Serial Murder

Links

The Global Persecution of Women
Glossary

Canada

Petti Fong, “Pickton said he didn't keep secrets,” Toronto Globe and Mail, 24 Jan. 2007.

NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. — Interrogating officer Sergeant Bill Fordy invoked Robert Pickton's love for his mother in an effort to get him to confess to killing women at his Port Coquitlam property, a jury heard this morning.

After failing to get a reaction from the accused about the DNA evidence the officer said had been found on the farm, Sgt. Fordy told Mr. Pickton that his mother would want him to tell the truth.

"I don't want any more lies. If your mother who you love and respect was in this room, she would want you to tell the truth. All you want was to be loved and have balance in your life," said Sgt. Fordy.

In the videotaped interview heard by the jury in his first-degree murder trial today, Mr. Pickton said women stayed at his place. But when questioned by Sgt. Fordy about whether any of them were from the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver shown on a poster of missing women, Mr. Pickton said he doesn't remember.

The lengthy police interrogation with Mr. Pickton was made after his arrest in Feb. 22, 2002, lasted 11 hours and involved several officers from the joint RCMP-Vancouver Police task force probing the missing women. Crown attorneys say the end of the videotape contains a confession from the suspect. The defence disputes this, saying Mr. Pickton did not confess to the crimes.

At the point in the investigation when the videotape was made, Mr. Pickton was charged with just two murders and police had not yet found body parts on his Port Coquitlam, B.C. farm. He is in court today facing six murder charges.

Sgt. Fordy told Mr. Pickton there was irrefutable DNA proof that he killed a woman at his farm. He showed Mr. Pickton photos of blood on mattresses and floors and walls and a spot where a body has been dragged.

"It's huge amounts of blood, Rob," Sgt,. Fordy said, adding it was Mona Wilson's blood.

"But that don't mean I did it," Mr. Pickton said.

"I didn't do anything, I don't know her. I don't know her face or anything else."

Mr. Pickton is in court on charges of first degree-murder in the deaths of Ms. Wilson, Sereena Abotsway, Georgina Papin, Marnie Frey, Andrea Joesbury and Brenda Wolfe.

In the videotape court heard the interrogating officer try to convince Mr. Pickton that some people would think the women from the Downtown Eastside got what they deserved.

Some people may call Mr. Pickton a "crazy, sick, demented wacko," said Sgt. Fordy. "There are different camps in this building," he said. "Some may think these women were masters of their own destiny and everything happens for a reason."

Mr. Pickton did not reply.

Earlier in the interrogation, Sgt. Fordy said if Mr. Pickton was the guy who killed all 50 of the women on the poster, he would remember.

"I've talked to a lot of killers. You remember them," said Sgt. Fordy.

"I don't, believe me, I don't," said Mr. Pickton. "I don't remember any one of these, really I don't, honesty. I'm telling you the honest truth."

Mr. Pickton said he does not remember specific people, but remembers dates and faces. If police link him with the missing women, he is charged, Mr. Pickton said.

"You can do whatever you want to do with me, that still doesn't make me a murderer just because but I don't know 'em and as you guys can link whatever onto me, I can't help that because that's your privilege. I got nailed to the cross. I'm just a plain little farm boy," he said.

Sgt. Fordy moved closer to sit next to Mr. Pickton and told him that the evidence is mounting against him.

Mr. Pickton tells him that he's sorry for living and "I'll take my life for any one of those people."

In the videotape, court heard Sgt. Fordy tell Mr. Pickton there was irrefutable DNA proof that he killed women at his farm in Port Coquitlam, B.C.

Heading into the fourth hour of interrogation, Sgt. Fordy said there was no turning back for Mr. Pickton. His face is in the newspapers and his DNA is linked to Ms. Wilson.

Sgt. Fordy said Mr. Pickton will not get bail and could die in jail.

"You're done. Done, done, done, done, done like dinner," said Sgt. Fordy. "You have no idea what those investigators are doing over there. They're digging. They are going through every centimetre over there."

By continuing to deny that he knew Ms. Wilson, Mr. Pickton was "nothing but a dirty, rotten liar," Sgt. Fordy said in the videotape.

On the tape, Mr. Pickton admitted to owning a .22-calibre weapon and said he used the gun to kill pigs.

Mr. Pickton said he used a .22-calibre weapon to kill big, big boars and it sometimes took three, four and five shots to bring the animal down. Because the gun is so loud, Mr. Pickton said he used a bit of plastic around it to silence the noise.

Twice during the interview Mr. Pickton referred to talking to his lawyer but he was not allowed to leave and Sgt. Fordy reminded him he didn't have to say anything.

"I shouldn't be talking because my lawyer's not here," Mr. Pickton said. "But the problem is I'm open."

Wednesday was the third day in the trial of Mr. Pickton, which began with jurors watching a videotaped interview he had with police.

Tuesday, the jury heard about three of the first hours of the interview.

Throughout the opening hours of the interview heard in court Tuesday, Mr. Pickton responds to police questions without hostility or aggression. He appears comfortable with long silences. He shows no emotion.

The seven men and five women in the jury saw Mr. Pickton on the videotape Tuesday, his lanky frame slumped in a chair in a suburban Vancouver police station. He appeared bored as he deflected questions from a police interrogator after his arrest.

At one point the police officer describes the extensive police investigation that had been launched on the Pickton farm. Mr. Pickton asks what they are looking for. He is told they are looking for any evidence clarifying his involvement. As Sgt. Fordy continues to talk about the investigation, Mr. Pickton yawns and asks, "What's that got to do with me?"

Court heard Mr. Pickton, in a tinny, high-pitched voice, describe the accusations against him as "hogwash," saying he was being set up.

"You are being investigated for upwards of 50 other disappearances and or murders," Sgt. Fordy said.

"In your own words, Rob, can you explain to me what that means to you?"

"What it means to me. Hogwash," Mr. Pickton answered.

Robert Matas, Jane Armstrong and Petti Fong, “'I'm just a working guy.' THE PICKTON TRIAL DAY 2: Relaxed, laughing, slumped in a chair, B.C. farmer patiently answered police interviewer's questions,” Toronto Globe and Mail, 24 Jan. 2007.

NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. -- Robert Pickton appeared as if he had few worries in the world as police interrogated him after his arrest in 2002 on charges of first-degree murder in the deaths of two Vancouver prostitutes.

Slumped in a chair shoved into the corner of a tiny police interview room at the RCMP police station in Surrey, Mr. Pickton responds to questions politely and with patience, speaking slowly in a soft mumble and sounding relaxed.

"I'm just a pig man; that's all I got to say," Mr. Pickton tells RCMP officer Bill Fordy of the Missing Women Task Force. He laughs and shakes his head as he is told that police, in addition to the murder charges against him, are also investigating the disappearance of about 50 women.

"Wow," he says, dismissing accusations against him as "hogwash." He cannot say much, because he doesn't know anything. "It could be a set-up," he suggests. "There is nothing to say. I don't know anything."

He says he's just a plain working guy. "That's all I am and now I got all those charges," casting his eyes downward to the floor. "It's a little far-fetched, isn't it?"

The conversation appears in the first portion of a videotape of police interrogating Mr. Pickton after he was charged. The tape was shown yesterday, on the second day of the first-degree murder trial.

Throughout the opening hours of the interview, Mr. Pickton responds to police questions without hostility or aggression.

He appears comfortable with long silences. He shows no emotion.

During the early stages of the interview, Mr. Pickton comes across as what he says he is: a farmer with limited education. He speaks mostly in broken phrases and bad grammar. But he appears to enjoy telling the police officer stories from his life.

Mr. Pickton wears dirty-looking street clothes, slacks, a T-shirt and a hoodie sweatshirt. Two sad-looking plants are tucked next to his chair in the interview room. Staff-Sergeant Bill Fordy, who was a sergeant at that time, sits a few metres away, at the edge of a small table.

For most of the time, Mr. Pickton sits with his hands resting on his chest, his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. He yawns repeatedly throughout the early hours of the interview, as if he can barely stay awake.

Mr. Pickton had been charged earlier that day -- Feb. 23, 2002 -- with the murder of two missing prostitutes from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Police at that point had not found any human remains on Mr. Pickton's property.

Over the next months, the police would find evidence leading to charges of murdering 26 more women. But on this Saturday morning, police know only about evidence related to the murder of two missing women, Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson.

Almost three hours after the interview begins, Inspector Fordy plunks a poster in front of Mr. Pickton. It shows the faces of 48 women who have vanished from Vancouver's streets. "Have any of these women been to your place?" Inspector Fordy asks.

Mr. Pickton replies that he can't keep track of all the women who come and go from his house. He tells his interrogator that he's good with numbers but bad with faces.

"I do not remember faces," he says. "Which ones am I supposed to [be] charged for, for murder, if you don't mind me asking?" The officer says he doesn't mind at all and points to one of the women. Mr. Pickton asks: "That one? Who the hell is she?"

He is told other witnesses say some of the women were at his place. "No way," says Mr. Pickton. "I don't know any of these women."

"Have you even had sex with any of those girls?" the police officer continues. "Not that I'm aware of," Mr. Pickton says.

The officer then points to each face on the poster, one by one, and asks Mr. Pickton if he knows any, or brought them to his house.

Mr. Pickton says "No" to each woman. From time to time, he remarks on how pretty some of them are.

Inspector Fordy turns the subject to sex with prostitutes and asks about Mr. Pickton's first experience with "a working girl."

Mr. Pickton says it was with a woman who stabbed him in 1997.

Earlier, the police officer describes the extensive police investigation that had been launched on the Pickton farm. Mr. Pickton asks what they are looking for. He is told they are looking for any evidence clarifying his involvement. As Inspector Fordy continues to talk about the investigation, Mr. Pickton yawns and asks, "What's that got to do with me?"

