Friday, August 9, 2002

By PETER SMITH, CALGARY SUN

Cops searching for the remains of 63 missing women have found the DNA of a one-time Calgary exotic dancer on a Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farm, says her close friend.

Sarah deVries, 29, became one of the best known of the 63 missing Vancouver women after her friend Wayne Leng took her 1998 disappearance to media worldwide.

Sarah deVries

His personal campaign to find her, spearheaded by a website devoted to all of the missing women, was the catalyst which eventually helped spark a massive police response.

Officers from the Missing Women Task Force visited Sarah's sister Maggie on Tuesday to tell her they had found her sister's DNA on an object at the pig farm.

"Maggie called me to tell me the news, and I knew from the tone of her voice what she was about to tell me," said Leng, who lives in the U.S.

Police confirmed to Maggie the DNA matched Sarah's, but said they didn't have enough evidence to charge pig farmer Robert William Pickton, 52, with her murder.

Pickton has been charged with seven counts of first-degree murder in relation to seven of the 63 missing women who all disappeared from Vancouver's drug-infested red-light district.

"I believe Sarah was murdered out there on the pig farm, and in a strange way it is a little better to know what happened, rather than not knowing all these years," said Leng.

Sarah, who once was an exotic dancer in a Calgary nightclub before moving to Vancouver, became a heroin addict.

She made a rare television documentary, allowing cameras to film her in a drug-induced haze shooting up her next fix.

Her gruesome description of her lifestyle was so sickening, she is credited with turning many potential drug-abusers away from the deadly way of life.

Staring into the camera with faraway eyes, Sarah ends the documentary prophetically, saying there were only three ways off Vancouver streets.

"You go to jail, you do a life sentence here, or you end up dead," she said.

Leng and Maggie's purpose in keeping the spotlight on Sarah for four years was to let people know she was more than a prostitute.

"She was a mother, a sister, a friend, a rounded human being, in the same way all these missing women should be considered," said Leng.

He recalled one of Sarah's happiest moments was discovering, after she had contracted HIV, that she hadn't passed it on to her son, Ben, who is being cared for by family members along with his sister Jeanie.