The Highway of Tears (And Maybe Hope)

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 Chuck, and Jerry's here, too.
And this is Stuff You Should Know.

Speaker 2 The man, this is a bummer edition.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 the Zero Laughs Edition

Speaker 1 because we're talking about the highway of tears.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there's no other way around it. This is just a devastating topic.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we should tell people. I mean, the Highway of Tears is fairly famous.
It's

Speaker 2 kind of been in the news and in pop culture, I guess, for a while.

Speaker 2 I guess at least since the 90s, but really in the early 2000s, I think is when it picked up. Regardless, it is a stretch of desolate highway that runs from in British Columbia, up in Canada, from

Speaker 2 the port city of Prince Rupert all the way into the interior to Prince George. And it's, I think, 720 kilometers, almost 450 miles, and it's known as Highway 16 officially.

Speaker 2 But the stretches of this highway are so desolate, so remote, and so sparsely populated that it has become a haven for murderers who pick people up, mostly women, mostly indigenous women, on this road and either make them disappear forever or murder them.

Speaker 2 And it's endemic in this area, so much so that it's caught national attention. It's just how poorly this group of women are being treated and their families as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's, you know, as you'll see, it's

Speaker 1 And there are many reasons for this, but it's a heavily hitchhiked road and that can be very dangerous.

Speaker 1 And so a lot of times these are hitchhikers, people just trying to get from one place to another.

Speaker 1 And like you said, they are,

Speaker 1 you know, either sexually assaulted or murdered or both.

Speaker 1 And these are the people that, you know, like they found bodies. There are, you know, dozens and dozens more than these dozens who have survived attacks and rapes along that stretch of highway.

Speaker 1 um you know it's no secret why it's called the highway of tears uh big thanks to libia for enduring

Speaker 1 this topic and helping us out with it. And big thanks to Al Jazeera, where she got a lot of information from a six-part series they did in 2021.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's a lot of good sources. The CBC, The Vancouver Sun's a good one.

Speaker 2 There's been a decent amount of coverage, but

Speaker 2 it's not the kind of coverage you would get when, say,

Speaker 2 like a Caucasian girl goes missing, which we'll talk about. It's the kind of coverage about how this group of people have just been totally

Speaker 2 basically left on their own to deal with something like this, that they don't have the resources to deal with this. And it's just such a terrible story.

Speaker 2 The story is so much larger than this collection of murders.

Speaker 2 But at the core, that's what it comes down to: just women who are treated like disposable beings.

Speaker 2 And the whole thing starts

Speaker 2 at the very earliest, as far as anyone knows, the first murder that's become part of what you would call the canon of the Highway of Tears, murders, and abductions, started in 1969.

Speaker 2 A woman named Lavinia Gloria Moody was murdered on Highway 16.

Speaker 2 And it went...

Speaker 2 kind of went along like that for a while. There was,

Speaker 2 but no one had kind of put together this whole group of people and call it the Highway of Tears, and they wouldn't for years to come.

Speaker 2 But at the time, there was enough going on that they had coined this term the Highway Murders.

Speaker 2 And by 1981, enough women and girls had been murdered or gone missing along Highway 16 that a group of Royal Canadian Mounted Police Detectives from all over British Columbia and I think Alberta got together and decided to kind of compare notes and see if

Speaker 2 if they could solve some of these unsolved cases.

Speaker 1 Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 1 While this was going on,

Speaker 1 you know, when the cops were sort of slowly coming around to the idea that there was a specific problem along the stretch, the families were getting involved, the families of the missing, the families of those who were found dead.

Speaker 1 And, you know, they organized their own efforts.

Speaker 1 One case that really kind of brought everything to even more of a head was the case of Ramona Wilson. This was in June of 1994.

Speaker 1 She was 16 years old and she went to go meet up with a friend to go to some

Speaker 1 end-of-the-year school graduation parties. She never got there and her mom, Matilda, was like, the cops don't really seem to care much that this happened.

Speaker 1 And so the locals got together and they started organizing. They started doing, you know, going on search parties and

Speaker 1 looking out for her.

Speaker 1 They ultimately, you know, very sadly discovered her body about 10 months later at an airport.

