Ben Nelms / Reuters, file

Women whose daughters are part of a missing women's inquiry in Canada cry during discussion of a report, titled 'Forsaken,' that examines the mishandling of the Robert Pickton serial killer case.

Sarah de Vries started running away when she was 13, in 1983. She lived in cheap apartments and grim hotels in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia -- places that would let a teenager turn tricks. Later, she got hooked on heroin.

Sarah's big sister, Maggie, remembers a bubbly, adorable baby. But life was not always easy. Of mixed race, with some black and aboriginal ancestry, Sarah was targeted by racist bullies, and sometimes felt disconnected from her white adoptive family.

In 1995, she wrote about how many women were missing from her neighborhood, Vancouver's rough Downtown Eastside.

"Am I next? Is he watching me now?" she wrote in a journal her sister published years later, after Sarah, too, disappeared. "Stalking me like a predator and its prey. Waiting, waiting for some perfect spot, time or my stupid mistake."

We know now that the Downtown Eastside was where serial killer Robert Pickton found his victims, picking up sex workers, killing them, and disposing of their bodies on his pig farm.

Investigators charged him with 26 murders, but only six counts went to trial. Found guilty in 2007, Pickton was jailed for life, the toughest sentence possible in Canada, which has no death penalty.

Vancouver police now admit they made mistakes probing the murders, and a public inquiry report released last month, titled "Forsaken," highlighted a "systemic bias" against the victims, paired with public indifference.

'Compelling information'
When Sarah de Vries went missing in 1998, her disappearance was one of many unsolved cases in the Downtown Eastside.

Vancouver police believed there had been an increase in disappearances but were unsure why. Some officers recognized a serial killer at work, but others clung to the idea that the women had just moved and did not want to be found.

A Vancouver police review from 2010 said the case was clear only in hindsight. But it also found that even in 1998 and 1999, police had "compelling information" pointing to Pickton: tales of bloody clothes and of a woman's body suspended in his barn.

Andy Clark / Reuters -- file

A supporter lights candles surrounding photos of murdered women outside the Missing Women's Commission of Inquiry in Vancouver, British Columbia on Dec. 17.

Pickton agreed to a search in 2000, but it was never done, and he was caught in 2002 only because of a separate weapons probe. DNA linked him to 33 of the Downtown Eastside's more than 60 missing women, including Sarah de Vries.

Vancouver police, who say they have made changes since 2002, have apologized: "We could have, and we should have, caught Pickton sooner," Chief Constable Jim Chu said in December.

Pickton's farm was in an area that is under the jurisdiction of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who have said they will study the inquiry report. They declined to comment on the case.

Canada is still wrestling with what the Pickton case means. It prompted questions about the fate of scores of other missing and murdered women, and in the years since Pickton's 2002 arrest, police have set up new task forces to investigate some of the disappearances.

One of these is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Project E-Pana, which was asked to determine whether one or more serial killers had stalked young women along British Columbia's highways.

'Highway of Tears'
In northern British Columbia, so many women, many of them aboriginal, have gone missing along Highway 16 that their families call it the "Highway of Tears." Those cases, along with disappearances near two other highways in the province, are Project E-Pana's focus. The 18 cases it is dealing with date from 1969 to 2006.

But E-Pana, which police say they named for an Inuit goddess who cares for the dead, has not cracked any of the cases along Highway 16.

Gladys Radek, who grew up in northern British Columbia, said she has known about the disappearances since she was a girl. In 2005, her niece, 22-year-old Tamara Chipman, went missing.

"The RCMP have always been in denial that there is a Highway of Tears," she said.

Among Canada's major provinces, British Columbia has the lowest clearance rate -- 49 percent of the murders are unsolved, compared with 39 percent nationally -- perhaps because of the Highway of Tears and Downtown Eastside cases that remain open.

Aboriginal women are disproportionately likely to be murdered in Canada, and they were overrepresented among Pickton's suspected victims.

Wally Oppal, whose inquiry produced the "Forsaken" report, recommended that British Columbia's government replace the patchwork of police jurisdictions in the Vancouver area with a regional force. He said geographic isolation, poor transit and poverty in the north of the province have put women and girls at particular risk.