He recounts stories about his life as if he were sitting with friends over coffee.

When asked about the worst thing that ever happened to him, he talks about a stabbing incident in 1997, even though he had just been charged with two murders. Later, he says the worst thing to happen to him was when he was mauled by two wild boars.

***

The following is a partial transcript from a videotaped Feb. 23, 2002, interview between RCMP Sergeant Bill Fordy and Robert William Pickton. A portion of the 11-hour tape was played to the jury in Mr. Pickton's trial yesterday. Sgt. Fordy talks about Mr. Pickton's arrest.

Fordy: Yeah okay. In addition to those two murders ah, Rob, the police are also investigating obviously the disappearance of, you know, approximately 50 ah, workers?

Pickton: (Laughing)

Fordy: . . . in

Pickton: Oh well.

Fordy: . . . from the Downtown Eastside. Okay now, I see you're laughing there. Let me clarify something, okay?

Pickton: Okay.

Fordy: You haven't been charged with those 50 murders.

Pickton: (Laughing) I think, I don't think so.

Fordy: All right.

Fordy: All right and that you're being investigated for ah, upwards of 50 other disappearances and/or murders. Right?

Pickton: Um, hum.

Fordy: Okay in your own words Rob, can you explain to me what that means to you?

Pickton: What that means, what, what it means to me?

Fordy: Yeah

Pickton: Hogwash.

Fordy: Pardon?

Pickton: Hogwash.

Fordy: Hogwash. Okay. Tell me more.

Pickton: That's all I can really say, I can't tell you much, like I don't know nothing about this. It could be set up.

Fordy: Okay. Let me ask you something, Rob. Why do you think I'm here to talk to you this morning?

Pickton: Well, you just said that you want to ask me a few questions. 'Cause you want to get, you want to see but I, I don't know what to say. I don't . . . I'm . . . I'm mind baffling and I'm just a working guy. Just a plain working guy, that's all I am.

Later in the transcript, regarding a stabbing:

Pickton: It's all black and white. I'm a bad dude, it's the name of the game I guess.

Fordy: um, hum.

Pickton: And they nail you to the cross if you can. I mean, when you pay, when you . . . push against the wall as far as you can go. Until the wall moves back, you move back with the wall.

Fordy: Interesting.

Later in the transcript:

Pickton: Life goes around and around.

Fordy: Yeah. Now you said to me the worst thing that ever happened to you was getting stabbed.

Pickton: Yeah. That wasn't the worse thing.

Fordy: What was the worse thing?

Pickton: Tore apart by pigs.

Fordy: Tell me about that.

Tape ends.

Robert Matas and Jane Armstrong, “Day 1: Prosecution outlines its case [against Robert Picton],” Toronto Globe and Mail, 23 Jan. 2007.

NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. — Robert William Pickton, 57, is charged with murder in the deaths of Mona Wilson, Sereena Abotsway, Georgina Papin, Marnie Frey, Andrea Joesbury and Brenda Wolfe, six drug-dependent women who sold sex at the street corners of Vancouver's bleakest neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

On Monday, the first day of Mr. Pickton's trial in B.C. Superior Court, Crown prosecutor Derrill Prevett set out in a calm, steady voice much of the evidence that will be introduced in one of the most sensational murder trials ever held in Canada.

Mr. Prevett told the seven men and five women in the jury that Mr. Pickton made incriminating remarks during an 11-hour police interview after he was arrested in February of 2002 and in lengthy conversations before and after the police interview with an undercover officer planted in his cell.

Mr. Prevett told court Mr. Pickton told the cell plant that he killed 49 women on his farm and he was planning to do one more to "make it an even 50."

"The officer tells him he is looking at some serious time if the police are able to put things together. Mr. Pickton then gestures with his hands showing five with the fingers on one hand and a zero on the other.

[The officer] asks "what's that, five, zero, 50, ha ha." Moments later Mr. Pickton verbalizes what he had earlier gestured. He says "I was going to do one more. Make it an even 50."

Mr. Pickton bragged that he might have gotten away with his crimes but he got "sloppy," Mr. Prevett said. "I made my own grave by being sloppy."

In the police interview, Mr. Pickton also chided officers for "bad police work." But he told police he was "nailed to the cross."

Mr. Prevett told the court Monday that at the end of the police interview, Mr. Pickton said he planned to "shut it down, but that's when I got sloppy."

Mr. Pickton tried to strike a deal with the police, asking what it would take for them to close down the investigation and get off the Pickton property. He told police to think about it and get back to him.

Defence lawyer Peter Ritchie later on Monday urged jurors to keep an open mind. He said they should not make any conclusions until they hear all the evidence.

"The defence position in this trial is clear and it is that Mr. Pickton did not kill or participate in the killing of the six women he is accused of murdering," Mr. Ritchie told court.

Echoing remarks from Mr. Justice James Williams, Mr. Ritchie said they should try not to let their emotions take over, and to be objective.

About 240 witnesses are expected to be called during the trial. In an overview of the prosecution case Monday before witnesses testify, Mr. Prevett told the jury that decomposed body parts of the six women were discovered in 2002 on Mr. Pickton's isolated property in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam.

A prostitute will testify that she saw Mr. Pickton engage in butchering the women, he told court Monday.

The Crown also told the court Monday that:

-- Another witness will say Mr. Pickton told him that he killed prostitutes, as well as how he killed them and how he took their bodies to the slaughterhouse on his farm.

-- Body parts, including blood and DNA of the dead women, were found throughout the muddy property — in pig pens, stuffed into garbage bags, in Mr. Pickton's trailer and motorhome and even in soil samples later excavated during a massive police search of the muddy property.

-- Police found the severed heads, hands and feet of Ms. Joesbury and Ms. Abotsway stuffed into two white five-gallon plastic pails lying on their side in a chest freezer at the back of a workshop on Pickton's suburban farm.

One pail was inserted into another. The uppermost bucket had the decomposed partial remains of Ms. Joesbury, her head cut vertically in two. Her left and right hands and the front part of her left and right feet were also in the bucket.

-- A bullet had entered the right rear of the head and exited through the left eye. Her jaw was divided by two cuts, one through the jaw and face up to the front of the bone near the top of the head and the second through the rear of the skull extending to the top of the head. The skull fractured where the two cuts ended. Police also found one of Ms. Joesbury's teeth in the bucket.

-- When police separated the buckets, they discovered the head, hands and feet of Ms. Abotsway in the bottom one. A cut had been made along the rear of the head, moving across the skull and stopping on the right of the forehead above the right eye. A second cut went through the centre of the face, stopping in the middle of the forehead. The police also found evidence of a decapitation between second and third vertebrae and a gun shot wound in the head.

-- Also, a shot had entered the head at the ear, passed through the brain and lodged in the lower section of the skull, Mr. Prevett said. A .22 calibre bullet was recovered from the bucket, he said. The severed heads, hands and feet of a third woman, Ms. Wilson, were found in a garbage pail outside a slaughterhouse on the pig farm. The skull had also been vertically bisected and a bullet had penetrated the back of the head. A bullet was recovered in the frontal lobe of her brain.

The Crown said police found only jawbone fragments of Ms. Frey and Ms. Wolfe. Ms. Wolfe's lower jawbone, with five teeth, was found in dirt and debris in a trough beside the slaughterhouse. A fragment of Ms. Frey's jaw with three teeth was found on the farm during an intensive excavation of the grounds.

Mr. Prevett also told the jurors that investigators found one bone from Ms. Papin's hand among a number of bones mixed with debris and manure in a pig pen outside the slaughterhouse of the Pickton farm. They did not find any other body parts of the six women.

Mr. Prevett told court police found personal belongings of some women in Mr. Pickton's trailer, including Ms. Abotsway's asthma inhaler and Ms. Joesbury's date book. The investigators also found a .22 calibre revolver on a shelf above the furnace in the laundry room of the trailer. The barrel of the gun had a dildo (a sex toy) stretched over it. The upper portion of the dildo yielded DNA profiles of both Mr. Pickton and Ms. Wilson.

Earlier, Mr. Prevett said the Crown will provide evidence that will prove the women were murdered and Mr. Pickton murdered them over the course of several years.

He said Mr. Pickton took women to his home in the isolated acreage in Port Coquitlam. "There, the Crown intends to prove, he murdered them, butchered their remains and disposed of them. He had the expertise and equipment for the task. He had the means of transportation available and the means for the disposal of the remains."

The arrest of Mr. Pickton and the subsequent discoveries of female body parts occurred in 2002. By then, dozens of women from the Downtown Eastside had been reported missing. The women — largely drug-addicted prostitutes — began vanishing in the late 1980s. For years, their families and advocates complained that police did not take the disappearances seriously.

RCMP Inspector Don Adam, the first witness to be called Monday confirmed that suspicion.

Insp. Adam, who would eventually lead the joint probe by the RCMP and Vancouver police, said the Vancouver police case was simply a missing-person's probe and, by 1999, it was badly stalled. In fact, Insp. Adam said, Vancouver police concluded that women had stopped vanishing in 1999.

Insp. Adam thought otherwise and testified that he quickly suspected the missing women were homicide victims.

The joint police probe, dubbed the Missing Women Task Force, began compiling cases of unsolved homicides in British Columbia's Fraser Valley. They also began compiling a list of suspects, chiefly of men who had histories of violent attacks on prostitutes.

At first, the task force thought the missing women's file was linked to three unsolved slayings of women whose bodies were dumped in the woods in the Fraser Valley.

But Insp. Adam did not believe the cases were linked. Eventually, the task force travelled south to Washington to confer with police there who were investigating the serial-murder case of Gary Ridgeway, who was convicted of killing scores of Seattle-area prostitutes.

