The Crime Web: News for November 2001

Crime News - November

Suspected serial killer gets 65 more years

Associated Press

Last updated 03:49 AM, EST, Thursday, November 29, 2001

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- A judge has ordered a suspected serial killer and homeless man to serve an additional 65 years in prison for the 1998 murder of an Indianapolis woman.

Judge Cale Bradford on Wednesday sentenced Cecil Jenkins to a total of 95 years for the murder of Yvonne Webb. Bradford ordered 65 years to be served consecutively and 30 years concurrently.

Jenkins already is serving 208 years in prison for other crimes.

"There's no way this man will ever walk the streets again," said Mark Hollingsworth, deputy prosecutor for Marion County.

Webb was a mother of two and addicted to crack cocaine when she met Jenkins, whom police believe offered her drugs. Her body was found in the back seat of her car on March 27, 1998.

Jenkins' DNA was found on her body and under fingernails. Police suspect the homeless man in the deaths of three other women, saying he used drugs to lure the women and then kill them. He is scheduled to go on trial for another murder Monday in Marion Superior Court.

Controversy over criminal profilers
25 Cromwell Street must certainly be the most notorious address in England. It was the home of the husband and wife serial killers, Frederick and Rosemary West. When police first began to unearth the dismembered bodies of murdered women from their backyard in 1994, they realised they were dealing with mass murder and they called in the psychologist Paul Britton to advise them. Dr Britton, already well-known for his work as a 'profiler' of psychopaths - told them to look for bodies "everywhere West had worked, everywhere that he'd lived". He was right. Criminal profilers are a rare and controversial breed - their insights have been invaluable in solving many cases. But not everyone agrees with their methods.

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Compere: Tony Jones
Reporter: Amber Muir

TONY JONES: 25 Cromwell Street must certainly be the most notorious address in England.

It was the home of the husband and wife serial killers, Frederick and Rosemary West.

When police first began to unearth the dismembered bodies of murdered women from their backyard in 1994, they realised they were dealing with mass murder and they called in the psychologist Paul Britton to advise them.

Dr Britton, already well-known for his work as a 'profiler' of psychopaths -- told them to look for bodies "everywhere West had worked, everywhere that he'd lived".

He told them the Wests had probably started burying bodies in the backyard "because the house was full".

He was right.

The whole house was a mass grave.

Criminal profilers are a rare and controversial breed -- their insights have been invaluable in solving many cases.

But not everyone agrees with their methods.

In a moment we'll speak to Dr Britton from London but first this report from Amber Muir.

AMBER MUIR: There could be no more chilling example of the work of a criminal profiler than where Clarice Starling confronts Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs.

She sifts through the brilliant doctor's sick mind, trying to make sense of his world without being sucked in it.

It's only natural to wonder why a murderer commits his crime, but these days, there's even more interest in the people whose job it is to know the answer to that question.

Nowhere is this more played out than in the Hollywood studios -- movies, books and TV series built around characters with a intuitive knack for knowing what kind of person the police should look for.

The glamour is at odds with the chilling reality of the job, but public fascination comes as no surprise to those who work in forensics.

SNR SUPT RON SMITH, NSW POLICE: The profiler, per se, does have an air of mystique about this whole process and I think that does interest the public.

AMBER MUIR: In the last 20 years, their intuitive interpretations of criminal minds have proved invaluable, none more so than Britain's top forensic psychologist, Paul Britton, who has worked on the Jamie Bolger and Fred West murder cases.

But in recent months, his methods have been questioned for their scientific value in an investigation of the 1992 murder of a woman on Wimbledon Common in London.

Australia's premier profiler, Dr Rod Milton is familiar with the fine line between public adoration for profilers and investigator cynicism.

He's the veteran of numerous investigations, including the granny killer and backpacker murders.

Critics say the study of the granny killer proved correct in almost every way except the age, which was predicted to be a teenager, but he says that misunderstands the purpose of their skills.

ROD MILTON, FORENSIC PSYCHIATRIST: Intuition is another word for use of one's experience of which one is unconscious, and it's reasonable -- sometimes it's possible to make a guess but it's important to say that it is just a guess and that it's at a lower level of reliability than other conclusions.

AMBER MUIR: Critics point to differences in details about the person ultimately convicted as proof of a profiler's limitation, but Dr Milton says it's not about being right every time.

Their job is to provide investigators with a line of thought they may not otherwise pursue.

ROD MILTON: It gets into a bit of strife when the police put too much reliance on it or when the person doing the report is too emphatic.

AMBER MUIR: That underlines the view Dr Milton shares with police that profiling is a guide, not a conclusion.

No doubt, many profilers have pondered the convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh's mind, a man who shattered so many lives.]

Task force meets with Green River detectives

Police here investigate possibility of serial killer

The new police task force investigating the disappearance of an estimated 45 women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside flew to Spokane this month to speak to U.S. police about two famous cases involving serial killers who preyed on prostitutes.

Twelve members of the joint RCMP-Vancouver police task force, launched last spring to take a fresh look at the cases of missing women in Vancouver, went to Spokane to gather information about the case of Robert Yates, who was convicted last year of murdering 13 people, including 10 prostitutes.

Vancouver officers also met with investigators on a new Green River killer review team, which is searching for the person who killed 49 prostitutes in Seattle in the mid-1980s.

None of the 16 members of the task force has experience on serial-killer investigations, so most of the team went to Washington to get advice on tackling the case. They were warned it could be a long, difficult process.

"We got an idea of what they dealt with . . . it was a good information/training session," RCMP Sergeant Wayne Clary said.

Vancouver police, who started to investigate the case in 1999, were initially hesitant to acknowledge the missing women could be the victims of foul play. The new task force now says there is a good possibility they are dead, and that police may be looking for a serial killer responsible for some or all of the slayings.

The task force also received specific information about Spokane's killer, Yates, and any suspects in Seattle's unsolved case.

While Vancouver investigators have not ruled out Yates or the Green River killer as a suspect in the Vancouver cases of missing women, there is one obvious difference -- no bodies have been found.

Sergeant John Urquhart, of the King County sheriff's office in Seattle, said the Spokane meeting allowed detectives to share techniques, discuss common problems, and brainstorm ways to investigate these cases.

"This was a unique opportunity for three police jurisdictions who have three distinct stages of serial homicide cases to get together and learn from one another," Urquhart said.

"The King County sheriff's office has 49 unsolved, but extensively investigated, cases that are 15 to 20 years old. Spokane has a number of relatively recent cases that are solved. The RCMP has a large number of cases where additional investigation is required."

Like the new RCMP-Vancouver police task force, the Seattle team appointed this summer to take a fresh look at the Green River killings is analysing old evidence in its search for fresh leads.

"They're interested in what we're doing, and we're interested in what they had and how they went about it," Clary said.

In an interview with The Vancouver Sun in his downtown Seattle office, King County Sheriff Dave Reichert said his review team has been sending evidence collected in the early 1980s to labs for DNA testing. That technology didn't exist when he began hunting for his elusive killer nearly two decades ago.

"We recognize that we could have some evidence here that, with new technology around DNA, may lead us to a suspect," he said.

Reichert became tight-lipped for the only time during the one-hour interview when asked if the team of detectives had uncovered any new leads since reviewing the DNA.

"That's something that I'm not going to comment on, as to the results of the tests so far," he said.

But Reichert, who was one of the original investigators assigned to the first Green River task force, which operated from 1982 to 1990, is convinced the case can be solved.

"We had eight years to try and solve this case, and we had some of the best investigators in the country and in the state working on this thing -- and we didn't make it," he said.

"This is something that haunts these people."

Police in Spokane arrested their suspect, Yates, in April 2000 following a three-year investigation into the murders of 10 prostitutes and three other people.

Sergeant Cal Walker, of the Spokane homicide unit, said the Vancouver officers were among police from several jurisdictions to attend a Nov. 6 seminar on tactics used to catch Yates.

"We did have a successful investigation based upon a lot of things that we learned -- the good and bad experiences from other people's agencies and the new technologies that we were able to put into place and utilize," Walker said.

"So we shared the experience of our whole case -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- and just put it out there for a learning experience for them."

The seminar was also intended to share the evidence in the Spokane case with other investigators, like those in B.C., who have unsolved murder cases that could be linked to Yates.

"There are certain traits and pieces of evidence that are similar in a lot of crimes and sometimes you will have different offenders with those similar traits and sometimes you will have the same ones and you don't put them together until you see the existence of that evidence," Walker said.

Yates was a helicopter pilot who travelled frequently by air and by car, and was known to come to B.C. occasionally.

Besides pleading guilty to 13 murders that occurred from 1988 to 1998, Yates has also been charged in the 1975 deaths of two Tacoma students.

In Seattle, bodies of asphyxiated prostitutes were found discarded along the shores of the Green River, between 1982 and 1984. It was after the murders stopped that sex-trade workers began disappearing from Vancouver streets.

Reichert, the King County sheriff, has met with Vancouver police many times over the years to discuss the coincidental timing of the two cases.

"If you look past mid-1984, when we think ours ended, up in Vancouver there's been a pretty steady disappearance rate of young women," he said.

Over the years, Reichert has also travelled to Victoria and Nanaimo to look into the deaths of a number of prostitutes whose bodies were found just outside city limits in secluded areas.

He said no information has been uncovered to connect Seattle's case to any of the murdered and missing women in B.C. "Not specifically, just the fact that the time-frame and the line of work they were in, the lifestyle and so forth."

Reichert is confident that one man is responsible for most, if not all, of Seattle's 49 victims -- 42 of whom were found murdered and seven who are missing and presumed dead.

The official police investigation in Seattle's case ended in 1990, leaving just two detectives to chase any tips that trickled in.

But when Reichert was elected sheriff, he had the political clout to reopen the probe.

This past summer, he invited about 25 police officers who had originally worked on the case to a brainstorming meeting -- some of them are retired, others had moved on to other agencies, and some were still working in King Country.

The investigators had collected more than 10,000 pieces of evidence in the case, much of which, given today's DNA technology, could uncover a suspect. Vaginal washes, blood, fingernail scraping, fingernail clippings, skin samples and hair stored in refrigerators and freezers were sent to labs for testing.

"So, what I've asked the detectives to do now is go through those cases, evaluate the evidence and possible DNA outcomes," he said.

Reichert has put together a team of six detectives to work full-time on reviewing the old evidence. He said the size of the team may grow if enough new leads are generated.

"A lot of the people who worked the cases back then are still around," he said.

Over the years, King County police have eliminated a number of suspects, but Reichert says there are still some names the review team is looking at.

"We have some that are still on the list," he said. "I think we had a Top 10 and there's a number of those left. Who knows?"

Although some people -- including officers in his own agency -- have questioned using scarce police resources to restart a 20-year-old investigation, Reichert believes most Seattle residents support the effort.

"To wait and not take advantage of this technology would be absolutely inexcusable," said Reichert, 51, who insists the case is solvable.

"I've said that from Day One, whenever anyone has ever asked me if we are going to solve this case. Back when I was 32 years old I said 'Yes,' so I'm still sticking by that."

Portrait of a prostitute killer

Born with fetal alcohol syndrome into an abusive home, he became a violent drunk -- and a killer

The life story of Marvin Alexander Tom -- like those of many men who attack and sometimes kill prostitutes -- has striking similarities to the backgrounds of the vulnerable women who make a living on the streets.

Many of the prostitutes who have vanished are aboriginal, like Tom. And, like Tom, most of them have tragic pasts filled with abuse, addiction, unemployment and poverty.

But while Tom became a killer, the missing women -- many speculate -- have become the victims of a murderer, possibly the most prolific serial killer Canada has ever seen.

Vancouver's sex-trade workers started disappearing in 1984, and Tom has been in prison for the majority of the intervening years. But is the person responsible for this mysterious and troubling case someone like him? Someone who has struggled since childhood and, in adulthood, can no longer control fatal impulses to lash out against some of the most fragile members of our society?

Police say they have as many as 600 suspects in the missing women case -- essentially a list of men convicted in B.C. of violent attacks on prostitutes.

This is the story of one of those men.

AGASSIZ -- Marvin Tom has a few theories about who may be killing sex-trade workers in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

He thinks it is someone acting alone. Someone who maybe had a mother or a sister who was a prostitute.

"He must have had a vicious background, let's put it that way. I keep thinking that someone in that person's family was a prostitute or something, like a sister or a mother or a cousin."

If there is a serial killer responsible for the disappearance of about 45 women in recent years, Tom thinks the man is cunning and calculating.

"They will go to any lengths. They will make sure that there is no loose ends," he said.

"If you were the murderer or a serial killer, I'd be classifying you as a person who knows how to play his cards. In other words, someone who knows how to beat the system."

But he doesn't think the serial killer is anything like him -- despite his arrest and imprisonment for killing one prostitute and raping two other women in a drunken four-day spree of violence in the Downtown Eastside in 1993.

In fact, Tom, who is serving an indefinite sentence as a dangerous offender at Kent Institution here, thinks of himself as a gentle soul who loves women.

That image is in drastic contrast to his vicious actions over a booze-crazed weekend more than eight years ago.

It started on Friday, July 30, 1993, when Tom was released from the Regional Psychiatric Centre after serving four years for slashing the throat of his girlfriend in an alcohol-fueled rage.

He was driven to the Downtown Eastside and dropped off about 11 a.m. at the Salvation Army's Harbour Light detox centre by a student social worker. He was told to come back by 1 p.m. to register.

Instead, Tom hit the bars and by the next morning, Lisa Lynn McLaren was dead.

The 24-year-old prostitute was found naked from the waist down, lying in some bushes beside the railway tracks at the foot of Dunlevy Street. Her head had been severely beaten, and bones were broken on both sides of her throat.

Covered in blood, Tom walked into the Vancouver police station the next day and said he had just found a body. Police, who had already located McLaren's remains, took Tom's clothes and a blood sample. He was questioned and released.

He continued his boozing. And he continued his violence, sexually assaulting two more women in the same neighbourhood within the next two days.

A 24-year-old prostitute says Tom agreed to pay her $50 for sex, but then raped and beat her in a field off Keefer Street. She escaped with scrapes, bruises and a broken breastbone.

Another woman testified in court that Tom followed her, pinned her down after she fell, sexually assaulted her, and repeatedly smashed her head into the sidewalk before running away.

Tom was convicted in two separate trials in 1995 of manslaughter in McLaren's death, and aggravated sexual assault and sexual assault in the other attacks.

In a parole decision earlier this year, a three-panel board denied Tom's application for release, noting the vicious nature of his crimes and the over-all problem of violence against prostitutes in the Downtown Eastside.

"Your victims have all suffered serious physical and psychological damage and the community has expressed its concerns regarding the safety of street prostitutes," the National Parole Board said in its decision.

Board members ruled Tom remains an undue risk to society.

Tom doesn't think it is fair that convicts like him have their parole eligibility impacted, in part, by public concern over the missing women, whose pictures are on a poster in the prison's entranceway.

"When they keep going missing, it is hitting also the people who are incarcerated and they are putting them down in the same category -- see he is a prostitute killer . . . it makes it harder for me to get out," he said.

