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