The matter is urgent, he wrote: "Serial predators are committing violence today; that is an inescapable fact."

Sled dogs rest after returning from a tour run by Outdoor Adventures in the Soo Valley north of Whistler, British Columbia, Canada in 2011.

The government of British Columbia, Canada has published new regulations governing the handling of sled dogs — a move prompted by a grisly 2010 case in which a tourism company near Whistler killed as many as 100 animals that became "surplus" amid slumping business.

The Sled Dog Code of Practice is a step — a small one, according to critics — toward addressing problems in competitive and entertainment dog sledding that is mostly unseen.

"The problem with this whole issue is these (breeding and training) operations are out of the public eye," said Debra Probert, executive director of the Vancouver Humane Society. "People see the dogs in public, but they don’t see what goes on behind the scenes."

The sled dog slaughter came to light only when one of the employees of Howling Dog Tours Whistler Ltd. who were charged with killing the dogs by shooting them and slitting their throats applied for compensation from the Workers’ Compensation Board of British Columbia because he said he was suffering trauma from the task. The WorkSafeBC document explaining the decision to approve the compensation was leaked, making incident public in gruesome detail.

Animal rights critics have long criticized major dog sled races — especially the 1,100-mile Iditarod across Alaska, which begins March 3. Mushers are adamant that dogs love the work, that they are bred to do it, and that no one loves the dogs more than they do. But critics say pushing the dogs to run 100 miles a day for two weeks is brutal. One or more dogs die in the race nearly every year, despite the volunteer veterinarians who attend to the animals.

The new British Columbia regulations are primarily focused on the breeding, training, transportation and euthanizing of the animals. They spell out requirements for pens and tethers, exercise, socializing, grooming and nail care. And they say that euthanizing should not be a means of culling or population control.

The standards disappointed some animal advocates, including the Vancouver Humane Society, which had advocated banning sled dog racing.

And some were outraged that the regulations spell out how sled dog owners should euthanize dogs if they cannot race anymore and can't be placed in a new home. A diagram illustrates the proper way to position a gun at a dog’s head to ensure a clean kill.

The Humane Society's Probert said that in any case the regulations and standards “have no teeth” because no resources were allotted for their enforcement.

Nonetheless, the British Columbia regulations move the province ahead of other Canadian jurisdictions, where no specific regulations exist.

Within the United States, Alaska currently has among the weakest legal protections for animals, with only a few lines in state law that require "minimum conditions" for "adequate" nutrition and care.  

Just last month, an Alaska court found a sled dog breeder guilty of cruelty to animals after local authorities found 19 dead dogs and 168 more severely malnourished at his operation in Willow. Frank Rich was sentenced to 180 days in jail after pleading guilty to two counts of animal cruelty.

A task force has just started formulating standards to elaborate on the law.

"The challenge is to make them broad enough to encompass all sorts of dog lifestyles," including athletes like sled dogs, said Jay Fuller, veterinarian for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. "We’d like to make clear standards for what is acceptable." 

There is no question of barring dog sledding, which is protected by state law, he said.

“Any regulations we adopt have to be consistent with state law, and the law says (the competitions) are OK,” Fuller said.

"What I hope is that there will be a universal standard of care for all dogs," said Maureen O’Nell, executive director of the Alaska Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals, who is taking part in the meetings. She said that sled dogs are a particularly sensitive case, and some would like to create special rules for them.

"The mushers are a strong community and I think there has been hesitation to what might somehow be perceived as anti-mushing,” she said.

After the dog slaughter case in British Columbia, which emerged shortly after Whistler hosted the 2010 Winter Olympics, the dog sledding business took a hit.

"When the incident occurred … it was a black eye not only for dog sledding but for Whistler," said Craig Beattie, general manager of Canadian Snowmobile, a Whistler company that provides outdoor adventures, including dogsledding tours. In order to reassure customers, he opened up his company's kennels to them and promised them full refunds if they felt there was anything amiss.

He said the standards mandated by the government were already in place for their sled dogs, and he said he hopes they will be enforced elsewhere.

"I think it will be way better for the animals, and for the people," said Beattie. "Obviously, the negativity will decrease toward the dog sledding."

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