give witnesses the
opportunity to either withdraw their affidavits (not usually
allowed in court proceedings) or testify in open court.
Meanwhile, lawyer Cameron Ward,
acting for the families of 18 murdered women, has raised
"grave" concerns that he is getting inadequate and delayed
disclosure of an estimated two million documents from the
inquiry, having received what he believes to be less than 10
per cent of relevant files.
Many of the RCMP files on Pickton
and Vancouver's missing women have been redacted even before
the commission gets them, and RCMP lawyers are asking
Thursday for even more control over information released to
the inquiry.
Oppal responded to Ward's
complaints by saying he knows there are "voluminous
documents out there," and the inquiry is being asked to do a
"difficult task" by "re-examining an investigation that took
place back in the '90s."
Oppal said testily that the
commission staff have done a great deal to help Ward,
including Oppal himself going to Staples to buy Ward's law
firm computer equipment to analyze electronic versions of
documents. Oppal said he has a firm deadline for the
hearings — already extended to the end of April — and will
deliver his final report in June.
"There's rarely a day goes by
that I'm not stopped in the street by citizens who commend
us for the work we're doing," said Oppal.
Oppal acknowledged that "feelings
and emotions are running high" and asked all participants to
be "professional.
"We're looking into a terrible
tragedy that has taken place," said Oppal, "and at the end
of the day I want to see all relevant evidence given to me,
and that all people are treated fairly."
Oppal also said he won't rule
until Monday on RCMP applications on protection of sensitive
evidence, which federal Justice lawyer Andrew Majawa
emphasized are "not publication bans, contrary to some
reports."
Slated to appear Monday is
Vancouver police deputy Chief Doug LePard, who has already
apologized for the Vancouver police's handling of the
Pickton case in a 400-page statement. LePard's evidence is
expected to take more than a week.
The inquiry is looking into
Vancouver police and RCMP handling of the investigation into
missing women, and Pickton, between the years 1997 and 2002.
Sex workers will be allowed to testify at the public inquiry
into the Robert Pickton murder case without having their
names published, the former judge overseeing the hearings
ruled Thursday.
The witnesses also don't have to appear
in person to be cross-examined by police lawyers.
Commissioner Wally Oppal granted an
application to give sex workers and sexual assault victims a
series of protections designed to encourage them to come
forward. He said the value of their testimony outweighs
concerns that the process would be unfair.
"I think the overall objective here has
to be to encourage those people who feel marginal and who
may feel intimidated by the process — and we've heard ample
evidence of that — to come forward," said Oppal.
"I think it's in the public interest that
they come forward and participate."
Jason Gratl, an independent lawyer
appointed to represent the broad interests of the Downtown
Eastside, put forward an application that included a number
of measures to protect vulnerable witnesses — all of which
were adopted by Oppal.
Anonymity and affidavit testimony
Under the proposal, the names of sex
workers and sexual assault victims will be covered by
publication bans.
They will be allowed to provide evidence
through written affidavits, preventing aggressive
cross-examination by lawyers for the police, prosecutors or
others.
Participants such as the police will be
able to apply to cross-examine witnesses if they can
demonstrate that's necessary, particularly for witnesses
that allege wrongdoing. If Oppal decides a cross-examination
is warranted, the witness would then have a choice: appear
in person or withdraw their affidavit.
The Vancouver police, its union and the
RCMP all opposed the application, specifically the blanket
order allowing affidavit testimony.
They argued such measures should be
determined on a case-by-case basis, and said it would be
unfair to prevent them from cross-examining witnesses who
are critical of police.
Witnesses vulnerable
Oppal acknowledged it's an unusual setup,
but he said allowing police lawyers to apply to
cross-examine specific witnesses provides an adequate
safeguard.
"This inquiry's main function is to
listen to those people who have felt aggrieved by the
system," said Oppal.
"I recognize that there are drawbacks ...
but I think we need to make an exception in this case
because of the vulnerability of those people."
Expert witnesses have spoken at length
about sex workers' distrust of the legal system and their
reluctance to speak to police, support workers in the
Downtown Eastside and academic researchers.
The inquiry has already heard from one
sex worker, outspoken advocate Susan Davis, but so far no
others have offered to testify.
The hearings are examining why Vancouver
police and the RCMP failed to catch Pickton in the late
1990s and early 2000s, and why prosecutors declined to
pursue an attempted murder charge against him after an
attack on a sex worker in 1997.
The inquiry is expected to continue well
into next year, with a final report due by June 30, 2012.
Oppal is also conducting a less-formal
set of hearings known as a study commission to examine
broader issues surrounding missing women, including the
so-called Highway of Tears in northern B.C.
VANCOUVER — The RCMP lawyer at the
Missing Women inquiry is seeking a sweeping ban on sensitive
information contained in documents that are expected to be
made public soon.
Cheryl Tobias, the federal lawyer
representing the Mounties, has filed an application seeking
to ban third-party information such as the names of suspects
in the police investigation that led to the 2002 arrest of
serial killer Robert Pickton.
The application was made earlier but was
put off until Wednesday so as not to interrupt the testimony
of family members of Pickton's victims.
Tim Dickson, the lawyer representing the
Vancouver police department and the Vancouver police board,
told the inquiry earlier that police documents contain "a
huge amount of confidential information," including the
names of sex trade workers and people listed on "bad date
sheets who have not been convicted at this time."
Bad date sheets are often issued with
licence plate numbers of violent customers who have raped
and assaulted street prostitutes. They are distributed to
women working the streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
At least two lawyers, Cameron Ward and
Jason Gratl, are expected to oppose the sweeping ban sought
by the federal government and supported by Vancouver police.
Ward is representing 18 families of
murdered and missing women at the inquiry. Gratl is
representing residents of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside,
where dozens of sex trade workers disappeared.
Gratl told the inquiry earlier that the
federal government's application is too broad.
He suggested the public should be able
to know the names of suspects who are convicted sex
offenders.
The RCMP's position is that the names of
suspects should not be publicly released because it could
jeopardize active investigations of unsolved cases.
The federal government is seeking a
ruling before a number of high-ranking police officers begin
testifying next week, starting Monday with Vancouver Deputy
Chief Doug LePard.
LePard earlier released a report on the
Vancouver police failures to solve the missing women case
and he apologized to the victims' families for not doing a
better job.
The inquiry also must make a ruling this
week on Gratl's application to offer protection for
vulnerable witnesses, including prostitutes who don't want
to be publicly identified if they testify about such illegal
activities as street prostitution and using illegal drugs.
Ward also plans to apply for a one-week
adjournment because of the late disclosure of some
documents, including the release late Tuesday of the notes
of Vancouver police Const. Dave Dickson, who was accused of
lying during the testimony Tuesday of Elaine Allan, who
worked from 1998 to 2001 at the WISH (Women's Information
and Safe House) drop-in centre for street sex trade workers.
Ward told inquiry Commissioner Wally
Oppal on Tuesday that the disclosure of police documents to
date has been inadequate.
The lawyer's application for an
adjournment prompted a testy exchange with Oppal.
"We have to move this thing, you know,"
Oppal told Ward, adding the inquiry has a deadline of June
30 next year to submit its final report.
"You told me, sir, on the first day of
hearing that as a result of my disadvantage of not getting
access to this disclosure until June, I could have as much
time as I needed on behalf of my client," Ward responded.
"I didn't say you were at a
disadvantage," Oppal said. "You're not at a disadvantage
here. You're on a level playing field and I wish you'd stop
saying you're at a disadvantage because you're not."
Ward responded: "You told me, sir, that
if I felt I was disadvantaged that they (police lawyers)
have had longer to prepare for these hearings than I have
had, your words were that you'd give me time to prepare."
Ward said he needed until Monday to make
his application for an adjournment, but Oppal suggested it
could be done by Thursday.
Darrel Roberts, the independent lawyer
appointed by the inquiry to represent aboriginal women, told
Oppal he was opposed to Ward's application to adjourn.
"I want this hearing to continue,"
Roberts said. "On Monday, I believe Deputy Chief LePard is
scheduled and I want nothing to interfere with that."
