The True Story of Tranquille Road …
By Brenda Craig
For Thompson Life Magazine Summer 2007
In the alley behind the barbershop, two women are dragging on smokes as they take a rest from their sex-for-dope lives in the shade of a leafy tree, while a couple of skinny guys in baseball caps and sunglasses are dealing drugs behind a dumpster. Down one of the side streets there’s a young man on the sly, checking for unlocked doors into a boarded up office building.
Further on I meet Jane (not her real name), a 34-year-old sex-trade worker hanging out behind a rundown old motel called the Royal Apartments, but the locals call it “Mutantville” because it has a history as a giant flophouse for druggies, sex-trade workers and whoever needs a cheap place to live.
Her steely blue eyes look tired and sad. She’s wearing a red sleeveless T-shirt and blue jeans; a crack pipe — her most valuable possession — sits on the ground beside her. Yes, she’ll talk to a reporter for a minute, she says.
How did Jane get into the sex trade? “Well, I just got mixed up with the wrong guy in Kelowna. Started using cocaine. And now I am addicted to four or five different drugs,” she says but adds she doesn’t do crystal meth, “It puts holes in your brain.”
Jane has a $600 a day drug habit, which she supports with money she makes as a sex-trade worker.
“It’s not hard physically,” she says. “It’s mentally hard. You’re up one minute feeling like a queen and then in the morning you feel bad, that’s the hard part.”
Jane grew up in Kamloops and has a daughter who lives with her family. She describes them as being Christian and hopeful that she gets straightened out.
But in the meantime, Jane has nothing to do with them or her daughter.
She knew the girls that were arrested in the June busts, but wasn’t among them. “I was out of town for two days. Can’t get me, I just keep moving,” she chuckles.
Jane has tried to kick her habit, she just completed 20 days in the House of Ruth, a women’s shelter on Maple Street that provides counselling and temporary housing. It is one of the few places she can go for help with her addictions.
Unfortunately, the road to change is a long one fraught with ups and downs. “I knew I was gonna relapse,” she says “but there was nothing to help me.”
Not so Tranquille Road
It’s ironic that a road named Tranquille is embroiled in a bitter turf battle between the people who live and own business there, and the sex-trade workers and drug dealers who live on and work the streets.
Residents complain about crime and prostitutes turning tricks in their yards, while frustrated shop owners blame prostitutes, addicts, homeless people and people with mental health issues for scaring away customers.
A neighbourhood watch group regularly patrols the streets trying to chase away johns that troll for dangerous delights. On the flip side, outreach workers are out there offering support to marginalized persons by assisting them in finding affordable housing, helping sex-trade workers get off the street and possibly reconnect with family, and helping people develop skills so they can find jobs.
In response to complaints from city residents and business owners the RCMP has initiated red zones to try to remove the “undesirable” elements from this North Shore neighbourhood and downtown Kamloops. A red zone is an arbitrary boundary that gives the courts power to tell people where they can and cannot go.
And despite the highly publicized two-day crackdown by RCMP on prostitution in the neighbourhood in early June (that resulted in street prostitutes being arrested and ordered to stay away), Kamloops’ infamous sex-trade area on the city’s North Shore is still humming along.
Tranquille Busted
In May the Kamloops RCMP identified prostitution and drugs as part of their crime-reduction mandate. They started with a crackdown on sex-trade workers and followed that up with two additional undercover operations to bust drug dealers and johns.
In the first week of June the RCMP set up a two-day undercover sting operation targeted at sex-trade workers in the city’s two red zones (North Shore and downtown). “The operation took 10 hours to plan and then another 10 hours to arrest 17 prostitutes,” says Insp. Yves Lacasse.
The crackdown made homeowners and business people feel better. One restaurant owner “came over and he thanked me. He hugged me in fact. And another customer came and shook my hand,” says the inspector who makes a point of patronizing local area businesses on the North Shore.
