Somebody's Daughter (36 page)

Eddy and Slugger didn't fair any better. Their sentences were not as stiff, five and six years respectively, but Teri and Gizelle had also been strong witnesses. By the end of August all four of the main players had fallen after their teenage prostitutes had the nerve to face them in court.

Back in Halifax, with her testimony complete, Taunya's fear of the pimps returned, and as that fear grew she realized she could not return to a normal life in the Halifax area. A year later Taunya opted to join the witness protection program. Once inside the program she was given a new identity, a new background, and a new city to live in. An RCMP officer accompanied Taunya to her new home and introduced her to an officer there who knew her true identity and her background. That officer promised to help her if she ever felt threatened or if she thought a member of the pimping family had discovered her.

On the first night of her new life Taunya sat alone in a small apartment the RCMP had found for her and watched TV. The pictures and sounds coming from the television did not cut through the anxiety she was feeling. She was preoccupied as she tried to decide what to do now that she was finally free. For most of her life Taunya wanted freedom. At first she wanted to be free of school and then it was her mothers' rules she wanted to escape. Finally she wanted freedom from the pimps who had made her life so terrible. Now Taunya had her freedom and it terrified her. For several days she was afraid to leave her apartment, but gradually she began to venture beyond the small convenience store located at the base of the large building she now called home. Within three weeks the former prostitute found a roommate to share the apartment and the expenses, and with her roommates help she found a job serving customers at a coffee shop. After four months, she enrolled in a few night classes at a beauty school where she hoped to become a hairdresser.

Socially, Taunya had great difficulty adapting to her new life. Her roommate introduced her to a few young men but Taunya discovered she did not like or trust white men. Her experience as a prostitute taught her that white men paid for sex while black men did not, and she found she had more respect for black men. She finally met a young black man and started her first normal relationship. Taunya decided early on she would never tell him about her past. She believed avoiding it was the best way for her to forget it. Taunya had one problem in her new life; money or a lack of it. The witness protection program only provided financial support for a few months. That money was gone and it was up to Taunya to fend for herself. Waiting tables in a coffee shop was not giving her enough money to pay her bills. Taunya found it very hard to cash a paycheck for one week of work that was less than half of what she often made in a single night on the street. As the need for money grew, Taunya began to take chances. She made excuses to her boyfriend, and left for occasional weekend trips to a neighboring city. There she went to work as an in-service worker at an escort service. Taunya continued that delicate balancing act for more than a year. Then she finally decided to break free of prostitution for good. To force herself to stay free of the escort service Taunya took a drastic step. She quit her job at the coffee shop and convinced her boyfriend to pack and move to another part of the country far from the temptations of the Escort Service she had begun to rely on. Taunya finally made the break and stayed away from prostitution.

For Taunya's close friend, Teri MacDonald, the break was easier to make. She held true to her word and stayed away from The Game, finished school and started the normal life she promised herself she would have on that flight back from Toronto after the 1992 raid.

Whether they assumed new identities and moved away, or tried to stick it out in Nova Scotia, all of the girls who had become involved with the task force—whether as witnesses in the trial of a pimp, or as participants in programs to help them get away from The Game—faced considerable difficulty adjusting to the “square” world.

Some, like Lydia Chiasson, made the transition with surprisingly few setbacks. The nineteen-year-old, like Taunya, joined the witness protection program after her pimps' trial; she was relocated to a small town and quickly found a job. That she accepted her minimum-wage salary with a certain amount of grace was testament to her maturity; Lydia knew how to survive, and she understood that others, too, had to struggle to pay their rent and put food on the table. Lydia also had the advantage of past experience; before meeting Charlie Cochrane that day on her way to the video store she had been supporting herself with a minimum wage job. Unlike Taunya, who missed her mother and sister, Lydia had been a loner before she met Charlie; there was no one left behind to regret leaving. As for fears of being tracked down for reprisal, she had none; her new home was small enough that the arrival of a fancy car filled with men asking questions about the new girl in town would have quickly attracted attention, especially from the police chief, who knew Lydia had been a witness in a case involving a violent pimp, and who had befriended the young girl and would occasionally stop by to chat with her while she worked.

