THIS WOMAN IS NOT DISPOSABLE

I know it's because of all the talk of Pickton in the news lately, but I thought of Vanessa B. Vanessa was another woman who died at the hands of yet one more evil man in a bad part of town. She also happened to be somebody I had gone to school with.

I didn't know her well; she hung with a different crowd then me. She always seemed to be in a good mood and I envied her ability to fit in. Vanessa was invited to the parties---the ones that somebody like me never heard of. Back then I had the reputation of being a straight kid and the lines were evenly drawn. Everybody knew on which side of the fence others fell.

Vanessa's smile is what I remember most about her. She was the sort of person who cut classes every once in a while. She didn't stand out for academic achievements. When she was happy, her entire face lit up and it was real. So many girls, the so called "popular" ones, had the forced, faked smiles of sales women. That's where the mouth moves but the eyes stay flat. Even as a person of that young age I could see through them and I recognized them for the practiced performers that they were. Think of those dolls with the strings in their backs; give it a tug and out comes a response. Not so Vanessa.

I never heard anything negative about her. There were a few girls who had reputations, yet she wasn't one of them. Vanessa wasn't one of the few girls who got pregnant in senior year. No, she liked to party, but no more then many others.

Graham Greene wrote, "There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives." Where was that for her? Could she look back at some period in her life and see it? Was there any attempt to change things? We've all had those awful moments, usually in the dead of night or early in the morning, where we are forced to face ourselves and the mistakes we've made; where we must confront the fact that we've hurt others.

Somehow, Vanessa ended up downtown and evidentally worked as a prostitute to make ends meet at times. She was an alcoholic who also used some drugs. It is reported that before she died she was despondent over the fact that social services had taken her child into care, as it had been born addicted to a chemical.

How did she get there? Where did that feeling come from? Was it merely a case of a party that got out of hand and a predisposition to addiction? Or did she have some horrid unease with herself. I know that her mother loved her intensely. After her death, she spoke out in public on behalf of victim's interests. She also raised the point that Vanessa's race may have had something to do with it. To be honest, I really hadn't noticed. She didn't look particularily different to me. However, her mother stated that one of the parents was black, while the other was white. At the time I first moved there, I would call the town "Vanilla Wonderbread", in that it was very, very white with almost everybody having a WASP background. I'd just moved from the city, in a largely Italian part of town. Years later, when I look back, I have to concede that there weren't more then two or three black faces in my high-school. Although she didn't look it, perhaps she was conscious of it. I know that the media was wrong in reporting her as being native.

God, did it matter to her? I wish she'd known that I would have loved to have had her smile. That's all I saw about her. All these stupid things that can derail us.

Whatever the reasons for her self hatred, she found herself in a cheap rooming house with a man who didn't hate himself; he hated women. Vanessa wasn't the only woman that would die at his hands. Several women would meet their demise because of him. He would give them money to continue drinking. They would be found with very high blood alcohol levels. In fact, some speculate that those levels could only have been reached had he poured the booze down their throats. They choked on their vomit, face down on a floor or on some stained bed in a pay-by-the week room.

What disgusts me most about this case is that the police actually had him under surveillance for a while, and interrupted a couple of incidents. Otherwise, there could have been more deaths. Thus, they know that he encouraged the women to drink. They heard him do it. One has to ask how good of a job they did in that so many died. As with my blog on the prostitutes, it's probably by virtue of their professions that nobody really cared.

Prior to our highschool reunion we got a mailing about people that they couldn't locate. Vanessa's name was on it. I phoned the committee and let them know what had happened with Vanessa. I was glad to see that there was a placard and a flower with her name on a table at the reunion.