Speaker 1 Her clothes were found near her with some rope and some cabling.

Speaker 1 And so her mom and her older sister, Brenda, and, you know, other members of her family and the community got together and said, all right, the least we can do is try and raise some awareness since no one seems to be paying attention.

Speaker 1 So they got a memorial walk together in June of 95, which became an annual thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there was another woman who really deserves a lot of credit for bringing national attention to this. She's a Wet Sowedin

Speaker 2 nation woman. And in 1998, there was a vigil where she coined the term highway of tears, which I can't, I don't think you can really calculate how much that helped this case.

Speaker 2 It was like, hey, media, here's a nice little tidy package for you to report on. It's even got a catchy name.

Speaker 2 Despite the actual obvious emotion behind calling it the highway of tears, I think it really helped quite a bit.

Speaker 2 And Florence Nazil also is credited with starting a walk that covered the entire, again, 450-mile stretch of

Speaker 2 the Highway of Tears for the first time. That walk's been made

Speaker 2 scores of times by now over the years by family members and community members and members of other nations who've gotten involved to try to, again, help, ask for resources, ask to get the police involved more, because that's another another recurring theme throughout this, Chuck, is that the police have shown over and over again opportunity after opportunity to just not really seem to care.

Speaker 1 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 She had already been working, you know, to raise awareness when very tragically it hit home for her in a more personal way when one of her family members, a woman named Tamara Chipman, went missing in 2005.

Speaker 1 And, you know, all this is going on through the, you know, I think it was 1981 when the cops finally started sort of getting together and comparing notes.

Speaker 1 And that was after at least 12 years since the first known murder.

Speaker 1 And it took all the way into the 2000s

Speaker 1 for things to really take a turn. And that was when very tragically, a woman named Nicole Hoer

Speaker 1 was killed. She was 25 years old, and she was white.
She disappeared in 2002.

Speaker 1 And this is what really brought the national attention.

Speaker 1 You've heard a journalist named Gwen Eiffel in the United States coin the term missing white woman syndrome, which is the idea that it takes

Speaker 1 a white person to be

Speaker 1 the victim of a crime for anyone to kind of sit up and take notice. And members of Indigenous communities or marginalized communities are often overlooked and underfunded and under-resourced.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the cases are kind of swept under the rug. And that's exactly what was going on in Canada for many, many years, and still is to a certain degree.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and again, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been called to task time and time and time again for not taking this stuff seriously enough, not devoting enough resources to it.

Speaker 2 But also, the media is largely responsible, too, not just in this case, but in any case of a missing or murdered woman who's not white in the United States or Canada, they get much less coverage, and the intensity of the coverage is much less too compared to white women.

Speaker 2 And that's not just anecdotal.

Speaker 2 I was reading at least one

Speaker 2 study on it from 2016, I think, in the Journal of Law and Criminology. And they were like, yes, we analyze this stuff, and it's absolutely true.

Speaker 2 So there's like a, but there's a bitter gratitude involved because the death of Nicole Hoer,

Speaker 2 she,

Speaker 2 like, it did bring a lot of attention to this. Yeah.
Yeah. And you just can't, you can't deny that.
And so 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 this for decades. And now this one white girl

Speaker 2 becomes part of

Speaker 2 the crowd of murdered girls. And like, now it, now people care.
It's got to be really tough to take.

Speaker 2 And I know I called her a girl, and she was 25, so she was a woman, but there's like this, this whole group is made up of women and girls. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I know it's not interchangeable, but it's important to say, like, some of these, I mean, the youngest victim was 12, Monica Jacks,

Speaker 2 who I think died in the late 70s, maybe 1978. Like, there are plenty of girls who were picked up and murdered.
There are also plenty of women, too. But,

Speaker 2 and not all of them were indigenous. A lot of them were white.
But the cops, as they started to get together,

Speaker 2 came up with some criteria that they applied to these cases that kind of narrowed

Speaker 2 the search,

Speaker 2 but also brought on new cases that they hadn't considered before, as we'll see.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, so in 2005, this is just a few years after Nicole Hoer brought more attention to the issue,

Speaker 1 the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, will probably call them that RCMP, maybe mounties. Do they still go by that?

