It was April 12, 2003, and a passerby was walking near the edge of Danny Johnson’s farmland, twenty kilometers north of Camrose, Alberta. Johnson had been out checking his property as he did most mornings, thinking only of routine chores, fences, and whatever the winter had buried. The cold had refused to leave that year. Lake Mikuelon still held ice along its edges, and the ground was soft in patches, frozen hard in others—a half-melted spring in which the earth was beginning to give back what winter had taken.

What the passerby saw jutting from the mud was not a rock, and certainly not the bone of a farm animal. It was a human skull. Within the hour, Johnson’s quiet stretch of land had become a crime scene. Tape went up, evidence markers were placed, and officers knelt in the mud, searching on their hands and knees in grid lines, working slowly and methodically across the field.

A week later, they found a blue jacket. Investigators bagged it without much comment. For now, it was just another piece of a puzzle no one could solve. A name without a face.

A body without a story. It would take four more months before anyone could put a name to the bones found in Danny Johnson’s field. The identity was not the only troubling thing about the discovery. She was not the first woman to turn up this way in the countryside outside Edmonton, and she would not be the last.

On August 28, 2003, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police confirmed what the blue jacket had already suggested. The skull found near Lake Mikuelon belonged to Debbie Lake, a twenty-nine-year-old woman who had spent time in Edmonton’s sex trade before her disappearance. With her name came a warning. Investigators asked sex workers across the city to take extra precautions and work in groups.

One RCMP officer put it plainly: those working in the profession should be careful, because no one knew yet whether police were dealing with one killer or several. That fear proved justified. Two months before Debbie Lake’s remains were found, something else had begun happening near a small community called Rolly View. Residents there started noticing a strange smell.

It was not garbage, not a dead animal on the road. It was something heavier, the kind of odor that seeps into a home and does not leave. For weeks the smell of decay lingered. Locals tried to ignore it, but with time they began to realize something was badly wrong.

On July 7, 2003, in a field near Range Road 235 and Township Road 500 in Leduc County, the remains of Sylvianne Bellrose were found in an advanced state of decomposition. She was forty years old, a mother of four, with ties to the Edmonton sex trade. A neighbor later said the body had not been hidden at all. It had been left somewhere that someone was bound to find it.

On September 13, 2003, forty members of trained ground search teams moved through fields east of Leduc County. Sixteen police dogs worked the ground alongside them. It was one of the largest searches the area had ever seen. Searchers fanned out across vast stretches of farmland, the dogs ranging ahead and coming back, everyone looking for the same thing and hoping they would not actually find it.

They kept going, searching for evidence, for remains, for anything that might connect Debbie Lake and Sylvianne Bellrose to a growing list of women who had gone missing in the Edmonton area. Women had been turning up in fields and ditches on the outskirts of Edmonton for years. There was a body near Sherwood Park in 1997, and another near Fort Saskatchewan that same year, then more in the years that followed. The pattern always seemed the same: usually rural land, isolated, easy to miss, especially if no one was looking hard.

For a long time, no one was. But there was one story that had gained momentum in the press, a case that had thrown this horrifying pattern into the light years before a skull was found in Danny Johnson’s field. It began with a young woman named Cara King. On August 2, 1997, Cara King made her last contact with her mother, Kathy, and then vanished off the face of the earth.

A month later, on September 1, her remains were found in a canola field near Sherwood Park, just outside Edmonton. She was only twenty-two years old. At first, investigators worked the case seriously. They canvassed the street where she had worked.

They compiled a list of known sex-trade clients who frequented those blocks and interviewed them one by one. In fact, Kathy King was told that RCMP investigators had interviewed every client who had been on the streets where her daughter was last seen. Initially, it seemed someone would eventually talk. But no suspect was ever named, not even a person of interest.

So Kathy King took up the work where the investigators left off. Over the years that followed, she built a database of more than 150 names of missing and murdered women, tracking them by hand in paper files, cross-referencing and updating as new cases emerged and old ones quietly faded from public attention. As a longtime social worker, she later co-authored a book examining the demand side of the sex trade—the men who buy it and who ultimately pay the price for that transaction. In a way, she became the institutional memory that law enforcement’s own case files had failed to preserve.

In 1997, when Cara King’s body was found in that canola field, investigators treated it as an isolated case. There was no reason yet to think otherwise. But six hundred miles away, something else was unfolding, something no one in Edmonton could yet connect to their own. In a small town just outside Vancouver, a pig farmer had been doing this for years already.

Robert Pickton was born in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, in 1949. In the late 1970s, he and his brothers inherited the family pig farm, land they would later sell off in parcels for more than five million dollars. But long before police ever set foot on the property, Pickton had turned the farm into something else entirely. Investigators would later determine that his crimes reached back to at least 1983.

