HIGHWAY OF TEARS
Audrey Auger will always
remember her daughter's last words.
"She waved at me, blew a kiss and
said: 'I'll be back mom, don't worry.
I'll phone you later.' But I never
heard from her again.
"From that night on, I just didn't want to live.
I felt like a failure - I wasn't able to protect her."
The body of her 14-year-old daughter Aielah
Saric was found last year, a few months after she
disappeared.
Tom Chipman is still looking for his 22-year-old
daughter Tamara, who went missing in 2005.
Both grieving parents have walked the same road
looking for their daughters - the road now known
as the Highway of Tears.
"We're up at six every morning, and we quit at
dusk," said the shattered dad. "I don't know how
long we can keep going. I guess until the cold
weather shuts us down."
Tamara vanished on an isolated strip of blacktop
that has become the world's most dangerous road
for women.
Fading posters of missing females are tacked to
utility posts along desolate Highway 16 in Canada,
which winds for 450 miles from the Rockies to the
Pacific.
Along this remote highway, 34 women,
mostly in their teens and 20s, have been found
murdered in the past 30 years. Dozens more have
disappeared.
"Every time we hear of someone else missing, it
just brings us so much sorrow because we know
what the families are going through," says Matilda
Wilson, whose 14-year-old daughter Ramona fell
victim to the highway 10 years ago.
Her body was eventually found by the
roadside. She'd been sexually assaulted
and strangled.
Road signs caution young women not
to hitchhike and starkly warn: "Killer on
the Loose!"
Police suspect they could be looking
for one of the world's worst serial killers
- perhaps more than one.
Published on: 01/16/2008
