Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - Highway of Tears Pt. 1: It Starts With One

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

Gloria Moody was 27 years old and the mother of two young children when she was found dead in Williams Lake, British Columbia. She is one of the earliest cases of indigenous women who have been found dead or have disappeared along a lonely stretch of roads known as the Highway of Tears. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and ways to support the search for missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in Canada, you can visit www.h highwayof tears.org. It was going to be a very long walk. Over 400 miles from the port city of Prince Rupert. across the interior of Northern British Columbia, finishing at Prince George. But that was the plan, to walk a long stretch of Highway 16 and tread that same ground where so many women and girls were lost.

A few dozen people showed up on the first day in 2006 with the knowledge that more would join along the route. The majority of the participants were indigenous women, some as old as 71, but despite their different ages, they were united for the same purpose. practically everyone had a connection to this terrible place. Some had lost a friend, a sister, a cousin, a daughter. They all showed up to walk along that lonely highway, penned in by dense black woods. On the first day, it started to snow.

Massive white flakes danced down, settling on the heads of the small group, making it hard to see what was ahead. But soon through the blizzard, they saw it. A small cross planted into the ground on the shoulder of the road. Then another a few paces down, and another. Each landmark was like a small headstone, a memorial to a woman or girl who had been lost. Seeing these markers, some of these women started to cry.

So many lives cut short. Cases that were never solved, with leads that went nowhere. Some of the crosses must have been there for months, years, even decades. But through the tears and the snow, the group didn't stop walking. If anything, this was the reason they were walking in the first place. Maybe the rest of Canada could ignore what was happening here, but they wouldn't. These women chose to remember, even if no one else did. Hi, I'm Greg Poulson.

And I'm Vanessa Richardson. And this is a special series on the Highway of Tears, presented by serial killers. We're taking a closer look at this lonely collection of roads that crisscrossed the British-Columbian landscape, a region that has been the site of countless missing persons and homicide cases. Over the next three episodes, we're going to grapple with the history of these crimes, the bigger issues at play, and how communities are taking action to protect themselves. Today, we're attempting to answer a deceptively simple question. How did we get here?

How did this place, a simple stretch of highway used by logging trucks, become the site of so many homicides and missing persons cases? In order to do that, we'll look at some historical context and explore the earliest known murder case connected to the Highway of Tears, Gloria Moody. In the next episodes, we'll look at the other cases that turned Highway 16 into the Highway of Tears. Along the way, we'll see how every case speaks to a bigger conflict taking place across the entire country. We've got all that and more coming up. Stay with us. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter.

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but it can also include other highways that pass through the upper half of British Columbia. But to start out, let's start with one highway in particular. Highway 16 is one of the main arteries of transport through multiple Canadian provinces. It stretches over 1,600. hundred miles, from the Manitoba city of Portage La Prairie, all the way west to the Pacific Ocean. It's a straight shot from Prince George to the port city of Prince Rupert, where long-haul logging trucks hand off their goods to transport ships. And for the most part, those are the kinds of vehicles that use Highway 16, trucks carrying raw materials to and from the coast.

For the sake of this story, we're going to focus on the tail end of Highway 16 as it passes through British Columbia. The trip from Prince George to Prince Rupert is only one quarter the total length of Highway 16, but it's extremely remote. It's northern enough to avoid the larger West Coast cities, such as Vancouver. Instead, it cuts across massive sections of wilderness. For the most part, there's nothing but trees on either side of the road, a cathedral of evergreen surrounding that black ribbon as it snakes through the landscape. There might be the occasional moose crossing sign or the rare sighting of a bald eagle as it glides lazily above the tree line. But for long stretches of time, it's just like this. Wooded, dense and dark, with no sign

of human life. It feels like you're completely alone. But of course, that's not entirely true. All along this section of Highway 16, there are small pockets of civilization, usually logging towns or indigenous reservations. The road passes through the lands of the Wet Suetan people, The Dackel, the Gitsan, and more. No one spot has more than a few thousand people, though. These aren't prosperous areas. The industries here are agriculture, forestry, fishing, and mining, fields of work that don't pay especially well.

