In a remote and eerily beautiful region of British Columbia,
dozens of women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered. The only
connection between most of these unsolved cases is that they happened along a
desolate road the locals now call the Highway of Tears.
For my latest feature in OutsideMagazine, I traveled up and down this road, which is also known as Highway
16, visiting crime scenes and interviewing victims’ families, private investigators,
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and members of the First Nations tribes and
other locals that live in the tiny villages and small mill towns scattered
along the way.
I was drawn into the story for Outside when I heard of a young woman, Madison Scott, who’d gone
missing from her campsite last spring. A large-scale search was underway, and
media attention often helps solve these kinds of cases, ideally with the
missing person safely returned to their family. (Tragically, though, Maddy, has
now been missing for more than a full year. Please visit www.madisonscott.ca
for information on search efforts, and contact the RCMP if you have any
information. There is a C$100,000 reward for information that leads to solving the case).
Investigating Maddy’s story put me on Highway 16, which you
soon discover has a long and terrible history with as many as 43 women and
girls from this stretch of BC either found murdered or gone missing and never
been found. There’s even a special unit of the RCMP dedicated to figuring out
whether a serial killer is on the loose along this lonely, misty road. They’ve
concluded that 18 of the cases (Madison Scott is not one of them) share enough
similarities to possibly be linked.
The deeper I got into the story, the more complicated it
became, and the more I found people who were frightened of what was happening
in their isolated, rural communities. The fact that none of the cases on the
RCMP’s official list has been solved only feeds the fear and the conspiracy
theories that run rampant in some of these small towns.
After three trips into BC to investigate, I turned in my
story. I’d found that another young woman from the same town where Maddy grew
up had recently been killed, but unlike the other cases, there’d actually been
an arrest. It seemed tangential to the main story because the suspect, Cody
Legebokoff, knew his victim.
Still, I mentioned it as supporting a theory that
maybe there wasn’t a serial killer involved in many of these cases after all,
that maybe the murders were more horribly mundane, and it was just that the
vast wilds of British Columbia made it easy to hide evidence of the crimes –
that Highway 16 simply offers a convenient artery for creeps, date rapists,
domestic abusers and other assholes who wind up killing women and ditching
their bodies far along the countless lonely logging roads that branch off the
highway. A passage I wrote about this, which was cut from the final story,
reads like this:
“So if something snaps inside, if bad mommy drank and didn’t
hug you enough, if the devil personally tells you he needs help, if somebody
touched you wrong and crossed the wires in your dirty little mind so now you
really need to hurt somebody… then Highway 16 can be your friend.”
The day I turned in my story, the RCMP announced that they
were charging 20-year-old Cody Legebokoff with three more murders. I yanked the
story back from the editors for the first of what would be two rewrites – the second
because of another horrific murder that happened while I was doing my research.
If the charges against
Legebokoff are proved in court this summer, then there was indeed a serial
killer preying on women in that part of British Columbia. However, as you’ll
read in the story, which is on newsstands now, what’s even more frightening is that his arrest does nothing
to solve all the other cases.