Only a few months after arriving, Lydia met a young man. They quickly fell in love and moved in together; within a year, the couple had a son. The relationship continued to flourish, and Lydia's boyfriend frequently proposed marriage, but she held back. Lydia just wanted to take life one day at a time; and he was willing to wait.

For Amber Borowski, the shift to “square” life wasn't quite so smooth. Determined to live near her elderly foster parents, with whom she had become increasingly close during Jay MacDonald's trial, she resisted task force officers' advice and decided to stay in Halifax. The job she found in a gift shop at a local shopping mall only lasted for a few weeks; a pimp she'd once worked for managed to find her. She wasn't threatened, but the man started dropping in to visit her regularly, teasing her and flirting with her in his “subtle” effort to get her back into The Game. She quit in order to escape his attentions, but it wasn't until August 1994 that she changed her mind about staying in Halifax. Amber was with some friends at the annual Buskers' Festival on the waterfront when a cousin of Jay's, drunk and obviously angry, came up to her, threatened her openly, and followed her through the crowd when she turned away.

A week later, Amber left Halifax; almost overnight, her problems ended. Like Lydia, she settled in a small town and quickly found all the necessities of life—a gentle, unhurried pace of life, a decent job, and a rewarding relationship with a well-established and hardworking young man. Indeed, her biggest challenge was learning to accept not only that her boyfriend made more money than she did, but that he insisted on turning his pay checks over to her. She was much more accustomed to financial arrangements conducted the other way around.

Of all the girls involved in the task force's war on juvenile prostitution, the one whose case launched Operation Hectic showed the most distinctive response to her experience. Not only did Stacey Jackson refuse to enter the witness protection program—despite the advice of her respected and beloved case worker, John Elliott—but she decided to offer her help in educating teenagers about the realities of prostitution. The task force had begun visiting secondary schools across Nova Scotia to promote a clearer understanding of The Game's dangers, and Elliott knew Stacey Jackson would be an asset to that program.

The very notion of speaking on-stage in front of a crowd would have been unthinkable to Stacey a year before her first “gig,” in the late winter of 1994, at a school in Colchester County, north of Halifax. Her self-doubt would have made such an appearance impossible only two years ago. Yet here she was, accompanying the task force's Darrell Gaudet to face a few dozen students who, she knew from experience, would be using the presentation as an excuse to lounge in their seats and chat for an hour or so.
There they go
, she thought sourly, as several of the students in the auditorium started talking and clowning around during Gaudet's talk; others were looking bored and yawning. Then it was her turn. Ignoring the wave of stage fright she felt as she began to speak, Stacey let her anger at the students' indifference fuel her description of the life she had led as a prostitute in Halifax and Toronto. The disruptions stopped immediately, and Gaudet was afraid even to shift in his seat, lest he break the spell she had cast. At the end of Stacey's twenty-minute speech, the teenagers were hushed, almost awed; she had reached them, and Gaudet knew they would think about what she'd said.

Shane Kirk, the Sullivan House counselor who first welcomed Stacey to the safe house, was also at the school that day and he saw something Darrell Gaudet did not. “It had a dramatic affect on Stacey, it was like she was working through her own problems—really coming to grips with her experience—as she spoke to those kids. She did reach the students but I think she gained more from those school visits than anyone else.”

Stacey's life changed in other ways, too. Like her friend Amber Borowski, she lost custody of her child; her son Michael was adopted by her ex-boyfriend's parents. In 1995, she had a second child with her new boyfriend and was content to spend all of her time with the baby boy. She took an apartment in north-end Halifax, and insisted on staying in touch with some of the girls she'd once worked with who had decided to stay in The Game.

