I’ve always been drawn to the stories nobody wants to tell. The ones that make people shift uncomfortably in their seats at dinner parties. (“Oh, Carrie’s talking about dismemberment again. Pass the potatoes?”) But some stories deserve to make us uncomfortable – like the women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside who vanished while an entire system shrugged.
You’ve probably heard of Robert Pickton. The pig farmer. The monster. The man who claimed to have killed 49 women. But how many victims can you actually name?
That’s what I thought.
The Women Behind the Headlines
These weren’t just “prostitutes” or “drug addicts” or whatever dismissive label made it easier for society to look away. They were daughters, mothers, sisters, and friends with lives that mattered long before they became entries in a police report.
Take Georgina Faith Papin. She was a mother of seven with a contagious laugh who loved dancing. Her sister once described her as someone who “lit up the room.” She wasn’t just victim #9 on some prosecutor’s list – she was a woman with dreams, flaws, and a family who still grieves her loss decades later.
I watched interviews with the families who shared their grief publicly, and honestly? I ugly-cried through most of them. The raw pain in their voices when describing how authorities dismissed their missing persons reports is absolutely gutting.
The System That Failed Them
Let’s be brutally honest here. If 60+ women had disappeared from Vancouver’s wealthy West Side neighborhoods, the response would’ve been swift and massive. But these women? They existed at the intersection of every marginalized identity possible.
Many were Indigenous women, already facing the devastating legacy of colonization and systemic racism. Add in poverty, addiction struggles, and involvement in sex work, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for police indifference. (Nothing says “low priority” to law enforcement like checking all the boxes on society’s “disposable people” checklist.)
The police response was about as effective as using a paper towel to stop a tsunami. Reports were filed and promptly forgotten. Concerns were dismissed with a “she’ll turn up” attitude that feels physically painful to even type out.
Indigenous women in particular faced a double burden of dismissal. The disproportionate violence against Aboriginal women has been so severe that some scholars have characterized it as a form of genocide – a targeted elimination of a specific group.
The Downtown Eastside: A Perfect Hunting Ground
Picture this: a neighborhood with rampant poverty, widespread addiction issues, and a transient population where people coming and going wasn’t unusual. For a predator like Pickton, it was basically a buffet with the staff on permanent break.
The Downtown Eastside in the 1990s was Canada’s poorest postal code. Women there faced violence as a daily reality – not the theoretical kind we discuss in university seminars, but the “I might not survive tonight” kind that most of us have the privilege of never experiencing.
Ryan (my husband, who tolerates my murder obsessions with the patience of a saint) once asked why I keep returning to this case. “Because it could have been stopped,” I told him. “Because dozens of women died while everyone who should have protected them looked the other way.”
The Legacy and Lessons
What haunts me most about the Pickton case isn’t just the horror of what happened on that farm. It’s how easily preventable it all was. How many red flags were ignored. How many women’s lives might have been saved if someone – anyone – in authority had just given a damn.
The families of these women continue fighting for justice and recognition. Many have become powerful advocates, transforming their grief into action by pushing for changes in how missing persons cases are handled, especially for marginalized individuals.
When I think about these women, I don’t want to remember them as victims. I want to remember Georgina’s laugh. Sereena Abotsway’s kindness to other women on the streets. Andrea Joesbury’s dreams of getting clean and rebuilding her life.
They were more than the worst thing that happened to them. They were human beings who deserved protection, justice, and at the very least, to be remembered by name.
And if reading this makes you uncomfortable? Good. It should. Because comfort is what allowed this to happen in the first place.