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    The Disappearance of Helen Claire Frost
    The Disappearance of Helen Claire Frost
    The Disappearance of Helen Claire Frost
    Ebook151 pages1 hour

    The Disappearance of Helen Claire Frost

    By Pete Dove

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    And who or what was responsible for her disappearance?
    There are the suspects in the Highway of Tears cases. Three serial killers have been charged and convicted of some of the crimes. Cody Legebokoff, Peter Arp and Edward Dennis Isaac. Another, Bobby Jack Fowler, has been implicated, but died before charges could be brought. Fowler is perhaps a likely consideration. He was a construction worker who travelled across the whole of the Americas and is known to have spent time in British Colombia. His DNA was found on one of the Highway of Tears victims, Colleen Macmillen. He was strongly suspected of the killings of Gale Weys and Pamila Darlington in the early seventies. The authorities in Canada believe he is connected to at least ten other deaths. His first suspected killing dates back to 1969. He was known for picking up hitchhikers. To his twisted thinking, women who asked for a ride where also asking to be raped or assaulted.
    Yet, on the other hand, it is easier to attach unsolved deaths and disappearances to already known killers than to seek out more hidden suspects. Certainly, there are dissenting voices on the Canadian police force regarding the involvement of Fowler in any of the Highway of Tears murders. The sad fact remains that almost nothing more is known about what happened to an unhappy and troubled seventeen-year-old today than when she first went missing in October of 1970.
     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrellis Publishing
    Release dateJul 12, 2021
    ISBN9798201151454
    The Disappearance of Helen Claire Frost

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      Book preview

      The Disappearance of Helen Claire Frost - Pete Dove

      THE DISAPPEARANCE OF HELEN CLAIRE FROST

      PETE DOVE

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      HELEN CLAIRE FROST

      BETTY LOU BEETS

      JUDY BUENOANO

      LYDA TRUEBLOOD

      MARGARET RUDIN

      MICHELLE REYNOLDS

      Victim of a Killer and of the State

      Canada is a splendid country.  Sitting high among the list of its many attractions is its natural beauty.  Vast open spaces; long, meandering bodies of water.  Pine forests sweep across its lands, and wide but quiet roads speed people across its vast distances.

      To the far west of the nation is one of its most beautiful Provinces, British Colombia.  Here, splendid Victorian architecture abounds, not least the magnificent Parliament Buildings in Victoria.  Well does that edifice deserve its capital letters.  To the east of its expansive lands stand the Rockies, huge and dominant.  To the west lay the chilly waters of the North Pacific. 

      The region has a thriving tourist trade, but what the shiny brochures will not tell would be visitors is that there is a very dark side to British Colombia as well.  Those hidden depths are best personified in the Highway of Tears, the four hundred and fifty mile stretch of road which runs between Prince George in the east and the port of Prince Rupert on the icy Pacific coast. A thin slice through the landscape alongside which exist some of the poorest people in Canada. Over the past fifty years up to eighty – and possibly more – women have disappeared from the vicinity of the Highway.  Some bodies have been found, many have not. 

      Nobody knows what has happened to many of these victims.  It is true that some may have committed suicide, others may have had accidents, a few may have even sought new lives and found them, although despite sounding temptingly romantic, such an outcome is extremely rare.  It is hard to believe that one person is responsible for so many deaths.  Although, that they seem to have occurred in bunches might be indicative of a single killer sometimes travelling locally, sometimes not. More likely, though, the fame of the Highway of Tears introduced the unintended consequence of copycat killers.  Still, a murderer who began his campaign at age fifteen would only now be sixty-five years old.  Nevertheless, some of the crimes have been solved and their culprits identified.  Apparently. This entire blight on Canada’s reputation is surrounded by uncertainty and opacity.

      A disproportionate number of victims from this otherwise wealthy region lived in poverty, and a remarkably high number were people indigenous to the nation.  A large percentage were believed to have been sex workers.  Hitchhikers too number significantly among the victims.

      But our sad story goes back to the beginning of this reign of terror.  To 1970 and a young woman who may well have been the very first victim to fall on the Highway of Tears.  Or not.  Nobody is sure.  And that is because it cannot be ruled out that other women fell prey before Helen Clare Frost. Such is the mystery of Highway 16, the Highway of Tears.

      Helen was just seventeen – she would be sixty-seven at the time of writing – when she was last seen.  The teenager was not having a good time.  Her open face, late sixties blond bob and slightly prominent front teeth made her look younger than her youth.  She had a slightly drooping eye which made her face particularly notable.  At around five feet five inches tall, and weighing in close to 125 pounds, in other respects she was a typical teen.  But, like so many girls back in those permissive days, at seventeen she was already a mother.  She had, though, been forced to give up her baby for adoption.  Infants, however, continued to feature strongly in her life.  Her roommate in the run-down Prince George apartment in which she lived had a new baby of her own.  Who can imagine what the effect of the presence of such a child had on the mental wellbeing of the teenager?

      Still, we didn’t worry about such matters back then.  Mental illness and emotional ill health are conditions of the modern era.  They didn’t exist in the seventies.  No: depression, suicide, bi-polar disorders and so forth were symptoms of another malaise, and usually assumed to be a weakness on the part of the bearer. 

      It was early Autumn - October 13th to be exact - when Helen donned her coat, a navy-blue three-quarter length job, with suitably sixties style faux fur around the collar, and walked out of the apartment.  With her matching blue trousers, she looked the part of trendy teen about town.  She has not been seen since, alive or, tragically, dead.

