And so it's finally over. So many years after they went missing, were murdered by a monster, and all but traces of them destroyed.
The police have apologized, again, for not catching the killer sooner.
And an inquiry has told us what we already knew.
I'm glad the inquiry into the case of Vancouver's missing women has finally begun.
But this makes me so angry.
Because it only makes worse the ugly truth at the heart of this tragedy.
The fact that the killing went on for so long because city officials and the police didn't care enough about the missing women, because they were aboriginal, poor, and marginalized.
So their voices, and the voices of those who loved them, fell on deaf ears.
Women like the beautiful and gentle Sarah de Vries were treated as less than human...
And went like lambs to the slaughter.
Robert Pickton was the bestial murderer, but as I once wrote, indifference was his accomplice, and that was the other horror of the pig farm massacre.
Yes. The ugly truth was known long before this inquiry even started. But it can't be repeated enough.
And ALL voices must be heard.
So the whole country can hear the message.
So those poor murdered women can finally rest in peace.
So it never happens again...
I didn't know what to think when I heard that Robert Pickton would not be tried for the murder of twenty other women he was accused of killing.
On the one hand I was glad that we would be spared from hearing more ghastly stories about what went on at that blood soaked pig farm. On the other hand I didn't want the families and friends of the dead women to feel that they had been denied justice. Again.
But now that a publication ban has been lifted, and I've heard some of the things the jury never did.
There was a tremendous amount of damning evidence against Robert (Willie) Pickton that the jurors deciding his fate did not hear during his year-long trial in 2007, including an allegation from a sex-trade worker that he nearly stabbed her to death.
One thing I'm absolutely sure about is that if this case is ever going to have closure we need a public inquiry.
Now that the legal wrangling is over, there is a bigger question to confront: how did the Port Coquitlam pig farmer manage to lure vulnerable women – many of them prostitutes from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside – to their deaths for 14 years before police arrested him?
Not just to look at what went wrong, but WHY?
Because this isn't just a crime story. Or the story of a sick monster. It's also the story of the powerful and the powerless, and the desperately poor people of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.
And as I once wrote, after watching the sad story of Sarah de Vries...
The other horror was indifference.
Yup. As I said three years ago, for Sarah, for all the other women, for those who loved them, for the sake of all of us, we need a public inquiry.
So we can send out a message to anyone who still doesn't get it: ALL lives are precious. And ALL Canadians are equal.
So some good might come of this horrible tragedy.
So it never happens again...
