Unlike many of the sordid characters with whom he shares the designation “serial killer,” John Martin Crawford shuns publicity. He has staked his claim as one of the nation’s most prolific sex killers with little fanfare. And indeed, in terms of self-preservation, Crawford could hardly have orchestrated a better scenario than his current situation. Housed in the Saskatchewan Penitentiary in Prince Albert, serving three concurrent life sentences, he is anonymous, his deeds virtually forgotten. Even within the confines of the P.A. Pen, an institution that has housed the likes of Clifford Olson and Charles Ng, few inmates are aware of Crawford or what he has done. His lack of celebrity bodes well for his survival. With a prison population that is 70 percent aboriginal, the unrepentant murderer doesn’t need his fellow inmates to know of his predilection for killing young Native women.
As of this writing, Crawford has been convicted of four deaths, all of them women, all of them Native. He is also a suspect in at least three other murders or mysterious disappearances of aboriginal women in Saskatoon. But Crawford has been the beneficiary of a disinterested media and an equally impassive public. More important, his victims have suffered even further because of this indifference.
The first killing came in 1981 in Lethbridge, Alberta, when the then nineteen-year-old Crawford led Mary Jane Serloin to her death. The murder, coming just two days before Christmas, caused barely a ripple in the community. The Lethbridge Herald gave the story three column-inches in the second section, beneath a story about members of the local Kinette Club delivering 425 poinsettia plants to nursing homes and senior citizens lodges in the city. Two days later, the paper succinctly identified the victim whose “nude body was found in the alcove of the old No. 1 firehall.” The story ran to forty-six words.
“It seems any time a Native is murdered,” the victim’s sister commented, “it isn’t a major case. It’s just another dead Indian.”
Less than a decade later John Martin Crawford emerged from the penal system with an enhanced appetite for sex and mayhem. Fuelled by prescription and nonprescription drugs, alcohol, and solvents, he spent his evenings trolling for prostitutes and other women from whom he could obtain cheap sex. In 1990, while living in Saskatoon, he was fined for attempting to engage the services of a prostitute. Two years later he was charged with raping Janet Sylvestre, a thirty-six-year-old aboriginal woman. Before the year was up, he had murdered Shelley Napope, Eva Taysup, and Calinda Waterhen. At least, these are the women Crawford was convicted of killing when he finally came to trial in 1996. The naked body of Janet Sylvestre— the same woman he had allegedly raped—was discovered in a grove of trees near Saskatoon in October 1994. During the same period, two more women, Shirley Lonethunder and Cynthia Baldhead, ominously disappeared from the aboriginal community. If the police were suspicious that these women, too, had fallen into Crawford’s murderous hands, they weren’t saying, at least not publicly.
They didn’t have to. No one was asking.
Law enforcement services had received reports of missing women and murdered women in and around Saskatoon for some time, but the police did not seem to take the disappearances of these women seriously—until bodies began turning up in a grove near the city. There were no posters soliciting information on the disappearances of Shelley Napope, Eva Taysup, Calinda Waterhen, or any of the dozens of Native women who are reported missing every year.
When Crawford appealed his conviction in January 1999, only one media outlet took any notice. A lone reporter from the Regina LeaderPost attended the half-day hearing in the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal in Regina, and was subsequently responsible for the account of the proceedings that made its way to the other papers in the Hollinger chain, including the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. None of the three television stations or half-dozen radio outlets in Saskatoon bothered to cover the story. Three months later, when Crawford’s mother, Victoria, engaged the services of a Winnipeg law firm in an effort to get her son’s case before the Supreme Court of Canada, nobody took any notice at all. When Crawford’s leave to appeal was dismissed by the Supreme Court on March 30, 2000, hardly anyone noticed. The media had simply abandoned the story. Faced with increasing competition and diminishing resources, the media were struggling simply to meet the challenges of daily journalism in a diverse and demanding market. Crawford was yester-day’s news. His victims and their families had had their moment in the spotlight. When the mainstream media did report on the story, many members of the Native community were offended by the coverage of Crawford’s aboriginal victims. “Instead of thinking about these young women as individuals who had dreams, aspirations, hopes and people who loved them,” wrote Janice Acoose in Iskwewak: Neither Indian Princesses Nor Easy Squaws, “we were encouraged to view them through stereotypical images.”
