The Highway of Tears is ground zero in one of Canada’s darkest ongoing tragedies. For more than 50 years, dozens of people – mostly Indigenous women and girls – have been murdered or gone missing along Highway 16 and its connecting routes in northern British Columbia. Despite RCMP task forces and national attention, these cases have been plagued by racism, mismanagement, jurisdictional confusion, and a chronic lack of funding and manpower.
In this episode of Box in the Basement, Arlene and Leah open the first boxes from the early years of the Highway of Tears – the late 1960s through the 1970s. They explore how a remote stretch of road with no public transit, limited cell coverage, deep poverty, and systemic indifference became a hunting ground for serial predators and a graveyard of unanswered questions.
Show Notes:
Finding Closure Fifty Years After a Murder
Gloria Lee Levina Moody (1969): A Case Never Truly Closed
Micheline Paré: A Young Hitchhiker’s Unsolved Murder
A Case Never Opened: Tracey Clifton
Listening to Indigenous Women’s Stories
A Teen Disappears Months After Giving Birth: Helen Claire Frost (1970)
Searching for a Birth Mother Missing Since 1970
The Mysterious Disappearance of Helen Claire Frost
Jean Virginia Sampare: Vanished at 18 Along Highway 16
MMIW Profile: Jean Virginia Sampare
The Teen Who Vanished While Pregnant with Twins: Velma Marie Duncan (1972)
“Highway of Tears” Murder Solved With Improbable DNA Sample
Oldest DNA Match in Interpol History Links U.S. Serial Killer to Highway of Tears Victim
In Memory – Official Highway of Tears Victims
The Road That Swallows Souls: Investigating the Highway of Tears
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