VANCOUVER — Thirty-one are women missing, there’s no trace of bodies, but a common thread runs through their difficult lives in the sex trade on Vancouver’s tough downtown eastside.
Is it the work of a serial killer?
Their families and at least one high-profile police officer say Yes. The rest of the force said No.
Testifying in a civil trial, former police officer Kim Rossmo said he expressed his suspicions that a killer was working the eastside neighborhood
But Vancouver police issued a press release stating the opposite.
Rossmo wanted to alert residents in 1998 to a possible killer preying on the city’s seediest neighborhood
At the time, more than 20 women, mostly sex trade workers, had vanished from Vancouver’s downtown eastside.
The cases date back to 1984, but the majority of disappearances took place over a period of three years.
The number now stands at 31.
There are no such obvious clues that a serial killer is responsible for the missing women in the downtown eastside case, Vancouver police say.
They cannot even confirm the women are dead, although “statistically the likelihood that all of them are alive and well is highly unlikely,” said Det. Scott Driemel, spokesman for the force.
“The difficulty is that we have never found a body or a crime scene. What we have are individuals who are missing.”
The case highlights the difficulty of tracking missing people who are known to lead transient lives.