Mr. Prevett told court Monday that Coquitlam RCMP searched the Pickton property on Feb. 5, 2002, on a report of illegal firearms, and subsequently Mr. Pickton was arrested on firearms charges. While searching for the firearms, police spotted several personal items belonging to Ms. Abotsway in Mr. Pickton's trailer, he said. The firearms search was immediately suspended and the Missing Women Task Force began to search the property. Their search continued until November of 2003.

In an opening address to the jury, Judge Williams warned that some of the evidence would be shocking and likely upsetting. "I ask each of you to deal with that as best you can," he said.

However, he was concerned that the evidence would be so distressing, and jurors would have such strong feelings of revulsion and hostility, that they could not remain objective and impartial.

"You should be aware of that possibility and make sure it does not happen to you. Be true to your oath and try the case on evidence without prejudice against or sympathy for anyone," Judge Williams said.

Doug Ward, “One woman's disappearance became a focus,” Vancouver Sun, 16 Jan. 2007.

"Will they remember me when I'm gone, or would their lives just carry on? "

From the journal of Sarah de Vries, 29, who vanished in the spring of 1998.

She had worked as a prostitute on the Downtown Eastside and was last seen on the corner of Princess and Hastings.

She wasn't forgotten.

The quote from her journals kicked off a feature in The Vancouver Sun on March 3, 1999 -- a two-part story by reporter Lindsay Kines about de Vries and the disappearance of sex-trade workers.

The fate of de Vries and of other missing women on the Downtown Eastside eventually shocked a city and a nation.

A cluster of disappearances sparked a police investigation and media coverage that culminated in the 2002 arrest of Robert (Willie) Pickton, who is scheduled to go on trial Jan. 22 for the murder of six women. He is to face a second trial in connection with the first-degree murder of 20 additional women.

Prostitutes have always experienced violence in Vancouver, and newspaper accounts about murdered sex-trade workers were not uncommon in the '70s and '80s.

But de Vries' disappearance in 1998 was part of an alarming rise in the number of missing sex-trade workers. She was one of 16 women reported missing in 1996, 1997 and 1998.

Kines's first stories on missing prostitutes were about Janet Henry, who vanished in 1997. A year later, Kines wrote a news story about other missing women, including de Vries.

A friend of de Vries, Wayne Leng, told Kines there was growing concern in the Downtown Eastside about the disappearance of many other women involved in drugs and the sex trade.

"This was the first hint I had that there were more missing women. It's what prompted me to start asking around the Downtown Eastside," Kines, who is now a Victoria Times Colonist reporter, said in an interview Monday.

"Then I found that the police were concerned about the number who were missing."

In September 1998, the Vancouver police department set up a team of officers to review unsolved missing women cases dating back to 1971. Vancouver police geographic profiler Kim Rossmo began reviewing missing women files.

And the media, including The Vancouver Sun, began to profile prostitutes who had disappeared. The phrase "missing women" became a familiar phrase as reporters attempted to give the alarming statistics some humanity.

In a two-part report in 1999 entitled Missing on the Mean Streets, which included his profile on de Vries, Kines reported: "With each passing month, the list of the disappeared continues to grow.

"Vancouver police have 20 outstanding files on missing 'street-involved' women since 1995 -- 11 from last year alone."

Kines's stories were confirming what was being said on the street, recalled Elaine Allen, who worked at a drop-in centre for prostitutes in the late '90s.

"The women at the drop-in centre were talking back in 1998 about friends and relatives who had gone missing."

And they were talking with a sense that nobody was listening, recalled Allen.

"There was no sense that help was on the way or that anybody in authority was listening."

But reporters such as Kines were listening and their coverage helped turn the case of the missing women into a major issue.

"There's no question that the stories put tons of pressure on the mayor and the police chief," Allen said.

DeVries' friend Leng similarly said that Kines's early coverage helped place the spotlight on the missing women and the police investigation.

Leng praised Kines and other Sun reporters for "handling the issue carefully and not sensationalizing it." He said The Sun helped the public see the victims as "missing women" as opposed to prostitutes with drug habits.

"Many people looked at prostitutes as throwaways who deserved what they got. But those of us who knew them -- we knew they were so much more. Sarah [de Vries] was a wonderful person."

In 1999, the police added detectives to a team of officers investigating the disappearances and sought assistance from authorities involved in major serial killer cases in the U.S. Also that year, the Vancouver police board approved a $100,000 reward to aid in the probe.

America's Most Wanted did a show on the missing women case in 1999.

But progress was slow, women continued to disappear and many in the Downtown Eastside believed there would have been a greater public outcry and police response if the missing women had been middle-class rather than prostitutes working in Vancouver's most impoverished neighbourhood.

Lori Cuthbert and Neal Hall, “Pickton trial looms as longest in our history,” Vancouver Sun, 13 Jan. 2007.

Crown's witness list numbers 240, and 300 media will come from around the world

The Crown will call about 240 witnesses when Robert (Willie) Pickton's murder trial begins this month, a court ruling revealed Friday.

The voluminous Crown witness list --which doesn't include the people who might testify for the defence -- is the latest proof the Pickton case could become the most complex and longest jury trial in Canadian history.

"I suspect when all is said and done it will probably become the longest," Mark Jette, a prominent Vancouver criminal defence lawyer, said Friday.

The trial is set to open in New Westminster Supreme Court Jan. 22. Pickton will face allegations he killed six women from Vancouver's drug-plagued Downtown Eastside and he has been charged with killing another 20 women from the same neighbourhood, and is expected to face those allegations at a second trial.

In total the charges represent, by far, the highest number of murder counts against one person in Canadian history.

More than 300 members of the media are accredited to cover the court proceedings, which is an "unprecedented" number, said Mark Jan Vrem, a media consultant for the court services branch of B.C.'s Ministry of the Attorney-General.

Most of the journalists will be from local and national outlets, but about a dozen international news organizations, including The New York Times and a German TV station, have also applied.

The government sent a staggering 3,500 summonses to find a jury pool -- seven times the usual number. And nearly 500 of those potential jurors were gathered in New Westminster in December to find 14 people -- 12 jurors and two alternates -- to hear the evidence against Pickton.

Pickton, a Port Coquitlam pig farmer, was charged with two counts of murder in February 2002. Since then, his legal proceedings have consumed extensive court time to determine what evidence will be heard by the jury.

Lori Cuthbert, “Stolen lives: The stories of three women,” Vancouver Sun, 12 Jan. 2007.

Vancouver Sun reporter Lori Culbert looks at the lives of three women whom Port Coquitlam pig farmer Robert (Willie) Pickton is accused of killing. His first trial on six murder charges starts Jan. 22

Mona Lee Wilson hated wearing dresses or putting her hair in ribbons to go to church.

As a young girl, she much preferred playing with the animals on her foster family's hobby farm in Langley, and even tried to smuggle chicks into her bedroom to sleep with them.

"She'd lay right down in the mud with them, and play with them, and have them in her pockets. You had to check her when she came in the house because in her coat pockets there would be a couple of chicks, and in her boot you'd have another," Greg Garley said with a kind laugh as he recalled his late foster sister.

"We'd take her to church but, oh, getting Mona into a pink dress -- that was an ordeal. Frills and bows weren't for her . . . . She didn't like being a girl. When she got home [from church], off came that dress and on went the jeans and boots."

Wilson is one of 26 women whom Port Coquitlam pig farmer Robert (Willie) Pickton is accused of killing. His first trial on six of those murder charges begins Jan. 22.

On the opening day, the public will hear for the first time the Crown's grim allegations of how these six women died: Sereena Abotsway, who vanished just days before her 30th birthday; Marnie Frey, who was 24 and left behind a young daughter; Andrea Joesbury, who was 23 and trying to straighten out her life; Georgina Papin, who was 37, outgoing and had many friends; Brenda Wolfe, who was 30, kind and well-liked; and Wilson, who disappeared when she was 26 years old.

The trial judge, Justice James Williams, warned the jurors selected in December that the evidence they will hear will be "graphic and distressing."

That disturbing information will dominate headlines and newscasts for months. What should not be forgotten during that time, say the victims' relatives and friends, is that the women had moments of youthful innocence and adult accomplishments that should be celebrated.

Many faced challenges in their lives that undoubtedly led them down the turbulent road to drug addiction and, in most cases, prostitution to support their habits.

But along that journey, they left behind many positive memories and touched the lives of people who continue to grieve for them today.

---

Mona Wilson was a terrified eight-year-old girl when she came to live with the Garley family: Mom Norma, dad Ken, their four biological children, and so many other foster kids that Greg lost count over the years how many there were.

After enduring horrific sexual and physical abuse as a child, Wilson was seized from her family and received psychiatric care in a hospital. The Garleys were her first long-term foster parents, and she lived with them until age 14.

"I'll tell you, of all the kids she stayed in our hearts and our minds," said Greg Garley in a recent interview.

That scared girl grew to love playing with the dogs, cats, chickens, turkeys and peacocks on the hobby farm.

"She was sort of like a tomboy," said Greg Garley, who was a few years older than Wilson. "Digging in the garden, feeding the chickens, getting the eggs."

Attending school and other regular childhood routines were sporadic for Wilson in her earliest years, but in the Garleys' home she went to class and was taken on family vacations -- including one to Disneyland.

"There was nothing she liked better than going camping, going fishing," Garley said. "An awfully good girl. We just absolutely love her."

The Garleys operated an "emergency" foster home, which meant they took in some of the most troubled children -- many of them babies born with drug addictions.

Wilson's behaviour started to worsen at puberty, but Greg Garley said his family was upset when the ministry removed the troubled teen from their house. At her new foster home, Wilson's problems increased, Garley said.

She was placed in "independent living" when she was about 16 years old, which meant the government found her a place to live in east Vancouver and gave her some money to live, he said.

"A survivor of such horrors -- and then they just gave her a cheque and let her loose in Vancouver. What did anyone think would happen to a vulnerable girl like that on her own in a big city?" Garley asked.