Ward said earlier that he wanted to have
disclosure of the expert report of Peel Regional Deputy
Chief Jennifer Evans before he cross-examined LePard.
The report was supposed to be finished
by Oct. 31 but Ward said outside court Tuesday that he still
has not received it.
Inquiry spokesman Chris Freimond said
Wednesday the commission now hopes to have the Evans report
by Nov. 14.
Evans was asked by the inquiry to
provide an expert opinion on the missing women
investigations done by the RCMP and Vancouver police.
Last August, two groups granted standing
at the inquiry — the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and
the Pivot Legal Society — called for the removal of Evans
and two other Peel regional police officers who were
assisting in the review of police documents.
BCCLA president Robert Holmes said at
the time that his group and others were deeply concerned
that having the Peel officers work closely with the Missing
Women inquiry seriously undermined the perceived
independence of the inquiry.
Using active-duty police in the Missing
Women inquiry created the appearance of police investigating
police, which two previous public inquiries in British
Columbia, into the deaths of Robert Dziekanski and Frank
Paul, found to be unacceptable, Holmes said.
The Missing Women inquiry is probing why
it took so long to catch Pickton, despite tips to police in
1998 that he might be responsible for the disappearance of
all the missing women.
The inquiry will also examine why the
Crown chose to drop serious charges against Pickton in 1998.
Pickton was charged in 1997 with
attempted murder and aggravated assault after stabbing a
prostitute a number of times.
The woman, who had slashed Pickton with
the same knife when he put a handcuff on her wrist, escaped
naked and bleeding from Pickton's farm in Port Coquitlam,
B.C. She flagged down a passing car, which took her to
hospital.
After his arrest in 2002, Pickton
confessed to an undercover officer that he had killed 49
women and planned to kill two dozen more.
The serial killer was charged with the
first-degree murder of 27 women, which the trial judge
divided into two trials.
Pickton, 62, was convicted at his first
trial in 2007 of six murders.
After exhausting all appeals, the Crown
decided it wasn't in the public interest to hold a second
trial because Pickton was already serving six life
sentences.
VANCOUVER — Sex workers who
testify at the public inquiry into the Robert Pickton serial
murder case should have their identities protected and
shouldn't be subjected to cross-examination from police
counsel, says a lawyer at the hearings.
Jason Gratl, an independent
lawyer appointed to represent the broad interests of
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, says sex workers are
especially vulnerable and afraid of the legal system, making
them extremely reluctant to come forward and tell their
stories.
"Legal processes have a bad
reputation among sex workers," Gratl said Wednesday as he
applied for a series of measures to protect such witnesses.
"They collectively have the
perception that being around judges and lawyers is a bad
thing. And of course, there are police lawyers, and that has
an effect. There's a lot of testimony about the adversity
between the police and sex workers."
Gratl asked for publication bans
for any sex worker or sexual assault victim who testifies.
He also wants them to be able to provide evidence through
written affidavits, rather than appearing in person and
answering questions from lawyers representing the police and
prosecutors.
If other parties such as the
police want to cross-examine a witness who alleges
wrongdoing, Gratl said they could then make an application
demonstrating why that's necessary.
He noted that, so far, the
commission has been unable to convince sex workers to come
forward and testify. The lone exception has been Susan
Davis, a longtime sex worker and outspoken advocate who
appeared earlier in the week.
Gratl said the inquiry needs sex
workers to testify because their stories will be important
-- particularly if they had contact with Pickton or visited
his farm in Port Coquitlam -- and he argued they should be
guaranteed protections in advance to encourage them to come
forward.
"These are not going to be the
affidavits of the missing women of the Downtown Eastside,
because they are not in the position to provide you with any
evidence," said Gratl.
"What I'm looking for are
procedural protections for current and former sex workers
from the Downtown Eastside who are still living -- that is
to say the potential future victims of the next Robert
William Pickton."
The inquiry has already heard
evidence that Pickton was well-known among sex workers in
the Downtown Eastside. Research conducted in 2008, for
example, showed that nine per cent of sex workers surveyed
said they had been to Pickton's property and roughly
three-quarters said they knew somebody who had.
The Vancouver police, its union
and the RCMP opposed the application -- specifically the
blanket request to allow sex workers to avoid
cross-examination.
They argue that any application
for such protections should be made on a case-by-case basis.
Tim Dickson, who represents the
Vancouver police, said some of the witnesses may allege the
force or its officers acted improperly, and it would be
unfair to deny the agency the opportunity to defend itself
through cross-examination.
"There's prejudice if the
affidavits are anonymous, there's prejudice if they're
shielded from cross-examination, and there's prejudice if
the allegations are vague and can't be countered," said
Dickson.
Commissioner Wally Oppal said he
will issue a decision Thursday morning.
During Wednesday's hearing, Oppal
seemed skeptical of the application, suggesting it would be
difficult to grant broad protections without knowing who
might end up testifying.
"I want the inquiry to be open
and inclusive so that people feel comfortable in coming
here," Oppal said as Gratl outlined his request.
"But it's difficult to make an
order in a vacuum. If you tell me that you have a particular
witness who wants to come forward and testify but is afraid,
then I'm in a position to consider the application."
The hearings are examining why
Vancouver police and the RCMP failed to catch Pickton in the
late 1990s and early 2000s, and why prosecutors declined to
pursue an attempted murder charge against him after an
attack on a sex worker in 1997.
The inquiry is expected to
continue well into next year, with a final report due by
June 30, 2012.
Women sing traditional songs
around a mock casket outside the missing women inquiry in
downtown Vancouver, Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2011. Commissioner
Wally Oppal has opened hearings to examine why police failed
to stop Robert Pickton as he murdered impoverished sex
workers from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. (CP/Jonathan
Hayward)
Updated: Tue Nov. 01 2011
17:45:44 The Canadian Press
VANCOUVER — A woman who helped
run a Vancouver drop-in centre for sex workers says she
reported one of serial killer Robert Pickton's victims
missing, but believes she was lied to when an officer told
her the woman was in rehab.
Elaine Allan, who ran the WISH
drop-in centre from 1998 to 2001, told an inquiry into the
Pickton case that she doesn't believe Tiffany Drew was ever
in rehab.
Instead, Allan said she thinks
she was lied to by a police force that was dismissive and
uninterested in reports that sex workers were vanishing at
alarming rates from the city's Downtown Eastside.
Allan said she was working at
WISH in 1999 preparing to open for the evening when another
sex worker named Ashwan came banging at the door.
Ashwan was frantic that she
hadn't heard from Drew, her friend, since the night before.
The pair had formed a buddy system in which they would keep
in contact to ensure each other was OK -- a system Allan
said was being used by many sex workers at the time because
of a rash of disappearances.
Allan said she called Const. Dave
Dickson of the Vancouver Police Department, who had been
researching reports of missing women and was WISH's main
contact on the force.
Allan said the officer visited
the centre and spoke to her and Ashwan, but she said Dickson
told her Drew had a reputation for taking off with clients
and not to worry about it. He didn't take any notes, said
Allan, and didn't take a formal missing person's report.
"He was very casual about it,"
Allan told the inquiry, which is examining why the police
failed to catch Pickton.
Eventually, Dickson told her Drew
was in rehab and had specifically requested not to be
contacted by anyone from the Downtown Eastside for fear she
would relapse, said Allan.
But Allan said she and Ashwan
didn't believe the story.
The next time Allan heard any
information about Drew was in 2002, when a local reporter
called her with news that Drew's DNA was found on Pickton's
farm in Port Coquitlam.
"The only explanation you have in
your own mind for why he said what he said to you is that he
lied to you, didn't he?" asked Cameron Ward, a lawyer for
the families of 18 missing women, including Drew.
"He lied to me," replied Allan.
Allan's account stands in
contrast to Dickson's reputation in the Downtown Eastside,
where he has become known as an officer who was among the
first to seriously investigate reports of sex workers
disappearing.
A lawyer with the inquiry
confirmed Tuesday that Dickson will be called to testify.