"I can understand where the public's coming from, but sometimes you have to understand and realize that some people are dealing with their issues."

- - -

A lot in Tom's 36 years could be classified as unfair.

Even a Kent prison guard escorting Sun reporters through locked corridors casually observed: "Nobody says Marvin has had an easy life."

That life began in Fort St. James on Sept. 13, 1965. Or so Tom thinks. He isn't even sure where he was born. Like so much of his past, including the violent acts that landed him in jail, things are blurry.

He was brain damaged even before his birth from fetal alcohol syndrome. As the oldest of Lawrence Tom and Matilda "Tilly Rose" Joseph's three boys, Marvin received most of the beatings when his dad was drunk. And that was often.

Cigarettes were butted out on his head. His leg was broken when he was kicked with a steel-toed boot. He lifts his striped T-shirt to show the scar on the right side of his stomach from his father holding him over a wood stove.

"Marvin was treated worse than his brother Lawrence, because he was the oldest," Tom's foster father David Dyck confirmed in an interview. "Even now if you look on his head, you'll see cigarette burns."

Social workers placed Tom in a series of foster homes. He and his youngest brother Lawrence finally ended up with the Dycks, a decent family with 16 children of their own on a small farm outside Vanderhoof. The Dycks looked after Tom for at least 10 years, from age five to his mid-teens, when he became lost to alcohol.

He doesn't remember much of his early childhood, except the fear of the beatings.

"According to my grandma on my mom's side, she said I was the oldest in the family and I was the one who was getting most of the beatings, so whatever my youngest brother did, I was the one who was getting it. I pretty well got it every time."

When he was forced to visit with his father at Dyck's home, Tom would hide, his foster father said.

"As soon as they mentioned my dad's name, I would be running in the other direction," Tom recalled. "I was scared to be in kindergarten. When my foster mom dropped me off in kindergarten there was more fear -- like maybe my dad was going to come in the door."

Court records in Prince George and Vanderhoof indicate Tom's father, Lawrence Seymour Tom, has had a violent past and many run-ins with the law.

On May 14, 1984 Lawrence Tom Sr. repeatedly stabbed his second wife, Kathy Tom, with a butcher's knife on the Pinchi Reserve near Fort St. James. The attack left her paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. He was convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to three years in jail.

Lawrence Tom Sr. has also been convicted of threatening his daughter Laurie Tom and assaulting his son Vern Tom with a knife, among other violent offences over the years.

If Marvin Tom's memories of his father are bad, the memories of his mother are non-existent.

Sun files indicate Matilda Joseph died of a drug overdose in Oakalla prison at age 26, a few months after participating in a jail break with seven other inmates.

According to court documents and Tom's step-mother Kathy, Joseph was in jail because she attacked her husband in self-defence.

Joseph's death was deemed accidental by a coroner's jury, despite testimony from another inmate that Joseph had been crying in her cell before deliberating injecting herself with the drugs that killed her.

Tom was thrilled when provided with two short news articles about Joseph published in The Sun in 1974.

"Cool. I have been trying to track down her records for so long. I didn't even know her age until right now," he said. "I don't even know why she went to prison in the first place. What I've been told is that she and my dad got into an argument, or got into a fight or something on the reserve, and from there I guess my mom just had enough of it -- enough of the violence -- and she just spun out one night."

Tom was nine when his mother died, and has a foggy memory of being taken to her funeral by a social worker.

Years later, while in prison, he addressed a suicide note to his mother, saying he wanted to kill himself so he could be with her.

Court documents indicate he has tried at least a dozen times to kill himself by slashing himself, swallowing razor blades, over-dosing and hanging.

His forearms are covered in scars from self-mutilation -- slashings done with razor blades both inside and outside prison. He jokingly calls them "Indian tattoos."

But Tom refuses to talk about the suicide attempts, or the sexual abuse that court and parole records say he endured in some of his foster homes.

"If it did happen, I probably wanted to forget about it," he said matter-of-factly.

Dyck, his longtime foster father, said Tom was well-behaved as a young boy, but a slow learner who didn't like doing chores around the house.

"He was reasonably good, but he never seemed to want to work," recalled Dyck, 86. "Going to school, he'd sit there and sleep instead of learning. What he has learned, I think he learned in jail."

Dyck sent Tom to a Christian school, where several teachers made extra efforts to help the boy. But he struggled with learning disabilities now associated with fetal alcohol syndrome. Although he stayed in school until about age 15, he left with a Grade 4 education. He still doesn't read or write very well, although he is taking classes in prison.

Tom said he started drinking at about age 10. Jack Daniels was his favourite, but he would drink anything he could get his hands on. He also started sniffing glue about age 12 and experimenting with drugs at 15, court documents show.

Add to this vandalism, truancy and stealing cars, and Tom said his foster mother got more and more concerned about his behaviour. As a teenager, his run-ins with police were mostly for drinking. And for mouthing off.

By the time he was 18 and 19 years old, court records in Prince George and Vanderhoof show Tom was continually in and out of court. Breaking windows. Smashing the headlights of a police car. Impaired driving. Failing to comply with probation orders -- mainly drinking when he had been ordered by the courts not to.

In one stint in prison, Tom was incarcerated in the Prince George regional correctional centre. His father was a fellow inmate. "We basically just talked like father and son kind of thing. I forgive him but I can't forget."

Tom's step-mother and former foster father both say Tom would do "anything" while drunk.

"Normally he is not violent," Kathy Tom said. "But he does get blackouts when he is drinking and that's when it happens."

By the time he left the Dycks in his mid-teens, Tom was "shacking up" with a series of girlfriends. The focus of all the relationships was alcohol, and they were frequently volatile.

He said he fathered his first child, a girl, at about 16. He saw the baby briefly at the hospital, but said the mother moved to Calgary. He doesn't even know his daughter's name.

A couple of years later, he said, he fathered his second baby -- a boy he named Steven. He doesn't remember the mother's name.

His third child to yet another woman was a boy, also named Steven.

"Steven I knew how to spell, so that's why I picked the name," Tom explained.

Exactly how many babies Tom has fathered isn't clear. He has told different stories to lawyers and psychiatrists -- ranging from two to six.

Tom's first assault conviction came in April 1985 after he broke into the home of a former Vanderhoof teacher with whom he had become infatuated. The victim would later testify in court that he climbed in her living-room window, grabbed her and began choking her before she fought him off. Tom was sentenced to serve seven months at the Hudta Lake Forestry Camp.

After that incident, Tom's aggression continued to escalate. He has since been described in court as hating women.

Tom told The Sun his relationship with the mother of his third child was particularly explosive. But he believes the woman was always falsely accusing him of being abusive, though he admits to throwing beer bottles at her.

"Even the RCMP in Prince George said: 'You guys have got to break up. We are getting calls from you left and right. It seems that every weekend we are getting calls to the apartment or in town or something. One of these days either she is going to kill you or you are going to kill her,' " Tom recalled.

They did break up and he moved in with Pauline Gillis.

Tom was convicted in 1989 of aggravated assault after police were called to a Prince George home and found Gillis had been stabbed in the neck with a 12-inch butcher knife. Tom was drunk, and the couple had argued over his welfare money when Gillis was attacked and told: "You're dead, bud," court documents say.

But Tom says the couple had been fighting over Gillis' care of her baby girl. He remembers leaving her apartment to go drinking, but said he does not recall what happened when he came back about 5 a.m.

"I got charged for stabbing her on the side with a knife. In the neck. That is what really discourages me sometimes, how that went down. All those years, like I didn't want to be like my dad," Tom said.

He insists he cannot recall the attack, but said police showed him a photo of Gillis' bloody wound. "It scared me more than anything else. How could that happen? How could I let it go that far?"

His four-year sentence for the aggravated assault of Gillis put Tom in the federal prison system and brought him to the Lower Mainland.

He was released on parole four times -- each time violating his probation by returning to the Downtown Eastside, where he had women friends and drinking buddies. And each time he was sent back to jail.

But on July 30, 1993, his sentence expired and he had to be released -- despite concerns raised by the parole board.

A decision written seven days before he was freed said: "You remain a risk to re-offend while on any form of release. It is noted with regret you will re-enter the community. . . . One can only hope some of the institutional programs will be of some benefit, and allow you to function as a law-abiding citizen."

Tom said he intended to return to the North where he had another girlfriend waiting for him.

But first he was supposed to complete the Salvation Army's detox program in the Downtown Eastside. Once he got to the neighbourhood, Tom's craving lured him to the booze that had controlled his entire life.

Tom claims to have no memory of the days that followed, or the rampage that has landed him in prison, possibly for the rest of his life.

"I told one of my friends I am going out on a big binge before I leave Vancouver," he recalled. "But they were trying to say stuff like: 'You should go back home. That is where you belong.' "

Twice in the first 24 hours since his release from prison, he was thrown into the Vancouver Detox Centre. And in between those visits, Lisa Lynn McLaren was murdered.

Asked if he remembers McLaren, Tom repeated what he said during his 1995 murder trial: "I didn't even know who she was until in court ... they showed me a photo and said: 'Do you recall seeing her?' and I said, 'No. Who is that?' "

He can't explain why he went into the police station and said he knew where a body was. He can't explain the blood all over him. He can't explain why he was wearing McLaren's running shoes. He can't explain his DNA being inside the victim.

"That is something that plays in my mind sometimes," Tom said of all the unanswered questions.

He has almost convinced himself of his lawyer's suggestion that maybe someone else was there when McLaren was killed.

"To be honest with you, I am not really sure myself about it. It is like being in another world without even realizing it," Tom said. "I'm not too aware of my surroundings or who I am with or who I am drinking with or whatever because to me I will drink with anybody."

Whether a blackout or denial has clouded Tom's memory, he acknowledges he probably did do something horrendous -- something he does not like to think about.

"If I took this person's life, and these are only my words, they should take me out and hang me. To me, I don't know if I can handle it."

The Sun attempted to contact McLaren's family through Crown counsel but was unsuccessful.

Although he was tried for first-degree murder in McLaren's death, a jury convicted Tom of manslaughter because he was so drunk.

But Judge Donald Brenner still declared him a dangerous offender and handed him an indefinite sentence.

"The circumstances of Lisa McLaren's death, in particular the severe nature of her injuries, were of such a brutal nature as to compel the conclusion that Mr. Tom's behaviour in the future is unlikely to be inhibited by normal standards of behavioural restraint," Brenner said.

While he said Tom has shown signs of trying to rehabilitate himself, Brenner concluded the man "is likely to violently reoffend."

Tom's defence lawyer Jim Hogan had earlier argued his client didn't ask for his start in life -- much the same way his victims didn't choose their backgrounds.

"[The complainants are] inadequate to some degree as far as their addictions and prostitution and cocaine and street life, unemployment, everything that may not be their fault -- and that leads me right into Marvin," Hogan said to the jury.

"I am not asking you to have sympathy and, therefore, relieve him of his responsibilities . . . what I am asking you is to understand and not condemn him for what he is . . . Marvin Tom did not ask for any of his inadequacies. He was born with them or they were bred into him."

Judge Michael Catliff, who presided over the sex-assault trial, said he understood Tom's "unfortunate early history," but said the offender should be kept "out of harm's way" for as long as the law would allow. "This man is a ticking bomb who will explode as soon as he is released from custody," Catliff said.

Quoting from a psychiatrist's report, Catliff noted Tom was "a very unfortunate and pathetic man who is really grossly lacking in the psychological resources necessary to manage in the world or handle his own problems. He is clearly someone who can at best lurch and stumble through life."

But Tom also has his supporters. Todd Cassidy, a Corrections counsellor who works with some of B.C.'s most troubled federal inmates, believes Tom could be rehabilitated if the prison system offered better programs -- both for his mental health problems and his alcohol addiction.

Cassidy is not necessarily advocating that Tom could one day be released, but that his quality of life in prison could be more productive if he were given the help he needs to heal -- and perhaps the opportunity to pass his story along to other troubled native youths.

"He does have flashes of brilliance, good ideas of straightening out his life and working with youth so they don't have to go through what he goes through. He is trying to change."

In the 2 1/2 years Cassidy has worked with Tom, he said the inmate has shown no signs of violence to anyone but himself. He said Tom is in a segregated unit in Kent, not because he has attacked other prisoners, but because he has been a victim of such assaults while incarcerated.

"He's like a child who people can lead," said Cassidy, a former inmate who served a total of 27 years in jail but has been working with prisoners ever since his release in 1983. "He hasn't progressed past about 10 years old emotionally."

Tom says he doesn't want to use alcohol as an excuse for whatever he has done.

But he can't say if he could quit drinking if allowed out on bail. He talks about going to a treatment program in Nanaimo. He mentions an article a friend read about surgery that can stop the cravings. There is also medication he hopes to take months before being released.

But there are no guarantees.

Tom hinted that alcohol was available behind prison walls, though he claimed not to be drinking. A parole board report said he had got into trouble in prison and may be involved in the drug sub-culture behind bars, something Tom denied to The Sun.

Throughout Tom's interview with two reporters in Kent's nondescript, internal court room, a prison guard remained nearby and was able to hear everything.

At the very least, Tom said he finally realizes he is an alcoholic. And that drinking makes him uncontrollably violent.

"I am starting to see more what other people are saying," he said. "I don't joke about alcohol any more either. I gave that up. To me it's like if you joke about it, you are still into it. The one thing I have to deal with is my alcohol. That is the main key to all the issues is the alcohol. That is my biggest downfall, when I go drinking."

Tom has been in prison, with the exception of a few drunken days, for more than a decade, and does not know when -- or if -- he'll ever get out.

His last parole decision referred to him as a moderate psychopath, with "possible organic brain impairment, impaired intelligence, depression and suicidal tendencies, anger and violence, sexual deviance and a personality disorder with inadequate, dependent, immature, borderline and anti-social features."

At his dangerous offender's hearing in 1996, a forensic psychiatrist said Tom has a vicious hostility toward women -- something Tom denies is true.

"It is something I am not really aware of," he said.

Asked about his history of assaulting women, Tom seemed incapable of seeing a pattern of violence. He tried to separate his actions from the charges of which he is convicted.

"That boils back down to what I have been charged with. Legally, the courts look at it as what was all done, or what harm was done. There's a sense that I've been labelled basically by what goes down on my files," he said.

But in the 1995 sentencing hearing for the manslaughter conviction, Judge Brenner noted Tom has an established pattern of behaviour. "These attacks indicate Mr. Tom's substantial hostility towards women."

Nonetheless, Tom argues he has always been friendly to prostitutes when they met in bars or when he passed them on street corners. "I guess people look at them as the lowest of the lowest, but they are human themselves. You've got to do what you've got to do. Who am I to judge another person by what they do?"

Even though he said he is still not sure what happened during those horrific four days in the summer of 1993, he does want to apologize to McLaren's family.

"I regret what has happened to her and I know how it feels to lose somebody who's really important to them. If there was anything I could do to change things around, I would," he said.

"It shouldn't have happened the way it happened. If I could change lives with her, I would in a heartbeat. I wish there was something I could do to bring her back."

And for the other two women he was convicted of sexually assaulting, Tom also offered an apology.

