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CA/Edmonton - Across the country, the bodies of 67 women have surfaced, dumped in remote areas. In all but five cases, their killers remain unknown

More than a decade ago, Cara King went missing in Edmonton. The impulsive 22-yearold “liked to live on the edge,” her mother, Kathy, remembered last month, and “struggled with many, many things.” In her teens, she lost interest in school and got involved with a social circle of older men, eventually getting addicted to cocaine. Sometimes, the drug caused psychosis, which landed Ms. King in and out of psychiatric hospitals. By the time of her disappearance in 1997, she had dropped regular contact with her middle-class family and was on the street, prostituting herself.

When Ms. King’s mother reported her missing that August and then attempted to follow up, she says police gave her the runaround, until one day an officer told her she should “wait for a body.”

Three weeks later, Cara King’s corpse was found in a canola field. Today, the case remains unsolved.

Disturbingly, elements of Ms. King’s story are playing out in scores of cases across the country as young women continue disappearing, their bodies dumped in remote back country, farmers’ fields, industrial lots and along desolate stretches of highway.

Until the spectre of Robert Pickton, their stories went largely unnoticed by the Canadian public. In many instances, the womens’ families have been their only campaigners. Until recently, their cases were also mostly ignored by police and treated as unrelated, unsolved homicides.

Across the country, 67 bodies have surfaced. In all but five cases, their killers remain unknown. In British Columbia, 37 women other than those connected to the Pickton investigation remain missing, although families say that number is closer to 80, with women vanishing mostly from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and the notorious Highway of Tears in the north of the province. In Edmonton, 31 women remain unaccounted for, with some cases dating back to the 1930s. In St. Catharines, the deaths of six prostitutes are the focus of a Niagara Regional Police task force. Since 1996, their bodies have turned up in ditches in Vineland and Welland, a school parking lot and the brush in Niagara Falls. Two men have been charged with three of their murders, but three cases remain unsolved.

In all of the cases, police face staggering challenges: huge and often remote search areas, decades worth of victims, many of them leading precarious lives.

“We face a lot of the same challenges as they did in the Pickton case. These victims, it’s part of their lifestyle to get into vehicles with strangers at odd hours of the night and to do it away from others seeing it,” said RCMP Constable Tamara Bellamy, who is part of Project Kare, a joint task force in Edmonton looking into unsolved murders and cases of “high-risk” missing persons.

“These are women who are addicted or involved in the drug world. It compromises their ability to help us with timelines. That’s a real difficulty for us, trying to find witnesses who are able to tell us the last time someone was seen and who they were seen with.”

In northern British Columbia, the bodies of 14 women have turned up since 1969 along the Highway of Tears, an isolated 724-kilo-metre stretch of Yellowhead Highway 16 West running between Prince George and Prince Rupert. Some of the women were prostitutes; nearly all were Aboriginal and hitchhiking. They include 26-year-old tree-planter Nicole Hoar and Tamara Chipman, 22, another hitchhiker whose father, Tom Chipman, walked the highway for months, looking in culverts for his daughter.

In Winnipeg, the bodies of 19 prostitutes — 17 women and two transgendered men — have turned up north and west of the city in the past 25 years.

The number is escalating: Three women have been murdered since April, the last being Fonessa Lynn Bruyere, 17, whose body was found in a field in August. In Edmonton, the bodies of 23 women have been found in hotel rooms, industrial areas, farmers’ fields and along rural roads since 1983.

Last May, RCMP charged Thomas Svekla with murdering Theresa Innes, a 36-year-old prostitute found stuffed in a hockey bag. Earlier this year, Mr. Svekla was also charged in the

death of a second prostitute, 19-year-old Rachel Quinney.

As in other similar investigations, Edmonton police deny that a serial killer is at work, arguing that assumption would jeopardize their work.

In British Columbia this October, RCMP doubled the number of files being probed from nine to 18, and expanded the investigation as far back as 1969 and as far south as Merritt and Kamloops. The investigation consists of 43 officers culled from several units.

“We didn’t do a great job talking to our communities and to the victims’ families way back when. In the last few years, we’ve picked up our socks on that,” said RCMP Staff Sgt. John Ward.

But aboriginal groups and some family members have criticized the investigation, specifically its expansion beyond the Highway of Tears just as it excludes some 40 missing women they believe vanished along the route. Police are also battling local rumours that a serial killer is prowling the stretch.

In Winnipeg, too, some experts say “a cluster dump” in a field outside the city likely points to a serial killer. In July, the body of 36-yearold Aynsley Kinch was found on the outskirts of Winnipeg. One month later, the most recent victim, Ms. Bruyere, was found a short distance east. Her body lay metres from the spot where Therena Silva’s remains were found almost five years earlier.

The field is likely a place where a serial killer feels comfortable discarding victims’ bodies, says Kim Rossmo. The former Vancouver police officer warned a serial killer might be stalking prostitutes in the Downtown Eastside, but had his theory dismissed by authorities. Now a professor in the department of criminal justice at Texas State University, Mr. Rossmo says a lack of resources and experience are often behind the categorical resistance of police to label any of the cases as the work of a serial killer.

“I think one of the issues is that it creates the expectation of a certain investigative process. Some agencies don’t want to deal with that. If you have a serial murder case, you have to investigate it. That can mean a pretty big demand on limited resources,” Mr. Rossmo said.

Along the Highway of Tears, it appears most efforts now focus on preventing new victims. Working with the RCMP and victims’ families, First Nations consultant Don Sabo prepared a list of recommendations to stop abductions along the notorious belt. Last March, his report was presented in Prince George at the highly publicized Highway of Tears symposium, which saw victims’ families tearfully demanding answers from the province.

His first recommendation is a shuttle bus service that might reduce the need for hitchhiking. Currently, the only public transportation between Prince George and Prince Rupert is a daily Greyhound bus. Isolated on reserves, local women often hitchhike into town for basic services, from groceries to doctors’ appointments. Few have drivers’ licences and fewer still have cars.

“The reason why there are so many young aborginal women going missing is poverty and geography. These reserves have little or no infrastructure. Poverty is the big thing for young women being on the highway,” Mr. Sabo said.

Today, Cara King’s mother heads the Prostitution Action and Awareness Foundation of Edmonton, which helps local women get out of the sex trade. The offices sit on a drug-infested stretch of 118th Avenue, “the stroll” from which many prostitutes in Edmonton have been disappearing.

She concedes that, “people who are legitimately high-risk are taken seriously now when they’re missing,” in Edmonton, but she remains bitter watching the Pickton case as her daughter’s murder remains unsolved.

“All of a sudden, there’s millions of dollars to sift six feet of topsoil at the Pickton farm and there’s no money for basic services that are going to prevent that carnage,” Ms. King said. “We’re fighting an uphill battle.”