been responsible.
The elusive “Green River Killer” had been killing runaways and prostitutes over the border in Washington State for much of the period. On 30 November 2001, 52-year-old Gary Leon Ridgway was charged with murdering four of the Green River victims. Two years later he pleaded guilty to 49 murders. There were reports that Ridgway had visited Vancouver, but the police could make no connection between him and the missing women.
Dayton Leroy Rogers was abducting, torturing and killing prostitutes in Oregon in 1987. He was arrested on 7 August 1987, after murdering a prostitute in a parking lot in front of witnesses. Only then did it become clear that he was responsible for the murder of seven women whose bodies had been found in a wooded area near Molalla, 20 miles outside the city. Some had had their feet cut off, possibly while they were still alive. But Rogers was soon cleared on any involvement in the earlier Vancouver abductions.
George Waterfield Russell Jnr—aka “The Charmer”, “The Bellevue Killer” and, coincidently, “The East Side Killer”—was also considered. He had killed three women in Bellevue, Washington in 1990. But he was discounted because he killed his victims in their own homes and then displayed them in elaborate poses, after he had raped and mutilated their corpses.
Other serial killers were suspected. In 1995, Keith Hunter Jesperson, a British Columbian, had been arrested in Washington State, for the murder of his girlfriend 41-year-old Julie Winningham. He had strangled her and dumped her body at the roadside. A long-haul truck driver, he then said he had murdered women widely across North America, dumping their bodies like “piles of garbage” along the roadside. At one point he boasted about 160 murders, though he has been convicted for just eight. But, again, the police could not find a link between the man the newspapers dubbed the “Happy Face Killer” and the missing women from Low Track.
Seemingly mild-mannered US Navy veteran and father of two John Eric Armstrong was arrested in April 2000 for the murder of a number of Detroit prostitutes and promptly confessed to killing 30 women around the world during his time in the Navy. However, his ship the USS
Middle-aged father of five, Robert Yates was convicted of killing 15 women in Washington State in October 2000, but is thought to have killed at least 18, most of whom were drug addicts and prostitutes. The earliest killings he admitted to were those of two women in Walla Walla in 1975 and a woman in Skagit County in 1988, both close to the border. However, evidence could not place him in Vancouver at the time of any of the disappearances.
Vancouver had its own home-grown suspect in the person of Ronald Richard McCauley, a twice-convicted rapist. Sentenced to 17 years imprisonment in 1982, he was paroled in September 1994. In September 1995, he was arrested again after he picked up a prostitute at Vancouver’s Astoria Hotel in July and drove her to Hemlock Valley, where she was beaten, raped and dumped from his truck. The woman reported the incident to police and McCauley was convicted of rape and attempted murder in 1996.
McCauley came to the attention of the police again when the bodies of prostitutes Tracy Olajide, Tammy Lee Pipe and Victoria Younker were found that year near Agassiz and Mission near Hemlock Valley. He was also a suspect in the murder of Mary Lidguerre whose body was found in north Vancouver two years later, and the disappearance of Catherine Maureen Knight, Catherine Louise Gonzalez and Dorothy Anne Spence who went missing in 1995. Despite circumstantial evidence against him, he was never charged. Eventually he was cleared of the three Hemlock Valley murders by DNA evidence in 2001. But after telling a parole hearing that, had he not been arrested, he “would have become a serial killer such as Clifford Olson” he was declared a dangerous offender and jailed indefinitely.
On 7 February 2002, Robert Pickton was arrested for the possession of illegal firearms. Meanwhile the task force began scouring the pig farm once again. Pickton was released on bail, but arrested again on 22 February—this time on two counts of first-degree murder. The victims were identified as Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson. On 8 March, it was revealed that DNA recovered from the farm had been conclusively identified as Sereena’s. Both had gone missing since Bill Hiscox had first reported his suspicions to the police
A month later, Pickton was charged with three more counts of murder—those of Jacqueline McDonnell, Heather Bottomley and Diane Rock. He was charged with the murder of Angela Josebury, six days later. Then on 22 May, a seventh first-degree murder charge was filed against Pickton when the remains of Brenda Wolfe were found on his farm. Again, all these women had gone missing after Hiscox first fingered Pickton.
This begged the question: if Pickton was the Low Track slayer, why had the searches of the farm in 1997 and 1998 not unearthed any evidence? And how could he have continued to abduct and murder victims afterwards, when he should have been under surveillance by the police?
The authorities were adamant that the evidence had been hard to come by as Pickton went to great lengths to dispose of the bodies. They were said to have been left out in the open to decompose or be eaten by insects. Otherwise they were fed to the pigs on the farm. Forensic anthropologists spent two years and $70 million shifting through the soil on the farm in an attempt to find traces of remains. Then in March 2004, the authorities said that the victims’ flesh may have been ground up and mixed with pork from the farm. This pork was never sold commercially, but was handed out to friends and fed to visitors to the farm—perhaps even visiting prostitutes themselves.
Meanwhile Pickton maintains his innocence of all charges. But even if he is guilty as charged, what happened to the other women who went missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside? Their number is disputed. The task force maintain there are another 47 unaccounted for. However, when Pickton was arrested, the Prostitution Alternatives Counselling Education said that 110 streetwalkers from British Columbia’s Lower Mainland had been slain or kidnapped over the past two decades. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have 144 cases of prostitutes murdered or missing with foul play suspected across the province. So it is likely that there is another—or possibly several—killers at large in British Columbia.
Canada’s “Highway of Tears”
A serial killer, or killers, seem to be at work along Highway 16 in northern British Columbia. The stretch that runs the 450 miles from Prince Rupert to Prince George has become known at the “Highway of Tears”. It is regularly flanked by posters showing pictures of teenage girls and young women under the word “Missing”.
It is a lonely stretch of road, especially in winter—though it can be staggeringly beautiful when the sun comes out and rays of light coming through the clouds play on the frozen lakes, creeks and vistas of mountains that disappear in the clouds. Sometimes at sunrise and sunset, the snow on the mountain peaks glows neon pink.
On some parts of the road there is nothing but wilderness for miles, interrupted by the occasional ranch house with smoke trailing from the chimney. There are signs warning: “Caution: Moose Next 20 km.”
Travelling through the towns along the way—Vanderhoof, Fraser Lake, Burns Lake, Houston, Telkwa and Smithers—the car radio announces meetings of the local knitting circle and the snowmobile club. Young residents have few choices but to hitchhike when they travel from town to town.
There are many side roads off the highway, leading to remote logging sites, lakes and other rural recreational spots. It is the kind of sparsely-populated rural countryside that attracts tourists and sports fishermen from Europe and the US—including late-night talk show host David Letterman—and, it seems, murderers.
The disturbing pattern of disappearances was first noticed in 1995, but they seem to have started much earlier. The victims were young girls, mostly Aboriginal in origin, and aged 15 to their early 20s. They vanished after being seen hitch-hiking along the highway.
Fifteen-year-old Monica Ignas appears to be the first victim. She went missing near Terrace on 13 December 1974. Her partially clothed body was found in a gravel pit on 6 April 1975, about four miles from Terrace. She had been strangled.
One area resident, Janet Hultkrans, recalls that Ignas used to hitch-hike from Terrace to her home just past Thornhill, on the outskirts of town.
“Maybe she was the first [to disappear],” she says. “She wasn’t much older than my kids and I had picked her up once and driven her to school, so she is forever in my memory. She was a nice girl and doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.”
In the early hours of 27 August 1989 a 24-year-old “First-Nations” woman named Alberta Gail Williams disappeared from Prince Rupert. The police were notified and the family under took a frantic search.
