On November 19, 2012, the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry issued Forsaken, its findings on the police response, and in it used a word it said it had chosen on purpose. The women who had gone missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside over the years, the commission concluded, had been treated as "nobodies." It also concluded that they had been valued members of their community. These cases turn on that gap: the response made when people went missing, and what inquiries, reviews, courts and relatives later said about it.
Each case has its own legal position, and none of the findings quoted proves anything about who committed a crime. Where a review concluded that police work was flawed, that is the review’s conclusion. Where relatives said they were ignored, that is their account. Where a case is unsolved, no one is named as guilty.
Robert William Pickton, a pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, was convicted on December 9, 2007, of the second-degree murders of six women. They were Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Georgina Faith Papin and Marnie Frey. Justice James Williams sentenced him on December 11 to life, with no parole eligibility for 25 years. The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed his appeal on July 30, 2010. On August 4, 2010, the Crown stayed 20 further counts of first-degree murder, on the ground that more convictions could not add to his sentence. Investigators had by then linked 33 women to the case through DNA, and Pickton had told an undercover officer after his arrest in 2002 that he had killed 49. That claim was never tested in court.
The convictions are the smaller part of what British Columbia examined afterward. The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, led by Wally Oppal, examined the police investigations of the missing women. Its report described the Downtown Eastside as a community with serious poverty, addiction and violence, and concluded that the women were valued members of it. It noted that Aboriginal women made up about 3 percent of the province’s female population but about a third of the missing and murdered women it examined, and that 12 of the 33 women identified through DNA were Aboriginal. It called the police investigations a "blatant failure."
The record that supports that conclusion is specific. In 1997 Pickton was charged with attempted murder, assault with a weapon and forcible confinement after a woman reported him to police. The Crown stayed the charges on January 26, 1998. The commission, whose mandate on the stay was limited to neutral findings of fact, said the woman, identified only by a pseudonym because of a publication ban, was interviewed by police only once and that no formal statement was taken from her. It identified "serious limitations on the initial investigation" by the Coquitlam RCMP and called it "patently unreasonable" that the matter had not been pursued further. The Canadian Encyclopedia reports that prosecutors did not consider her a competent witness.
Within the Vancouver Police Department, the geographic profiler Kim Rossmo had concluded that a serial killer was at work. His analysis was set aside, CBC News reported in 2010. A joint RCMP and Vancouver task force, Project Evenhanded, was formed only in 2001.
The department’s own deputy chief, Doug LePard, examined what the police had done. His report, about 400 pages long and based on more than 20,000 documents, was released in August 2010. It concluded that information pointing to Pickton reached police in 1998 and 1999 and should have produced a much more vigorous investigation of him. In January 2000 two Coquitlam RCMP constables interviewed Pickton, who agreed to a search of his property. The officers did not act on the offer. LePard testified at the inquiry that the officers did not follow basic interrogation techniques and did not warn Pickton that his statements could be used against him. "There didn’t appear to be an interview strategy at all," he said. He also said the RCMP had dismissed credible informants and had not shared important information with the Vancouver police. A search came only on February 5, 2002, for illegal firearms. Pickton was charged with murder on February 22.
The RCMP apologized to the victims' families on January 27, 2012, and the Vancouver police apologized on December 18, 2012. In March 2014 Canada, British Columbia and Vancouver announced a joint compensation framework, and the children of the victims received a reported 4.9 million dollars. Pickton died in a Quebec hospital on May 31, 2024, twelve days after he was assaulted by another inmate. The inmate, Martin Charest, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder on September 25, 2025.
Lonnie David Franklin Jr. was convicted by a Los Angeles County jury on May 5, 2016, of 10 counts of first-degree murder and one of attempted murder. Nine women and a 15-year-old girl were the victims named in those counts. They had died between 1985 and 2007 in South Los Angeles. He was sentenced to death on August 10, 2016, and died at San Quentin State Prison on March 28, 2020, while his automatic appeal was pending.
