Wally Oppal. Q.C.
Today our speaker was Mr Wally Oppal Q.C. who gave a review of the Missing Womans Inquiry that he chaired two years ago.
When we had 26 missing woman they asked the question, was it foul play?
Perhaps they are just missing? In 1991 there was no real conclusion.
Maybe they were subject to violence?
By 1995 the numbers were increased and 3 women went missing from Agassiz.
They were known to have been in the sex trade but a missing persons unit was established. This was wholly inadequate.
It is no crime to go missing, people do it all the time and with no body on their hands there was no money released for an investigation. There was some investigation done but with multiple police forces involved there was no overall coordination.
In 1996, 3 or 4 more women went missing so the Vancouver police stepped up their patrols, which had the effect of driving the sex workers further away from safety making them more vulnerable. In 1997 a woman turned up in emergency with multiple stab wounds, as did Robert Picton.
They charged him with attempted murder but because she turned up high on drugs for the interviews they dropped the charges as they felt she was unreliable.
They didn’t bother to investigate him any further.
They didn’t even bother going to his farm.
12 more women went missing.
In 1998 Crime Stoppers received a tip off it was Picton and still they did nothing.
A killer profiler was brought in and he wrote a report that said maybe they were dealing with a serial killer.
It fits all the patterns.
A task force was formed in 2001.
A weapons search was performed on the Picton farm.
Guns were found and also a prescription with a missing woman’s name on it.
Then the digging started.
Wally was asked to form the Missing Woman’s Enquiry.
It lasted 97 days. They heard from hundreds of witnesses.
They took two tours of the Hwy of tears in the North. Hwy 16.
The conclusion of the report was that there was little interest paid to the missing woman’s reports because of their background of sex trade workers and drug users.
The blame was laid at the feet of the police and the general public.
The media did a good job of keeping the stories in front of the public. The public were fairly dismissive. We really didn’t care.
The Vancouver police did apologize afterwards. So did the RCMP. But not as well.
The politicians need to hold the police to account.
We have little corruption in our police force and we have very conscientious police officers but there was not enough funding from the senior police officers for this case.
There was no body and so no funding.
There is a lot of interest today.
The commission cost 10 million dollars but it was well worth it.
We as a society needed it as a therapeutic release.
200 million was spent just digging out the Picton farm.
The there was the case against Robert Picton. He was eventullay conviced of 49 murders and is in for life. He probably commited at least twice that amount.
Wally was thanked by President Davinder.