B.C. mom pleased with missing-persons databank
Tories plan to create DNA database
OTTAWA — Bittersweet emotions struck Judy Peterson as she heard Finance Minister Jim Flaherty credit her for the government’s decision to create a national missingpersons DNA databank.
The Vancouver Island woman has fought for more than two decades to find out what happened to her teenage daughter, Lindsey Nicholls, who disappeared in 1993.
“It was surreal, like I was in a movie,” said Peterson, who was in the visitors gallery in Ottawa on budget day.
The federal decision follows years of frustrating negotiations between Ottawa and the provinces over who would pay for the database.
The move could also set up a clash with the Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner, which has expressed concern about the type of database described in Tuesday’s budget.
In an interview, Peterson said it was “cool” that Flaherty specifically mentioned her daughter in Tuesday’s budget speech.
Peterson, a guest of the government, wore a necklace adorned with an inspirational message of hope given to her this week by her youngest daughter, Kim, an ally in the campaign to find Lindsey and give police better tools to find other missing Canadians.
“I wore it yesterday so Kim could be with me,” Peterson said Wednesday while on her way home to Sidney, B.C., 25 kilometres north of Victoria.
Peterson began lobbying for a missing-persons databank shortly after the federal government launched the RCMP’s national system to use DNA to solve crimes in 2000. It has a databank of the DNA of serious offenders and another with DNA collected at crime scenes.
The system contains 284,661 DNA profiles of offenders, and 92,397 from crime scenes, the RCMP says, information that has been used in about 30,000 investigations — more than 2,000 in murder cases.
But when Peterson heard about the databank and sent a sample of Lindsey’s DNA to Ottawa to see if there was a match among crime scene DNA, she discovered that such a search wasn’t possible.
It was one of many agonizing setbacks since the summer day in 1993 when Lindsey vanished after going for a walk to see some friends near Courtenay, B.C.
There had been family tension in the period before her disappearance, after Peterson’s then husband, RCMP officer Martin Nicholls, was moved by the Mounties from Delta to Comox.
Lindsey wanted to stay in Delta and moved in with friends there, later moving to the island to live in a foster home in Comox.
In her last phone call with her daughter, “I told her I loved her and I missed her, and then I never saw her again,” Peterson told Chatelaine magazine in 2008.
She explained to the magazine the rationale for her relentless campaign: “If Lindsey is still out there, she’ll know how hard I tried.”
The 1998 legislation that set up the RCMP DNA databank excluded missing persons over concern it would infringe on the privacy rights of people who go “missing” on purpose, such as a spouse fleeing an abusive relationship.
Peterson’s campaign was endorsed by Vancouver Island MP Gary Lunn, who joined the federal cabinet after Stephen Harper won a minority government in 2006. The idea has also been endorsed by committees in the Senate and House of Commons, and by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.