"I regret putting them through the terror and the misery. It is something I don't want anyone more to go through. I regret the whole situation from the beginning, from day one. It is the biggest mistake of my life."

Police consider collecting DNA from prostitutes

Police are looking into setting up a province-wide data bank of DNA donated by prostitutes to help officers identify bodies or other crime-scene evidence when they suspect a sex trade worker has gone missing.

Right now, the concept is nothing more than a dream of Corporal Joanne Skrine of the Provincial Prostitution Unit. If it comes to fruition, she envisions sex trade workers from across B.C. offering blood, fingerprints, photographs and, potentially, dental imprints to the data bank.

It could also include personal information, ranging from where the women work to lists of scars and tattoos to names of next-of-kin to how they usually dress.

"Would you normally wear underwear? These are questions that if a body was found and they don't have underwear, would that be unusual or not? Those sort of things could help an investigation," Skrine said.

The concept is modelled after a similar, but smaller, initiative by New Westminster police, who have collected samples from 50 prostitutes in that city.

Several experts interviewed for this story said they were not aware of other cities, provinces or countries trying such an idea.

Skrine admits there are legal hurdles -- such as privacy laws and constitutional rights -- she must clear before a voluntary province-wide data bank can become a reality. She also wants to ensure the information isn't used against the prostitutes -- by defence lawyers or other police officers investigating the women for crimes, for example.

"We have to be very careful because we have to be very protective of this information," Skrine said. "There are a lot of issues to try to smooth out right now. It's certainly in the preliminary stages."

The idea has also faced criticism from some prostitution advocates who say it is morbid: Why don't police try to stop the violence, rather than finding a way to identify a woman once she has been violated?

But Skrine argues the data bank would give police a head-start in an investigation such as the current attempt to determine what happened to women missing from the Downtown Eastside. And she wants to incorporate some elements into the plan that will increase safety for the women, such as information about so-called bad dates that police could use to determine if a rough john is operating in different cities.

"At least we're doing something," Skrine said. "If nothing else, you establish a really good rapport with the girls."

Skrine's idea is based on a project developed in August 1999 by two rookie female police officers in New Westminster. Constables Judy Robertson and Jennifer Fraser are believed to be the first in Canada to set up a voluntary DNA data bank in their department to hold physical evidence taken from prostitutes.

Aptly named FIRST -- Forensic Identification Registry for Sex Trade workers -- the program now has blood, fingerprints, photographs and personal information from about 50 prostitutes who work in New Westminster.

Robertson said it takes about 15 minutes to gather samples from the participating prostitutes while they are working on the street. But she acknowledged some of the women and their advocates have been critical of the program.

"It's obviously unfortunate if we ever have to use it. It's horrible to think that we will. But at least we do have something to fall back on, rather than having a body sit there for an extended period of time not knowing who it is," Robertson said.

She stressed the intent of the program is also safety. She and Fraser came up with the idea after publicity in 1998 about an increasing number of women being reported missing from the Downtown Eastside.

"The Vancouver police department has identified one of the problems in investigating the missing women is that there is no record of who they are or where they frequent," a report written by Fraser and Robertson says.

"This information is used to ensure that if a sex trade worker goes missing, there is information, photographs, fingerprints and a DNA sample on file."

But John Lowman, who is on the board of the Downtown Eastside agency PACE (Prostitution Awareness Counselling Education), dismissed the plan as macabre.

"Basically, the message is that what we're concerned about is identifying bodies when they're dead, instead of making sure that there aren't any dead bodies," said Lowman, a Simon Fraser University professor who has studied the sex trade for more than 20 years.

"I think the message given by this development is tragic."

Police have not yet pitched the idea to the provincial government, and Solicitor General Rich Coleman refused to answer questions about it until he sees a "formal proposal."

The prostitution data bank is being pursued at a time when a separate DNA data bank -- one that could be used to identify the women who are already missing -- has been put on hold pending the Liberal government's cost-cutting review of government services. Without that data bank, there is no way to check DNA collected from 24 of the missing women's families against unidentified human remains catalogued by the coroner's service.

NDP MP Libby Davies, whose riding includes the Downtown Eastside, challenged the legality under Canada's privacy laws of gathering evidence for a prostitution data bank, and questioned guarantees it will never be used against the women.

"I would imagine there's fairly major civil liberties issues involved in that," said Davies, who has been a strong advocate for improvements to the impoverished neighbourhood.

She has met with Vancouver police to discuss the missing women case. Davies argues that instead of a data bank, more needs to be done to find out what happened to the sex trade workers and to prevent others from meeting the same fate.

"I am hugely concerned about what happened to these women and why aren't we solving it."

But Skrine argues that most police officers are trying to improve relations with sex trade workers by treating them as victims not criminals, and hopes the data bank sends a message that police are responding to the concerns of prostitutes.

"I'd like to see them come to police and feel confident that we will do something, and we will try to put the pieces together."

Skrine knows she may have an uphill battle with prostitutes, who -- at least at first -- may not trust police enough to volunteer blood samples.

However, she plans to point out to skeptics that the data bank information could be used for reasons other than naming bodies, such as identifying a victim's blood left at a crime scene.

In New Westminster, Robertson said women voluntarily participated in the program after they were promised she and Fraser were the only two officers who could access the information.

"We explained to them that this could never be used criminally, and it was all set up basically for their benefit -- if they were to go missing then there would be something to fall back on or some kind of closure for the next of kin so they would be identifiable," said Robertson, who has worked in New Westminster for four years and is with the street crime unit.

The names of the women participating in the New Westminster program are listed on a cross-Canada police computer network. Robertson said the information is shared with other agencies only to confirm or rule out whether a woman is a victim of a crime.

New Westminster police haven't successfully used the data bank yet to identify any missing women, but the information has been used to rule out identities in some cases when bodies were found.

Robertson and Fraser, who recently left New Westminster and is now an RCMP officer in Surrey, also set up a chat line for local sex trade workers to offer information about bad dates or to update their data bank files.

About a year ago, police from areas with an active prostitution industry -- such as Prince George, Vancouver Island, Kelowna and the Lower Mainland -- had a brain-storming session to discuss expanding New Westminster's idea into a province-wide data bank.

Skrine said there are still many details to work out, such as where to house the data and who will fund the program.

For now, Skrine is still working with lawyers and police to work out all the logistics. "It needs a lot of manpower and time ... but hopefully we'll be able to move ahead."

Missing women make Vancouver a grisly anomaly


Kim Bolan, Lori Culbert and Lindsay Kines
Vancouver Sun

Tuesday, November 27, 2001

With 45 prostitutes missing and another 40 unsolved murders, Vancouver is unique across the country, a Vancouver Sun investigation shows.

No other Canadian city has the volume of missing and unsolved murders that Vancouver does, according to a Sun survey of Canadian police agencies.

Staff Sergeant George Rocks, of the Calgary police department, said Calgary has not had any reports of murdered prostitutes in almost eight years.

There was a problem in Calgary and the surrounding area from 1985 to 1993, with 12 murders, 10 of which remain unsolved. As for missing prostitutes, there is just one active file involving a woman who went missing because of her involvement in the sex trade, Staff Sergeant Dean Young of the Calgary vice squad said.

Edmonton police service spokesman Dean Parthenis said just two murders of prostitutes remain unsolved in the city. And police know of no cases of women working in the sex trade who have gone missing, Parthenis said.

Saskatoon had a notorious case that began in late 1991 or early 1992. Several sex trade workers, all aboriginal, went missing and were presumed dead.

In October, 1994, southwest of Saskatoon, the skeletal remains of three of the women were found. They were Shelley Napope, 16, Eva Taysup, 30, and Calinda Waterhen, 22.

RCMP began surveillance on their prime suspect -- a convicted killer named John Crawford -- a short time later. He was eventually charged in 1996 and was convicted of murder in all three cases. He remains a suspect in the presumed murders of Shirley Lonethunder and Cynthia Baldhead, who disappeared in 1991.

Aside from the murders and disappearances linked to Crawford, there have been no other cases in the city of Saskatoon in recent years, said Sergeant Tom Loster, who heads the vice squad.

Regina police spokeswomen Elizabeth Popowich said her city has just one unsolved murder of a prostitute, which dates back about a decade. There were also three missing sex trade worker cases from 1985 to 1995. But in the last six years, there have been no unsolved murders and no reports of prostitutes who have disappeared.

In Winnipeg, there have been just three unsolved killings of prostitutes in the last decade and no missing cases, Constable Bob Johnson of the Winnipeg police department said.

"We would enter into a fairly intensive investigation if we knew it was a prostitute who was missing and probably even list it after a period of time as suspicious if nothing else and I don't have any listed that way currently," Johnson said.

Ottawa has three unsolved murders of prostitutes from 1990, 1993 and 1995, but no documented cases of missing prostitutes, department spokeswoman Carol Ryan said.

Canada's two largest cities have not experienced what Vancouver has, despite having a larger population and proportionately more street prostitution.

In Toronto, Sergeant Jim Muscat said there are still several unsolved murders of prostitutes, related to a number of bodies found in and near Lake Ontario. The force struck a task force, known as Project Break Wall, to investigate those cases.

"I don't think there is a problem with missing prostitutes," Muscat said. "We are not aware of any missing prostitutes per se."

Detective Steve Tracy, of the Toronto police service's juvenile task force, said that his city has had the occasional case of a sex trade worker going missing, but nothing like the situation in Vancouver.

"That's staggering," Tracy said when told of the number here. "Certainly we have nothing that would support a trend that would be specific to the trade."

Montreal hasn't had a murdered prostitute since 1994. And none are recorded as missing in the last 16 years, police Inspector Jean-Guy Gagnon said.

Between 1985 and 1994, there were 15 cases of prostitute murders, peaking in 1988 with the murder of six young male sex trade workers. None of these cases has been solved, Gagnon said.

The Maritimes region has had some slayings of sex trade workers, but no disappearances or probable serial cases.

Detective Sergeant Gary Mott, of Saint John, N.B.k, said his department has no known missing prostitutes or unsolved murders. "We have a problem [with prostitution] in our city, but not like that," he said.

Halifax police have two unsolved murders of sex trade workers in the last 10 years, said Sergeant Brenda Zima, of the Halifax police department.

As well, three prostitutes went missing during the same period, including one in 1996, one in 1997 and one last summer, Zima said.

"We don't have any trend of missing sex trade workers," Zima said. "If we do have a case, it is an anomaly. That is not a regular occurrence here."

For prostitutes, fear rises as more go missing

Police overtures draw mixed response: Some are happy, some say it's too little, too late

The Sun's investigative team has spent months looking into the cases of missing women. This news series is their report.

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On a warm summer evening in the Downtown Eastside, the rumour on the street is that a sex trade worker called Lily is dead. That she was killed some time in the last few months, her body dumped somewhere in Delta.

The women who work the same stroll are short on details. But the stories of Lily's disappearance and death have stoked the fears of an already panicked community, in which up to 45 women have gone missing over the past 17 years.

"This guy was talking about Lily being dead," says Theresa, who worked the same stroll as her friend. "It scared me. I jumped out of the car."

She asks a couple of Vancouver Sun reporters to investigate. But the women on the street don't know Lily's last name.

She was called "Vietnamese Lily," they say. She was about 20 and she worked on Hastings Street -- two blocks from the WISH drop-in centre for women in the sex trade.

These women are desperate for accurate information about their friends and co-workers. But they don't know where to turn.

The Sun found that Lily's full name was Rumkahn Ponne "Lily" Nuon and her family came from Cambodia -- not Vietnam -- when she was a small child to escape the violent regime of Pol Pot.

But Nuon became a victim of her violent life on the street in Vancouver's poorest neighbourhood.

Her body was found last June 24 by a highways ministry worker in some bushes on Nordel Way in Delta.

While Delta police treated the death as suspicious at first, Staff Sergeant John Robin said toxicology reports indicate she was not murdered but died of a drug overdose.

Investigators would still like to talk to whoever left Lily to die among the trees and shrubs along the truckers' route.

They know she died where she was found because her stiff hand was clutching a branch there.

Theresa, a 23-year-old, first tells us of Lily. An attractive young woman with shoulder-length brown hair, she says despite her fear, she has to work the street to support a crack habit. She started selling sex earlier this year. Her two younger sisters have been down here much longer.

Even though there is apprehension over the growing list of missing women, Theresa does not feel comfortable taking her concerns and questions to police. She thinks they should be doing more to protect prostitutes. Instead, they are hassling her and other sex trade workers unnecessarily, she claims.

"They arrested me for one line of cocaine. Why? Why don't they go after the dealer? I'm not the problem. There are bigger problems than me."

And she tells of being chased by a knife-wielding client and running into police, literally, who she claims did nothing to stop the man.

"Some of them are good. But sometimes they are calling us dirty sluts," Theresa says. "[Recently] I had a bad date. I waved down two cops and none of them stopped."

But other women working in this neighbourhood say their relationship with police is improving. And they hope that will lead to greater safety and maybe even a breakthrough in the missing women case.

Thirty-nine-year-old Skylar is standing on the corner of Jackson and Cordova. It is November. It is raining.

She doesn't work often, but she has some bills to pay.

She says she has noticed a big difference in the attitude of police down here.

In fact, earlier in the evening, officers stopped and told her about some "bad dates" to watch for -- referring to potential clients who may be violent toward sex trade workers.

"That wouldn't have happened before," says Skylar. "That is really good."

Judy McGuire, chairwoman of the board of the Women's Information and Safe House (WISH) drop-in centre, believes police are generally very responsive now to the needs of women in the Downtown Eastside.

She says they attend the monthly safety meetings. They follow up on the "bad date" sheet produced by the Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society.

"I think a lot of the women are incredibly interested in promoting their own safety," McGuire says. "I think the news of the number of women going missing and being assaulted is more news to the outside public then it is to the people we deal with. I mean, you just have to look at our bad-date sheet to know how many people are assaulted on a regular basis and just how fragile their lives are most of the time."

McGuire says the sex trade workers are "really responsive when the police come and talk to them about specific incidents."

Women on the street are only too aware of the danger they face and always have been.

"If anything, it only seems to get more depressing as the numbers mount up and nobody seems to have a really good lead of what is going on," McGuire says.

"I think the major concern in terms of getting information from the women is it is necessary to form a certain level of trust, so the better cooperation there is among the cops on the street and the cops who are doing the more investigative work, the better off it is."

According to McGuire, many, many police, from beat cops to investigators, are making great efforts to reach out to prostitutes.

But that is not how Raven Bowen feels.

She works with PACE -- Prostitution Alternatives, Counselling and Education -- and says the new RCMP-Vancouver police Missing Women task force has not even contacted her group, which deals with between 200 and 250 sex trade workers a month.

"I don't even know who the hell is on it. And we should know who is on it because we are on the street all the time. I don't know if they are going to go around and do agency visits or if they are just going to exclude the agencies all together like they usually do," Bowen says.

"At least give us a contact name if there is anything, any leads, any follow-up, if there is a girl missing that we notice is missing. I mean, there has got to be a quicker way of communicating that to the police. We are open to set up an appointment whenever they are ready."

Bowen thinks police need to spend the time to gain trust on the street.

