A History of Invisibility

Many people across the country were upset with media reports earlier this year of the brutal murders of drug-dependent women who sell sex from street corners in Vancouver’s skid row. They did not want to read the graphic accounts of the horrific murders. They did not want to hear about the testimony in court suggesting that women’s bodies were butchered and disposed of as if they were pigs.

How naive it was to anticipate anything else. For decades, Vancouver pretended not to see the open-air drug markets and curb side prostitutes in the city’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. Police were deaf to cries for an investigation into the disappearance of the women. Federal, provincial and municipal leaders ignored pleas to help make a difference in the lives of some of the community’s most damaged people.

Two recent books draw much-needed attention to those dark corners of the city. Well-known journalist Stevie Cameron, in The Pickton File, writes about her efforts to find out about events leading up to the first-degree murder trial of Robert Pickton. Author Daniel Francis, in Red Light Neon: A History of Vancouver’s Sex Trade, offers an engrossing history of prostitution in Vancouver.

I was anxious to read The Pickton File. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, I was at the Pickton trial every day and familiar with the sprawling cast of characters in the story. I had not written much about the missing women before police on February 5, 2002, raided Pickton’s farm, although I reported on the announcement in 1999 of a $100,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the missing women case. At that time, friends and family of 22 missing women believed a serial killer was stalking skid row. Vancouver police just shrugged. What could they do? They had no bodies, no crime scenes, no suspects and no tips. Reflecting the widespread cynicism toward the missing women, some suggested the reward should be offered to women who stepped forward and confirmed they were still alive. Better minds eventually prevailed.

I was also eager to read the book because it was by Cameron, a controversial investigative reporter with a flair for storytelling. Cameron became part of the story when defence counsel at the trial raised questions about her contact with a crucial prosecution witness before the witness testified. I assumed the encounter indicated nothing more than her enthusiasm for a good story. I had got to know Cameron when we worked in the same newsroom many years ago, a connection she mentions in her book. I expected her first true crime book to be as noteworthy as her previous books On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years, a national bestseller on politics, and Blue Trust: The Author, The Lawyer, His Wife and Her Money, a Canadian tale of greed, deceit and infidelity.

True crime books are generally built on the lurid details of sensational cases. The best of them—Nick Pron’s Lethal Marriage: The Unspeakable Crimes of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka and many of Ann Rule’s bestsellers—go beyond the salacious details of the deaths, the unsuspecting misadventures of innocent victims and the missteps of police. They take the reader into the mind of the murderer, suggesting something about the nature of cruelty and possibly evil. Some, such as Redrum the Innocent: The Murder of Christine Jessop and the Controversial Conviction of her Next-Door Neighbour, Guy Paul Morin by Kirk Makin, challenge the accepted account of events, pointing to possibly wrongful convictions.

Vancouver’s missing women case, with its psychosexual intrigue and horrific deaths, is unlike anything that has happened before in Canada. The victims were frail human beings, vulnerable and abandoned. The refusal of police to acknowledge that the women were being murdered may have been tantamount to issuing a licence to kill them. Police eventually poured unprecedented resources into the case. Yet evidence at trial indicated that police did not solve the crime. They stumbled over evidence of the missing women while investigating an illegal firearm tip. They found human remains by accident, while checking a bad smell in a freezer during a power outage. Their search for DNA profiles on the farm provided more than enough material for a season of CSI: Vancouver. The trial also exposed a cast of characters from the netherworld of drugs and prostitution that are rarely caught in the glaring light of the media. The suspects were not your typical Canadians. Or were they?

But despite the brutal realities, Cameron’s book does not fit easily onto my shelf of true crime books. Actually, I’m not sure on which shelf to place it. The Pickton File is not the story of the six women who were the alleged victims in Pickton’s first-degree murder trial this year. Nor is it Pickton’s story.

Pickton was not being tried for the murder of all 65 women from the Downtown Eastside whom Vancouver police say are missing. He was on trial for the murder of six specific individuals: Marnie Frey, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin, Andrea Joesbury, Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson. Cameron speaks to family members of Frey and Joesbury but she does not tell us anything about when, how or why the six women came to the farm and when, how or why they were murdered. Cameron does not offer new insights into the diabolical murders; she does not go behind the headlines. Readers looking for an overview of the troublesome case will undoubtedly feel cheated.

The Pickton File is the first of two books that Cameron plans to write about the case. She sets out what can be expected in the first instalment at the beginning of the book. Her aim is to recount how the story began and how it developed into the largest criminal investigation in Canadian history. What she really means is how the story began for her and how she learned about the largest criminal investigation in Canadian history. It is her file, her memoir, her blog printed out in old-fashioned book form.

Cameron starts off with an account of the phone call she received from her literary agent, Linda McKnight, to find out if she was interested in writing a book about the sensational murder case. She goes on to explain how she does research for a book. She identifies where she intends to look for information and introduces some of her contacts.

Her Pickton file is clearly a messy folder, with many sections in it. She ties the disjointed pieces together with events occurring in her life while she was writing the book. In her chatty style, Cameron takes the reader along as she goes out to the farm and to the Downtown Eastside. She runs through brief biographies of some of the lawyers. With considerable compassion, she begins to flesh out the lives of Pickton family members. She goes to court and reports on the early developments in the months after Pickton was arrested in February 2002. She then works down the list of names and phone numbers in her file, recounting conversations with her contacts.

Finally she comes to the drug-addicted prostitutes and their squalid lives. “The pathetic remnants of shattered bodies scattered in the dirt of a filthy farm were a rebuke to the city of Vancouver as much as they were to the police,” she writes. “It was one of the lessons I was learning about this story: there is no way to separate the fact of 65 missing women from the fact of the city’s neglect.”

