The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)

0:01Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:11hey and welcome to the podcast i'm josh and there's chuck and jerry's here too and this is stuff you should know the man this is a bummer edition yeah the zero laughs edition because we're talking about the highway of tears and uh there's no other way around it this is just It's a devastating topic. Yeah, we should tell people, I mean, the Highway of Tears is fairly famous. It's kind of been in the news and in pop culture, I guess, for a while. I guess at least since the 90s, but really in the early 2000s, I think, is when it picked up. Regardless, it is a stretch of desolate highway that runs from, in British Columbia, up in Canada, from the port city of Prince Rupert all the way into the interior to Prince George.

1:06And it's, I think, 720 kilometers, almost 450 miles. And it's known as Highway 16 officially. But the stretches of this highway are so desolate, so remote, and so sparsely populated that it has become a haven for murderers who pick people up, mostly women, mostly indigenous women, on this road and either make them disappear forever or murder them. And it's endemic in this area so much so that it's caught national attention. It's just how poorly this group of women are being treated and their families as well. Yeah, it's, you know, as you'll see, it's and, you know, there are many reasons for this, but it's a heavily hitchhiked road and that can be very dangerous.

1:58And so a lot of times these are hitchhikers, people just trying to get from one place to another. And like you said, they are, you know, either sexually assaulted or murdered or both. And these are the people that, you know, like they found bodies. There are, you know, dozens and dozens more than these dozens who have survived attacks and rapes along that stretch of highway. So, you know, it's no secret why it's called the Highway of Tears. Big thanks to Livia for enduring this topic and helping us out with it. And big thanks to Al Jazeera, where she got a lot of information from a six-part series they did in 2021.

2:41Yeah, there's a lot of good sources. The CBC, the Vancouver Sun's a good one. There's been a decent amount of coverage, but it's not the kind of coverage you would get when, say, like a Caucasian girl goes missing, which we'll talk about. It's the kind of coverage about how this group of people have just been totally basically left on their own to deal with something like this, that they don't have the resources to deal with this. And it's just such a terrible story. The story is so much larger than this collection of murders. But at the core, that's what it comes down to, just women who were treated like disposable beings.

3:24And the whole thing starts at the very earliest, as far as anyone knows, the first murder that's become part of what you would call the canon of the Highway of Tears murders and abductions. Started in 1969, a woman named Lavinia Gloria Moody was murdered on Highway 16. And it kind of went along like that for a while. But no one had kind of put together this whole group of people and called it the Highway of tears and they wouldn't for years to come. But at the time, there was enough going on that they had coined this term the highway murders. And by 1981, enough women and girls had been murdered or gone missing along Highway 16 that a group of Royal Canadian Mounted Police detectives from all over British Columbia and I think Alberta got together and decided to kind of compare notes and see if they could solve some of these unsolved cases.

4:26Yes, absolutely. While this was going on, you know, when the cops were sort of slowly coming around to the idea that there was a specific problem along the stretch, the families were getting involved, the families of the missing, the families of those who were found dead. And, you know, they organized their own efforts. One case that really kind of brought everything to even more of a head was the case of Ramona Wilson. This was in June of 1994. She was 16 years old, and she went to go meet up with a friend to go to some, you know, end-of-the-year school graduation parties. She never got there.

5:08And her mom, Matilda, was like, the cops don't really seem to care much that this happened. And so the locals got together and they started organizing. They started doing, you know, going on search parties and looking out for her. They ultimately, you know, very sadly discovered her body about 10 months later at an airport. Her clothes were found near her with some rope and some cabling. And so her mom and her older sister, Brenda, and other members of her family in the community got together and said, all right, the least we can do is try and raise some awareness since no one seems to be paying attention.

5:49So they got a memorial walk together in June of 95, which became an annual thing. Yeah, there was another woman who really deserves a lot of credit for bringing national attention to this. She's a Wet'suwet 'en nation woman. And in 1998, there was a vigil where she coined the term Highway of Tears, which I can't, I don't think you can really calculate how much that helped this case. It was like, hey, media, here's a nice little tidy package for you to report on. And it's even got a catchy name, despite, you know, the actual obvious emotion behind calling it the Highway of Tears. I think it really helped quite a bit.

6:29And Florence Nazil also is credited with starting a walk that covered the entire, again, 450-mile stretch of the Highway of Tears for the first time. That walk's been made scores of times by now over the years by family members and community members and members of other nations who've gotten involved to try to, again, help, ask for resources, ask to get the police involved more. Because that's another recurring theme throughout this, Chuck, is that the police have shown over and over again opportunity after opportunity to just not really seem to care. Yeah, absolutely. She had already been working, you know, to raise awareness when very tragically it hit home for her in a more personal way when one of her family members, a woman named Tamara Chipman, went missing in 2005.