In the 1990s, women began disappearing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Mary Anne Clark in 1991, Diana Melnick in 1995, Tanya Holyk in 1996, Cara Ellis and Sherry Irving in early 1997. A handful of different women over multiple years. Nearly all of them were from the same neighborhoods, living on the margins of society in the shadows of dark streets.

Eventually, each of them would be linked to the Pickton farm. None of them would be found alive. In March 1997, a woman named Wendy Eistetter went to the Pickton farm. What happened next nearly killed her.

Pickton handcuffed her wrists and then stabbed her four times. Somehow, she managed to fight him off and wound him with his own knife before escaping to get help. He was later charged with attempted murder. But here was the alarming part: the case never went to trial.

In a troubling decision, prosecutors determined that Eistetter, a drug user, would not hold up as a credible witness. The case was quietly dropped in January 1998. Around that time, one of Pickton’s employees found something disturbing on the property: several handbags belonging to women reported missing from the Downtown Eastside. The employee reported it to police.

Then, in June 1999, police received a report that Pickton was keeping a freezer full of human meat. But for reasons unknown, no action was taken on either report. Think about that for a minute. A highly specific report, tied to a man who was already on law enforcement’s radar, and still it led nowhere?

Investigators did not set foot on the property until February 2002. That investigation would become a symbol of one of the worst policing failures in Canadian history. What began as a routine search turned into the largest criminal investigation the country had ever seen. Within days, personal belongings belonging to missing women began to surface.

That was enough to shut the site down and bring in additional resources. The excavation that followed lasted nearly two years, until November 2003, and ultimately cost roughly seventy million dollars. Forensic teams used conveyor belts and industrial soil sieves, treating the earth as if they were working a mine. They were searching for any fine detail the ground might hide.

By the time the operation ended, investigators had extracted nearly eighty distinct genetic profiles from the property, of both men and women—far more than anyone could connect to a specific name. Within weeks, Pickton was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, and more charges followed. In 2004, forensic examinations revealed DNA from two of the missing Vancouver women preserved on Pickton’s own clothing—clothing that had been seized during his 1997 arrest for attempted murder and had sat in a police evidence locker ever since. When his jury trial began in January 2007, the prosecution revealed that Pickton had confessed to an undercover officer that he had killed forty-nine women.

In December of that year, he was ultimately convicted on six counts of second-degree murder. The remaining twenty charges were stayed in 2010 after his final appeals were exhausted. He later died in a hospital in Quebec City in 2024, twelve days after being attacked by a fellow inmate. Now, the Pickton farm was nowhere near Edmonton.

But the fear it generated spread far beyond British Columbia. That brings us back to Alberta. In 2002, the same year police finally searched the Pickton property, a specialized unit was quietly forming across the prairies. Investigators in Alberta had watched what happened in Vancouver: women disappearing over the years, reports being ignored, a killer operating for more than a decade before the crimes were linked.

The unit would eventually be known as Project KARE. By 2011, its founder and leader, Chief Superintendent Mike Sekela, stood before the Standing Committee on the Status of Women in Canada to testify about the task force’s work. He described a program designed to prevent exactly what had happened in Vancouver from happening again—a coordinated response to a pattern of violence against vulnerable women. At the time, he told the committee that it was working.

But outside Edmonton, the body count kept rising. Most of the women found in the fields around Edmonton had been left the same way: naked, positioned in the fetal pose, placed in rural locations that were easy to access. Criminologists would later describe these disposal sites as deliberate in their visibility. It was clear that the killer or killers wanted these women to be found, and perhaps were trying to send some kind of message.

Leaving a body in a place meant to be found requires a certain kind of bold confidence. To investigators, it did not look like carelessness. It looked like a signature. But even then, not every case fit the pattern, and that was what made this murder series so difficult to solve.

Take, for example, the burned remains of two women, Edna Bernard and Charlene Galle. The fire broke the pattern completely. Fire destroys DNA, trace evidence, and the other small details that might link one crime scene to another. The theory was that whoever had done this to Bernard and Galle wanted to destroy something, or simply wanted them to disappear without a trace.

According to a story published by The Globe and Mail in 2005, criminologist Stephen Eager believed investigators might be facing more than one killer working in those same rural fields. Either way, the body count kept rising, the signatures evolved, and investigators came no closer to an answer. As the years passed, the mystery of the Edmonton murders continued to haunt families and law enforcement agencies alike. Then one man’s name finally led to a conviction.

