Soet, a schizophrenic on medication, disappeared on 28 August 1989 and was reported missing on 1 October 1990. The first black woman on the list was Kathleen Dale Wattley. She was 32 years old when she vanished on 18 June 1992 and was reported missing 11 days later.
There was then a three-year hiatus. But in March 1995 47-year-old Catherine Gonzales, a drug user and sex-trade worker, disappeared. She was reported missing 9 February 1996. In April 1995, 32-year-old Catherine Maureen Knight went missing. Her disappearance was reported to the police on 11 November. Dorothy Spence, a 33-year-old First-Nations woman, vanished on 6 August 1995. Her disappearance was reported earlier on 30 October. Then 22-year-old Diana Melnick disappeared two days after Christmas and was reported missing two days later.
There was another hiatus until 3 October 1996 when 22-year-old drug user and prostitute Tanya Holyk disappeared. Her family knew something was wrong when she didn’t come home to see her son, who was about to turn one, after a night out with friends. Pickton has since been charged with her murder. She was reported missing on 3 November. Olivia Gale Williams, aged 21, disappeared on 6 December 1996 and was not reported missing until 4 July the following year.
Twenty-year-old Stephanie Lane left her two-year-old son with her mother along with an uncashed welfare cheque, though she continued to call on birthdays and holidays. Then on 11 March 1997, she was released from hospital after an episode of drug psychosis. She was last seen alive at the Patricia Hotel on Hastings Street later that day. She has not been heard of since.
Twenty-two-year old Helen Mae Hallmark was last seen alive on 17 June 1997 and reported missing on 23 September 1998. Her sister wrote a poem to her memory.
Janet Henry, who also went missing in June 1997, came from the KwaKwaQueWak Nation in Kingcome Inlet in British Columbia, the youngest in a family of thirteen. She had a happy childhood until her mother fell ill and her father died. The children were sent to residential schools and foster homes, losing all ties to their native culture. Her sister Lavina was raped and murdered when she was 19. Another sibling killed himself.
A bright young woman, Janet graduated from high school, became a trained hairdresser, married and had a daughter, who she was devoted to. But when the marriage broke up in the late 1980s, her husband was given custody of their daughter. Janet was devastated and her life went into free-fall. She moved to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and begun attending parties where she exchanged sex for drugs.
She had already had one brush with a serial killer. In the early 1980s, she met Clifford Olson, who drugged and raped her, but her life was spared. Olson pleaded guilty to 11 murders in 1982. All too aware of the dangers of her profession, Janet would phone her brothers and sisters frequently to let them know she was okay. She was reported missing on 28 June 1997, two days after her last contact with her siblings.
Marnie Lee Frey, 27, was last seen alive in August 1997, though she was not reported missing until 4 September 1998. She had a baby at 18 and asked her parents to adopt the child.
“She said, ‘Mom, this is the only thing I can do for her. I love her dearly, but I know I can’t look after her as a mom,’” her mother recalled.
Her parents pretended that the child, Brittney, was Marnie’s younger sister but were forced to tell her the truth in the light of the publicity surrounding the case.
Jacqueline Murdock, aged 26, was last seen alive on 14 August but was not reported missing until 30 October 1998. Thirty-three-year-old Cindy Louise Beck disappeared in September 1997 and was reported missing on 30 April 1998. Andrea Fay Borhaven, aged 25, had no fixed address until she vanished sometime during 1997, it is thought. Her disappearance was only reported to the police on 18 May 1999. Thirty-eight-year-old Kerry Lynn Koski disappeared in January 1998 and was reported missing on the 29th of the month.
Four more women would disappear before Vancouver police were prompted to take an interest in the case. Twenty-three-year-old Jacqueline McDonnell disappeared in mid-January 1998 and was reported missing on 22 February 1999 and 46-year-old Inga Monique Hall was last seen alive in February 1998 and reported missing on 3 March.
Twenty-nine-year-old mother-of-two Sarah Jane deVries was last seen on the corner of Princess and Hastings in the early morning of 14 April 1998 and reported missing by friends later the same day.