In August of 1994, the task force was told of the death of Keri Sherwood, the teenager Mitch Ginn had spotted on the Hollis stroll more than a year before, but could not persuade to spend more than one night in the safe house. Her pimp Eric Conrad, true to form, had tired of the teenager, who moved on to another pimp, then another city. From Montreal she travelled to Calgary, where her prospects brightened—she was befriended by a police officer who, like Ginn, tried hard to help her break away from prostitution. She vanished again before he could reach her. She called the officer in Calgary just one more time, in August 1994, from Montreal; she wanted his help and would be returning to Calgary soon. Later that month, a businessman en route to a meeting in Laval saw an unusual looking pile of clothes in a field near the furniture store where he was headed—he went to have a look, and found the mud-encrusted body of a naked girl, bound with wire at the ankles and wrists. Keri.

It was going to be almost impossible to track down Keri's killer; her belongings weren't found near her body, so police were unable to find out where she lived and locate a clue to her pimp's whereabouts. Then there was the strong possibility that Keri had been slain by a bad date, in which case there would have been no chance of solving the murder. The Montreal police turned to the Operation Hectic officers, but all they had was the photograph taken the night Ginn met her. In short, Keri's murder would probably never be solved. Her case, like many police files on murder victims involved in prostitution, presented not even a single clue to help officers track down their murderers.

Constable Gary Martin, who had taken over as media liaison officer for the task force, contacted local reporters after hearing of Keri's death, hoping the publication of her photograph and an account of her tragic death might generate leads for investigators in Montreal. Instead, articles bearing such headlines as “Halifax Hooker Found Dead in Montreal” appeared in the papers—no mention of Keri's dream to become a writer, or of the poetry that filled her journal; she was just a dead “hooker.”

For Stacey, this coverage was exceptionally frustrating. She acknowledged that the media had played a vital role in bringing the problem of juvenile prostitution to the public's attention—thus prompting the formation of the task force—but she wanted to see more articles and TV coverage about the challenges faced by young women struggling to get their lives under control—young women like herself. Stacey, like many others, adults and teenagers alike, denounced the use of words like “hooker”—like Judge Kimball's “whore”—it was completely inappropriate. Throughout 1994 the Halifax media had carried the stories of terrorized young teens who had broken free from the prostitution game but for Stacey it was not enough.

Stacey's anger turned against the police as well as the news media over the murder of Kathy Armstrong, a twenty-seven-year-old woman whose body was discovered in an alleyway in the early winter of 1995. Her throat had been cut. Armstrong had spent much of her adult life working as a prostitute in Halifax. Stacey had met her several times, and knew she was several months pregnant and was suffering from a crack addiction that not only kept her on the street, but also forced her to resort to robbery and other petty crimes. Stacey was horrified to learn of her death, as was her friend Amber, who found out about the murder during a telephone conversation with her foster mother. Just as Annie Mae's death had turned Stacey away from prostitution and inspired her to keep her promise to testify against her former pimps, Amber was similarly determined to stick to the straight and narrow. She had met Armstrong years before, on the crack stroll, and the two had become fast friends; Amber would not betray her memory by returning to the old life. Stacey, however, wasn't content to leave matters there, nor perhaps would Amber have been if she had been in Halifax to watch the story of Kathy Armstrong unfold—or, rather, to watch the story disappear from media reports almost as quickly as it made headlines when the murder occurred.

Stacey complained to anyone who would listen. Her frustration exploded into outrage a few months later, when the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl, unconnected to prostitution, remained a top news story for days and prompted the RCMP in Lower Sackville, where the body had been discovered behind a local school, to deploy a team of investigators around the clock in an effort to find her killer.

Where was the team investigating Kathy Armstrong's murder? Stacey called John Elliott to try to find out more; it turned out that the Halifax police were facing problems similar to their Montreal counterparts: the victim could have been killed by any number of suspects—drug dealers, pimps, bad dates—and the investigation was making little headway. A few days later, the Lower Sackville RCMP announced an arrest in the sixteen-year-old's murder, and John Elliott told his persistent former witness that the man in charge of the investigation was none other than Brad Sullivan, who had left the task force for a posting as a lead investigator.