Breadcrumb Trail Links
We introduce you to some of the victims, they’re babies, teens, and grandmas. Search our interactive tool of the 1,725 missing people and unsolved murder cases in BC.
Published Oct 23, 2023 • Last updated 5 days ago • 13 minute read
Clockwise from left: Bette-Jean Masters, 21 months, vanished in Kamloops in 1960; Carol Davis, 29, murdered in Burnaby in 1987; Helen Frost, 17, missing from Prince George in 1970; Willene Chong, 76, murdered in Vancouver in 2008; Travis Thomas, 40, missing from Ahousaht in 2018; Tanner Krupa, 19, murdered in Surrey in 2017; and Janet Henry, 36, missing from Vancouver in 1997. Submitted photos. jpg
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In February 1997, the First Nations Summit sent a fax to the sergeant in charge of the Vancouver Police major crime section, listing 48 unsolved murders of Indigenous women in the city.
How many were under investigation? Were some files closed? Were any ruled accidental?
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Members of the Summit, which represents a majority of B.C. First Nations and Tribal Councils, hoped their questions would turn up the heat on police.
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“They were dealing with a crisis that their mothers and sisters and aunties were going missing and nobody was doing anything about it, and that they were being murdered and still nothing was being done about it,” said Cheryl Casimer, a political executive with the Summit. She was not with the organization in 1997, but has been told about the advocacy work at the time.
Of those 48 files flagged so many years ago, 42 of them remain unresolved today: Most are cold cases, and in a handful the main suspect was never charged or convicted.
It’s a dismal outcome for victims’ families who need answers and justice to heal, said Casimer.
“When I looked at the list of the names, it was haunting,” she said. “It was almost like if their names hadn’t been on that list then they would just be invisible. That’s all that was left of them was their names on a list. And that was really disturbing and heart wrenching.”
Nearly all of those 48 cases are included in a massive database compiled by a group of female researchers called the Midnight Order, who have spent that last seven years collecting the names of nearly 12,000 missing people and victims of unsolved murders in Canada.
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As Postmedia reported last week, they hope the database can be used to pinpoint where important information is missing, illustrate main causes behind missing-and-murdered cases, and identify actions that community activists, politicians and police could take to increase safety.
The Midnight Order has completed entering details — including age, race, date and location last seen — for 6,325 victims. At this point, more than a quarter of these finished files are from B.C. and nearly one-third of the B.C. victims identified so far are Indigenous, with the vast majority of those being female.
Lori Davis holds a photo of her sister Carol Ruby Davis. Photo by Jason Payne /PNG
Carol Ruby Davis, an Indigenous woman who left behind a 12-year-old son when she was found murdered in Burnaby in 1987, is on both the Summit’s list and in the new database. Her sister Lori Davis, who raised Carol’s son and has spent 36 years pushing for answers, said she was happy the unsolved killing was highlighted by the Midnight Order.
“The more information you have the better. I know my sister got murdered a long time ago, but it’s just nice that somebody’s remembering, somewhere. Somebody else is speaking her name,” said Davis. “Because I always felt like I was walking alone.”
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The 1,725 victims identified so far from B.C. range in age from a baby to 96. Their cases date back nearly a century, although the bulk of the files are from the past four decades.
‘No one had any reason to kill him’
Molly Justice was 15 when she was killed on Jan. 18, 1943. Photo by Family photo /Victoria Times Colonist
One of the earliest cases is 15-year-old Anneta Margaret (Molly) Clive Justice, a young seamstress who rode the bus from Victoria to Saanich on a snowy January night in 1943, carrying three parcels — a wool sweater, socks and shoes. She was attacked while walking home along a railway track and suffered “abominable” injuries, according to newspaper reports at the time.
In 1996, the province ordered an investigation into a long-rumoured coverup in the case: that the main suspect, a teenage boy, avoided being charged because he was allegedly related to the man who was attorney general in 1943. That theory was debunked and the case remains unsolved eight decades later.
