Rebecca Guno, a drug addict and prostitute, vanished from Vancouver's downtown eastside in June 1983. Her name was the first of 61 that would eventually be placed on the list of women to disappear mysteriously from the drug-infested area over the two decades that followed.
It wasn't until 19 years later, early in 2002, that charges were laid in any of the cases. The charges came not long after police focused their efforts on a farm in Port Coquitlam, outside Vancouver.
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Families of the missing women have accused Vancouver police of mishandling the investigation from the beginning by ignoring evidence that a serial killer was at work. The RCMP became involved in 2001.
The families also say police neglected the cases because many of the women were prostitutes and drug addicts.
It wasn't until August of 2001 that Vancouver police began hinting that a serial killer could be responsible for the disappearance of the missing women. At the time 31 women had vanished, but four had been accounted for and two of those were confirmed dead.
Dr. Elliott Leyton, an anthropology professor at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland, who wrote a book on serial killers called Hunting Humans, says that police are rightly reluctant to identify serial murders because public panic often follows.
"Responsible people have to be careful about making wild pronouncements about possible serial killers," Leyton says. "And when we are not sure if it is true, then it is inappropriate to throw people into a state of panic. Prostitution is a very dangerous profession and many of the people in it are wanderers and not well-connected to any conventional system of government controls or social services. So they can drift away from the system without being noticed for a very long time, even when nothing may have actually happened to them."