The question families put for decades was why it took so long. Community members said that police did not investigate seriously because the victims were Black and poor. The Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, started by the activist Margaret Prescod, held vigils, handed out more than 100,000 flyers, and objected to the label police and press used for the cases. In 2007, under Chief William Bratton, the Los Angeles Police Department formed a small unit to work the linked cases, but it did not announce them. The reporter Christine Pelisek learned of the secret task force in 2008, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, and the police had resisted going public out of fear of alerting the killer. Within days of her story the city council pledged a 500,000 dollar reward, and the LAPD began meeting families and community leaders.
Prescod’s coalition pressed the point after the verdict. At the time she put at 35 the number of women in photographs the police had released who remained unaccounted for, and she said conditions in South Los Angeles were much as they had been when the victims died.
Bruce McArthur pleaded guilty in a Toronto courtroom on January 29, 2019, to the first-degree murders of Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, Majeed Kayhan, Soroush Mahmudi, Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, Dean Lisowick, Selim Esen and Andrew Kinsman. They died between 2010 and 2017. On February 8, 2019, Justice John McMahon sentenced him to life with no parole eligibility for 25 years; the Crown had asked for 50. CBC News reported that most of the men had ties to the Church and Wellesley Village and that six were immigrants or refugees.
By then the police had already had three of the cases in front of them for years. A Toronto task force, Project Houston, was formed in 2012 to look at three missing men, CBC News reported. Police interviewed McArthur in 2013 and linked him to three of the men, according to court documents reported by CP24. The task force closed in 2014. In June 2014 the Parole Board of Canada granted McArthur a record suspension for his 2003 convictions for assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm. In 2016 a man reported that McArthur had assaulted him, and police arrested McArthur and released him without charge. It was only after Kinsman was reported missing in June 2017, and a calendar entry reading "Bruce" and security video led a second task force to his van, that he was arrested, on January 18, 2018.
What families said about those years is part of the record. Skandaraj Navaratnam, a Tamil refugee from Sri Lanka, was 40; two friends reported him missing in 2010, and his family believed he might be in hiding because of his immigration status, according to the later review. His brother told the sentencing court that the family had lost his support and that their mother, who was ill, still did not know the truth. Abdulbasir Faizi, born in Afghanistan, had a wife and two daughters. His cousin reported him missing the day after he was last in contact, and officers at the time suggested he had left his family. His wife, believing he had abandoned them, divorced him. In her statement in 2019 she told the court his death had left her unable to manage daily life, and that their daughters, then six and ten, were struggling. Majeed Kayhan, 58, had come to Toronto from Afghanistan in 1989. His son reported him missing on October 25, 2012. At the sentencing hearing Kayhan’s brother said the family had "agonized" since 2012.
The Toronto Police Services Board commissioned an independent civilian review, led by the retired judge Gloria Epstein. Its report, Missing and Missed, was transmitted on April 9, 2021. It identified serious flaws in how missing-person cases were handled and concluded that systemic discrimination had played a part in the investigations. Xtra’s summary called it a "profound systemic failure." In August 2021, the officer who arrested and released McArthur in 2016 was cleared of the disciplinary charges against him.
In 2009 the deaths of eleven women and girls, and of the unborn child of one of them, came to light on the West Mesa, the high desert on Albuquerque’s western edge. By January 2010 each of the eleven had a name. The Albuquerque Police Department lists them with the ages it gives: Monica Candelaria, 22; Victoria Chavez, 26; Virginia Cloven, 24; Syllannia Edwards, 15; Cinnamon Elks, 32; Doreen Marquez, 24; Julie Nieto, 24; Veronica Romero, 28; Evelyn Salazar, 27; Michelle Valdez, 22; and Jamie Barela, 15. They had gone missing between 2003 and 2004. No one has been arrested or charged. The department and the FBI have worked the case for more than 17 years, CBS News has described it as the largest homicide investigation in the department’s history, and a reward of up to 100,000 dollars stands.
