Every life has value - that’s the message that seemed to escape the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Vancouver Police in the late 1990s, as more and more women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside began disappearing.
Many of their DNA was eventually found on convicted murderer Robert Pickton’s farm, in a gruesome story that gets more and more grotesque as more information is made available.
According to a report on the investigation, evidence pointed to the existence of a serial killer in these cases, more than two years before the Pickton's arrest.
The 400-page report, released by the Vancouver Police Department on Aug. 20, blames both the city’s police force and the RCMP for a series of errors that allowed women to be continue being killed by Pickton before he was arrested in February 2002.
A total of 13 women vanished from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside after the police department forwarded information about Pickton to the RCMP, in August 1999.
Why in the world did it take so long to charge him?
If Pickton had targetted rich, white women, alarm bells would have been ringing very quickly, we're sure. If dozens of young white women had disappeared over a short period of time, the story would have made front-page news from the start.
And that’s the sad truth of the Robert Pickton case. Pickton got away with what he did for so long because those he targetted — most of them aboriginal women working the streets as prostitutes — were not valued by society, or by police.
Only family members truly cared when these women started disappearing, and that is a tragedy.
What is even more tragic is that this kind of disappearing act continues to this day throughout Canada, most notably along the so-called Highway of Tears, a 720-kilometre stretch of road between Prince George and Prince Rupert, where young girls, mostly aboriginal, have been disappearing since 1988.
Until we as a society start truly caring about these horrible disappearances and deaths — and start caring about the women and children who are disappearing — we will continue to see the likes of Robert Pickton get away with murder. And that will be the greatest tragedy of all.