He said Wilson phoned his parents regularly, even after they retired to the Okanagan.

"She stayed in touch with us until her death, every single month we got a phone call from her and it was just wonderful. She was always going to come and visit, but always had an excuse as to why she couldn't."

Garley said his family didn't know anyone involved in drugs or prostitution, but would have tried to help Wilson if they'd known she was mixed up in that world.

"I try not to think about that stuff because that's not who we knew. The way she talked on the phone, she was still the Mona we knew. So, right up until the month before they found her . . . she was still pretending to be the same girl."

Wilson was 26 years old when she was reported missing by her boyfriend in November 2001.

Foster mother Norma Garley was concerned something was wrong when she didn't receive her monthly phone call that December.

Then in February 2002, the family was horrified when Wilson was named in one of the first two murder charges against Pickton.

"My parents are in their mid-70s and I've watched them visibly age through this whole thing. So many sleepless nights, and nightmares, and not eating, losing weight," Greg Garley said.

Garley, who now lives in Parksville, is upset about the process that was set up to help the victims' families prepare for and attend the trial.

He said it favours biological relatives, and doesn't treat foster families equally.

"She's as close to blood as you can get. I went through my teen years with her, we loved her as much as anyone else," said Garley.

"It's just a very difficult thing to imagine this happening to someone you know and love."

- - -

Maggy Gisle is haunted by the memory of the last time she saw her friend Georgina Papin in March 1999. They were both drug-free and at a baby shower in Mission, where Gisle was celebrating the birth of her daughter.

But Papin, 37, was in a less celebratory mood. The mother of at least six children, she was devastated by a recent court ruling prohibiting her from getting custody of her kids, who were in government care.

"She said she was going to go downtown. I asked her to stay overnight with me . . . I was really, really upset. And I told her that I had lost many friends when they had relapsed," recalled Gisle, who now lives with her daughter on the Sunshine Coast, where she works as a nurse.

"She insisted that she wasn't going to use drugs, that she was just going to drink. And she was going and I couldn't stop her. I told her if she had to [then] be safe and come back. And she didn't come back," Gisle said, her voice breaking with emotion.

"About a week and a half after she left, she just disappeared off the face of the Earth."

Gisle, who spent 16 years on the streets of the Downtown Eastside before getting sober in 1998, checked with drop-in centres and needle exchanges but found no sign of her friend. The police would not accept a missing person report from her because she was not a relative.

The heartache of losing a friend was not unfamiliar to Gisle, who says she knew 54 of the 65 names on the police list of those missing from the Downtown Eastside.

Papin had a troubled life growing up in Alberta, bouncing from foster homes to group homes to residential schools. She began experimenting with drugs at age 11, and was under the control of a pimp shortly thereafter, her brother Rick Papin said in an interview in 2001.

She moved to Las Vegas, got married and had a baby girl in her early 20s, and then returned to Canada, where she had at least five more children. However, she struggled with relationships, drugs and incarceration.

Gisle first met Papin in 1994 at a recovery house in New Westminster, where they were roommates. Gisle was drawn to Papin's honesty, boundless energy and constant offers of assistance to vulnerable women.

"She was very outgoing, she was very motherly, and she took people underneath her wing," Gisle said in a recent interview. "She taught me about native culture, she drummed, she sang. . . She did traditional beading and native crafts."

They remained friends through the 1990s, when they both struggled through cycles of getting clean, then falling back into drugs again.

However, even in her darkest hours, Gisle said, Papin did not live in the Downtown Eastside, as she kept an apartment in Mission. She also maintained that Papin was not a sex-trade worker but instead an "opportunist" who would use her outgoing personality to get alcohol or drugs from others.

Gisle said Papin was a good mother who phoned her children and had regular visits with them when they were in care -- which made her disappearance all the more suspicious.

"When she relapsed, her getting clean was always about her kids. That's why I was so adamant about looking for her sooner because I knew it wasn't in her character to let go of her kids and have absolutely no contact," she said.

Gisle's faint hope of finding her friend alive was dashed in 2002 when Pickton was charged with her murder.

- - -

Jack Cummer, a kind retired salesman from Nanoose Bay, remembers vividly his last phone call with his beautiful granddaughter

Andrea Joesbury, who ran away from a difficult childhood on Vancouver Island to the Downtown Eastside when she was just 16 years old.

The conversation was just before Joesbury disappeared in June 2001, at the age of 23. In those seven years on the streets she had experienced a lifetime of pain, but she was upbeat on the phone because she was completing a methadone program to kick her heroin habit and was hoping to move back to the island.

"She was a very happy young lady whose life was in a starting mode. .... Our conversation ended with our love to each other," Cummer wrote in a recent e-mail to The Sun.

"I did say goodbye."

But he did not realize then it would be for the last time.

Joesbury loved drama and sports as a young girl, but struggled in school. She mostly lived with her troubled mother, and occasionally stayed with her grandparents, Jack and Laila Cummer.

She had a good relationship with her grandparents, but they couldn't stop the vulnerable teenager from running away to pursue her dream of finding a husband and having a baby.

"She went to Vancouver because she was looking for love. And she found this guy, and she fell in love with him. She's a young, naive girl, 16 years old, not knowing what's going on," Cummer said in an earlier interview.

"Eventually she phoned and let me know he was 15 or 20 years older than she was, so it gave her two things: A man she loved and a father figure. [But] she was put on the streets because he was a drug dealer."

Cummer tried to convince his granddaughter many times to come home, but she stubbornly said it was the life she had chosen and wouldn't leave Vancouver until she was ready, he recalled.

Joesbury did have the baby she yearned for, and Cummer came to visit after the birth. He said his granddaughter was "worn to a frazzle" trying to provide for the baby on a limited budget, but the little girl was healthy and receiving good care.

However, social services would eventually seize the child and put her up for adoption, which caused Joesbury to spiral back into her life on the streets.

"She tried to make a new life for herself and baby but was forced to give up her child and [had] nowhere else to return to but the man causing all her heartbreak," he said in his e-mail.

In that final phone call, Joesbury told Cummer she had the support of a caring Downtown Eastside doctor who was helping her with the methadone, and would come home to Vancouver Island when she was clean of her habit.

"Her dream was to come and search for the baby," Cummer wrote.

But she disappeared before ever seeing her daughter again.

Joesbury kept in regular contact with her grandfather through her collect calls, so when the phone didn't ring again, Cummer knew something was wrong.

The Cummers were devastated when police knocked on their door in 2002 to say Pickton had been charged with her murder.

"She is missed by the family and dearly loved," Cummer wrote in his e-mail. "Our Andrea is safe in God's arms and He is a wonderful, understanding person. He is helping us to be the same."

Honduras

Amnesty International, "Honduras," Report 2004.

Violence against women

Several, mostly young, women were murdered, decapitated and dismembered, most of them in San Pedro Sula, northern Honduras. In some cases the victims were shot in the head, in others they were killed with knives or similar weapons. The police carried out some initial investigations but these did not progress and no one was brought to justice for these killings.

Mexico

Theresa Braine, “Argentine Experts Study Juarez Murder Remains,” Women’s eNews, 5 October 2006.

MEXICO CITY (WOMENSENEWS)-- …

… As many as 400 women in Ciudad Juarez--just across the border from El Paso, Texas--have been slain since 1993, and their deaths are considered unsolved murder cases. More than 100 have been found dumped in the desert with signs of sexual torture.

Esther Chavez, founder and head of Casa Amiga, a Juarez center for abused women, also hopes that positive identifications could give victims' families the ammunition to keep pushing for prosecution of the authorities who haven't found any credible suspects.

If the identifications of the bodies from the cotton field, which are among those being studied, turn out to be different from what the Chihuahua state authorities initially said they were, there's a chance that these cases could be started from scratch as new cases, says Chavez.

"We have to keep insisting that the authorities be prosecuted," Chavez says. "With this we could demand the punishment of the authorities, because now after so many years, it's very difficult."

The Murders Continue

The murders have continued. Twenty-two females, including an infant, were killed in 2005, according to Amigos de las Mujeres de Juarez (Friends of the Women of Juarez), a Las Cruces, N.M., advocacy group for victims' families that was formed in 2001. So have killings of people involved in the cases. …

In February, a report by the Mexican government enraged relatives and advocates hoping for something approaching an explanation.

"We didn't think it would be such an insubstantial report. It's an embarrassment," Chavez says. "They didn't want to do anything more than issue reports to appease the international organizations."

Culture of Violence Blamed

The report attributed the Juarez slayings to cultural and social violence against women throughout the country; Juarez ranks fourth among Mexican cities in the number of women murdered, the report noted. After three government reports over the past two years failed to generate action, victims' families and advocates had not held out much hope that this one would break new ground. But they were enraged at the complete dismissal of what they say is the central issue: a lack of regard by the authorities for the victims and the potential for a cover-up.

"It's not a competition," says Monreal, referring to the report's remarks about the number of female homicides being even higher in other parts of Mexico. She says victims' families are more concerned about the failure of investigations and high-level appointees to get to the bottom of murders that have generated allegations of complicity among the investigators' ranks. "There is no justice, there is nothing."

"For years the officials in Chihuahua and Mexico have been trying to minimize and manipulate numbers," says Sally Meisenhelder, a co-founder of Amigos de las Mujeres de Juarez.

What gets lost in the report, says Laurie Freeman, Mexico specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America, a think tank in the U.S. capital, is "the possibility that there's some kind of organized element behind some of the killings--not all of the killings--and that the perpetrators may have links to and be protected by state officials. There is something different about Juarez."

State and federal authorities say that years of suspicion and inaction have led people to draw this conclusion but insist that the underlying problem is no different than the violence committed against women elsewhere.

Special Prosecutor Investigated

Two years ago the Mexican government appointed a special prosecutor, Maria Lopez Urbina, to revisit the investigations of 380 women who have been murdered.