Speaker 2 I think so, whether they like it or not. Everybody calls them mounties.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 They launched what was called the Unsolved Homicide Unit, launched something called Project E Panna, the letter E, that was just the division of the RCMP.

Speaker 1 And Pana is named after an Inuit goddess who cares for souls in the afterworld. And

Speaker 1 their official designation was, hey, we think we have a serial killer, maybe more than one, out there on this highway of tears.

Speaker 1 It's a pretty, like you said, a pretty great place to get away with a crime like that because it's so desolate.

Speaker 1 Up until recently, there were long, long, long, long, long stretches where you had no cell phone service even.

Speaker 1 So you couldn't, you know, call anyone if you were in trouble. Not very many people around and plenty of animals around to take care of bodies and the remains.
So

Speaker 1 they found some commonalities in three teenage girls, Ramona Wilson, who I mentioned, a woman named Roxanne Thiara, 15 years old from Prince George.

Speaker 1 This is a very sad case. She was in the foster system

Speaker 1 and the juvenile incarceration system. And she eventually had to turn to survival sex, which is a term for

Speaker 1 women who are forced to resort to sex work to

Speaker 1 feed and clothe themselves. And it usually means like instead of getting money, they get food and clothing and

Speaker 1 items to live and survive. In 1994, she told a friend she was going to meet one of her clients.
She disappeared and her body was discovered off Highway 16.

Speaker 1 And then finally, Alicia Germain was 15 years old, last seen in 1994 at a Christmas dinner. And she was discovered close to Highway 16.
So that's when they came up with their

Speaker 1 criteria to see if they could sort of narrow this down, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. And just one thing, Roxanne and Leah were, or Alicia, who also went by Leah's, they were friends and also colleagues.
They both were sex workers who were engaged in survival sex.

Speaker 2 Ramona, who was not engaged in anything like that, I think she worked at a restaurant or something, but Ramona, Roxanne, and Leah

Speaker 2 all were murdered in the same area between

Speaker 2 Ramona was June, Roxanne July, Leah in December of 1994, I think. And all their cases, like in this area, everybody's like, there's something going on.

Speaker 2 The cops are like, just give us 11 more years and we'll come together and come up with this new EPANA project. And right when they did, those three just stuck out immediately.

Speaker 2 It's like, there's some real commonalities here. They need to be investigated.
But, like you were saying, those three criteria that they came up with from this EPANA project,

Speaker 2 you had to be female, you had to last be seen dead or alive

Speaker 2 within a mile of Highway 16. And then you also had to be involved in high-risk activities like sex work, but also hitchhiking.

Speaker 2 And we should say here, too, like for those of us who grew up in towns with bus service and cabs and you could walk places and get to where you're going easily or ride your bike, like hitchhiking almost seems like frivolous.

Speaker 2 Hitchhiking is a way to live and survive and get to work in this area. It has been for decades.
So it's not like I think you can view hitchhiking as like, man, why did you hitchhike?

Speaker 2 In a lot of cases, the women and girls who were picked up hitchhiking were trying to get to where they were going. Like they weren't like just hitting the road.

Speaker 2 Like they, that was just part of daily life for them, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So once they narrowed down this criteria, they found more cases that sort of fit that and were lumped into the Highway of Tears murders.

Speaker 1 Alberta Williams was 24, and she was celebrating at a pub at the end of summer after working there seasonally with her sister. This was 1989.

Speaker 1 Her body was found about a month after her disappearance. Delphine Nical was 16 years old, disappeared in 1990 while hitchhiking.
Lana Derrick, a 19-year-old college student,

Speaker 1 disappeared in October of 95.

Speaker 1 We mentioned Tamara Chipman. That was the relative of Florence and Ezeil.
She was 22, and the mother of a two-year-old boy

Speaker 1 disappeared while hitchhiking in 2005. And then 14-year-old Alia Sarek Auger went missing from Prince George in 2006.
And she was found deceased in a ditch right beside the highway, Highway 16.

Speaker 2 And Ayla, I'm pretty sure that's how you say her name. She was the last one to be officially added.