With compassion and understanding, Cameron offers a glimpse of the circumstances surrounding the dismal lives of the drug-dependent women. Cameron is at her best here. It is a solid portrayal, filtered through a warm heart. The city’s neglect is only part of the story. Many of the women come from dysfunctional families where they were sexually and physically abused. Others live with the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome or schizophrenia. Recognizing their handicaps is not enough to allow them to escape the past. They become victims of customers who rape, beat and rob them. Pimps—who the women like to believe are their boyfriends—brutalize them. Friends betray them for a fix, a heroin injection. Cameron writes of the alphabet of related diseases—hepatitis A, B and C as well as HIV—that the addicted people of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside contract by sharing filthy needles. Some have tuberculosis. Only newcomers are likely to have all their teeth.

“The addicted women I met there, every one of them, wanted a different life. They wanted to be well, to be part of their children’s lives, to have a little place of their own, to eat good food, to have enough money to go to a movie. They certainly wanted to stop selling blow jobs in parks and alleys … What’s stopping them?” Cameron asks rhetorically.

That may be one of the most challenging questions for those who think about the life of drug addicts and prostitutes. What is stopping them from moving away from such self-destructive behaviour? Cameron touches too lightly on the issues. She writes about some of the missing women but then moves too quickly to anecdotes about the lives of Pickton family members. The connection between the lives of the women and their deaths remains unexplored. Likewise, she recounts stories about the Pickton family without drawing out the implications. Of course, how could she? At the time of her writing, the jury was still listening to the available evidence. That is an excuse for what is missing, but the explanation does nothing to satisfy a reader.

Cameron goes back to court and then to the intensive search of the Pickton farm. She checks in with the police investigation and some people in the Downtown Eastside. As she meanders about, she weaves in numerous episodes from her own everyday life—her car is stolen; she stays in a room with a beautiful view; where did she leave her cellphone? The book ends with the opening statement of the prosecution and defence at the Pickton trial.

As I closed The Pickton File, I felt as if I had just walked away from a conversation with Cameron. Charming as always, she had filled me in on many of the people and places linked to the story. But she also left me with the feeling that she was not willing to trust me with me everything she knew. Maybe next time our exchange would be more satisfying. Hopefully the sequel to The Pickton File will tell the story in a more comprehensive way.

Red Light Neon, which came out last year, reminds the reader that Vancouver has been grappling with some of the issues surrounding prostitution for quite a long time. Daniel Francis begins his historical account of prostitution in Vancouver with Birdie Stewart, a cheeky madam who opened a brothel in 1873 two doors down from the home of a Methodist minister and a short walk from police officer Jonathan Miller’s jail. Despite the close proximity of prostitution, police and church, the issues remain unresolved 130 years later. Occasionally, waves of moral panic sweep through the city, prodding police and politicians to launch a crackdown on vice. But the spasm of righteousness soon passes. A climate of willful blindness invariably prevails.

Francis, the editor of the Encyclopedia of British Columbia and author and editor of 22 books, describes the periods of civic righteousness in which the city felt compelled to grapple with the issues. He peppers his account with tales of the indiscretions of some of the province’s leading figures, including John Farris, a former chief justice of the British Columbia Supreme Court, who resigned in 1978 shortly before he was linked with a 30-year-old call girl named Wendy King. Prostitution offers an unusual perspective on the history of the city’s politics, its social geography, criminal life and moral atmosphere, Francis says, describing the tale as a history of hypocrisy.

Francis sketches the evolution of the neighbourhood now known as the Downtown Eastside from a benign low-rent neighbourhood for transients and retired folks—lumberjacks, loggers, prospectors and sailors—to the poorest postal code in the country with its scantily clad drug-addicted women in doorways and along the curbs of the street. The area is referred to as the low track, the workplace for women who were so damaged that they could not make it as prostitutes on downtown streets, at pubs or in the salons of the city’s more prosperous neighbourhoods.

In recent years, the controversy has been mostly over street prostitution, which accounts for roughly 20 percent of the prostitution in Vancouver. A police raid in 1975 of Penthouse Cabaret—a colourful nightclub in the centre of the city several blocks away from the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood— pushed prostitution onto the street. The raid coincided with a shift in government policies and events in the city, putting the lives of street prostitutes at risk as never before. Francis writes that the women were increasingly pushed into more isolated parts of the city by neighbourhood groups, police and politicians; they had more difficulty renting rooms by the hour following a crack-down on brothels.

Francis connects the murder of Vancouver prostitutes in recent decades to the lingering effect of the Penthouse raid. Similarly to Cameron, he says responsibility for their deaths rests with the residents of Vancouver. The disappearance and murder of so many people from one neighbourhood is unprecedented in Canadian history. “It weighs on the community’s conscience. At least it should,” he writes. “An entire community bears responsibility for the fate of some of its most disadvantaged members.”

But no matter how often it is said, just saying does not make it so. The city—and certainly not only Vancouver—has yet to figure out how to respond to street prostitution. Francis found that more prostitutes are currently at work in Vancouver than at any other time in the city’s history, despite more than a century of efforts to grapple with the problem. He estimates between 200 and 300 men and women are selling sex on the streets of Vancouver every night.

It is troubling to realize that extensive media coverage of Pickton’s arrest, investigation of his farm and the horrific evidence at his trial has had minimal impact so far, maybe no impact at all, on the exploitation of women who sell sex for money to buy drugs. It is even more distressing to read that decades of debate and numerous attempt to respond to the issues raised by prostitution have not led to an acceptable solution.