March 20, 2025 • 42 mins
Indigenous women in Canada have always been vulnerable, but there’s a stretch of remote road that’s such a hotspot for disappearances, assaults, and murders of women that it’s been called the Highway of Tears. And not much has been done to change that.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know. The man, this is a bummer edition.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yeah, the zero laughs edition, because we're talking about the
Highway of Tears and there's no other way around it.
This is just a devastating topic.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah, we should tell people. I mean, the Highway of
Tears is fairly famous. It's kind of been in the
news and in pop culture, I guess for a while.
I guess at least since the nineties, but really in
the early two thousands I think has reen it picked
up regardless. It is a stretch of desolate highway that
runs from in British Columbia up in Canada, from the
(01:00):
the port city of Prince Rupert all the way into
the interior to Prince George. And it's I think seven
hundred and twenty kilometers almost four hundred and fifty miles,
and it's known as Highway sixteen officially. But the stretches
of this highway are so desolate, so remote, and so
sparsely populated that it is become a haven for murderers
(01:26):
who pick people up, mostly women, mostly Indigenous women, on
this road and either make them disappear forever or murder them.
And it's it's endemic in this area, so much so
that it's caught national attention. It's just how poorly this
group of women are being treated and their families as well.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, it's you know, as you'll see, it's and you know,
there are many reasons for this, but it's a heavily
hitched hiked road and that can be very dangerous and
so a lot of times these are hitchhikers, people just
trying to get from one place to another, and like
you said, they are you know, either sexually assaulted or
(02:10):
murdered or both. And these are the people that you know,
like they found bodies, there are you know, dozens and
dozens more than these dozens who have survived attacks and
rapes along that stretch of highway. So you know, it's
no secret why it's called the highway Tiers. Big thanks
to Olivia for enduring this topic and helping us out
(02:33):
with it, and big thanks to Al Jazeera, where she
got a lot of information from a six part series
they did in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, there's a lot of good sources. The CBC of
the Vancouver Sun's a good one. There's been a decent
amount of coverage, but it's it's not the kind of
coverage you would get when say, like like a Caucasian
girl goes missing, which we'll talk about. It's the kind
of about how this group of people have just been
(03:02):
totally basically left on their own to deal with something
like this, that they don't have the resources to deal
with this, and it's just such a terrible story. The
story is so much larger than this collection of murders,
but at the core, that's what it comes down to,
just women who were treated like disposable beings. And the
(03:25):
whole thing starts at the very earliest, as far as
anyone knows. The first murder that's become part of what
you'd call the canon of the Highway of tears murders
and abductions started in nineteen sixty nine. A woman named
Lavinia Gloria Moody was murdered on Highway sixteen and it
(03:48):
went kind of went along like that for a while.
There was but no one had kind of put together
this whole group of people and call it the Highway
of Tears, and they wouldn't for years to come, but
at the time there was enough going on that they
could coin this term the Highway murders. And by nineteen
eighty one enough women and girls had been murdered to
(04:10):
go on missing along Highway sixteen that a group of
Royal Canadian Mounted Police detectives from all over British Columbia
and I think Alberta got together and decided to kind
of compare notes and see if they could solve some
of these unsolved cases.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yes. Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
While this was going on, you know, when the cops
were sort of slowly coming around to the idea that
there was a specific problem along this stretch, the families
were getting involved, the families of the missing, the families
of those who were found dead, and you know, they
organized their own efforts. One case that really kind of
(04:50):
brought everything to even more of ahead was the case
of Romona Wilson. This was in June of nineteen ninety four.
She was sixteen years old and she went to go
meet up with a friend to go to some you
know into the year school graduation parties. She never got there,
and her mom, Matilda, was like the cops don't really
(05:13):
seem to care much that this happened. And so the
locals got together and they started organizing, They started doing,
you know, going on search parties and looking out for her.
They ultimately, you know, very sadly, discovered her body about
ten months later at an airport. Her clothes were found
near her with some rope and some cabling. And so
(05:37):
her mom and her older sister Brenda, and you know,
other members of her family and the community got together
and said, all right, the least we can do is
try and raise some awareness since no one seems to
be paying attention. So they got a memorial walk together
in June of ninety five, which became an annual thing.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Yeah, there was another woman who really deserves a lot
of credit for bringing national attention to this. She's a
Wet Sudan Nation woman. And in nineteen ninety eight there
was a vigil where she coined the term Highway of Tears,
which I can't I don't think you can really calculate
how much that helped this case. It was like, hey, media,
(06:18):
here's a nice little tidy package for you to report on.
It's even got a catchy name, despite you know, the
actual obvious emotion behind calling it the Highway of Tears.
I think it really helped quite a bit. And Florence
Nezil also is credited with starting a walk that covered
the entire again four hundred and fifty miles stretch of
(06:39):
highway of the Highway of Tears for the first time.
That walk's been made scores of times by now over
the years by family members and community members and members
of other nations who've gotten involved to try to again
help ask for resources, ask to get the police involved more,
because that's another recurring theme throughout as Chuck, is that
(07:02):
the police have shown over and over again opportunity after
opportunity to just not really seemed to care.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Absolutely, she had already been working, you know, to raise
awareness when very tragically it hit hit home for her
in a more personal way when one of her family members,
a woman named Tamara Chipman, went missing in two thousand
and five. And you know, all this is going on
through the you know, I think it was nineteen eighty
one when the cops finally started sort of getting together
(07:34):
and comparing notes, and that was after at least twelve
years since the first known murder, and it took all
the way into the two thousands for things to really
take a turn. And that was when very tragically, a
woman named Nicole Hoher.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Was killed.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
She was twenty five years old and she was white.
She disappeared in two thousand and two, and this is
what really brought the national attention. You've heard a journalist
named Gwynn Eiffel in the United States coined the term
missing white woman syndrome, which.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Is the idea that it takes.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
A white person to be, you know, the victim of
a crime for anyone to kind of sit up and
take notice. In members of indigenous communities or marginalized communities
are often overlooked and underfunded and under resourced, and you know,
the cases are kind of swept under the rug. And
that's exactly what was going on in Canada for many,
many years and still is to a certain degree.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah, and again, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been
called the task time and time and time again for
not taking this stuff seriously enough, not devoting the enough
resources to it. But also the media is largely responsible
to not just in this case, but in any case
of a missing or murdered woman who's not white. In
the United States or Canada, they get much less coverage,
(08:55):
and the intensity of the coverage is much less too,
compared to white women. It's not just anecdotal. I was
reading at least one study on it from two thousand
and sixteen, I think in the Journal of Law and Criminology,
and they were like, yes, we analyze this stuff and
it's absolutely true. So there's like a but there's a
(09:17):
bitter gratitude involved because the death of Nicole Hoer, she
like it did bring a lot of attention to this. Yeah,
and you just can't you can't deny that, and so
that's good. But at the same time, it's just like, man,
we've been having to we've been trying to deal with
this for decades, and now this one white girl becomes
(09:40):
part of the crowd of murdered girls, and like, now
now people care. It's got to be really tough to take.
And I know I called her a girl, and she
was twenty five, so she was a woman. But there's like,
this whole group is made up of women and girls.
I know it's not interchangeable, but it's important to say,
like some of these I mean, the youngest victim was twelve.
(10:02):
Monica Jacks I think died in the late seventies, maybe
nineteen seventy eight. Like, there are plenty of girls who
were picked up and murdered. There are also plenty of
women too, and not all of them were Indigenous, a
lot of them were white. But the cops, as they
started to get together, came up with some criteria that
(10:23):
they applied to these cases that kind of narrowed the search,
but also brought on new cases that they hadn't they
hadn't considered before, as we'll see.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Yeah, so in two thousand and five, this is just
a few years after Nicole Howard brought more attention to
the issue. The RCMP, the Royal Canadian amount of Police
will probably call them that RCMP maybe mounties do they
still go by that.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
I think so, whether they like it or not, everybody
calls them mounties.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
They launched what was called the Unsolved Homicide Unit, launched
something called Project E Pana the letter E. That was
just the division of the rc MP, and Pana is
named after an Inuit goddess who cares for souls in
the afterworld. And they there, you know, their official designation was, Hey,
(11:20):
we think we have a serial killer.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Maybe more than one out there on this Highway of tears.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
It's a pretty, like you said, a pretty great place
to get away with a crime like that, because it's
so desolate. Up until recently there were long, long, long, long,
long stretches where you had no cell phone service even
so you couldn't you know, call anyone if you were
in trouble. Not very many people around, and plenty of
animals around to take care of bodies and the remains.