Those investigations found everything from gross negligence to corruption and abuse among dozens of officials involved in the case, and Lopez recommended that charges be filed against dozens of state investigators, police and other authorities. But only a handful has gone before a judge and no one has yet been punished.

Given that much of the evidence is long since lost or compromised, the hope of actually solving the murders is growing dim. Most of the cases have passed the statute of limitations and can no longer be prosecuted.

”No end to women murders in Mexico,” BBC News, 23 Nov. 2005.

This year has been one of the worst for the murder of women in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez since a wave of killings started there in 1993, an official says.

Mexico's human rights ombudsman, Jose Luis Soberanes, said that 28 women had been murdered so far in 2005.

He called for a co-ordinated and tough effort by all levels of government to prevent more deaths in the city.

More than 300 women have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez. There is no generally accepted motive for the killings.

They have been variously attributed to serial killers, drug cartels and domestic violence. Some are believed to have been sexually motivated.

Many of the victims were poor working mothers employed in factories in the industrial city on the border with Texas.

There have been several arrests, but the killings have continued.

'Corruption'

The federal government has recently become involved in the investigation in Ciudad Juarez, after Amnesty International accused it of not doing enough.

The UN has also criticised Mexico's handling of violence against women.

Human rights groups say the investigation has been hit by corruption and inefficiency at local level.

Mr Soberanes warned that the Mexican police were continuing to use torture to extract confessions and information from suspects, although now the practice was often more psychological than physical.

The killings were first exposed when bodies were found in desert graves and by city roadsides in 1993.

Holly Cowart, “NOW Calls for Commitment to Stop Brutal Murder of Juarez Women. Mexico Appoints New Prosecutor to Investigate Killings,” National Organization for Women, 9 June 2005.

… The [Cuidad Juarez] victims have primarily been young women who have been raped and strangled, their bodies left in the desert or on a secluded street. They worked at maquiladoras, assembly factories often equated to sweatshops, where they earned $55 a week from U.S. companies such as Alcoa, DuPont and General Electric.

Roccatti will need to change the daily reality of most Juarez women who have to wait in the dark on empty streets for the buses that take them to and from the maquiladoras. These women are turned away from the factories if they are even a few minutes late to face a long, dangerous walk home past crosses for the dead and billboards that remind them, "Be careful — watch for your life."

To date, no safety measures have been put in place by the factories or the Mexican government. In fact, victim's advocates face a culture where violence against women has traditionally been ignored by authorities. Advocates believe the culture actually works to foster violence, rather than prevent it — for example, men in Mexico cannot be charged with spousal rape. The former Attorney General of Chihuahua, the state where Juarez is located, said the murder victims encouraged the attacks by dressing provocatively.

Many advocates scorn Mexican President Vicente Fox for possibly playing a role in perpetuating violence against women. On the day he announced Roccatti's appointment, he blatantly lied by saying, "the great majority of cases have been solved," and then went on to blame the media for focusing on security problems rather than the criminals detained.

The following day, Fox attempted to back away from his controversial comments. "200 killers are in prison," he said. "This shows the work done so far, but we're aware there are still other cases that need to be solved." The number Fox cited was based on a report by Urbina. This report has been criticized by citizens of Juarez and human rights watch groups. Many of those who confessed in police custody have said they were tortured. Despite assurances that the perpetrators have been jailed, the killings continue. Seventeen more murders have taken place in the past six months.

International pressure to stop the killings has come from the U.N. and from human rights groups. However, the U.S. government must take greater responsibility for conditions in Juarez. The city is located across the border from El Paso, Texas. The factories in Juarez, most of which are U.S. owned and operated, employ young women living in poverty to create goods for export to the U.S. These U.S. companies use factories in Mexico because the low taxes, lenient environmental regulations and cheap labor made possible by North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) means cheaper goods.

Washington Office on Latin America, “Crying out for Justice: Murders of Women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico,” March 2005.

In 1993, the bodies of young women – many showing signs of rape, beatings, and mutilation – began appearing in the desert on the outskirts of Juárez, Mexico, a city of 1.4 million just across the border from El Paso.

This was the beginning of an epidemic of brutal rape and murder aimed at Juárez’s young, poor women.

Over the past twelve years, nearly 400 women have been killed in the cities of Juárez and Chihuahua, 250 miles south. Of these, at least 137 of the victims were sexually assaulted prior to their murders. Because of the similarities in these “sexually motivated” murders, some suspect that they are the work of one or more serial killers who prey on young female students, store clerks, and assembly-plant workers. Their victims, some as young as 13 years old, were kidnapped, raped, strangled, mutilated, and buried in shallow graves in the desert or at construction sites and railroad yards around the city. Many other women have died at the hands of husbands, boyfriends, drug traffickers and other criminals. Very few have been punished for these crimes – they are murders that flourish in a city where everyone knows that you can kill a woman with impunity.

There have been insufficient police investigations to identify suspects in the serial killings, and a lack serious efforts to prosecute them. Though eleven men have been convicted for 21give the number (I think it’s 20) of these murders, they were sentenced with little evidence except for confessions extracted under torture, and under the theory that they were working for a jailed mastermind. Despite their arrests and prosecutions, women’s mangled bodies continue to appear around Juárez –four women were found in January 2005 alone.

For almost a decade, the Mexican authorities did little to address the tragedy of the Juárez murders. Efforts in Mexico combined with international pressure have helped shine a spotlight on the situation, prompting President Fox to create federal offices responsible for preventing murders, investigating and punishing the perpetrators, and promoting women’s rights and safety. Continued international pressure will be necessary to ensure that the federal and state officials take effective action to bring an end to Juárez’s nightmare of murder and impunity.

Background

Young women are easy targets in Juárez, a city plagued by drug cartels, migrant-smuggling rings, police corruption and brutality, severe underdevelopment and a ballooning population. Since the advent of the maquiladora industry – assembly plants that take advantage of cheap labor – in the 1980s, poor Mexicans have flocked to this border town in search of jobs. They live in shantytowns without basic utilities or services, and the women who work in the maquiladoras often leave for work before dawn or return home in the middle of the night, alone and unprotected.

Although violence against women in Juárez is all too common, there is only one women’s crisis center, Casa Amiga, founded in 1999 by women’s rights activist Esther Chavez Cano. A number of groups have formed to demand an end to the killings and justice for the victims’ families, including “May Our Daughters Return Home” (Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa), a group of the mothers of disappeared and murdered women in Juárez, and “Justice for our Daughters” (Justicia para Nuestras Hijas), a similar organization based in Chihuahua City.

The local authorities have been slow to react. Their original response was to blame the victims, implying that their behavior led to their rapes and murders. Former State Attorney General Arturo González Rascón said in 1999 that some murder victims’ provocative dress had encouraged the attacks against them. Many police officers and investigators share that attitude. Recent reports still allege that the victims are involved in the drug trade, or they wore provocative clothing.

The authorities have demonstrated a lack of both will and ability to find the culprits. Police have failed to collect clothing fragments and other evidence at the sites where women's bodies are discovered. They have mixed up DNA tests, destroyed important evidence, and have allegedly returned some young women's remains to the wrong families. The few who have been arrested in connection with the serial murders credibly allege that police tortured them into confessing. The authorities declare that the perpetrators are in jail, and yet the killings continue.

Authorities have been indifferent, insensitive, and even hostile toward the victims’ families, who are often subject to harassment and threats. One relative of a murder victim received a threatening voicemail message warning her to drop the case; the caller ID showed that the call had come from the state judicial police. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has offered assistance to the Chihuahua state authorities, including training, DNA testing, and the use of FBI profilers. The FBI has also endorsed a binational investigation of the murders. The Chihuahua authorities have responded only with requests for training and other limited forms of assistance.

Response from the State and Municipal Authorities

Homicide is a state crime and therefore falls under the jurisdiction of the Chihuahua state police and attorney general’s office. The municipal authorities are not responsible for investigating crimes; however, they are often the first to arrive at the site of a murder and can affect how well the crime scene is preserved. The authorities have failed in many ways to effectively investigate the murders of women in Juárez and Chihuahua.

First, investigators have failed to collect and preserve key evidence. Groups of volunteers in Juárez and Chihuahua organize searches of desert areas to find bodies and detect evidence left behind by police. In February 2002, volunteers searching the Juárez site where eight bodies had been found in November 2001 discovered clothing that was recognized by the mother of one of the victims, who participated in the search, as well as hair, shoes, and clothing remnants, none of which had been gathered by police investigators during their search of the area three months earlier. Second, authorities have mishandled and destroyed key evidence, such as clothing, fibers and fluids, and even the victims’ remains. Third, investigators have ignored important leads. Fourth, they have incorrectly identified victims, or failed to identify them at all.

The shoddy investigations reveal a profound lack of concern for punishing those who abduct, rape, and murder women. They also point to more than mere incompetence, suggesting corruption and cover-up. If this is the case, the authorities are complicit through their deliberate failure to find and punish those responsible. Their reluctance to investigate also fosters a climate of impunity by sending the message that protecting the lives of women is not a priority.

The State Attorney General’s office came under fire in February 2004 after 13 state police were arrested for executing 12 men at the behest of drug traffickers. There are pending arrest warrants for four other officers in connection with these murders. During the course of investigation, reports surfaced that police may have been responsible for abducting and killing women to celebrate successful drug runs. These allegations led State Attorney General Jesús José Solís to resign in March 2004. Despite widespread calls to investigate him for his role in both the drug-related crimes and the crimes against women, no charges have been filed against him.

Status of the Investigations

On occasion, state authorities have carried out arrests to quell public concerns over the murders. Many detainees have been tortured into providing false confessions that are later contradicted by more reliable forms of evidence.

This pattern of behavior reflects a desire to scapegoat convenient suspects, such as convicted sex offenders and maquiladora shuttle-bus drivers, more than a desire to find the real culprits.