Speaker 2 Like as far as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are concerned, she's the last highway of tears victim. Although, as we'll see, there have been plenty more who would qualify for sure.

Speaker 2 The problem is, EPAN is very much underfunded and not basically not really operational right now. So they're not adding people for that reason.

Speaker 2 But when they looked into this a little more, they basically went back to their credit and found that there was about 300 boxes of information and paperwork on all these cases.

Speaker 2 And so they're like, we can't get anywhere until we have all this stuff logged in some sort of database. So they created the database and they logged it.
And it took them like a year.

Speaker 2 But after they finally got all that stuff in, some of those older cases, the ones between 1969 and 1981, they started bubbling up toward the top and were eventually included.

Speaker 2 starting with that first one with Gloria Moody, also including Monica Jack.

Speaker 2 And then there was also Micheline Parre, Gaylen Weiss, Pamela Darlington, Colleen McMillan, and Monica Ingus, and then Maureen Mosey.

Speaker 2 And again, all of them were killed between 1969 and 1981, all along Highway 16. And a lot of them were hitchhiking as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and, you know,

Speaker 1 if you look into these cases and people, you know, the volunteers that are working with some of these,

Speaker 1 you know, a lot of them are run by, you know, families of victims.

Speaker 1 They will say that it's probably more like, you know, 50 people.

Speaker 1 Advocates say that, the total is way higher than they're saying it is,

Speaker 1 kind of for all the reasons that we've mentioned so far. And that seems like a good time to take our first break, and we'll be right back.

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Speaker 1 All right. So when we left off, we were saying that the

Speaker 1 total number could be as high as 50 if you look at all these cases. And not a lot of them have been solved.

Speaker 1 There are a few exceptions here and there that definitely show that there were serial killers, killer or killers operating.

Speaker 1 There was one big one in 2012

Speaker 1 with Colleen McMillan. She was murdered hitchhiking.
She was 16 years old. This was 1974.
But they had, you know, in some of the evidence boxes, had her blouse still.

Speaker 1 And with the improvement in DNA matching and databases and stuff like that, they were able to find a match on Interpol.

Speaker 1 It was an American named Bobby Jack Fowler, who had died in prison in 2006, where he was serving time for attempted kidnapping and attempted murder on another woman in 1995.

Speaker 1 And they found that he had been working as a roofer in Canada when this murder and others took place. And,

Speaker 1 you know, basically we're like, it was probably two other women as well on the list, Pamela Darlington and Gail Weiss.

Speaker 1 And they were both murdered in 1973, but he died in prison before they could officially pin that on him.

Speaker 2 Yes. And from what I've read about him, Bobby Jack Fowler is the kind of scumbag that you wish you could go dig up and reanimate so you can punish him some more.

Speaker 2 He was terrible. And when the Canadian cops were like, hey, you guys had somebody incarcerated in your prisons to the officials in Oregon who killed at least one girl here, but probably three total.

Speaker 2 You should probably look around at your own files. They started finding,

Speaker 2 I think they've said up to maybe 20 murders that they've pinned on Bobby Jack Fowler. Nothing they can prove, but it's just likely that he committed them.

Speaker 2 And he'll obviously never be convicted or tried for them because he's dead.

Speaker 2 But it just, it goes to show you, like, there are human beings out there who will just kidnap, rape, and murder and just do it over and over again.

Speaker 2 And the easiest thing to do in the world is, if you're going to do that kind of thing, is take advantage of a very vulnerable population in a very sparsely populated area, which makes Highway 16 just like the perfect spot.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's another guy. In fact, he's the only living person convicted of one of these murders from someone on the ePana list.
His name is Gary Taylor Handlin.

Speaker 1 He, you know,

Speaker 1 going back to the 1960s, had committed multiple rapes, been in jail multiple times for these rapes.

Speaker 1 One was a hitchhiker in 1978, and he became a suspect. And the youngest victim, 12-year-old Monica Jack, that you had mentioned earlier,

Speaker 1 and also

Speaker 1 Catherine Mary Herbert, 11 years old, she just was not one of the EPANA cases, but they caught him by setting up a sting operation in which they kind of created this fake crime enterprise where he was answering to an undercover

Speaker 1 cop playing a crime boss who got him to confess that he abducted and strangled Monica Jack. And this is when he also confessed to killing Catherine Mary Herbert.