(11:49):
So they found some common allies and three teenage girls.
Ramona Wilson, who I mentioned a woman named Roxanne Thierra,
fifteen years old from Prince George. This is a very
sad case. She was in the foster system and the
juvenile incarceration system and she eventually had to turn to
(12:12):
survival sex, which is a term for women who are
forced to resort to sex work to feed and clothe themselves,
and it's usually means like instead of getting money, they
get food and clothing and items to live and survive.
(12:32):
In nineteen ninety four, she told a friend she was
going to meet one of her clients. She disappeared and
her body was discovered off Highway sixteen, and then finally
Alicia Germaine was fifteen years old lasting in nineteen ninety
four at a Christmas dinner and she was discovered close
to Highway sixteen. So that's when they came up with
(12:53):
their criteria to see if they could sort of narrow
this down right.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah, and just one thing, Rock sand and Leah or
Alicia who also went by Leah. They were friends and
also colleagues. They both were sex workers who were engaged
in survival sex. Ramona who was not engaged in anything
like that. She I think she worked at a restaurant
or something. But Ramona, Roxanne, and Leah all were murdered
(13:19):
in the same area. Between Ramona was June, Roxanne July
Leah in December of nineteen ninety four. I think in
all their cases in this area, everybody's like there's something
going on. The cops are like, just give us eleven
more years and we'll come together and come up with
(13:40):
this new EPANA project. And right when they did, those
three just stuck out immediately. It's like there's some real
commonalities here. They need to be investigated. But like you
were saying, the three criteria that they came up with
from this EPANA project, you had to be female, You
had to last be seen dead or alive within a
mile Highway sixteen, and then you also had to be
(14:02):
involved in high risk activities like sex work, but also hitchhiking.
And we should say here too for those of us
who grew up in towns with bus service and cabs
and you could walk places and get to where you're
going easily, ride your bike, like hitchhiking almost seemed like frivolous.
Hitchhiking is a way to live and survive and get
(14:24):
to work in this area. It has been for decades,
So it's not like I think you can view hitchhiking
as like, man, why did you hitchhike? In a lot
of cases, the women and girls who were picked up
hitchhiking were trying to get to where they were going,
like they weren't like just hitting the road like they
that was just part of daily life for them. Unfortunately.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Yeah, so once they narrow down this criteria, they found
more cases that sort of fit that and were lumped
into the Highway of Tears murders. Alberta Williams was twenty
four and she was celebrating at a pub at the
end of summer after working there seasonally with her sister.
This was nineteen eighty nine. Her body was found about
(15:08):
a month after her disappearance. Delphine Nikol was sixteen years old,
disappeared in nineteen ninety well hitch hiking. Lanta Derrek, nineteen
year old college student, disappeared in October of ninety five.
We mentioned Tamra Chipman that was the relative of Florence
and Aziel. She was twenty two and the mother of
(15:30):
a two year old boy, disappeared while hitchhiking in two
thousand and five, and then fourteen year old Aliyah Sarah
Auger went missing from Prince George in two thousand and
six and she was found deceased in a ditch right
beside the highway Highway sixteen and Aila.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
I'm pretty sure that's how you say her name. She
was the last one to be officially added, like as
far as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are concerned, she's
the last high Way of Tears victim, although as we'll see,
there have been plenty more who would qualify for sure.
The problem is EPANA is very much underfunded and not
(16:10):
basically not really operational right now, so they're not adding
people for that reason. But when they looked into this
a little more, they basically went back to their credit
and found that there was about three hundred boxes of
information and paperwork on all these cases. And so they're like,
we can't get anywhere until we have all this stuff
logged in some sort of database. So they created the
(16:33):
database and they logged in, and it took them like
a year. But after they finally got all that stuff
in some of those older cases, the ones between nineteen
sixty nine and nineteen eighty one, they started bubbling up
toward the top and were eventually included, starting with that
first one with Gloria Moody, also including Monica Jack and
then there was also Micheline Pare, Gaylen Weiss, Pamela Darlington,
(16:58):
Colleen McMillan, and Monica Ingus and then Maureen Mosey and
again all of them were killed between nineteen sixty nine
and eighty one Paul along Highway sixteen, and a lot
of them were hitchhiking as well.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Yeah, and you know, if you look into these cases
and people, you know, the volunteers that are working with
some of these, you know a lot of them are
run by, you know, families of victims, they will say
that it's probably more like, you know, fifty people advocates
say that, you know, the total is way higher than
(17:31):
they're saying it is, you know, kind of for all
the reasons that we've mentioned so far, and that seems
like a good time to take.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Our first break and we'll be right back, all right.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
So when we left off, we were saying that the
total number is could be as high as fifty. If
you look at all these cases, and not a lot
of them have been solved, there are a few exceptions
here and there that definitely showed that there were serial killers,
a killer or killers operating. There was one big one
in twenty twelve with Colleen McMillan. She was murdered hitch hiking.
(18:33):
She was sixteen years old. This is nineteen seventy four,
but they had, you know, in some of the evidence
boxes had her blouse still and with the improvement in
DNA matching and databases and stuff like that, they were
able to find a match on Interpol. It was an
American named Bobby Jack Fowler, who had died in prison
in two thousand and six, where he was serving time
(18:56):
for attempted kidnapping and attempted murder on another woman in
nineteen ninety five, and they found that he had been
working as a roofer in Canada when this murder and
others took place, and you know, basically we're like, it
was probably two other women as well on the list,
Pamela Darlington and Gail Weiss, and they were both murdered
(19:18):
in nineteen seventy three, but he died in prison before
they could officially pin that on him.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Yes, and from what I've read about Bobby Jack Fowler
is the kind of scumbag that you wish you could
go dig up and reanimate so you can punish him
some more. He was terrible. And when the Canadian cops
were like, hey, you guys had somebody incarcerated in your prisons,
to the officials in Oregon who killed at least one
(19:44):
girl here but probably three total, you should probably look
around at your own files, they started finding. I think
they've said up to maybe twenty murders that they've pinned
on Bobby Jack Fowler. Nothing they can prove, but it's
just likely that he committed them. And he'll obviously never
be convicted or tried for him because he's dead. But
(20:06):
it just it goes to show you like there are
human beings out there who will just kidnap, rape and
murder and just do it over and over again. And
the easiest thing to do in the world is, if
you're going to do that kind of thing, is take
advantage of a very vulnerable population in a very sparsely
populated area, which makes Highway sixteen just like the perfect spot.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, there's another guy.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
In fact, he's the only living person convicted of one
of these murders from someone on the E panelist.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
His name is Gary Taylor Handlin.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
He, you know, going back to the nineteen sixties, had
committed multiple rapes, been in jail multiple times for these rapes.
One was a hitchhiker in nineteen seventy eight and he
became a suspect. And the youngest victim twelve year old
Monica Jack that you had mentioned earlier, and also Katherine
(21:00):
Mary Herbert eleven years old. She just was not one
of the E paniccases. But they caught him by setting
up a sting operation in which they kind of created
this fake crime enterprise where he was answering to an
undercover cought playing a crime boss who got him to
confess that he abducted and strangled Monica Jack. And this
(21:22):
is when he also confessed to killing Katherine Mary Herbert.
