That Lonely Section of Hell: The Botched Investigation of a Serial Killer Who Almost Got Away

249 Pages·2015·1.12 MB·English

by  Lori Shenher

THAT LONELY SECTION OF
HELL
THE BOTCHED INVESTIGATION OF A
SERIAL KILLER WHO ALMOST GOT
AWAY
Lori Shenher
Vancouver/Berkeley
TO MY PARTNER, Jennifer; our three children; and our nutty dog. Thank you all for
your unwavering love and support, joyful distraction, and constant reminder of
why I remain. None of you fully understands the difference you’ve all made to
my life.
To Cindy, Jay, Cheryl, Sean, Monica, and Farshid, who lost your battles with
mental illness. I miss you all and wish your circumstances could have been
different and your pain far less. Be at peace.
“You gotta kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.”
BRUCE COCKBURN, “LOVERS IN A DANGEROUS TIME”
Contents
• • •
Preface
Prologue
PART ONE
1 Becoming One of Them
2 Paid to Play in the Strike Force
3 How It All Began
4 The Initial Pickton Information
A Letter to Anderson
5 Working with Bill Hiscox
6 Watching Our Investigation Stall
7 The Missing Women
A Letter to Sarah de Vries
8 Looking for Links
9 Project Amelia (the Missing Persons Review Team)
10 Other Cases, Other Avenues
A Letter to Janet Henry
11 The Families
A Letter to Marnie Frey
12 The Second Pickton Tip
13 Another Opportunity with Lynn Ellingsen
14 Dead in the Water
15 Finding Four Women
16 Investigating Person of Interest (POI) 390
17 Salvaging Project Amelia
18 The Creation of Project Evenhanded
19 Post–February 5, 2002
A Letter to Sereena Abotsway
20 Interrogating Robert Pickton
PART TWO
21 Soldiering On
22 Salvaging a Career
23 The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry
24 Defending My Writing
25 Testifying for the Last Time
26 Losing My Grip, Again
27 Shaking Hands with My Own Devil
28 Doing the Hard Work
Epilogue
A Letter to All the Women
Acknowledgments
Pincher Creek, Alberta
Summer 1990
THE WHITE ECONOLINE rumbles along Highway 507 in the early morning sunlight.
I squint, vowing to find my sunglasses when I stop to gas up for my trip to
Calgary to deliver the negatives for the next edition of the Pincher Creek Echo. I
enjoy the weekly adventure: while the Calgary printer churns out the papers, I
spend eight or ten hours with my friends, playing basketball and catching up,
before heading back south to Pincher Creek in the late evening, loaded down
with papers filled with stories I have written for distribution the following day.
As I drive east, a flock of sparrows—there must be more than a hundred—
takes flight from a ditch on my right toward the road in front of me, angling to
cross the front of my van. For one hopeful moment, I reassure myself that they
will easily clear the van. The next instant, I realize with horror that they will not.
Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba! Bird after tiny bird pelts the windshield, grill,
and front bumper as I fight to maintain control of the wheel, resisting the instinct
to veer into the oncoming traffic in an effort to save them.
My hands are shaking. I pull off the highway at the town’s last gas station.
Small impossibly perfect bodies litter the windshield.
Why? You could have so easily saved yourselves, just a little more altitude, a
little more speed, and you were good. Why?
I imagine them lying in a nest as eggs, working hard to hatch, learning to fly
under the watchful eye of their parents, only to end up like this—one minute
soaring in flight, the next dead, stuck fast to my van. Bile rises in my throat.
I pick the first still body off the windshield and gently hold it in my palm. It is
still warm. I marvel at the total absence of blood or visible injury and say a
silent prayer of thanks, though I no longer have religion. In no time, I hold a
small stack of four tiny birds in my hand and look around for something to put
them in. The bell on the station door startles me and I turn to see a petite middle-
aged woman walk out toward me. Her efficiency both comforts and alarms me,
as though she encounters such events often.
“Oh, goodness. Let’s get the poor things off of here,” she says as she begins
gently plucking one flawless body after another from the grill. Dumb with grief, I
shake my head. She glances into my eyes and continues her grim harvest.
“I thought they would make it,” I offer. “I thought they’d clear the van. They
just...” My throat constricts with emotion. “They just flew straight into the van.”
She straightens up from the grill and faces me. “I do taxidermy. I can keep
them in my little fridge for the day and take them home, if you like,” she
suggests. It feels strange to think of myself as their guardian, the next of kin to
these little creatures I’ve only known in the briefest seconds of life and the
finality of sudden death.
“Um, sure. That would be great,” I answer. “But, I mean, I don’t think I need
to get them back from you after.” I worry she has mistaken me for someone who
would want a reminder of this day. Someone who mounts dead birds on her wall.
“I understand, dear,” she assures me, patting my arm with the hand not full of
birds. “I’m happy to keep them.”
“Thank you for helping me with this.”
“It’s my pleasure.” I believe then that it truly is.
She takes the birds into her office and I fill the van’s tank. I stare at my face in
the mirror as I wash my hands in the station’s filthy washroom sink. How can it
be that I detect no outward evidence of the utter helplessness and despair I feel?
How will I wear this irrational cloak of failure?
Preface
• • •
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long
bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such
a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can
neither resist nor understand.”
GEORGE ORWELL, “WHY I WRITE”
THIS IS THE story of my work as the first police detective assigned to find the
missing women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and the effect of that
experience, spanning more than fourteen years, on my life. I have tried to recall
these events accurately; this story arises from my memory and reflects my
