Blocks away from where she sold herself in the last years of her life, Mona Wilson’s brother tried to sell her in death.
Sitting at a Vancouver Starbucks in the weeks before the trial for her alleged murder began, he offered report cards, photographs of her son, full access to the story of her often cold, hard life in exchange for cold, hard cash.
Mona Wilson
Her brother hates the system, the bureaucracy that took his sister away from the O’Chiese First Nation in Alberta, the government he thinks has taken advantage of his people and contributed to the cycle of violence that led to his sister’s death.
At 26 years old, police said she vanished from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in November 2001.
Robert Pickton was charged with her murder and the murders of 25 others. Jurors began deliberations Friday on a verdict in Wilson’s death, as well as the deaths of five others and a trial on the remaining charges is to be held later.
Wilson’s death needs to mean something to her brother. He needs to make her life story matter.
His family -- there are five siblings -- believes they’ll just get used again if they give Wilson’s story away for free, he says.
So pay for her mementoes, Jayson Fleury says, pay for her story. Pay like she was made to pay because society failed her.
As the trial on Wilson’s death stumbled along, one of her sisters attended proceedings and said Wilson’s death had turned their lives around.
“My sister Mona when she walked on this earth she wanted to turn her life around and get off the street. She was reaching out to me for help. It’s very hard for me to find words to speak on her behalf,” Lisa Bigjohn told reporters outside the courthouse.
The value of Wilson’s life to her foster brother Greg Garley is different.
Between the ages of eight and 14, she lived on the Garley’s hobby farm in Surrey, B.C.
“I remember her smile, I remember what a great girl she was,” Garley said. “She would have been a great wife and a great mother, she had true love in her heart.”
Before she came to the Garley’s, the young girl had been in a treatment centre after she was found cowering in the hallway of an apartment building, raw from a beating, Garley said.
When she got to the farm, instead of being a target, she became a helper, racing after her foster mother, tugging on rain boots as she ran to help tend the garden or feed the chickens.
When the family took a trip to Disneyland, he remembers Wilson’s big eyes lighting up at the sight of rides and her favourite cotton candy.
“She went on billions of rides, she loved stuff like that, the fast ones,” he said. “We’d all feel sick getting on those kinds of rides but she just thought it was great. What’s going to happen to her? She’s got her big brother with her.”
When the Garley family went to church, as they did on many Sundays, Wilson would go along.
She liked being able to hang around with other kids her age, but hated the wardrobe.
“Oh boy, did she not like wearing dresses,” said Garley.
After much cajoling, she’d consent to the ribbons and finery but not without a fight.
“Don’t make me mad,” was her signature phrase, Garley said, and she’d invoke it each time there was a struggle, her eyes narrowing, her brow furrowed and a massive frown crossing her face.
Despite the early aversion to dresses, she played with Barbies and loved to roam the aisles at Toys R Us, where she and Garley would have Silly String fights.
The transition from child to woman was the first time Garley said he saw Wilson break down about the violence she experienced as a child.
Though the women in the Garley house had talked to her about what would happen once she got her period, the day it came, shrieks reverberated around the house, followed by sobs that lasted the whole day.
“She thought she was bleeding to death I guess, like when this man was raping her as a child,” Garley said.
“She didn’t want to be a woman, she wanted to stay a kid.”
But a woman she became, now trading jeans for skirts and swiping her sisters’ makeup.
“I remember when she got caught in the bathroom trying to put on lipstick,” he said. “Her lips were about three, four inches wide, she looked hilarious.”
She loved the colour pink and years later would be remembered by a teacher for her signature hot-pink lipstick.
After six years of being one of the family, Wilson was moved from the Garleys and placed with a single mother who had a 14-year-old son, Garley said.
From there, she moved to the east end of Vancouver, where she was living on her own at the age of 16.
What was left of her childhood ended when she left the Garleys. The stories of love ended there, too.
Though she kept calling the Garleys, usually once a month, they had no inkling she’d turned to heroin and was selling her body to finance her habit.
She refused to visit them, but sent pictures.
The year she turned 25, Wilson appeared in court for charges of theft, false pretences and fraud.
She had 19 run-ins with police, starting in 1997 and ending the day before she was reported missing by her common-law husband Steve Rix.
He reported her missing on Nov. 23, 2001, though the last of her prescriptions for methadone, hundreds over a six-year period, went through the provincial billing department on Dec. 4 of that year.
She’d been a regular at WISH, a drop-in centre for prostitutes on the Downtown Eastside, the centre’s former director Elaine Allan testified at the trial.
In her last days in the neighbourhood, she’d bounced around apartments, getting evicted from one, moving to another. Her welfare benefits were handled by the St. James Society, and according to an admission of facts read into court, they gave her cash every few days in November.
The money trail stopped at the end of the month.
Seven months later, in June, her head, hands and feet would be found in a garbage can in the slaughterhouse next to Pickton’s trailer. Testing yielded the presence of drugs, though the amount couldn’t be determined.
In the trailer, police found a dildo, fitted over the barrel of gun, that held Wilson and Pickton’s DNA. In the rear of a dilapidated, filthy motorhome, police found her blood spattered, and her DNA on cider bottles, a running shoe, a kitchen counter, a beer can, a shower hose and syringe.
The graphic evidence was hard for the family to hear, Bigjohn said.
Attending the trial “has brought some positive feelings on my behalf, but it also brought a lot of mixed feelings inside of me,” she said.
To Jayson Fleury, Wilson’s death is yet another reason First Nations must continue their fight for acceptance and success in Canadian society.
To Garley, Wilson’s death means the world lost a woman who could have been a great mother, sister, friend.
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