Grieving mom uses billboard to raise awareness
Campaign to find daughter’s killer has become a ‘universal cause’
For five seconds, each minute, it flashes. A red dress crumpled on the street. A web address. A logo.
The image, appearing between advertisements for football games and fast food on a digital billboard looming over a busy inner-city intersection, was placed by the mother of an Edmonton woman found slain 21 years ago.
Kathy King ’s daughter Caralyn Aubrey King went missing on Aug. 2, 1997. A month later, the 22-year-old’s body turned up in a wheat field near Sherwood Park. Her homicide remains unsolved, and the case file is with the Strathcona RCMP detachment.
In the years after her daughter’s death, Kathy King told her story countless times.
Media started calling her to comment when other women went missing or were killed, and as theories about a local serial killer or killers swirled.
Along the way, she became an advocate and a volunteer with Victims of Homicide and the Edmonton-based Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation (CEASE).
When the opportunity came earlier this year to bid on a month of billboard space at a silent auction she was attending, she saw a new possibility for creating awareness about the lack of resources for vulnerable people. And for generating tips about a number of unsolved local cases.
“Cara has come to represent, I think, a universal cause,” she said during an interview at her west Edmonton home Wednesday. “The grief is so much more than mine.”
Instead of putting up a photo of her own daughter, she opted to use an image from the Red Dress Photography Project, a collection started by Edmonton photographer Mufty Mathewson to honour missing and murdered Indigenous women. She shared her website’s URL and the CEASE logo, and chose to put it up at 97 Street and 111 Avenue in August because it’s a time of year and area of the city she’s always associated with her daughter’s disappearance.
The ad will move to Yellowhead Trail on Aug. 20 because the expressway runs east toward the area her daughter’s body was discovered and west toward the infamous Highway of Tears in British Columbia.
Kathy King keeps a shrine to her daughter atop a cabinet covered with keepsakes in her home office. A small urn sits with some of her daughter’s cremated remains inside. Candles and statues of angels stand between framed photos of the girl who went by “Cara”: a baby in her mother’s arms, a little girl smiling brightly in school pictures, a teen on horseback competing in equestrian events, portraits of a beautiful young woman, her head tilted slightly to the right, a pose her mother said she often struck when her picture was taken.
Cara King was adventurous and impulsive, her mother said. She began using drugs, and addiction followed. The young woman bounced between shelters, friends’ couches and a boyfriend’s house, at times supporting her addiction through the sex trade.
Kathy King tried to keep up with her daughter and offer support. When Cara King disappeared in early August 1997, she reported her missing.
Weeks went by and police recovered a young woman’s body. Kathy King feared the worst, but investigators told her it wasn’t her daughter.
And then, on Sept. 1, 1997, it was. She saw a newspaper photo of police carrying a white body bag out of a field. The next day, investigators confirmed Cara King was inside.
Across the office from the memorial for her daughter is a bookshelf jammed with binders of records Kathy King has accumulated over the years. After her daughter’s death, she began tracking local media reports about missing and murdered women.
Eventually, she decided to move her efforts online. She launched a website, and used it to publish a manuscript about her daughter’s life story. She also uses the site to share her records of about 150 murdered or missing northern Alberta women, plus links to resources for victims, along with anti-sexual exploitation information.
“If my story can amplify the stories of others, then that’s what I want it to be about,” she said.