We introduce you to some of the victims, they’re babies, teens, and grandmas. Search our interactive tool of the 1,725 missing people and unsolved murder cases in BC.
How many were under investigation? Were some files closed? Were any ruled accidental?
Members of the Summit, which represents a majority of B.C. First Nations and Tribal Councils, hoped their questions would turn up the heat on police.
“They were dealing with a crisis that their mothers and sisters and aunties were going missing and nobody was doing anything about it, and that they were being murdered and still nothing was being done about it,” said Cheryl Casimer, a political executive with the Summit. She was not with the organization in 1997, but has been told about the advocacy work at the time.
Of those 48 files flagged so many years ago, 42 of them remain unresolved today: Most are cold cases, and in a handful the main suspect was never charged or convicted.
It’s a dismal outcome for victims’ families who need answers and justice to heal, said Casimer.
“When I looked at the list of the names, it was haunting,” she said. “It was almost like if their names hadn’t been on that list then they would just be invisible. That’s all that was left of them was their names on a list. And that was really disturbing and heart wrenching.”
As Postmedia reported last week, they hope the database can be used to pinpoint where important information is missing, illustrate main causes behind missing-and-murdered cases, and identify actions that community activists, politicians and police could take to increase safety.
The Midnight Order has completed entering details — including age, race, date and location last seen — for 6,325 victims. At this point, more than a quarter of these finished files are from B.C. and nearly one-third of the B.C. victims identified so far are Indigenous, with the vast majority of those being female.
Carol Ruby Davis, an Indigenous woman who left behind a 12-year-old son when she was found murdered in Burnaby in 1987, is on both the Summit’s list and in the new database. Her sister Lori Davis, who raised Carol’s son and has spent 36 years pushing for answers, said she was happy the unsolved killing was highlighted by the Midnight Order.
The 1,725 victims identified so far from B.C. range in age from a baby to 96. Their cases date back nearly a century, although the bulk of the files are from the past four decades.
One of the earliest cases is 15-year-old Anneta Margaret (Molly) Clive Justice, a young seamstress who rode the bus from Victoria to Saanich on a snowy January night in 1943, carrying three parcels — a wool sweater, socks and shoes. She was attacked while walking home along a railway track and suffered “abominable” injuries, according to newspaper reports at the time.
In 1996, the province ordered an investigation into a long-rumoured coverup in the case: that the main suspect, a teenage boy, avoided being charged because he was allegedly related to the man who was attorney general in 1943. That theory was debunked and the case remains unsolved eight decades later.
Price, 37, was a tobacco salesman by day and drove the cab in the evenings to make extra money, so he could afford a house for his new wife, as they planned to start a family.
“No one had any reason to kill him,” Price’s brother Jimmy told The Province newspaper in 1950.
The Pauls family, murdered in 1958 in their Vancouver home, are also in the database: David, a Woodword’s warehouse employee, and his wife Helen, who worked in a sausage shop, were both beaten and shot, while their daughter Dorothy, in Grade 6 at Walter Moberly Elementary, was bludgeoned to death.
“It’s been more than half a century since a family was brutally murdered in their own home in a quiet Vancouver neighbourhood, and today there are still far more questions than answers. Why was this family targeted? Who would savagely beat a young girl to death as she lay sleeping in her bed,” the Vancouver police asks on its cold cases website.
Another historical B.C. case involves the disappearance of toddler Edna Bette-Jean Masters, who was wearing a green bonnet and pink T-shirt when she vanished while playing at a friend’s house near Kamloops in July 1960. A massive search for the 21-month-old girl, who went by her middle name Bette-Jean, turned up no clues, the RCMP said in 2013 while seeking leads in the cold case.
Bette-Jean, who had curly blond hair, green eyes and an oval-shaped burn scar on her left arm, could still be alive today, as no evidence of her death was found, the RCMP said. An unfamiliar car with Alberta plates driven by a young couple was seen in the area, but police in 1960 found no answers when they pursued that lead.
Most of the 18 missing and murdered women and girls from the Highway of Tears case in Northern B.C. are in the database as well. Also included are more than a dozen new names that a 2014 Postmedia investigation argued should be added to the case, including missing teenager Helen Claire Frost, 17, who vanished from Prince George in 1970.