PRINCE GEORGE, B.C.—Matilda Wilson still cries almost every day and has nightmares most nights over the death of her daughter Ramona.
Ramona, 16, was missing for 10 months until an anonymous phone call to police in April 1995 told investigators to look for her body behind the Smithers, B.C., airport. The caller has never been identified, no killer has ever been caught.
Still, Wilson believes that she is more fortunate than many others that she has come to know over the last 16 years.
“I’ve lost a child and there’s hardly a day when I don’t cry but I’m lucky,” said Wilson. “So many other parents, mothers and sisters out there never know what happened to their loved ones. Their murdered daughters or sisters have just vanished into thin air.”
The Missing Women’s Commission of Inquiry was ordered by the B.C. government after public concerns were raised over the police investigation into serial killer Robert Pickton, who was convicted in 2007 on six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Families of missing women and victims of Pickton have long believed that police acted too little, too late; in some cases, especially among missing women from northern communities, some relatives have stated that racism have played a factor in investigations.
The inquiry held a forum in Prince George Friday in the heart of what has been called the Highway of Tears, a stretch of more than 700 kms of highway that runs through the northern communities.
Over the last four decades, at least 18 women — many of them native — have gone missing or been murdered along the highway.
“The question needs to be asked about what role did ethnicity and gender play to finally have this commission struck up,” said Preston Guno, a youth advocate for the Aboriginal Youth Network. “Why did it take so many missing and murdered women before anything happened?”
Guno and many others in northern communities want a separate inquiry held to deal specifically with the missing women in northern communities.
Chief Jackie Thomas with the Saik’uz First Nation said the inquiry’s mandate of looking at police investigations between 1997 and 2002 is too narrow.
“We have decades and decades of issues,” said Thomas. “Like many others, I don’t have confidence in the RCMP.” The inquiry’s commissioner, Wally Oppal, a former Court of Appeal judge and a former attorney general in B.C., said he understands the emotions and anger in the community.
“These people have lost loved ones. If you lose a daughter and nothing’s been done, maybe you have reason to be angry,” Oppal said. “Someone out there knows what happened to these women.”
The final report is due by the end of 2011.
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