7:28And, you know, all this is going on through the, you know, I think it was 1981 when the cops finally started sort of getting together and comparing notes. And that was after at least 12 years since the first known murder. And it took all the way into the 2000s for things to really take a turn. And that was when, very tragically, a woman named Nicole Hoer was killed. She was 25 years old and she was white. She disappeared in 2002. And this is what really brought the national attention. You've heard a journalist named Gwen Ifill in the United States coined the term missing white woman syndrome, which is the idea that it takes a white person to be, you know, the victim of a crime for anyone to kind of sit up and take notice.

8:18And members of indigenous communities or marginalized communities are often overlooked and underfunded and under-resourced. and, you know, the cases are kind of swept under the rug. And that's exactly what was going on in Canada for many, many years and still is to a certain degree. Yeah, and again, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been called to task time and time and time again for not taking this stuff seriously enough, not devoting enough resources to it. But also the media is largely responsible too, not just in this case, but in any case of a missing or murdered woman who's not white in the United States or Canada, They get much less coverage and the intensity of the coverage is much less too compared to white women.

8:59And that's not just anecdotal. I was reading at least one study on it from 2016, I think, in the Journal of Law and Criminology. And they were like, yes, we analyze this stuff and it's absolutely true. So there's like a, but there's a bitter gratitude involved because the death of Nicole Hoer, she, like it did bring a lot of attention to this. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you just can't, you can't deny that. And so that's good. But at the same time, it's just like, man. Why does it take that, you know? We've been having to we've been trying to deal with this for decades. And now this one white girl is becomes part of the crowd of murdered girls.

9:44And like now now people care. It's got to be really tough to take. And I know I called her a girl and she was 25. So she was a woman. But there's like this. This whole group is made up of women and girls. I know it's not interchangeable, but it's important to say, like, some of these. I mean, the youngest victim was 12. Monica Jacks, I think, died in the late 70s, maybe 1978. Like, there are plenty of girls who were picked up and murdered. There are also plenty of women, too. And not all of them were indigenous. A lot of them were white. But the cops, as they started to get together, came up with some criteria that they applied to these cases that kind of narrowed the search.

10:30but also brought on new cases that they hadn't considered before, as we'll see. Yeah, so in 2005, this is just a few years after Nicole Hoer brought more attention to the issue, the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, will probably call them that, RCMP, maybe Mounties? Do they still go by that? I think so. Whether they like it or not, everybody calls them Mounties. Yeah. They launched what was called the Unsolved Homicide Unit, launched something called Project E-PANA. The letter E, that was just the division of the RCMP. And PANA is named after an Inuit goddess who cares for souls in the afterworld.

11:15And their official designation was, hey, we think we have a serial killer, maybe more than one, out there on this highway of tears. It's a pretty, like you said, a pretty great place to get away with a crime like that because it's so desolate. Up until recently, there were long, long, long, long, long stretches where you had no cell phone service even. So you couldn't call anyone if you were in trouble. Not very many people around. and plenty of animals around to take care of bodies and the remains. So they found some commonalities in three teenage girls, Ramona Wilson, who I mentioned, a woman named Roxanne Thiera, 15 years old, from Prince George.

12:02This is a very sad case. She was in the foster system and the juvenile incarceration system, and she eventually had to turn to survival sex, which is a term for women who are forced to resort to sex work to feed and clothe themselves. And it usually means like instead of getting money, they get food and clothing and items to live and survive. In 1994, she told a friend she was going to meet one of her clients. She disappeared and her body was discovered off Highway 16. And then finally, Alicia Germain was 15 years old, last seen in 1994 at a Christmas dinner. And she was discovered close to Highway 16.

12:51So that's when they came up with their criteria to see if they could sort of narrow this down, right? Yeah. And just one thing, Roxanne and Leah were, or Alicia, who also went by Leah, they were friends and also colleagues. They both were sex workers who were engaged in survival sex. Ramona, who was not engaged in anything like that. I think she worked at a restaurant or something. But Ramona, Roxanne, and Leah all were murdered in the same area between – Ramona was June, Roxanne July, Leah in December of 1994, I think. Like in all their cases, like in this area, everybody's like, there's something going on.