Poverty and addiction are major problems for these communities, and there isn't much infrastructure in place to help combat them. But for those just traveling through, these are places and problems that are easy to ignore. The people who live along Highway 16 are themselves, profoundly isolated from the rest of the country, from the rest of the world, and for someone driving the route, it could be easy to simply pass through these towns without stopping to continue on their way to somewhere else.

For these casual travelers, it might be tempting to ignore the small white crosses that stand like little graves on the side of the road, to look instead at the trees, the birds, anything else. These are issues to be handled at the local level, or ignored altogether. But on Highway 16, it's not always easy to ignore the signs that something is very, very wrong here, especially when those signs are quite large, literally. A few miles outside of Prince George tucked among the brush is a massive yellow billboard. In huge, clear letters, it says, Girls don't hitchhike on the highway of tears.

Killer on the loose. In the corner, the sign shows three photographs, long faded after exposure to the elements. Victims, the sign warns in large black text. Each photograph shows a girl smiling at the camera, her name printed above each image, Delphine Necall, Cecilia Nikol, and Tamara Chipman. Three people, three girls who are abducted along Highway 16, but they're only a small sample. Too small.

There are many, many more. It's impossible to know the name of the first person who was killed along Highway 16 and its bisecting roads, the area now referred to as the Highway of Tears, it's not even clear how many people have been lost over the decades, how many bodies have never been found. But there are a few things we do know. As far back as the 1960s, and probably even before that, people have been vanishing from the nearby towns around Highway 16.

Later, their bodies are found on the side of the road, underneath trees, cast aside next to a river. That is, if they're found, at all. For the majority of these cases, the killer has never been found. And depending on who you ask, there are different explanations for that. The isolation, the poverty, the countless anonymous drivers just passing through. Any one person could, in theory, kill someone and then simply drive away, never to be detected. Some have wondered if all the deaths were the work of one serial killer, if certain murders were connected to each other. But often, it's difficult to find

major links between one case and the next. The age of the victims vary greatly. Occupation doesn't always matter. Even the circumstances around their deaths aren't always the same. Some of them were last seen hitchhiking on Highway 16. Some were sexually assaulted or beaten or stabbed. But not one of these things is ever consistent across the board. There is just one common trait.

Overwhelmingly, the victims are female, and most are indigenous. We need to pause here because that last detail is extremely important. The issue of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls is a massive national issue in Canada. According to 2016 government statistics, indigenous women and girls make up only 4% of Canada's female population, but comprise 16% of all female homicides across the entire country. And while it's hard to find statistics about the sheer number of indigenous women and girls, who've been lost along the highway of tears, the numbers we do have are shocking.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or RCMP, have estimated a total of 1,200 missing and murdered indigenous women and girls across the whole of Canada. Of those official cases, a third of them took place in British Columbia, where the Highway of Tears is located. So for the last several decades, this region has served as a microcosm of this national issue,

tucked away in a remote. remote sector of the country where few people would travel, the plague of violence against indigenous women and girls has run rampant along Highway 16 and the network of logging roads that branch off it. It's worth noting that some of these cases have been solved. There have been multiple murders involving serial killers, along with a slew of individuals who chose Highway 16 as their preferred hotspot for murder. These perpetrators were caught, convicted, and sent to jail.

But these crimes are by far the exception. Unsolved murders pile up or get lost in filing cabinets of small local police stations. And because of that, it's very difficult to know the exact number of women and girls who have been killed over the years. In 2006, the RCMP confirmed 18 unsolved cases that are still being investigated today. But for many people, that number just doesn't sound right. After all, the killings didn't stop in 2006. Many more women and girls have disappeared since then, and many of their bodies were never found.

In fact, activist groups estimate that the number of unsolved cases from the region is much higher than 18. It could be as high as 50. Discussing the complicated, terrible history of the Highway of Tears is itself a challenge. This story is one part of a much larger tapestry, which touches on several massive themes. Racism, the abuse of indigenous women and girls in Canada, poverty, addiction, Lack of infrastructure, it's all at play here, and there's no way for us to cover all of that. What we can do is look at certain cases and use them as tent poles for these larger issues. The story of the Highway of Tears is massive, but it's also extremely intimate,

involving individual people and small communities whose stories aren't often told. To really understand the long, harrowing legacy of this place, we're going to look at the oldest case being investigated by a task force called Project E. Pana. In 1969, the cluster of highways and roads running across British Columbia were just that, a bunch of roads, a way to get from here to there. This is where we'll meet a 27-year-old mother of two named Gloria Moody. And her disappearance is where the story of the highway of tears more or less begins. Coming up, the tragedy of Gloria Moody.

