BC's Murdered and Missing Women
By Sean Devlin

The  driver of the giant compactor disposal truck was tired and yawning. It was 7:30 a.m. and his shift was nearly over. In a downtown eastside Vancouver alley he slid the forks of his behemoth into a dumpster filled with construction waste and raised it high. Something fell off the container, landing with a thud beside the truck. The driver yawned again, hugely, and jumped down from his cab. He was expecting to scoop up a chunk of drywall or two-by-four.

What he did find was a small duffel bag, stuffed and crammed with the body of a young Native woman, chin crushed into her knees, wrapped in a cotton comforter, her hair pulled up in a ponytail.

Lisa Marie Graveline's short life had been as tragic as her death.

The 20-year-old woman's body was found on May 1.  Police confirmed her identity and said she had been a prostitute, a drug user and dealer, roughly in that order. Also known as Lisa Marie Bear, she had been addicted to heroin and crack cocaine. When found, her body was intact, fully clothed, with no signs of sexual assault.

Lisa Marie's childhood was troubled. One month before her 13th birthday, she was arrested for theft under $5,000. Before she was 14, she was arrested twice more, for theft and possession of a weapon. At the age of 16, she was put on probation after being convicted of robbery and assault. In November 1998, Graveline was first charged as an adult, for trafficking in cocaine. She was a known prostitute, according to police, but had lately been involved exclusively in the drug trade.

The founder of one drug rehabilitation facility Lisa Marie had resorted to said: "You could see a little girl inside her who was desperately crying out for help. But the window of opportunity is so small. They do want the help. Yet the minute they see the drug they run right back to it."

Lisa Marie's family had come to Vancouver about eight years ago from a Manitoba reserve. Their lives on the streets of the most impoverished postal code in Canada were not happy. In the fall of 1998, Lisa Marie's two brothers and her mother overdosed in separate locations in the city. They all wound up in St. Paul's hospital at the same time. Her brother Oswald died.

Then in June 1999, her mother was found dead of an overdose behind a strip joint, the No. 5 Orange at Powell and Main. Her father had died four years previously from addiction related problems.

"They all loved each other, you could see that," said Jean-Claude, a close friend of the family. "But it was just so sad to see them on the street."

A worker in an east-end social agency, who didn't want to be named, said Lisa Marie's story is familiar.

"This happens to a lot of Native families down here," he said. "You get whole families who are in an addictive cycle."