Butcher. Gary C. King

and her brother committed by one of their mother’s spouses or live-in partners who was now deceased. According to one of her siblings, Helen had taken much of the abuse to protect her younger siblings from having to go through the same horrible experiences as she had been forced to endure. The purported abuse was one of the reasons that she had eventually decided to leave home, though her mother had described her as being a rebellious teenager who didn’t want to be told what she could or couldn’t do—particularly clubbing and partying with her peers. She had been placed in a group home at age thirteen, and later into a foster home, which is where her mother contended that her problems actually started. Nonetheless, regardless of the reasons that she took to the streets, Helen never forgot about her family, particularly her siblings.

      “We all meant a lot to her,” said one of her siblings. “She was actually a strong enough person, she forgave a lot of the things that she experienced growing up a lot easier than maybe some of us did.”

      Following two failed marriages and a number of boyfriends, Helen, at age nineteen, gave birth to a baby girl, whom she gave up for adoption when the girl was a year old. Much later that daughter’s DNA would play a major role in an effort to identify her mother’s remains. Helen’s life on the streets consisted of little more than drugs, prostitution, and attempts being made to rescue her by those who loved her—efforts that ultimately always ended up with Helen going back to her pitiful life in Low Track. Her family finally realized that something was terribly wrong when she failed to come home for the Christmas holidays in 1997—she never missed spending Christmas with her family until that fateful year.

      The cold and rainy month of November seemed to have passed without any known or reported disappearances of women from the Downtown Eastside. In fact, according to police, the next known disappearance did not occur until December 1997. That was when the police added forty-two-year-old Cynthia Feliks to the roster of missing women. The police were not certain when Cynthia actually disappeared; they backtracked a little and said that she might have disappeared in November, but they went with December because of sketchy reports indicating that she had been seen during that month. It was difficult to pinpoint an actual date because she had a history of disappearing, often showing up later in jail or at a relative’s home, sometimes even at a hospital, but nearly always because of her ongoing drug problem.

      One of the first clues that something was wrong was when her friends and associates, those who used drugs just like her, began calling her relatives’ homes to speak with her. They were concerned because they had not seen her for some time, they said. When her family began making their usual inquiries, Cynthia was nowhere to be found. When family members reported her missing to the police, the cops took the same cavalier attitude that they had taken with family members of several of the other missing women and simply told them that she would show up sometime. They even told one of her siblings that they had seen her on Kingsway, one of the busy streets where hookers try to drum up business. However, the relative believed that the cops had either lied to her or had been mistaken about having seen Cynthia.

      Cynthia Feliks was one of the working girls not originally from Canada. Born in Detroit, Michigan, she was the second of four children. Following their parents’ failed marriage, the children lived with their father, a watchmaker, who moved them to Vancouver in 1960 after marrying a second time. Eight years later their father left his second wife, leaving the children with her, and went back to the United States. Because their father failed to provide financial assistance to their stepmother for their well-being, the children grew up having a tough time—along with the stepmother. But their stepmother did the best that she could under the circumstances, often holding down two jobs.

      According to the stepmother, Cynthia became involved with drugs following a trip to Florida at age sixteen to visit her father, who is now deceased. Her stepmother claimed that Cynthia’s father had coaxed her into smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol with him, and she alluded to the possibility that Cynthia’s father had also sexually abused her during that trip. Soon after her return to Vancouver, Cynthia began skipping school and running away from home. She finally left home for good at age nineteen, got married, and had a child, a daughter. Unfortunately, her husband, who has since died, was also a drug abuser, and neither of them provided much of a life for their child. Although Cynthia had been very proud of her daughter, the child ended up being raised by relatives and living much of her youth in foster homes.

      Cynthia Feliks became the thirty-ninth woman to disappear from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, but she wouldn’t be the last.