13:35The cops are like, just give us 11 more years and we'll come together and come up with this new EPANA project. And right when they did, those three just stuck out immediately. It's like there's some real commonalities here. They need to be investigated. But like you were saying, those three criteria that they came up with from this EPANA project, you had to be female. You had to last be seen dead or alive within a mile of Highway 16. And then you also had to be involved in high-risk activities like sex work, but also hitchhiking. And we should say here, too, like for those of us who grew up in towns with bus service and cabs and you could walk places and get to where you're going easily or ride your bike, like hitchhiking almost seems like frivolous.

14:21Hitchhiking is a way to live and survive and get to work in this area. It has been for decades. So it's not like I think you can view hitchhiking as like, man, why did you hitchhike? In a lot of cases, the women and girls who were picked up hitchhiking were trying to get to where they were going. Like they weren't like just hitting the road. Like that was just part of daily life for them, unfortunately. Yeah. So once they narrowed down this criteria, they found more cases that sort of fit that and were lumped into the Highway of Tears murders. Alberta Williams was 24 and she was celebrating at a pub at the end of summer after working there seasonally with her sister.

15:05This was 1989. Her body was found about a month after her disappearance. Delphine Nikal was 16 years old, disappeared in 1990 while hitchhiking. Lana Derrick, a 19-year-old college student, disappeared in October of 95. We mentioned Tamara Chipman. That was the relative of Florence and Ezeel. She was 22, and the mother of a 2-year-old boy disappeared while hitchhiking in 2005. And then 14-year-old Aliyah Sarek Auger went missing from Prince George in 2006. And she was found deceased in a ditch right beside the highway, Highway 16. And Ayala, I'm pretty sure that's how you say her name, she was the last one to be officially added.

15:54Like as far as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are concerned, she's the last Highway of Tears victim. Although, as we'll see, there have been plenty more who would qualify for sure. The problem is EPANA is very much underfunded and not basically not really operational right now. So they're not adding people for that reason. But when they looked into this a little more, they basically went back to their credit and found that there was about 300 boxes of information and paperwork on all these cases. And so they're like, we can't get anywhere until we have all this stuff logged in some sort of database.

16:32So they created the database and they logged it and it took them like a year. But after they finally got all that stuff in, some of those older cases, the ones between 1969 and 1981, they started bubbling up toward the top and were eventually included, starting with that first one with Gloria Moody, also including Monica Jack. And then there was also Micheline Paré, Gaylan Weiss, Pamela Darlington, Colleen McMillan, and Monica Inges, and then Maureen Mosey. And again, all of them were killed between 1969 and 81, all along Highway 16. And a lot of them were hitchhiking as well. Yeah, and, you know, if you look into these cases and people, you know, the volunteers that are working with some of these, you know, a lot of them are run by, you know, families of victims.

17:22they will say that it's probably more like, you know, 50 people. Advocates say that, you know, the total is way higher than they're saying it is, you know, kind of for all the reasons that we've mentioned so far. And that seems like a good time to take our first break. And we'll be right back.

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20:32All right, so when we left off, we were saying that the total number could be as high as 50, if you look at all these cases. And not a lot of them have been solved. There are a few exceptions here and there that definitely show that there were serial killers, killer or killers operating. There was one big one in 2012 with Colleen McMillan. She was murdered hitchhiking. She was 16 years old. This was 1974. But they had, you know, in some of the evidence boxes, had her blouse still. and with the improvement in DNA matching and databases and stuff like that, they were able to find a match on Interpol.

21:14It was an American named Bobby Jack Fowler who had died in prison in 2006 where he was serving time for attempted kidnapping and attempted murder on another woman in 1995 and they found that he had been working as a roofer in Canada when this murder and others took place And, you know, basically we're like, it was probably two other women as well on the list, Pamela Darlington and Gail Weiss. And they were both murdered in 1973, but he died in prison before they could officially pin that on him. Yes. And from what I've read about him, Bobby Jack Fowler is the kind of scumbag that you wish you could go dig up and reanimate so you can punish him some more.

21:58he was terrible and when the Canadian cops were like hey you guys had somebody incarcerated in your prisons to the officials in Oregon who killed at least one girl here but probably three total you should probably look around at your own files they started finding I think they've said up to maybe 20 murders that they've pinned on Bobby Jack Fowler nothing they can prove but it's just likely that he committed them. And he'll obviously never be convicted or tried for him because he's dead. But it just, it goes to show you like there are human beings out there who will just kidnap, rape and murder and just do it over and over again.

22:42And the easiest thing to do in the world is if you're going to do that kind of thing is take advantage of a very vulnerable population in a very sparsely populated area, which makes Highway 16 just like the perfect spot. Yeah, there's another guy. In fact, he's the only living person convicted of one of these murders from someone on the e-panel list. His name is Gary Taylor Handlin. He, you know, going back to the 1960s, had committed multiple rapes, been in jail multiple times for these rapes. One was a hitchhiker in 1978, and he became a suspect. And the youngest victim, 12-year-old Monica Jack that you had mentioned earlier.