In 1995 state authorities arrested Omar Latif Sharif, an Egyptian-born engineer who worked at a maquiladora plant, and charged him with raping and murdering an 18-year-old. They also claimed he was responsible for dozens of other killings. He was convicted on one count of rape and murder. He won an appeal in 1999 when his lawyer proved that the victim’s description did not match the body, but the conviction was upheld in February 2003.

When more women were found dead after his arrest, police argued that he had orchestrated the killings from prison by contracting others to commit them, and many of the suspects have been held in prison since 1996. In 1999, after authorities were pressured to “solve” additional murders, the state police rounded up four maquiladora shuttle-bus drivers who confessed to murdering 20 women on Sharif’s orders. They allege they were tortured into confessing.

Authorities have yet to produce any evidence, other than their confessions, linking these suspects to the crimes. Despite this, in January 2005, ten of these suspects were convicted of 12 murders, and received sentences of up to 40 years in prison.

On November 7, 2001, eight more women’s bodies -- showing signs of extreme brutality and sexual violence – were found in an empty lot in Juárez. Two days later, state police had arrested two bus drivers, Victor García Uribe and Gustavo González Meza, and tortured them into confessing. According to forensics expert Oscar Maynez, who resigned after refusing to falsify evidence against García and González, no evidence other than their confessions links the men to the murders. Nevertheless, a judge ordered them to stand trial, ignoring evidence of torture, including a prison doctor’s report confirming bruises and burns and suggesting the use of electric prods.

In February 2002, state police shot and killed González’s lawyer, claiming he had been mistaken for a fugitive. A state judge ruled the police were acting in self-defense and would not be tried for the homicide. González was found dead in his cell under mysterious circumstances on February 8, 2003. At this time, his death is not being investigated. García Uribe was convicted of the murders in October 2004, and is serving a 50-year sentence. Despite evidence of torture that was certified by state experts, his confession was allowed to stand.

Torture as an Investigative Tool

Torture is commonly used in the context of criminal investigations in Mexico. According to the State Department’s 2004 Human Rights Report for Mexico, “the police regularly obtained information through torture, prosecutors used this evidence in courts, and the courts continued to admit as evidence confessions extracted under torture.”

The United Nations Committee Against Torture also reported that torture is systematically practiced in Mexico. It occurs not as a result of “exceptional situations or occasional excesses by police agents,” but is “habitual and is used systematically as a resource in criminal investigations.” Methods include beatings, electric shocks, simulated executions, suffocation, and deprivation of food and water.

A report by Physicians for Human Rights echoes these concerns, concluding that, “Torture and ill treatment of detainees is a major problem in Mexico facilitated by multiple medical and legal factors.” The organization surveyed forensic doctors employed by Mexico’s federal and state attorney general’s offices. Forty percent of Mexican forensic doctors had suspected torture and/or ill treatment of detainees examined in the previous year, and approximately fifty percent believe that torture is a severe problem.

The Federal Government’s Response

President Fox, who has called the Juárez murders a national shame, first announced in late 2001 that the federal authorities would join investigation. Chihuahua authorities resisted, claiming that President Fox, of the PAN (National Action Party) was attempting to usurp the authority of a governor from the opposition PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party).

Because homicide is a state crime in Mexico, the federal authorities cannot investigate unless the murders are directly linked to federal crimes like weapons or drug trafficking, and only if the murders were committed specifically for the purpose of committing a federal crime. Within these guidelines, in May 2003 the Federal Attorney General’s Organized Crime Unit took over investigations into 14 of the murders under suspicion of organ trafficking – a federal crime. Though the federal authorities have since dismissed this claim for lack of evidence, they retain jurisdiction over these cases to this day. In their initial investigations, federal investigators confronted resistance from the state police and prosecutors, who refused to share evidence, autopsy reports, and other information.

On July 22, 2003, the federal government launched its “Integrated Public Security Program” to help solve and prevent the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez. The Federal Attorney General’s Office created a commission of state and federal prosecutors, police, and forensics experts to investigate and prosecute the murders. The federal government also detailed its plans for improving public security through improved public transportation, better street lighting, and shelters for battered women.

In November 2003, Fox created a commission to oversee and coordinate federal and state efforts to prevent and punish women’s murders in Juárez, appointing Guadalupe Morfín as commissioner. Despite generalized support for her work, a lack of funding and political backing, and an unclear mandate have hampered her from being effective in her work.

Early in 2004, a special federal prosecutor, María López Urbina, was named to review cases in order to determine leads for the unsolved crimes, determine which murders fall under federal jurisdiction, and document acts of negligence, abuse, and omission that led to impunity for the crimes. To date federal officials have taken on a total of only 24 cases, including the 14 taken by the federal attorney general in 2003 for organ trafficking. However, in an unprecedented step in Mexico, Ms. López Urbina has named 130 state officials who she believes are responsible for negligence or abuse of authority in the investigation of murders. Though their cases have been handed over to state investigators, judges have refused to issue arrest warrants for the first five officials that the State Attorney General saw fit to prosecute.

The federal commissioner’s office and special prosecutor have lent new visibility to the tragedy of women’s murders in Chihuahua state. The new governor of Chihuahua, along with his new Attorney General, have also adopted a tone of concern for the state of investigations. However, these statements of concern and the formation of commissions to investigate and prevent these crimes have done nothing to produce new investigations with credible suspects, or to deter the rate of women’s murders. Instead, they have served to ease political pressure on the government to produce a response to these crimes without holding them accountable for the results.

Recent Victims

• Teresa Torbellin, a 33-year-old factory worker, was found on April 26, 2004 in Chihuahua City. She had gone missing on April 22, but state law does not allow families to file missing persons reports until 72 hours have passed since the disappearance, so her family could not report her missing until April 25. She had been beaten to death, and her bloody body had been dragged through bushes and dumped in an isolated area. Authorities initially claimed that she was a homeless woman who had died of natural causes.
• Luísa Rocío Chávez Chávez, 14 years old, was found murdered in Chihuahua City on May 28, 2004. She had disappeared the previous morning on her way home from the store. She had been raped and strangled to death. Her body was found partially clothed. Two suspects were immediately arrested.
• Alma Brisa Molina, a 34-year-old factory worker, was found murdered in Juárez on July 26, 2004. She had been raped and strangled to death. Her body, partially clothed in a bra and panties, was found by passers-by behind a shopping center not far from the offices of the state judicial and municipal police. Jorge Ramos was arrested and charged with the murder. (Authorities did not charge him with rape because they claimed the victim tried to charge him for having intercourse with her.)
• The body of Cynthia Irasema Ramos, 21 years old, was found in Ciudad Juárez on December 3, 2004. She had been raped and strangled to death minutes before her body was found on a sidewalk near a busy intersection in downtown Juárez. She worked as a waitress in a bar downtown, a few blocks from where she was found dead. Cynthia’s sister, Rocío Lizeth Sepúlveda, has reported receiving threatening phone calls warning her not to investigate Cynthia’s death. Family members believe her boyfriend may have been involved in the murder; however, the authorities were investigating the alleged involvement of a gang member whose description was given by witnesses.

Nick Wadhams, “U.N. Chides Mexico Over Unsolved Deaths,” Asscoiated Press, 27 Jan. 2005.

UNITED NATIONS - Mexico is guilty of "grave and systematic" violations of the rights of women for mishandling investigations into the killings of more than 300 women in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, a U.N. committee said Thursday.

The committee released the findings in a report that was the result of an investigation into the killings and whether Mexico had violated the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

In response, Mexico acknowledged "grave attacks" on women's rights and said widespread societal and cultural traditions were also to blame. It said there was no deliberate policy of discrimination.

"It must be acknowledged that there are social situations, stereotypes, attitudes, values and age-old cultural traditions and customs that have been preserved throughout our history and restrict women's development potential," the government said in its response.

Mexican authorities estimate that 258 women have been killed in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas, over the past decade. That tally includes the sexually motivated killings of nearly 100 women. Mexican and international human rights groups put the number of female Juarez victims at more than 350, however.

Victims' families have complained of bungled investigations and suspect authorities of everything from incompetence to a cover-up. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the United Nations, Amnesty International and other organizations also have pressured Mexican officials.

The committee's investigation, the first such inquiry as allowed for under the convention, found that authorities' response to the murders and other forms of violence against women had been "extremely inadequate," especially during the early 1990s.

The killings began in earnest in 1993, when the raped, beaten and mutilated bodies of young women started turning up in the desert outskirts of Juarez.

While there has been some drop in the numbers, and conditions have improved since then, the investigators found similar killings have spread elsewhere, and there was still evidence of negligence by state officials, torture to extract confessions, delays and obstruction.

"It's an environment where gender-based discrimination is widespread and systematic and where violence against women seems to be regarded as a normal or acceptable fact," committee expert Tavares da Silva said.

The report praised the government, saying that Mexican officials recognized the problem and are committed to solving the issue. But it was also deeply critical, saying that the crimes had been treated as routine violence and not part of a larger problem.

Kent Paterson, “The Juarez Women’s Murders,” Albion Monitor, 19 Jan. 2005.

Like other mothers, Patricia Cervantes has heard the promises sung like empty lyrics by a chorus of presidents, governors, and law enforcement authorities. Their reassuring words vow to end impunity and find justice for the murdered daughters.

Cervantes, whose 19-year-old daughter Neyra was raped, tortured, and murdered last year in Chihuahua City, has seen authorities defile her loved one's case to such an extent that someone even put a man's skull on Neyra's skeleton in order to make it appear that a full body had been recovered. She's watched in horror as Chihuahua state police officers picked up her nephew David Meza and then -- according to the young man's account -- tortured him into falsely admitting to killing Neyra. Speaking to reporters in Ciudad Juarez, Cervantes had a simple message: She wants her daughter's real killers caught. "We don't want words, we want action."