His notes, including those related to Drew's disappearance,
have also been disclosed to the inquiry.
Pickton was initially expected to
stand trial on murder charges involving 26 women, including
Drew, but his trial was split into two parts, with six
counts heard first and the remaining 20, which included
Drew's case, to be heard later.
He was convicted of six counts of
second-degree murder, and the Crown decided to stay the
outstanding 20 charges because Pickton had already received
the maximum sentence. The remains or DNA of 33 women were
found on Pickton's farm, and he claimed to have killed 49.
Allan said she knew or had met 20
of the women linked to Pickton's farm, many of whom were
regulars at WISH.
The inquiry has already heard
allegations that police were quick to dismiss reports that
women were disappearing, suggesting some of them may have
moved away or gone on vacation to places as far away as
Mexico.
But among residents and support
workers in the Downtown Eastside, Allan said it was plainly
obvious that something terrible was happening.
"It was sort of this dark force
out there, it's like there was this monster out there," said
Allan.
"You could feel the presence of
this evil force that seemed to be swallowing up women, but
we couldn't really figure out what it was."
The hearings are expected to
continue for months, with commissioner Wally Oppal's final
report due by June 30 of next year. Along with the work of
the Vancouver police and the RCMP, the hearings will also
examine the decisions by Crown counsel not to prosecute
Pickton for attempted murder after an attack on a sex worker
in 1997.
Among the dozens of witnesses
still to testify will be sex workers from the Downtown
Eastside. Oppal will hear an application this week to
provide such witnesses with a number of protections,
including publication bans to shield their identities and
measures to ensure they don't face aggressive
cross-examination.
The lawyer for the victims'
families will also ask for a temporary adjournment later
this week to give him more time to read documents before
officials with the Vancouver police testify.
By NEAL HALL, VANCOUVER SUN
November 2, 2011 Elaine Allan shown on the monitor in
the media room, Nov. 1, 2011, at the Missing Women inquiry
in Vancouver. Allan was the coordinator of the WISH drop-in
centre for street sex workers between 1998 and 2001.
Photograph by:
Ward Perrin, PNG
Missing
women video collection Families and friends of the
missing women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and
in northern B.C. along Highway 16, known as the
Highway of Tears, speak out about their pain and
frustration. The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry
was appointed by the British Columbia provincial
government last year to inquire into the conduct of
police investigations of women reported missing from
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside between January 23,
1997 and February 5, 2002.
VANCOUVER - A Vancouver police officer lied about
the whereabouts of one of the dozens of women who had
disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a witness
told the Missing Women inquiry Tuesday.
Elaine Allan, who ran the WISH drop-in centre for
street sex workers from 1998 to 2001, recalled Tuesday that
Tiffany Drew disappeared in 1999 and Drew’s friend Ashwan
was frantic the day after she vanished.
“She was completely hysterical,” Allan recalled.
“She was adamant that something was wrong.”
She pointed out that Drew and Ashwan, another sex
trade worker, used a “buddy system” to check in with each
other after so many women had disappeared at an alarming
rate.
“It was sort of this dark force out there, it’s
like there was this monster out there,” Allan recalled of
the missing women. She knew 20 of them, including five of
the six that serial killer Robert Pickton was convicted of
killing.
“You could feel the presence of this evil force
that seemed to be swallowing up women, but we couldn’t
really figure out what it was,” she added.
Allan told the inquiry that after talking to
Ashwan, she paged Vancouver police Const. Dave Dickson and
told him what had happened.
Dickson attended the drop-in centre that night and
seemed very concerned about Drew’s disappearance, but the
officer didn’t take notes and didn’t fill out a
missing-person report, she said.
The officer said not to worry, that Drew would
eventually show up, Allan recalled.
“I never saw her again,” she said of Drew. “She was
a beautiful young girl.”
Three months later, Allan said, Ashwan was still
upset about her missing friend and kept asking Dickson if he
had done what he said he would do: check whether Drew had
cashed her welfare cheques.
Dickson said he hadn’t got around to it, she
recalled.
Allan said Dickson took her aside one day and said
Drew was in recovery and didn’t want contact with her former
friends because she feared she would relapse.
Allan recalled she was doubtful about Dickson’s
explanation, as was Ashwan.
She said she later learned from a Vancouver Sun
reporter that Drew’s DNA had been found on Pickton’s farm in
Port Coquitlam.
“He lied to me,” Allan said of Dickson’s
explanation that Drew was in rehab. She didn’t realize it
until after Pickton was arrested in 2002, she said.
She said Dickson’s casual response to Drew’s
disappearance was indicative of the indifferent attitude
police had toward the dozens of women who went missing.
Dickson, who is expected to testify at the inquiry,
was a highly-respected officer in the Downtown Eastside who
took early retirement in 2003 but was hired back on contract
because of his extraordinary work and popularity in the
area.
Allan said she tried to get anyone who would listen
to bring attention to the missing women problem.
“It was really a struggle — a hard sell,” Allan
told inquiry Commissioner Wally Oppal.
Cameron Ward, the lawyer representing 18 families
of murdered and missing women, complained Tuesday to Oppal
that Dickson’s notes were only disclosed at 3:06 p.m.
Tuesday, despite asking for them months ago.
“I consider this late disclosure of critical
information to be most unsatisfactory,” Ward told the
inquiry commissioner.
“I have the gravest of concerns about the
disclosure of documents to date.”
The inquiry is probing why it took so long to catch
Pickton and looking at some of the systemic problems with
the investigations conducted by Vancouver police and the
RCMP. Police had been provided tips in 1998 about Pickton,
who even offered to allow police to search his farm in 2000,
but police failed to act.
The inquiry will also look at the Crown decision in
1998 to drop charges against Pickton stemming from a knife
attack on a prostitute a year earlier.
The woman fled naked and bleeding from Pickton’s
farm and flagged down a passing vehicle.
nhall@vancouversun.com
Brothels groom young women before
exploiting them: Report By Mike McIntyre,
Winnipeg Free Press November 1, 2011 Winnipeg police Sgt.
Gene Bowers authored a report in which he says the "pimps"
who run brothels are really no better than those who ply
their trade outdoors.
Photograph by: Marc Gallant,
Winnipeg Free Press
WINNIPEG — They tout themselves as a better
alternative to turning tricks on the streets. But a report
on Winnipeg's sex-trade says brothels, massage parlours and
escort agencies aren't the safe haven their owners promote
them to be.
A 16-page document filed last week in a
high-profile sentencing hearing — and obtained this week by
the Winnipeg Free Press — provides a glimpse into the inner
workings of the industry.
Police Sgt. Gene Bowers authored an expert opinion
on how the "pimps" who run these businesses are really no
better than those who ply their trade outdoors.
If anything, those who go underground become harder
for authorities to monitor and shut down — such as the
47-year-old housewife who admitted last week to turning her
two-storey home into a sex den while working as a
leather-clad dominatrix.
"They operate as fronts for prostitution. Both the
men and women (who run them) use various forms of
psychological manipulation in order to persuade, compel or
entice persons into prostitution," Bowers wrote.
He described the mostly young women who work in
this industry as "inmates" who don't necessarily realize how
they're being victimized.
"Some of the grooming techniques (by the operators)
are so well-executed that the person is unable to recognize
they are being sexually exploited," he said.
Bowers has spent the past decade investigating
crimes linked to the sex trade, including five other
brothels previously shut down by police. He was most
recently assigned to the Manitoba Integrated Task Force for
Missing and Murdered Women. He said the grooming includes
forcing the young workers into having a "practice session"
with the business owner to ensure they are not undercover
police officers and to gain a level of control.
"This is used as a form of intimidation, whereby
the keeper would threaten to reveal the girl's actions to
police in an attempt to discredit them," said Bowers.
"As is often the case, many female inmates of bawdy
houses are too embarrassed or ashamed to admit they were
convinced into having sex with the bawdy-house keeper."