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Call 1-800-545-99 or visit setbound.lily.com. Now back to the story. Like many other women and girls who went missing along the highway of tears, there isn't much detail about Gloria Moody's life before she disappeared. And even then, her story is shrouded in mystery. In 1969, Gloria was 27, a black and white photo of her. shows off her tall beehive hairdo, her delicate earrings, and her piercing dark eyes. A smile plays across her mouth as if she was suppressing a laugh. A mother of two young children, Gloria

was a member of the New Hawk Nation, living on the Belakula Indian Reserve in a region of British Columbia, called the Caribou. Like many other reservations in the area, Belakula is surrounded by wilderness, flanked by the mountains and the forest. On October 24, 1969, Gloria was invited to go to Williams Lake, a small town several hours away from Bella Kula. There, her family was planning to go Christmas shopping and spend some time relaxing at the local bars. But for whatever reason, Gloria didn't want to go. Maybe she was too busy with her kids, or she simply didn't feel up to shopping for the holidays. But with some cajoling, her parents and brother convinced her to join them on a weekend away.

As far as we know, the trip began without incident. Gloria and her family checked into their hotel, and probably spent the night eating, drinking, and enjoying each other's company. Saturday, October 25th, was more of the same. During the day, the family probably got their shopping done, wandering around the small downtown of Williams Lake. In the evening, Gloria and her brother decided to do some bar hopping. First, they hit the Lakeview Beer Parlor, then the Maple Leaf. And finally, the Ranch Hotel's beer parlor to while away the rest of the night.

This is around the time when the details about the night start to get a bit muddled. We know that Gloria was in the beer parlor a little before 11 p.m. that night, and at some point she must have gotten up and walked out. That was the last time anyone saw her alive. When she didn't return to the hotel later that night, her family must have been worried. And when she still hadn't shown up the following morning, they likely sensed that something just wasn't right. It's not hard to imagine her parents and her brothers scouring the streets of Williams Lake, calling her name and hoping that this was. nothing more than a misunderstanding. Maybe they thought Gloria hitchhiked back to Bella Kula.

Maybe she had to get home to her kids. But a little before noon that day, two hunters found Gloria's body. They were wandering down a small cattle trail about six miles out of Williams Lake when they spotted her in the brush. She was nude, with her clothes tossed onto the ground nearby. She'd been beaten and sexually assaulted, which had caused one of her arteries to break. That injury was the one that killed her. She bled to death. Immediately, questions were raised surrounding the circumstances of Gloria's death.

How did she get so far away from Williams Lake? Since her body was found on the side of a road, it seemed likely that a vehicle was involved. Could the killer have been someone who was at any of the beer halls Gloria visited the night she disappeared? The investigation into her death hoped to answer these questions.

Corporal West Knop led the search, speaking to virtually every patron at the bars Gloria and her brother visited that night. Investigators even looked into the whereabouts of anyone in the area with a criminal record, but nothing came of it. Frankly, it seemed like there weren't any leads at all. Without anything to push the investigation forward, the case seems to have started drying up. It can happen to any crime. If the police just don't see any leads, there really isn't much to keep the momentum of the search going. And for several years, that appears to have been what happened to Gloria.

case. There was brief coverage about her death, but it was quickly replaced with other stories. But five years later, in 1974, her story came back into focus, because at that point, several other bodies had been found in the British Columbia Interior. All of a sudden, Gloria Moody's murder was considered in a much larger context. It was as if a pattern was emerging, and she was a part of it. The other victims were Colleen McMillan, Pamela Darlington, Gail Ways, and two unknown women. All of the victims were female, ranging in age from 16 to their mid-30s, and almost every single victim was white except for Gloria. All but one had been found at the brush on the side of a road or highway.

