A letter to Sarah Jean de Vries, who disappeared in Vancouver in 1998
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As I head to Vancouver, a city I first visited in 2010 to visit my dear friend Lee Lakeman and to research my book on the global sex trade, I am minded of Sarah Jean de Vries and her moving, heartbreaking but beautiful prose
Sarah, with one of her two children
Dear Sarah, writer, poet, and one of the many victims of serial killer Robert Pickton.
In 2012 in Vancouver, several years after you went missing, I heard the evidence you left behind about the hellish violence and abuse of women on the streets, and the lack of concern from police and too many citizens.
Your beloved sister Maggie read your evidence - diary entries and poetry - to the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry into how police forces were investigating cases of missing and murdered women in British Colombia, and why it took so long to catch your killer.
I had an interest in Pickton’s crimes, having written about them in 2005.
I was researching a book on the global sex trade, and knew many feminists working to end sexual exploitation in Vancouver and elsewhere in Canada. Pickton preyed on sexually exploited women, namely those struggling to survive on the streets.
Over the years, you had written in your diary about the man, or men, who preyed on street prostituted women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, long before Pickton was caught.
Whilst you had no idea of Pickton’s name or identity, you knew it was unlikely that his capture would be a priority because for so long the police maintained the women were transient and would eventually show up.
A decade after first hearing them, I still can’t get your words out of my head.
“Am I next? Is he watching me now? Stalking me like a predator and its prey. Waiting, waiting for some perfect spot, time or my stupid mistake. How does one choose a victim? Good question. If I knew that, I would never get snuffed,” read an entry from 1995.
These words made me shiver.
Sarah, you knew about danger. For almost a decade, from the age of 18, you were prostituted from the corner of Princess and East Hastings, the most notorious red light area in Downtown Eastside.
The last time you were seen was in April 1998. Noone knows when you died, just that your DNA was discovered on Pickton’s farm four years later, along with that of many other missing women.
Your life was always hard. Born in 1969 with Black and Mexican ancestry, you were adopted at the age of 11 months by a white family.
Growing up in a relatively affluent and, at the time, overwhelmingly white neighbourhood of West Point Grey in Vancouver, you were described by family members as a precocious girl who loved to swim and draw. But you were bullied in your neighbourhood because you were different from the white population born and raised in the area. By the time you were 14, you were using drugs and hanging around with girls who looked more like you.
In 1998, police were tasked with investigating 17 missing women, all from Canada's Indigenous population (although a minority of the victims were other ethnicities). All of you were prostituted drug users.
A potential suspect was named – three months after you disappeared – in the investigation: Robert William Pickton, a pig farmer in Vancouver.
A police officer checked the police database and saw that Pickton had been charged with imprisoning and stabbing Wendy Lynn Eistetter, a prostituted, drug addicted woman, almost fatally, the previous year. She managed to disarm Pickton and escape. A passing motorist later found her on a highway covered in blood.
Pickton was charged with the stabbing, but all charges were dropped a few months later as Eistetter used heroin, and it was assumed she would make a poor witness.
This detail was exposed during the Inquiry, and hard questions were asked of police as to why they had missed an opportunity to put this man on trial.
Had Pickton been convicted, countless lives would have been saved, including yours.
You also used heroin. In 1993, a news outlet featured a video of you saying you spent $1,000 a day on the drug, and that you knew that one day it would kill you. But heroin didn’t kill you, Sarah.
The Basil family still searches for any sign of Mackie Basil, thought to be killed by Pickton, along the isolated wilderness logging roads where she was last seen, on June 19, 2019
Police waited until 2002 to carry out a forensic search on Pickton’s farm. He had kept items belonging to many of his victims, some of whom you knew. By the time they did the search, at least another 14 women had been murdered.
Police found the DNA of 33 women in buildings, freezers and machines on his farm. Pickton boasted that he used a meat grinder to dispose of some victims and fed others to his pigs.
Pickton was far from the only violent john to commit terrible acts of violence against women in prostitution.
Prostitution also led you to your death. And neglect by every single agency that should have supported you when you were selling sex.
I have interviewed and spend time with hundreds of women in prostitution, and every single one of them counted at least one near death experience at the hands of a john – otherwise known as a ‘client’ or customer’ – or a pimp, and all have been raped on multiple occasions. This violence is normalised, every day, and horrific.
I have visited and worked alongside feminists at Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR) & Women’s Shelter, which runs services for sexually exploited women. I have walked around the streets near where you were prostituted, and seen women screaming while being chased by pimps as police patrol cars drive past and ignore them.
Research published by VRR in 2020 showed that over two years, 24 percent of the women – either prostituted at the time or in the past – who called the crisis line, wer
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