The new podcast True Crime Byline looks back at The Vancouver Sun investigation into Vancouver\u0027s missing women, a case that eventually led to the arrest and…
This story was originally published on Nov. 24, 2001:The father is Ernest Albert Crey, 57, a former hard-rock miner and hard-drinking logger. He gave up booze to build a better life for his family and moved them, here, to a new home in Hope.
In the end, some of them will survive, grow to be native leaders and healers. Others will spiral into despair and drugs and, eventually, death.She will drift into drugs and prostitution, endure having acid thrown in her face and, finally, in late 2000, at age 43, she will join the ranks of 45 women missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.Article content
Dawn’s first foster home was on a farm near Chilliwack, where she was sent to live with her older sister Faith. Their strict foster parents provided them a stable, if regimented, life. But later they would tell their brothers and sisters horror stories of their time there.“Basically, they were used as child labour and horribly abused, so much so that our eldest sister, Faith, never stopped talking about how cruel those foster parents were on that farm,” Dawn’s sister Lorraine says.
“My life in poverty has been a long road,” she said. “In my own family, before I went into the foster homes, there was lots of love and caring that I needed, but not all the material things. The meeting was brief. But when Lorraine came to know Dawn as a teenager, she could always see traces of that energetic child’s bright expression.
Years later when they were teenagers, Rose saw Dawn in a Chilliwack field as they were picking raspberries with their foster mothers. “She didn’t try to push herself on me. She was considerate and understood that I was uncomfortable because I didn’t know any of our family.”Article content Marie Wiebe recalls the social workers being terribly blunt when telling Dawn that she would now be living with this new family. She and 14-year-old Faith, who would be separated from her and sent to live in Hope, would never return to their former home.Dawn’s meagre belongings were brought to her, and Wiebe took her a few times to visit her former foster parents.
However, Wiebe soon learned Dawn’s actions were going beyond those of a restless teenager when she got up in the middle of the night and discovered her foster daughter was missing. She had completed Grade 8 before leaving the Wiebes, and upon her return entered Grade 9, but her attendance was sporadic.
Dawn also spent some time in Hope with her sister Faith, and began experimenting with hallucinogens, such as LSD. She would periodically return to the Wiebes to shower and eat, before disappearing into a hazy world of drugs and boys.Article content One day, Dawn announced she was going to meet a relative at a Chilliwack hotel. Wiebe was instantly worried. “She insisted it was just for coffee,” Wiebe recalled. “But she never came back.”
“We encouraged her to give it some time, let’s not do anything rash,” Wiebe recalled. But when it became clear that Dawn wasn’t coming back, the Wiebes eventually adopted the boy. “She didn’t forsake him, she just felt very inadequate. That’s what we’ve tried to tell [her son] all his life: it wasn’t that she didn’t love him.”
The sisters were not interested in returning to small-town Chilliwack. “The big city lights, all those lights, we were amazed by them,” Lorraine recalled. They migrated to Granville Street, and learned to survive as homeless teenagers in downtown Vancouver. They met boyfriends who worked in the bar at the former Nelson Place Hotel, a common hangout for natives in the late 1970s.
For several months in 1979 and 1980 Dawn attended high school equivalency courses at the Ray Cam Cooperative Centre on East Hastings. Fellow students remember her as a pretty young woman with large brown eyes. But she dropped out of school after meeting other new friends in the Downtown Eastside — new friends whose priorities weren’t geography and algebra.
Lorraine can recall walking tentatively into a small lounge in Vancouver’s Chinatown with her sisters, and attempting to pick their mother out of the crowd. “Dawn and I were trying to guess: Were we still going to remember our mom? But I was right. I went up to her and said, ‘I’m Lorraine, and those are your two other daughters over there.'”
Before she died, Minnie had asked a man whom she had befriended in Chinatown to watch out for her girls. Dawn found a new parental figure in Henry Yip, an older, divorced man who lived in downtown hotels and portrayed himself as a self-sufficient person with family money. She turned to Yip for support in the mid-1980s, when she hit rock bottom after a longtime boyfriend inherited some cash and left her.
“Within 24 hours or 36 hours before, she had actually ODed and they had even thought that she was dead … I think that was probably the one and only time that I can recall really thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, here she’s been close to death.’ You could see it.”Article content While in treatment, Dawn gained some weight and stopped hallucinating, and went on methadone to try to kick her heroin habit. After being released, she lived in a series of motels and low-rent apartment buildings in Abbotsford for about four years, and survived on social assistance.
Dawn’s visits became less frequent. Her son, who is now 25 years old, was well behaved for his first 13 years but, like his biological mother, began to act out once he entered his teens. He is still living a troubled life today. Dawn moved into the Columbia Hotel and was there for only a short time before her life took a devastating turn for the worse. One night after visiting Yip, she was followed to her tiny hotel room by two women. East Hastings Street is crawling with many desperate creatures, especially at night, but this time Dawn was scared. She had been getting into scraps with other women who were looking for drugs and believed Dawn had a stash, funded by Yip’s money.
“She found that injecting it would take the pain away more quickly than swallowing it, because it went straight into the blood,” Lorraine said.Before the burning, Dawn was proud of her looks. “She was very prissy. I remember that it would take her hours to get ready,” said Lorraine. Dawn’s rage brought three more assault convictions in Vancouver in just four months, from October 1992 to February 1993. On the last offence, she was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
Court documents indicate Dawn has a history of psychiatric problems, and spent some time in a Chilliwack hospital in 1991. She was described as delusional and mentally ill. A judge also noted she attended the outpatient clinic at Forensic Psychiatric Services on Broadway. As a teenager on Granville Street, Dawn would sometimes dress as a boy to try to elude police. But Lorraine didn’t know if her sister was trying the same tricks in the 1990s.
But even on the streets from which she disappeared, Crey did not always find acceptance. According to a sex-trade worker who knew her for about three years in the late 1990s, Dawn was ostracized by some of the other working women because of the disfiguring scars on her face.
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