Relatives said later that the police had not treated the missing-person reports as urgent. A 2009 New Mexico Senate memorial put it in its own words: some of the families filed reports that "go nowhere." Jamie Barela’s mother said in 2010 that the police had treated her daughter as a runaway, that they never questioned the family, and that apart from a recent visit to collect a DNA sample no Albuquerque officer had called on her since 2004. Jamie was the last of the eleven to be identified, on January 26, 2010. Her funeral was held on March 4. Her mother told reporters, "Somebody took a bright smile away from us," and said the funeral did not bring her closure. In 2025 she told KOB 4 that the department rarely contacted her and that she learned most news secondhand. "It doesn’t matter what they were doing," she said of the women. "They were human beings, somebody’s daughter."
Syllannia Edwards had been in the custody of the Oklahoma Department of Human Services since she was five. News 9 in Oklahoma City reported that she left a residential facility for girls in Lawton in August 2003 and that Lawton police listed her as an endangered runaway. She was the only one of the eleven who was not reported missing in Albuquerque. She was identified on November 13, 2009, and would have turned 21 that month, KSWO noted.
Julie Nieto’s mother told NM News Port in 2019 that she had reached "a little bit of closure" only when her daughter was identified, and asked people to stop gossiping about the women and to remember that any child could end up in the same place. In 2021 she said she had had no contact with the police for years: "I’m tired, and I just want closure." Evelyn Salazar’s mother said in a statement released through Young Women United on the tenth anniversary that the women "didn’t deserve what they got" and "all had families that care for them."
Michelle Valdez was 22 and pregnant. Her father searched for her until his death in 2014, and told the Daily Lobo in April 2009 that the families would keep looking where the police stopped. Her daughter, a small child when her mother went missing, was raised by her grandparents. At the dedication of the Women’s Memorial Park on June 27, 2020, she remembered her mother’s smile and said she would rather visit the park than the cemetery.
In 2025 New Mexico passed House Bill 340, which adds the DNA of certain offenders to the state’s CODIS database; KOB 4 reported it as a bill that could help solve cold cases. On the seventeenth anniversary, in February 2026, the president of the Albuquerque City Council said again that the killings remain unsolved.
On November 27, 2003, the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court convicted Ma Yong, 43, of Hengdong County, Hunan, and Duan Zhiqun, 20, of Pengxi County, Sichuan, of robbery and sentenced both to death with deprivation of political rights for life. The court held that Ma had killed twelve young women who had gone alone to a job agency in Buji, a town in the Longgang district, between May 26 and October 2003, and that Duan took part in five of the killings. What the court recorded as taken amounted to the women’s bags and ten mobile phones. Whether either man would appeal was not reported.
Time, reporting from Shenzhen, described the city the women had come to. By 2003 almost all of its roughly five million residents had arrived within the previous ten years, neighbors rarely knew each other, and across China about 120 million rural migrants were living in cities. The first of the women Time named was Zhang Ping, 19, of Hubei province, who went missing on May 26, 2003. By late September, the magazine reported, eleven more young women had gone missing from Buji. The Central News Agency of Taiwan, relaying Ming Pao, reported that the police did not take the families' reports seriously at first.
The police eventually drew up a list of the missing women and circulated it among the labor markets, but they made little headway for months, Time reported. The break came when a manager at the market told officers that Ma, an unregistered broker, had bribed his way into a booth. While the case was open, Time added, the police ordered Shenzhen’s newspapers to stop reporting on the killings, as the authorities had done in a similar case in Henan.
At the trial, which lasted six hours on November 25, 2003, a working group from the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing attended and, the Central News Agency reported, was also examining whether local police had been negligent in handling the missing-person reports. The outcome of that examination was not reported with the verdict. Ming Pao called the series the cruelest in the city’s history. Ren Jiantao, head of the School of Government at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, told Time that Chinese society now had blind spots that had become "a heaven for killers," and that Shenzhen was only a few years ahead of the rest of the mainland.
Herbert Baumeister, an Indianapolis thrift-store owner, was never charged, tried or convicted. Police named him as the only suspect in the deaths of men connected with his Westfield, Indiana, property, and he died in Ontario, Canada, on July 3, 1996, aged 49. Two years later investigators said they suspected him in nine earlier deaths of men and boys in Indiana and Ohio. None was ever charged.