But that confession was ruled and admissible, but he was
convicted of Jack's murder in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Yeah, he I hadn't heard of this, but that's apparently
a fairly typical sting operation. They call him a mister
Big operation where you just introduced to successively higher up
criminals in some organization that they're all cops. The judge
was like, no, the admission to or confession to Katherine
(21:52):
Mary Herbert's murder in admissible, but he thought that he
was basically convincing this crime boss to get him out
of being tried convicted for Monica Jack's murder. So they're like,
that's totally admissible. He completely volunteered that, but yeah, I
mean he went down for it. But like you said,
he's the only living person who's ever been convicted for
(22:13):
one of these dozens of murders.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
So, you know, we mentioned two thousand and six is
when they stopped officially tagging names onto the official epanelist.
There have still been plenty of murders and sexual assaults
along that stretch of highway since then, Cody Lejebikov, I.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Believe is how you pronounced that it sounds.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Right killed three women and a fifteen year old girl
between two thousand and nine and twenty ten, So that
was after the official list. Two of those victims were indigenous,
and the cops caught him when they just pulled him
over for a speeding violation and found blood on him,
and they found the body of a fifteen year old
Lauren don Leslie, and then you know, realized that they
(22:56):
could link him to and I believe he was convicted
to of killing of three other women, Jill Stacy Stachenko,
Cynthia Francis Moss, and Natasha Lin Montgomery.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yeah, and so all three of them were from Prince George,
which is the easternmost town considered part of the Highway
of Tears. And Cody was nineteen when he killed the
first of them, Jill Stacy Stachenko. He's not the youngest
serial killer in Canadian history, but he too, like the
(23:27):
other guys, was a scumbag and still is. He was
sentenced to no less than twenty five years four times,
but it appears that his sentences are concurrent. So he's
serving twenty five years for four murders, and the judge
reminded him that he could apply for parole as early
as fifteen years in. So that's four years from now
(23:48):
that this guy might be able to get out after
being convicted of murdering for three women and a girl.
I don't like that.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Yeah, So you mentioned Florence Nazil earlier having organized her
own walk.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
This was in two thousand and six.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
They called it the Highway of Tiers Awareness Walk, and
they walked two weeks. They walked through snowstorms, they walked
through some you know, terrible weather and conditions, and eventually
ended at the Highway of Tiers Symposium in Prince George.
And again this wasn't something organized by the cops or anything.
It was organized by indigenous groups and victims families themselves.
(24:24):
But they did have five hundred delegates from the Mounies
there as well as some representative from you know, the
Canadian government there, and it was basically a symposium where
they had recommendations on what they could do, you know,
not only to help solve these crimes, but to prevent
more of this from happening. We'll get to you know
(24:44):
what's happened since then, because they have done some things
that seemed like they should probably help. But also you know,
how to support these families, how to support these communities
a little better because it was, you know, not well
funded and any kind of work was very sparse up
until that point.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah. So Brenda Wilson, Ramona Wilson's sister, she works for
Carrius Sikhani Family Services, and she's the one employee of
the Highway of Tears Initiative, and she frequently has to
work for free because they just are like, we're out
of money again, wait till next quarter for the check
to come in. And obviously she's extremely dedicated. But that's
(25:24):
a kind of a par for the course thing, like
just the funding is just not there. And if you
follow like government funding, that usually goes to stuff that
people care about or like a lot of people care about.
So if you don't get funding, it's a kind of
a big slap in the face in addition to you know,
really tying your hands from doing the work you're trying
to do.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
Yeah, and you know, there's a lot of distrust for
the Mounties there, and for good reasons.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
In a lot of cases we'll see.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
There's a woman named Gladys Raddick who was an aunt
of Tamra Chipman, one of the victims, and she she
leads a cause called Tears for Justice, the number four.
She has a lot of distrust of the police because
as a teenager she ran away and was hitchhiking and
was picked up two different times by RCMP officers who
(26:13):
raped her. So, I mean, as far as the RCMP
is concerned, they're like, we're going to investigate this stuff,
and we're going to treat anyone within our ranks who
does something like this just like we would any common criminal.
But the fact that that stuff happens period, and that
they're like a human There's a Human Rights Watch report
(26:35):
that came out in twenty twelve that documented police abuse
against Indigenous women and girls, and that's like literal abuse
and sexual assault the cops are taking part in at
the worst then all the way down to just being
hostile or uninterested in what happened to these crime victims
and families.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Yeah, because as the Canadian government has said many times
and is recognized and apologize for Canada's history of how
they've treated their Indigenous populations, like putting them in residential schools.
Apparently in the sixties there was a second wave of
that kind of thing, but rather than residential schools, they
took kids from their family homes and put them in
with foster families, and so there was a lot of
(27:20):
breakup of the culture and families in the indigenous tribes
in the area, and as a result, like poverty began,
violence really set in deaths of despair like suicide and
alcoholism and drug overdoses and an inability to take care
(27:41):
of themselves. And then you couple that reality with somebody
coming to the police and saying, my daughter hasn't come
home since Friday, and they're like, Friday, huh, what was
she doing last while she went to a party. Then
she's probably just on a week long bender. Just give
her a few days. From all the stories I've read,
I would say ninety percent of the family said that
(28:01):
that was the first response they got from police.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Yeah, and not only that, but they've been shown to
get rid of information. So in twenty fifteen, Elizabeth Denham,
she is the Commissioner for the Information in Privacy for
British Columbia, she put out a report that said officials
removed like one hundred and fifty emails about the Highway
(28:26):
of Tears from their database, which was a violation of
the Freedom and Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Right which was obviously didn't foster any further trust with
the Royal Canadian Mound and Police, and I guess in response,
in twenty eighteen, the Commissioner of the Mawnies, Brenda Lucky,
actually issued like a formal heartfelt apology for the problems
that the families have been facing in the lack of
support they've been getting from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
(28:57):
which has been few and far between. But I think
when it does, when something like that does happen, it
goes a long way, and I think the families are
kind of like, Okay, let's let's get back to work
with the Mounties again.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
So what this represents though, as a larger population scene,
not only in Canada, but the United States and all
over the world where minority communities are. Although they represent,
you know, sometimes a small part of the population, they
make up a much larger part of people in prison,
of people who were killed by police. And that's certainly
(29:30):
the case in Canada. I think you know, part of
the reason that EPANA has gotten mixed not only results,
but mixed reviews over the year for their work is
because they've just been you know, they came out with
a bang, and then they've sort of been slowly waning
over the years. I think they went from sixty assigned
officers down to six by twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, and there's a guy staff sargeant named Wayne Clary
who said, you know, we probably aren't going to be
able to make any more arrests in these cases, that
most of them are stranger on stranger violence, so there's
basically no motive other than to sexually assault and kill.
(30:14):
It's really hard to track somebody down, especially when you
don't have many leads. So we're probably going to have
to get used to the fact that these murders are
going to go unsolved. But from what I was reading,
there's a lot of families who are like, this wasn't
a stranger. We know the guy who did it, he
lives over there, and they're not getting listened to. And
then also there was a report from twenty sixteen, an
(30:36):
analysis of thirty two cases. Did you see this part
about where the police had said that there was no
foul play in these murders of Indigenous women, and this
analysis is like, that's kind of a weird thing to say,
because some of them were found nude, some of them
had unexplained injuries. In some cases the coroner contradicted the
(30:59):
idea that there is no foul play, and yet they
have been logged as no foul play and therefore they're
not being investigated because they're not considered murders.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Yeah, and you know, along the lines of what I
was talking about before, this is not just a Canada problem.
There's an official name for something like this, missing and
Murdered Indigenous women and Girls mmi WG, and that has happened,
you know, all over North America and other places in
the world. There's some estimates that say Indigenous women and
(31:30):
girls are twelve times more likely than the general population
to go missing or to be murdered in Canada and
ten times more likely in the US. And there have
been people trying to bring attention to this as well.