"There is a wealth of information if they want to spend the time to build the relationship they can get a lot more insight into what's going on than they have now," she says.

It astonishes her that there is still no system in place to report when a woman goes missing.

"They should have a 1-800 number or anything like that. If they sat with community groups, they could come up with really innovative ways to deal with us and to get the information flowing," she says. "We've got a special relationship with the women because we were the women and I don't see why they don't tap into that as a resource if nothing else."

Bowen says the women in the sex trade are completely demoralized about the violence and the increasing number of women going missing.

"What we are noticing now is like a numbness. The girls who are actively working don't want to talk about it any more because they have to exist in that violence. So that when there is a lot of media attention and their friends are going missing, they don't want to hear about, they don't want to talk about it. They just want to go to work, get their fix and get better."

The politics of the Downtown Eastside, where different agencies have different views on issues like the sex trade, can interfere with a joint response to the missing women crisis. PACE, a gritty support group made up of former prostitutes, has butted heads with the board of WISH, made up of long-time community activists.

PACE is not invited to WISH's monthly safety meeting for sex trade workers. And PACE was recently kicked out of seminars given to police recruits to sensitize them to issues facing prostitutes.

While Bowen says PACE has individual Vancouver police officers it can turn to in a crisis, there is no pro-active relationship with the force after a scathing report PACE released last June that suggested some Vancouver officers have had improper relationships with prostitutes.

Vancouver police have also rejected PACE's proposal to have a liaison officer or team dealing strictly with sex trade workers and following up on assaults against them.

Bowen thinks it is a mistake for the police not to build up a better relationship with PACE and the prostitutes it represents.

"If there is an officer or a team that is always around, that is available, that is there for the women to access, that will at least give them another place . . . where they can come in and access law enforcement without that judgment or feel they are going to be charged with a breach or something."

The women say they still get charged with drug offences, but Bowen is hopeful the city's new drug policy, which says drug users won't be police targets, will mean addicted sex trade workers no longer get charged.

"I hope that will really remedy that situation because they are always targeting the girls. Always. And the girls are accessible because they are always standing on the same corner on the same days. The drug dealers are more aloof," Bowen says.

Bowen says women inform each other about violent dates using "a town crier system where one girl would make sure that all the other girls know."

The bad date sheets can be helpful, but too few women report information to them, Bowen says.

"They don't see the other side of it. They don't see, okay after you report, is there any follow-up with you? Is there anybody actually taking that on and investigating your situation? It doesn't happen."

Police need to rebuild a relationship of trust with sex trade workers, Bowen says.

"They disclose so much to us. There is a wealth of information if they want to spend the time to build the relationship."

Vancouver police media relations officer Detective Scott Driemel thinks police do as much as they can by talking to women on the street and passing information on to the task force.

He says the Vancouver police department's missing persons section is talking to the RCMP-VPD review team "on almost a daily basis."

The Vancouver force relies a lot on Constable Dave Dickson, a well-respected beat cop who lets prostitutes call him 24 hours a day if they have a problem.

"He is really on top of this and he is one of the people who was really instrumental in initially identifying the problem," Driemel says of Dickson. "Dave's down there on a regular basis, talking to [sex trade workers]."

Driemel says Dickson keeps in touch with the agencies in the Downtown Eastside that work with prostitutes. But he admits the relationship with PACE has been strained since the lobby group's contentious report.

"If they come up with any kind of information, of course we will act on it. Do we think it was prudent for them trying to educate recruit-level officers? No we didn't. People have to be responsible about what they say."

Communication is better between beat cops, those in the sexual offence squad and investigators on the task force, Driemel says.

"Everybody knows about the missing women," he says. "The police we have are professional enough that if they know they've got something -- even though it might not appear to be a big break -- everybody recognizes that it is sometimes small pieces that can lead to solving the puzzle. I don't think anybody really sits on any information. Everybody likes to pass it on as quickly as possible."

But the bottom line is there are no additional police assisting sex trade workers, given all the constraints on resources.

"Have we got more men assigned to actually being out working trying to protect the prostitutes? No we don't. We've still got our same amount of deployment that we've got for that area of the city and of course they are deployed for all the residents."

Bowen said while Vancouver police no longer lay charges for solicitation, they do restrict where individual prostitutes can work. It is called a "no-go."

"They do a no-go Vancouver, no-go this and no-go that. But that obviously displaces the sex worker to Whalley somewhere where we can't even find them."

Laura Keewatin knows all about no-goes. She is often in a cat-and-mouse game with police at the corner of Victoria and Triumph, where she has been working and living on the streets for years.

Keewatin turned 23 last week. That means she has now been working more than half her life as a prostitute, since she was 11. Seven of those years have been spent here, just east of the Downtown Eastside.

She smokes crack cocaine and heroin. Her older sister is working in the sex trade too and is also into crack. So is their mother, who spends as much time on the streets with her daughters as possible. To watch over them.

Some of Keewatin's experiences with police in the area have been positive -- they sincerely care about her and the other "girls" as she calls them.

But other times, police have harassed her and her friends, even physically driving them out out of Vancouver and leaving them to make their own way back, she claims.

And police have threatened to arrest Keewatin and her family -- for trespassing on the driveway of a deserted building.

Three Vancouver Sun reporters monitored Keewatin's corner late one night this month. Several women could be seen working the area. Police officers in an unmarked car repeatedly stopped with lights flashing to shoo the sex trade workers away.

The activity was in sharp contrast to the scene a few blocks away, where marked cruisers patrol the Main and Hastings area without bothering any of the numerous women working the stroll.

"I don't know why the police are hassling us," Keewatin says, shaking her head.

Especially when women like her are going missing.

"I know every girl on that poster," she says of the list published two years ago by Vancouver police when the number of missing sex trade workers stood at just 31.

Keewatin says she knows of at least two more women who have disappeared in recent weeks -- aboriginal women like herself -- but the disappearances have not yet been reported to the police.

A stunning beauty who describes herself as strong, Keewatin says she can't wait for the day when she and her older sister are off the streets and drug-free. Her mother came out from Regina in 1999 after Keewatin had a car accident, being lured into a life of crack almost by accident.

Before her mother came, while she was still a teen, Keewatin didn't mind being homeless.

"In summer, when we'd sleep outside, we'd go and build a fort in a doorway. It was fun. We would make these cool forts out of boxes to keep warm."

She doesn't think it is fun any more. All of her money goes to crack and heroin.

"I make $500 a day and I wake up broke," she says.

She wants to go back to school and describes herself as "a fantastic writer," who takes time off every day from drugs and selling sex to write in her journal and to create poetry.

Some of those poems are about the missing women and the violence on the street.

Keewatin thinks there is more than one killer preying on the women of the Downtown Eastside. She thinks police could catch someone if there were more undercover women police officers in the area. And if those women spent time with the johns before their fellow officers moved in on potential suspects.

"What they should be doing is having more women cops out here. And they should put them on that corner right there," she says, pointing to Salisbury and Triumph, a block from where the mutilated body of prostitute Cheryl Joe was found in 1992.

"It is not just one guy. We all know that. These guys are circulating around 24 hours a day. The bad dates are still able to cruise all around this area."

She knows that she and others like her will continue to be prey as long as so few people respect them.

While sleeping inside a doorway at the Maritime Labour Centre at 1880 Triumph, Keewatin had a bucket of ice water thrown on her and her sister.

And just last month, iron bars that stretch from the sidewalk to the roof were installed across the coved entranceway at the centre to keep the Keewatins out.

Still, Laura Keewatin is a positive person with dreams for herself and her family.

"I have got lots of hope myself," she says. "I can't wait for the day that we are all away from here."

New Clues and Puzzles in Boston Strangler Case

By PHILIP J. HILTS

OSTON, Nov. 19 — After nearly 40 years, the perplexing case of the Boston Strangler has come back to life — a result of forensic science and an unlikely alliance between the families of a victim and the man long thought to have killed her.

For decades it has been widely assumed that the strangler was Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to some of the murders that terrified and transfixed this city in the early 1960's. But he was never convicted of any of them, and the killings are still officially listed as unsolved. DeSalvo was sentenced to life in prison for another crime, and died there in 1973.

Now, forensic scientists hired by the families of DeSalvo and the final victim, Mary Sullivan, have exhumed the bodies and examined them for DNA and other evidence. They say their analysis, nearly complete, has produced enticing new clues — and some new mysteries.

The forensic team expects to make a detailed report in Washington in a few weeks, said its leader, James E. Starrs, a law professor at George Washington University. The team says it expects to announce these findings, among others:

¶DNA found on Miss Sullivan's body is not hers and may be that of her killer — whether DeSalvo or someone else, the forensic team will not say.

¶The forensic team found a hair, missed at the time of the killing, in the young woman's teeth. The scientists say it may be from her killer.

¶In a particularly intriguing finding, the team says Miss Sullivan may not have been strangled by hand — as DeSalvo confessed he had done — but with her stockings. The finding is based on the condition of a neck bone called the hyoid: it was intact, but would probably have snapped if she had been strangled by hand — particularly since she had a condition that weakened her bones.

¶Much of the belief in DeSalvo's guilt has come from the widely held assumption that he told the criminal lawyer F. Lee Bailey, and later the police, details about the murders that only the killer and investigators could have known. But Elaine and Daniel Sharp , lawyers for the two families, have uncovered transcripts from DeSalvo's first tape-recorded confessions, in 1965, suggesting that he was unfamiliar with many facts of the killings and got some of the most basic ones wrong.

¶When DeSalvo's body was exhumed two weeks ago, investigators were stunned to discover that his brain, lungs, heart and liver were missing. Mr. Starrs says he has no idea what happened to the organs; the most innocent explanation is that they were simply misplaced after the first autopsy in 1973.

The case of the Boston Strangler, perhaps the most confounding serial- killer mystery since that of Jack the Ripper, began in 1962. On the evening of June 14, Anna Slesers, a 55-year- old seamstress, was sexually assaulted, then strangled with the cord from her bathrobe.

Within three weeks, two more women were sexually assaulted and strangled with their own clothing, setting off a wave of fear in Boston. Eight to 12 more killings — depending on whether the police or newspaper reporters were counting — followed over the next 18 months.

In the news pages, the murders were soon attributed to a single killer; he was dubbed the Phantom Fiend because he seemed able to get into apartments without breaking in, apparently talking his victims into opening their doors.

A manhunt began. The police warned women in the Boston area to be on their guard. Sales of guard dogs and door locks soared. Police leaves were canceled. The killings stopped for several months, then started again, then ended for good after Jan. 4, 1964, with the strangling of 19-year-old Mary Sullivan.

By Jan. 17, with no solution in sight, the Massachusetts attorney general, Edward W. Brooke, started a task force to take over the investigation.

The task force said 11 of the murders might be linked, and over many months, strong suspects were developed in half a dozen cases. But there were no arrests until early 1965, when Albert DeSalvo, 29, an inmate at a state mental hospital, came forward. He had been convicted of talking his way into the apartments of several women and abusing them sexually; after the conviction, he claimed to have committed more than 300 sexual assaults.

He told his lawyer, Jon Asgeirson, that he had the "biggest story of the century," that he had committed not only the 11 murders under investigation but 2 others.

The lawyer was doubtful, but within a short time, a young Boston defense lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, began to listen to DeSalvo's pleas with the aim of arranging book and movie deals. In what became his first prominent case, Mr. Bailey interviewed DeSalvo and on March 6, 1965, collected the first taped confession. Soon, newspapers announced that the strangler had been caught.

Mr. Bailey said he became convinced DeSalvo was the killer because he had given details of the crimes that corroborated those in the police files. Lengthy police interrogations followed.

After that, other suspects were dropped, and the police focused their attention on DeSalvo. He was never charged with the crimes, but in his trial on sexual assault charges, the jury was told he was the strangler, and he was sentenced to life in prison. While behind bars, he tried to market himself by making "choker" necklaces and offering to sing on a record called "Strangler in the Night." DeSalvo was stabbed to death in prison in 1973. Three inmates were charged with the killing but never convicted.

Though some police officials never accepted DeSalvo as the killer, the blame remained with him until at least 1995, when Susan Kelly wrote a book, "The Boston Stranglers," concluding that there were at least six killers — perhaps including DeSalvo, perhaps not.

Ms. Kelly pointed out that DeSalvo got much of the information in his confessions from lawyers and police officials. His chief interrogator, John Bottomly of the state attorney general's office, even showed him pictures of the crime scene, Ms. Kelly said.

The writer Gerald Posner, who reviewed a police analysis of the DeSalvo interrogations for an article in Talk magazine, says that of 63 assertions made by DeSalvo in his confession, 38 could have come from other sources. Of the other 25, Mr. Posner says, DeSalvo got more facts wrong than he got right.

Mr. Bailey said last week that he remained convinced that DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler and added that he did not expect the DNA analysis to reveal anything new.

The impetus for the new investigation came from Casey Sherman, Miss Sullivan's nephew, who took an interest in the case in 1999, after trying to reassure his skeptical mother that the killer had been caught. Instead, after reading up on the case, he became convinced that DeSalvo was the wrong man.

Mr. Sherman recruited the Sharps as lawyers, and they in turn told Mr. Starrs about the case. Mr. Starrs had conducted a number of "celebrity forensics" cases — using DNA, for example, to positively identify the body of Jesse James, and battling the National Park Service for permission to exhume the explorer Meriwether Lewis to solve the mystery of how he died. DeSalvo's brother, Richard, also agreed to join the investigative effort.

The team asked the Massachusetts attorney general's office for help in reviving the famous cold case but said the state declined to get involved. An assistant attorney general, Kurt Schwartz, said the state had re-examined tissue and biological evidence it had stored from the time of the killing, and had isolated some DNA. But he added that the state and the families could not agree on a plan to compare those samples with those collected by the Starrs team.

So it was that by the fall of 2000, two families, a pair of lawyers and a squad of forensic experts began the exhumation of two people linked as the killer and killed in the last of the Boston Strangler cases.

By the end of last month, both bodies had been exhumed and autopsied a second time, and scores of new forensic samples had been collected from the two corpses.

A few details of the family's investigation have been related by Mr. Starrs, and a few facts of the documentary case have been shared by the Sharps. "We have to hold on to some things till we're finished," Mr. Starrs said in a telephone interview. "But what we will have I think you will find significant."

18 additional women to be featured in new poster issued by police investigators

A police task force investigating the disappearances of women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is expected to release a new poster within two weeks of 18 more women who have vanished.

RCMP Sergeant Wayne Clary said the new names on the poster will bring the total number of missing women cases being investigated by the task force to 45, which is the number first reported in The Vancouver Sun in September.

Two years ago, Vancouver police released a reward poster with the names of 31 women, most of whom were involved in drugs and the sex trade, who had disappeared from the Downtown Eastside.

Four of those women were found alive, but the other 27 files were handed over to an RCMP review team last spring that has come up with the additional 18 cases now being investigated by the joint RCMP-Vancouver police task force.

Clary outlined the status of the investigation to about 55 relatives of the missing women who attended a four-hour information meeting in Surrey on Sunday. It was the second meeting in two months that police had organized for the relatives.

