Canada's Lethal "Highway of Tears"

Canada's Lethal "Highway of Tears"

Highway 16 stretches more than 800 miles across Canada, from Prince Rupert on the coast east through the Rockies to the border with Alberta. Since the 1970s, as many as four dozen people (mostly young women) have gone missing along this stretch of isolated wilderness highway. Some of them were later found dead, but most have simply vanished.
Many Canadians are calling this another series of botched RCMP investigations. Most damning, the RCMP didn't get involved until recently, when a white woman went missing. However, according to tribal leaders, 43 aboriginal women had already gone missing by that point. Did media and police interest only awaken when a white woman's life was lost? It certainly seems that way.
It's unlikely that a single answer will be found for all the disappearances, but they certainly seem to follow several different clusters. The earliest cluster is in the 1970s, of women who were hitchhiking. Highway 16 was - and still is - a major trucking route. 18-wheelers ferry goods from the Prince Rupert shipyards into the interior of Canada. It would be a simple matter for a trucker to pick up a lone woman, then dump her body anywhere in the trackless wilderness along his route.
Another cluster happened in the 1980s, mostly women who worked at hotels along the highway. They were sexually assaulted, strangled, and their bodies dumped. The RCMP launched an investigation at the time into a possible serial killer, calling it the "highway murders" case. Several potential subjects were identified, but it seems that the investigation eventually fizzled out.
The high-profile death of tree planter Nicole Hoar in 2002 sparked another investigation which strove to tie together several of the deaths, including three 15 year-old aboriginal girls who were murdered in 1994. This investigation is technically ongoing, although aboriginal leaders argue that "authorities are mostly just talk" at this point.
Meanwhile, women continued to vanish. The most recent victim was Madison Scott, a 20 year-old woman who was last seen at 3AM at a local campsite. Several days later police found her truck and camping gear, but Scott had vanished, and search parties were unsuccessful.
The RCMP has frequently come under fire for failing to take reports of vanished women seriously, and for bungling high-profile cases in which underprivileged women were the victims. Many people feel that serial killer Robert Pickton would have been caught a lot sooner, if the RCMP had taken an interest in the disappearance of several dozen prostitutes in the Vancouver area.  And once the RCMP was involved, the case was bungled at several points. (In some ways, it looks like a miracle that Pickton was caught at all.)