There's an artist named Jamie Black who made these really
powerful installations. That is, sometimes the most powerful ones are
(31:51):
very simple, and that's the case here where it would
hang empty red dresses in public places and it really
caught on, and since twenty ten, Canada has recognized May
fifth as red dressed day.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Yep, let's take our second break and we'll come back.
How about that, all right? Okay, Chuck, So you said
(32:38):
the magic word missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
It's a thing, and Canada launched an inquiry into that group,
and some people in the Highway of Tears community gave
testimony for it. They released a report in twenty nineteen
and they said, look, let's just cut to the chase here.
(32:59):
It's not like Native American tribes were living in poverty
and destitution and engaged in sex work and alcoholism and
drug addiction before we Euro Canadians came along and just
completely disrupted their culture. So this is actually this problem
(33:19):
of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. It's part
of a larger, bigger picture, a history of being exploited
and left vulnerable and not protected by the people who
were supposed to protect them.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
This is not new, yeah, and I mean, this is
horrific to look at. But of the one of the
problems is they found that whenever they have a very
large group of only men around in a desolate area
for one reason or another, sexual assaults and murders happen.
(33:55):
And that is the case in these isolated parts of
Canada where the fossil fuel industry is. So what will
happen is they'll go to work on a pipeline or
something and they have what's called a man camp with
like a thousand dudes on site working out in the
middle of nowhere together and historically speaking, not just here,
(34:16):
but kind of everywhere, this has happened dating back to
the eighteen hundreds. When this happens, they're going to be
sexual assaults and murdered and disappeared women and girls nearby.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, there's reports that show like an actual correlation, like
a man camp shows up. Sexual assaults of indigenous women
goes up in the area too. And unfortunately, this part
of Northern British Columbia that the Highway of Tiers runs through,
that's like this central area for Canada's resource extraction. So
there are a lot of man camps there and there's
(34:50):
plenty more coming. So that in and of itself is
a problem, and it's not just in Canada. Apparently, North
Dakota underwent an oil boom back in the two thousand aughts,
and as more and more people were brought in as laborers,
sexual assault of Indigenous women there went up too, because
(35:11):
they're also pretty vulnerable here in the United States as well.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Yeah, I mean this happens everywhere all over the world
that that is the case, it's not just North America.
They've taken some steps I mentioned earlier some of the
things that they're doing that seem like they would help out.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
One is, we got to stop people.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
From hitchhiking, or at least reduce the rate of hitchhikers.
They don't have any other way to get around sometimes,
like you mentioned, So in twenty seventeen, British Columbia Transit
move forward on something that came out of that two
thousand and sixth summit. So well, eleven years later that
launched three new bus routes along Highway sixteen. But that
(35:57):
didn't work for very long because that worked in conjunction
with Greyhound, and just two years after that, and like
five thousand people were now using the service, Greyhound cut
back on the routes there because they weren't turning a profit,
and so all of a sudden hitchhiking was back on
the map again.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yep. Yeah, And just a lot of people just don't
have cars, and if you do have a car, it's
probably being used by somebody else. I remember what was
the movie Smoke Signals. I think they talk about the
res car, where it's just like a car, everybody just
kind of shares and it just gets handed from person
to person when you need it. So, yeah, hitchhiking's going
(36:34):
to be a lot more convenient in some cases. Cell
phone you said, also, cell phone service is a big
deal too.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
Right, Yeah, I mean just not being able to call
nine one one very simply is a problem. So in
twenty twenty one, I mean just four years ago, it's
astounding that it took this long. The provincial and federal
governments said, all right, we'll chip in four and a
half million bucks out of what will eventually cost eleven
(37:01):
and a half million total to get Rogers' Communications to
put to get coverage all along this highway with cell
phone towers. And I think by the end of last year,
the good news is nine of those eleven towers were up,
and hopefully soon the entire four hundred and fifty ish
mile stretch you'll at least be able to call the cops.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Yeah, and that was a big one of the two
hundred and thirty one calls for justice that came out
of that symposium in twenty fifteen. And for I mean,
that's lightning fast, if like, for this kind of stuff
that happened that past. So just two more to go, everybody,
let's get it done in twenty twenty five. Yeah, absolutely,
(37:44):
there's also like a little bit of a certainly I
wouldn't call it a tuss or anything, but there's a
growing kind of disagreement on how to approach this. Up
to basically, I guess twenty twenty three, the approach was exclusive.
This is a horrific situation, This is tragic, This is
(38:05):
super sad, and it doesn't need to portray it any
other way. That's just what it is. And the Carrier
Sikhani Center, remember they run the Highway of Tears initiative,
They're like, what if we just kind of alter this
a little bit, what if we make this more of
a hopeful thing for a very long time. There's some
(38:26):
famous billboards along the Highway of Tears. It had pictures
of three of the victims, Ramona Delphine and Cecilia, who
isn't included in the canonical victims, but she was Delphine's cousin.
They went missing within six months of each other, and
I think Cecilia's never been found again. They're pictures around
(38:46):
this billboard and not on the billboard it said girls
don't hitchhike on the Highway of Tears, kill her on
the loose. Well, that was helpful for years and years
and years. But Carrier Sikhani's like, you know, there's a
way that some people who don't understand our way of
hitchhiking why we do it, could possibly see that as
like there's some sort of victim blaming in there. So
(39:08):
what if we just kind of remove that and make
this whole more hopeful message. And they unveiled I think
four billboards that kind of change things a little bit, right.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Uh. Yeah, they say we are hope, we are strength,
keep Highway sixteen safe. And you know, there are obviously
critics of that messaging because they're saying, we don't want
to say that there's hope because right now, with the
way things are going with the Mounties and the investigations,
like there is no hope.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
So why say that if it's not hopeful.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Right, yeah, And I think the billboards coexist. And the
critics of that were like, Okay, these billboards can coexist.
That's a great billboard. We're fine. But it was when
they proposed, I think, yeah, Carrier Sikhani proposed, hey, let's
let's rename the Highway of Tears officially the Highway of hope,
when activists and supporters like Gladys Raddick were like, no, well,
(40:05):
we are definitely not there yet a lot of these
cases are not solved. There's not much traction. Still like,
it's ridiculous and we're not going to do that. But
hopefully someday it will reach that status, you know. Yeah,
So until then, that's the Highway of Tears. Here at
stuff you should know, we say rest in peace to
(40:27):
all the victims, and we hope peace can come to
all of their families who have to live with this
and the ongoing frustration of not getting the help they need.
And since I said all that, it's time for a listener, ma'am.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
I'm going to call this mushroom fruit. And this is
from Mike.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
Hey, guys, I'm a mushroom farmer from Saint Louis and
thought I needed to write in and give Josh some
bad news. Listening to the Catacombs episode. The mushroom, guys,
is the fruit of its organism. The plant that it
has grown from is called mycilium there. Furthermore, not all
fungi produce fruit aka mushrooms. If you or your family
(41:07):
use mushrooms and supplement form like mushroom powder or something
like that, be sure to look for made with fruiting
bodies only on the packaging or something of that nature.
A lot of manufacturers are using myciliated grain without any
mushrooms to make these products. It's like going to the
grocery store for apples and leaving with most of an
(41:27):
apple tree. There's a lot more to that discussion, but
at the moment, and with the current data, I say
that if it advertises mushrooms, then it needs to have mushrooms.
I've included some picks of the farm and my fur babies.
If you come to Saint Louis, please come to the
farm for a tour. And there are some great pictures
(41:49):
of these beautiful fruiting mushrooms. One terribly lazy, looks like golden,
long haired Golden retriever type laying with a candy cane
and a awful, terrible tabby cat laying on a box
as cats do.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Very nice. That was a very mean email. Who is that, Mike?
Speaker 1 (42:10):
That's Mike.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
But I get your point, Mike, and I appreciate that
because I've been studiously avoiding any mushroom supplement that has
the word fruiting on it. So maybe I should just
bite the bullet.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
You know.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
I can put a piece of like electrical tape over
that part and just take the supplements as needed.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Yeah, bite the mushroom.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
If you want to be like Mike and get in
touch with us and turn my stomach, you can do that.