It was probable that a vehicle had been involved in transporting the bodies in all cases. And similarly, it was probable that almost all of the victims had been raped. The coverage of these crimes stopped short of connecting the cases to a single perpetrator, but it did show that this was becoming a bigger issue than anyone might have wanted to realize at the time. People were beginning to notice that violence had a way of lingering around the region, and importantly, they'd noticed that Gloria Moody's death was an essential part of that issue. But that attention was short-lived. Like Gloria's case, there was very little evidence to help continue the investigation into any of the five other murder.

So after the 1970s, the story slowly faded into the background. No new updates, no evidence, no suspect. As the years inched by with no developments, it's easy to imagine that the families of the victims had to find their own kind of closure, and that wasn't always an easy thing to do. Glorious families struggled to move on, but the terrible reality of the tragedy kept returning to them. Above everything else was the overwhelming sense of guilt they felt, for a convincing her to go on the trip to Williams Lake in the first place.

For years, the family wouldn't talk about the events of October 25, 1969. To have such a terrible thing happen without any hope of closure must have been torturous. But in 1998, an unexpected development took place that split the silence. That year, the Williams Lake Tribune published a shocking story. A woman who was given the pseudonym Georgia came forward with a shocking revelation. Her husband and two other men were responsible for Gloria Moody's death. Georgia painted her husband, who will call Keith as a, quote, evil man, a jekyll and hide type. She said he regularly beat her, and she spent their marriage knowing that she had better

do what she was told if she didn't want him to hurt her or her children. Keith was one of the people with a criminal record who was interviewed by investigators shortly after Gloria's death. But for whatever reason, nothing came of that conversation. Georgia's suspicion of her husband seemed to come from two factors. One was his abusive mercurial nature, and the second was more of a matter of timing. Shortly after Gloria's murder, Keith demanded that the family move away from the caribou immediately. Georgia wasn't in a position to argue, so she agreed.

After this move, however, things between Georgia and Keith went from bad to worse. Fearing for her life, she packed up her things, took their children, and fled. and fled. After Georgia left the relationship, Keith died by suicide, and to Georgia, his death seemed like an admission of guilt. She explained in her interview with the Tribune, quote, he was a tormented soul. Georgia didn't divulge much information about the two other men she believed were involved in Gloria's death.

They reportedly also died by suicide, which many felt suggested their guilt. But her Tribune interview offered virtually nothing else to suggest who these people were, how they knew her husband, or why exactly she believed they killed Gloria Moody. Still, after Georgia's story, local police teamed up with the FBI to see if there was any merit to her claims. As evidence, Georgia offered the police a 12-page letter that Keith mailed to her before his death. While the contents of the letters suggested a man who was profoundly unhappy, there is nothing tangible to suggest that he had anything to do with Gloria Moody's murder. The results of the FBI probe were inconclusive.

but many investigators remained totally convinced. To them, there was no doubt that Georgia's husband and these two unknown men were the ones responsible for torturing and killing the 27-year-old mother. Gloria's brother, Sam, had complicated feelings about these three men. It seemed he believed that they were his sister's killers, but even that belief had its limitations. After all, by the time Georgia made her confession, all three men were already dead.

But Sam still felt that the men had been, punished in a way. In an article with the Williams-like Tribune, he stated plainly that, "...sometimes carrying that guilt is more retribution than jail." For Gloria's remaining family, George's admission was enough, but legally it didn't hold any weight. Sure, Keith was an abusive, unpredictable person, but that didn't mean he was capable of killing someone, and there was no hard evidence to prove that he or the other two men had anything to do with the crime. So Gloria's case remained unsolved.

However, her story wasn't quite over yet. And the next chapter of Gloria's case helped to find the conversation around the highway of tears for years to come. But don't get us wrong, it's not a happy ending. Frankly, it's not an ending at all. Coming up, an unexpected revelation breathes life into several highway of tears cold cases, and Gloria's story becomes part of a much larger conversation. This episode is brought to you by Prime.

