Mike on Crime

By Carol Sanders
Winnipeg Free Press

Crystal Saunders was released from the Winnipeg Remand Centre in late March with nothing but a transit ticket and a sense of dread.

“She didn’t want to leave,” said fellow inmate Wendy Forrest in an interview at the remand centre this week.

About 25 women locked up in the facility downtown and the remand centre’s chaplain held a vigil service for Saunders on Monday night. The 24-year-old woman’s body was found April 19 near St. Ambroise.

The inmates say too many women are released with no help or hope and end up committing more crimes that lead them back inside the Winnipeg Remand Centre.

“They’re so worried about recidivism — where are all the millions we hear about for programs?” Forrest said. The money is not getting to people like Saunders when they need it, and she wants that to become an election issue.

Little help is offered to women while they’re in the remand centre or when they’re released from custody, Forrest said.

“The only counselling they get is from the guards.” On the outside, emergency shelters operate on a first-come, first-served basis, she said.

Forrest said she’s not sure who or what Saunders feared on the outside. Crystal’s mother, Sandra Saunders, said her daughter became addicted to crack cocaine and was forced to work in the sex trade. Sandra doesn’t think her daughter was killed by a john, but someone else with whom her daughter had other dealings.

In jail, Saunders felt safe and protected, Forrest said.

“She had some kind of community and three square meals a day.” But it’s no picnic in the remand centre, said Forrest, who has been there five months waiting for a bail hearing. At times, three women are packed inside cells designed for two, said Forrest, who has been in and out of prison all her life for what she described as white-collar crimes. The university-educated woman said she’s seeing generations of women from the same families coming and going through the remand centre’s revolving doors. Forrest said someone needs to speak out for them to get help and stop the door from spinning.

She said the Elizabeth Fry Society has received funding for transitional housing, but women at the remand centre aren’t accessing it. Either they don’t know how, or they are released after office hours, and the society closes its office at 4 p.m.

“We’re not a 24-hour service shelter,” said Margaret Marin, executive director of the Elizabeth Fry Society. “We do provide services to protect and support women who’ve been criminalized.”

“We have a small-scale housing unit for women,” Marin said. The unit can take up to four women in at a time for anywhere from one day to three months.

“As for transportation — we have no resources in place,” Marin said.

The society has one reintegration worker who visits the remand centre regularly. But there’s not enough funding to pick women up from jail and give them all the help they need to help themselves, she said.

“There’s some struggle around resources when women are leaving (custody),” Marin said.

If someone had been there to help Crystal the night she was released from prison, she might have taken a different path than the one that led to her death, her mother said.

“I would get more support workers to work with each individual.” Forrest and the women who got to know Saunders in the remand centre say she was a beautiful, kind, but lonely person who wanted to finish high school and dreamed of becoming a hairstylist one day.

She had so much potential, but no chance to develop it, Forrest said.

*****

There are now 17 unsolved homicides involving Winnipeg sex-trade workers or people who may have been mistaken for sex-trade workers.

1. Marie Edith Banks, August 1983: Banks was last seen alive getting into a vehicle near McDermot Avenue and Princess Street in July. The sex worker’s strangled body was found two weeks later in a Fort Garry hydro field.

2. Constance Lynn Cameron, August 1984: Cameron was last seen alive during the early morning hours of Aug. 3, 1984. Her strangled body was found in the same area as Banks.

3. Charlene Orsulak, January 1987: Orsulak was last seen getting into a four-door Buick at MacDonald Avenue and Argyle Street. Her body was left in a remote area of bush south of Matlock.

4. Cheryl Duck, December 1987: The body of 15-year-old Duck was found face down in a field near the outskirts of the city. It’s not known if Duck engaged in sex-trade work.

5. Susan Janine Holens, April 1989: Holens’ body was found in a drainage ditch on Loudoun Road, southwest of city limits.

6. Glenda Morrisseau, August 1991: Morrisseau was last seen alive on Logan Avenue in July hitching-hiking a ride downtown from the Stock Exchange Hotel. Her body was discovered in August in a St. Boniface industrial area.

7. Jamie McGuire, March 1994: The woman’s frozen body was found in a drainage ditch west of St. Francois Xavier. It’s not known if she was a sex-trade worker.

8. Evelyn Stewart, March 1998: Stewart, a sex worker, was found in a Point Douglas parking lot with massive head trauma.

9. Tania Marsden, September 1998: Last seen the night of her 18th birthday, the West End sex worker’s body was found three weeks later in the Assiniboine River, weighed down by a cement block.

10. Noreen Taylor, August 2001: Taylor’s partially clothed body was found on Ham Street. She was pushed or fell from a moving vehicle.

11. Simon Bloomfield, July 2002: The cross-dressing sex worker died of massive injuries after he was hit by a car driving down Highway 8.

12. Therena Silva, December 2002: Silva’s skeletal remains were found near Templeton Avenue and Ritchie Street. Police believe Silva’s body had been there for several months.

13. Moira Erb, September 2003: Erb was last seen alive by her family in the city in August. Her decomposed body was found between a set of railway tracks in the northwest corner of the city.

14. Velicia Solomon, October 2003: DNA tests verified that body parts later found in the Red River belonged to the teenager. Police have no information to indicate she was involved in prostitution.

15. Divas Boulanger, November 2004: Boulanger, 28, a transgendered street prostitute, was found dead in the bushes at a rest stop east of Portage la Prairie.

16. Tatia Ulm, May 2005: Ulm, 39, was found in a garbage bin in the back lane of Stella Avenue.

17. Crystal Shannon Saunders, April 2007.