But Lacasse is a realist. He admits that despite the arrests, and despite an order that those arrested not go anywhere within what is now called the red zones, within days, some of the women arrested were back on the street, working again.
Who’s Neighbourhood is it?
“Is it the taxpayers’ neighbourhood or is it the junkies neighbourhood?” asks Peter Mutrie from the North Shore Business Improvement Association (NSBIA). “The taxpayers are taking it back!”
Three years ago, Mutrie and the NSBIA started hammering away, trying to create a better environment on the North Shore and rebuild the community.
“Starbucks turned up their nose at me at a convention four years ago, now they have a little kiosk over at Safeway,” says Mutrie. From his perspective the sex trade and everything that goes with it is gouging the life out of a potentially vibrant neighbourhood.
The City of Kamloops has a plan to create a market village in the Tranquille area using the latest in urban design to build streets that encourage people to be there. Mutrie and the NSBIA are working with business owners to brighten up properties in the area and have hired the very people that some folks want to eject to work on landscaping and painting projects.
People that need a hand have signed on to help spruce up the neighbourhood in two separate programs: the Social Enterprise Program, for landscaping, and the
Job Creation Partnership, for painting.
The Social Enterprise Program is organized by the community development committee of the NSBIA together with the ASK Wellness Centre. The project is aimed at building a sense of community by bringing together business and property owners, agency workers and neighbours in an effort to beautify prominent corners along Tranquille. Both Service Canada and the City of Kamloops are helping with funding, and business owners are paying for materials. Ten people have come forward to spruce up the neighbourhood.
The Job Creation Partnership is a Federal program under which the NSBIA applied for a four-person crew to paint six buildings to create an interesting visual change along Tranquille. Eligible persons are those on an unemployment insurance claim. The NSBIA provides project development and admin while building owners ante up funding for materials.
Both projects are aimed to improve the area’s appearance and build community relationships as well as community pride. They also build a business case for the merchants along the affected strip as consumers, residents and business owners find the area becoming more appealing.
Homeowner Deserts the Hood
“One man complained about sex acts happening on the church steps. We don’t want this (area) to become like East Hastings Street, in Vancouver,” says Insp. Lacasse. “This is not acceptable behaviour in this community. Anybody’s community.”
“You need to bust the johns and you need to give the prostitutes help,” says former Tamarack Avenue resident Robert Lee from his new home in Logan Lake. After watching the prostitution and drug problems in the area get worse and worse every year, Lee finally gave up and sold his house in June.
“It was quite the sight” on Tranquille Road, says Lee. “All the time you could literally see drug users and prostitutes walking across the street, waving, trying to ask people for dates and stuff.”
Although he liked the street where his family lived, he didn’t like the sight of prostitutes along Clapperton and Tranquille Road, on his twice-daily trip to drop-off and pickup his kids at school. “It was just a little too much,” he says.
She’s Not a Criminal
The RCMP round up of prostitutes has been both praised and disparaged, but everyone agrees some of the women are in desperate need of help.
Natilia James, 19, suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome and has a mental age of about five reported the Kamloops Daily News (June 14, 2007) on the court proceedings that followed her June arrest with 16 other sex-trade workers. “When the time came to impose a sentence, (Judge Stella) Frame stopped speaking, as if momentarily lost for words, as if suddenly overwhelmed by the circumstances of an offender without much hope. Her hand came to her mouth, then to her eyes as she broke into tears. She left the bench, saying she needed a break,” wrote Robert Koopmans.
Bob Hughes, executive director of the ASK Wellness Center, says, “She (Natilia James) represents why we need something done. This is unacceptable. She is barely able to function in society. She doesn’t deserve to be in jail. She is not a criminal. She is a social disaster!”
The ASK Wellness Centre provides support for persons with HIV and hepatitis C, and to the people in the community who are marginalized: sex-trade workers, people with mental health problems, drug addicts and homeless people.
The window in Hughes’ office overlooks Tranquille Road. With a $750,000 a year budget his staff of outreach workers is in contact with most of the road’s marginalized, doing everything from needle exchange to finding food, shelter and health care.