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It had been over three decades since her body was found on the side of a cattle trail six miles from Williams Lake, and with each passing year, it seemed less and less likely that any new detail would come to light. Gloria's relatives had long ago made their own peace with her death, but by this point, they'd been joined by many, many others, people who were also trying to grapple with this exact kind of loss. Because Gloria's story wasn't unique. Far from it. Since Gloria's murder, there have been countless cases just like hers, all female victims, all unsolved. In 1974, 14-year-old Monica Ignace was last seen walking along Highway 16 by herself. Her body was found

four months later. On May 9, 1981, the body of 33-year-old Maureen Mosey was found near Highway 97. She was last seen hitchhiking. Eight years later, 24-year-old Alberta Williams was found dead near Prince Rupert. And as the years passed, many more names are added to this seemingly endless list. It's likely that each of these ran into similar issues to Gloria Moody's investigation. A lack of evidence and few leads toward a potential suspect. And without anything to keep the search going, the investigation simply dried up. It's often extremely hard to investigate crimes like this.

for several reasons. For a start, it could take months, even years, to find the body. By then, who knows what evidence is left at the scene. Now, there's also the issue of finding a suspect. Time is never on the side of the investigation. The longer that passes, the harder it gets to identify the person responsible. So by the time that the police get involved, it's already an uphill battle to find any shred of evidence. That is, if the police get involved at all. Sometimes the real challenge is getting the RCMP to investigate a case in the first place. This has become a frequent problem in cases that involve indigenous victims. And to many people, this trend speaks of a larger issue of racism within the RCMP.

Carolyn Bennett, Canada's former Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs, explored this problem in extensive detail to the New York Times in 2016. In her work, she traveled across the whole of Canada, consulting with indigenous populations, and many people spoke to her about the racism and prejudice they experienced at the hands of local police. Bennett explained that for many people, it felt like the RCMP treated the death of indigenous women

as, quote, inevitable, as if their lives matter less. In many cases, the option of foul play was never considered, and no investigation was ever started. Instead, police would label an indigenous woman's death as the product of a suicide and over-esuitive. overdose or simply a freak accident, despite calls for action from the victim's loved ones, and that often left families to search on their own without the help of the RCMP. But this sense of injustice was also a powerful catalyst for advocacy.

As the Ensemble cases ticked higher and higher, First Nations groups surrounding the highway of tears took action to raise awareness about the safety of women and girls in their community. In 2006, a group of Wetsuaten organized the first high-year-old. of Tears Awareness Walk, a massive track across Highway 16 all the way from Prince Rupert to Prince George. There were dozens of people who joined along the walk, but most of the participants were Native women who had lost loved ones along that lonely stretch of road. The 400-mile journey took over two weeks and ended with a symposium organized by the

provincial government of British Columbia in tandem with indigenous advocacy groups. The event was the first of its kind, but it wouldn't be the last. By then, the story of the Highway of Tears had become much more than a local problem. It was growing to be a national emergency, one that needed to be acted upon fast. It's likely that indigenous activism was the catalyst for the RCMP to get involved in a more structural way. After all, there needed to be serious systematic support from the police, if any of these cold cases were going to be solved. And that meant that the RCMP had to step up to the plate. So in 2006, a group of officers created Project E. Panna, a task force specifically set up to reopen unsolved cases from along the highway of tears.

Of the 18 deaths that were chosen, Gloria Moody's was the oldest by several years. The task force also included the other three unsolved murders that were grouped alongside her all those years ago, Colleen McMillan, Gail Waze, and Pamela Darlington. Project E. Pana quickly became a bittersweet project. In a way, it offered a kind of support that was sorely lacking in local communities around the highway of tears. But at the same time, it was only addressing a small sliver of the problem. After all, it was impossible to know the sheer number of women and girls whose cases had simply been cast aside, long forgotten in some filing cabinet at a local police station.

But still, it was a start. For Gloria and the other women and girls chosen for the task force, It was the first time in multiple decades that their names were being recognized. Up until this moment, Glory had been nothing more than a face in a faded newspaper. But now, maybe, things could change. In 2012, it looked like that was exactly what was going to happen. That year, DNA from Colleen Macmillan's crime scene was shown to be a match to a deceased U.S. convict named Bobby Jack Fowler.

