MORE TEARS ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF TEARS

Very sad to hear of the passing of a friend I met while reporting on Canada's Highway of Tears.

Ray Michalko was a former RCMP officer who quit the force after getting transferred to Vancouver where the style of policing was a little too genteel for his tastes.

In The Vanishing, this is how I described meeting Ray for the first time:

I met Michalko one morning at an east side Vancouver coffeehouse. At six-two, 240 pounds, with arms that take up more than his share of the table, Michalko, 64, still looks like he could handle himself in the Manitoba mining-town bar brawls where he cut his teeth as a Mountie. 

Michalko left the force after he was transferred to Vancouver, where they expect their cops to be more refined. “If somebody in Manitoba told you to fuck off,” he says, “you flattened him, and there was no flap. Here, it was a lot different.” 

After leaving the RCMP, Ray hung up his shingle as a private investigator. He mainly did insurance work, the bread and butter of any private dick, staking out deadbeats trying to scam disability insurance and snapping pictures of them moving refrigerators and playing golf. 

When a string of murders and disappearances of women and girls along Highway 16 reached into the double digits and started hitting the news, Ray was pissed that the cops weren't solving any of the cases. His wife Shirley finally got tired of Ray yelling at the TV every time the story appeared, so she told him to put up or shut up. 

From that moment on, Ray spent most of his free time working on the Highway of Tears. He worked pro bono, in one case taking a single Loonie from one victim's sister in exchange for the hundreds of hours and thousands of miles he put in trying to solve the murder. 

I spent quite a bit of time with Ray up in BC, visiting with victims' families, tracking down leads and potential suspects, visiting crime scenes, working on a TV crime show together, and even once meeting up in a secluded owl sanctuary like a couple of Cold War spies so he could hand off some documents.

Ray was a great story teller, and finally wrote a book about his experiences and his battles with the RCMP, "Obstruction of Justice: The Search for Truth on Canada's Highway of Tears." The title recalls the threats made against Ray by the RCMP after they told him to back off and he told them the same thing he used to flatten Manitoba morons for saying.

I never saw Ray dressed in anything except black. He liked the cloak and dagger stuff and the tough guy pose (even though he told me he actually based his investigative technique  on Detective Columbo's strategic bumbling). He was a genuine tough guy, but even more so he cared. He cared that justice wasn't being served and he cared, especially, when he saw First Nations victims marginalized and maligned. 

The Ray I watched stalking the back streets of Prince George and the trailer park reservations squatting along 16 to follow yet another faint cold-case clue in the hope of bringing closure to a family who felt forgotten by the authorities was the real Ray. 

He was a good man with big arms and a bigger heart who will be dearly missed.

My thoughts are with his family and the communities along the Highway of Tears who've lost one of their greatest friends and champions.     

HIGHWAY OF TEARS UPDATE

After years of a whole lot of nothing happening to improve conditions along a deadly stretch of Canada’s Yellowhead Highway, aka “16,” and notoriously known as The Highway of Tears, it looks like there’s finally some governmental action.

Depending on whose figures you go with—the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the First Nations’ officials and activists—there have been between 18 and 100-or-so women and girls gone missing or found dead along the 450-mile length of Highway 16 between Prince George and its western terminus at Prince Rupert.

(For full background on the chilling story and the factors that make this lonely road through British Columbia so dangerous, see my Outside magazine piece The Vanishing )

Multiple Canadian inquiries about the disappearances going back more than three years have come up with obvious common-sense solutions to mitigate some of the most important risk factors for women traveling the highway, especially financially strapped First Nations women without their own means of transportation. Now, finally, after the recent change of Canadian federal government and an email scandal related to the issue in the BC Transportation Ministry, comes concrete action in the form of a few Loonies (Canadian dollars) earmarked for the Highway 16 improvements.

Women forced to hitchhike along the highway to get to jobs, visit relatives, collect government checks or just go anywhere have always had among the highest risk of abduction. The lack of convenient, affordable public transport for the economically struggling First Nations people of Northern BC was the glaring problem with the simplest solution. Not that simple means easy. It’s a long highway, and a couple big buses running the road each day wouldn’t solve the problem for people who live in such small, scattered communities.  

What’s needed is a tribal transportation system where each of the settlements could have access to its own vans or buses in addition to better access to the province’s regular bus system, BC Transit. And that’s what’s finally happening.

According the CBC, of the $3 million (CAD) that will be spent on a new Highway 16 safety program, about half will go to “extend and enhance” BC Transit so it can better serve these communities. More importantly, $900,000 will be spent over three years to buy vans and to train drivers for provide transport for the most remote First Nations settlements.

Another $500,000 will go toward installing transit shelters and webcams along the highway.

For those following the story of 20-year-old Madison Scott’s tragic disappearance covered in The Vanishing, unfortunately there have been no promising leads. Family, friends, and members of her community in Vanderhoof, BC, continue to search and to hope.