Kamloops has become a big city with big city problems. According to the RCMP, the city is home to 55 known sex-trade workers. But depending on the time of year this number can rise as high as 80 to 90 as prostitutes from elsewhere arrive, work the streets for a while and then move on.
On one particular day, says Hughes, an outreach worker picked up 50 needles in the alley, went back three hours later and picked up 50 more. But he doesn’t think rounding up prostitutes and throwing them in jail solves the problems of the women themselves, or the community as a whole.
“Women who are picked up as sex-trade workers — should they be pushed through the criminal justice system or a health-care system?” asks Hughes. “Well I would believe, based on my knowledge of this community, that people are in favour of assistance and help.”
New Hope
Arjun Singh, an energetic, Kamloops city councilor is talking so fast he’s out of breath. “We don’t have enough social housing, we have wait lists. We don’t have enough detox opportunities.”
He’s part of a group looking at the North Shore Improvement Plan and the recent debate of sex trade in the area and says, “We are at a crossroads. We have ladies on the street who don’t want to be there, defiling themselves, and it’s affecting our community.”
But getting help to sex-trade workers and others with drug addictions is a complex task. “People’s initial need is for safety and some supportive place to live,” says Carol Savage, manager of Addiction and Residential Services for Interior Health.
When it comes to dealing with addiction problems Savage operates on the housing first idea and right now she says “its bleak.... Landlords can have pretty high standards in what they will accept in their lower rent housing, so the people who are really struggling, who are difficult, who go in and out doing drug runs, they are having a really hard time right now.”
The rental housing vacancy rate in Kamloops was 0.5 per cent in April 2007 according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s Rental Market Statistics Spring 2007 report, and the average rental rate for a bachelor suite was $513.
Savage is part of the Kamloops Initiative Project, which involves BC Housing, social agencies, the RCMP, Interior Health, the NSBIA and others working to come up with a plan to help both the community and the sex-trade workers and other marginalized groups.
The John Howard Society is building Georgian Court, a new low cost housing project on Fortune Drive. Construction started July 23 of this year and the building is expected to be ready for tenants Aug. 15, 2008. Of the $7.9 million budget, the John Howard Society contributed $870,000. Georgian Court is a 48-unit complex made up of one-bedroom suites. Ten of the apartments will be fully furnished by the society.
In addition to this complex, the society owns five other buildings and is currently putting together two more building proposals for housing in Kamloops.
Including Georgian Court the society owns and manages 186 apartments. It has become the largest non-profit housing provider in the city. It accommodates low-income single individuals, seniors and low-income families. Georgian Court will be a transition-housing complex where people can live for up to two years. In the future, the society hopes to build a 50-unit, one-bedroom apartment complex that will house the individuals who move through Georgian Court, says Dawn Hrycun, CEO of the John Howard Society Thompson Region.
The House of Ruth has received funding to expand its services and will build eight new apartments for women and children at its Maple Street location. The project will also include a new 10-bed emergency shelter, which will accommodate more women and will reach out to street level women who are homeless, says Tim Larose, executive director of New Life Mission, which operates the facility.
With $1.8 million loaned from the province along with $180,000 in annual operating funding, the mission will house women recovering from drug and alcohol problems for up to two years while they learn life, job and parenting skills. The facility is intended to fill a void in housing that currently does not allow for long-term recovery. When complete, the new building will bring the inventory of beds from 18 to 24 as well as the eight two-bedroom apartments for women and children.
“I’m not saying things are perfect,” says Hughes “but I have never felt the sense of optimism around what the government and community is prepared to do to help these marginalized people.”
One of the big issues, apart from housing, is a way to connect sex-trade workers with the help they need says Hughes. “We want a regular sex-trade workers addictions program. We want to be able to have housing available, access to medical treatment, help them get income assistance, peer support, to reconnect with family, and say we care, not by making you go to jail, but make sure you get some help.”
