Thomas disappeared under suspicious circumstances near Quesnel on or about 10 September 1971. Her body has never been recovered. Herman Alec disappeared under suspicious circumstances near the Nazko Indian Reserve on 14 October 1977. His body has never been found. Santokh Kaur Johal disappeared under suspicious circumstances near Quesnel on or about 1 April 1978. Her body has never been recovered. Janice Ellisabeth Hackh disappeared under suspicious circumstances near Quesnel on or about 24 August 1979. Her body has never been found. Wayne Albert Taylor disappeared under suspicious circumstances near Quesnel in or around January 1976. His body has never been recovered. Mary Jane Jimmie was found murdered on the banks of the nearby Fraser River on or about 26 June 1987. Duncan Harris was found on a sidewalk in Quesnel on 6 July 1988, apparently the victim of an assault. He later died in hospital from these injuries. William Henry Terrico was found murdered in his home on 12 December 1989. Brian Mirl Chaffee was reported missing on 22 September 1990. He was last seen at his home on 18 September 1990. His body was found on 24 September 1990. Dale Melvin Johnson disappeared under suspicious circumstances on August 15, 1996. His body has never been recovered. Not bad for a city of around 10,000 people.
Thirty-one-year-old Melanie Dawn Brown, another First-Nations woman, was found deceased in a basement suite located in the 400 block of Olgivie Street in Prince George at around 4 p.m. on 8 December 2004. A post mortem confirmed that she had been murdered. Police have not released the exact cause of death. She is considered a candidate for a Highway 16 killing.
Nineteen-year-old Corrine Cunningham of the Katzie Reserve near Pitt Meadows, outside Vancouver, disappeared at 3 p.m. on 24 November 2005 after she left “New Transitions” in the Pitt Meadows Industrial Park. She had the mental capacity of a 12-year-old and a tendency to befriend older men. Her new black BMX bicycle was also missing.
Seventy-one-year-old Helena Jack, a member of the Cheslatta Carrier Nation, was murdered on 29 July 2004 in the garage beside her cabin in Burns Lake, which is in the 600-block of Highway 16. Police believe a man named Vincent Sam followed her into the garage on the night of the assault. Sam was arrested in August 2004, shortly after Burns Lake Fire and Rescue discovered the severely beaten body of Helena Jack in a burnt-out garage beside a cabin on the 600-block of highway 16. Evidence found in the garage directed the police search to a local motel room. They believe their suspect tried to wash his body of evidence linking him to the crime, before returning to his residence later that night. But investigators found DNA in the motel room that matched DNA found at the crime scene. It belonged to Vincent Sam. Sam was charged with Helena Jack’s murder on 4 September 2004. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Belinda Ann Cameron—aka Belinda Ann Engen—disappeared in early May 2005, from Esquimalt near Victoria. She was a schizophrenic and needed daily medication to keep the condition in check. She was also a drug user thought to be involved in the sex trade. Foul play is suspected. She could have been the victim of Robert Pickton, like Victoria resident Nancy Creek, if he had not already been in custody.
Another possible victim of a second Low Track slayer is 24-year-old Doras Gail Shorson, who was last seen on 2 April 2005 when she left the family home on Larner Road, Surrey. She was a drug-user who worked in the sex trade in Surrey or Vancouver. And 14-year-old Lorna Ulmer-Billy was last seen home in the 15100 block of 86 Avenue in Surrey, BC, at around 9 p.m. on 7 January 2005 when her stepfather looked in to check she was still asleep. It was thought that she left home early the next morning to meet some friends. However, she has run away before to Squamish and Vancouver.
Twenty-year-old Rene Gunning has been missing since 19 February 2005 when she left Edmonton for her home in Fort St John in the company of another female from Dawson Creek. The pair were thought to be hitch- hiking.
Seventeen-year-old Lisa Paul disappeared from her home on 4 August 2005. Lisa was known to frequent the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Twenty-nine-year-old Charlene Kerr was found dead in a pool of blood in the Gastown Hotel in 1990. She was a prostitute and drug user.
Fourteen-year-old Tawyna Megan Lisk called a friend on 18 July 2004 and said that she was going to Calgary, Alberta. It is thought she planned to hitch-hike.
Sarah Strachan, aged 16, was last seen on 7 February 2004 from Coquitlam, just a few miles from Pickton’s pig farm. Also missing is her Caucasian friend Leah Nestegarde, aged 14.
Then there is the case of 39-year-old Ada Brown of Prince George who died three weeks after suffering a serious head injury during a beating. Her family said that she sought medical attention on three different occasions following the beating and was turned away.
“When she died, and we went to the funeral home, my sister and I didn’t recognize her,” said sister Terri Brown. “It was obvious she had been badly beaten several times yet the authorities had ruled she died of ‘natural causes’.”
Chelsea Acorn, aged 14, disappeared from Abbottsford, BC, late in the afternoon of 10 June 2005. It is believed that Chelsea has run away and could be in the Surrey area 25 miles away.
This is just a small sample of the mayhem in British Columbia. But the “Highway of Tears” seems to stretch right across Canada. There are countless unsolved cases out there and numerous killers at large. One even exploits Native Americans’ low tolerance for alcohol, takes First-Nations women to his hotel room and pours vodka down their throats until they die. He is still at large.
Costa Rica’s Psychopath
A serial killer known as
The Psychopath preys on young couples in the secluded wooded area to the south of the capital San Jose. He always attacks at night. It is thought that he is a hunter who plans his attacks, waiting and watching until a couple arrive. He usually waits until the couples start making love before shooting them with a 45-calibre weapon, thought to be an M3 machine gun, then mutilates the breasts and sexual organs of his female victims with a US Army knife. It is believed that he follows his potential victims for several days before killing them, leaving no tracks.
Most of the killings have been committed in a wooded area south of the Florencio Freeway that runs from San Jose out to Cartago. The area stretching south to Desamparados is now called the “triangle of death” by the locals. The killings often occur near a brook or river, also giving the perpetrator the nickname “The Psychopath of the Rivers”.
To start with, the killer also exhibited a unique pattern to his murders. After the murder of two couples, he then murdered a single women. But, in that case, he did not mutilate the bodies, though it was thought that he carried out acts of necrophilia. His attacks occurred every other month, on a full moon. However, the pattern has now become less clear. The authorities now think that killer began with a murder known as Alajuelita Massacre— the murder of seven women and girls on 6 June 1986 in the town of Alajuelita, which lies within the triangle of death. His last known attack was on 26 October 1996 when he found Ileana Alvarez and Mauricio Cordero parked in their Nissan Sentra. He forced them to get out of the car and walk 500 yards before he shot them. However, the police now think he may also be responsible for the disappearance of 12 other young people in 1996.
Several psychological profiles of the killer have been drawn up. One sees him as a “Rambo” type—a deranged former military or police official. Another theory is that he was a Nicaraguan guerrilla, or a Costa Rican who had gone to fight in the civil war there. Other theories say he could be the son of a wealthy politician or a landowner. Police believe the killer is probably in his thirties or forties, and could be highly intelligent.
On 26 June 1998, the Judicial Investigative Organization of Costa Rica announced they had arrested a serial killer who operated in the triangle of death. The killer was a 52-year-old construction worker, the father of 11 children whose favourite hobby is hunting. He sexually abuses his victims, then kills them with hunting rifles, and buries them under concrete. However, there seems to be no connection between this new unnamed killer and the Psychopath.
There is also another serial killer at large in Costa Rica known as