“This started when she was 12,” said her mother Pat. “She has HIV, she has hepatitis C. What I do for her now is look after her kids the best I can.”
When Sarah went missing, her children were seven and two.
“It’s very hard to tell a seven-year-old that somebody is missing,” said Pat. “It’s something you can’t come to terms with, you can’t work through, because there’s never an end to it.”
Nobody has seen or heard from her since. This was unprecedented as she always called on her mother’s birthday, Mother’s Day and her own birthday.
Ex-boyfriend Wayne Leng said Sarah underwent “a lot of turmoil” in her 29 years, particularly as she was a child of mixed parentage adopted by an all-white family on the West Side. As Sarah herself observed in a diary she left behind: “I think my hate is going to be my destination, my executioner.”
Leng put up posters around the Vancouver’s Downtown East-side carrying Sarah’s picture and details of a $1000 reward. But three phone calls he got on his pager around midnight one Saturday night left him chilled.
“Sarah’s dead,” said a man’s slightly slurred voice, with music pounding in the background. “So there will be more girls like her dead. There will be more prostitutes killed. There will be one every Friday night. At the busiest time.”
The second message featured the same voice and had the same music playing in the background.
“You’ll never find Sarah again,” the man said. “So just stop looking for her, all right? She doesn’t want to be seen and heard from again, all right? So, ’bye. She’s dead.”
The final message said: “This is in regard to Sarah. I just want to let you know that you’ll never find her again alive because a friend of mine killed her and I was there.”
Leng said the mystery caller knew things about Sarah deVries not known by many others.
Sheila Catherine Egan was 20 when she vanished in July 1998. Her disappearance was reported on 5 August. She had been a prostitute since the age of 15.
In September 1998, a First Nations’ group sent the authorities a list of women they said had been murdered in Downtown East-side and demanded a thorough investigation. The police responded by saying that some of those listed had moved away and were still alive. Others had died from drug overdoses or disease. However, the complaint prompted Detective Dave Dickson to take a second look at the list of all the Low Track women who had simply disappeared without a trace. By now it had enough names on it to persuade Dickson’s superiors to allow him to set up a cold-case task force.
Throwing its net wide, the task-force started with 40 cases from all parts of Vancouver dating back to 1971. But in an effort to find a pattern, the roster was narrowed to 16 prostitutes from Low Track who had disappeared since 1995. By the time the task force made its first arrest the number had climbed to at least 54 women, who had vanished between 1983 and 2001. By then the task force had swelled to 85.
In the last three months of 1998, while the task force was compiling old cases, four more Low Track prostitutes vanished. Thirty-one-year-old Julie Louise Young was last seen alive in October 1998 and finally reported missing on 1 June 1999. Drug-addict Angela Rebecca Jardine was 28 when she went missing, but she was mentally handicapped and had the mind of a 10-year-old child. She had been working Low Track’s streets since she was 20. Last seen between 3.30 and 4 p.m. on 20 November 1998 at a rally of around 700 people in Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, she was reported missing on 6 December. Twenty-nine-year-old Michelle Gurney, a Native American, disappeared in December 1998 and was reported missing on the 22nd. Twenty-year-old Marcella Helen Creison got out of jail on 27 December 1998. She was last seen at 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning around the corner from the Drake Hotel and never returned to the apartment where her mother and boyfriend were waiting with unopened Christmas presents. She was reported missing on 11 January 1999.
The task force’s investigations were given added impetus in March 1999 when Jamie Lee Hamilton, a transsexual and former prostitute who went on to become the director of a drop-in centre for sex-trade workers, called a news conference complaining of the police’s lax attitude towards missing prostitutes.
First the task force had to decide if there was a serial killer at large in Vancouver. Inspector Kim Rossmo was convinced there was. The founder of the “geographic profiling” later used in the “Freeway Phantom” case, he was then working for the Vancouver Police Department. He mapped unsolved crimes in an attempt to highlight any pattern or criminal signature overlooked by detectives working on individual cases. Geographic profiles work on the
