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CNN Live Saturday
Police in Vancouver, Canada Finally Act on Missing Persons Cases
Aired February 23, 2002 - 12:32 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Canadian officials investigating a case involving 50 missing women have made an arrest. In custody, pig farm owner Robert Pickton. Right now, he's charged with two counts of first degree murder. Still, police say there are many questions that remain unanswered.
CNN's Frank Buckley has more.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They were not model citizens, the women in the missing posters; most of them drug addicts or prostitutes. But they were also mothers and daughters and sisters who were missing, who deserved the attention of authorities. And for nearly 20 years in this picturesque city, say critics, they didn't get it.
SUZANNE JAY, VANCOUVER RAPE RELIEF AND WOMEN'S SHELTER: The police didn't take these disappearances very seriously. It did not take the lives of these women very seriously.
BUCKLEY: But their loved ones did. People like Bixi Purcell and Valerie Hughes.
VALERIE HUGHES, SISTER OF MISSING WOMAN: My sister was just out partying. She's just another junkie.
BUCKLEY: Her sister, Carrie Coskey (ph), who is also a mother of three, disappeared four years ago.
HUGHES: I promised my sister's youngest that I would never stop looking.
BUCKLEY: Bixi Purcell tells a similar story. Her daughter, Tanya (ph), a mother of a baby boy, was a recovering addict who went missing five years ago. Ms. Purcell can't forget the phone call to police who told her they weren't worried.
BIXI PURCELL, MOTHER OF MISSING WOMAN: Tanya (ph) was just out having fun. "Don't bother us. Don't waste our time." And she hung up on me. I just stayed there with the phone in my hand for 10 minutes just looking at it. BUCKLEY (on camera): Authorities here say most of the women went missing from this part of Vancouver, downtown east side Vancouver, an area notorious for its open drug sales and prostitution.
MORRIS BATES, VICTIM ADVOCATE: You're down in the skids -- skid row.
BUCKLEY: Victim advocate Morris Bates showed us the allies and doorways where drug use and prostitution are partners. Women selling their bodies, using the money to buy more drugs.
BATES: When the person goes missing, who do you go to? We don't have any family here.
BUCKLEY: But people did know they were missing. Wayne Leng, was not a family member, he was a John, but also a friend of Sara Debris (ph), who went missing in 1998. Leng created a Web site on the plight of the missing women years before police did.
WAYNE LENG, FRIEND OF MISSING WOMAN: I just could not do it, all right? I needed to know what happened to Sara (ph). And I just -- I don't know, I just -- I was driven.
BUCKLEY: So were Ms. Purcell, Mrs. Hughes and others who publicly protested and pressured police to focus on their missing loved ones.
HUGHES: We went and said -- stood on a street corner, and all I said to people was, "Do you know that there are this many missing women?" And most of the (UNINTELLIGIBLE) saying, "No." I said, "Phone Vancouver City Police and tell them that you care.
BUCKLEY: Finally, last spring, nearly two decades after the first woman on the missing list disappeared, Vancouver Police formed a joint missing women task force with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And this month, investigators began focusing their attention on this pig farm. Police are removing evidence that may be linked to the missing women.
On why it took so long, police say they did the best they could with the information they had.
DET. SCOTT DRIEMEL, VANCOUVER POLICE DEPARTMENT: When you look at the fact that we've got some people, of course, that are involved in various activities that put them in a high-risk category to begin with, those reports are taken as seriously as possible by the police department.
BUCKLEY: Now some 80 people are attached to the task force that is gaining the confidence of these two women, who believe their loved ones are dead. Their only remaining hope, to find and bury them with respect.
Frank Buckley, CNN, Vancouver, British Columbia.
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