Mary Lidguerre, a 30-year-old Indigenous woman, was last seen on July 7, 1995, after living and working in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Contemporary records and later reviews of the missing-women investigations describe her as being involved in the sex trade around the Main and Hastings area and struggling with cocaine dependence. Although July 7 is sometimes associated with her case as a death date, available records identify it as the date she was last seen; her exact date of death is
unknown.
When people who knew Lidguerre realized she had disappeared, efforts to have her formally treated as a missing person encountered serious problems. Evidence presented years later to British Columbia’s Missing Women Commission of Inquiry showed that Freda Ens, who worked with vulnerable Indigenous people in Vancouver, attempted to report Lidguerre missing in 1995 but was initially refused. Inquiry testimony and subsequent reviews identified her case as one of several in which concerns about women disappearing from the Downtown Eastside were not handled with the urgency they warranted. By late 1995, Vancouver police were nevertheless examining Lidguerre’s disappearance alongside those of other women and considering the possibility of foul play.
More than a year after she vanished, skeletal remains were discovered on Mount Seymour in North Vancouver on August 16, 1996. Investigators did not immediately know whose remains they had found. It was not until 1997 that dental records established that the remains belonged to Lidguerre. By then, investigators were already confronting a disturbing series of disappearances and murders involving women connected to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Her death remained unsolved, and no definitive publicly established cause of death emerged from the condition of the recovered remains.
Lidguerre’s disappearance drew particular attention because of three other killings in 1995 that became known as the Hemlock Valley or E-Valley murders. Tracy Olajide, Tammy Lee Pipe and Victoria Younker had all been associated with the Downtown Eastside sex trade. Their bodies were discovered in remote areas near Agassiz and Mission. Investigators determined that those three victims had been strangled, and police considered the similarities strong enough to investigate whether one offender was responsible. During the same period, authorities feared Lidguerre might have encountered the same person.
RCMP investigators developed a prime suspect in the Fraser Valley killings. Public investigative reviews described him as a man already imprisoned following convictions involving the rapes and attempted murders of two women during the early 1980s. For years police focused heavily on him, but later DNA testing eliminated that suspect from the linked killings. Investigators then began considering other possibilities. Evidence from the Valley crime scenes—including red automotive paint, oil and small yellow material thought possibly to have come from rain gear—also led police to theorize that the killer used a four-wheel-drive vehicle and was familiar with the isolated roads and wooded terrain where victims were left.
Robert “Willy” Pickton was also investigated as police examined whether murders and disappearances from the Downtown Eastside might be connected. Subsequent DNA evidence ruled Pickton out as the killer in Lidguerre’s case and in the three E-Valley homicides. Investigators and later official reviews did not ultimately agree that Lidguerre’s death was necessarily part of the same series. The Missing Women Commission’s Forsaken report noted that although her remains were found in the North Shore mountains and her case had initially been considered alongside the Valley murders, investigators came to believe that her case might not be related to those killings.
No one has been charged, tried or convicted in connection with Mary Lidguerre’s death. The prime suspect once investigated in connection with the E-Valley murders was eliminated through DNA evidence, and Pickton was likewise excluded. What happened after Lidguerre disappeared from Vancouver on July 7, 1995, how she died, who transported her remains to Mount Seymour, and whether her death was connected to another unsolved homicide or series of killings remain unresolved.