Speaker 1 But that confession was ruled inadmissible, but he was convicted of Jack's murder in 2019.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I hadn't heard of this, but that's apparently a fairly typical sting operation. They call him a Mr.

Speaker 2 Big operation, where you just introduce to successively higher-up criminals in some organization, but they're all cops.

Speaker 2 The judge was like, no, the admission to or confession to Catherine Mary Herbert's murder, inadmissible, but he thought that he was basically convincing this crime boss to get him out of the, out of being tried or convicted for Monica Jack's murder.

Speaker 2 So they're like, that's totally admissible. He completely volunteered that.
But yeah, I mean, he went down for it.

Speaker 2 But like you said, he's the only living person who's ever been convicted for one of these dozens of murders.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so, you know, we mentioned 2006 is when they stopped officially tagging names onto the official e-panelist.

Speaker 1 There have still been plenty of murders and sexual assaults along that stretch of highway since then.

Speaker 1 Cody Lejebikov, I believe is how you pronounce that. It sounds right.

Speaker 1 Killed three women and a 15-year-old girl between 2009 and 2010. So that was after the official list.

Speaker 1 Two of those victims were indigenous. And the cops caught him when they just pulled him over for a speeding violation and found blood on him.
And they found the body of 15-year-old Lauren Don Leslie.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, realized that they could link him to, and I believe he was convicted too, of killings of three other women, Jill Stacey Stachenko, Cynthia Frances Moss, and Natasha Lynn Montgomery.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and so all three of them were from Prince George, which is the easternmost town considered part of the Highway of Tears.

Speaker 2 And Cody was 19 when he killed the first of them, Jill Stacey Stachenko.

Speaker 2 He's not the youngest serial killer in Canadian history, but he too,

Speaker 2 like the other guys, was a scumbag and still is. He was sentenced to no less than 25 years, four times, but it appears that his sentences are concurrent.
So he's serving 25 years for four murders.

Speaker 2 And the judge reminded him that he could apply for parole as early as 15 years in.

Speaker 2 So that's four years from now that this guy might be able to get out after being convicted of murdering three women and a girl. I don't like that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so you mentioned Florence Nazil earlier having organized her own walk. This was in 2006.

Speaker 1 They call it the Highway of Tears Awareness Walk. And they walked two weeks.
They walked through snowstorms.

Speaker 1 They walked through some terrible weather and conditions and eventually ended at the Highway of Tears Symposium in Prince George.

Speaker 1 And again, this wasn't something organized by the cops or anything. It was organized by Indigenous groups and victims' families.
themselves.

Speaker 1 But they did have 500 delegates from the Mounties there, as well as some representative from the Canadian government there.

Speaker 1 And it was basically a symposium where they had recommendations on what they could do,

Speaker 1 not only to help solve these crimes, but to prevent more of this from happening. We'll get to what's happened since then because they have done some things that seem like they should probably help,

Speaker 1 but also how to support these families, how to support these communities a little better because it was, you know, not well funded and any kind of work was very sparse up until that point.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so Brenda Wilson, Ramona Wilson's sister,

Speaker 2 she works for Caria

Speaker 2 Sakani Family Services and she's the one employee of the Highway of Tears Initiative and she frequently has to work for free because they just are like, we're out of money again.

Speaker 2 Wait till next quarter for the check to come in.

Speaker 2 And obviously she's extremely dedicated, but that's a kind of a par for the course thing. Like just the funding is just not there.

Speaker 2 And if you follow like government funding, it usually goes to stuff that 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 a big slap in the face in addition to, you know, really tying your hands from doing the work you're trying to do.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And, you know, there's a lot of distrust

Speaker 1 for the Mounties there and for good reasons in a lot of cases. We'll see.
There's a woman named Gladys Raddick.

Speaker 1 who was an aunt of Tamara Chipman, one of the victims. And

Speaker 1 she leads a cause cause called Tears for Justice, the number four.

