A Haunting

"I was willing to concede this [serial killer notion was] a very real possibility, but I wasn't ready to make that leap" Det.-Const. Lori Shenher

And when she eventually was prepared to make that leap, there was no one there in authority to back her up, to take action, to gather all the evidence and to make a case, to stop the disappearances of women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside; to solve the puzzle of the mysterious absences of well-known faces who just simply vanished, not to be seen again. Despite that this was uncharacteristic of them.

As a junior constable she was handed quite the assignment, transferred to the Vancouver Police Department's Missing Persons Unit, because women had been vanishing from the Downtown Eastside. The public was beginning to wonder, prodded by the concerned questions that family members of the missing women were raising. The public was beginning to understand that these were not merely prostitutes, they were women and young girls who were important to their families.

She was warned, "This could very possibly become a serial killer investigation", by one VPD officer. That realization was there, but there was no co-ordinated effort to attempt to amass evidence or data that might corroborate that theory; no interviews, no investigation had been undertaken, nor any record-checking that might reveal that there had been some revelations that required tracking.

Soon after she checked in to her new job with the Missing Persons Unit, a tip was received through a hotline with someone talking about a pig farmer in suburban Port Coquitlam, some "creepy guy" who was involved with sex trade workers. This was when Det.-Const. Shenher heard the name Robert "Willie" Pickton, and she did a background check, discovering that a violent exchange had occurred between the named man and a prostitute a year before.

He had been charged, and the charges dropped because this was a prostitute who was a drug addict, obviously untrustworthy. Although when Det.-Const. Shenher interviewed the woman she sounded as though she had her head together, and when she met the hotline tipster, he too seemed credible and concerned. And, she informed the Missing Women's enquiry, "I thought, 'Bingo, this is the kind of guy we're looking for'."

In fact, as the investigation proceeded, and further circumstantial evidence was accrued, she became increasingly convinced that this man was involved, could be the man they were looking for. Trouble was, her superiors did not share her conclusion, and they told her so. And she reasoned that they were senior officers for a reason, knowing and having experience she hadn't, and who was she to question them?

So she didn't. She withdrew from her theory, although she continued to plod along with the investigation until she finally 'burned out'. She's still burned out, in a different sense. She is haunted now by the ghosts of all those women who are still missing. They're missing primarily because, well, they're dead. All 26 of them, poor things, dead, gone, bits and pieces here and there, but the memory of them still lives with their relatives.

When Det.-Const. Shenher 'burned out', after chasing tips, interviewing sources, writing memos, attending meetings, brainstorming and liaising with the RCMP non-stop, she finally withdrew and was re-assigned. The indifference of her superiors and her unwillingness to challenge their negativity and sexism led her to take a four-month leave-of-absence, and ultimately transfer to another unit.

Finally, an RCMP colleague called her to inform her that they were searching Pickton's farm. "Anybody but him", she thought to herself. Because the rejection of her certainty of his involvement by her VPD heads gave him another few years to continue his luring of women with money and drugs to his pig farm where he was free to continue slaughtering them.

This is what she thinks of, it's what she thought of when she burst into tears during the hearing. "He was in my sights the whole time", she wailed, inconsolably.