He said many of the families had travelled from outside the Lower Mainland, including one family that flew in from Ontario.

"People were very supportive. We talked about different things and where we are going and what we want to do and just reinforced that it is not a quick fix," Clary said.

The new poster will ask for the public's assistance in finding out what happened to the 18 women. Police are also expected to set up a tip line in the coming weeks.

Clary said the task force is up to 14 investigators and five clerks, some of whom are starting work today.

"We are well on our way, we know where we need to go and we are going there. That is not to say we are going to get there quickly, but we are going there," Clary said.

Sunday's meeting was also attended by several Vancouver police officers who answered questions about their investigation, which a Sun investigation found had been hampered by a lack of resources, inexperience and in-fighting.

Sandra Gagnon, whose sister Janet Henry is among the missing, said she generally found Sunday's meeting positive and hopes the renewed police effort will bring closure.

"Maybe some day we will finally get some answers," Gagnon said.

Book chronicles disappearances in Canada's poorest postal code

DENE MOORE
Canadian Press

Sunday, November 25, 2001

VANCOUVER (CP) - They were there and then they were gone. There are no bodies, no crime scenes, no clues as to what happened to 27 women who have disappeared from the underworld of drug addiction and prostitution in Vancouver's downtown eastside.

So far, answers have eluded police but in his recently released book Bad Date, author Trevor Greene offers some possibilities about not only where they ended up, but how they got there. Over two years, Greene spent just about every day in the impoverished neighbourhood, eventually earning the trust of prostitutes, police and the families left behind.

He paints a graphic picture of life in the 's most drug-addicted neighbourhood.

"What I was shocked at is the violence that is perpetrated on these women by normal, everyday johns every single day," Greene said in an interview.

"You get guys who go down there not for sex but for violence."
Against this desolate backdrop, the disappearances are not surprising. Some women weren't reported missing for years.

There are 16 RCMP and Vancouver city police investigating the disappearances.

They have reviewed reports of 485 missing women in B.C. and found 18 that fit the same profile.

"We anticipate adding some new names (to the missing list) but we're not at that point yet," said RCMP spokesman Const. Danielle Efford.

The nature of life on the downtown eastside makes residents easy prey.

"They're in and out of rehab, they're in and out of jail," Greene said. "They're going up to somewhere in the Interior, they're going to Winnipeg. . . . They're on the move all the time, they never stop."

In the book, published by ECW Press, Greene ponders what could have happened to these women.

Have some died aboard freighter ships while servicing foreign crews? Did they fall prey to sexual sadists known to police? Have American serial killers crossed the border for their murderous sprees?

"I think a serial killer is knocking them all off," one woman tells Greene, after recounting a beating she suffered at the hands of a violent john.

Of the many prostitutes Greene spoke to, every single one had been beaten up, brutalized or raped.

Sixty B.C. prostitutes have been murdered in the past two decades. Forty cases remain unsolved.

A $100,000 reward for information on each of the women hasn't helped locate them.

Pat deVries, whose daughter Sarah has been missing since April 1998, tells Greene these women didn't choose to live that way.

"She desperately wanted out, but was unable to break free," she says in the book. "Heroin and cocaine owned her. I knew her as a very caring person who was tormented by her life on the eastside."

Sarah deVries' friend, Wayne Leng, hopes the book will keep the women in the public eye.

"There's not a day that doesn't go by that I don't think about Sarah, think about what's happened," he said in an interview.

Leng, who maintains a Web site on the missing women, said he spoke to Greene because he wants people to know the human stories of these women.

"They weren't throw-aways. They were good people."
Greene said he started out believing many of the women had simply escaped the drug scene. He no longer does.

Sandra Gagnon, whose sister Janet Henry was reported missing in June 1997, says she dreams of her sister still.

"I honestly don't think I'll have peace until we find Janet's remains and bring her home," she tells Greene.

Greene is hopeful that will happen.

"Something has to turn up," he said "It's so difficult to vanish. It's so difficult not to be found."

Serial killer bargains confession for move west
Montreal's William Fyfe transferred from Quebec jail after admitting murders
MONTREAL (CP) — A man serving a life sentence for the murders of five Montreal-area women was transferred to a prison in Western Canada today after he confessed to four other murders, police said. Montreal police Cmdr. Andre Bouchard did not specify where William Fyfe was sent but all-news network RDI reported Wednesday he was headed to Saskatchewan. Bouchard said Fyfe, who is in his mid 40s, confessed to the four other murders after receiving a guarantee he would not have to stay behind bars in Quebec. The newly revealed victims, all women, were killed in the Montreal area and the Laurentians between 1978 and 1989. No additional charges were laid against Fyfe in exchange for the information. Fyfe is serving a life sentence after pleading guilty in September to killing five other Montreal-area women over an 18-year period dating back to 1981. He won't be eligible for parole for 25 years. Fyfe was born in Toronto but spent much of his life in Montreal and the Laurentians. For the seven years prior to his arrest, he lived in St-Hippolyte, Que., and worked for the town. The earliest slaying for which he was convicted dates back 20 years when Helen Scattolon, 52, was stabbed and sexually assaulted in her Montreal apartment. Fyfe was also charged with stabbing Teresa Shanahan, 53, to death in Laval, Que., in November 1999. He also beat and stabbed to death Mary Glen, 50, in her home in Baie-d'Urfe, west of Montreal. In February 2000, Fyfe was charged with killing Anna Yarnold, 59, and Monique Gaudreau, 45.

REAL-LIFE 'HANNIBAL' HAS SHOT AT FREEDOM

By JAMIE SCHRAM

ALBERT FENTRESS:
Decades in mental ward.

November 25, 2001 -- A killer who has been dubbed New York's "Hannibal Lecter" will tomorrow get the first of two chances in the next six months to be released from a state mental hospital.

Albert Fentress, a former eighth-grade social-studies teacher, has spent the last 21 years in mental institutions after a court found him not guilty by reason of insanity for the gruesome slaying of teenager Paul Masters in 1979.

The court was told Fentress lured 18-year-old Masters into his basement, tied him to a pole and sexually molested him. He then castrated him, cooked and ate the teen's genitals and shot him twice in the head.

During a 1998 hearing to review his case and his ongoing mental condition, a six-person jury voted 5-1 to release Fentress from Long Island's Pilgrim Psychiatric Center.

Suffolk County Supreme Court Judge Harry Seidell overturned the verdict, ruling that the jury's majority decision ran counter to the evidence presented during the review.

Gov. Pataki issued a statement praising the judge's decision, as did Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who called Fentress "the Hannibal Lecter guy" in a 1999 press release.

Fentress, 59, appealed the judge's ruling and has won a new hearing. The appellate court agreed that Seidell should have sent the matter back to the jury rather than making his own decision on the review.

The case review will go before a different judge and another six-person jury in a new hearing slated to begin tomorrow.

That will be the first of two scheduled court appearances for Fentress over the next six months. In April 2002, his case comes up again for its biennial review.

Burt Masters, the victim's father, is outraged by any hint that Fentress could be released.

"I don't think it's safe to have that guy [Fentress] out on the streets," he said.

But Masters, who said depression over the murder of his son prompted him to move from New York to San Jose, Calif., does not get a say in the assessment of Fentress' mental state.

Masters and his wife, Barbara, were barred from a 1992 hearing into Fentress' status after a court order ruled their presence would violate Fentress' privacy. They have no plans to attend the forthcoming hearings.

Instead, Masters has been writing letters to the court and others in an effort to keep Fentress incarcerated, although he concedes his words carry no legal weight in the assessment of Fentress' health.

The governor's office will monitor next week's hearing, a spokeswoman said.

"There was a certain element of surprise how the jury came to that conclusion," said Pataki spokeswoman Jennifer Farina, referring to the 5-1 ruling in the 1998 hearing. "We certainly will be paying attention again."

The Suffolk County attorney general's office, which is prosecuting the case, would not comment but is understood to have compiled extensive expert medical testimony to present to the court.

Fentress was spotted by The Post walking in a parking lot at Pilgrim recently. When approached, he ran inside a building. His attorney, Kim Darrow, declined any interview request.

Very, very ordinary man' one of worst serial killers

CP
November 23, 2001 – Page A1

By INGRID PERITZ

MONTREAL -- He spoke without emotion, as though recounting the details of an old movie. In a chilling declaration, a 46-year-old handyman already in prison for the murder of five women has admitted to killing four others.

The surprise jailhouse confession has turned William Patrick Fyfe -- described by a police detective as "a very, very ordinary man" -- into one of the worst serial killers in Canadian history, and perhaps the worst serial slayer of women.

"He was a vicious murderer," Montreal Urban Community police Commander André Bouchard said yesterday.

The killings went on for 20 years; they were random and gruesome, often involving sexual assaults and multiple stabbing. The youngest victim was 26; the oldest 59. What the women had in common was being home alone in the Montreal area when Mr. Fyfe showed up.

He killed his first victim in 1979, while out on a day pass from a Montreal jail for a minor crime. He killed his last victim in 1999 when he rang her doorbell in an affluent bedroom community west of Montreal. What convinced police of Mr. Fyfe's guilt was the precise details of his account.

"You couldn't invent those details," Cdr. Bouchard said.

Mr. Fyfe made the murder confession to police in exchange for obtaining a transfer from a Quebec prison, where he is serving a 25-year sentence for murder, to a prison in Western Canada.

Police defended the controversial deal with Mr. Fyfe, who was born in Ontario, saying it didn't lessen his punishment.

"I don't know the difference between an eight-by-eight-foot cell in Western Canada [and] an eight-by-eight-foot cell in Quebec," Cdr. Bouchard said. "He got it in English instead of in French, and that's what he asked for."

Marc Labelle, Mr. Fyfe's lawyer, said his client wanted to go to a Saskatoon prison because it offers specialized treatment for offenders, and also because his case in Quebec had been highly publicized.

Mr. Labelle drew parallels with Karla Homolka, another of his clients, who asked to serve her sentence in a prison in Quebec instead of Ontario, where she committed her crimes.
"It's for a question of safety," he said. "It's a way of keeping inmates with difficult cases in safer conditions."

Mr. Fyfe was described by police as a stubborn and icily manipulative man who made a living working in odd jobs -- installing swimming pools, working for roads departments -- because he was good with his hands. Cdr. Bouchard listened attentively to interrogation tapes to find underlying causes for Mr. Fyfe's vicious killing binge, but said he could find none.

One trait that set him apart from typical serial killers was his determination to avoid the spotlight, Cdr. Bouchard said.

Police held yesterday's news conference only after Mr. Fyfe was flown out of Quebec, at his insistence.

"Usually, serial killers love the publicity and when they're caught they're all over the place," Cdr. Bouchard said. But in Mr. Fyfe's case, "even though he's a serial killer, he knew that what he did was wrong."

Mr. Fyfe's undoing began two years ago, when he was arrested near his mother's home in Barrie, Ont., for the death of Mary Glen in Montreal's quiet West Island. With the help of DNA, he was then charged in the deaths of four more women.

He pleaded guilty to five murders two months ago.

What troubles police is a 10-year gap between his two killing rampages, when, they believe, he may have committed other crimes.

"There are gaps. We won't close [the case] until we close the gaps," Cdr. Bouchard said. "Anything is possible. It's possible he's killed other women."

The women killed between 1979 and 1989 were Suzanne Bernier, 55, of Montreal; Nicole Raymond, 26, of Pointe-Claire; Louise Blanc, 37, of Ste. Adèle; Pauline Laplante, 44, of Piedmont; and Hazel Scattolon, 53, of Town of Mount Royal. Killed in 1999 were Anna Yarnold, 59, of Senneville; Monique Gaudreau, 45, of Ste. Agathe-des-Monts; Teresa Shanahan, 55, of Laval; and Ms. Glen, 50, of Baie d'Urfé.

Police said Mr. Fyfe won't be tried for the four new confessed slayings, because he is serving a life sentence, the maximum under the law.

Hall of shame

William Patrick Fyfe is not Canada's deadliest serial killer despite his confession to committing four murders after earlier being convicted of five. In fact, who is Canada's deadliest serial killer is a matter of dispute. Officially, it's Clifford Olson. But Michael Wayne McGray might emerge with the notorious title.

Michael Wayne McGray
Guilty of six murders, he says he has committed up to 16 others.

Clifford Olson

Convicted of killing 11 children in 1982.

William Patrick Fyfe

Convicted of killing five Montreal-area women; confessed yesterday to killing four others.

Allan Legere

Known as the Monster of Miramichi, he killed three women and a priest.

Paul Bernardo
Convicted in 1995 of the sex-slayings of teenagers Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy.

Another body found in violent Mexican border that is site of rape- murders

11/20/2001

Associated Press

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Authorities said Tuesday they had found the bruised and partially clad body of a young woman on a street in this violent border city where a string of rape-murders already has claimed at least 65 women.

The woman was believed to be between 17 and 20 years old, police told the government news agency Notimex.

A woman passing through the neighborhood on Monday night discovered the body lying in an intersection. The victim was dressed in pants and a bra, with no blouse, socks or shoes. Bruise marks were visible on her head and investigators believe her skull was fractured, Notimex reported.

Authorities are investigating whether the victim was sexually assaulted before she was killed.

Last week, police arrested two city bus drivers in connection with the killing of eight women whose bodies were found earlier this month in Ciudad Juarez, a border city of 1.3 million across from El Paso, Texas.

Between 1993 and 1999, police found at least 57 bodies in the desert around Ciudad Juarez.

Since the 1990s, a total of 51 men, including the two latest suspects, have been arrested in connection with the deaths.

All of the victims were young, slender women; all had been strangled, apparently raped and many mutilated. The circumstances were so similar that investigators considered them serial killings.

Many of the victims were young teen-age women who came from small, poor towns in the Mexican countryside to work at the city's mostly U.S.-owned factories.

Pressured by women's groups who insist that police have not done enough to solve the killings, Chihuahua state authorities announced on Nov. 8 that a special police task force would investigate. They set a $21,500 reward for the capture of the killer or killers.

2-year string of slayings unnerves E. St. Louis

By Stephanie Simon, Special to the Tribune. Stephanie Simon is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune newspaper
Published November 23, 2001

EAST ST. LOUIS -- The first body was discovered nearly two years ago in an abandoned house shrouded by roof-high weeds. The next was found three months later in a desolate field. A search for clues netted a third body stuffed into a trash bag.

And that was only the beginning.

In the past 23 months, the corpses of nine women have turned up in this battered riverfront city, including two in October. The bodies of four more women have been dumped in nearby communities. They have been found mostly by gruesome happenstance: a construction worker wandering past a decomposing corpse, a pedestrian spotting motionless feet in the weeds, a neighborhood dog gnawing on what turned out to be a human leg bone.

Nearly all of the 13 victims were prostitutes or drug addicts. All but the first were black. At least seven of the bodies were found nude or nearly so. Four had been crammed into plastic bags, several had been strangled and at least four showed signs of having been bound hand and foot. Five of the corpses had been dumped within a few blocks of one another.