The brothel owner who was in court last week —
known to her customers as "Sinful Sydnee" — pleaded guilty
to keeping a common bawdy house. Similar charges against her
husband were dropped as part of the plea deal. Her real name
is under a court-ordered publication ban to protect her
children.
The Crown seeks a conditional sentence for the
woman, while defence lawyer Evan Roitenberg has requested a
period of probation. Queen's Bench Justice Deborah McCawley
has reserved her decision.
Police arrested the woman in June 2009 following an
investigation of the residence.
Police learned the woman ran her sex-for-cash
business since at least 2007, employing at least a dozen
young adult women and even one 18-year-old man to offer up
various services to customers.
Also, the woman's 11-year-old daughter and
17-year-old son were living in the home and were apparently
aware of their mother's profession.
The teenager admitted he helped "recruit" a handful
of the people who ended up working for his mother after
meeting them at a youth help line he volunteered at, court
was told. Many of the workers were reluctant to testify
against the woman, claiming they enjoyed the opportunity she
provided.
"The fact they all liked (the accused) and felt
they were in a business relationship is not surprising,"
said Bowers.
"It's a common tactic to befriend the person and
have them enter into what they believe is a fair business
relationship. The relationship is actually exploitative, but
appears to be reciprocal on the surface."
Bowers spent several weeks analyzing the business
records connected to the woman's brothel and concluded it
was a highly organized operation. She would take a $60 cut
from every client. Typically, customers paid $180 an hour
for a full range of services.
"The commodity that this business is selling is
sex, and this commodity can be sold over and over again. The
profit margin is very high for a business like this," said
Bowers.
The defence lawyer told court last week his client
believed she was providing a safe alternative for young
people who wanted to work in the sex trade — something she
herself had dreamed about since she was a teenager. By
keeping them off the streets and screening clients, the
woman remains adamant she wasn't hurting anyone.
The woman now lives in Vancouver, where she
volunteers with an organization that helps sex-trade workers
get off the streets, court was told. She is estranged from
her husband, who has custody of their daughter, who is now
15. Their 21-year-old son lives on his own.
Witness testifies Pickton raped her years before his arrest Elder Eugene Harry of the Squamish
Nation looks at a poster of missing women prior to
performing a ceremonial blessing at the start of the missing
women inquiry in downtown Vancouver, Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2011.
(Jonathan Hayward / THE CANADIAN PRESS)
The Canadian Press
Date: Monday Oct. 31, 2011
6:26 PM ET
VANCOUVER — A
longtime sex worker believes serial killer Robert
Pickton violently raped her in the early 1990s, but she
told the inquiry into Vancouver's missing women that
police never showed up to investigate.
Susan Davis, a self-admitted sex worker who is an
outspoken advocate for the city's prostitutes, testified
she can't be certain it was Pickton who picked her up
several blocks from the Downtown Eastside in 1990 or
1991 and raped her at knifepoint.
But Davis said she believes that's what happened.
"When he was arrested, I saw his picture and I
thought, 'That's the guy,' and I thought to myself,
'Your mind is playing tricks on you, that's not
possible,"' Davis said during her testimony at the
public inquiry into the Pickton investigation.
"So I asked a veteran sex worker in the Downtown
Eastside -- she asked me to describe the vehicle, which
I did, and she told me that she thought it was indeed
him. That's the truth that I live with, even though I
can't prove it."
Davis was attacked more than a decade before Pickton
was arrested and charged with killing women from the
Downtown Eastside.
She told the inquiry on Monday she made three
attempts to report the assault to police.
Davis testified that she was standing with another
sex worker on a street just south of the Downtown
Eastside on a snowy winter day when a blue Chevrolet
drove up. The other women declined to get in, but Davis
said she needed the money and took the client.
She said the man drove her to a nearby parking lot,
but after a dispute over money, she was attacked. The
man punched Davis in the face and then held her down at
knifepoint and raped her, she said.
After it was over, she said she jumped out of the
car.
Davis said she called the Vancouver Police
Department's non-emergency line and was told to call
911, which she did. She waited for an hour, but no one
from the force showed up. She said it was cold and she
still needed money to pay for a room for the night, so
she took another client and left the area.
During the next three weeks, Davis said she tried two
more times to contact police, first by phone and then in
person. She never connected with an investigator,
despite having the licence plate number of the man she
alleged attacked her, she said.
The hearings are examining why Vancouver police and
the RCMP failed to catch Pickton as he killed sex
workers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The inquiry
has already heard about what appears to be several
missed opportunities to connect him to attacks and
murders against sex workers the Downtown Eastside.
The most striking example is an alleged attack on a
sex worker in 1997, in which Pickton was charged with
attempted murder but never prosecuted. More than a dozen
women disappeared from the Downtown Eastside in the
years that followed.
Davis's allegations, if true, would mean Pickton
could have come to investigators' attention even sooner
if police had taken her report more seriously.
The inquiry has already heard complaints that
Vancouver police were quick to dismiss or even mock sex
workers who came forward to report assaults or rapes.
"It haunted me because he had used a knife, he was
violent and it was my first really serious assault,"
said Davis.
"And I guess being the middle-upper-class daughter, I
believed I would get equal treatment. And it haunted me
that I couldn't."
Under cross-examination from a Vancouver police
lawyer, Davis readily acknowledged she did not have any
evidence about the assault or her interactions with the
force.
"I have no proof of that, and I also realized myself
that my eyes could be playing tricks on me, and you hear
this all the time that people see a picture and they
want it to be the guy that raped them because they want
the rape to be over," said Davis.
"So I am totally aware that I might be making this up
in my mind, but it is the reality that I live with."
Vancouver police lawyer Tim Dickson asked Davis to
contact him if she can recall any other details,
suggesting the force would try to dig up any records of
its own.
Davis first entered sex work in Nova Scotia in the
mid-1980s, when she answered a wanted ad at an escort
agency. She moved to Vancouver in 1990, and soon found
herself working as a street prostitute in the Downtown
Eastside, taking on risky clients for small amounts of
money to feed her drug addictions.
Davis is still a sex worker, though she no longer
works on the streets. She has spent years as an advocate
for prostitutes.
Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree
murder and sentenced to life in prison with no parole
for at least 25 years. The remains or DNA of 33 women
were found on his farm, though Pickton claimed he killed
49.
The public inquiry began in early October and is
expected to continue for months as it hears from dozens
of witnesses, including academic experts, families of
Pickton's victims, sex workers, police officers and
prosecutors.
Commissioner Wally Oppal had asked for an extension
that would have seen his final report due at the end of
next year, but the British Columbia government wants his
report complete by June 30.
Oppal is also conducting a less-formal set of
hearings known as a study commission to examine broader
issues surrounding missing women, including the
so-called Highway of Tears in northern B.C.
Attorney General Shirley Bond
announced Friday a six month extension to the deadline for
the Missing Women inquiry.
The inquiry was supposed to
submit its report by Dec. 31 but only began hearings three
weeks ago and isn't expected to wrap up until next spring.
The inquiry had asked for a
one-year extension but Bond granted only a six month
extension of the deadline - to June 30, 2012.
"This extension will be
incremental to the commission's current budget," the
attorney general ministry said in a statement.
"To date, government has invested
$2.5 million to support the commission."
The inquiry, which resumes
Monday, didn't finish hearing the testimony this week of the
families of victims of serial killer Robert Pickton. Some
families have been told to expect to return in January.
The inquiry was commissioned by
the provincial government last year to examine why it took
police so long to catch Pickton, who was arrested in 2002.
The inquiry's mandate includes
probing the reasons why the Crown decided in 1998 not to
proceed to trial on charges laid against Pickton in 1997.
There had been tips to police in
1998 about Pickton killing one woman and possibly being
responsible for the disappearance of dozens more from
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
Police eventually found the DNA
of 33 women on Pickton's farm.
He was charged with 27 counts of
first-degree mur-der, which were split into two trials.
His first trial ended in 2007
with Pickton convicted of six murders. He now is serving six
life sentences.
After Pickton exhausted all
appeals, the Crown decided it would not be in the public
interest to proceed on the second trial involving 20
murders.