Reg Price with his wife of eight months, Phyllis Price. Photo by PNG files
Two years after Molly’s death, an unsolved murder gripped Vancouver: UBC graduate Reg Price was shot four times in the front seat of his taxi on Quebec Street in October 1945. He had $18.35 in his pockets, which police said ruled out a robbery motive.
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Price, 37, was a tobacco salesman by day and drove the cab in the evenings to make extra money, so he could afford a house for his new wife, as they planned to start a family.
“No one had any reason to kill him,” Price’s brother Jimmy told The Province newspaper in 1950.
The Pauls family (David, Helen and daughter Dorothy) was murdered in June 1958. Photo by Vancouver Sun
The Pauls family, murdered in 1958 in their Vancouver home, are also in the database: David, a Woodword’s warehouse employee, and his wife Helen, who worked in a sausage shop, were both beaten and shot, while their daughter Dorothy, in Grade 6 at Walter Moberly Elementary, was bludgeoned to death.
“It’s been more than half a century since a family was brutally murdered in their own home in a quiet Vancouver neighbourhood, and today there are still far more questions than answers. Why was this family targeted? Who would savagely beat a young girl to death as she lay sleeping in her bed,” the Vancouver police asks on its cold cases website.
Edna Bette-Jean Masters has been missing since July 3, 1960. Photo by RCMP /SunMedia
Another historical B.C. case involves the disappearance of toddler Edna Bette-Jean Masters, who was wearing a green bonnet and pink T-shirt when she vanished while playing at a friend’s house near Kamloops in July 1960. A massive search for the 21-month-old girl, who went by her middle name Bette-Jean, turned up no clues, the RCMP said in 2013 while seeking leads in the cold case.
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Bette-Jean, who had curly blond hair, green eyes and an oval-shaped burn scar on her left arm, could still be alive today, as no evidence of her death was found, the RCMP said. An unfamiliar car with Alberta plates driven by a young couple was seen in the area, but police in 1960 found no answers when they pursued that lead.
Most of the 18 missing and murdered women and girls from the Highway of Tears case in Northern B.C. are in the database as well. Also included are more than a dozen new names that a 2014 Postmedia investigation argued should be added to the case, including missing teenager Helen Claire Frost, 17, who vanished from Prince George in 1970.
Travis Thomas played with the Maaqusiis Suns men’s basketball team. [PNG Merlin Archive] PNG
Just under half of the B.C. victims identified so far in the database are men or boys, including Travis Thomas, 40, a father of four from the Ahousaht First Nations who hasn’t been seen since July 2018. Friends and family on the west coast of Vancouver Island searched repeatedly for the one-time champion athlete and rising community leader, but his whereabouts remain unknown.
Police showed ‘systemic bias’
A disproportionate number of B.C. victims identified so far in the database are Indigenous, as were all the women on the First Nations Summit list.
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That list was filed as evidence at B.C.’s 2012 Missing Women Commission, where inquiry head Wally Oppal, a former attorney general and B.C. Appeal Court justice, concluded police had showed systemic bias toward women who disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
“They did not receive equal treatment from police. As a group they were dismissed,” said Oppal, whose inquiry investigated why it took police so long to arrest serial killer Robert Pickton, who preyed on vulnerable women from the poor neighbourhood.
Political Executive Cheryl Casimer of the First Nations Summit. Photo by DARREN STONE /TIMES COLONIST
The Summit wrote its 1997 list five years before Pickton’s 2002 arrest, but the 48 women on it have no known connections to the Port Coquitlam pig farmer.
The list includes Elsie Sebastian, whose daughter, Donalee, told Oppal at the inquiry that she tried to report her mother missing in 1992 but was “shrugged off” by Vancouver police. She said her mother struggled with alcohol and drugs, but had maintained phone contact with her three children and other relatives until the summer of 1992, when she vanished from the Downtown Eastside.
