HIGHWAY OF TEARS TV

British Columbia's tragic tale of missing and murdered women along its "Highway of Tears" is getting its highest profile attention this Saturday when CBS 48 Hours airs a full hour on the story.

I've been working with the CBS team on this ever since my article on the highway, The Vanishing, appeared in Outside Magazine last summer. It's a tough topic with a lot of sadness and anger, especially since none of the cases had been solved, leading to a lot of frustration among the victims' families and their communities.

Remarkably, during the filming of the show there was a huge break in the case. It doesn't solve everything, but it's a big step and offers a lot of hope to the many families still waiting for answers.

Here's a sneak peek at the beginning of the show, which will air on CBS this Saturday, November 17, at 10 PM.

 

Major Success in Highway of Tears Serial Killer Case

Bobby Jack Fowler circa 1972

Good police work by the persistent Mounties in the Vancouver forensics lab resulted in the oldest DNA offender hit in INTERPOL history and the solving of a terrible crime that happened nearly 40 years ago.

According to RCMP Inspector Gary Shinkaruk who heads the Special Projects Unit in Northern British Columbia, in July of 2007, technicians were able to sequence DNA from evidence found with the body of 16-year-old Colleen MacMillen who’d been murdered and dumped on a logging road back in 1974.

The results, though, didn’t match any of the DNA profiles in the Canadian databases. Early this year, they decided to try again, this time using a more advanced sequencing technology that allowed them to run the profile with INTERPOL (the international organization which connects police forces from 190 countries, allowing them to cooperate on investigations). Interpol, in turn, ran the profile with the FBI’s CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), which connects samples from federal, state and local US police forces. And that’s when bells started ringing.

Down in Oregon, they had the DNA profile of a monster named Bobby Jack Fowler. Fowler was a rapist, kidnapper, arsonist, alcoholic bar-brawler, and all-around asshole who drifted from state to state and up into Canada working as a roofer and at other blue collar jobs. He was serving time in an Oregon prison for rape and kidnapping when, in 2006, lung cancer cheated the lethal-injection needle Fowler might have gotten if Oregon prosecutors could nail him for as many as seven murders – including four teenage girls –they now believe he committed.

Fowler’s history of violent sexual attacks, his MO of hunting female hitchhikers (all four of the Oregon girls were taken from roadsides), and his timeline that puts him in Canada in the 1970s – and of course now the evidence that he killed 16-year-old Colleen MacMillen – has the RCMP’s E-Pana Unit looking at him as the lead suspect in at least two more of their Highway of Tears cases – and there are another seven where he hasn’t yet been ruled out as the killer.

The two cases they believe show strong links to Fowler are the murders of Pamela Darlington and Gale Weys, both 19 years old when they were last seen hitchhiking along one of BC’s desolate, rural highways. In November 1973, Darlington was beaten to death and later found at a park near Thompson River, partially clothed with bite marks on her body. At the time, a train crew passing through Kamloops noticed a man in a 1950s Chrysler driving suspiciously, trying to race the train to first one then another crossing. Fowler, police say, is known to have preferred old cars, beaters, that sources report he drove until they died.

Gale Weys was last seen at 9:30PM on an October night in 1973 when she left her job at a service station and walked out to the road to hitchhike home to her parents’ house in Kamloops, BC. Her nude, decomposed body wasn’t found until a year later.

Fowler was arrested in 1995 when he beat a woman and attempted to tie her up after telling her that he knew women liked to get raped. She escaped by jumping naked from a motel room’s second story window. Fowler died in jail at age 66 while serving time for those charges.

With two 19-year-old girls taken within a month in 1973... then Colleen MacMillen murdered less than a year later... And four Oregon teenagers in the 1990s… These crimes could just be the beginning of the horrific story of Bobby Jack Fowler.  

Seeing as serial killers are usually at their most prolific during their 20s and 30s, and Oregon investigators convinced that this sadistic psychopath was still murdering girls in his mid-50s, you have to assume that there are an awful number of cold cases going back to at least 1960 that police across the U.S. and Canada will be reviewing very closely to see if there are any links to Bobby Jack Fowler. 

      

American Named in Highway of Tears Serial Killer Case

Bobby Jack Fowler, an Oregon man who died in prison in 2006 while serving a 16-year sentence for kidnapping and attempted rape, was named as the killer behind a nearly 40-year-old cold case that's part of British Columbia's infamous Highway of Tears.

In August 1974, 16-year-old Colleen MacMillen left her home in Northern BC to go to a girlfriend's house. She walked out to the main road and stuck out her thumb -- hitchhiking is still a common way for young people to get around the rural area where she lived, and was even more common back in the 70's.