It took old Tranquille Road a long time to get so far down. It could take a while to see real improvement. But when is finally comes together, “it will be a win for everyone in the community,” says Singh.
And the NSBIA’s Peter Mutrie, who has carried the torch for the community, believes that in three years Tranquille Road will have a very different tone.
Unsolved Murders
There have been three unsolved murders of sex-trade workers in Kamloops since 2003.
Denise Heather Hamill, age 31, was found in the Thompson River on Aug. 1, 2003. It took several days for the RCMP to identify the victim. The local media assisted by showing jewelry from the victim, which helped to identify her. She is believed to have been murdered elsewhere and her body dumped into the river by the killer. She was a sex-trade worker who was known to police. Hamill’s mother says her daughter was a happy go-lucky person as reported in the Kamloops Daily News (Aug. 16, 2003).
Shana Labatte, age 30, was found near the beach at Weyerhaeuser on March 23, 2004. She is believed to have been murdered elsewhere and her body dumped where it was found. The mother of two was a sex-trade worker and known to police. She was addicted to drugs and separated from her children, but missed them terribly and wanted to straighten her life out, according to a report in the Kamloops Daily News (Oct. 28, 2004).
The badly beaten body of Sherri Lee Hiltz, age 44, was found in a vacant lot on Surrey Avenue on April 8, 2005. She was a sex-trade worker and was known to police. A mother and recovering addict, Hiltz once wrote a letter to the Kamloops Daily News (appeared Apr. 28, 2000) after an incident in a dentist’s office to remind people “they shouldn’t be so quick to judge others.”
Anyone with information on any of the murders is urged to call Kamloops RCMP at 828.3000 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS(8477).
Red Zone Arrests
Results of the Kamloops RCMP mandate to reduce drugs and prostitution this summer in the city’s two red zones (North Shore and downtown):
17 sex-trade workers arrested during two-day undercover sting operation first week in June
38 people arrested during two-week undercover operation targeting street dealers in early July
22 johns arrested during two-day undercover sting operation in late July
By Brenda Craig
For Thompson Life Magazine Summer 2007
In the alley behind the barbershop, two women are dragging on smokes as they take a rest from their sex-for-dope lives in the shade of a leafy tree, while a couple of skinny guys in baseball caps and sunglasses are dealing drugs behind a dumpster. Down one of the side streets there’s a young man on the sly, checking for unlocked doors into a boarded up office building.
Further on I meet Jane (not her real name), a 34-year-old sex-trade worker hanging out behind a rundown old motel called the Royal Apartments, but the locals call it “Mutantville” because it has a history as a giant flophouse for druggies, sex-trade workers and whoever needs a cheap place to live.
Her steely blue eyes look tired and sad. She’s wearing a red sleeveless T-shirt and blue jeans; a crack pipe — her most valuable possession — sits on the ground beside her. Yes, she’ll talk to a reporter for a minute, she says.
How did Jane get into the sex trade? “Well, I just got mixed up with the wrong guy in Kelowna. Started using cocaine. And now I am addicted to four or five different drugs,” she says but adds she doesn’t do crystal meth, “It puts holes in your brain.”
Jane has a $600 a day drug habit, which she supports with money she makes as a sex-trade worker.
“It’s not hard physically,” she says. “It’s mentally hard. You’re up one minute feeling like a queen and then in the morning you feel bad, that’s the hard part.”
Jane grew up in Kamloops and has a daughter who lives with her family. She describes them as being Christian and hopeful that she gets straightened out.
But in the meantime, Jane has nothing to do with them or her daughter.
She knew the girls that were arrested in the June busts, but wasn’t among them. “I was out of town for two days. Can’t get me, I just keep moving,” she chuckles.
Jane has tried to kick her habit, she just completed 20 days in the House of Ruth, a women’s shelter on Maple Street that provides counselling and temporary housing. It is one of the few places she can go for help with her addictions.
Unfortunately, the road to change is a long one fraught with ups and downs. “I knew I was gonna relapse,” she says “but there was nothing to help me.”
