Indigenous women in Canada have always been vulnerable, but there’s a stretch of remote road that’s such a hotspot for disappearances, assaults, and murders of women that it’s been called the Highway of Tears. And not much has been done to change that.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the Highway of Tears?
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. The man, this is a bummer edition.
Yeah, the Zero Laughs edition, because we're talking about the Highway of Tears. And there's no other way around it. This is just a devastating topic.
Chapter 2: Why is the Highway of Tears notorious?
Yeah, we should tell people. I mean, the Highway of Tears is fairly famous. It's kind of been in the news and in pop culture, I guess, for a while. 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 in British Columbia, up in Canada, from 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. 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.
And it's endemic in this area so much so that it's caught national attention just how poorly this group of women are being treated and their families as well.
Yeah, it's, you know, as you'll see, it's and, you know, there are many reasons for this, but it's a heavily hitchhiked road and that can be very dangerous. And so a lot of times these are hitchhikers, people just trying to get from one place to another. And like you said, they are, you know, either sexually assaulted or murdered or both.
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. So, you know, it's no secret why it's called the Highway of Tears. Big thanks to Livia for enduring 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.
Yeah, there's a lot of good sources. The CBC, the Vancouver Sun's a good one. There's been a decent amount of coverage, but it's not the kind of coverage you would get when, say, 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 –
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Chapter 3: What efforts have been made to address the Highway of Tears murders?
basically left on their own to deal with something like this, that they have, they don't have the resources to deal with this. And it's just such a terrible story. The story is so much larger than this collection of murders. But at the core, that's what it comes down to, just women who were treated like disposable beings.
And the whole thing starts at the very earliest, as far as anyone knows, the first murder that's become part of what you call the canon of the Highway of Tears murders and abductions. Started in 1969, a woman named Lavinia Gloria Moody was murdered on Highway 16. And it went... Kind of went along like that for a while.
But no one had kind of put together this whole group of people and called it the Highway of Tears, and they wouldn't for years to come. But at the time, there was enough going on that they had coined this term the Highway Murders.
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 they could solve some of these unsolved cases.
Yes, absolutely. While this was going on, 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. And, you know, they organized their own efforts.
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. She was 16 years old, and she went to go meet up with a friend to go to some, you know, 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.
And so the locals got together and they started organizing. They started doing, you know, going on search parties and and looking out for her. They ultimately, you know, very sadly discovered her body about 10 months later at an airport. Her clothes were found near her with some rope and some cabling.
And so her mom and her older sister, Brenda, and, you know, other members of her family in 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. So they got a memorial walk together in June of 95, which became an annual thing.
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Chapter 4: Who are some of the victims of the Highway of Tears?
Yeah, there was another woman who really deserves a lot of credit for bringing national attention to this. She's a Wet'suwet'en Nation woman. And in 1998, there was a vigil where she coined the term Highway of Tears, which I don't think you can really calculate how much that helped this case. It was like, hey, media, here's a nice little tidy package for you to report on.
It's even got a catchy name. Despite, you know, the actual obvious emotion behind calling it the Highway of Tears, I think it really helped quite a bit. And Florence Nazeel also is credited with starting a walk that covered the entire, again, 450-mile stretch of the Highway of Tears for the first time. That walk's been made…
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 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.
Yeah, absolutely. 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. 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.
And that was after at least 12 years since the first known murder. And it took all the way into the 2000s. um, for things to really take a turn. And that was, uh, when, uh, very tragically a woman named Nicole, uh, Hoer, um, was killed. She was 25 years old and she was white. Uh, she disappeared in 2002, uh, And this is what really brought the national attention.
You've heard a journalist named Gwen Ifill in the United States coined the term missing white woman syndrome, which is the idea that it takes a white person to be, you know, 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, and 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.
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. 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. And that's not just anecdotal. I was reading at least one 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. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What is Project E-PANA?
And she was discovered close to Highway 16. So that's when they came up with their criteria to see if they could sort of narrow this down, right?
Yeah, and just one thing, Roxanne and Alicia, who also went by Leah, they were friends and also colleagues. They both were sex workers who were engaged in survival sex. Ramona, who was not engaged in anything like that, I think she worked at a restaurant or something, but Ramona, Roxanne, and Leah...
All were murdered in the same area between, 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. 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.
It's like, there's some real commonalities here. They need to be investigated. Right. But like you were saying, those three criteria that they came up with from this ePANA project, you had to be female, you had to last be seen dead or alive within a mile of Highway 16, and then you also had to be involved in high-risk activities like sex work, but also hitchhiking.
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. 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? 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 like they that was just part of daily life for them, unfortunately.
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. 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. Her body was found about a month after her disappearance.
Delphine Nicol was 16 years old, disappeared in 1990 while hitchhiking. Lana Derrick, a 19-year-old college student, disappeared in October of 95. We mentioned Tamara Chipman. That was the relative of Florence and Azil. She was 22. And the mother of a two-year-old boy 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.
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Chapter 6: Who are the known perpetrators associated with the Highway of Tears?
And we'll have plenty of other fun surprises and trivia, too.
Oh, and me? Well, I'm the lucky ghost crew stowaway who gets to help moderate and guide the discussion each week. Kind of like how Kanan guided Ezra in the Ways of the Force. You see what I did there?
Nicely done, John. Thanks, Tia. So, hang on, because it's going to be a fun ride.
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