In a column written at the time of the Crawford trial, Les MacPherson, a popular columnist with the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, asked why reporters from across Canada were not “climbing over each other to get at the story,” and why it wasn’t “generating anything like the publicity of . . . the Paul Bernardo trial.”
He determined that geography and a lack of compelling drama were responsible but that crying racism was an “almost entirely superficial” and “quite wrong” response. “Yes, the victims were Indian women, but that’s largely by the way,” he wrote.
MacPherson goes on to say that “more relevant than race is the nearly total absence of connections between the victims and the mainstream community. They inhabited an isolated underworld where people routinely drop in and out of sight.” These women, he said, “did not maintain close contact with their immediate families. They were not expected home for dinner. Missing person reports were not outstanding on any of the three victims. Police were not beset by concerned family members demanding to know why not.” Rather than condemning “white folks for not much caring about murdered Indian women,” he asks, “who cared for them while they were still alive?”
In posing these questions, MacPherson is displaying a common ignorance of the history and plight of many Native Canadians as well as some misconceptions concerning the Crawford case. That these victims were not part of mainstream society and that they inhabited an isolated underworld are precisely why we have to ask ourselves what role racism played in this tragedy. As for no one showing any concern for these women when they were alive, that was not the case. Shelley Napope’s anxious parents, perplexed that their young daughter had simply vanished, had been in frequent contact with police. Eva Taysup’s family had contacted police in Saskatoon, Kelvington, and Yorkton to file missing person reports, complete with recent photographs of Eva. And Steve Morningchild, Calinda Waterhen’s father, went repeatedly to the police with concerns about his missing daughter. He was told that Calinda was alive and living somewhere in Saskatchewan. But it should come as no surprise if some of the victims’ families felt uncomfortable turning to the police for help.
Beyond their immediate families and a few close friends, no one could have known that Shelley Napope, Calinda Waterhen, and Eva Taysup were missing. Is it not the duty of the police to inform the public when a family expresses concern that one of its members has unexpectedly dropped out of sight? A senior officer with the Saskatoon Police Service offers the explanation that hundreds of missing person reports are filed every year, making it impossible to publicize them all, and that many of these “missing persons” are runaways who return in a few days or are simply people who do not want to be found. That is cold comfort to families who have valid reasons for fearing that something has happened to a loved one.
The police officer also suggests that the responsibility of informing the media that someone is missing falls to the family. Obviously, only those with a certain sophistication, social status, and adequate resources are able to gain the ear of the media. Police procedure, in this case, may have served to further marginalize the Native families involved.
In his column, MacPherson correctly pointed out that if the trial had been in Toronto, it would have been national news. But as to the lack of compelling drama, one wonders what MacPherson considers compelling. There was an abundance of sex. There was murder and mutilation. There was a depraved, slack-jawed predator supported at every turn by his devoted mother. There was an unscrupulous informer who earned more than $15,000 for his efforts to trap Crawford and, in the process, avoided being named as a co-accused in at least one of the murders at which he had been present. Finally, there was a world-renowned forensic anthropologist who, with a handful of bones and a dearth of evidence, eventually brought a serial killer to trial.
It sounds like a fairly compelling drama by any standards. And yet, most members of the general public don’t even recognize the name of John Martin Crawford. He’s no Clifford Olson. Certainly he’s no Paul Bernardo. In his home town of Saskatoon, he doesn’t even rank with the likes of David Threinen, the man who killed four Saskatoon youngsters in a murderous rampage twenty-five years ago.
Crawford’s comfortable obscurity may not be a bad thing. The tragedy is that we don’t remember Mary Jane Serloin, Shelley Napope, Eva Taysup, or Calinda Waterhen, either.
Perhaps we can begin to redress the balance.