Many of them travel back and forth across the Canada-U.S.
WHAT MAKES A SERIAL KILLER HARDER TO CATCH SERIAL
“The (FBI’s) Highway Serial Killer Initiative has about 400 to 450 offender profiles of unidentified subjects on its database alone that are involved in the trucking industry for the entire Interstate system (in the US),” Arntfield told APTN InFocus host Melissa Ridgen. While serial killers in urban centres can be from an assortment of walks of life, who hunt victims in a variety of settings and circumstances, those who prey in isolated rural areas are often long-haul truckers.īut don’t think that makes them easier to catch, Arntfield says.
It’s something police in Canada are reluctant talk about, but something that many missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls advocates have long theorized. “We don’t know for sure in Canada because no one will give us the data but for sure you would see Edmonton up to Fort McMurray (light up) that’s already well established… certainly Manitoba through to Northern Ontario and down through the Golden Horseshoe and the Greater Toronto area as well.” metro region and the Great Lakes region light up and we see major trucking centres light up,” Arntfield said. “When we input all the (American) data at and we see both coasts light up. is helpful in guessing patterns north of the border. While Canadian data is hard to come by, data generated in the U.S. “There is very good research on west coast and the north west in the U.S and in Canada which helps explain a lot of patterns seen in lower mainland and B.C and in the Highway of Tears region,” Arntfield said, referring to the 724-kilometre stretch of Highway 16 in northern B.C where 18 – 50 women, mostly Indigenous, have gone missing or been found murdered since the 1960s. That’s according to Michael Arntfield, a Western University criminologist and serial killer expert who studies murder patterns for the Murder Accountability Project in the U.S. Subscribe to the InFocus podcast and listen to other episodes here Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcastsįrom the west coast to the Golden Horseshoe surrounding Toronto, there is evidence to suggest serial killers are hunting and disproportionately, Indigenous women and girls are their prey.Īnd those serial killers likely number far more than the average person imagines.