How Vancouver police botched the missing women case
I wasn’t on the case at that point. I
The Downtown Eastside of Vancouver is a squalid neighbourhood in the centre of a glorious, wealthy city. Sex workers trade their bodies for money to buy hits of heroin, HIV clinics abound, malnourishment is endemic and homelessness a brutal fact. In the mid-1990s, local women began to go missing but few paid attention. As a member of the Vancouver Police Department, Lori Shenher was posted to the missing person’s unit. She suffered anguish over the following years as she tried to find out what had happened to the lost women. She tells the story in That Lonely Section of Hell: The Botched Investigation of a Serial Killer Who Almost Got Away. Our conversation has been edited for length.
You learned about the lost women of Vancouver in the spring of 1998 when you joined the missing persons unit and became responsible for their cases. At that time it was believed only 17 women were missing. This was your first big assignment.
At that time, even though things were automated and we had computers, I had 17 fat binders to look through. It was so difficult to take that on and organize. It was hard to determine whether these women were missing or whether they had just moved. I started looking for commonalities, for clues, anything that linked the women, anything that made sense. Had they all been living in the same rooming house? Did they hang out in the same place? What streets did they work on? Where were they getting their drugs?
How did you first hear about Robert (“Willie”) Pickton, the pig farmer who turned out to be the serial killer responsible for many of the women’s deaths?
It was my first week in the office. A Crime Stoppers tip was on my desk and it said you should look at this guy, Willie Pickton: he is a pig farmer and he has bloody clothing in bags like trophies and he boasts of grinding up people. I managed to get into the RCMP record management computer and found Pickton and two entries, one for attempted murder and one for forcible confinement. But the charges were stayed. I tried to get the police interested in Pickton again but I couldn’t, and I’ve never gotten an adequate answer to why the charges were stayed.
The police failure to arrest Pickton early on resulted in more women’s deaths. This was something you really worried about. Why didn’t anyone pick up on your concern?
My immediate teammates and my supervisor got it. They shared my incredulity that nothing was happening.
There were a lot of files that had gone missing and we just couldn’t convince anyone and get things going.
Women weren’t just disappearing from B.C. There was an epidemic of lost women throughout the Pacific Northwest. In Seattle, there was the Green River Killer case and Spokane had missing sex workers. What did you learn from American police?
They said you need more people, you need to throw everything at this. You need a task force. But we had no resources and a lack of will. The police in Vancouver who were on the job for 20 to 25 years didn’t understand how the sex trade in the city had changed, how it had become a need for survival. And there was a dismissal of these women because they were drugaddicted, they were sex-trade workers and they chose to live on the street.
You are quite critical of the Vancouver Police Department.
Did we have the right people dealing with family members? Did we have the right people on the street? There was no thought around that. We didn’t get great people.
In February 2002, the police discovered Pickton was the serial killer. At Pickton’s farm, police found an inhaler used by one of the victims and other forensic evidence. How did you react to this news?
was already quite burnt out. I guess shock is the best word. I was absolutely and completely devastated. One of my colleagues told me they were searching the farm. We talked for quite a while on the phone and we agreed to have breakfast the next day to talk more about it.
As the years went on I felt more pain. So much time had gone by during the police investigation and I figured if it was so hard for me, I can’t imagine how painful it was for the families. Then there was the trial and an appeal and an inquiry. It was one thing after another. I don’t think I felt any healing through this probably until the inquiry was over.
It is still a hard thing for me to get my head around. I know post-traumatic stress disorder is chronic and when I am not taking care of myself it gets worse. I try to put the issue and the story into a bigger context. If some good can come of it for women down the road who go missing . . . then that is great. I tried to write this book as a writer, not as a cop. I’ve always seen the world through the eyes of a writer. I was a reporter before I became a cop. I wanted to explain what I had seen. I didn’t want to write a sensationalist book. I just wanted to share my experience.