This is an article published by Edmonton Journal just after the news came out in Svekla's trial that five deaths were linked together. There are details about each woman.
http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=16ffbc4a-56bc-4c84-abbf-04f26baa6b4ePublished Feb 18, 2008
Five similar deaths lead police to suspect single killer
Ryan Cormier and Trish Audette, The Edmonton Journal
Published: Monday, February 18 2008
EDMONTON - By mid-2003, 10 Edmonton sex-trade workers had been killed in 14 years.
To the public, the similarities were obvious.
All worked the streets of Edmonton, usually along 118th Avenue. All were found in rural areas to the south or east of the city. All were poor, vulnerable and struggling with drug addictions. Sources have said none were shot or stabbed. There were no obvious injuries.
Each case was investigated separately, by officers in different detachments and units.
But a report from the RCMP Behavioral Sciences Branch in Ottawa changed that.
The special unit looked at the 10 murders and drew out five. According to court documents, the RCMP believe Edna Bernard, Debbie Lake, Monique Pitre, Melissa Munch and Katie Ballantyne were all victims of the same killer.
"The committee also reported at this time that this offender would continue to frequent prostitutes and murder some of them," states an RCMP affidavit.
The RCMP will not talk about how they linked the deaths, or even the process they used to arrive at such conclusions.
In October 2003, shortly after the links were confirmed, the Project Kare task force was formed, charged with investigating the deaths and disappearances of victims with high-risk lifestyles.
None of the five linked cases have been solved.
EDNA BERNARD
Four hours before her burnt body was found smouldering in a wooded area outside Leduc, Edna Bernard was dropped off near 118th Avenue and 95th Street.
The 28-year-old mother of six, a crack addict, had spent about an hour with a regular john. He told police he left her on the Avenue of Champions around 4 a.m. on Sept. 23, 2002.
Most pictures of Bernard have vanished, says her aunt, Annette Bernard. Some were lost to fire, others as family left Whitefish-Goodfish Lake First Nation for the city.
Annette Bernard's only picture of her niece -- a singed newspaper clipping -- sits in a china cabinet in her home.
"I can remember her in my mind's eye, in my heart," she says. "She was just a good little girl, a good kid. A smile that would light up the dark."
Edna Bernard looked like her maternal grandmother, with brown eyes and curly brown hair. Five-foot-four and slight of build, she was raised by her mother, aunts and grandmother on the 2,000-person reserve located 150 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.
As a adult, Bernard did not speak to her family of life on Edmonton's streets.
"She had so many bad breaks in life. ... She was so soft-hearted," Annette Bernard remembers. "That word, prostitute, I hate it."
Annette Bernard had stopped singing before Edna's death, but after she died, Annette could hear Edna command: "Aunty, sing for me."
Edna's favourite song was a First World War-era hymn -- "Life's evening sun is sinking low / a few more days and I must go / to meet the deeds that I have done / where there will be no setting sun."
"I think of her, this bouncing little girl, hippity-hopping down the road," Annette Bernard says.
DEBBIE LAKE
Debbie Darlene Lake was only going out to a pay phone to call a friend when she left her home in the early morning of Nov. 4, 2002. She had left behind both both her 10-month-old child and her cigarettes.
Her husband reported her missing the next day; for six months, there was no word. On April 12, 2003, a man looking for deer antlers near Miquelon Lake north of Camrose found a skull. In August, a DNA test confirmed it was Lake's.
The rest of her body was never found.
Lake moved from Bancroft, Ont., to Edmonton as an exuberant 13-year-old. Problems began in high school, and she dropped out when she turned 18.
"She had moved away from home and was living with her boyfriend at her aunt's place," says her mother, Mary Lake. "She'd sooner go out and party with them and not bother going to school."
By then the rest of the Lake family lived in Barrhead; Debbie was in Edmonton.
When she was 19, Lake got one of the biggest scares of her life. Doctors said she had cervical cancer, which could make it impossible for her to have children.
"It really upset her because she always loved kids," Mary Lake says.
Cancer treatments were successful. She married at 20 and gave birth to her first child one year later. That little girl was the first of four children.
Lake had separated from her husband, then reconciled. They lived in a bus in Edmonton. She was making her first serious attempt to stabilize her life, and wanted to reunite with all her children.
Lake reportedly worked the sex-trade in Edmonton, though her mother doesn't believe it. "Debbie liked to dress up nice, she wanted nice clothes and nice things. To stoop that low, she would not do it."
MELISSA MUNCH
A picture of Melissa Munch at about age 20 shows the pretty blond in the back of a police car. Her arms are clasped behind her back. Her mouth and eyes are tough.
Addicted to crack cocaine, she was known to steal from the johns she turned tricks for along 118th Avenue or in Little Italy near Giovanni Caboto Park.
She had two daughters, one just 11 months, the other five years old.
On Jan. 12, 2003, her frozen body was found near Ardrossan.
