Somebody's Daughter (28 page)

The team's media relations officer badly wanted this piece of history recorded for posterity, most importantly because he knew what a positive impact extensive coverage could have on Operation Hectic's early efforts. Sergeant Bill Price, the RCMP media liaison officer for Nova Scotia, contacted local reporters, triumphantly reporting that the task force, only in its infancy, was already making a difference in the battle against juvenile prostitution. Reaction to reports of the arrest was overwhelmingly positive: an outpouring of support from the public, congratulating police for tackling a problem that had been too long ignored. Interestingly, a number of calls from parents requested that task force team members speak with their daughters—who they were concerned were hanging out with the wrong crowd—about the dangers of prostitution. This preventative action became a regular activity of Operation Hectic, and one the officers welcomed: keeping a girl away from The Game was a lot easier than rescuing her from it after she had chosen to play. Even more significantly, there was a noticeable increase of calls from girls who had been approached on the stroll by Botterill and the others; apparently, they were beginning to believe that police truly meant to crack down on violent pimps, and not on the young prostitutes themselves. The officers began to hear stories of brutal torture that at first seemed too horrendous to be plausible—like the statements of Stacey, Taunya, and Teri. As they heard similar accounts from girl after girl, police realized the pimps' abusive behavior was both widespread and extreme.

Most of the girls told their stories in the interview room at the Dartmouth police station, which had been pressed into service as the task force's office. The rooms, with their cinder-block walls and sparse furnishings—a table and three chairs at most—provided starkly dramatic backdrops to the graphic stories. One of the first accounts the task force heard was the experience of Linda Devoe, a seventeen-year-old prostitute who at eleven had run away from an abusive family in rural Nova Scotia and headed for the big city. In Halifax, she met a man of thirty-three who quickly persuaded her to move in with him: in rapid succession, he had sex with her, talked her into working the Hollis Street stroll—proof that she really loved him, as he put it—and subjected her to a taste of what she could expect if she ever opposed his wishes. Overcome with guilt after her first night as a working girl, Linda told her pimp she was leaving; the price of his love was too high. His reaction was swift and violent—and a chilling reminder to task force officers of Stacey's brutal treatment. Unwinding a wire coat hanger, he beat Linda repeatedly as she begged for mercy. That was not enough for him. He took a small steel bar from the pile of weights he used to keep his impressive physique well toned, and kneeling beside the terrified child, he ripped off her clothes, and raped her with the bar. Linda went back to the stroll the next night; she never argued with her pimp again.

It wouldn't be the last time the task force members heard of the Nova Scotia players' use of the wire whip that the girls described as a “pimp stick.” They also learned submersion was a common form of abuse. An errant prostitute was forced into a full bathtub and her head held underwater until her tormentor felt she was certain she would suffocate. The punishments often seemed completely unprovoked—some pimps would whip a girl because they thought she might be talking to another pimp, or because they didn't like the way she answered when she was called. The beatings often took place in front of other girls—just as Manning Greer had alternately terrorized Taunya, Teri, and Gizelle—leaving them all feeling brutalized, demoralized, and completely powerless. Such subservience was the purpose of the torture: a passive girl tends not to struggle against her servitude in The Game. As they listened in shock, and with growing determination to put an end to such practices, the officers began to believe that many of these men had adopted the practice of beating prostitutes for fun, or to have something to tell their cohorts.

One teenager told investigators about an experience that seemed to support that theory. Her pimp had taken her to a card game, along with several other prostitutes enjoying a rare night off; the girls were drinking and joking, and the pimps were having a good time too. “I had a bit too much to drink, so he told me I couldn't have any more; well, I just laughed at him and said he was making me ‘blue mad'—that's something I said all the time, not an insult or anything.” She drew a deep breath and sipped at the Coke one of the officers had brought her. “But I could see he didn't like it, because he said we were leaving.” Before returning to his apartment, the pimp stopped to pick something up at a pharmacy; when they got home, she found out what it was. “So he fills the tub and adds what he bought at the store—a bottle of blue dye. Then he tells me to get in, right up to my neck so I'm all covered with this tuff, from head to toe. After that I have to get into a bathing suit, and put my coat over it because we're going back to the party.” There, he ordered her to remove her coat and model for the other pimps: “She's real ‘blue mad' now!” His buddies hooted and hollered, but the other prostitutes weren't impressed, not only because he'd punished her for no reason, but also because he'd totally outsmarted himself. That girl would have to wear slacks on the stroll, instead of a miniskirt—and she'd be in long sleeves, too, until the dye faded—which meant she'd be pulling in a lot less cash for her pimp. “That made it a little easier to take,” she told the officers—but they surmised, with growing awareness of the methods of these players, that when the girl did come home with less money than usual, her pimp put the blame on her and probably came up with another gruesome punishment.

Blue jeans on the stroll. [Print from ATV video tape]

A critical aspect of the task force's approach involved befriending the girls whose trust the investigators earned, and providing support to them whenever they called. Some of them simply wanted a quick chat to break up the day or relieve an unpleasant night, while others were seeking a serious discussion of the reasons for staying away from The Game. It wasn't just phone calls, either. A number of team members were driving out to the Truro Training School for girls on an almost daily basis. This facility had quickly become a holding area for the youngest prostitutes caught up in Operation Hectic, and a safe haven for two of the teenagers whose rescue in Toronto had launched Operation Hectic—Taunya and Teri. Stacey, at seventeen, was too old for the facility and was still living with her family when the task force got its start.