Also on the Summit’s list was Edna Marie Shade. She was believed to be a victim of Gilbert Paul Jordan, the “boozing barber” who was found guilty in the alcohol poisoning death of one woman and is suspected of killing others, but was never charged in Shade’s death.
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In the Downtown Eastside in 1993, community members held a smudging ceremony to remember some the women found dead in the impoverished community, who would four years later be named in the Summit’s list: Cheryl Ann Joe, Marjorie Susan Piironen, and Lisa Leo. But their deaths remain unsolved.
“There needs to be more done. We’re not disposable. We keep telling ourselves that but the actions of people in authority and decision-making places seem to think otherwise,” said Casimer.
Sandra Gagnon holds a photo of her sister, Janet Henry, outside B.C. Supreme Court in 2006. Photo by Don MacKinnon /AFP/Getty Images
Janet Henry, an Indigenous woman, disappeared from the Downtown Eastside in 1997, leaving behind a young daughter named Debra. Her sister, Sandra Gagnon, attended Pickton’s long murder trial, anxiously listening for any evidence that could explain Henry’s whereabouts, although none ever surfaced.
Henry’s inclusion in the Midnight Order database gives Gagnon a faint glimmer of hope that, perhaps, one day she will get answers — something that’s heartbreakingly elusive for relatives of these cold cases.
“It’s been a living nightmare. I remember when I used to go to bed at night crying because I was wondering if Janet was being held against her will? I was wondering if she was hungry somewhere?” said Gagnon.
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“It’s hard because the not knowing is the worst thing a person can ever go through.”
The Coalition on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was created to support relatives through this type of emotional turmoil. It is a large, grassroots group that includes victims’ families and social justice organizations who push for changes to end the systemic violence, said coalition member Chief Marilyn Slett, secretary-treasurer of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs.
Chief Marilyn Slett, secretary-treasurer of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs. Photo by Nadya Kwandibens
One of the group’s frustrations is that of the 231 recommendations from the national Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry, which included creating a database, only two have been implemented, said Slett, chief of the Heiltsuk Tribal Council.
“It’s been disgracefully slow,” she said. “Not enough is being done. We need to take these recommendations, like this database, and implement them nationally.”
A database like the one created by the Midnight Order is desperately needed to track victims, the circumstances of their cases, and which ones are being solved.
“The very basic tools of assessment can’t be utilized because there is no national database,” said Slett, noting the UBCIC has also been researching how to create this type of tool.
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“Are police investigations improving? It’s hard to assess if there’s improvement when there’s no baseline, when there’s no data to look at.”
The RCMP continues to work on unsolved cases, which includes collaborating with other police forces, Staff Sgt. Kris Clark said in response to questions from Postmedia.
There are challenges with these investigations, especially for historical files, such as finding relatives to collect familial DNA, balancing what information to release publicly so cases aren’t jeopardized, and gathering sufficient evidence to bring the perpetrators to court, Clark said.
“As time passes, the difficulties can grow due to failing memories, as witnesses move or become unavailable, or through the degradation of evidence,” he added.
Kim Krupa holds a photo of her murdered son Tanner. Photo by Larry Wong /POSTMEDIA NETWORK
This year, the RCMP renewed calls for leads in the murder of 19-year-old Tanner Krupa. The Edmonton man was working for a Surrey company laying fibre-optic lines, to save money for university, when he was fatally stabbed in 2017.
“It’s something you can never in your whole life imagine, that you would be burying a 19-year-old child,” his mother, Kim Krupa, said in August.
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Police say cold cases not forgotten
If victims are not posted on the RCMP’s national or provincial missing people websites, that doesn’t mean their cases are not being investigated, Clark said. He noted police earlier this year solved the 2011 disappearance of Madison Scott, after finding her body near Vanderhoof, and the 2009 disappearance of a Richmond woman, who was found alive.
Of the approximately 22,000 missing person cases reported annually in B.C., up to 90 per cent are solved in the first week and all but about 50 are solved within a year, Clark said. The province generally has an estimated 2,500 open missing person cases.