Thomas Svekla was arrested in 2006 in connection with the death of Theresa Innes. He was later charged with killing another young Indigenous woman named Rachel Bean. In June 2008, he was convicted of second-degree murder in the Innes case, but acquitted in the Bean case. However, two years later, in May 2010, the court declared him a dangerous offender—a designation reserved for people considered likely to reoffend, making it easier to keep a person imprisoned indefinitely.

For a time, that seemed to close at least one chapter of this story. But there was more to come. In April 2015, human remains belonging to a woman named Dolores Brower were discovered. Three months later, in July, the remains of Corrie Ottenbreit were identified on the same rural property.

Like Brower, she had last been seen in Edmonton in 2004, more than a decade earlier. Her identification was owed to a single detail from years before her disappearance. In 2003, Ottenbreit had given a sample of her hair to Project KARE’s outreach team. Another woman in the records, just in case.

Twelve years later, that sample was the only reason anyone could identify her remains. Police eventually named Thomas Svekla as a suspect in both deaths, yet no formal charges were ever laid in either case. Whether Svekla was responsible for those deaths remains unresolved to this day. August 18, 2010.

Amber Tuccaro, twenty years old and a member of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, accepted a ride from an unknown man outside a hotel in Nisku, heading toward Edmonton. No one knows where she ended up. When Amber failed to return to her hotel room the next morning, her family did not wait days to raise the alarm. In fact, her mother, Vivian, reported her missing to the RCMP almost immediately.

But not much happened. Police dismissed her mother’s panic, telling her that Amber was probably just at a party. To make matters worse, two weeks later, on September 4, the RCMP issued a public statement. They did not believe Amber Tuccaro was in danger.

It took a month before investigators began searching for her. For two years, the case moved at the pace of a file the RCMP had decided in advance was not urgent. Her family kept calling. They kept pushing, and they always received some version of the same answer: there was not much that could be done.

That all changed in August 2012. That month, investigators finally released an audio recording they had held for more than a year: Amber’s last phone call, made from inside the car, which had captured the voice of the man driving her. “Where are we going? ” she asked.

“We’re just heading south of Beaumont, or north of Beaumont. We’re heading north of Beaumont. ” “Buddy, where are we going? ” “Just no, let’s turn around.

” “Are you fucking kidding me? ” “No, I’m not. ” “You better not take me. You better not take me anywhere I don’t want to go.

I want to go to the Industrial City. ” “We’re going to the Industrial City. ” “Buddy, we’re not going into the city, are we? ” “Yeah, we are.

” “We’re going—no, we’re not. ” “Yeah. ” “Then where the hell does this road go? ” “It’s 50th Street.

” “50th Street? You sure? ” “Sure. ” “Buddy, where are we going?

” “50th Street. ” “50th Street? ” “50th Street. ” “50th Street?

” “Yes. ” “You better pull over right now. ” “Follow me. ”

This was the kind of breakthrough that should have come much earlier.

The police had held an audio recording the entire time, and it was the first real lead in the case. But just as some hope appeared, tragedy struck. Days later, on September 1, searchers found Amber’s remains in a field in Leduc County. Amber’s life had not been perfect, but she was a young woman with a whole life ahead of her.

She had a young son and a family who loved her. She had goals and ambitions, but she never got the chance to achieve them. In 2014, Vivian, Amber’s mother, filed a formal complaint against the RCMP in Leduc over how her daughter’s case had been handled. It took four more years for that complaint to produce an answer.

In August 2018, the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP issued a 120-page report. The report concluded that the investigation into Amber Tuccaro’s disappearance had been inadequate. The following year, in July 2019, an assistant commissioner of the RCMP issued a formal apology to the Tuccaro family. “On behalf of the RCMP, I am truly sorry.

”

The voice on that final phone call was never identified. When several women came forward to identify the same man from the recording, police interviewed him but stated he was not a person of interest. Project KARE, the task force born from the fear that Edmonton would repeat Vancouver’s mistakes, was quietly disbanded in 2014, the same year Vivian Tuccaro filed her complaint. In the years that followed, different investigations from different agencies tried to count the number of women who had died in those fields.

Depending on who was counting and how, the number fluctuated wildly: twenty, forty-one, two hundred and fifteen. One count even reached forty-nine—the same number Pickton had once confessed to. It turned out no one could even agree on how many names belonged to the list Kathy King had begun keeping by hand in 1997. Debbie Lake has a name now, and so do Cara King, Amber Tuccaro, Sylvianne Bellrose, Corrie Ottenbreit, and Dolores Brower.

But these are just a few stories from this case. What no one can tell you—not the police, not Project KARE, not two decades of advances in forensic science—is how many killers passed through those fields, or whether one of them is still out there.