Given those common threads, police from several local agencies have suggested that a serial killer, or perhaps more than one, could be at work. They even have a suspect in mind for four of the murders, although police do not have enough evidence to charge him. But here in East St. Louis, where police are taking the lead on most of the cases, officials angrily turn back suggestions that a serial killer is on the prowl.

"I don't know anything about a serial killer," Police Chief Delbert Marion said. "At this point, we're not associating any of [the cases]. We're investigating them one at a time, as they come."

Shrinking police presence

Marion has promised vigorous detective work. But he concedes that he is woefully short-staffed. More than two dozen veteran officers quit when the city offered an early-retirement package in 1999. The turnover rate remains disastrously high.

There were 98 sworn officers on the force three years ago. Today there are 61. That works out to one officer for every 500 residents. By comparison, across the river in St. Louis, there is one officer for every 250 residents.

The force here is so overextended that Mayor Debra Powell has declared a policing "emergency."

Marion said his force can do little other than respond to 911 calls. For instance, he can spare no officers to crack down on the prostitutes, pimps and drug pushers who strut through the city's so-called strip areas--including the decaying industrial neighborhood where 41-year-old Lolina Collins, one of only two victims not believed to be a prostitute, was found strangled earlier this month.

"We don't have the manpower to be a proactive department," Marion said.

FBI offer rejected

The FBI repeatedly has offered to help. After the fifth body was found in the spring of 2000, local agents suggested calling in FBI experts on serial killers. But Marion's predecessor as police chief rebuffed that offer.

Marion, who took office last month, said he would welcome federal help. Now that the city is open to collaboration, however, the FBI is otherwise engaged.

"Everyone in this country realizes that with what has happened on Sept. 11, this [case] is not going to be a priority right now," said FBI agent Reginald Joseph, based in nearby Fairview Heights, Ill.

Local detectives are collaborating with the Illinois State Police and other law-enforcement agencies in the region. They have identified all 13 of the women, ages 28 to 61. And they have determined that several of the victims frequented the Princess Motel, a grubby cinder-block establishment where rates start at $10 for two hours and vodka is sold behind bulletproof glass at the front desk.

Yet beyond those basics, progress has been slow. Some of the bodies were so decomposed that it was impossible to determine the cause--or even the approximate month--of death. Authorities are not even sure whether the nine victims found within city limits were killed here or just disposed of here.

"East St. Louis has historically been used as a dumping ground because there are so many derelict areas," Powell said.

The mayor is struggling to change that reputation, pushing for a $500 million development of a golf course, theaters and a convention center on the city's waterfront along the Mississippi River. She also has ordered the cleanup of head-high weeds in vacant lots.

Meanwhile, several police officers have been ordered to focus almost exclusively on issuing traffic tickets, in the hope of generating enough funds to hire recruits who then can go out and solve crimes. Until they get reinforcements, Marion said, the seven detectives on his force do not have time to bother with cases that have no clear suspects.

One relative impatient

"We do the best we can with what we have," he said.

That's not good enough for Christy Curl, whose sister was the first of the nine victims found here. "It's been almost two years, and we have heard absolutely nothing," she said. "It's a joke, that's what it is. I have a saying now: If you're going to get killed, don't get killed in East St. Louis, because they will never find out who did it."

Despite the lack of progress in the cases, the city's homicide rate actually has been dropping: There were 21 murders last year and 22 so far this year, compared with 68 in 1998. "We don't live in fear here," Powell said.

Business apparently still is brisk along a strip notorious for drugs and prostitution. Although Collins' nearly naked body--jammed into a trash bag--was found nearby just a few weeks ago, a local businessman said the sex trade in the area has not cooled a bit. "It's 24 hours a day," he said.

From his window, the businessman can watch the melodramas of the strip: the cars cruising, the women preening, the fights, the shouts. As he watches, he thinks of the dead women. He wonders who killed them--and who will be next.

"You see the regular johns, the guys who come around all the time, and you wonder, `Is it him?"' he said. "You see new girls come out and then a few days later they disappear. You wonder what happened to them."

Shipman's Wife: 'He's Innocent'

The wife of serial killer Harold Shipman says her husband is innocent.

Primrose Shipman, 54, has been speaking publicly for the first time since the former GP was jailed for life for murdering 15 of his elderly women patients.

Helping appeal

Giving evidence at the public inquiry into his crimes, Mrs Shipman said she was doing everything she could to help her husband's solicitors launch an appeal against his conviction.

Mrs Shipman spent nearly 90 minutes answering questions at the hearing in Manchester Town Hall.

She was questioned in detail over suggestions that she accompanied her husband on home visits to two 74-year-old patients who later died.

Immunity granted

Mrs Shipman also told the inquiry she could not remember being present when the GP treated Elaine Oswald, a patient who claims she survived an attack by Dr Shipman 27 years ago.



	Shipman: Mass murderer

Lawyers for Mrs Shipman had asked that she be allowed to testify in private or through a video link - but the request was turned down.

Before the session began, the head of the inquiry, High Court judge Dame Janet Smith, revealed that Mrs Shipman had been granted immunity from any criminal charges that could arise against her or her husband from the evidence she gave.

A statement from Mrs Shipman was then handed to the inquiry in which she complained of the "publicity and intrusion" she had suffered over her husband's case.

She said the investigation and trial had caused her "an enormous amount of emotional trauma, stress and anxiety", but insisted she had nothing to hide.

A woman who would allow a man to get away with murder

BY VALERIE GROVE AT MANCHESTER TOWN HALL

DAME JANET SMITH had decreed that there were pieces in the jigsaw of Harold Shipman’s life that only his wife, Primrose, could fill. And so Mrs Shipman, married for 35 years to the worst serial killer in British history, waddled into Manchester Town Hall’s council chamber yesterday to face questions instead of being allowed, as she had requested, to get on with her life in peace.

Was this a cruel decision? It was a bit like gawping at the bearded lady in the circus. Mrs Shipman, encased in a two-piece tent-dress in black with white spots, heaved herself into the chair and proceeded to stare with owlish blankness from behind her spectacles at the faces before her.

They were kindly faces, disposed to treat her gently. Dame Janet, like all women who sit in chairs, reminds everyone of a headmistress, and was quick to restrain any interrogator who threatened to make Mrs Shipman uncomfortable. Miss Caroline Swift QC, who has beautiful diction and a manner reminiscent of Sue MacGregor, was preternaturally patient as, time and again, she asked whether Mrs Shipman recalled being present at some dramatic scene — the resuscitation of a young woman (Elaine Oswald) for instance, or the death of an older one (Irene Chapman) — only to receive the answer: “I don’t remember.”

Encumbered at birth with a delicate, floral name, Primrose Shipman (née Oxtoby) grew up plain, ungainly and with a tendency to obesity. At 52 the shape of her face is lost in folds of flesh, fringed with straight grey locks. It is obvious that she has never been at all bright; she was lucky, at 17, when she was a window-dresser, to seduce her mother’s lodger, Shipman, a medical student who would marry her as soon as she became pregnant, and give her the respectable aura of the doctor’s wife.

Mrs Shipman is, I am afraid, one of those women who allow men to get away with murder. Noticing nothing, remarking nothing, barely articulate or literate, achieving nothing in life except maternity. What was Primrose thinking, as she trailed vacuously through the motions of child-rearing? We are told that her house was a tip, although she did manage to drive a car, to answer the surgery telephone and to write, in capital letters, “CAT FOOD” on the appointments page that was beamed up before us on a screen.

This inquiry dealt most humanely with Primrose Shipman. When Andrew Spink, counsel for the bereaved families, dared gently to ask about “patients who had died”, and an expression of fear glanced upon Mrs Shipman’s face, Dame Janet stepped in to prevent such an “inappropriate” line of inquisition. Mrs Shipman must not, she warned, be asked questions that might discourage the frankest and fullest evidence. But this proved a superfluous caveat. The evidence of Mrs Shipman could never be frank and full, since it hardly existed.

Even when she did recall something — her husband having one of his blackouts while she was driving him — she added nothing, no graphic detail that might lend verisimilitude. “The photograph you have been shown of Professor Oswald and her home, has that jogged your memory?” “No.”

“Does it help you to think what your arrangements might have been that day for your children, as it was August and in the school holidays?” “That crosses my mind now you point it out, but no.”

At one point she was reminded that the Shipmans had invited Professor Oswald and her husband to dinner. (A perverse image of Primrose Shipman serving up boeuf bourguignonne and pommes duchesse sprang ludicrously to mind.) “Do you have any recollection of that?” “No.”

“Did you do a lot of entertaining?” “No.”

Dame Janet was prepared to excuse such lapses of memory since those events happened 27 years ago. But even the events of three or four years ago were equally a blur to Mrs Shipman. On and on the hopeless questioning went. “Do you remember how long had passed?” “No.”

“Do you have any impression of Mrs Chapman at all?” “No.”

“Do you remember that she was sitting in a chair? Do you recall anything about her appearance at all?” “No.”

“ ‘Sitting upright on the sofa, as if she was asleep’. Does that ring any bells?” “No. I’m sorry I can’t remember.”

So the gap in the jigsaw puzzle remains unfilled. But wives and husbands, and how they interact, is one of the great mysteries. The last woman I watched answering questions about her husband’s misdeeds was Mary Archer, five years Mrs Shipman’s senior. The contrast between the two women could not be greater, but the enigma (to outsiders) remains the same.

Outside the courtroom Mrs Helen Blackwell, the daughter of one of Shipman’s victims, told reporters how disappointed she was. She thought Primrose Shipman calculating and devious. But I suspect that there was neither calculation nor deviousness behind Mrs Shipman’s dim-witted performance: just an extremely deficient brain, of the kind on which miscreant men have long relied to defend and support them in times of trouble.

Convicted serial killer sentenced to death

Associated Press

Last updated 04:27 AM, EST, Friday, November 16, 2001

BELLEVILLE, Ill. (AP) -- A jury recommended Thursday that confessed child killer Lorenzo Fayne be put to death for the slayings of four girls.

Fayne, 30, showed no emotion as the verdict was read by St. Clair County Circuit Judge James Donovan. The jury reached its decision after about three hours of deliberations.

Fayne has admitted killing Faith Davis, 17, Glenda Jones, 17, Fallon Flood, 9, and Latondra Dean, 14. Autopsies determined Fayne molested the girls after killing them.

Although Donovan set an execution date for May 15, the death sentence would likely not be carried out then because of a moratorium on the death penalty, imposed by Gov. George Ryan. The appeals process also would extend that date
by years, St. Clair County State's Attorney Robert Haida said.

Fayne's attorney, John O'Gara said that Fayne will appeal the death sentence issued in each of the killings.

Jurors declined to talk to reporters after issuing their decision. Haida said he was glad to see the case end.

"The emotions are different than a normal case. It's so definite and final," Haida said. "We continue to think of the victims and their survivors. That's what kept us pursuing this case to its disposition."

Fayne, who already was serving a life sentence for the 1989 murder of 6-year-old Aree Hunt, pleaded guilty in October to the four remaining murder charges against him in an attempt to avoid multiple trials and opportunities for prosecutors to win a death sentence.

Jurors spent a week viewing grisly crime scene photos and hearing testimony detailing the rape and murders of the four girls. They also heard psychologists testify about Fayne's childhood of rape and abuse at the hands of his mother and stepfather, and an adolescence spent in juvenile detention facilities.

O'Gara had asked the jury to spare Fayne's life, saying his abusive past should keep them from condemning Fayne to death. He argued that Fayne had a low IQ, and that childhood beatings left him with severe brain damage.

But Assistant State's Attorney Lisa Porter said Fayne "chose to kill; he knew exactly what he was doing every step of the way."
Dean was raped, stabbed more than 20 times and left in a bathtub at a friend's home in East St. Louis in March 1992. In July of that year, Flood was lured from a school lunch program, strangled and hung by a belt in the locker room at East St. Louis High School. After her first day of work at Illinois Public Action in Belleville, Jones was raped and stabbed behind Martin Luther King Junior High in June 1993.
A month later, Davis was stabbed and raped in the kitchen of her family's East St. Louis home.

from email

Man charged with 6 more murders - Roseland `loner' tied to 7th killing
By Eric Ferkenhoff and Lynette Kalsnes, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff reporter Kirsten Scharnberg contributed to this report
Published November 15, 2001

Seventeen months after he was first suspected in a series of murders that haunted the Far South Side's Roseland neighborhood, a man described by police as "a loner" who sought sex for drugs was charged with raping, strangling or beating to death seven women.

Geoffrey Griffin, 30, already in Cook County Jail on one murder charge, was charged Tuesday with six more murders, an attempted murder, two aggravated criminal sexual assaults and two attempted sexual assaults.

Police said the long delay in bringing the charges was the result of a backlog at the state's crime lab that until recently prevented an analysis of DNA from all the victims and crime scenes. Authorities said that evidence tied Griffin to all seven slayings.

Authorities, who have watched several cases unravel because DNA evidence indicated the wrong suspects had originally been charged, said it was critical to get the lab results and other evidence before filing the other charges against Griffin.

Griffin has also been linked through DNA to an eighth murder that occurred in 1998, but charges have so far not been filed in that case, said Lt. Joseph Murphy, head of the Chicago Police Department's cold case squad.

Griffin, 30, was first suspected in a string of slayings in Roseland in the summer of 2000 after police said he gave a videotaped statement and was charged in the killing of Angela Jones.

At the time of his arrest, police had already discovered several bodies in abandoned buildings on the South Side, some within blocks of each other, and in south suburban Harvey, and began suspecting that the slayings were linked.

Griffin denied any involvement in the other women's slayings and there was no solid evidence to tie him to any case but the death of Jones.

In the months after his arrest, however, police began submitting evidence for DNA testing. Very quickly, they received information that blood found on Griffin's clothes matched two of the six victims found in Chicago.

Skin found under the fingernails of a woman found strangled and beaten in a Harvey drug house also matched to Griffin, as did blood found on the woman's clothes.

Police asked the state crime lab to put a rush on DNA tests for the other cases. But Phil Cline, chief of detectives, said investigators had to wait it out due in part to a severe backlog at the state crime lab that has been blamed on limited resources and a flood of new evidence to be tested.

With Griffin already in jail for Jones' murder, investigators figured they had time.

"The guy was already in custody, so I think it was a matter of getting everything investigated early," said John Gorman, spokesman for the Cook County state's attorney's office.

Around the Roseland neighborhood Wednesday, word of the charges brought relief. After the killings, weekly prayer meetings were held, men walked their wives and children to the bus and residents boarded up abandoned buildings.

"If he's the right man, that is the blessing, that the killings will stop," said Rev. Dearal Jordan, a youth minister and associate pastor at the Salem Baptist Church of Chicago at 118th Street and Indiana Avenue.

According to police, Griffin typically targeted women who lived the high-risk life of drugs and prostitution, and he would promise the women drugs in exchange for sex or cash. Police said he always worked alone and never intended to give up the drugs.

In one case, police said, he punctured a woman in the neck. In another, he beat a woman with a brick. Mostly, he would kick and beat them with his fists before strangling them and having sex with them, police said. He would then leave their bodies in abandoned buildings.

The first body found was of Charquanque Johnson, a mother of four who long battled drugs. She was discovered May 2, 2000, in the bedroom of a Harvey house known to police as a hangout for drug abusers.