Little has changed in the cases of Neyra Cervantes and the more than 400 women and girls who have been murdered in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua state since 1993, according to Amnesty International and press accounts. Dozens more remain missing. About 100 of the victims are thought to have been killed by serial rape murderers. Still, police have arrested no credible suspects in the serial killings, while widely believed scapegoats like Meza remain locked up in jail, and new murders stain an already bloody landscape.

Chihuahua's new governor, PRI member Jose Reyes Baeza, took office on October 3 and was immediately confronted with the femicide issue as a top priority. He appointed a woman, Patricia Gonzalez, as new state attorney general; met with the relatives of murder victims; reshuffled law enforcement and women's services personnel; renamed the organized crime-linked Chihuahua State Judicial Police, and vowed to "lower impunity and clean up the security forces."

But things have not gotten off to a good start for the governor. Within hours of his inauguration, a woman's body was discovered in Chihuahua City. In the next several weeks, 5 other women and girls were killed in Chihuahua City and Juarez. Some of the latest killings follow a previous pattern, when changes in government or public events related to women's rights have been accompanied by the discovery of new bodies. As if a macabre message were being delivered.

John Burnett, “Chasing the Ghouls: The Juarez Serial Murders, and a Reporter Who Won’t Let Go,” Columbia Journalism Review, Issue 2, March 2004.

Were they to occur in an American city, the serial murders of women in Juarez, Mexico, would be the crime of the century, assigned to teams of reporters coming at the murders from every angle. But because they happen in a Mexican border city, just across the sluggish Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, they are seen from the U.S. as a ghoulish curiosity. The exception is the El Paso Times, where reporter Diana Washington Valdez has covered the sexual homicides for the last five years, and not without some cost to herself.

According to Amnesty International, at least 137 women have been the victims of sexual homicide during the last ten years. The state government of Chihuahua puts the number closer to ninety. Their bodies, some mutilated, were usually dumped in ditches or vacant lots in the treeless desert. Most victims have been young, attractive women attending school or working at one of the city’s large export assembly plants, known as maquiladoras. Though the police claim to have jailed the killers, whom they identify as a cabal of bus drivers and gang members led by an Egyptian chemist, almost no one believes that they are the real culprits. Washington Valdez thinks she knows why.

The forty-nine-year-old investigative reporter has written a book, Harvest of Women: A Mexican Safari, based on her coverage, which is due out this spring. In it, she offers a widely circulated, though hushed, theory of why the authorities have failed to arrest the real suspects. She alleges that some of the murderers are young members of prominent Juarez families who have ties to the Juarez drug cartel and buy protection from the police. They are called Los Juniors.

“The best information we have is that these men are committing crimes simply for the sport of it. We know of girls who’ve told stories about escaping from certain parties — orgies — at which some of these people were present,” she says. “The Mexican federal investigators have enough information to put people in jail now. I know that.”

Evelyn Nieves, “To Work and Die in Juarez,” Mother Jones , May/June 2002.

NEWS: Scores of young women workers have been murdered in this tough Mexican-border factory city. Now a grassroots women's movement is seeking answers -- and justice.

Early last fall, authorities in the gray-brown factory city of Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, were prepared to declare a triumph. For nine months, no women's bodies had been found dumped in a field or ditch or along the side of a road. Officials were ready to say that Ciudad Juarez's eight-year series of rape-murders was finally over.

True, about two dozen women were still missing, their photos and descriptions ("tan skin, long brown hair") taped to the windows of the discount stores along Avenida Juarez, downtown's main drag. But there were no bodies. No proof the women hadn't simply up and left. There was certainly no hard evidence to investigate, despite the warnings from women's rights groups that the young women who had vanished fit the profile of scores of others who have been raped, mutilated, and tossed like garbage throughout Ciudad Juarez since 1993.

Then, on November 6, a construction worker stumbled onto the body of a slim, long-haired young woman in a ditch between two major intersections. Hours later, police searching the ditch found the skeletal remains of two more young women. The next day, bulldozers uncovered five more. Police quickly arrested two suspects, drivers for the factory buses that shuttle workers between the city's shantytown colonias and its sprawling industrial district. Authorities soon announced that the drivers had confessed to 11 murders of women over the previous 15 months. But after years of false starts and dubious arrests, few in Ciudad Juarez -- including the families of the victims -- were willing to believe that police had caught the real killers.

A week later, another body -- another slim, long-haired young woman, dead less than a day -- was found tossed in the middle of a street in a quiet residential neighborhood. And a week after that, another one.

And so Mexico's fourth-largest city retains its nickname as "the capital of murdered women." The city of 1.5 million, where an acrid haze of factory smoke and car exhaust hangs in the air, is known for having one of the highest crime rates in Mexico; in 2001 alone, drug traffickers were blamed for more than 60 execution-style murders. But Juarez is most notorious as a place that draws tens of thousands of young women from small, poor towns to take $55-a-week jobs in assembly plants, known as maquiladoras, operated by some of the wealthiest corporations in the world -- companies like General Electric, Alcoa, and DuPont. More than 60 percent of maquiladora workers are women and girls, many as young as 13 or 14.

At least 75 young women, many of them factory workers and most fitting the same description -- slim, pretty, long dark hair -- have been raped and murdered here since 1993, according to most accounts. Scores more are missing. Yet young women keep arriving, even as the city remains seemingly unable to protect them. But while the murders have scarred Ciudad Juarez and exposed its law-enforcement officials as either incompetent or corrupt, they have also sparked the creation of more than a dozen women's rights groups in the city. Born of desperation and outrage, many of the groups are made up largely of housewives, mothers, and grandmothers, some of them relatives and friends of the murdered. Most have few means and little time, given the demands of tending to their families.

Still, the women have become a force in Juarez. Taking on the powers that be, much as civil rights marchers in the United States did in the segregated South, they have marched time and again to the state attorney general's office demanding more aggressive investigations. They have held vigils, erected crosses throughout the city in the victims' memories, and scoured fields and ditches for evidence. They have kept the murders in the news, drawn attention from human-rights groups in Mexico and the United States, and pressured President Vicente Fox to send federal investigators to look into the cases. (He finally promised to do so in January, but by early spring no federal help had arrived.)

Mostly, the groups have demanded more attention to violence against women in a city where, they charge, the lives of young, poor women haven't counted for much. "The killings continue," says Esther Chávez, who is considered a pioneer in Juarez's women's movement. "So not much has changed."

On the surface, it does seem that little has changed in Juarez in response to the killings. Women still wait for the rickety green factory buses well before the sun is up, on lonely, unlit corners where no one would see them if they were dragged into a car and driven away, never to be seen alive again. The owners of the more than 300 factories that have flocked here in search of low tariffs and cheap labor have said little on the subject of the abductions, rapes, and murders. Though companies have vowed to improve security in the city's industrial areas, there has been no coordinated campaign to pro-tect the young women workers -- even though the eight bodies found in November were discovered in a field directly across the road from the office of the foreign companies' trade organization, Asociación de Maquiladoras.

Nor have the plants changed policies that may be endangering their employees. Workers are still turned away at many factories if they are as little as three minutes late, leaving them to return home alone and vulnerable -- as was the case with several of the women who were later found dead. Workers still begin and end their late-night shifts with no police or security patrols in sight.

Throughout Ciudad Juarez, fear is palpable. Crosses and messages of remembrance have been nailed to signposts all over town, a constant reminder of the dead. Billboards and bus advertisements warn: "Be careful -- watch for your life." Women are on edge. On a visit after the bodies were found in November, women factory workers who were waiting, alone, for buses at 5 a.m. all recoiled when I approached them for interviews with a male photographer and a male guide. Two ran away, and one shouted out that her boyfriend would be along shortly.

Yet the women's groups have won a few victories -- and by all accounts, no one has done more to advance their cause than Esther Chávez. A tiny, fine-boned woman in her 60s, Chávez worked as a financial manager for Kraft Foods in Mexico City before moving to Ciudad Juarez 20 years ago. Today, she is the executive director of Casa Amiga, the city's first and only rape crisis center and one of only six such centers in Mexico.

Chávez founded Casa Amiga in 1998 after hearing horrific stories of domestic abuse, rape, and incest from factory workers she had met while operating a local dress shop. Located in a storefront on a busy thoroughfare, the center now has five staff members and hundreds of volunteers, who have been among the most visible advocates for the city's murdered women.

Long before the killings attracted attention beyond Ciudad Juarez, Chávez was organizing rallies on behalf of the murder victims and writing about their lives in her column in the city's newspaper, El Diario de Juarez. She and her allies in the city's women's movement have spurred the creation of a special commission on the murders in Mexico's Congress and the appointment of a special state prosecutor -- though the latter proved to be a mixed victory: Since the office was created in 1998, two successive special prosecutors have quit, the second this March after only eight months on the job.

The groups' most successful lobbying effort came last fall, when hundreds of women mobilized to scuttle a new state law in Chihuahua -- the state where Juarez is located -- that would have reduced sentences from four years to one for rapists who could convince a court that their victims had "provoked" them. The women appealed to activists, politicians, and the media through- out the country to help them defeat the proposal, which proponents said would protect men from false claims of rape by women who feared telling their parents that they had had sex. Mexico's Congress finally threatened to intervene if Chihuahua legislators did not repeal the law.

The controversy over the rape law, Chávez and her allies argue, shows the root problem behind the Ciudad Juarez murders -- that, in a society where men cannot be charged with raping their wives and domestic abuse is rarely prosecuted, authorities simply do not take violence against women seriously enough. As recently as 1999, then-Chihuahua Attorney General Arturo González Rascón blamed murder victims for dressing provocatively and thus encouraging men's baser instincts.