Between 1993 and 1995 a number of men went missing in Indianapolis, most of them in their twenties or early thirties. There was no public link between the cases. In 1994 the families of two of them, Allen Wayne Broussard and Roger Allen Goodlet, hired a private investigator, Virgil Vandagriff, a former police detective. Vandagriff told WRTV in 2022 that he sent investigators into bars to gather information and hand out posters of the missing men, and that they learned many other men had gone missing in the Indianapolis area.
An Indianapolis police detective, Mary Wilson, took over the search and in June 1996 wrote a 12-page handwritten memo summarizing two years of work. A witness’s account had led her to Baumeister in 1995. In August 1995, according to WRTV, she went to the property, saw that it matched the witness’s description, and wrote down the license plates of the vehicles there. A judge refused to sign a search warrant. Vandagriff told WRTV that Hamilton County judges did not find the witness credible enough. On November 1, 1995, Wilson and a police lieutenant confronted Baumeister at one of his stores, and weeks later his lawyer told police he would not consent to a search. His wife declined as well in December. The search came on June 24, 1996, with the consent of his wife, who had filed for divorce in January. Baumeister died nine days after the search began.
The Hamilton County coroner reopened identification work in 2022. As of May 2026 ten men had been identified, with work continuing on two more.
The findings arrived on different schedules. In British Columbia the commission reported in November 2012, ten years after the arrest. In Toronto the independent review was transmitted in April 2021, two years after the sentencing. In Shenzhen a court judgment came within two months of the arrests, while the question of police negligence was still being examined and its outcome was not reported. In South Los Angeles the case went to trial six years after the arrest, and Prescod’s coalition was still counting the women in the photographs. In Indianapolis there was no trial at all.
Albuquerque has none of these. There is no verdict, no commission and no review of the first police response, only a police department that says it is still working and relatives who say they have to ask for news. Each February the eleven names are read aloud.
• 1993 to 1995: A number of men go missing in Indianapolis.
• 1994: Two Indianapolis families hire a private investigator.
• August 1995: A judge refuses to sign a search warrant for the Indianapolis property.
• June 24, 1996: Investigators search the Indiana property with the consent of Baumeister’s wife; he dies in Ontario on July 3.
• March 1997 to January 26, 1998: Pickton is charged with attempted murder, assault with a weapon and forcible confinement; the Crown stays the charges.
• 1998 and 1999: Information pointing to Pickton reaches police, according to the 2010 review by Doug LePard.
• January 2000: Two RCMP constables interview Pickton and do not act on his consent to a search.
• 2001: Project Evenhanded is formed in British Columbia.
• February 22, 2002: Pickton is charged with murder.
• 2003 to 2004: Eleven women and girls go missing in Albuquerque.
• May 26 to October 2003: Twelve young women die after going to a job agency in Buji, Shenzhen.
• November 27, 2003: Ma Yong and Duan Zhiqun are convicted of robbery and sentenced to death.
• 2007: The Los Angeles Police Department forms a small unit to work the linked cases.
• December 9, 2007: Pickton is convicted of six counts of second-degree murder.
• August 27, 2008: Reporter Christine Pelisek publishes her account of the task force.
• 2009 to January 26, 2010: Eleven West Mesa victims are identified.
• August 4, 2010: Twenty of Pickton’s charges are stayed.
• 2012: Project Houston is formed in Toronto; the Vancouver commission reports on November 19.
• June 2014: McArthur receives a record suspension for his 2003 convictions.
• May 5, 2016: Franklin is convicted; he is sentenced to death on August 10.
• January 18, 2018: McArthur is arrested.
• January 29 and February 8, 2019: McArthur pleads guilty and is sentenced.
• March 28, 2020: Franklin dies at San Quentin.
• April 9, 2021: The Epstein review is transmitted to the Toronto Police Services Board.
• May 31, 2024: Pickton dies after an assault in prison.
• February 2026: The West Mesa case is unsolved on its seventeenth anniversary.