Ten days later, Angela Jones' body was found by workers cleaning an abandoned building in the 11800 block of South Yale Avenue. On May 17, at another abandoned building about a block south, the body of Roberta McKinney was found.

Over 12 days in June, the bodies of Toliya Spivey, Deborah Pagan, Beverly Burns and Julia Veal were found.

As with the others, most of these women appeared to have been beaten or strangled and dumped in empty buildings.

Dig For Mob Bodies Continuing In Hopkinton

Looking For Alleged Victims Of Winter Hill Gang

POSTED: 7:37 a.m. EST November 14, 2001

UPDATED: 7:30 p.m. EST November 14, 2001

BOSTON -- Investigators have not found the remains of two brothers, alleged victims of Boston's Winter Hill gang, at a site in Hopkinton, Mass., where they were digging for a second day. NewsCenter 5's David Boeri reports that investigators are looking for more skeletons in the closet for reputed mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, who is now ranked second on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List, behind Osama Bin Laden.

Bulger, the former leader of the Winter Hill Gang, is wanted for 19 murders. He has been a fugitive since 1995.

Investigators are confident they've found another of Bulger's mob burial grounds and sources say the man who pointed them to Hopkinton is mobster Frank P. "Cadillac Frank" Salemme.

"There's a lot of fill in the area that we have to take out and give a good look at. There's a lot of overgrowth over the years, so we'll remove most of that and play it by ear," Massachusetts State Police Maj. Thomas Foley said.

Detectives are searching the grounds of the Hopkinton Sportsmen's Club firing range for the remains of two Dorchester brothers, Walter and Edward "Wimpy" Bennett, both of whom were murdered in 1967.

Officials believe the pair, who were involved in loan-sharking and gambling businesses, were killed by Bulger's partner Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi.

Flemmi had been charged in the 1967 killings of the Bennett brothers, in a mob turf war.

Flemmi, a former FBI informant, is in prison awaiting trial on 10 other murder cases. Last May, as part of a plea-agreement, he told them about the Bennett murders, but charges were dropped, partly because there were no bodies. Salemme reportedly tipped off investigators to the burial site, perhaps as revenge for Flemmi's cooperation with the FBI or as a bargaining chip to have his own federal prison sentence reduced.

Salemme has three years remaining in his prison sentence, which he is serving in Kentucky.

Man charged in 7 serial slayings on Far South Side
By Eric Ferkenhoff
Tribune staff reporter
Published November 14, 2001, 3:26 PM CST

Seventeen months after he was first jailed on suspicion of committing a series of murders on the Far South Side, Geoffrey T. Griffin was charged today with strangling or beating to death seven women.

Griffin, of the 11600 block of South Racine Avenue, also was charged with two counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault and one count of attempted murder for attacks on two women, one of whom he left for dead; and two counts of attempted criminal sexual assault against two other women, police said.

All of the cases date to 1998, said Lt. Joseph Murphy, head of the cold case squad of the Chicago Police Department. Police said they interviewed Griffin all day Tuesday and filed the charges against him Tuesday night.

Police first tagged Griffin the “Roseland Killer” in the summer of 2000, after he gave a videotaped confession and was charged with first-degree murder in the killing of Angela Jones. The body of Jones, 32, a mother of seven, was found May 12, 2000, in the basement of an abandoned building in the 11800 block of South Yale Avenue.

Jones was the first of seven women whose bodies were found in abandoned buildings on the South Side and in south suburban Harvey. Police said at the time they were certain Griffin was responsible for the slayings, but he denied involvement in the other women’s deaths, and there was no solid evidence to tie him to any case but Jones’, authorities said.

Subsequent DNA tests matched Griffin to two slayings in Chicago, as well as to a woman found strangled and beaten in a reputed Harvey drug house, according to authorities. Investigators said they held off filing new charges against Griffin until conclusive scientific evidence was returned in all the slayings.

That evidence came in recent weeks, when the Illinois State Police crime lab notified Chicago detectives that DNA matches had been made connecting Griffin to each of the seven crime scenes, Murphy said.

Judge hears arguments on request to close Bar-Jonah hearings
Associated Press
GREAT FALLS (AP) - Defense demands that the public be prevented from getting any more information about the case of accused child killer Nathaniel Bar-Jonah are not justified, lawyers for 14 news organizations told a district judge Wednesday.

The court has other, less severe alternatives for ensuring Bar-Jonah gets a fair trial, the media attorneys said.

Bar-Jonah faces trial in February on charges of kidnapping, assault with a weapon and three counts of sexual assault. He is also charged with kidnapping and murdering 10-year-old Zachary Ramsay in 1996 and with impersonating a police officer.

Attorneys for Bar-Jonah urged Judge Kenneth Neill to approve their request to seal documents, close pretrial hearings and issue a gag order as a means to prevent the release of more information that could hurt their client's chances of finding an unbiased jury.

"This is not your garden-variety murder case," said defense attorney Don Vernay of Bigfork, referring to widespread news coverage of allegations that Bar-Jonah killed and cannibalized a 10-year-old victim.

Neill said he would issue a ruling later.

Vernay and co-counsel Greg Jackson of Helena sought court-ordered restrictions 11 months ago and Cascade County Attorney Brant Light initially joined in the request.

Wednesday, however, Light told Neill that he doesn't believe closed hearings and sealed court files are necessary.

"I'm not sure we need a blanket seal on everything filed by the defense or the state," Light said.

Light also said a gag order is not needed because his office and law enforcement have imposed a muzzle on themselves with regard to the case.

Much of the three-hour hearing involved media attorneys attacking the validity of a poll that, according to the defense, shows news media coverage of the case has resulted in a large percentage of people in three counties believing Bar-Jonah to be guilty.

Two men confess to 8 Juarez killings

Claims by prosecutors received with skepticism by women's advocates

By JAMES PINKERTON and ARMANDO VILLAFRANCA
Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle

Prosecutors in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, said two drug-using bus drivers have confessed to kidnapping, raping and killing the eight women whose bodies were found last week, but women's advocates -- and even a high-ranking investigator -- were skeptical of the swift arrests.

Chihuahua state prosecutors said the two men are Victor Javier Garcia Uribe, 28, known as "El Cerillo" or "the Match," and Gustavo Gonzalez Meza, also 28, whose nickname is "La Foca," or "the Seal." The men also are implicated in the killings of three other women who were found in the border town across from El Paso in January 2000, authorities said.

"They have confessed that they beat and raped the victims inside a Chevrolet van," said Juan Manuel Carmona, a department spokesman. "They have assured us they have killed eight women."

"The motive, according to their declarations, was to enjoy the women sexually," Carmona added. "And the reason they killed them was so they would not be discovered."

But a high-ranking official with the state judicial police, who asked not to be identified by name, said he was skeptical of the arrests.

"Nobody believes that these guys are the ones," said the source close to the investigation. "They only have confessions, but those are not valid in Mexico."

Several women's groups also were suspicious of such a speedy resolution of a case involving eight victims, the first of whom disappeared more than a year ago and the latest last month. The discovery of the bodies dumped near an industrial area deeply shook residents of Ciudad Juarez, who feared a series of rape-slayings that began in 1993 and claimed 57 victims had resumed.

The bodies were discovered in adjoining fields last Tuesday and Wednesday. The bus drivers were arrested Friday.

"We are very skeptical; we really don't believe it," said Victoria Caraveo, a spokeswoman for 14 women's rights groups. "We are not very certain these are the responsible people. ... It is very difficult in four days to pinpoint the people who killed these women."

Authorities said the suspects admitted cruising streets for victims after drinking beer, smoking marijuana and snorting cocaine. The men drove a van borrowed from Garcia's brother and searched for young women alone, Carmona said.

"First they would hit them in the head with a bat and when they had lost consciousness" place them in the vehicle, Carmona said. "Then, in the van, they would take off their undergarments and rape them and then strangle them."

The account does not jibe with information released last week about the victims. Last week, a Chihuahua medical examiner said there were no visible injuries on the remains.

Carmona said investigators tied the men to the eight killings based on witnesses who claimed to have seen the van used to dump the victims. The van was distinctive, Carmona said, a tan 1984 Chevrolet with orange and brown striping and a large luggage rack. Police recovered the vehicle and found bloodstains and other evidence inside, Carmona said.

Women's groups said a suspect's wife says she can prove the Chevrolet van has not worked for the last six months and that her husband was working out of town when several of the victims disappeared.

"We want the real killers (jailed)," said Caraveo. "We don't want scapegoats; we want the real killers in jail so this nightmare will stop in Juarez."

Between 1993 and 1997, the bodies of 57 young women were found in the desert around Ciudad Juarez. They had been raped and strangled.

Police charged four other bus drivers and a fifth man with committing 20 of the murders in March 1999. At the time, Garcia also was questioned by police but released.

The other five men remain in custody as their cases make their way through the legal system.

Police also charged Abdel Latif Sharif, an Egyptian engineer who worked at one of the border factories known as maquiladoras, in one of the deaths. Many of the young women killed were abducted on their way to or from the maquiladoras.

Sharif's conviction was overturned by an appellate court in April 2000, but he remains in custody.

The killings continued after Sharif was imprisoned, so police charged members of a Juarez motorcycle gang. When the slayings continued, police arrested bus drivers and the other man and said they had been paid by Sharif to commit additional killings to shift suspicion.

Caraveo said there have been too many assurances, such as the one made Sunday by the state attorney general, that the guilty had been found.

"We do not believe they have the killers of these girls," Caraveo said. "We think this is far from over."

2 Arrested in Killings of 8 in Border City

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Two bus drivers have been arrested in the killings of eight women whose bodies were found last week in a field in this tough city on the U.S.-Mexican border, where a wave of murders in the last decade was feared to be the work of serial killers.

Arturo Gonzalez Rascon, the attorney general for Mexico's northern state of Chihuahua, said late Sunday that Victor Uribe and Gustavo Gonzalez, both 28, had confessed to kidnapping, raping and killing the women.

One of the two suspects arrested Sunday allegedly confessed to killing three more women in Ciudad Juarez, although no other bodies have been found. The men belonged to a gang, some of whose members are serving time for at least 20 of the other rape-murders, said Fernando Medina, spokesman for the state prosecutor's office.

Scores of women have been raped and murdered, or have disappeared, over the last eight years in and around Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso.

Dozens of men have been arrested over the years in connection with the murders, but the killings have continued.

The attorney general said that the two suspects snorted cocaine, smoked marijuana and drank liquor before they went on the prowl for victims. When they spotted a vulnerable woman, they forced her into their van, where the victim was raped and killed, he said.

Police got a break in the case when a witness said he had seen one of the men dump a body into the cotton field.

Reporters discover serial killer not as normal as he seems

Nicholas K. Geranios; The Associated Press

SPOKANE - Veteran newsman Bill Morlin spent seven months trying to get inside the mind of serial killer Robert L. Yates Jr.

How, Morlin wondered, could a married father of five with a mortgage, a military career and an outward appearance of banal normality also be the confessed killer of 13 people? The answer:

"I learned he was far stranger that I thought he was," Morlin said last week. "Despite the ordinary veneer, he was a very strange fellow."

Morlin and colleague Jeanette White are the authors of "Bad Trick, The Hunt for Spokane's Serial Killer." The title is a term prostitutes use to describe a violent customer.

Both are reporters at The Spokesman-Review, and the book is published by a subsidiary of the newspaper. It is available in book stores around the state, and from Amazon.com.

The two reporters were assigned to the story last November, shortly after Yates pleaded guilty to the murders and was sentenced to 408 years in prison.

They spent the first seven months of the year investigating Yates, his family and law enforcement officers. They spent close to 100 hours talking with members of the task force that captured him. They interviewed more than 100 other people with some ties to the crimes.

In addition, White traveled to Walla Walla to gain the trust of Yates' wife, Linda, and their children.

Their work was first published as a series in the newspaper, which prompted demand from readers all over the country, said Morlin, who has specialized in the coverage of white supremacist activities in the Northwest.

Among their most interesting findings:

* Yates has told his family that he expects to be reunited with them in heaven.

* Yates has dozens of pen pals, plus women who come to pray with him in prison and who give him spending money.

* Linda Yates agrees with Spokane County sheriff's deputies that her husband is likely involved in additional murders he has not been charged with.

* Yates is a model prisoner who is deferential to authority, as befits a career Army helicopter pilot.

* Yates was a regular customer of prostitutes, most of whom he did not kill. He continued patronizing prostitutes right up to his arrest in April 2000.

* Linda Yates has not divorced her husband, in part because the personal bankruptcy they filed after Yates' arrest has yet to be resolved.

* When the reporters asked Yates for an interview, he responded by mailing them Bible verses but declined to talk.

White said Linda Yates and the couple's children are struggling financially and emotionally.

One daughter was rejected when she tried to join the military. Kyle, 12, has been taunted at school. Linda Yates has found work only in restaurants.

Family members continue to profess love for Yates, White said. Yates, 49, recently became a grandfather for the first time when daughter Sonja gave birth.

This book is different from the recent book by celebrity author Mark Fuhrman, whose "Murder in Spokane" was critical of law enforcement for taking so long to solve the case. While the task force did make some mistakes, Morlin and White did not think that was the main story.

Their book is more of a police procedural, documenting the needle-in-a-haystack hunt for the person who preyed on Spokane prostitutes.

Under the deal to avoid the death penalty, Yates pleaded guilty in October to 13 murders and one attempted murder.

Yates now faces a possible death sentence when he goes on trial in April for the murders of two women in Pierce County.

Morlin doesn't believe there will be a trial.

"My hunch is he'll plead guilty and ask for leniency in the sentencing phase," Morlin said.

Although not a serial killer he will be an interesting one to watch to see if he repeats this type of behaviour.

Sanity hearing set to begin for university killer

CHELSEA J. CARTER, Associated Press Writer

Monday, November 12, 2001

(11-12) 12:52 PST SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) --

Nearly 25 years ago, Edward Charles Allaway was found innocent by reason of insanity after killing seven people in a shooting spree at California State University, Fullerton.

Now, a handful of state psychiatrists say Allaway is healed and can rejoin society.

At a hearing set to begin Tuesday, Orange County Superior Court Judge Frank F. Fasel will decide whether Allaway, 63, is fit to be released. If found safe for society, Allaway would be the nation's first mass killer found innocent by reason of insanity to be released.

The case pits Allaway's attorney and state psychiatrists -- who believe the man is no longer a threat -- against a prosecutor and the victims' family members -- who say Allaway killed once and will do it again.

"Presenting the evidence will be the easy part. ... The magnitude of the case, the ramifications politically and socially, not just now but over the years, will make it a difficult case," said Allaway's attorney John Bovee.

But Deputy District Attorney Dan Wagner disagreed, saying the only issue is whether "Mr. Allaway would be a danger to society. Our position is he would."

Fasel must base his decision on Allaway's mental health, not on the seriousness of what he did.

About a dozen psychologists and clinicians are expected to testify during the three week hearing. Although Allaway is expected to testify, he is not expected to be present for most of the hearing.