Send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know. The man, this is a bummer edition.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Yeah, the zero laughs edition, because we're talking about the
Highway of Tears and there's no other way around it.
This is just a devastating topic.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah, we should tell people. I mean, the Highway of
Tears is fairly famous. It's kind of been in the
news and in pop culture, I guess for a while.
I guess at least since the nineties, but really in
the early two thousands I think has reen it picked
up regardless. It is a stretch of desolate highway that
runs from in British Columbia up in Canada, from the
(01:00):
the port city of Prince Rupert all the way into
the interior to Prince George. And it's I think seven
hundred and twenty kilometers almost four hundred and fifty miles,
and it's known as Highway sixteen officially. But the stretches
of this highway are so desolate, so remote, and so
sparsely populated that it is become a haven for murderers
(01:26):
who pick people up, mostly women, mostly Indigenous women, on
this road and either make them disappear forever or murder them.
And it's it's endemic in this area, so much so
that it's caught national attention. It's just how poorly this
group of women are being treated and their families as well.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, it's you know, as you'll see, it's and you know,
there are many reasons for this, but it's a heavily
hitched hiked road and that can be very dangerous and
so a lot of times these are hitchhikers, people just
trying to get from one place to another, and like
you said, they are you know, either sexually assaulted or
(02:10):
murdered or both. And these are the people that you know,
like they found bodies, there are you know, dozens and
dozens more than these dozens who have survived attacks and
rapes along that stretch of highway. So you know, it's
no secret why it's called the highway Tiers. Big thanks
to Olivia for enduring this topic and helping us out
(02:33):
with it, and big thanks to Al Jazeera, where she
got a lot of information from a six part series
they did in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, there's a lot of good sources. The CBC of
the Vancouver Sun's a good one. There's been a decent
amount of coverage, but it's it's not the kind of
coverage you would get when say, like like a Caucasian
girl goes missing, which we'll talk about. It's the kind
of about how this group of people have just been
(03:02):
totally basically left on their own to deal with something
like this, that they don't have the resources to deal
with this, and it's just such a terrible story. The
story is so much larger than this collection of murders,
but at the core, that's what it comes down to,
just women who were treated like disposable beings. And the
(03:25):
whole thing starts at the very earliest, as far as
anyone knows. The first murder that's become part of what
you'd call the canon of the Highway of tears murders
and abductions started in nineteen sixty nine. A woman named
Lavinia Gloria Moody was murdered on Highway sixteen and it
(03:48):
went kind of went along like that for a while.
There was but no one had kind of put together
this whole group of people and call it the Highway
of Tears, and they wouldn't for years to come, but
at the time there was enough going on that they
could coin this term the Highway murders. And by nineteen
eighty one enough women and girls had been murdered to
(04:10):
go on missing along Highway sixteen that a group of
Royal Canadian Mounted Police detectives from all over British Columbia
and I think Alberta got together and decided to kind
of compare notes and see if they could solve some
of these unsolved cases.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yes. Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
While this was going on, you know, when the cops
were sort of slowly coming around to the idea that
there was a specific problem along this stretch, the families
were getting involved, the families of the missing, the families
of those who were found dead, and you know, they
organized their own efforts. One case that really kind of
(04:50):
brought everything to even more of ahead was the case
of Romona Wilson. This was in June of nineteen ninety four.
She was sixteen years old and she went to go
meet up with a friend to go to some you
know into the year school graduation parties. She never got there,
and her mom, Matilda, was like the cops don't really
(05:13):
seem to care much that this happened. And so the
locals got together and they started organizing, They started doing,
you know, going on search parties and looking out for her.
They ultimately, you know, very sadly, discovered her body about
ten months later at an airport. Her clothes were found
near her with some rope and some cabling. And so
(05:37):
her mom and her older sister Brenda, and you know,
other members of her family and the community got together
and said, all right, the least we can do is
try and raise some awareness since no one seems to
be paying attention. So they got a memorial walk together
in June of ninety five, which became an annual thing.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Yeah, there was another woman who really deserves a lot
of credit for bringing national attention to this. She's a
Wet Sudan Nation woman. And in nineteen ninety eight there
was a vigil where she coined the term Highway of Tears,
which I can't I don't think you can really calculate
how much that helped this case. It was like, hey, media,
(06:18):
here's a nice little tidy package for you to report on.
It's even got a catchy name, despite you know, the
actual obvious emotion behind calling it the Highway of Tears.
I think it really helped quite a bit. And Florence
Nezil also is credited with starting a walk that covered
the entire again four hundred and fifty miles stretch of
(06:39):
highway of the Highway of Tears for the first time.
That walk's been made scores of times by now over
the years by family members and community members and members
of other nations who've gotten involved to try to again
help ask for resources, ask to get the police involved more,
because that's another recurring theme throughout as Chuck, is that
(07:02):
the police have shown over and over again opportunity after
opportunity to just not really seemed to care.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Absolutely, she had already been working, you know, to raise
awareness when very tragically it hit hit home for her
in a more personal way when one of her family members,
a woman named Tamara Chipman, went missing in two thousand
and five. And you know, all this is going on
through the you know, I think it was nineteen eighty
one when the cops finally started sort of getting together
(07:34):
and comparing notes, and that was after at least twelve
years since the first known murder, and it took all
the way into the two thousands for things to really
take a turn. And that was when very tragically, a
woman named Nicole Hoher.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Was killed.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
She was twenty five years old and she was white.
She disappeared in two thousand and two, and this is
what really brought the national attention. You've heard a journalist
named Gwynn Eiffel in the United States coined the term
missing white woman syndrome, which.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Is the idea that it takes.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
A white person to be, you know, the victim of
a crime for anyone to kind of sit up and
take notice. In members of indigenous communities or marginalized communities
are often overlooked and underfunded and under resourced, and you know,
the cases are kind of swept under the rug. And
that's exactly what was going on in Canada for many,
many years and still is to a certain degree.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah, and again, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been
called the task time and time and time again for
not taking this stuff seriously enough, not devoting the enough
resources to it. But also the media is largely responsible
to not just in this case, but in any case
of a missing or murdered woman who's not white. In
the United States or Canada, they get much less coverage,
(08:55):
and the intensity of the coverage is much less too,
compared to white women. It's not just anecdotal. I was
reading at least one study on it from two thousand
and sixteen, I think in the Journal of Law and Criminology,
and they were like, yes, we analyze this stuff and
it's absolutely true. So there's like a but there's a
(09:17):
bitter gratitude involved because the death of Nicole Hoer, she
like it did bring a lot of attention to this. Yeah,
and you just can't you can't deny that, and so
that's good. But at the same time, it's just like, man,
we've been having to we've been trying to deal with
this for decades, and now this one white girl becomes
(09:40):
part of the crowd of murdered girls, and like, now
now people care. It's got to be really tough to take.
And I know I called her a girl, and she
was twenty five, so she was a woman. But there's like,
this whole group is made up of women and girls.
I know it's not interchangeable, but it's important to say,
like some of these I mean, the youngest victim was twelve.
(10:02):
Monica Jacks I think died in the late seventies, maybe
nineteen seventy eight. Like, there are plenty of girls who
were picked up and murdered. There are also plenty of
women too, and not all of them were Indigenous, a
lot of them were white. But the cops, as they
started to get together, came up with some criteria that
(10:23):
they applied to these cases that kind of narrowed the search,
but also brought on new cases that they hadn't they
hadn't considered before, as we'll see.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Yeah, so in two thousand and five, this is just
a few years after Nicole Howard brought more attention to
the issue. The RCMP, the Royal Canadian amount of Police
will probably call them that RCMP maybe mounties do they
still go by that.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
I think so, whether they like it or not, everybody
calls them mounties.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
They launched what was called the Unsolved Homicide Unit, launched
something called Project E Pana the letter E. That was
just the division of the rc MP, and Pana is
named after an Inuit goddess who cares for souls in
the afterworld. And they there, you know, their official designation was, Hey,
(11:20):
we think we have a serial killer.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Maybe more than one out there on this Highway of tears.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
It's a pretty, like you said, a pretty great place
to get away with a crime like that, because it's
so desolate. Up until recently there were long, long, long, long,
long stretches where you had no cell phone service even
so you couldn't you know, call anyone if you were
in trouble. Not very many people around, and plenty of
animals around to take care of bodies and the remains.