Munch was last seen between Jan. 6 and Jan. 10 at a pharmacy on 118th Avenue near 95th Street.
She grew up in the Calgary neighbourhood of Bowness, an area where brand new houses are regularly being built to replace run-down ones.
At Bowness Hotel bar, regulars remember Doris Munch. She worked there, and patrons remember her two cute little girls, Melissa and Jessica.
The girls went to Our Lady of Assumption school, where a white cross hangs starkly against dark bricks. Staff will not talk about them.
"It was pretty tragic," says Deacon Paul Coderre, who presided over Munch's funeral in 2003.
MONIQUE PITRE
On Nov. 24, 2002, Monique Pitre got a ride from a roommate to the Transit Hotel in northeast Edmonton. That was the last confirmed sighting of the 30-year-old.
She was known as a sex-trade worker who had been around a while and knew how to be smart on the streets.
Later, some people would recall seeing Pitre in December 2002. A security guard at the Cecil Hotel thought he saw her just after New Year's Day.
But nothing was certain until her body was found on Jan. 9, 2003, in a field northeast of the city. Investigators believe she had been there for several days.
She had not been reported missing.
"I was shocked because Monique had been around for awhile, and knew better," a fellow sex-trade worker said then.
Pitre was born in Bathurst, N.B., then moved to Petawawa, Ont., with her mother and two older brothers when she was five. A "girly-girl," Pitre dressed up her dolls and spent hours in front of a mirror trying to apply makeup to her young face, says mother Rose Imhoff.
According to family, her problems began in Grade 10, when she started a drug habit among a different crowd.
She ran away from home soon after.
Pitre came to Edmonton on the invitation of a friend. Pitre then stopped calling home, and her family couldn't keep track of her.
KATIE SYLVIA BALLANTYNE
She would be right back.
That is what Katie Sylvia Ballantyne told her friend Jack Perrault when she left his McCauley-area home late on April 27, 2003: She would work the streets and be back soon.
On July 7, 2003, her skeletal remains were found in a field east of Leduc.
"She had a sickness and she wasn't well. Some guy decided she was nothing and he murdered her," says Victoria Merasty, Ballantyne's mother. "She was a human being."
Merasty visits her daughter's grave in Saskatoon every Mother's Day, but has no interest in Edmonton, the city that took Ballantyne's life.
Ballantyne was addicted to crack cocaine, and worked near 111th Avenue and 95th Street.
Merasty believes her daughter's addictions started with the Ritalin she took after her divorce. She sold sex to pay her dealers.
"Saskatoon, the street where the girls walk, was very visible. I think she was ashamed that I would see her or her kids would see her," she says. "She didn't want us to know about it, but we knew."
The eldest of eight children, Ballantyne was born in Le Pas, Man. Her father was Greek, her mother Opaskwayak Cree.
Bernard, Lake, Munch, Pitre and Ballantyne are just five victims among almost 20 who have disappeared.
Their families hear little from RCMP. They don't know if there have been any clues in the cases, or any new information.
There is still hope, though, says former vice officer JoAnn McCartney.
McCartney works with the Prostitution Action and Awareness Foundation of Edmonton, counselling women who work in the sex trade. She knew all five women.
"Certainly people who work in the network of support agencies, we know it couldn't all just be one" killer, McCartney says.
"They're easy pickings. ... They're vulnerable, they're addicts. If someone hurts them they're not going to be good witnesses," she says.
"There are lots of people in society who think these women are disposable."
taudette@thejournal.canwest.comrcormier@thejournal.canwest.com- - -
Q&A
Q: What is Project Kare?
A: An RCMP-led task force investigating the disappearances and deaths of Alberta women and men who led high-risk lifestyles.
Q: How many cases is Project Kare investigating?
A: The number fluctuates, but the task force has been investigating more than 70 cases of missing or dead Albertans, including 13 sex-trade workers found dead outside Edmonton since 1989.
Q: What is a high-risk lifestyle?
A: The victims are usually involved in the sex trade, have drug addictions, or are homeless.
Q: How many people make up Project Kare?
A: The task force is made up of roughly 50 people, including 35 Mounties and four Edmonton Police Service officers.
Q: How many tips has Project Kare received?
A: Thousands. A single file can fill 80 boxes.
Q: How many arrests has Project Kare made?
A: One. Thomas George Svekla, 38, was arrested in May 2006. He was charged with second-degree murder and interfering with a dead body in connection with the death of 36-year-old Theresa Merrie Innes. Svekla is also charged with second-degree murder and offering an indignity to a body in the death of Rachel Quinney, a 19-year-old sex-trade worker found in a field east of the city on June 11, 2004.
Q: Why is Kare spelled with a K?
A: The Alberta division of the RCMP is known as K-Division. The names of all projects and task forces must begin with a K.
© The Edmonton Journal 2008
Topic: Police believe up to 11 prostitutes may be victims of same killer (Read 1784 times)
