Crime Immemorial

In January of 2001, in the cold northern climes of Edmonton, Alberta, a young woman would turn up murdered, her death another grim statistic in the disturbingly long list of missing and murdered Aboriginal and mixed-race women and sex workers in Canada.

Kelly Dawn Reilly was twenty-three years old in 2001, and like many women who ended up in her situation, her youth had been a troubled one. When she was nine years old, she was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, and though her mother and teachers classified her as exceptionally bright and a musical prodigy, her ADD made school a struggle for her. She turned to drugs as a teenager, and spent some time in and out of treatment centers.

Adding even more trauma to her already difficult life, she was later raped at a party celebrating her own seventeenth birthday in 1995, and became pregnant as a result. She had a daughter, and though the first three years of motherhood were turbulent, Kelly eventually seemed to get her life together: moving into her own apartment, maintaining a relationship with a steady boyfriend, getting off drugs, and entering a job-training program, all with the encouragement of her mother. Kelly even got pregnant with a second child, and things seemed to be looking up.

But then, halfway through the pregnancy, Kelly and her boyfriend broke up, and she began using drugs again. She gave birth to a son in 1999, but the child was removed from her care by social services, which caused her downward spiral to accelerate. She eventually turned to sex work to pay for her cocaine habit.

According to a friend and fellow sex worker, Kelly was last seen alive on January 15th, 2001, getting into a sports car with two unidentified men. When she never reappeared, her family became concerned and reported her missing.

Twelve days later, on January 27th, her dead body was discovered near a gravel pit close to Villeneuve, Alberta. She had been badly beaten, though her precise cause of death was either never determined with any certainty, or not released to the public.

Kelly Reilly was by no means the first Edmonton woman of Native ancestry and/or involved in sex work to be murdered in the area, and some investigators favor the idea that a serial killer may be responsible for some of the slayings and disappearances in and around Edmonton that have taken place since the early 1980s.

Twenty-one-year-old Gail Cardinal, for example, was found dead near Fort Saskatchewan in 1983, and an alarming number of other area sex workers were murdered as the eighties and nineties went on, including twenty-one-year-old Melodie Joy Riegel in September of 1986; twenty-year-old Georgette Flint in September of 1988; twenty-two-year-old Bernadette Ahenakew in October of 1989; twenty-nine-year-old Mavis Mason in October of 1990; twenty-five-year-old Elaine Ross in February of 1993; and twenty-four-year-old Joanne Ghostkeeper on Christmas Day of 1996. In addition, three more women were found slain in 1997: twenty-four-year-old Jessica Cardinal; twenty-two-year-old Cara King; and twenty-two-year-old Joyce Hewitt.

Authorities do not believe that all of these slayings are necessarily connected, and notably, some area murders with similar circumstances have been solved, such as the 1993 murder of Linda Giles, the 1996 murder of Charmaine Pidlesney, and the 1999 killings of both Sherry Ann Upright and Catherine Ann Burrell. Further, another young woman who was beaten to death later in 2001—twenty-six-year-old Ginger Lee Bellerose, found in a hotel courtyard in late April —was found to have been murdered by a fifty-two-year-old man named Richard David Douglas.

However, enough similarities exist between some of the cases that it seems reasonable to posit that a serial killer may be targeting sex workers in Edmonton and the surrounding areas. Authorities in Alberta have pooled their resources into a task force dubbed Project KARE to provide a database of at-risk women and investigate possible links between the murders.