(11:49):
So they found some common allies and three teenage girls.
Ramona Wilson, who I mentioned a woman named Roxanne Thierra,
fifteen years old from Prince George. This is a very
sad case. She was in the foster system and the
juvenile incarceration system and she eventually had to turn to
(12:12):
survival sex, which is a term for women who are
forced to resort to sex work to feed and clothe themselves,
and it's usually means like instead of getting money, they
get food and clothing and items to live and survive.
(12:32):
In nineteen ninety four, she told a friend she was
going to meet one of her clients. She disappeared and
her body was discovered off Highway sixteen, and then finally
Alicia Germaine was fifteen years old lasting in nineteen ninety
four at a Christmas dinner and she was discovered close
to Highway sixteen. So that's when they came up with
(12:53):
their criteria to see if they could sort of narrow
this down right.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yeah, and just one thing, Rock sand and Leah or
Alicia who also went by Leah. They were friends and
also colleagues. They both were sex workers who were engaged
in survival sex. Ramona who was not engaged in anything
like that. She I think she worked at a restaurant
or something. But Ramona, Roxanne, and Leah all were murdered
(13:19):
in the same area. Between Ramona was June, Roxanne July
Leah in December of nineteen ninety four. I think in
all their cases in this area, everybody's like there's something
going on. The cops are like, just give us eleven
more years and we'll come together and come up with
(13:40):
this new EPANA project. And right when they did, those
three just stuck out immediately. It's like there's some real
commonalities here. They need to be investigated. But like you
were saying, the three criteria that they came up with
from this EPANA project, you had to be female, You
had to last be seen dead or alive within a
mile Highway sixteen, and then you also had to be
(14:02):
involved in high risk activities like sex work, but also hitchhiking.
And we should say here too for those of us
who grew up in towns with bus service and cabs
and you could walk places and get to where you're
going easily, ride your bike, like hitchhiking almost seemed like frivolous.
Hitchhiking is a way to live and survive and get
(14:24):
to work in this area. It has been for decades,
So it's not like I think you can view hitchhiking
as like, man, why did you hitchhike? In a lot
of cases, the women and girls who were picked up
hitchhiking were trying to get to where they were going,
like they weren't like just hitting the road like they
that was just part of daily life for them. Unfortunately.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Yeah, so once they narrow down this criteria, they found
more cases that sort of fit that and were lumped
into the Highway of Tears murders. Alberta Williams was twenty
four and she was celebrating at a pub at the
end of summer after working there seasonally with her sister.
This was nineteen eighty nine. Her body was found about
(15:08):
a month after her disappearance. Delphine Nikol was sixteen years old,
disappeared in nineteen ninety well hitch hiking. Lanta Derrek, nineteen
year old college student, disappeared in October of ninety five.
We mentioned Tamra Chipman that was the relative of Florence
and Aziel. She was twenty two and the mother of
(15:30):
a two year old boy, disappeared while hitchhiking in two
thousand and five, and then fourteen year old Aliyah Sarah
Auger went missing from Prince George in two thousand and
six and she was found deceased in a ditch right
beside the highway Highway sixteen and Aila.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
I'm pretty sure that's how you say her name. She
was the last one to be officially added, like as
far as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are concerned, she's
the last high Way of Tears victim, although as we'll see,
there have been plenty more who would qualify for sure.
The problem is EPANA is very much underfunded and not
(16:10):
basically not really operational right now, so they're not adding
people for that reason. But when they looked into this
a little more, they basically went back to their credit
and found that there was about three hundred boxes of
information and paperwork on all these cases. And so they're like,
we can't get anywhere until we have all this stuff
logged in some sort of database. So they created the
(16:33):
database and they logged in, and it took them like
a year. But after they finally got all that stuff
in some of those older cases, the ones between nineteen
sixty nine and nineteen eighty one, they started bubbling up
toward the top and were eventually included, starting with that
first one with Gloria Moody, also including Monica Jack and
then there was also Micheline Pare, Gaylen Weiss, Pamela Darlington,
(16:58):
Colleen McMillan, and Monica Ingus and then Maureen Mosey and
again all of them were killed between nineteen sixty nine
and eighty one Paul along Highway sixteen, and a lot
of them were hitchhiking as well.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Yeah, and you know, if you look into these cases
and people, you know, the volunteers that are working with
some of these, you know a lot of them are
run by, you know, families of victims, they will say
that it's probably more like, you know, fifty people advocates
say that, you know, the total is way higher than
(17:31):
they're saying it is, you know, kind of for all
the reasons that we've mentioned so far, and that seems
like a good time to take.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Our first break and we'll be right back, all right.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
So when we left off, we were saying that the
total number is could be as high as fifty. If
you look at all these cases, and not a lot
of them have been solved, there are a few exceptions
here and there that definitely showed that there were serial killers,
a killer or killers operating. There was one big one
in twenty twelve with Colleen McMillan. She was murdered hitch hiking.
(18:33):
She was sixteen years old. This is nineteen seventy four,
but they had, you know, in some of the evidence
boxes had her blouse still and with the improvement in
DNA matching and databases and stuff like that, they were
able to find a match on Interpol. It was an
American named Bobby Jack Fowler, who had died in prison
in two thousand and six, where he was serving time
(18:56):
for attempted kidnapping and attempted murder on another woman in
nineteen ninety five, and they found that he had been
working as a roofer in Canada when this murder and
others took place, and you know, basically we're like, it
was probably two other women as well on the list,
Pamela Darlington and Gail Weiss, and they were both murdered
(19:18):
in nineteen seventy three, but he died in prison before
they could officially pin that on him.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Yes, and from what I've read about Bobby Jack Fowler
is the kind of scumbag that you wish you could
go dig up and reanimate so you can punish him
some more. He was terrible. And when the Canadian cops
were like, hey, you guys had somebody incarcerated in your prisons,
to the officials in Oregon who killed at least one
(19:44):
girl here but probably three total, you should probably look
around at your own files, they started finding. I think
they've said up to maybe twenty murders that they've pinned
on Bobby Jack Fowler. Nothing they can prove, but it's
just likely that he committed them. And he'll obviously never
be convicted or tried for him because he's dead. But
(20:06):
it just it goes to show you like there are
human beings out there who will just kidnap, rape and
murder and just do it over and over again. And
the easiest thing to do in the world is, if
you're going to do that kind of thing, is take
advantage of a very vulnerable population in a very sparsely
populated area, which makes Highway sixteen just like the perfect spot.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, there's another guy.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
In fact, he's the only living person convicted of one
of these murders from someone on the E panelist.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
His name is Gary Taylor Handlin.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
He, you know, going back to the nineteen sixties, had
committed multiple rapes, been in jail multiple times for these rapes.
One was a hitchhiker in nineteen seventy eight and he
became a suspect. And the youngest victim twelve year old
Monica Jack that you had mentioned earlier, and also Katherine
(21:00):
Mary Herbert eleven years old. She just was not one
of the E paniccases. But they caught him by setting
up a sting operation in which they kind of created
this fake crime enterprise where he was answering to an
undercover cought playing a crime boss who got him to
confess that he abducted and strangled Monica Jack. And this
(21:22):
is when he also confessed to killing Katherine Mary Herbert.
