Expert suspects serial killer in Winnipeg
A former police officer who warned that a serial killer was at work in the Vancouver area -- but was ignored -- says Winnipeg police cannot disregard the significance of where Fonessa Lynn Bruyere was found dead last week.
Kim Rossmo, a former officer in the Vancouver Police Department and now an authority on geographic profiling at Texas State University, said the area where Bruyere was found may be a "cluster dump" for a serial killer.
Geographic profiling expert Kim Rossmo says area northwest of city might be a serial killer’s dumping ground.
"The odds of a different offender picking the same location is highly unlikely," Rossmo said. "You have to consider what are the odds."
Winnipeg police said they are aware of the geographic similarities and the fact that three women, including Bruyere, were known street prostitutes. Bruyere and another woman were found within metres of one another five years apart.
But Insp. Tom Legge said other than those similarities, there is no evidence the same killer is responsible for the deaths, or that a serial killer is stalking Winnipeg's street sex-trade workers.
By definition, a serial killer is someone who murders three or more people in separate events over a period of time.
Without knowing all the details of the Winnipeg cases, Rossmo said it sounds eerily similar to an investigation more than a decade ago in Saskatoon where the remains of three people were discovered in the same area outside the Saskatchewan city.
Rossmo said then it was possible the same killer was responsible. Convicted rapist John Martin Crawford was eventually charged with four murders and is suspected of others.
In Winnipeg, there are nine people possibly connected to the sex trade who have been found dead in the past 20 years in an area or quadrant north and west of Winnipeg, between the city and Portage la Prairie.
Police have ruled two of the deaths were accidental -- one was hit by a train and the other by a car -- but cannot explain how the victims ended up in harm's way.
What has raised the spectre of a serial killer in some minds is that Bruyere and two other known prostitutes were found dead in a small area in northwest Winnipeg. The body of Aynsley Kinch was found in July in a field off Murray Avenue near McPhillips Street, just a short distance east of where Bruyere was found at Mollard Road and Ritchie Street. Bruyere's body was found within metres of where the remains of Therena Silva were found almost five years earlier.
Legge said police are treating the most recent slayings separately, but they need witnesses or anyone with information to call detectives at 986-6508.
He also said police have no hard evidence that Bruyere, Kinch and Silva's deaths are connected in any way, other than their bodies were left in the same area by killers who did so only because it was convenient, nothing else.
He added that many women involved in the city's sex trade are extremely vulnerable, as they are addicted to drugs.
Many prefer to sell sex close to a drug supplier, but will agree to go to a remote location in exchange for money.
"They'll put themselves at a great deal of risk to get that $20," Legge said.
Police have determined how Bruyere died, but will not release that information, as it is something only the killer, or killers, know.
"So many of the gals go missing, and they never turn up or they turn up dead," said Bernice Getty, chief financial officer of Ndinawe, a youth resource centre on Selkirk Avenue that provides programs and shelter for high-risk and gang-involved youth.
"Once they go missing, rarely do they turn up again. And if they do, it's because they found the body."
Getty said Bruyere was known for the past three or four years by Ndinawe outreach workers who go into the community and chat with street sex workers about safety.
She said Bruyere sometimes collected free harm-reduction kits containing condoms and high-energy food, but it took resource workers a significant amount of time to earn Bruyere's trust. Many youth in the community who use Ndinawe's 16-bed safe house knew Bruyere, said Getty.
"She was too afraid to even come into the resource centre," Getty said. "It took them a year or two (for the outreach workers) to gain her trust.
"For a year, she'd come and get a harm-reduction kit and take it and leave. She wouldn't even look them in the eye. At some point, they got to know who she was and she started talking to them. They built a relationship with her."
Getty estimated there are "hundreds" of youths working the streets, both young men and women, but there are few programs to assist them. She said many law enforcement programs targeted at stopping the sex trade end up charging the young women and criminalizing them instead of the johns who hire the sex-trade workers.
Rossmo said if Winnipeg police get enough evidence to point towards a single killer, they will have to issue a public warning, even if it may jeopardize their investigation by releasing too much information.
"Ultimately, police are responsible for public safety," he said.
Rossmo was a high-ranking officer with the Vancouver Police Department when he claimed a serial killer was at work in the Vancouver area. He said disappearances were normal, but that the number of incidents was abnormally high between 1995 and 1998. Those claims were ignored and in 2000 Rossmo left the department after he was demoted.
Police eventually reversed their approach on why so many sex-trade workers were missing and began investigating if a single person was responsible.
Robert (Willie) Pickton is currently on trial for the killings of six of the missing women. He was arrested in February 2002 and is also charged with 20 additional counts of first-degree murder.
-- with files from Gabrielle Giroday
bruce.owen@freepress.mb.ca
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