It was on one of Craig Botterill's regular visits to Truro, this time to talk to Taunya, Teri, and another girl, that the prosecutor's last lingering doubts about the veracity of his young witnesses' horror stories faded away entirely. Botterill picked the girls up at the training centre and took them to a local steakhouse for lunch; during the meal, face to face for the first time with the heartbreaking youth of the individuals behind the graphic words of their sworn statements, he realized with a rush of sorrow and outrage that the task force was truly dealing with children. The girls acted silly and giddy in the restaurant, three energetic and slightly unruly daughters with an indulgent dad. He began to wonder if he should be considering child abuse charges instead of pimping. That night he talked with his wife about the issue, and both felt a surge of anger at the renewed awareness that fully grown men were preying on youngsters because other fully grown men were willing to pay a lot of money to have sex with them. Craig Botterill felt a new resolve to make the justice system work for girls who had been ignored by society for so long.

What Botterill and the other investigators didn't know was that a serious problem was beginning to develop at the school they were visiting in Truro. Taunya, Teri, and some of the other girls held fast to their decision to stay away from The Game. For them, the institution, with its rules and mandatory training programs, provided a positive experience that also allowed them leisure time in the evenings and on weekends. Others used the freedom to return to Hollis Street for a couple of nights' work and some ready cash; they'd return to Truro fairly bursting with tales of pimps and dates that fascinated some of their schoolmates—like Keri Sherwood, a sixteen-year-old who had never been involved in prostitution. Keri was at the Truro school because of emotional problems: a foster child, she had been sexually abused by a youth at her foster home. Although she hadn't shared the experience with her counselors, she had described it extensively in her diary. Keri was impressed with the apparent independence of the young prostitutes, and on Sunday nights she would eagerly await their return—with new stories of money, sexual aberrations, and the adrenaline rush of life on the street. She soon decided to give prostitution a try. Taunya got wise to what was going on and tried to talk Keri out of her plan, but she could see the girl's quiet demeanor—and a confidence problem that bordered on self-hatred—made her a prime target for the pimps.

A few weeks after her first foray onto the Hollis stroll, Keri failed to return to Truro; she had been taken to Montreal by her pimp, Eric Conrad, who had spotted her freelancing downtown with some of her school friends, and claimed her as “his” girl. Actually, he had accosted her while she was making a phone call, ordering her into his shiny red sports car and informing her sternly that she owned him money for working on a corner he considered his exclusive property. The painfully introverted teenager just sat there silently, unresisting. A perfect situation for Eric, who much preferred the sound of his own voice. This was just the right girl to take on the road: Eric Conrad didn't like to stay in one place longer than a couple of weeks, and the prostitute he was running tended to be a chatterbox, anyway. Before leaving he handed his current girl over to another pimp. He decided to waive the usual leaving fee, not as a favor to the pimp but because he simply wanted to be rid of her. Just as she'd obeyed his command to get in the car, Keri quietly accepted Eric's announcement that they were going to Montreal. Inside, as recorded in the secret pages of her journal, Keri Sherwood was filled with excitement at Eric's descriptions of the places and people they would see, in Montreal and other cities. The budding writer within her thrilled to the opportunity for new material, but the naive adolescent could not know that life-as-work only goes so far; the journey on which Keri was embarking would take her way over the line, into an inexpressible nightmare.

Keri and Eric spent the night at his cousin's apartment in Dartmouth, and by noon the following day, she was on an airplane for the first time in her life. In Montreal, Eric rented a large car—the nicest Keri had ever been in—and checked them into a big, sparkling-clean hotel room. While she sat at a small writing table near the window, gazing out past the parking lot into the hot blue sky, her man phoned room service and ordered lunch. That night, her work began—and it was the beginning of the end of the daydream. The other girls working the Scotian stroll saw quickly that Keri wouldn't offer serious competition; she was young and pretty, but terribly passive, waiting for clients to approach her rather than accost them with the boldness she would need to develop if she was going to make enough money to satisfy her man. “You're not gonna get a date sittin' in Harvey's with your head down,” one of the other girls succinctly put it.

At first, Eric didn't seem perturbed by his new girl's measly take. It was party time—2
A.M.
, and back at the hotel, a few other pimps and their girls were waiting for them. Eric and the other guys shared a few lines of pure coke, ostentatiously using a rolled fifty dollar bill for the purpose. The girls, as usual, were not invited to participate, and had to content themselves with pizza and beer. The routine continued for several nights before Eric began to get suspicious about the amount of money Keri was making; pretty and slim as she was, she ought to have been pulling in double the $400 she was averaging. First he accused her of withholding “his” money, and then he berated her for laziness. How was he supposed to pay for all these goodies if she was dragging her sorry ass around like an old nag put out to pasture? She'd just have to work longer hours. Eric's decision meant Keri had to go to the stroll in the middle of the afternoon. The move did nothing to improve her technique, if anything it made her even more reluctant to hustle. At night she assumed every man coming to the restaurant or the curb was looking for sex. In the daylight there were too many people around and she didn't know who to approach. She resorted to her night time habit of waiting for someone to approach her. After spending ten hours on the stroll, Keri only managed to bring in $600. The infuriated pimp turned on her, whacking her repeatedly in the head, then ordered her to spend the rest of the night on the bathroom floor. A few more nights of this, and Keri began forcing herself to hustle more actively; she hated what she was doing, but fear of Eric triumphed over her reluctance. Besides, the loathing she felt about herself was familiar territory.