Angel Wolfe, an 18-year-old Toronto student, told
theMissing
Women Commission of InquiryThursday
she was only eight years old when police “very coldly” told
her they thought her mother’s remains had been found on a
pig farm.
Then police “interrogated” her and left her to find
out from the media, as a child and then as a teen, all the
“grotesque” details of the murder of her mother Brenda Wolfe
and other women by serial killer Robert Pickton.
Today Angel is a strong, confident young woman, who
read a statement to the inquiry calling for rights and
redress for the children of the many missing and murdered
women. The inquiry is addressing police handling of the
cases between 1997 and 2002, when Pickton was finally
arrested when Coquitlam RCMP stumbled over evidence of
missing women while searching for firearms at the Pickton
farm in Port Coquitlam.
Angel said the trauma of her mother’s disappearance
and death was compounded by police “letting this monster”
Pickton troll the Downtown Eastside for victims for decades
“because my mother and many of the other women were poor,
First Nations in the high-risk street sex trade.”
“I didn’t know what happened between when I was six
and my mother’s last call to her death,” said Wolfe.
“I felt like I’d been punched in the face,” said
Wolfe. “I didn’t know why no one wanted to protect these
women.”
Wolfe ran away from an abusive Ontario foster home
and at 15 found her own way back to the stepmother she’d
lived with as a child, before her father abandoned the
family.
Bridget Perrier, Angel’s stepmother, said she and
Angel now give a course to social workers and police called
“Sex Trade 101,” to gain respect for women forced into
prostitution by poverty or addiction.
Angel is also outraged that last July, after
Pickton’s life sentence was upheld for the murder of her
mother and five other women, she finally got a visit from
the Missing Women Task Force. They offered her $10,000 from
the B.C. Criminal Injuries Compensation Branch for the death
of her mother.
“The fine print though said you had to give up all
future legal action and claims,” said Wolfe. She refused to
sign, saying “No one can put a price tag on my mother’s
death. She’ll never see me graduate, walk down the aisle or
give birth.”
Wolfe is now lobbying for First Nations counsellors
and other resources such as education benefits for the
children of the missing women.
“I had a horrible childhood in some ways but I’m
very lucky to live now with Bridget and a family that loves
me,” said Wolfe, who is also a teen delegate to the
aboriginal Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian
residential schools.
Meanwhile, the Missing Women Inquiry is already
running out of time and will require government action to
extend its timetable.
Families of 18 murdered women who have travelled
from other cities and provinces are upset that they will not
get a chance to speak to the inquiry. Only four days have
been set aside to hear the wrenching testimony of family
members, some of whom have never spoken publicly of how,
when and why their loved ones vanished and then how they
found out those women had been murdered.
The majority of families of 33 murdered women
linked by DNA to convicted serial killer Robert Pickton have
never even found out details of their loved ones’ deaths,
nor have 27 of those cases ever been heard in a court of
law.
It will require an order-in-council from the B.C.
government to extend the inquiry, slated to halt hearings on
Dec. 1. Next week will begin a long roster of VPD and RCMP
witnesses, who will take weeks. Some families have been told
they may be recalled as witnesses in January, 2012, although
Commissioner Wally Oppal had pledged to hand in his report
by the end of 2011.
VANCOUVER - Sweet memories were
entwined with an incredible sadness as a B.C. First Nations
leader marked his late sister's birthday and derided the
circumstances that led to her death.
Ernie Crey told the inquiry
looking into Vancouver's missing women Wednesday that his
sister would have been 53 on Oct. 26. Instead, her DNA was
found on the Port Coquitlam, B.C. pig farm of convicted
serial killer Robert Pickton, though charges in her death
were never laid.
"Well, we can't bring our sister
back. We know that. But we want people responsible for doing
the investigations to account for themselves," Crey, a
member of the Sto:lo Nation, told reporters during a break
in his testimony.
Pickton was arrested Feb. 5,
2002. Investigators found the remains or DNA of 33 women on
his farm and Pickton boasted to police of killing as many as
49 women.
In December 2007, a jury
convicted Pickton of six counts of second-degree murder, and
in July 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld that
conviction.
Crey said after Pickton lost his
appeal, police visited him in Chilliwack, B.C. and told him
Dawn's DNA had been found in a trailer on Pickton's farm.
Crey said police also told him Dawn had likely been killed
by Pickton.
Crey was reminded at the inquiry
that an attempted murder charge against Pickton had been
stayed in March 1997, and that an informant had called a tip
line twice in 1998 to warn police about Pickton.
Crey was then asked how he felt
about B.C.'s justice system.
"I feel it failed my sister and
failed my family and failed the other families," he said. "I
can't begin to tell you how angry I am about that, the
frustration and anger my family carries."
Later, Crey said that if the
charges hadn't been dropped and Pickton had gone to trial,
lives would have been saved.
"It didn't happen so we want to
know why and the people to do the accounting for that are
the police and the criminal justice branch of British
Columbia. That's why we're here."
Crey said he doesn't want to see
another serial killer in B.C. and wants to make sure the
police have made improvements in their tactics. He
criticized the scope of the commission, saying he would have
liked to have seen the inquiry focus on social and economic
conditions.
And he criticized social policies
that concentrate women in the Downtown Eastside.
"These women, you know, we all
owe some responsibility to them.
"By dent of our social policies
... we've concentrated all these women in the Downtown
Eastside like it was an Indian reserve or something, and we
keep them down there and they become vulnerable.
"They become easy prey for
somebody like Pickton."
Earlier in the morning, Margaret
Green testified about how police handled and investigated
the death of Angela Williams, a mother, sex worker and
addict who was found dead in Surrey, B.C. in December 2001.
Green, who is the legal guardian
of two of Williams' children, said she spent Christmas Day
2001 looking for Williams on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside
and Boxing Day filling out a missing person's report.
Williams' body was found days
later, but the family wasn't told.
Green said the repercussions of
late 2001 were still being felt less than two years ago when
one of Williams' nieces was found dead on the streets of
Burnaby, B.C.
She said a coroner originally
told her he couldn't say definitively why Williams died, but
police told her during a 2007 visit to the place where
Williams' body was found that strangulation was the likely
cause of death.
Green said she hasn't received an
update from police about the investigation, and Williams'
children want to know how their mother died.
One of those children, Ashley
Smith, demanded answers from the inquiry.
"I want to know why no one cared
enough to take this case properly from the beginning. Was it
because she was native? Was it because she used drugs?
"It's been almost 10 years and I
don't know how my mother died."
Commissioner Wally Oppal said
Smith made a good point about the lack of respect the
community shows to women who are poor and often aboriginal.
"I think if there's one thing
this inquiry can do, it can show the community out there
that the women who were on the Downtown Eastside who died
tragically were real human beings.
"They were like anyone else. They
were mothers, they were daughters, they were aunts, they had
people who loved them. And I hope that at the end of the day
that the public will realize how terrible these tragedies
have been."
VANCOUVER - A relative of a 2001 murder victim told
the Missing Women inquiry today that racial stereotyping of
the victim hampered a proper police investigation.
Margaret Green recalled when she reported Angela
Williams missing to Vancouver police on Dec. 26, 2001,
police seemed to focus on the fact that Angela was a first
nations drug addict who dabbled in prostitution.
She said when Angela was found dead beside a rural
road in Surrey, the RCMP initially assumed it was a drug
overdose.
But an autopsy found only a trace of cocaine in
Angela's system that was about a week old, so a second
autopsy had to be done, which found evidence of bruising on
the neck, she told the inquiry.
Green said she felt police never investigated the
case properly.
"They seemed to have tunnel vision that Angela's
case was part of that life," she testified.
"I really think this is another case of racial
stereotyping."
And she was upset that there seemed to be no
communication with the Vancouver police missing persons
unit.
The inquiry heard that on Dec. 21, 2001, then
Surrey RCMP Constable Tim Shields sent an email to the head
of the missing women task force about the unidentified woman
being found in Surrey on Dec. 13, 2001.
Green recalled she only learned about unidentified
woman's body being found in Surrey from a street person in
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, who had a read a newspaper
article about it.