23:24And also, Catherine Mary Herbert, 11 years old, she just was not one of the E-Pana cases. But they caught him by setting up a sting operation in which they kind of created this fake crime enterprise where he was answering to an undercover cop playing a crime boss who got him to confess that he abducted and strangled Monica Jack. And this is when he also confessed to killing Catherine Mary Herbert. But that confession was ruled inadmissible, but he was convicted of Jack's murder in 2019. Yeah, he hadn't heard of this, but that's apparently a fairly typical sting operation. They call him a Mr. Big operation where you're just introduced to successively higher up criminals in some organization, organization that they're all cops.

24:11And the judge was like, no, the admission to or confession to Catherine Mary Herbert's murder, inadmissible. But he thought that he was basically convincing this crime boss to get him out of being tried or convicted for Monica Jack's murder. So they're like, that's totally admissible. He completely volunteered that. But yeah, I mean, he went down Tom Ford, like you said, he's the only living person who's ever been convicted for one of these dozens of murders. Yeah. So, you know, we mentioned 2006 is when they stopped officially tagging names onto the official e-panelist. There have still been plenty of murders and sexual assaults along that stretch of highway since then.

24:56Cody Lejebikoff, I believe is how you pronounce that. It sounds right. Killed three women and a 15-year-old girl between 2009 and 2010. So that was after the official list. Two of those victims were indigenous. And the cops caught him when they just pulled him over for a speeding violation and found blood on him. And they found the body of a 15-year-old, Lauren Dawn Leslie, and then realized that they could link him to, and I believe he was convicted too, of killings of three other women. Jill Stacey Stachinko, Cynthia Francis Moss, and Natasha Lynn Montgomery. Yeah. And so all three of them were from Prince George, which is the easternmost town considered part of the Highway of Tears.

25:41And Cody was 19 when he killed the first of them, Jill Stacey Stachinko. He's not the youngest serial killer in Canadian history, but he too, like the other guys, was a scumbag and still is. he was sentenced to no less than 25 years, four times, but it appears that his sentences are concurrent. So he's serving 25 years for four murders. And the judge reminded him that he could apply for parole as early as 15 years in. So that's four years from now that this guy might be able to get out after being convicted of murdering for three women and a girl. I don't like that. Yeah. So you mentioned Florence Nazil earlier, having organized her own walk.

26:27This was in 2006. They call it the Highway of Tears Awareness Walk. And they walked two weeks. They walked through snowstorms. They walked through some, you know, terrible weather and conditions and eventually ended at the Highway of Tears Symposium in Prince George. And again, this wasn't something organized by the cops or anything. It was organized by indigenous groups and victims' families themselves, but they did have 500 delegates from the Mounties there as well as some representative from, you know, the Canadian government there. And it was basically a symposium where they had recommendations on what they could do, you know, not only to help solve these crimes, but to prevent more of this from happening.

27:09And we'll get to, you know, what's happened since then because they have done some things that seem like they should probably help. But also, you know, how to support these families, how to support these communities a little better because it was, you know, not well funded and any kind of work was very sparse up until that point. Yeah. So Brenda Wilson, Ramona Wilson's sister, she works for Caria Sakani Family Services, and she's the one employee of the Highway of Tears initiative. And she frequently has to work for free because they just are like, we're out of money again. Wait till next quarter for the check to come in.

27:47And obviously she's extremely dedicated, but that's a kind of a par for the course thing. Like just the funding is just not there. And if you follow, like, government funding, it usually goes to stuff that people care about or, like, a lot of people care about. So if you don't get funding, it's kind of a big slap in the face in addition to, you know, really tying your hands from doing the work you're trying to do. Yeah, and, you know, there's a lot of distrust for the Mounties there and for good reasons in a lot of cases. as we'll see. There's a woman named Gladys Radek, who was an aunt of Tamara Chipman, one of the victims.

28:24And she leads a cause called Tears for Justice, the number four. She has a lot of distrust of the police because as a teenager, she ran away and was hitchhiking and was picked up two different times by RCMP officers who raped her. So, So, I mean, as far as the RCMP is concerned, they're like, we're going to investigate this stuff and we're going to treat anyone within our ranks who does something like this just like we would any common criminal. But the fact that that stuff happens, period, and that there's a human rights watch report that came out in 2012 that documented police abuse against indigenous women and girls.