Missing Sarah [Paperback]

Between 1978 and 2001, 63 women disappeared from Vancouver's Lower Eastside. "How could this have happened?" is a question that will haunt the families of the missing for the rest of their lives. While a lumbering, largely unconcerned police department is partly to blame, Maggie de Vries thinks this is too simple an answer. Most if not all the women in question were prostitutes and/or drug addicts, and so it was relatively easy for law enforcement officials and politicians to ignore the mysterious disappearances of people considered by society to be second-class citizens. Missing Sarah is de Vries's attempt to remind us that these women had dreams and hopes, and families who loved them. In clear, honest (and, at times, honestly naive) prose, the author recalls her adopted sister Sarah's early, outwardly happy middle-class childhood, and the powerlessness the family felt as the young sibling became more and more entrenched in a downtown milieu of drugs and sex. By her teens Sarah was running away from home at every opportunity, and eventually the family saw her only a few times a year, usually during the holidays. And then they stop hearing from her at all.

Using Sarah's journal entries and the recollections of some of her co-workers in the sex trade, as well as family memories, de Vries pieces together what she can of her sister's life on the streets and finds moments of humour and humanity: "My toes get so cold they actually make me cry when they start warming up again," Sarah writes in her journal. "My hands aren't much better. The tips of my fingers, yikes: ouchie, ouchie, ouchie." Why did Sarah let herself get lost on the cold streets of the city rather than retreating to the bosom of her family? How could the police be aware of over five dozen missing women and still not admit there might be a serial predator at work? These are questions that, ultimately, will never really be answered to anyone's satisfaction. In Missing Sarah, Maggie de Vries has written a warm, sometimes angry but most often evenhanded tribute to her sister that does much to commemorate the lives of all the women whose remains may lie somewhere on the now-infamous Port Coquitlam pig farm. De Vries herself comes to a deeper understanding of the world, and rather than shrink back she faces the darkness with strength and clarity. The rest of us should feel lucky Missing Sarah is as close as we'll come to experiencing the horror that she and the rest of the families are enduring still. --Shawn Conner

On April 14, 1998, Sarah de Vries disappeared from the corner of Princess and Hastings in Vancouver. She became one of the many women who had vanished from the Downtown Eastside, women—most of them prostitutes or drug addicts—whose fate was all but ignored by the authorities. Years went by, women continued to disappear, and there were no answers for their families.

For the women who disappeared did have families. They were loved, they had friends, they had lives that began long before their terrible end. And Maggie de Vries's sister Sarah was one of them.

Although Sarah and Maggie shared a comfortable, middle-class upbringing, Sarah, adopted as an infant, was black, while the rest of her family was white; and so she alone was the victim of racist taunts and prejudice. As Sarah reached adolescence, her troubles grew. She ran away from home. She became addicted to drugs. She ended up on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. But always she was loved.

Missing Sarah, which incorporates excerpts from Sarah's journals, is Maggie de Vries's story of her search for her sister. From those journals, and from the recollections of people who knew Sarah during her 14 years downtown, emerges a portrait of a bright, funny and sensitive woman who found herself trapped in a downward spiral of self-loathing, prostitution, drugs and violence.

From the moment Sarah disappeared, her sister never stopped looking for her. Even after Sarah's DNA was discovered at Robert Pickton's farm, and hope was replaced by grim certainty, Maggie continued her search. This time she was looking for answers. Why did so many women have to disappear before the authorities took notice? Was there any way Sarah could have been saved from her life on the streets? And what can we do to help those women who are still trapped, by chance or circumstance, in the same bleak world that Sarah de Vries once inhabited?

Maggie de Vries is a writer, editor and teacher who lives in Vancouver. Her recent children's novel, Chance and the Butterfly, is a B.C. Book Prize Honour Book and is also included on the Ontario Library Association's list of Best Bets. She is also the author of two picture books: How Sleep Found Tabitha, which is illustrated by Sheena Lott, and the bestselling Once Upon a Golden Apple, published by Penguin, which she co-authored with Jean Little and which was illustrated by Phoebe Gilman.