Not so Tranquille Road
It’s ironic that a road named Tranquille is embroiled in a bitter turf battle between the people who live and own business there, and the sex-trade workers and drug dealers who live on and work the streets.
Residents complain about crime and prostitutes turning tricks in their yards, while frustrated shop owners blame prostitutes, addicts, homeless people and people with mental health issues for scaring away customers.
A neighbourhood watch group regularly patrols the streets trying to chase away johns that troll for dangerous delights. On the flip side, outreach workers are out there offering support to marginalized persons by assisting them in finding affordable housing, helping sex-trade workers get off the street and possibly reconnect with family, and helping people develop skills so they can find jobs.
In response to complaints from city residents and business owners the RCMP has initiated red zones to try to remove the “undesirable” elements from this North Shore neighbourhood and downtown Kamloops. A red zone is an arbitrary boundary that gives the courts power to tell people where they can and cannot go.
And despite the highly publicized two-day crackdown by RCMP on prostitution in the neighbourhood in early June (that resulted in street prostitutes being arrested and ordered to stay away), Kamloops’ infamous sex-trade area on the city’s North Shore is still humming along.
Tranquille Busted
In May the Kamloops RCMP identified prostitution and drugs as part of their crime-reduction mandate. They started with a crackdown on sex-trade workers and followed that up with two additional undercover operations to bust drug dealers and johns.
In the first week of June the RCMP set up a two-day undercover sting operation targeted at sex-trade workers in the city’s two red zones (North Shore and downtown). “The operation took 10 hours to plan and then another 10 hours to arrest 17 prostitutes,” says Insp. Yves Lacasse.
The crackdown made homeowners and business people feel better. One restaurant owner “came over and he thanked me. He hugged me in fact. And another customer came and shook my hand,” says the inspector who makes a point of patronizing local area businesses on the North Shore.
But Lacasse is a realist. He admits that despite the arrests, and despite an order that those arrested not go anywhere within what is now called the red zones, within days, some of the women arrested were back on the street, working again.
Who’s Neighbourhood is it?
“Is it the taxpayers’ neighbourhood or is it the junkies neighbourhood?” asks Peter Mutrie from the North Shore Business Improvement Association (NSBIA). “The taxpayers are taking it back!”
Three years ago, Mutrie and the NSBIA started hammering away, trying to create a better environment on the North Shore and rebuild the community.
“Starbucks turned up their nose at me at a convention four years ago, now they have a little kiosk over at Safeway,” says Mutrie. From his perspective the sex trade and everything that goes with it is gouging the life out of a potentially vibrant neighbourhood.
The City of Kamloops has a plan to create a market village in the Tranquille area using the latest in urban design to build streets that encourage people to be there. Mutrie and the NSBIA are working with business owners to brighten up properties in the area and have hired the very people that some folks want to eject to work on landscaping and painting projects.
People that need a hand have signed on to help spruce up the neighbourhood in two separate programs: the Social Enterprise Program, for landscaping, and the
Job Creation Partnership, for painting.
The Social Enterprise Program is organized by the community development committee of the NSBIA together with the ASK Wellness Centre. The project is aimed at building a sense of community by bringing together business and property owners, agency workers and neighbours in an effort to beautify prominent corners along Tranquille. Both Service Canada and the City of Kamloops are helping with funding, and business owners are paying for materials. Ten people have come forward to spruce up the neighbourhood.
The Job Creation Partnership is a Federal program under which the NSBIA applied for a four-person crew to paint six buildings to create an interesting visual change along Tranquille. Eligible persons are those on an unemployment insurance claim. The NSBIA provides project development and admin while building owners ante up funding for materials.
Both projects are aimed to improve the area’s appearance and build community relationships as well as community pride. They also build a business case for the merchants along the affected strip as consumers, residents and business owners find the area becoming more appealing.