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In Vancouver, police have an “extremely high” solve rate: There were 5,000 missing person files opened in 2022 and all but eight of them have been solved, said Vancouver Police Sgt. Steve Addison.
“We know how discouraging it is for family, friends, and community members when they don’t have the answers they need to explain why someone important to them was murdered or went missing. We take our responsibility to investigate these cases very seriously,” he said.
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Derek and David D’Alton. Photo by Vancouver police
The VPD has made breakthroughs recently in a few historical files, such as identifying the young murder victims in the Stanley Park Babes in the Woods case, Addison said. Seventy years after the boys’ skeletal remains were found, police identified them as Derek and David D’Alton, although who killed them is still unknown.
The VPD uses its cold case website to bring attention to unsolved files, he said. It currently has 17 cases profiled, including that of Willene Chong, 76, who was sleeping in her south Vancouver house in September 2008 when it was set on fire by someone who may be linked to other arsons that evening. Chong, a grandmother, died in the blaze.
Family photo of arson murder victim Willene Wah Ying Chong. Photo by Vancouver Police /Vancouver Sun
Indigenous advocates criticized the VPD for being slow to investigate the September 2020 disappearance of Chelsea Poorman, 24, and for being too quick to conclude that she was not the victim of foul play after her body was found near an abandoned mansion in May 2022. Addison said police will continue to investigate the case, even if they don’t think a crime took place, to try to answer her family’s questions.
Chelsea’s mom, Sheila Poorman, believes police are trying, but noted she hasn’t been told of any new evidence.
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The Midnight Order database may help in cases like Chelsea’s to pinpoint similarities with other unsolved victims, she said.
“I was wanting (a database) to be done for a while. Because you can’t find that information anywhere. You don’t know how many went missing in Vancouver. And how many were found and how many are still out there,” Poorman said.
Sheila Poorman holds a photo of her daughter Chelsea. Photo by Arlen Redekop /PNG
Sasha Reid, the former University of Calgary instructor and current law student who created the Midnight Order database, included Chelsea Poorman in it, along with other suspicious unsolved cases that could potentially be linked to similar files.
The original intent of the database was not to solve crimes, but as the names and details grow, she said it could now be used to pinpoint geographic clusters or similar patterns of how victims disappear or are killed. For example, she has seen clusters of cases around hospitals in B.C., especially in the North.
“Maybe it’s not a serial killer, but maybe there’s some kind of structural or systemic issue there that needs to be addressed. And maybe a community needs some stats to back up why they need (solutions). And that is where the database can come in,” said Reid, who has Métis roots.
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Casimer said the Midnight Order’s database is a step in the right direction to help convince decision makers that more needs to be done, such as the call for the federal government to financially back a Red Dress Alert system for when Indigenous women and girls go missing.
Despite hundreds of recommendations stemming from provincial and federal missing-and-murdered inquiries, and politicians and other authority figures saying they want to address this crisis, Casimer said very little has actually changed over the years.
“Women and girls go missing and die every day. All you have to do is go on Facebook or whatever social media platform you use, and you will see families posting pictures of their loved ones that are missing,” said Casimer, of the Ktunaxa Nation.
Chelsey Quaw, 29, from the Saik’uz First Nations went missing on Oct 11. Photo by RCMP
Just last week, she added, Chelsey Quaw, 29, from the Saik’uz First Nations near Vanderhoof went missing, something that police said was very out of character for her.
Missing and murdered cases affect every community in the province, said Slett, including her Heiltsuk Nation on B.C.’s central coast.
“They’ve (often) been young men. And we’ve helped to support the family. And it’s the hardest thing when there’s no closure for families, and the pain does not seem to diminish. It’s really heartbreaking,” she said.
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“There hasn’t been accountability required on this ongoing tragedy.”
With data analysis by Nathan Griffiths, [email protected]
With research by Postmedia librarian Carolyn Soltau
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