By Kathryn Carlson
Judy Peterson isn’t asking for much. All she wants is to know what to say when people ask her how many children she has.
It’s been more than a decade since Peterson’s then 14-year-old daughter Lindsey Jill Nicholls vanished from a rural road near her home in Royston, B.C. To this day, Peterson doesn’t know if Lindsey is dead or alive, missing or found.
Like many other parents in Canada, she wonders if her daughter’s body is one of the hundreds of corpses lying unidentified in morgues across the country.
“After my daughter had been missing about five years, I phoned the police and asked that her DNA be entered into the databank. This was very difficult for me as it seemed like an admission that she had been murdered,” said Peterson in an email interview. “However, when I realized that the databank did not exist, the thought that her remains could have been sitting somewhere all that time was horrific.”
Since then, Peterson has been pushing for the creation of a databank system that allows DNA from unidentified bodies to be cross-checked with samples from missing persons.
This type of system would help identify unidentified bodies and solve crimes. It would also bring emotional closure to people like Lindsey’s mom.
“Every time I hear a news report of found human remains, I am compelled to phone to make sure that the investigator knows about Lindsey,” said Peterson.
Currently in Canada, there is no systematic process for gathering and comparing DNA from missing persons and unidentified remains. As a result, any collection of samples for people falling into either of these categories happens only on an ad hoc basis and are not retained or indexed at a provincial or national level.
Although Canada has had a national DNA databank since June 30, 2000, it only houses DNA gathered from crime scenes and convicted offenders. It doesn’t include DNA from missing persons or unidentified remains.
According to the RCMP’s latest national databank statistics, the DNA system has helped solve more than 4,800 cases ranging from murder to armed robbery. Based on the crime-solving success of this system, the RCMP has expressed its support for the type of index Peterson is working so hard to establish in Canada.
“The Robert Pickton case is the most famous example of the police identifying victims through familial DNA,” said Peterson.
“Recently, one of the charges was removed because it names ‘Jane Doe.’ If we had a national missing persons DNA databank, she may have been able to be identified and he could be charged with her murder and her family would have answers.”
Even with the crime-solving and humanitarian benefits aside, you don’t have to look far to understand how a missing persons index (MPI) could be useful to authorities and families in other unforeseeable and tragic circumstances. Think of the thousands of people missing, dead and dismembered following Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami, and Sept. 11.
And it’s not as if this has never been done before. The United States and Australia already have their own versions of an MPI and provinces like P.E.I. and Saskatchewan have expressed interest in a national MPI system.
So why hasn’t the government worked harder to make this happen in Canada? In a word: privacy.
Apparently, some policy-makers in this country care more about trivial privacy issues than emotional closure for people like Judy Peterson.
Yes, privacy is something that must be protected—but only to a certain degree.
DNA could be taken on a voluntary basis, so no one has to fear the authorities barging into their homes looking for toothbrushes and combs.
However, some privacy devotees disagree with even the voluntary sampling of familial DNA, arguing that it’s nobody’s business to find someone who might not want to be found.
But let’s face it, out of the about 270 people who go missing each year, how many just decided to go AWOL? And how many of the 20 to 30 new or partial sets of unidentified human remains discovered in Canada each year belong to people who wanted to end up in a morgue?
Privacy buffs should also be comforted by the fact that the missing persons index would only be used for law enforcement and humanitarian purposes.
The DNA housed in the missing persons databank would be just as secure as the samples already contained in the crime scene and convicted offenders indexes.
And by linking the MPI with the already-established national system, initial costs would be significantly lower and efficiency would be considerably greater.
Though the former Liberal government’s DNA databank advisory committee did discuss the creation of an MPI, policy-makers have been frustratingly slow-moving.
But hope is not lost. Over the years, the Conservative party has been vocal in its support of a missing persons databank in Canada.
It was a Conservative MP, Gary Lunn of B.C., who proposed amendments to the government’s DNA legislation as a private members motion back in 2003. Lunn hopes to call the legislation “Lindsey’s Law.”
But if Judy Peterson ever gets her way, people all over the country will rest easier — assured they’ll someday have closure, instead of waiting for decades for a phone call that never comes.