interpretation of these events as I experienced them. Others may have different
memories or interpretations of these events.
I began my assignment in the Vancouver Police Department’s (VPD) Missing
Persons Unit in July 1998, and in the first week, I received an anonymous Crime
Stoppers tip that implored me to look at a man named Willie Pickton, who lived
on a farm in Port Coquitlam, a community about eighteen miles outside of
Vancouver. The tipster said Pickton bragged to his friends about his ability to
dispose of bodies on his property and he offered them the use of his grinder. The
tipster believed Pickton could be responsible for the deaths of the missing
women. Thus began my repeated futile attempts to convince the police of that
jurisdiction—the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)—to investigate
Pickton, while I continued my own search for the women.
This is the story of the many obstacles to the Pickton investigation and of the
women who died as a result of our inability to work together in those three and a
half years before we finally searched Pickton’s farm and discovered the victims’
remains. It chronicles the investigation and the physical and emotional toll this
took on me as a police officer and as a human being.
There are places in this book where my words may seem irreverent. Please
know that I have only survived by maintaining a sense of humor, and it is not my
intention to disrespect the victims or their families in any way. I apologize in
advance to anyone I may offend.
My goal has only ever been to help the families understand the factors at play
behind the scenes so that they might better appreciate or gain insight into the
behind the scenes so that they might better appreciate or gain insight into the
investigation. There is no information contained in this book about the victims or
their families that has not already been in the public domain through the trial of
Robert Pickton or the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry. As I stated in my
testimony at the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, the struggles I have
endured through my association with this file are nothing in comparison to those
of the victims and their families.
I have used many people’s real names, but where I have used a pseudonym—
for privacy or legal reasons—I have indicated that with an asterisk. The official
report, entitled Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of
Inquiry, written by Commissioner Wally Oppal, is available online at
www.missingwomeninquiry.ca, and I refer to it and to VPD Deputy Chief
Constable Doug LePard’s report Missing Women Investigation Review.
I am blessed with a loving community of family, friends, and health
professionals, whose care and guidance lifted me through the darkest times when
I doubted that I could revisit these events and tell my story in its entirety without
further jeopardizing my mental health. Without the support of these people, this
book would not have been possible. I feel so fortunate they simply would not
allow me to isolate myself when my depression compelled me to do so.
This is my story, but it has never been my tragedy. The tragedy is the
cataclysmic demise of far too many disenfranchised women. It is for them that I
tell my story and for their families and supporters that I continue to pursue the
deeper truth behind the causes of this tragedy and the myriad ways the system
failed to protect vulnerable people.
A May 29, 2014, piece in the Guardian about Maya Angelou’s death quoted
her as once saying, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story
inside you.” Although I have struggled with such an untold story, I believe living
with poverty, addiction, violence, racism, sexism, and classism are greater
agonies. I interpret Ms. Angelou’s words to mean that we do not speak out
because we believe that no one will care about our stories. Therein lies the
terrible shame. This book is for the missing and murdered women and all of their
untold stories.
Prologue
• • •
“There is only one kind of shock worse than the unexpected: the
expected for which one has refused to prepare.”
MARY RENAULT, THE CHARIOTEER
ON THE NIGHT of February 5, 2002, while the rest of the city lay down to sleep, a
team of police officers prepared to execute a search warrant. But this was not
just another search warrant; this would be the groundbreaking moment in the
largest police investigation in Canadian history. Robert Pickton would soon
become infamous around the world as the killer of Vancouver’s missing drug-
addicted sex workers, all of them women. A floundering police investigation had
suddenly and sickeningly become the hottest story in town.
Unaware of the warrant, I readied myself for bed, knowing that another
restless, nightmare-filled night awaited me. Just the night before, I had dreamt
that I was standing at the top of a snow-covered mountain, watching dozens of
tumbling women, some far below me, others falling past me. Their screams
echoed in the crisp night air. Despite the darkness of the night, huge spotlights
illuminated the entire mountain, and the trees cast giant shadows all around me.
The last woman slid past me, hands outstretched, eyes imploring me to help her.
As I grabbed her cold, translucent hand, dried scabs scraped against my own
palms.
Suddenly, her hands were greasy and slick, impossible for me to hang onto. I
shouted out to her, Why? Why are your hands so slippery? But no words came
out. I screamed, Hang on! But, again, no words came out, and she slipped from
my grasp and plummeted down the mountain, her screams accentuating my
failure. As usual, I awoke soaked in sweat and lay in bed for another couple of
hours, unable to sleep.
Variations on this nightmare had haunted my nights since 1998, when I
became the first and only Vancouver Police Department (VPD) detective assigned
full time to find Vancouver’s missing sex workers. I had learned of Robert
Pickton my first week on the file, and he had rarely left my thoughts since. The
night of February 5 was no different.
VPD Detective Mark Chernoff paged me late in the afternoon of February 6,