Allaway was declared innocent by reason of insanity in the July 12, 1976, shooting spree after a jury was unable to reach a verdict.

Allaway, a campus janitor, took a .22-caliber rifle into the library and shot to death two custodians, a photographer, a retired professor, a library assistant, a graphic artist and an audio technician. Two other people were wounded.

Allaway fled the campus but later surrendered to police.

He told authorities he killed his co-workers because they teased him about his belief that pornographic movies were being made on campus. Some, he said, joked that the movies might even have starred his wife.

Witnesses testified at the trial that Allaway chased some of his victims down and bypassed other people during the rampage.

Eight years before the shooting, Allaway was hospitalized after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The defense at his trial claimed he still suffered from that illness. His diagnosis was later changed to bipolar disorder.

Allaway has petitioned for release four times. Judges rejected three of those petitions and Allaway withdrew the other one. This time the state psychiatrists' report may sway the decision. They previously did not support his petitions for release.

But family members of those killed want Allaway to spend the rest of his life at a state mental hospital.

"You can't rehabilitate a mass murderer," said Patricia Almazon, whose father, graphic artist Frank Teplansky, was killed in the shooting spree.

Almazon and others said they plan to attend the entire hearing as a silent protest.

Monday, 12 November, 2001, 14:10 GMT

Shipman's wife called to inquiry

Harold Shipman is serving 15 life sentences

Shipman's wife has so far refused to give evidence

The wife of serial killer Harold Shipman will be called to give evidence in person and in public at the inquiry into his crimes.

Dame Janet Smith, who heads the inquiry at Manchester Town Hall, ruled that 54-year-old Primrose Shipman must attend.

The inquiry has been told she was present at the death of one of her husband's possible victims, 74-year-old Irene Chapman, who died in 1998.

Mrs Shipman initially refused to speak publicly about the circumstances surrounding any of her husband's victims.

Primrose Shipman: "Terrified" about giving evidence

Jim Sturman, counsel for Mrs Shipman, had requested her evidence be given behind closed doors or by video link from another building.

He said she should be spared the "unique and horrendous" stresses of giving evidence in public.

Mr Sturman said: "She is uniquely terrified about being forced to attend.

"She fears the pressure she is under will be reflected in her evidence and the quality of her evidence.

"Within the context of this case, she is by far the most vulnerable witness."

But counsel for the inquiry Caroline Swift QC argued it would be unfair on other vulnerable witnesses who have given evidence in public.

She said: "Such witnesses have not been given the opportunity to give evidence in private and may well feel a justifiable sense of grievance if Mrs Shipman is given that opportunity."

Interim report

Dame Janet has now ruled that Mrs Shipman must give her evidence on Friday.

Harold Shipman is currently at Frankland Prison, County Durham, serving 15 life sentences.

The hearings are currently looking into 401 deaths. Dame Janet is expected to produce an interim report from the hearings early next year, indicating the patients she believes were killed by Shipman whose surgery was in Hyde, Greater Manchester.

Murder linked to suspected serial killer

11/12/2001

By The Associated Press

KINGFISHER, Oklahoma (AP) -- Authorities have identified a condemned Texas killer as the suspect in the 1999 murder of an Oklahoma girl.

Officials say Tommy Lynn Sells is the prime suspect in the murder of 14-year-old Bobbie Lynn Wofford, who disappeared in July of 1999 near Kingfisher, Oklahoma.

Hunters found some of the girl's belongings in November 1999 near a creek and cemetery. Her skeletal remains were found nearby. She had been shot.

Sells, who is 36, faces a death sentence in the murder of 13-year-old Kaylene Harris on December 31st, 1999, in Del Rio, Texas. An 11-year-old girl, Krystal Surles, survived the attack and was able to testify against him.

Earlier this year, Sells was indicted in the murder of nine-year-old Mary Bea Perez of San Antonio. The girl disappeared from San Antonio's annual Fiesta celebration.

Texas law officers say Sells has confessed to at least a dozen murders across the country.

Man confesses to I-45 murders

By: MARY ALYS CHERRY, Citizen Staff November 08, 2001

The decades-old mystery of the murders of more than 20 young girls' along the Gulf Freeway took still another turn this past week when League City Police questioned a new suspect at length. The suspect is Mark Roland Stallings, 34, who worked on the Calder Road property that came to be known as the "killing fields" after the bodies of four young women were found buried on the grounds in the 1980s. Two of the four were never identified. They are known simply as Jane and Janet Doe.

Stallings is currently serving 489 years in the Texas Department of Corrections for aggravated assault and an escape attempt. He has a lengthy criminal history and appears to have benefitted from Texas' early release program. In 1991, for example, he was given an 18 year sentence. He served two years. Stallings became a suspect after he wrote a letter to the Fort Bend County sheriff, confessing to the murders of two Houston area women 10 years ago.
Then clues began surfacing in the I-45 murders. After lengthy interviews with Stallings, in which he allegedly confessed to
several other murders in the area, the Fort Bend sheriff and the FBI contacted League City Police, who promptly issued a bench warrant in order to interview him about the multiple homicides in the Calder Road area. League City Police Capt. Chris Reed said that "based on those interviews, Stallings is considered a strong suspect in the League City murders."
The many murders along the 50-mile stretch of I-45 between Houston and Galveston led one tabloid to call the Gulf Freeway "America's Highway to Hell."

Over the years many young women have been abducted, raped and murdered and their bodies dumped in the swamps near the roadway. The roadway has gained such a reputation that most Bay Area women avoid driving it alone at night.
The string of murders date back to 1971 when three Galveston girls disappeared.

Two were found in Turner's Bayou in Texas City, the third in Galveston Bay. Six more who lived close to the Gulf Freeway in Alvin, Dickinson, Sagemont and Houston were found in watery graves during the next few months. Another,
14-year-old Sandra Ramber disappeared from her Santa Fe home in 1983 and is still missing.

Heidi Villareal, 23, and Laura Miller, 16, both disappeared from the same League City convenience store - one in 1983, the other a year later in 1984. Their bodies were found in the Calder Road "killing fields," as were the unidentified bodies of Jane and Janet Doe ê one in 1986, the other in 1991. Susan Eads, 20, of Seabrook also died during that same period, on Aug. 31, 1983. Her killer dumped her nude body in high grass near NASA Road 1 in Seabrook after raping and strangling her. She worked two jobs, as a waitress at a Clear Lake night spot and as a disc jockey at another. Her death remains unsolved. Then in 1996 Krystal Jean Baker, 13, of Texas City disappeared from a convenience store. Her body was found the same day under a Trinity River bridge in Chambers County. In April 1997 Laura Smither, 12, was abducted while jogging near her Friendswood home. Her body was found three weeks later in a Pasadena retention pond. Her killer has never been found. Four months later, on Aug. 17, 1997, Jessica Cain, 17, of Tiki Island
disappeared after joining her theatre pals that evening at a party at Bennigan's in Webster.

Her truck was found parked on the emergency lane of I-45, not far from her home. Many leads were followed but she had vanished without a trace. Over the years, various officers working the cases have expressed the opinion that the murders are probably the work of more than one killer. For a while in the spring of 1994, lawmen targeted Robert William Abel, 61, who owns the Calder Road property where four of the bodies were found. League City Police, working with an FBI expert, had concluded that one person was responsible for all four slayings.

After a 12-hour search of his home, League City Police later were ordered to return his personal belongings when the FBI notified them that evidence sent for evaluation could not be linked to Abel. "It's a great relief," Abel said when police returned his property. "Especially because I live the opposite life. I've never been involved with any criminal activity."
Hopeful that police interviews with Stallings will clear his name forever, Abel said he remembered Stallings working there in the late 1980s. Stallings knew the property well, Abel said. Police are running DNA tests on evidence to determine if there is a link to Stallings. However, results will not be available until December.

Discovery of eight more bodies reignites terror in violent Mexican border city

(11-08) 20:50 PST CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) --

Police found the bodies of eight more young women this week in this tough border town, renewing fears that a 1990s string of rape-murders had resumed.

In March 1999, five bus drivers were charged in 20 of the 57 previous murders, and police thought they had solved brutal killings.

But this week's shocking discoveries showed they were wrong, said women's rights activists who have insisted the killings never stopped.

Authorities in Ciudad Juarez found the skeletal remains of five women Wednesday near a field where they had uncovered the decayed bodies of three other young women the previous day.

"My God, I'm so angry," said Victoria Caraveo of Mujeres por Juarez, one of a dozen women's groups that has pressured police to do more. The activists marched to the prosecutor's office Thursday to demand action.

"Tell me, in what part of the world do you find a cemetery with bodies of girls who didn't do anything wrong -- they just worked -- and for that they have been raped, tortured and murdered, their bodies thrown in the desert like dogs," she said.

Between 1993 and 1999, police found at least 57 bodies in the desert around Ciudad Juarez, a sprawling city of 1.3 million people across the border from El Paso, Texas.

Most were young teen-age women who had come from small, poor towns in the Mexican countryside to work in the city and support their families. Some aspired to earn enough money to eventually go to school and begin new careers.

Women's groups have insisted that the number of women who disappeared had risen to more than 200, and they accused police of failing to investigate. More than a dozen Juarez women disappeared this year alone, they say.

"We want straight answers," Caraveo said. "The police don't do anything and they don't care to do anything. Yet they always have a perfect excuse for their incompetence."

On Thursday, Chihuahua state authorities announced that a special police task force will investigate the killings and they set a $21,500 reward for the capture of the killer or killers.

"This is no halfhearted effort, the state government has an absolute resolve to clear up this case," Chihuahua state Interior Secretary Sergio Martinez Garcia, told local media. Also Thursday, Mexico's Congress voted to create a special commission to follow the investigation.

At the time, police identified as the main suspect Abdel Latif Sharif, an Egyptian citizen formerly employed as an engineer at a Ciudad Juarez factory.

Sharif allegedly paid as many as 10 other men, including the bus drivers, to commit copycat murders to draw suspicion away from him. Sharif denied any involvement in the killings, and his 30-year sentence was overturned on appeal last April. He remains in custody pending appeal by the prosecution.

Following the arrests, the killings appeared to have ended for a while, and police said the disappearances of other women were unrelated to the serial killings.

But at least one of the victims found this week had her hands tied behind her back and was stripped down to her socks in a murder chillingly similar to the dozens of killings that occurred here in the 1990s. She had been killed about 10 days ago, and was between 15 and 17 years old.

The bodies were found about 300 yards from the offices of the Association of Maquiladoras, the group representing the mostly U.S.-owned export assembly plants that dominate the city. Most of the victims in the 1990s killings were young, slender maquila employees.

It was not immediately known whether the victims found Tuesday had been raped, and a source close to the investigation said it may be difficult to make that determination from the remains.

"The authorities lack investigative skill, and they lack interest," said Esther Chavez, a women's rights activist who led the battle to investigate the killings, which began in 1993. "Imagine: after all these deaths, they are only now deciding whether to bring DNA identification equipment here."

Juarez's problems go beyond the rape-murders. A disproportionate number of women are killed here in more "common" crimes.

The city recorded the murders of 192 women between 1987 and 1997, compared to 138 in Tijuana, another violent border city of almost the same size.

      Shipman 'began killing in the 1970s'

      The Times
      NOVEMBER 05 2001
      BY RUSSELL JENKINS

      The first detailed evidence that serial killer Harold Shipman began murdering patients as a young GP in Todmorden during the early years of his career was aired in public yesterday.
      Relatives of three patients, who died more than a quarter of a century ago told the public inquiry into the doctor's murderous activities how he played a prominent role in the deaths of their father, mother or aunt.

      Altogether Dame Janet Smith, the inquiry chairman, will be asked to rule on whether Shipman had a hand in the deaths of 31 patients during his time as a partner at the Abraham Ormerod practice in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, between March 1974 and September 1975.

      Police are convinced that Shipman, 56, serving life for murdering 15 of his patients by administering overdoses of diamorphine, was responsible for at least some of this number. However the Crown Prosecution Service has said that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute further.

      Eunice Shaw broke down as she recalled the death of her father, William Earnshaw, 88, a retired engineer, who died in her home in Todmorden on August 9, 1975.

      Several months before his death Mr Earnsaw, a fit man who had never smoked, suffered a fall and his health deteriorated rapidly. A colleague of Dr Shipman's told him that his heart was tired and giving out.

      Shortly before his death, Dr Shipman arrived at the house to see Mr Earnshaw. Mrs Shaw said she took the doctor upstairs to her father's bedside.

      In her statement to the inquiry, she said: "Dr Shipman's first comment to me after arriving in my father's bedroom was along the lines that his visit was simply a formality so that I did not have to go through the pain of a postmortem.

      "I was very shocked and upset by Dr Shipman's comment, especially as he said this while standing next to my father's bed. I thought the remark was very callous. I did not know whether my father could hear or understand."

      Mrs Shaw recalled that as she turned to leave, Shipman said he would follow her downstairs in a few minutes so that he could write up his medical notes in the bedroom. Mrs Shaw heard him leave five minutes later.

      "I then went back up to see my father and to sit with him for as little while," she said in her statement. "I distinctly remember that my father was lying absolutely peacefully.

      "At the time I did not know whether my father had been quietened by having heard Dr Shipman's nasty comment or because when I sat down by my father I said a prayer. However, I now am not sure why my father should suddenly go so quiet."

      Christopher Melton QC, senior counsel for the inquiry, said there was no evidence that Shipman had administered an injection.

      Mrs Shaw said that it was around this time that six silver forks, that had been a wedding present from her grandmother to her mother, went missing.

      The inquiry also took evidence about the sudden death of Edith Roberts, a 67 year old widow, who lived alone in a cottage in Todmorden. She was found dead but sitting up in bed, still clutching her reading book and looking serene.

      During the recent investigation the family had been alarmed to discover that Shipman had given her cause of death as cardiac arrest and that her death had been "expected" by her two nieces.

      Evelyn Ross, her daughter, said in a statement: "I would strongly dispute that my mother had a poor state of health. I would also say that her death was not expected and I find this an outrageous thing for Shipman to have said."

      Hilda Mycock, her niece, who discovered the body, spoke of her suspicion that Mrs Roberts looked too peaceful for a victim of heart failure.

      "You would have thought the book would have fallen out of her hands and she would have clasped her chest," she said.

      Dame Janet is due to hear evidence today (tues) into the deaths of three people whom Shipman certified dead on the same day.

      Elaine Oswald, a university professor, now living in America, who believes she was Shipman's first intended victim, will give evidence on Friday.

      Shipman left Todmorden in disgrace after he admitted to being a drug user and addicted to the pain killing drug Pethidine.

      Mr Melton said that Shipman suffered black-outs and his colleagues were called out on at least three occasions to treat him after a fall. The inquiry heard that Pethidenine can cause convulsions.

      When his addiction was discovered, he told his colleagues that he first too the pain killer because he did not believe in prescribing drugs which he had not tried first himself.

      Shipman underwent a period of rehabilitation before arriving as a GP in Hyde, Tameside, where is believed to have killed hundreds of patients.

      The inquiry continues.


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The Shipman Inquiry:
http://www.the-shipman-inquiry.org.uk/home.asp

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