A community is following in the final footsteps of Ramona Wilson, a teenager whose murder is still unsolved 17 years later.
The Wilson family and their supporters gather each year at Lake Kathlyn school near Smithers and walk to Yelich Road where her body was found 303 days after she went missing. The last time her loved ones saw her alive was June 11, 1994.
She left that day for a hitchhiking trip to nearby Moricetown and was never heard from again until her murdered form melted out of the snows near the Smithers Airport near the junction of Highway 16.
The crime is part of the legacy of the Highway of Tears, a term her sister now resists.
"I'm trying a different tactic. Nobody seems to take it seriously when you call it the Highway of Tears," Brenda Wilson told The Citizen. "Once you put them into a group, you stop seeing each victim as a person who was part of our community. We need to start bringing them to life. We need to find them [the ones still missing] and find out what happened to them. We need answers about each one of them, not just about policies and procedures."
When Ramona Wilson disappeared, the Vancouver Canucks were embroiled in the Stanley Cup Finals against the New York Rangers. They have not been back to finals since then, until now. Wilson is a big Canucks fan and wondered what it would be like if as much hype could be generated for the life and death concerns of the missing and murdered women as it is for our province's NHL team.
She wants this year's memorial walk, which started in 1995 and hasn't missed a year yet, to be the biggest ever, but not for Canucks parallelism.
"[Missing Women Commission of Inquiry] Commissioner Wally Oppal has shown interest in coming to Smithers," she said. "We need to show that we have the support of the communities along the Highway 16 corridor."
She feels that the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry is too narrow of scope - an emphasis on the missing and murdered women of Vancouver's downtown eastside - to be relevant to Ramona Wilson's case.
"For us in the north, the problem is still there, and there is still no answer about who is doing this to our girls. Most of them are under the age of 19, so do you even call them women or are they children?" she said.
"The commissioner really needs to come to the north to visualize what is happening here. I believe there should be a whole other inquiry for the women of the north. That would be helpful for our communities."
The Ramona Lisa Wilson Memorial Walk happens Saturday at 1 p.m. starting at Lake Kathlyn school. After the march to Yelich Road where her body was found, there will be a social gathering at the Native Friendship Centre in Smithers.
RAMONA WILSON LIKED BASEBALL
Underneath the sheets of paper tacked to bulletin boards are dimensions never seen to Ramona Lisa Wilson.
She was 16 when she disappeared on June 11, 1994 not far from her Smithers home. She was hitchhiking. Her body was found on April 10, 1995 near the Smithers Airport - near the Trans Canada roadway now dubbed the Highway of Tears.
She was the youngest of six born to Matilda Wilson. Her only sister Brenda was the oldest.
"When she was born she was like my baby. We all looked after her," Brenda said. "She had dark curly hair, dark eyes, my mom and I would dress her up in pink bonnets and cute little coats, my brothers adored her."
In the year before she was murdered, she got her first job, employed at a restaurant. She was a peer counsellor in Grade 11 at Smithers Senior secondary school. Her goal was to be a psychologist.
For fun she played baseball.
"We all fell apart when she went missing," Brenda said. "My mom was sometimes ready to give up and not be on this earth anymore. We were able to talk her up and put her back on track. I went to treatment and tried to build myself up, to bring this awareness and keep my sister's memory alive so she didn't die in vain.
"My brothers are still dealing with it, still grieving, and even the nieces and nephews. Ramona looked after them when they were little, and that is still in their hearts. Her murder left a big void in our hearts."
The song Highway Of Tears by Kathy Frank can be found on You Tube. Frank was a Smithers resident before moving to Prince George, and now in the Vancouver area to pursue her music career. Her signature song was written in honour of Ramona Wilson. The two knew each other as kids.