Homeowner Deserts the Hood
“One man complained about sex acts happening on the church steps. We don’t want this (area) to become like East Hastings Street, in Vancouver,” says Insp. Lacasse. “This is not acceptable behaviour in this community. Anybody’s community.”
“You need to bust the johns and you need to give the prostitutes help,” says former Tamarack Avenue resident Robert Lee from his new home in Logan Lake. After watching the prostitution and drug problems in the area get worse and worse every year, Lee finally gave up and sold his house in June.
“It was quite the sight” on Tranquille Road, says Lee. “All the time you could literally see drug users and prostitutes walking across the street, waving, trying to ask people for dates and stuff.”
Although he liked the street where his family lived, he didn’t like the sight of prostitutes along Clapperton and Tranquille Road, on his twice-daily trip to drop-off and pickup his kids at school. “It was just a little too much,” he says.
She’s Not a Criminal
The RCMP round up of prostitutes has been both praised and disparaged, but everyone agrees some of the women are in desperate need of help.
Natilia James, 19, suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome and has a mental age of about five reported the Kamloops Daily News (June 14, 2007) on the court proceedings that followed her June arrest with 16 other sex-trade workers. “When the time came to impose a sentence, (Judge Stella) Frame stopped speaking, as if momentarily lost for words, as if suddenly overwhelmed by the circumstances of an offender without much hope. Her hand came to her mouth, then to her eyes as she broke into tears. She left the bench, saying she needed a break,” wrote Robert Koopmans.
Bob Hughes, executive director of the ASK Wellness Center, says, “She (Natilia James) represents why we need something done. This is unacceptable. She is barely able to function in society. She doesn’t deserve to be in jail. She is not a criminal. She is a social disaster!”
The ASK Wellness Centre provides support for persons with HIV and hepatitis C, and to the people in the community who are marginalized: sex-trade workers, people with mental health problems, drug addicts and homeless people.
The window in Hughes’ office overlooks Tranquille Road. With a $750,000 a year budget his staff of outreach workers is in contact with most of the road’s marginalized, doing everything from needle exchange to finding food, shelter and health care.
Kamloops has become a big city with big city problems. According to the RCMP, the city is home to 55 known sex-trade workers. But depending on the time of year this number can rise as high as 80 to 90 as prostitutes from elsewhere arrive, work the streets for a while and then move on.
On one particular day, says Hughes, an outreach worker picked up 50 needles in the alley, went back three hours later and picked up 50 more. But he doesn’t think rounding up prostitutes and throwing them in jail solves the problems of the women themselves, or the community as a whole.
“Women who are picked up as sex-trade workers — should they be pushed through the criminal justice system or a health-care system?” asks Hughes. “Well I would believe, based on my knowledge of this community, that people are in favour of assistance and help.”
New Hope
Arjun Singh, an energetic, Kamloops city councilor is talking so fast he’s out of breath. “We don’t have enough social housing, we have wait lists. We don’t have enough detox opportunities.”
He’s part of a group looking at the North Shore Improvement Plan and the recent debate of sex trade in the area and says, “We are at a crossroads. We have ladies on the street who don’t want to be there, defiling themselves, and it’s affecting our community.”
But getting help to sex-trade workers and others with drug addictions is a complex task. “People’s initial need is for safety and some supportive place to live,” says Carol Savage, manager of Addiction and Residential Services for Interior Health.
When it comes to dealing with addiction problems Savage operates on the housing first idea and right now she says “its bleak.... Landlords can have pretty high standards in what they will accept in their lower rent housing, so the people who are really struggling, who are difficult, who go in and out doing drug runs, they are having a really hard time right now.”
The rental housing vacancy rate in Kamloops was 0.5 per cent in April 2007 according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s Rental Market Statistics Spring 2007 report, and the average rental rate for a bachelor suite was $513.
Savage is part of the Kamloops Initiative Project, which involves BC Housing, social agencies, the RCMP, Interior Health, the NSBIA and others working to come up with a plan to help both the community and the sex-trade workers and other marginalized groups.