At the time, Green said, she was handing out
posters with Angela's photo on them in the Downtown
Eastside.
She said the RCMP initially said Angela's cause of
death was undetermined.
Green, the legal guardian of Angela's two youngest
daughters, recalled one of Angela's daughter's kept asking:
How did mommy die? Why didn't they catch the person."
She said the last update from Surrey RCMP on the
unsolved case was in 2007, when Green told police that one
daughter wanted to visit the site where her mother was
found.
Two officers then took Green and Angela's two
daughters to the site, where the girls laid flowers.
"I want to know how mommy died," one of the girls
asked the Mounties.
Green added that one of the officers pulled her
aside and said: "It's pretty clear to us she died of manual
strangulation."
And that was the first time police confirmed it was
believed to be a murder case, she said.
"I want to know why no one cared enough to
investigate properly," Ashley Smith, 21, one of the
daughters of Angela Williams, told the inquiry today.
"Was it because she was native? It's been 10 years
and I don't know how she died," she added.
The daughter of a woman who vanished from
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in 1992 made an emotional
appeal at the Pickton inquiry Tuesday for authorities to
find out what happened to her mother.
Elsie Sebastian was last seen in July, 1992, when
her daughter, Donalee Sebastian, was 16 years old. Elsie was
40.
Testifying at the inquiry in Vancouver, Donalee
Sebastian said police refused to accept missing-person
reports for years after her mother went missing. “It’s quite
disturbing,” she said, adding that attempts were made by her
sister, two grandmothers and two uncles, as well as herself.
She had been referred to a native liaison officer
who said police would not bother looking for a 40-year-old
drug-addicted aboriginal prostitute. “That was a shock for
me,” she said.
Family members were told younger non-aboriginal
women were of higher priority, Ms. Sebastian said. The
native liaison officer suggested the family speak to
community agencies in the Downtown Eastside to see if they
could help find her mother, she said.
Once the police began an investigation, they made
mistakes, Ms. Sebastian said. They took blood and DNA from
family members but lost the samples before doing any
testing. They returned four years later to take more, Ms.
Sebastian said. “They lost time … when she could have been
found.”
Also, they closed the file at one point after
finding a woman with the same name, she said.
Almost two decades have passed, but the family
still cannot mourn her mother’s death, Ms. Sebastian said.
Police told the family not to have a memorial service. “They
said it would jeopardize the investigation.”
Ms. Sebastian said she hoped the inquiry could find
out what happened to her mother. “We need closure. We would
like to have her found. We want to know what happened.”
The B.C. government appointed former
attorney-general Wally Oppal to investigate why serial
killer Robert Pickton was not arrested before February,
2002. Dozens of women went missing from the Downtown
Eastside in the years before his arrest. He was convicted of
second-degree murder in the deaths of six women. He has said
he killed 49 women.
Elsie Sebastian’s background was similar to those
of women killed by Mr. Pickton, the inquiry was told.
However, none of the evidence found on the Pickton farm was
linked to her.
Ms. Sebastian recalled her last meeting with her
mother. It was a family reunion in Vancouver in July, 1992.
Ms. Sebastian, who was then 16 years old, had been living
with her grandmother in Hazelton in northern B.C. for the
previous four years.
Her mother was frail, restless and wanted to leave
for a narcotic fix, Ms. Sebastian said. She recalled her
younger brother was crying, “Don’t go away,” but her mother
left anyway. “That was the last time I saw my mother,” Ms.
Sebastian said. No one in the family has heard from her
since.
The first attempt to report her missing was in
October, 1992. Two years later, Ms. Sebastian went to
conduct her own search for her mother in the Downtown
Eastside. She was appalled by the gritty conditions on the
street.
Ms. Sebastian said both her mother and father, who
were from native bands in northern B.C., had gone through
residential schools and lacked parenting skills. They
struggled with alcohol.
Her mother became addicted to drugs after her
marriage broke up and she became involved with another man,
Ms. Sebastian said. Her mother tried unsuccessfully on
several occasions to go to treatment.
Although her mother lived in Vancouver away from
her three children, she regularly kept in touch with her
family. Then the phone calls suddenly stopped, the inquiry
was told. “I was scared,” Ms. Sebastian said.
Posted: Oct 25, 2011 4:30 PM PT
Last Updated: Oct 25, 2011 6:32 PM PT
The sister-in-law of one of Robert Pickton's
victims says a missing-person's report she filed with
Vancouver police sat in a filing drawer for years without
officers taking any action on the document.
Lori-Ann Ellis told thepublic
inquiry into the Robert Pickton caseTuesday
that she filed the report about Cara Ellis by phone from
Calgary, Alta. in 1998, about one month after she returned
home from Vancouver where she had spent part of a holiday
looking for her missing sister-in-law.
Cara was among the 20 women Pickton was charged
with killing before those charges were stayed.
However, Ellis said she never heard back from
police and only learned what happened to the report in the
mid-summer of 2004, when members of the Missing Women Task
Force visited her in Calgary — one day before a family
memorial to Cara Ellis.
Ellis said an RCMP member who was also a member of
the task force told her he had found the report in a filing
drawer and it had never been "actioned."
Police accountability
"I almost dropped the coffee pot," she said. "All
this time that we'd been sitting here waiting to hear, it
had sat in a damn drawer in the police station and no one
had even taken the time to do it."
"They're getting their paycheque to do it but
they're not doing it, and that really pissed me off."
Ellis said she thinks the incident is shameful, and
she said the people of Vancouver should be making the police
accountable for taking paycheques while not doing their
jobs.
Deborah
Ellis said she believes police inaction in dealing with her
missing sister-in-law was 'shameful.'CBCOver
the coming weeks, the inquiry will try to determine why
police failed to stop Pickton as he murdered sex workers
from the Downtown Eastside starting in the late 1990s.
But Ellis said it wasn't just police inaction that
infuriated her, it was also the attitude displayed by some
in the department.
She said in 1998, she called the Vancouver police
to follow up on her first missing person's report and spoke
to a woman.
"She told me in a really snarky tone: 'If Cara
wants to be found, she'll be found. Why don't you leave us
alone and let us do our job."'
Losing faith
Ellis said she began to lose faith that the police
were even looking for Cara.
"She told me that she's is probably on vacation,"
Ellis said. "How the hell can somebody earning like $100 a
month on welfare be able to go on vacation?"
'Nobody wants to look for
a 40-year-old native woman they're not interested in looking
for.'—Donalee Sebastian
During cross examination, Sean Hern, the lawyer for
the Vancouver police and the city's police board, asked
Ellis if she told police that Cara had a boyfriend named
Stan who was also a member of the Hells Angels.
He asked Ellis if she told police that Cara would
stay at a farm with a man who lived like a pig and who would
give her free drugs for cleaning his place.
Ellis said she didn't tell police about the Hells
Angels boyfriend or the man on the farm in 1998, and she
didn't recall if she told police about the man on the farm
in a later 2002 interview.
'Nobody wants to look'
Following Ellis' testimony, Donalee Sebastian told
the inquiry about her mother, Elsie Sebastian, who was last
seen on the Downtown Eastside in 1992 and who has never been
found.
Sebastian said she was shocked by the attitude of
the Vancouver police when she talked to a native liaison
worker.
"He told me that 'You might as well prepare
yourself, Donalee, because nobody wants to look for a
40-year-old native woman they're not interested in looking
for.'
"He also mentioned that looking for a drug-using
woman on the Downtown Eastside is like looking for a needle
in a haystack. And that was quite the shocker for me to
hear, you know, being the daughter of the woman who brought
me into this world."
Sebastian said the last time she saw Elsie was in
1992 when she was 16 and visiting an uncle's house at the
University of British Columbia.
But Sebastian said her mother needed a fix, made a
call and was picked up by a man who looked rough, and not
like a normal working person.
"We didn't want her to go. We wanted her to stay."
Sebastian said her brother began to cry.
"And I stood there and I just tried to hold my
brother's hand and she left with that person."
