Andrea Joesbury was the kind of big sister little sisters dream about.
She included her baby sister in big sister things like meeting friends and sharing secrets. She was protective. She read 'The Little Mermaid' over and over again.
Angela Joesbury (and below)
And she taught hilarious dance moves.
"We loved to dance, me and her,' says little sister Heather Joesbury, who lives in Victoria where Andrea grew up.
"Dance to Madonna. 'Like a Prayer', that's me and Andrea's song. I remember this one dance move she taught me," Joesbury says. "It was pretty funny."
"I talked to her in 2000, the Christmas of 2000," Heather Joesbury says. "She said she was going to come over here and have Christmas with us. Then ... that's the last I talked to her."
Her sister always called. Or she would write, says Joesbury, 19, the youngest of three Joesbury children.
'We always had plans."
Andrea Joesbury was reported missing by a street nurse in June of 2001, when she stopped coming to have dressings on some wounds changed.
Her last prescription for methadone was filled that month as well. She had been trying to kick drugs in an effort to clean up her life and win back custody of her daughter.
In 2002, pig farmer Robert Pickton was charged in her death and the deaths of 25 others.
Joesbury is among six women Pickton is currently on trial for killing . On Friday, jurors were sequestered to consider a verdict. A trial on the other 20 charges is scheduled for later.
Andrea Joesbury was beautiful, with a huge smile that leaps off the page of the poster of women missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Growing up, she witnessed alcoholism, physical abuse and mental illness. She left Victoria for Vancouver in her mid-teens after an older boyfriend persuaded her to move to the big city.
Joesbury said her big sister needed a father figure, but the boyfriend was a drug dealer and she ended up drug addicted and working as a prostitute.
"She fell for this guy because he showed her a lot of stuff," Joesbury said. "All of a sudden it came, OK, now it's time to pay up."
Once on the street, Andrea Joesbury suffered abuse from her pimps.
"She one time got her head smashed off the coffee table," her sister said of one encounter. "She had a big friggin' bruise on the back of her head."
The pimps were ruthless, Joesbury said.
They would regularly come to Victoria seeking new candidates for prostitution and when her sister was too drug-sick to work, 'they came here looking for me, too," said Joesbury, who was 15 years old at the time. "To pimp me out."
At the Pickton trial, jurors heard from Elaine Allan, who ran a safe house for prostitutes on the Downtown Eastside and said Joesbury "was probably the best client I had."
"She was polite and quiet and always asked how I was," Allan said, describing her as a composed young woman who "handled her drugs quite well."
Joesbury lived in room 201 of the Roosevelt Hotel, then at Main and Hastings streets in Vancouver. The area is known as one of the poorest, sickest, drug-infested neighbourhoods in North America.
A black jacket found in a box at the foot of Pickton's bed had some papers sticking out -- "mellow, yellow, fellow," read one note. "Andrea 201 Roosevelt Hotel."
Chi-Sing Leung, a clerk at the hotel, testified at Pickton's trial that the last time he’d seen Joesbury she told him she was going out to Coquitlam and had no money.
The Pickton farm is in the next community.
Almost a year after she was last seen, her head, hands and feet were found frozen in a white, five-gallon bucket in a freezer on the farm.
A forensic entomologist testified that her remains had been exposed to the elements for weeks, possibly months, before they were frozen.
X-rays showed that she had had previous brain surgery.
Unidentified male DNA was found in her teeth. Her DNA was on a set of earrings and on a ring, both found in the slaughterhouse on Pickton's land. Her DNA was also found on a stain inside Pickton's trailer.
Jack Cummer, Andrea Joesbury's grandfather, said previously Joesbury was lured to Vancouver by the kind of people who feel no guilt introducing a friendly and naive teenager to drugs and prostitution.
Cummer declined to be interviewed, saying the media has spent too much time focusing on the drugs and prostitution angle, while disregarding the real lives of the victims and the families they left behind.
In an e-mail to The Canadian Press, Cummer declared his love for Joesbury is everlasting.
"I am content with the image I have in my heart of Andrea, as well as the rest of the family," Cummer wrote.
"We know all her faults and blessings and her smiling face is with each and everyone she had met."
He disdained the media who consistently portrayed his granddaughter and the other women who disappeared from the Downtown Eastside as drug-addicted prostitutes.
"This is the picture the media have planted in the public's eye, heart," he wrote. 'The media has had a field day. At no time did anyone attempt to paint a real picture."
"You are unable to change what you have caused," he wrote.
"We have 'closure' (Peace). Closure comes between the parties and their God. Nothing anyone can say or write will alter this process."
Cummer signed off saying: "Good luck."
Cummer did support the release of a song, 'Missing', featuring lyrics by award-winning Victoria poet Susan Musgrave and haunting music by Galiano Island guitarist Brad Prevedoros.
Musgrave wrote the lyrics in Andrea's memory.
"How far from home is missing?/In our prayers you're close beside us every day/When you left to chase the wind so high/The rain moved in to stay," goes the chorus.
Proceeds from the sale of the song go to Haven Society, a Nanaimo-based non-profit organization that for 28 years has been helping women and children escape violence and sexual exploitation.
Heather Joesbury, who has her sister's name tattooed on her left ankle, said the missing women of the Downtown Eastside were short-changed in life and the bad news continued after they disappeared.
If the police had been investigating the disappearances as if each missing woman was one of their own daughters, some may still be alive today, she said.
"They didn't wake one day and be like, 'Well you know what, I'm going to be a prostitute,"' she said.
"'Then I'm going to have HIV and then I'm going to get murdered."'
Joesbury keeps a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings about her sister. She wants to write a book.
PREVIOUS