The John Howard Society is building Georgian Court, a new low cost housing project on Fortune Drive. Construction started July 23 of this year and the building is expected to be ready for tenants Aug. 15, 2008. Of the $7.9 million budget, the John Howard Society contributed $870,000. Georgian Court is a 48-unit complex made up of one-bedroom suites. Ten of the apartments will be fully furnished by the society.
In addition to this complex, the society owns five other buildings and is currently putting together two more building proposals for housing in Kamloops.
Including Georgian Court the society owns and manages 186 apartments. It has become the largest non-profit housing provider in the city. It accommodates low-income single individuals, seniors and low-income families. Georgian Court will be a transition-housing complex where people can live for up to two years. In the future, the society hopes to build a 50-unit, one-bedroom apartment complex that will house the individuals who move through Georgian Court, says Dawn Hrycun, CEO of the John Howard Society Thompson Region.
The House of Ruth has received funding to expand its services and will build eight new apartments for women and children at its Maple Street location. The project will also include a new 10-bed emergency shelter, which will accommodate more women and will reach out to street level women who are homeless, says Tim Larose, executive director of New Life Mission, which operates the facility.
With $1.8 million loaned from the province along with $180,000 in annual operating funding, the mission will house women recovering from drug and alcohol problems for up to two years while they learn life, job and parenting skills. The facility is intended to fill a void in housing that currently does not allow for long-term recovery. When complete, the new building will bring the inventory of beds from 18 to 24 as well as the eight two-bedroom apartments for women and children.
“I’m not saying things are perfect,” says Hughes “but I have never felt the sense of optimism around what the government and community is prepared to do to help these marginalized people.”
One of the big issues, apart from housing, is a way to connect sex-trade workers with the help they need says Hughes. “We want a regular sex-trade workers addictions program. We want to be able to have housing available, access to medical treatment, help them get income assistance, peer support, to reconnect with family, and say we care, not by making you go to jail, but make sure you get some help.”
It took old Tranquille Road a long time to get so far down. It could take a while to see real improvement. But when is finally comes together, “it will be a win for everyone in the community,” says Singh.
And the NSBIA’s Peter Mutrie, who has carried the torch for the community, believes that in three years Tranquille Road will have a very different tone.
Unsolved Murders
There have been three unsolved murders of sex-trade workers in Kamloops since 2003.
Denise Heather Hamill, age 31, was found in the Thompson River on Aug. 1, 2003. It took several days for the RCMP to identify the victim. The local media assisted by showing jewelry from the victim, which helped to identify her. She is believed to have been murdered elsewhere and her body dumped into the river by the killer. She was a sex-trade worker who was known to police. Hamill’s mother says her daughter was a happy go-lucky person as reported in the Kamloops Daily News (Aug. 16, 2003).
Shana Labatte, age 30, was found near the beach at Weyerhaeuser on March 23, 2004. She is believed to have been murdered elsewhere and her body dumped where it was found. The mother of two was a sex-trade worker and known to police. She was addicted to drugs and separated from her children, but missed them terribly and wanted to straighten her life out, according to a report in the Kamloops Daily News (Oct. 28, 2004).
The badly beaten body of Sherri Lee Hiltz, age 44, was found in a vacant lot on Surrey Avenue on April 8, 2005. She was a sex-trade worker and was known to police. A mother and recovering addict, Hiltz once wrote a letter to the Kamloops Daily News (appeared Apr. 28, 2000) after an incident in a dentist’s office to remind people “they shouldn’t be so quick to judge others.”
Anyone with information on any of the murders is urged to call Kamloops RCMP at 828.3000 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS(8477).
Red Zone Arrests
Results of the Kamloops RCMP mandate to reduce drugs and prostitution this summer in the city’s two red zones (North Shore and downtown):
17 sex-trade workers arrested during two-day undercover sting operation first week in June
38 people arrested during two-week undercover operation targeting street dealers in early July
22 johns arrested during two-day undercover sting operation in late July
Posts