Sebastian said she never saw or heard from her
mother again.
Lawyers for the federal government have told the
inquiry they will not cross-examine the family members.
Lori-Ann
Ellis, sister-in-law of Cara Ellis who was one of Robert
Pickton's victims, poses for picture after testifying at the
Missing women inquiry inside Federal Court in Vancouver,
B.C., October 24, 2011.
Photograph by:Arlen
Redekop, PNG
VANCOUVER — The relatives of two missing women —
one murdered, the other never found — told a Vancouver
inquiry Tuesday that police ignored them when they tried to
report the disappearances.
Lori-Ann Ellis, whose sister-in-law Cara was found
dead on Robert Pickton's farm, said police told her "if Cara
wants to be found, she'll be found, now leave us alone and
let us do our job."
Ellis told the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry
Tuesday that her husband's sister disappeared from
Vancouver's drug- and violence-plagued Downtown Eastside in
1998.
Ellis said that she made a 36-point list for police
that included the fact that Cara sometimes visited a
suburban farm "run by a man who lived like a pig, and was
filthy."
Cara would clean for the man in exchange for "free
drugs," Ellis said.
But police, the Calgary mother said, "let us down
over and over. (They) could have done a lot more to stop
this."
Cara's remains were found on Pickton's farm in
2004, two years after the serial killer was arrested. At
that time, the inquiry heard, RCMP Staff Sgt. Murray Lunn
told Ellis: "Oh, by the way, we found that missing persons
report you filed back in 1998."
Pickton, 62, is now serving a life sentence for the
murders of six women. He was initially charged with killing
20 more — including Cara — but those charges were stayed in
2010.
The serial killer has been linked by DNA to the
deaths of 33 women and boasted to an undercover police
officer that he killed at least 16 more.
The inquiry, headed by Commissioner Wally Oppal, is
investigating why it took the Vancouver Police Department
and RCMP until 2002 to catch Pickton when they were
receiving detailed tips as far back as 1998.
Ellis slammed the police during her testimony on
Tuesday, saying they "dropped the ball."
"We were lied to, mistreated, misled and
manipulated."
She said she's worried that police will not tell
Oppal the truth because "they have so much to hide."
Ellis, the second family member to testify at the
inquiry, had advice for police.
"Take the families seriously. Don't write these
girls off," she said.
"Learn not to make a second group of victims by
victimizing the families as well. . . . If we stay with the
all-boys club (that) the police have become, and stay
cloistered in your blue-uniform world, sitting above
everyone — things will never get better."
Later Tuesday, Donalee Sebastian testified that her
mother, Elsie Louise Jones Sebastian, disappeared in 1992,
but Vancouver police wouldn't take a missing persons report.
"The lady said to me, 'Looking for a native woman
down here is pretty well near impossible, especially a
native woman who's a drug-user.' "
Sebastian, now a nursing student in Victoria, said
her mother struggled to survive as a single mom, after
suffering severe beatings and isolation while in residential
school from the age of five to 16.
"She had limited resources to rebuild her life and
she fell down through the cracks, down and down. . . . She
was a loving mother who did her best."
Elsie has never been found.
Her voice breaking, Sebastian turned to face Oppal,
saying "Mr. Oppal, you took this upon yourself; find my
mother for me, please let's find her and bring her home."
Oppal responded late Tuesday: "We expect to hear
from a lot of police officers who may be in a position to
tell you what happened.
"I want to sincerely thank you for coming here and
sharing your heart-wrenching stories with us. If change is
going to come it will only come from people like yourself
who will tell us how we can improve the system."
Then Jan Brongers, lawyer for the RCMP, promised to
make inquiries and "provide an update" on the long-unsolved
disappearance.
Brongers has vowed he will not cross-examine family
members of 18 murdered women.
Lawyers for the Vancouver Police Department, the
Vancouver Police Board, the Vancouver Police Union and
individual officers all cross-examined the first family
member to testify on Monday.
The cross-examination of Lynn Frey, whose
stepdaughter Marnie was murdered by Pickton, prompted the
families' lawyer, Cameron Ward, to complain to the inquiry
about duplicate and harassing questioning.
Oppal's report will analyze how Vancouver police
and the RCMP handled the Pickton investigation from 1997 to
2002 and whether the 20 additional murder charges should
have been stayed. It will also look at why 1997 charges were
stayed against Pickton after a sex worker ran naked and
handcuffed from his farm.
The daughter of a woman who vanished from
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in 1992 made an emotional
appeal at the Pickton inquiry Tuesday for authorities to
find out what happened to her mother.
Elsie Sebastian was last seen in July,
1992, when her daughter, Donalee Sebastian, was 16 years
old. Elsie was 40.
·
The debacle over B.C.'s missing women Testifying at the inquiry in
Vancouver, Donalee Sebastian said police refused to accept
missing-person reports for years after her mother went
missing. “It’s quite disturbing,” she said, adding that
attempts were made by her sister, two grandmothers and two
uncles, as well as herself.
She had been referred to a native liaison
officer who said police would not bother looking for a
40-year-old drug-addicted aboriginal prostitute. “That was a
shock for me,” she said.
Family members were told younger
non-aboriginal women were of higher priority, Ms. Sebastian
said. The native liaison officer suggested the family speak
to community agencies in the Downtown Eastside to see if
they could help find her mother, she said.
Once the police began an investigation,
they made mistakes, Ms. Sebastian said. They took blood and
DNA from family members but lost the samples before doing
any testing. They returned four years later to take more,
Ms. Sebastian said. “They lost time … when she could have
been found.”
Also, they closed the file at one point
after finding a woman with the same name, she said.
Almost two decades have passed, but the
family still cannot mourn her mother’s death, Ms. Sebastian
said. Police told the family not to have a memorial service.
“They said it would jeopardize the investigation.”
Ms. Sebastian said she hoped the inquiry
could find out what happened to her mother. “We need
closure. We would like to have her found. We want to know
what happened.”
The B.C. government appointed former
attorney-general Wally Oppal to investigate why serial
killer Robert Pickton was not arrested before February,
2002. Dozens of women went missing from the Downtown
Eastside in the years before his arrest. He was convicted of
second-degree murder in the deaths of six women. He has said
he killed 49 women.
Elsie Sebastian’s background was similar
to those of women killed by Mr. Pickton, the inquiry was
told. However, none of the evidence found on the Pickton
farm was linked to her.
Ms. Sebastian recalled her last meeting
with her mother. It was a family reunion in Vancouver in
July, 1992. Ms. Sebastian, who was then 16 years old, had
been living with her grandmother in Hazelton in northern
B.C. for the previous four years.
Her mother was frail, restless and wanted
to leave for a narcotic fix, Ms. Sebastian said. She
recalled her younger brother was crying, “Don’t go away,”
but her mother left anyway. “That was the last time I saw my
mother,” Ms. Sebastian said. No one in the family has heard
from her since.
The first attempt to report her missing
was in October, 1992. Two years later, Ms. Sebastian went to
conduct her own search for her mother in the Downtown
Eastside. She was appalled by the gritty conditions on the
street.
Ms. Sebastian said both her mother and
father, who were from native bands in northern B.C., had
gone through residential schools and lacked parenting
skills. They struggled with alcohol.
Her mother became addicted to drugs after
her marriage broke up and she became involved with another
man, Ms. Sebastian said. Her mother tried unsuccessfully on
several occasions to go to treatment.
Although her mother lived in Vancouver
away from her three children, she regularly kept in touch
with her family. Then the phone calls suddenly stopped, the
inquiry was told. “I was scared,” Ms. Sebastian said.
By Suzanne
Fournier, The ProvinceOctober 24, 2011 7:28 PM
The family of
Marnie Frey -- Joyce Lachance (L), Rick Frey (C) and Lynn
Frey (R) hold a star blanket bearing Frey's photo at the
First Nations healing circle supporting the families of the
missing and murdered women in the intersection of Granville
and Georgia on Oct. 17. Lynn Frey testified at the Missing
Women inquiry on Monday, Oct. 24.