When Colleen was late getting home, her parents began searching for her. It wasn't until September, though, that her body was found ditched on a logging road.

Colleen's murder is just one of dozens of cases of girls and women killed or gone missing along three lonely highways that run through Northern British Columbia. Several times over the past decades, the Canadian police have created special units to investigate whether a serial killer -- or serial killers -- could be involved. They've looked at American suspects before, including Ted Bundy, the psychopathic necrophiliac who, during the 70's, lived and hunted victims in Washington State and was known to visit Canada. However, no firm connection could ever be made to any suspect in a Highway of Tears case, until just recently.

RCMP officials say that it was DNA preserved from Colleen's crime scene that finally broke the case when it matched DNA that had been collected from Fowler and held in a database of known offenders. Officials in Oregon now say they're looking at Fowler as a potential serial killer on the US side of the border as they try to tie him to the 1995 deaths of two teen girls in Oregon.

The good news from the Canadian side comes from the latest special unit to tackle the highway murders: the RCMP's E-Pana. For the complete story of E-Pana and the Highway of Tears, see my feature The Vanishing in Outside Magazine. If this information holds true (and the RCMP sound very confident that it will) this will be the first success in a high-profile series of cases. E-Pana has spent more than $20 million on their investigation of 18 of the highway murders since 2005. Those specific cases were chosen because police felt they were potentially similar enough that there could be at least one serial killer involved.

With police now saying that Bobby Jack Fowler was indeed hunting for teenage girls along Canada's roads, the question now is whether he can be linked to any of the other cases -- or even more unsolved cases in the US.  

BAREFOOT BANDIT Movie Update

This has been in the works for awhile now, but Robert Zemeckis and 20th Century Fox have officially come to an agreement for Zemeckis to get involved in the film adaptation of The Barefoot Bandit.

This still doesn't mean there's definitely going to be a movie, but involving an A-list director like Zemeckis -- Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Polar Express, and even a few movies without Tom Hanks, such as Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future(s), Contact, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and so on including the next Denzel Washington film, Flight, which is in post production -- is a good thing.

It's unfortunate that all the Hollywood press that picks up any stories on the movie keeps referring to the original title of my book: Taking Flight. Not that I didn't like the title, but the title of both the book and the screenplay changed to The Barefoot Bandit. (It'd also be cool for them to acknowledge once in awhile that there IS a book.)

So, the film is in development, which can mean a lot of things. In this case, it means screenwriter Lance Black (Milk, J. Edgar, Virginia) is completing his third draft of the script in consultation with Zemeckis. Fox secured the rights to my book and to Colton's life rights (with all of the life rights money going to repay Colton's victims).

I know that a favorite game has been speculating on which actor would be best to play the Barefoot Bandit. There's still no word on that, though don't be surprised if it turns out to be none of the usual suspects...
      

More Highway of Tears on the Radio

Here's the interview I did with Canandian Broadcast Co North's morning show: CBC Daybreak North Show. It airs in all of the communities along the Yellowhead, aka, Highway 16, the Highway of Tears.
(BTW: The story appears in this month's Outside magazine, not Outdoor Magazine.)
    

HIGHWAY OF TEARS on the Air

Mention the phrase "serial killer" and you naturally get some attention.

I did a couple of media appearances in the last two days about "The Vanishing," my feature in the latest issue of Outside magazine that's about Canada's infamous Highway of Tears.

Yesterday, NPR's Ross Reynolds had me on his show, The Conversation. (Look for the Listen to the Show links to the right and pick one of the options to hear the archived segment). It's surprising that even here in Washington few people have heard about this tragic story that's been going on for a long time just north of us in British Columbia.

This morning I did an interview with CBC radio, on Daybreak, a show that's based in Prince George, BC, a city that's seen more than its share of Highway of Tears murders and mystery. The host seemed a little miffed that the story appeared in an outdoors magazine, especially in an issue where the cover lines aside from my story (which was given the "eyebrow" above the logo) were all about How to get in shape, and How to buy running shoes.

I understand their sensitivity about the issue (and, frankly, I'm not a fan of this issue's beefcake cover). This is, after all, their collective tragedy, with way too many of their Northern BC daughters and sisters and friends dead or disappeared along this wild stretch of the province. They're also very frustrated that not one of the Highway of Tears cases going back 43 years has been solved.

Outside, though, has a long tradition of covering stories like this: serious journalism about serious subjects like Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, Sebastian Junger's The Storm and others. Byliner has a list here of Outside's "greatest must-reads." Not a fluffy story about running shoes or ab workouts among them.

I'll post the CBC interview as soon as they get it up there.

TRAVELING THE HIGHWAY OF TEARS

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.