      As well as the third member of the household, the one with the young child, Helen shared the home with her sister.  It lay just a few blocks from Highway 16, close to where it intersects Highway 97.  But back then the Highway of Tears was still years away from being christened with such a mournful name, and its notoriety was yet to come.  Like many of her generation, hitch-hiking was a way of life for Helen.  From today’s perspective, with the awareness of just how vulnerable a hitchhiker can be, even in this era of packed roads, we look on undertaking this sort of act as madness.  Especially for a single woman.  It was even more dangerous in the sixties and seventies, when roads were quieter, and any apparently kindly driver with nefarious thoughts in his mind would have plenty of time and opportunity to tackle a weaker victim.

      But likely as not Helen thought little about this.  If times were potentially more dangerous back then, they were also more innocent.  People trusted.  Even when the evidence suggested they should not.

      Helen was not only a woman who hitchhiked often, she also ran away from home.  But this time, it seems that this was not her intention.  She did not take clothes with her, she left money behind.  Sandy thinks her sister might have been upset and could even have been suicidal at the time.  But she suspects not.  Yes, life was tough, and it had been made tougher by the fact that her boyfriend had recently dumped her.  But Sandy had no reason to be especially concerned about her younger sister that early evening.  Beyond, that is, the normal concerns towards a woman who has had her baby legally snatched from her.

      Helen and Sandy were not natives of Canada.  The sisters were born in England, and emigrated in the mid-1950s. Then the attraction of the colonies – wide open spaces and lots of job opportunities – appealed to many British citizens. These far off lands presented a pleasant alternative to people faced with the rubble and poverty that still remained as a consequence of the second world war. The Frosts came from Reigate, a town in the county of Surrey which lay on high ground just to the south of London. It suffered heavily during the war, often from bombs destined for London which were dropped as the German bombers sought to lighten their loads as they raced south for the English Channel having failed to dispatch them, for whatever reason, on their primary target.  Vancouver was the destination for many who selected the wild lands of British Columbia as their new home but still wanted the comfort of a city.  The Frosts headed in that direction, settling on the small city of Nanaimo, which sits on the east coast of Vancouver Island.  How could they imagine they were leaving the destruction of Reigate for even greater danger in their new home?

      Sandy confirms that growing up was good, their parents were supportive and loving, even if money was often tight.  Dennis, their father, worked in a menial role, acting as a sweeper for the local civic authority.  But the girls – Sandy was fourteen months older than Helen – hit the dangerous mid-teens as the sixties were in their free-loving rebellious, anti-Vietnam war, youth-cultured peak.  Like many of their peers, these times were impossible to fathom for a generation that had lived through a just war; Dennis must have found the attitudes of youngsters doubly difficult, having served in the distinguished and highly disciplined Green Berets during his army days.

      But despite all this, he and Daphne, the girls’ mother, were loving parents; they were married for no less than sixty-seven years before Dennis’ death in 2014.  The last forty-four of those must have been unbearable as each day dawned with no news of their missing younger daughter.

      ‘My dad said to me one time,’ recalled Sandy painfully, ‘ I really hope I know what happened before I die.  It is really hard to keep up the hope.’

      ‘Mum and Dad were good parents, despite the headstrong actions of their two rebellious teenage girls,’ she continued.

      The sisters were close; one year they spent a teenage summer earning pocket money picking fruit.  The following year they attempted to repeat the work, but the jobs they had been promised failed to materialize.  Instead of returning home, they spent that summer hitchhiking around the British Columbia countryside, taking trucks where the kindly driver would often call radio ahead to arrange the next stage of their route-less journey.  The girls, aged fifteen and sixteen at the time, would spend the night sleeping out in the warm Canadian evenings. High risk, yes.  But not that unusual.

      ‘Why walk when you can hitchhike?’ recalled Sandy. ‘The two of us did it all the time.  We never felt scared.’ 

      It was not a surprise that when Helen moved to Prince George, five hundred kilometers from her parents, Sandy would soon follow. With Darlene, the third member of their apartment, they set up home.  It has never been fully established why Helen chose to move away.

      Helen made her contribution to the living costs of the apartment by taking short term jobs, she waitressed and worked in a gas station for a while.

      The father of Helen’s child was Stefan Grumpner, but he separated from her soon after little Sandra Jeanette was born, which was on May 13th, 1970.  Helen planned to name the baby after her loving sister.  Just five months to the day of her daughter’s birth, Helen disappeared.  The precise timing of this might be significant in whatever caused her to want to take a mid-evening walk on that fateful October day.

      Or perhaps not.  Sandy recalls the details of that evening with understandable but disturbing clarity. She had gone for a coffee with a friend after work and got in about 8.00pm.  Helen had asked her to go for a walk with her, just a short one, but Sandy had felt too tired.  She said no.  How often must she have dwelt on that everyday decision?  Helen decided that she would go anyway. 

      That process does not sound like the sort of one a person about to kill herself, run away or go for a long hitchhike would choose to take.  But we cannot lose sight of the fact that her daughter had been taken from her.  That this kind of unimaginable wickedness was commonplace across much of the English-speaking world, in some form or other, just half a century ago does not excuse its barbarity.  Be it the Magdalene Sisters in Ireland, or indigenous Aboriginal Australians seeing their children stolen by the state, such acts are indefensible, and those responsible have never been held to account.  It seems like some regressive degenerate

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