“I don’t believe she ever got here,” he said and believes that she got lost like other women along Highway 16. He agreed to take a lie-detector test.
Ten RCMP officers were assigned to the investigation and Tamara’s family undertook an extensive search of the highway. Her father walked long stretches of the road looking in every culvert. Officers also contacted the major crimes unit in Prince George which continues to investigate the disappearance of numerous women along Highway 16 over the last decade.
Meanwhile, 24-year-old Crystal Lee Okimaw disappeared from a women’s shelter in Prince George on 16 January 2006. Foul play was suspected.
The remains of 14-year-old Aielah Saric-Auger were found by a passing motorist on the side of Highway 16 near Tabor Mountain 10 miles east of Prince George on 10 February 2006. She was last seen by her family on 2 February. At the time, family members said she stayed overnight with a friend, but there were report of a sighting of her getting into a black van the following day. Two retired RCMP officers who had worked on the earlier investigation told the
Retired RCMP officer Fred Maile, who helped crack the Clifford Olson serial killer case in British Columbia by getting Olson to confess to 11 murders, told the
He had been asked by the Calgary-based Missing Children Society to investigate these two Highway 16 cases and found too many similarities.
“They were both native, both about the same age and they were hitch-hiking in opposite directions,” Maile recalls. “The whole situation smacks of someone driving that highway and living there.”
The unusual thing about serial killers, he said, is that they can sometimes go years between murders.
“They look for an opportunity,” he said. “There’s usually not two or three individuals in the same area that do this.”
He also points out that a serial killer can appear normal and go undetected.
“They don’t stand out as monsters. They blend in with the rest of us. Look at the Green River killer.”
Arlene Roberts, a volunteer fire-fighter who lives on Highway 16 just west of Terrace, agrees that there is a killer who preys on young women at work. She often sees people hitch-hiking along the highway.
“It’s male and female, young and old,” she says. “But it’s only the young women who are going missing.”
Highway 16 also runs east to Edmonton, where the police have the unsolved murders of 12 prostitutes on their hands. In that case, RCMP have offered a reward of $100,000 and released a profile that suggests the killer or killers drive a truck or SUV which is cleaned at unusual hours. It is thought that the killer may be a hunter, fisherman or camper, who is comfortable driving on unmetalled roads, and is probably connected to towns south of Edmonton.
Some 175 miles south of Edmonton is Calgary where, in a 19-month period in the early 1990s, five women— four of whom were prostitutes—disappeared. Their bodies later appeared, dumped around the outskirts of the city.
The first woman to disappear was 16-year-old street urchin Jennifer Janz, who disappeared in July 1991. Her badly beaten body was discovered in a shallow grave on 13 August 1991 in the Valley Ridge district of northwest Calgary. Reported missing on 30 August 1991, the body of 17-year-old Jennifer Joyes was found in a shallow grave on 6 October 1991, just a mile south of where Janz had been buried. Both had reportedly been attempting to escape life on the streets. Keely Pincott, who disappeared three months later, was found nearby.
Tracey Maunder went missing in October 1992 and 20-year-old Rebecca Boutelier disappeared in February 1993. She was found stabbed to death on 11 March. Their bodies were found in fields east of the city rather than to the west like those of Jennifer Janz, Jennifer Joyes and Keely Pincott.
Then the killings stopped. Police believe that the perpetrator might have been jailed for another murder. During the same time period these five women were murdered city officials also have unsolved murder files on six other women.
Later Barry Thomas Neidermier became a suspect in the murders of Jennifer Janz and Rebecca Boutelier. A convicted pimp, he had become “a person of interest” in the case of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside’s missing prostitutes after being arrested in Lethbridge, Alberta, a hundred miles south of Calgary. Forty-three-year-old Barry Thomas Niedermier was charged with brutal sexual assaults from 1995 to 1997 against seven prostitutes working in downtown Vancouver, where he had been living. He was also questioned by police in Edmonton and Calgary in their own missing prostitute cases, including those who had gone missing in the late 1970s and 1980s. In 1990 Neidermier had been sentenced to 14 months imprisonment for pimping a 14-year-old girl whom he brought from Calgary to Vancouver.
As if RCMP did not have enough unsolved cases on their hands, according to Amnesty International Canada, Tamara Chipman’s disappearance bought the number of missing or murdered women along the highway to 33—all but one were Aboriginal. This was based on information gathered for a report Amnesty released in October 2004 called
The report also included a figure gathered by the Native Women’s Association of Canada, which estimates that more than 500 native women may have been murdered or gone missing over a 20-year period prior to 2004.
The Amnesty International report also cited nine cases of violence against native women, including the murder of Helen Betty Osborne, a 19-year-old Cree student from northern Manitoba who dreamed of becoming a teacher but was abducted from the street of The Pas, Manitoba by four men, raped and killed on the night of 12 November 1971. Her naked body was found later by the police.
It took more than 15 years to bring one of the four men to justice. The Aboriginal Justice Implementation Commission conducted an investigation into the length of time involved in resolving the case and concluded that the most significant factor was racism. The Commission found that police had long been aware of white men sexually preying on native women and girls in the town of The Pas but “did not feel that the practice necessitated any particular vigilance.”
A formal apology from the Manitoba government was issued by Manitoba’s Minister of Justice in 2000 and a scholarship was created in Osborne’s name for aboriginal women.
But at least the case of Helen Osborne was resolved. Many more have not been—like that of 16-year-old Deena Lynn Braem of Quesnel, BC. She was last seen alive at around 4 a.m. on 25 September 1999, just two days before her 17th birthday. She was later reported as missing and the police immediately suspected foul play.
On 10 December 1999, human remains were found near Pinnacles Park, just west of Quesnel. A post mortem identified the body as that of Deena Braem. She had been murdered.
On Friday, 24 September, she had attended Correlieu Secondary in Quesnel, where she was just beginning her final year. She lived in Bouchie Lake, some six miles to the west of Quesnel, but her parents had given her permission to stay the weekend with a friend in the city to celebrate her birthday. Together they went to an outdoor party in the Quesnel area. It was well part midnight when they left. Deena had been drinking alcohol, but according to friends was not drunk. They got a lift back to Quesnel and were dropped off at a residence on English Avenue at around 2.30. But then, at Deena’s urging, they went out again.
Deena had decided she wanted to go home to her Mom and Dad instead of staying in town with friends. The two girls walked the short distance to the intersection of North Fraser Drive and Edkins Street, then up North Fraser Drive to Fuller, while they tried to hitch a ride. It was cold and Deena’s girlfriend went home, leaving Deena to hitchhike alone. Witnesses saw two males in their teens or early twenties in North Fraser Drive around that time and the case remains unsolved. But then in Quesnel there are a remarkable number of unsolved cases.
On 26 November 2004, the family of Barbara Anne Lanes, aged 57, reported her missing. She had not been seen for a week. The sightings were investigated but none were confirmed, and police have no clues about where she is or how she disappeared. Laurie Joseph Blanchard was last seen in Quesnel on 2 July 1972, when he was preparing to move to New Brunswick. His body was found on 13 August 1972. He had been murdered. Mary Agnes