Speaker 1 She has a lot of distrust of the police because as a teenager, she ran away and was hitchhiking and was picked up two different times by RCMP officers who raped her.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 I mean, as far as the RCMP is concerned, they're like, we're going to investigate this stuff and we're going to treat anyone within our ranks.

Speaker 1 who does something like this just like we would any common criminal.

Speaker 1 But the fact that that stuff happens, period, and that they're like a human, there's a Human Rights Watch report that came out in 2012 that documented police abuse against Indigenous women and girls.

Speaker 1 And that's like literal abuse and sexual assault that cops are taking part in

Speaker 1 at the worst, then all the way down to just being hostile or uninterested in what happened to these crime victims and families.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because as the Canadian government has said many times and has recognized and apologized for, Canada's history of how they've treated their Indigenous populations, like putting them in residential schools.

Speaker 2 Apparently, in the 60s, there was a second wave of that kind of thing, but rather than residential schools, they took kids from their family homes and put them in with foster families.

Speaker 2 And so there was a lot of breakup of the culture and families in the Indigenous tribes in the area.

Speaker 2 And as a result, like poverty began, violence really set in,

Speaker 2 deaths of despair, like suicide and alcoholism, and drug overdoses,

Speaker 2 and just

Speaker 2 an inability to take care of themselves. And then you couple that reality with somebody coming to the police and saying, My daughter hasn't come home since Friday.
And they're like, Friday, huh?

Speaker 2 What was she doing last? Well, she went to a party. Then she's probably just on a week-long bender.
Just give her a few days.

Speaker 2 From all the stories I've read, I would say 90% of the families said that that was the first response they got from police.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And not only that, but they've been shown to

Speaker 1 get rid of information. So in 2015, Elizabeth Denham, she is the commissioner for the information and privacy

Speaker 1 for British Columbia. She put out a report that said

Speaker 1 officials removed like 150 emails about the Highway of Tears from their database, which was a violation of the Freedom and Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 Which was obviously didn't foster any further trust with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Speaker 2 And I guess in response in 2018, the commissioner of the Mountains, Brenda Lucky,

Speaker 2 actually issued like a formal heartfelt apology for

Speaker 2 the problems that the families have been facing and the lack of support they've been getting. from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,

Speaker 2 which has been few and far between, but I think when it does, when something like that does happen, it goes a long way.

Speaker 2 And I think the families are kind of like, okay, let's get back to work with the Mounties again.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so what this represents, though, is a larger population seen not only in Canada, but the United States and all over the world, where minority communities are,

Speaker 1 although they represent sometimes a small part of the population, they make up a much larger part of people in prison, of people who are killed by police.

Speaker 1 And that's certainly the case in Canada.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 part of the reason that EPANA has gotten mixed, not only results, but mixed reviews over the year for their work is because they've just been, you know, they came out with a bang and then they've sort of been slowly waning over the years.

Speaker 1 I think they went from 60 assigned officers down to six by 2022.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And there's a guy, a staff sergeant named Wayne Clary who said, you know, we probably aren't going to be able to make any more arrests in these cases.

Speaker 2 That

Speaker 2 most of them are stranger on stranger violence. So there's basically no motive other than to sexually assault and kill.

Speaker 2 It's really hard to track somebody down, especially when you don't have many leads. So we're probably just going to have to get used to the fact that these murders are going to go unsolved.

Speaker 2 But from what I was reading, there's a lot of families who are like, this wasn't a stranger. We know the guy who did it.
He lives over there, and they're not getting listened to.

Speaker 2 And then also there's a report from 2016, an analysis of 32 cases.

Speaker 2 Did you see this part about where the police had said that there was no foul play in these murders of Indigenous women?

Speaker 2 And this analysis is like, that's kind of a weird thing to say because some of them were found nude. Some of them had unexplained injuries.

Speaker 2 In some cases, the coroner contradicted the idea that there was no foul play, and yet they have been logged as no foul play, and therefore they're not being investigated because they're not considered murders.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and you know, along the lines of what I was talking about before, this is not just a Canada problem.

Speaker 1 There's an official name for something like this, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, M-M-I-W-G.

Speaker 1 And that has happened, you know, all over North America and other places in the world.

Speaker 1 There's some estimates that say Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely than the general population to go missing or to be murdered

Speaker 1 in Canada and 10 times more likely in the U.S.