Photograph by:
Ian Lindsay, PNG
Lynn Frey told the Missing Women Commission of
Inquiry that “as a mom from Campbell River,” she readily
heard on Vancouver streets in 1998 about a farm where women
disappeared into a wood chipper.
Frey was searching for her beloved stepdaughter
Marnie, who had the “disease” of drug addiction but called
home every day — for the very last time on Marnie’s birthday
on Aug. 30, 1997.
In her testimony at the inquiry Monday, Frey said
she and Marnie were very close, and that Marnie was a
“compassionate, caring” girl who began using drugs in her
late teens, then moved to the Downtown Eastside. Lynn asked
Marnie how she was paying for drugs there and Marnie told
her, “I’m selling myself ... it’s really scary.”
Frey knew Marnie was in trouble and began calling
hospitals and morgues. She pounded the Downtown Eastside
streets, putting up posters and photos of her daughter.
Frey said she tried very hard to get Vancouver
Police and the RCMP to help.
“They didn’t give a damn,” she said, adding that if
Marnie had been from the University of B.C. or Kerrisdale
and not a “low-class prostitute,” police would have looked
for her. The inaction of police made Frey feel “lost, empty,
like I was garbage,” she said.
Frey said Vancouver police officers failed to do
the basic research she did, although she lived in a small
town and was searching for Marnie while taking care of her
dying mother, who lived in Mission, and Marnie’s daughter
Britney.
One police officer joked that the heavily-addicted
Marnie, who tried many times to kick her heroin habit, was
“on a cruise,” Frey testified.
Frey began asking Downtown Eastside residents more
questions about women going missing on a muddy farm, near a
fast-moving river, 45 minutes from Vancouver, their bodies
disposed of in a “chipper.”
Then a tip from Frey’s foster sister Joyce
Lachance, who lived in Port Coquitlam, led her right to the
front gate of the PoCo pig farm owned by now-convicted
serial killer Robert Pickton. Frey even scaled the fence the
first night she went there but retreated when dogs were set
on her.
Frey visited the farm many times, often at night
after a fruitless day of looking for Marnie. She even drove
onto the farm once with Lachance, who babysat for the
children of Pickton’s friend and sometime-housemate Gina
Houston. Frey said she felt a strange premonition that
“Marnie was there.”
But Pickton went on to kill a dozen more women
until Coquitlam RCMP exercising a firearms warrant stumbled
upon evidence of the missing women and arrested him in 2002.
After his arrest police began an exhaustive
forensic search to the bedrock of the
junk-and-vehicle-strewn farm where Pickton slaughtered pigs.
It was not until 2004 that a six-car cavalcade of
RCMP officers came to the Campbell River home of Lynn Frey
and her husband, commercial fisherman Rick Frey, who had a
very close bond with Marnie.
They had found Marnie’s right jawbone and three of
her teeth, not far from where Lynn had sensed her daughter’s
presence on the gloomy, muddy farm of Willie Pickton.
Frey said she finally found a “caring,
compassionate” police officer when Vancouver police
detective Lori Shenher was assigned to Missing Persons.
Shenher would hug Frey, ask how she was doing, and
even chided her for climbing the fence at the Pickton farm.
Frey said Shenher was well-aware of Pickton, his farm and
the avalanche of tips that he was picking up women on the
Downtown Eastside and luring them to his PoCo farm with
money and drugs. Some women never returned.
Frey did not know what Shenher did with the
knowledge of Pickton, but no police agency went on the farm
until 2002.
Pickton, 62, is serving a life sentence for the
murder of six women, including Marnie Frey, but has been
linked by DNA to the deaths of 33 women.
Charges involving 20 murdered women were stayed in
2010, after Pickton exhausted all legal appeals. Pickton
himself boasted in jail to an undercover officer that he had
killed 49 women in total.
Inquiry Commissioner Wally Oppal has pledged to
hand in his report to the BC government by the end of 2011.
This week, the inquiry will hear from several
family members, represented by lawyers Cameron Ward and Neil
Chantler, about the lives of 18 women murdered by Pickton.
Almost four years
before Robert Pickton was arrested for a string of horrific
murders, the stepmother of one of his victims tried to climb
a fence at his notorious pig farm in a desperate search for
any signs of the young woman.
Lynn Frey told the
missing women's inquiry in Vancouver Monday that she was
following a horrible rumour after her stepdaughter vanished
from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in 1997.
Frey said that more
than a year after Marnie Frey disappeared, she spoke with a
prostitute who relayed the rumour that bodies of Vancouver
prostitutes were being stuffed into a wood chipper.
''They just didn't
really care. They were too busy.'—Lynn
Frey on the police attitude about her missing stepdaughter
Frey later found an aid
worker who had a tape recording of a woman who also offered
a chilling warning about Pickton.
"The lady's voice on
the tape said you're never going to find these women.
Willie's got them and he has a pig farm," she told the
inquiry.
Frey said many other
women were looking for their daughters around that time and
had heard the same rumours.
In September 1998, Frey
said she drove to Pickton's farm in suburban Port Coquitlam
and tried to climb a fence but was chased away by a couple
of dogs.
"That night when I went
there, when I was backing out of the driveway, I had a very
weird feeling," Frey said. "My heart was pounding and I
thought at first it was just because I was having anxiety
attacks, but I guess it wasn't really an anxiety attack. It
was a reality check. She was there."
Frey said the officer
said Pickton was a person of interest.
Returned to farm
often
Frey said after her
first visit to the farm, she returned there every time she
travelled to Vancouver from Campbell River, B.C.
In December 2007, a
decade after Marnie Frey disappeared, Pickton was convicted
of murdering her and five other women. The remains or DNA of
33 women were found on his farm.
Another 20 murder
charges against Pickton were stayed after he lost his appeal
at the Supreme Court of Canada.
Frey told the inquiry
that her stepdaughter was a drug addict and a sex worker,
and that the last time they spoke was on Marnie's 24th
birthday at the end of August 1997.
The young woman had
taken on the street name Kit Kat, and to this day Frey said
she can't eat the popular chocolate bar of the same name.
She said her
stepdaughter even told her to use the moniker if she ever
wanted to find her on the streets.
Frey said she did just
that as she battled police indifference and initiated her
own search to find Marnie Frey in the months after she
disappeared.
Between August 1997 and
March 1998, Frey said she made at least 10 to 15 trips to
the Downtown Eastside from her Vancouver Island home to look
for her daughter.
"They just didn't
really care," said Frey of one interaction she had with
police, during which she showed the officers a photo of her
stepdaughter. "They were too busy."
Walked streets in
search
She said that after her
stepdaughter went missing, police in Campbell River told her
to wait a few more days because the woman was a 24-year-old
adult and that she may be on a holiday.
Frey said that several
days later, she returned to the detachment but was told to
wait a few more weeks.
That's when Frey
travelled to the Downtown Eastside to look for Marnie
herself, even though her own mother was dying at the time in
the Fraser Valley.
"I just had an awful
feeling that something was wrong and I wasn't getting
anywhere with the police so I took it upon myself. As I said
my mother was dying, so I'd go down there as often as I
could and spend time with my mom during the day and look for
Marnie on the streets of Vancouver at night."
Frey said she and her
foster sister walked up and down the streets in November
1997 with a picture of Marnie, asking local residents if
they had seen "Kit," and even looked in dumpsters.
Over the coming months,
inquiry Commissioner Wally Oppal will try to determine why
police failed to stop Pickton as he murdered sex workers
from the Downtown Eastside starting in the late 1990s.
Oppal will also examine
the decision of Crown counsel to not prosecute Pickton for
attempted murder after an attack on a sex worker in 1997.
Vancouver police have
apologized several times for failing to catch Pickton as he
continued his killing spree. The force released a report
last year that was critical of itself and the RCMP in Port
Coquitlam, where Pickton's farm was located.
The RCMP has not
offered such an apology or admitted its officers made
mistakes, insisting it is up to the inquiry to confirm what
happened.
Deborah
Ellis said she believes police inaction in dealing with her
missing sister-in-law was 'shameful.'