Others have offered more thoughtful theories about the killings. In 1998, state prosecutors requested assistance from one of the fbi's top serial-crime profilers, Robert Ressler. He concluded that a serial killer could have committed some of the murders, but that many more were probably random crimes. Other investigators have suggested that women might be falling prey to killers as they wait for buses or walk home from work past a downtown district full of cantinas and discos. Chávez believes that many of the murders are the work of copycats who rape, torture, and murder women simply because they have discovered that they can do so with impunity.

"We say, 'Ni una más -- not one more,'" Chávez says. "I want that to be true."

It is a hope that over the past nine years has been frustrated again and again. There have been at least three instances when police announced that they had solved the crimes and arrested the perpetrators -- only to see the killings continue, often within days. In 1995, an Egyptian-born engineer who had worked at one of the maquiladora plants, Abdel Latif Sharif, was charged with raping and murdering an 18-year-old, and police claimed to have proved that he had killed dozens of other women. When more women were found dead after Sharif's arrest, police argued that he had orchestrated the killings from behind bars; but the suspects they arrested were later freed for lack of evidence. Sharif's own murder conviction was overturned in 2000 after his lawyer proved that the alleged victim's description didn't match the body that authorities produced as evidence. He remains in custody pending further appeals.

In 1999, police announced another break-through, after arresting four maquiladora shuttle-bus drivers who they said had confessed to committing 20 murders on orders from Sharif. The bus drivers contend that they were tortured and beaten into confessing; their cases are pending.

Last November, once again, the two men arrested were bus drivers, and once again the suspects claimed that they had been tortured. After police broadcast videotapes of the drivers' confessions, defense lawyers showed the press photos of their clients with cigarette burns and welts all over their bodies. The following month, the Juarez prison director released a doctor's report suggesting that the suspects had been tortured with electric prods; he resigned two days later. Police have yet to produce any physical evidence connecting the drivers to the murders.

Women's groups joined the suspects' families in protests at police headquarters, urging authorities to find the real killers. In response, José Ortega Aceves, a deputy attorney general in charge of the case, told reporters that the men had probably burned themselves in order to claim that they were tortured.

In February, state police inadvertently brought the November cases back to the limelight when they shot and killed a lawyer for one of the drivers, saying they had mistaken him for a fugitive. Just days earlier the attorney, Mario Escobedo Jr., had announced plans to file a criminal complaint against state police officials for allegedly kidnapping and torturing his client.

After Escobedo's killing, the demonstrations that began after the drivers were arrested last fall intensified. Activists, who believe that the drivers were framed, charge that police killed the attorney to silence criticism. Officials dismiss the accusations, saying the protests are politically motivated. Authorities "are not interested in fabricating suspects," insists Rascón, the former attorney general.

But Victoria Caraveo, a local attorney who leads a consortium of 13 women's groups that have been holding weekly protest marches, says the facts in the case speak for themselves. "We do not attack just to attack," says Caraveo. "We want the killings to stop. This is not political; it's human."

The controversy over Escobedo's killing, and the increasingly vocal complaints from women's groups, have once again drawn national -- and even international -- attention to Ciudad Juarez. Mexico's independent human-rights commission has launched an investigation into the situation in Juarez, including the conduct of police and prosecutors; during an initial visit in February, a spokeswoman for the commission called authorities' response to the killings "markedly insufficient."

And in El Paso, local legislators, labor-union members, and students recently launched a group, called the Coalition on Violence Against Women and Families on the Border, that plans to hold a series of demonstrations on both sides of the border and along the Rio Grande bridges that connect the two cities. "When people say this is Mexico's business and we should stay out of it, they don't recognize that there are binational relationships when it comes to trade and commerce," says one of the coalition's founders, Emma Perez, who chairs the history department at the University of Texas at El Paso. "Of the border factories in Juarez, 80 percent are U.S.-owned. NAFTA had a lot to do with them coming here. So we also have to take responsibility for the workers in those factories that are being killed."

In one of their first public events, members of the binational organization recently joined a Juarez group, Voces Sin Eco, or Voices Without Echo, on a trip to the spot where the eight bodies were found in November. Twice a month, Voces Sin Eco searches such places, looking for clues that might lead to the missing.

On a clear, cold day in February, the volunteers gathered in a field where eight crosses and thousands of candles had been placed during more than a dozen vigils. The spots where the bodies had been found were still marked by red cord, wooden stakes, and signs numbering the corpses ("Cuerpo Uno,""Cuerpo Dos," "Cuerpo Tres,"…).

Soon, the volunteers located more reminders of the dead. Two boys discovered a pair of tan overalls in the weeds at the edge of a ditch, and Josefina González -- one of three mothers of murder victims who had joined the search -- recognized them as the ones her 20-year-old daughter, Claudia Ivette, had worn to her factory job on October 10 last year. That day, Claudia Ivette had been turned away for being three minutes late for her 3:30 p.m. shift. She had disappeared on her walk home.

In the ditch, the volunteers also discovered ripped and cut women's underwear, four pairs of shoes, a dress, and strands of human hair -- none of which had apparently been noted by police during their search of the area three months earlier. A state investigator was called in to examine the finds. As mothers of the murdered women wept, he scolded the volunteers for contaminating possible evidence.

Ginger Thompson, “Women’s Killings Confound Juarez,” New York Times, 10 Dec. 2002.

At least 280 women and girls have been killed in this city on the American border since 1993, according to the police. The Chihuahua State authorities say at least 76 of them fell prey to serial killers.

Women’s leaders say that many families, distrustful of local authorities, are afraid to report crimes to the police and that the total of women and ghirls killed or missing is closer to 600. MTheir deaths have drawn hundreds of protests and expressions of international outrage, but the epidemic of violence against women here continues.

United States

”Green River Killer Faces Families,” Associated Press, 19 December 2003.

SEATTLE -- The case of the Green River Killer, the serial murderer who preyed on dozens of troubled young women, tore apart families and terrorized the region two decades ago, ended with a moment of silence and many tears.

A King County Superior Court judge on Thursday sentenced Gary Ridgway, a 54-year-old truck painter from suburban Auburn, to 48 consecutive life terms and fined him $480,000. That amount represented $10,000 for each woman he confessed to killing.

Legally, the sentencing was little more than a formality, but it gave the victims' relatives a chance to confront Ridgway, at last. With an eloquence honed by years of grief, they stepped forward and cursed the killer, or forgave him.

"There are people here that hate you. I'm not one of them," said Robert Rule, a shopping mall Santa whose daughter, Linda, was killed in September 1982. "I pity you, sir. You won't have a Christmas. You won't have the love around you that everyone needs at Christmastime."

Ridgway broke down when Rule forgave him, but maintained a blank stare through much of the proceedings, only occasionally nodding or dabbing tears that slipped from behind his dark-rimmed glasses.

When the family members finished addressing him, Ridgway, who once bragged to police about his skill at strangulation, offered a tearful apology: "I'm sorry for killing all those young ladies. I have tried to remember as much as I could to help the detectives find and recover the ladies. I'm sorry for the scare I put into the community."

Judge Richard Jones blistered Ridgway for his "Teflon-coated emotions and complete absence of genuine compassion," and ordered a moment of silence for the victims before passing sentence.

"The time has come for the final chapter of your reign of terror in our community," Jones told Ridgway. "It is now time for our community to have peace from the Green River murders."

Prosecutors agreed to spare Ridgway the death penalty in exchange for his confession and helping investigators, who recovered four sets of remains during the summer. He pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder Nov. 5.

The case takes it name from the Green River in south King County where the first bodies were found in 1982. By the end of 1984, the death toll had risen to 42, and more were still to come, the most recent in 1998.

In his confession, Ridgway said he killed because he hated prostitutes and didn't want to pay them for sex, and that he killed so many women he had a hard time keeping them straight.

"Jesus knows you have broken my heart," a sobbing Joan Mackie, mother of victim Cindy Smith, told Ridgway as he faced her and listened silently.

Most relatives wept, some shook as they tried to describe the inexpressible grief of having a mother, daughter or sister disappear.

"It was not your right to decide who lived and who died," said Tim Meehan, the brother of Mary Meehan, whose body was found Nov. 13, 1983. "Mary was no less a human being than your mother or your son, or as trash as you have classified all the victims."

"I can only hope that someday, someone gets the opportunity to choke you unconscious 48 times, so you can live through the horror that you put our mothers and our daughters through. ... To me you are already dead."

Kathy Mills, the mother of victim Opal Mills, 16, whose body was found Aug. 15, 1982, also offered Ridgway her forgiveness.

"We wanted to see you die, but it's all going to be over now," she said. "Gary Leon Ridgway, I forgive you. I forgive you. You can't hold me anymore. I'm through with you. I have a peace that is beyond human understanding."

Others lashed out at prosecutors, investigators and the news media.

"I believe we've been sold by the prosecutor for not giving us the justice that we could expect," said Helen Dexter, whose daughter, Constance Elizabeth Naon, was killed in 1983.

"I believe we still are victimized by some very politically ambitious careers," she said. "The self-proclaimed heroes have put the victims and their families on a shelf."

J. Norman, whose daughter Shawnda Summers' body was found Aug. 11, 1983, said prosecutors should not have bargained with the death penalty to get Ridgway's guilty plea.

"The politicians, if they cared about this heinous crime, it would have been solved 20 years ago," Norman said. "There shouldn't have been no plea bargain. ... Shame on Seattle."

Ridgway was arrested Nov. 30, 2001, after detectives linked his DNA to sperm found in three of the earliest victims. By spring 2002, prosecutors had charged him with seven murders, but they had all but given up hope of linking him to the dozens of other women, most of whom disappeared during a terrifying stretch from 1982-84.

Last spring, defense attorneys offered King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng a deal: If Maleng would not seek the death penalty, Ridgway would help solve those other cases. Though Maleng had previously said he would not bargain with the death penalty, he changed his mind, saying that a strong principle of justice is to know the truth.

Links

The Global Persecution of Women
Glossary