Speaker 1 And there have been people trying to bring attention to this as well.

Speaker 1 There's an artist named Jamie Black who made these really powerful installations that is sometimes the most powerful ones are very simple.

Speaker 1 And that's the case here where they would hang empty red dresses in public places. And it really caught on.
And since 2010,

Speaker 1 Canada has recognized May 5th as Red Dress Day.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Let's take our second break and we'll come back. How about that? All right.

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Speaker 2 Okay, Chuck, so you said the magic word, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. It's a thing.

Speaker 2 And Canada launched an inquiry into that group. And some people in the Highway of Tears community gave testimony for it.
They released a report in 2019.

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 and destitution and engaged in sex work and alcoholism and drug addiction before we Euro-Canadians came along and just completely disrupted their culture.

Speaker 2 So this is actually

Speaker 2 this

Speaker 2 problem of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

Speaker 2 It's part of a larger, bigger picture, a history of being exploited and left vulnerable and not protected by the people who were supposed to protect them. This is not new.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I mean, this is horrific to look at, but

Speaker 1 one of the problems is they found that whenever they have a very large group of only men around in a desolate area for one reason or another,

Speaker 1 sexual assaults and murders happen. And that is the case in these isolated parts of Canada where their fossil fuel industry is.
So

Speaker 1 what'll happen is they'll go to work on a pipeline or something, and they have what's called a man camp with like a thousand dudes on site working out in the middle of nowhere together.

Speaker 1 And historically speaking, not just here, but kind of everywhere this has happened, dating back to the 1800s,

Speaker 1 when this happens,

Speaker 1 there are going to be sexual assaults and murdered and disappeared women and girls nearby.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's reports that show like an actual correlation. Like a man camp shows up, sexual assaults of Indigenous women goes up in the area too.

Speaker 2 And unfortunately, this part of northern British Columbia that the Highway of Tears runs through, that's like the central area for Canada's resource extraction.

Speaker 2 So there are a lot of man camps there and there's plenty more coming. So that in and of itself is a problem.

Speaker 2 And it's not just in Canada. Apparently, North Dakota underwent an oil boom back in the 2000 aughts.

Speaker 2 And as more and more people were brought in as laborers, sexual assault of Indigenous women there went up too, because they're also pretty vulnerable here in the United States as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, this happens everywhere, all over the world, that that is the case.

Speaker 1 It's not just North America.

Speaker 1 They've taken some steps. I mentioned earlier some of the things that they're doing that seem like they would help out.

Speaker 1 One is

Speaker 1 we got to stop people from hitchhiking or at least reduce the rate of hitchhikers.

Speaker 1 They don't have any other way to get around sometimes, like you mentioned. So in 2017, British Columbia Transit

Speaker 1 moved forward on something that came out of that 2006 summit. So 11 years later that launched three new bus routes along Highway 16.

Speaker 1 But that didn't work for very long because that worked in conjunction with Greyhound.

Speaker 1 And just two years after that, and like 5,000 people were now using the service, Greyhound cut back on the routes there because they weren't turning a profit.

Speaker 1 And so all of a sudden, hitchhiking was back on the map again.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And just a lot of people just don't have cars.
And if you do have a car, it's probably being used by somebody else. I remember, what was that movie, Smoke Signals?

Speaker 2 I think they talk about the res car, where it's just like a car everybody just kind of shares and it just gets handed from person to person when you need it.

Speaker 2 So yeah, hitchhiking is going to be a lot more convenient in some cases. Cell phone, you said also cell phone service is a big deal too, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, just not being able to call 911 very simply is a problem. So in 2021, I mean,

Speaker 1 just four years ago, it's astounding that it took this long.

Speaker 1 The provincial and federal governments said, all right, we'll chip in $4.5 million

Speaker 1 out of what will eventually cost $11.5 million total

Speaker 1 to get Rogers Communications to put to get coverage all along this highway with cell phone towers. And I think by the end of last year, the good news is nine of those 11 towers were were up.

Speaker 1 And hopefully soon the entire 450-ish mile stretch, you'll at least be able to call the cops.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and that was a big one of the 231 calls for justice that came out of that symposium in 2015.