Fowler died in prison in 2006 while serving a sentence for kidnapping, assault and attempted rape. But he'd long been a suspect for several murders around British Columbia. In the 1970s, Fowler worked for a roofing company that regularly sent employees across the Canadian border for jobs. He allegedly worked around Prince George, one of the largest cities along the highway of tears. He also was known to speak candidly about women

and how he believed they deserved to be sexually assaulted. He reportedly liked to tell friends that women who hitchhiked were especially deserving of this kind of abuse. The people who knew him described Fowler as having personalities that changed on a dime. In one moment, he was charming, and in an instant he became violent, as if he was a different person entirely. This definitely seemed suspicious, but before investigators matched his DNA to the crime scene of Colleen McMillan's murder, Fowler had been nothing more than a suspect. He certainly seemed guilty, and had traveled extensively through the region that encompassed

the highway of tears. Now the evidence directly suggested his involvement. This revelation about Colleen McMillan's case spurred more speculation about the other victims who had died in the area. Suddenly, Bobby Jack Fowler was a potential suspect for the murders of both Pamela Darlington and Gail Ways. The reporting around these updates was almost celebratory. After all, these were cases that had been cold for decades, with little sign that things would ever change. The moment was huge for the families of these three victims who'd been waiting so long for any shred of hope. And it would be easy to imagine that Glory Moody's case could have been tied to Bobby Jack Fowler. After all, her name had been listed along with these

other victims, whose murders look similar enough to be suspicious. Surely her case was also tied to this killer. But the RCMP stayed tight-lipped about any connection there. Her name came up briefly, but only to mention that her death was somewhat similar to the others. As always, it's possible, but we just don't know the details of the investigation. Maybe there was a perfectly good reason why Gloria's case wasn't tied to this killer. For some people, the message was crystal clear. This was just another case of an indigenous woman forgotten. Her story sidelined to make room for white women. At the very least, it's a disappointing end to a story that was already full of confusion, false leads, and grief.

The star truth is that there aren't any happy stories here. So, in a terrible way, Gloria is one of the luckier ones. Her death was investigated. Her name was printed in the newspaper. Her photo was published for all to see. There are countless other stories that will never be told. Names, we will never know. And frankly, that's why Gloria Moody's story is so important to tell here.

Because this kind of case is the defining story of Highway of Tears. It's unsatisfying, convoluted, and one without a conclusive ending. Her family had to find their own kind of closure on their own terms. In 1994, nearly three decades after Gloria's death, Sam and his family gathered at the location where her body was found. He brought up members of the Alkalai Lake Indian Band, and together they held a healing ceremony. It was the closest thing to closure that Sam could find.

And for countless others, closure looked a lot like this, a family gathered together in grief, trying to make peace with something truly terrible. It's hard to find any satisfaction in stories like these. But that won't stop communities from searching for answers and from lifting up the stories of women and girls whose names are often forgotten. At the core of this issue, there are always people who will still choose to remember. Thanks again for tuning into our Highway of Tears, special. Next time, we're going to look at the massive structural issues that make this region

especially dangerous. Along the way, we'll follow the stories of two notorious killers who made the Highway of Tears their hunting ground. You can find all episodes of serial killers and all other Spotify originals from Parcast or free on Spotify. For more information about activism around the Highway of Tears, check out Highway of Tears.org. See you next time. Cereal Killers is a Spotify original from Parcast. Executive producers include Max and Ron Cudler, sound design by Michael Motion, with production assistance by Ron Shapiro,

Nick Johnson, Trent Williamson, and Carly Madden. This episode of Serial Killers was written by Georgia Hampton, edited by Joel Callan and Abigail Cannon, fact-checked by Anya Barely, researched by Brian Petrus and Chelsea Wood, and produced by Joshua Kern. Serial Killers stars Greg Polston, and Vanessa Richardson.

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Despite an exhaustive investigation, the killer avoids arrest and then strikes again. I'm Global News crime reporter Nancy Hicks. You might listen to a lot of true crime podcasts this year, but they're not crime beat. Search for and follow the award-winning podcast Crime Beat on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music and wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Do you want to hear something spooky? Some monster, it reminded me of Bigfoot. Monsters Among Us is a weekly podcast featuring true stories of the paranormal.

One of the boys started to exhibit demonic possession. Stories straight from the witnesses' mouths themselves. Something very snake-like lifted its head out of the water. Hosted by me, your guide, Derek Hayes. Somehow I lost eight whole hours. Listen now on Spotify or Word. you get your podcast.