But that confession was ruled and admissible, but he was
convicted of Jack's murder in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Yeah, he I hadn't heard of this, but that's apparently
a fairly typical sting operation. They call him a mister
Big operation where you just introduced to successively higher up
criminals in some organization that they're all cops. The judge
was like, no, the admission to or confession to Katherine
(21:52):
Mary Herbert's murder in admissible, but he thought that he
was basically convincing this crime boss to get him out
of being tried convicted for Monica Jack's murder. So they're like,
that's totally admissible. He completely volunteered that, but yeah, I
mean he went down for it. But like you said,
he's the only living person who's ever been convicted for
(22:13):
one of these dozens of murders.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
So, you know, we mentioned two thousand and six is
when they stopped officially tagging names onto the official epanelist.
There have still been plenty of murders and sexual assaults
along that stretch of highway since then, Cody Lejebikov, I.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Believe is how you pronounced that it sounds.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Right killed three women and a fifteen year old girl
between two thousand and nine and twenty ten, So that
was after the official list. Two of those victims were indigenous,
and the cops caught him when they just pulled him
over for a speeding violation and found blood on him,
and they found the body of a fifteen year old
Lauren don Leslie, and then you know, realized that they
(22:56):
could link him to and I believe he was convicted
to of killing of three other women, Jill Stacy Stachenko,
Cynthia Francis Moss, and Natasha Lin Montgomery.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yeah, and so all three of them were from Prince George,
which is the easternmost town considered part of the Highway
of Tears. And Cody was nineteen when he killed the
first of them, Jill Stacy Stachenko. He's not the youngest
serial killer in Canadian history, but he too, like the
(23:27):
other guys, was a scumbag and still is. He was
sentenced to no less than twenty five years four times,
but it appears that his sentences are concurrent. So he's
serving twenty five years for four murders, and the judge
reminded him that he could apply for parole as early
as fifteen years in. So that's four years from now
(23:48):
that this guy might be able to get out after
being convicted of murdering for three women and a girl.
I don't like that.
Speaker 3 (23:57):
Yeah, So you mentioned Florence Nazil earlier having organized her
own walk.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
This was in two thousand and six.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
They called it the Highway of Tiers Awareness Walk, and
they walked two weeks. They walked through snowstorms, they walked
through some you know, terrible weather and conditions, and eventually
ended at the Highway of Tiers Symposium in Prince George.
And again this wasn't something organized by the cops or anything.
It was organized by indigenous groups and victims families themselves.
(24:24):
But they did have five hundred delegates from the Mounies
there as well as some representative from you know, the
Canadian government there, and it was basically a symposium where
they had recommendations on what they could do, you know,
not only to help solve these crimes, but to prevent
more of this from happening. We'll get to you know
(24:44):
what's happened since then, because they have done some things
that seemed like they should probably help. But also you know,
how to support these families, how to support these communities
a little better because it was, you know, not well
funded and any kind of work was very sparse up
until that point.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah. So Brenda Wilson, Ramona Wilson's sister, she works for
Carrius Sikhani Family Services, and she's the one employee of
the Highway of Tears Initiative, and she frequently has to
work for free because they just are like, we're out
of money again, wait till next quarter for the check
to come in. And obviously she's extremely dedicated. But that's
(25:24):
a kind of a par for the course thing, like
just the funding is just not there. And if you
follow like government funding, that usually goes to stuff that
people care about or like a lot of people care about.
So if you don't get funding, it's a kind of
a big slap in the face in addition to you know,
really tying your hands from doing the work you're trying
to do.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
Yeah, and you know, there's a lot of distrust for
the Mounties there, and for good reasons.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
In a lot of cases we'll see.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
There's a woman named Gladys Raddick who was an aunt
of Tamra Chipman, one of the victims, and she she
leads a cause called Tears for Justice, the number four.
She has a lot of distrust of the police because
as a teenager she ran away and was hitchhiking and
was picked up two different times by RCMP officers who
(26:13):
raped her. So, I mean, as far as the RCMP
is concerned, they're like, we're going to investigate this stuff,
and we're going to treat anyone within our ranks who
does something like this just like we would any common criminal.
But the fact that that stuff happens period, and that
they're like a human There's a Human Rights Watch report
(26:35):
that came out in twenty twelve that documented police abuse
against Indigenous women and girls, and that's like literal abuse
and sexual assault the cops are taking part in at
the worst then all the way down to just being
hostile or uninterested in what happened to these crime victims
and families.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Yeah, because as the Canadian government has said many times
and is recognized and apologize for Canada's history of how
they've treated their Indigenous populations, like putting them in residential schools.
Apparently in the sixties there was a second wave of
that kind of thing, but rather than residential schools, they
took kids from their family homes and put them in
with foster families, and so there was a lot of
(27:20):
breakup of the culture and families in the indigenous tribes
in the area, and as a result, like poverty began,
violence really set in deaths of despair like suicide and
alcoholism and drug overdoses and an inability to take care
(27:41):
of themselves. And then you couple that reality with somebody
coming to the police and saying, my daughter hasn't come
home since Friday, and they're like, Friday, huh, what was
she doing last while she went to a party. Then
she's probably just on a week long bender. Just give
her a few days. From all the stories I've read,
I would say ninety percent of the family said that
(28:01):
that was the first response they got from police.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Yeah, and not only that, but they've been shown to
get rid of information. So in twenty fifteen, Elizabeth Denham,
she is the Commissioner for the Information in Privacy for
British Columbia, she put out a report that said officials
removed like one hundred and fifty emails about the Highway
(28:26):
of Tears from their database, which was a violation of
the Freedom and Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Right which was obviously didn't foster any further trust with
the Royal Canadian Mound and Police, and I guess in response,
in twenty eighteen, the Commissioner of the Mawnies, Brenda Lucky,
actually issued like a formal heartfelt apology for the problems
that the families have been facing in the lack of
support they've been getting from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
(28:57):
which has been few and far between. But I think
when it does, when something like that does happen, it
goes a long way, and I think the families are
kind of like, Okay, let's let's get back to work
with the Mounties again.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
So what this represents though, as a larger population scene,
not only in Canada, but the United States and all
over the world where minority communities are. Although they represent,
you know, sometimes a small part of the population, they
make up a much larger part of people in prison,
of people who were killed by police. And that's certainly
(29:30):
the case in Canada. I think you know, part of
the reason that EPANA has gotten mixed not only results,
but mixed reviews over the year for their work is
because they've just been you know, they came out with
a bang, and then they've sort of been slowly waning
over the years. I think they went from sixty assigned
officers down to six by twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, and there's a guy staff sargeant named Wayne Clary
who said, you know, we probably aren't going to be
able to make any more arrests in these cases, that
most of them are stranger on stranger violence, so there's
basically no motive other than to sexually assault and kill.
(30:14):
It's really hard to track somebody down, especially when you
don't have many leads. So we're probably going to have
to get used to the fact that these murders are
going to go unsolved. But from what I was reading,
there's a lot of families who are like, this wasn't
a stranger. We know the guy who did it, he
lives over there, and they're not getting listened to. And
then also there was a report from twenty sixteen, an
(30:36):
analysis of thirty two cases. Did you see this part
about where the police had said that there was no
foul play in these murders of Indigenous women, and this
analysis is like, that's kind of a weird thing to say,
because some of them were found nude, some of them
had unexplained injuries. In some cases the coroner contradicted the
(30:59):
idea that there is no foul play, and yet they
have been logged as no foul play and therefore they're
not being investigated because they're not considered murders.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Yeah, and you know, along the lines of what I
was talking about before, this is not just a Canada problem.
There's an official name for something like this, missing and
Murdered Indigenous women and Girls mmi WG, and that has happened,
you know, all over North America and other places in
the world. There's some estimates that say Indigenous women and
(31:30):
girls are twelve times more likely than the general population
to go missing or to be murdered in Canada and
ten times more likely in the US. And there have
been people trying to bring attention to this as well.
There's an artist named Jamie Black who made these really
powerful installations. That is, sometimes the most powerful ones are
(31:51):
very simple, and that's the case here where it would
hang empty red dresses in public places and it really
caught on, and since twenty ten, Canada has recognized May
fifth as red dressed day.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Yep, let's take our second break and we'll come back.