Speaker 2 And for, I mean, that's lightning fast if

Speaker 2 like for this kind of stuff that it happened that fast. So just two more to go, everybody.
Let's get it done in 2025.

Speaker 1 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 um there's also like a little bit of a certainly i wouldn't call it a tussle or anything but there's a um a growing kind of disagreement on how to approach this um up to uh basically i guess 2023 the approach was exclusively this is a horrific situation this is tragic this is super sad and it doesn't need to be portrayed any other way

Speaker 2 That's just what it is. And the Carrier Sakani Center, remember, they run the Highway of Tears initiative.
They're like, what if we just kind of alter this a little bit?

Speaker 2 What if we make this more of a hopeful thing?

Speaker 2 For a very long time, there's some famous billboards along the Highway of Tears.

Speaker 2 It had pictures of three of the victims, Ramona, Delphine, and Cecilia, who isn't included in the canonical victims, but she was Delphine's cousin. They went missing within six months of each other.

Speaker 2 And I think Cecilia's never been found again. There are pictures around this billboard, and on the billboard, it said, Girls, don't hitchhike on the highway of tears.
Kill her on the loose.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 that was helpful for years and years and years, but Carrier Sakani is like, you know, there's a way that some people who don't understand our way of hitchhiking, why we do it, could possibly see that as like there's some sort of victim blaming in there.

Speaker 2 So what if we just kind of remove that and make this whole a more hopeful message? And they unveiled, I think, four billboards that kind of change things a little bit, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, they say, we are hope, we are strength, keep Highway 16 safe.

Speaker 1 And, you know, they're obviously critics of that messaging because they're saying, we don't want to say that there's hope because right now, with the way things are going with the Mounties and the investigations, like, there is no hope.

Speaker 1 So why say that if it's not hopeful?

Speaker 2 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I think the billboards coexist. and the critics of that were like, okay, these billboards can coexist.
That's a great billboard. We're fine.
But it was when they proposed, I think,

Speaker 2 yeah, Carrier Sakani proposed, hey,

Speaker 2 let's rename the Highway of Tears officially the Highway of Hope, when activists and

Speaker 2 supporters like Gladys Raddick were like, no, we are definitely not there yet. A lot of these cases are not solved.

Speaker 2 There's not much traction still. Like, that's ridiculous, and we're not going to do that.
But hopefully, someday it will reach that status, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, until then, that's the Highway of Tears.

Speaker 2 Here at Step You Should Know, we say, Rest and peace to all the victims, and we hope peace can come to all their families who have to live with this and the ongoing frustration of not getting the help they need.

Speaker 2 And since I said all that, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 1 I'm gonna call this mushroom fruit,

Speaker 1 And this is from Mike.

Speaker 1 Hey guys, I'm a mushroom farmer from St. Louis and thought I needed to write in and give Josh some bad news listening to the catacombs episode.
The mushroom,

Speaker 1 guys, is the fruit of its organism. I know.
The plant that it is grown from is called mycelium. Furthermore, not all fungi produce fruit, aka mushrooms.

Speaker 1 If you or your family use mushrooms in supplement form, like mushroom powder or something like that, be sure to look for made with fruiting bodies only only on the packaging or something of that nature.

Speaker 1 A lot of manufacturers are using myceliated grain without any mushrooms to make these products. That's like going to the grocery store for apples and leaving with most of an apple tree.

Speaker 1 There's a lot more to that discussion, but at the moment and with the current data, I say that if it advertises mushrooms, then it needs to have mushrooms.

Speaker 1 include I've included some pics of the farm and my fur babies. If you come to St.
Louis, please come to the farm for a tour. And there are some great pictures of these beautiful fruiting mushrooms.

Speaker 1 One terribly lazy, looks like golden, long-haired, golden retriever type, laying with a candy cane lovey. And an awful, terrible tabby cat laying on a box, 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 because I've been studiously avoiding any mushroom supplement that has the word fruiting on it. So maybe I should just bite the bullet.

Speaker 2 You know, I can put a piece of like electrical tape over 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 touch with us and turn my stomach, you can do that. Send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.