TW: Murder, sexual assault
An unrelated news item reminded me of where I used to live, and why I wouldn’t want to live there ever again. And that was before the United Nations criminal gang and Renegades motorcycle gang (affiliated with the Hell’s Angels) took over the city.
I’ve talked before about the Highway of Tears, a 700km stretch of Highway 16 west of Prince George out to the coast. The RCMP’s (*) “official” number of women murdered along that highway is over seventy, about 20 in the last 20 years. First Nations groups claim the actual number of murdered women to be over a hundred.
(* RCMP: Racist Corrupt Misogynistic Pricks)
It was on August 16, 1982 that Nina Marie Joseph’s body was found in Freeman Park. She was the third known victim (there were possibly others) of convicted serial killer Edward Dennis Isaac. He was sentenced to life in prison. The killer’s first two victims went missing and died in fall of 1981, Jean Mary Kovacs (October) and Roswitha Fuchsbichler (November). There are three serial killers currently serving life sentences, but there may be more.
I was fourteen when I moved there in June 1981. Freeman Park was less than a kilometre from the house where I lived.
That same summer of 1981, serial killer Clifford Robert Olson was apprehended after murdering at least eleven children in Vancouver. While it was far away, Wayne Williams of Atlanta, Georgia was in the news, arrested in June 1981 after murdering at least 24 children. It made me wonder what the hell kind of a world I was living in. (Recall that the previous few years included the Iranian revolution, the Jonestown massacre, and Three Mile Island.) At the time Joseph’s body was discovered in 1982, the Green River Killer in Seattle, Gary Ridgway, had only murdered his first victim during what would be a two decade long spree with dozens of victims.
According to the Racist Corrupt Misogynistic Pricks (RCMP), “officially” 70 women have been murdered along the Highway of Tears since 1970. First Nations groups claim the number is well over 100. Given the RCMP’s history of mistreatment and racism towards First Nations people, of sexual assault, violence, and murder they perpetrated, the higher number is likely more accurate.
The rightwing “BC liberal party” of the 2010s destroyed evidence about the Highway of Tears, making it harder to get justice for the victims’ families. And after Greyhound ceased all bus service in the north, the only means of transportation is either commercial flights from large centres, privately owned vehicles, or hitchhiking. With hundreds of kilometres of isolated wilderness and carrion eating animals that remove the bodies, opportunistic murder is easy to get away with.
As mentioned above, Freeman Park was near where I lived. I attended the public junior/senior high school in the area that was next to a “residential school” which had closed by the 1980s. Next to Freeman Park is a catholic church (“st. mary’s”) and a private school it owns, one of two catholic schools in the city. News about the other church, “sacred heart”, is what prompted this post.
Early this year, Dr. Nicholas Harrison of Delta, BC (a Vancouver suburb) filed a civil claim against “sacred heart” church because of two pedophiles in that “school” who raped him for several years. If Harrison was in kindergarten to Grade 4 from 1973 to 1977, then he and I are the same age.
My “parents” were fanatical catholics. They wanted to send us three kids to a “catholic school”, but they couldn’t afford it. For once, not being a well-off family was a good thing.
Those same churches and catholic disease . . . I mean, diocese would in the 1980s be overseen by Hubert O’Connor, a repeat sex offender who raped children in residential schools, and raped multiple adult women in larger communities around BC.
Delta professor alleges sexual abuse by Prince George Catholic priests
Two dead Prince George Roman Catholic priests are among defendants named in a sexual abuse case filed by a man who asserts the pair began abusing him when he was in kindergarten at a church school.
Jan 6, 2022
A Delta professor and actor alleges in a new lawsuit that Roman Catholic priests in Prince George sexually abused him as a child.
Dr. Nicholas Harrison made the allegations in a notice of civil claim filed in the B.C. Supreme Court Vancouver registry on Jan. 4. He claims abuse by Father Francis “Frank” Joseph Rayner and Brother Dennis “Leopold” O’Mahoney occurred from 1973 to 1977, while he was in kindergarten through Grade 4.
“I was only six years old when the sexual abuse began,” Harrison said in a statement to Glacier Media, provided by his lawyer.
At the time, Harrison was an altar boy at Sacred Heart Cathedral and a student at the adjoining elementary school.
“I cannot find the right words to explain how the sexual abuse that I endured at such a young age has impacted my life,” Harrison said. “My experiences at Sacred Heart have left a permanent stain on my soul. I have spent a lifetime in therapy, writing and sharing my experiences with others as a cautionary tale of how these horrific breaches of the social contract between adults and children occur.”