How about that, all right? Okay, Chuck, So you said
(32:38):
the magic word missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
It's a thing, and Canada launched an inquiry into that group,
and some people in the Highway of Tears community gave
testimony for it. They released a report in twenty nineteen
and they said, look, let's just cut to the chase here.
(32:59):
It's not like Native American tribes were living in poverty
and destitution and engaged in sex work and alcoholism and
drug addiction before we Euro Canadians came along and just
completely disrupted their culture. So this is actually this problem
(33:19):
of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. It's part
of a larger, bigger picture, a history of being exploited
and left vulnerable and not protected by the people who
were supposed to protect them.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
This is not new, yeah, and I mean, this is
horrific to look at. But of the one of the
problems is they found that whenever they have a very
large group of only men around in a desolate area
for one reason or another, sexual assaults and murders happen.
(33:55):
And that is the case in these isolated parts of
Canada where the fossil fuel industry is. So what will
happen is they'll go to work on a pipeline or
something and they have what's called a man camp with
like a thousand dudes on site working out in the
middle of nowhere together and historically speaking, not just here,
(34:16):
but kind of everywhere, this has happened dating back to
the eighteen hundreds. When this happens, they're going to be
sexual assaults and murdered and disappeared women and girls nearby.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah, there's reports that show like an actual correlation, like
a man camp shows up. Sexual assaults of indigenous women
goes up in the area too. And unfortunately, this part
of Northern British Columbia that the Highway of Tiers runs through,
that's like this central area for Canada's resource extraction. So
there are a lot of man camps there and there's
(34:50):
plenty more coming. So that in and of itself is
a problem, and it's not just in Canada. Apparently, North
Dakota underwent an oil boom back in the two thousand aughts,
and as more and more people were brought in as laborers,
sexual assault of Indigenous women there went up too, because
(35:11):
they're also pretty vulnerable here in the United States as well.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Yeah, I mean this happens everywhere all over the world
that that is the case, it's not just North America.
They've taken some steps I mentioned earlier some of the
things that they're doing that seem like they would help out.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
One is, we got to stop people.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
From hitchhiking, or at least reduce the rate of hitchhikers.
They don't have any other way to get around sometimes,
like you mentioned, So in twenty seventeen, British Columbia Transit
move forward on something that came out of that two
thousand and sixth summit. So well, eleven years later that
launched three new bus routes along Highway sixteen. But that
(35:57):
didn't work for very long because that worked in conjunction
with Greyhound, and just two years after that, and like
five thousand people were now using the service, Greyhound cut
back on the routes there because they weren't turning a profit,
and so all of a sudden hitchhiking was back on
the map again.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yep. Yeah, And just a lot of people just don't
have cars, and if you do have a car, it's
probably being used by somebody else. I remember what was
the movie Smoke Signals. I think they talk about the
res car, where it's just like a car, everybody just
kind of shares and it just gets handed from person
to person when you need it. So, yeah, hitchhiking's going
(36:34):
to be a lot more convenient in some cases. Cell
phone you said, also, cell phone service is a big
deal too.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
Right, Yeah, I mean just not being able to call
nine one one very simply is a problem. So in
twenty twenty one, I mean just four years ago, it's
astounding that it took this long. The provincial and federal
governments said, all right, we'll chip in four and a
half million bucks out of what will eventually cost eleven
(37:01):
and a half million total to get Rogers' Communications to
put to get coverage all along this highway with cell
phone towers. And I think by the end of last year,
the good news is nine of those eleven towers were up,
and hopefully soon the entire four hundred and fifty ish
mile stretch you'll at least be able to call the cops.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Yeah, and that was a big one of the two
hundred and thirty one calls for justice that came out
of that symposium in twenty fifteen. And for I mean,
that's lightning fast, if like, for this kind of stuff
that happened that past. So just two more to go, everybody,
let's get it done in twenty twenty five. Yeah, absolutely,
(37:44):
there's also like a little bit of a certainly I
wouldn't call it a tuss or anything, but there's a
growing kind of disagreement on how to approach this. Up
to basically, I guess twenty twenty three, the approach was exclusive.
This is a horrific situation, This is tragic, This is
(38:05):
super sad, and it doesn't need to portray it any
other way. That's just what it is. And the Carrier
Sikhani Center, remember they run the Highway of Tears initiative,
They're like, what if we just kind of alter this
a little bit, what if we make this more of
a hopeful thing for a very long time. There's some
(38:26):
famous billboards along the Highway of Tears. It had pictures
of three of the victims, Ramona Delphine and Cecilia, who
isn't included in the canonical victims, but she was Delphine's cousin.
They went missing within six months of each other, and
I think Cecilia's never been found again. They're pictures around
(38:46):
this billboard and not on the billboard it said girls
don't hitchhike on the Highway of Tears, kill her on
the loose. Well, that was helpful for years and years
and years. But Carrier Sikhani's like, you know, there's a
way that some people who don't understand our way of
hitchhiking why we do it, could possibly see that as
like there's some sort of victim blaming in there. So
(39:08):
what if we just kind of remove that and make
this whole more hopeful message. And they unveiled I think
four billboards that kind of change things a little bit, right.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Uh. Yeah, they say we are hope, we are strength,
keep Highway sixteen safe. And you know, there are obviously
critics of that messaging because they're saying, we don't want
to say that there's hope because right now, with the
way things are going with the Mounties and the investigations,
like there is no hope.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
So why say that if it's not hopeful.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Right, yeah, And I think the billboards coexist. And the
critics of that were like, Okay, these billboards can coexist.
That's a great billboard. We're fine. But it was when
they proposed, I think, yeah, Carrier Sikhani proposed, hey, let's
let's rename the Highway of Tears officially the Highway of hope,
when activists and supporters like Gladys Raddick were like, no, well,
(40:05):
we are definitely not there yet a lot of these
cases are not solved. There's not much traction. Still like,
it's ridiculous and we're not going to do that. But
hopefully someday it will reach that status, you know. Yeah,
So until then, that's the Highway of Tears. Here at
stuff you should know, we say rest in peace to
(40:27):
all the victims, and we hope peace can come to
all of their families who have to live with this
and the ongoing frustration of not getting the help they need.
And since I said all that, it's time for a listener, ma'am.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
I'm going to call this mushroom fruit. And this is
from Mike.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
Hey, guys, I'm a mushroom farmer from Saint Louis and
thought I needed to write in and give Josh some
bad news. Listening to the Catacombs episode. The mushroom, guys,
is the fruit of its organism. The plant that it
has grown from is called mycilium there. Furthermore, not all
fungi produce fruit aka mushrooms. If you or your family
(41:07):
use mushrooms and supplement form like mushroom powder or something
like that, be sure to look for made with fruiting
bodies only on the packaging or something of that nature.
A lot of manufacturers are using myciliated grain without any
mushrooms to make these products. It's like going to the
grocery store for apples and leaving with most of an
(41:27):
apple tree. There's a lot more to that discussion, but
at the moment, and with the current data, I say
that if it advertises mushrooms, then it needs to have mushrooms.
I've included some picks of the farm and my fur babies.
If you come to Saint Louis, please come to the
farm for a tour. And there are some great pictures
(41:49):
of these beautiful fruiting mushrooms. One terribly lazy, looks like golden,
long haired Golden retriever type laying with a candy cane
and a awful, terrible tabby cat laying on a box
as cats do.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Very nice. That was a very mean email. Who is that, Mike?
Speaker 1 (42:10):
That's Mike.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
But I get your point, Mike, and I appreciate that
because I've been studiously avoiding any mushroom supplement that has
the word fruiting on it. So maybe I should just
bite the bullet.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
You know.
Speaker 2 (42:21):
I can put a piece of like electrical tape over
that part and just take the supplements as needed.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Yeah, bite the mushroom.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
If you want to be like Mike and get in
touch with us and turn my stomach, you can do that.
Send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Josh Clark
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