Project E-PANA

E-Pana began in 2005 with a review of three unsolved 1994 murders along northern B.C.’s Highway 16, but would soon expand its scope.

“We started doing the review but very early into it we recognized that, if we are looking for this serial killer, we’ll have to broaden our scope and have a look at other files,” Hulan said this week.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to say [whether there is a serial killer at play] until we’re at the point where we are satisfied that we have been successful in solving or charging in all 18 of the files, or the majority, or having determined what the circumstances were that led to the murders.”

To zero in on a suspect or suspects police examined 619 unsolved files of violence against women along three highways, including murders and missing person cases, as well as sexual assaults and attempted sex assaults. A half dozen of the cases are in the Hinton area of Alberta, while the majority are from B.C.

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Police reveal details of E-Pana investigation into 18 female unsolved cases in northern B.C.

BY NEAL HALL, VANCOUVER SUN DEC. 12, 2009

Here is the full exclusive Vancouver Sun interview with RCMP Staff-Sgt. Bruce Hulan, the officer in charge of B.C.'s Unsolved Homicide Unit and team commander of Project E-Pana, which is conducting homicide investigations of 18 girls and women who disappeared or were found murdered along major highways in northern B.C.

It is the first extensive media interview by police to explain Project E-Pana, which began in the fall of 2005 when the Unsolved Homicide Unit was tasked with viewing three homicides that the behavioural sciences people, the profilers, had reviewed and found there was some commonalities between the files.

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British Columbia RCMP say there has been a significant development in the ongoing Project E-Pana investigation into 18 girls and women who disappeared or were found murdered along major highways in northern B.C. over the past several decades.

Mounties have scheduled a news conference tomorrow morning in Surrey and will be asking "British Columbians, Canadians and Americans" for assistance in their investigation, according to a news release.

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The announcement is expected to span two days, with initial details revealed Tuesday morning and subsequent announcements by investigators in Prince George and Kamloops detachments the next day.

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Police promise lengthy details into the case — known also as E-PANA — allotting 45 minutes to explain just the background of the missing and murdered women to reporters, prior to the news conference beginning.

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RCMP will announce Tuesday that it has linked a deceased U.S. sex offender to at least one of the 18 cases of women who were murdered or vanished along British Columbia’s northern “highway of tears.”

An American prosecutor has confirmed to The Oregonian newspaper that Canadian authorities have DNA evidence connecting an American inmate, Bobby Jack Fowler, to the death of 16-year-old Colleen MacMillen of 100 Mile House, whose body was found in northern B.C. in 1974.

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Mr. Fowler, who died in custody in 2006, is also emerging as the suspect in the 1995 killing of two teenaged girls in Oregon, District Attorney Rob Bovett told The Oregonian.

Investigators are also re-examining evidence in the killing of two other teenaged Oregonian girls in 1992.

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American Bobby Jack Fowler will be named as a suspect in “a number of homicides that occurred in Canada and the United States over the course of the 1970s and 1990s,” Oregon police said in a release.

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Officers with Project E-PANA, the code name for the investigation, along with provincial Mounties, an official from the United States and a family member of one of the women, will speak at the news conference, which is scheduled for 11:15 a.m. local time.

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The Highway of Tears cases are not the work of a single serial killer, RCMP say.

No arrests or charges have been made in the case yet, but investigators believe they have three to four suspects linked to the cases of 18 women who murdered or missing along northern B.C. roads between 1969 and 2006.

They had 1,413 “persons of interest” in the case and were able to eliminate 90 of them.

During the investigation, which the RCMP estimates is 75-per-cent complete, more than 750 DNA samples have been collected and more than 2,500 people interviewed. It took police two years to sift through 700 boxes of information on the case.

It’s still unclear whether the Oregon inmate who was reported to be implicated in one of the cases is involved in the larger investigation.

RCMP has discovered DNA that ties Bobby Jack Fowler to the 1974 slaying of 16-year-old Colleen MacMillen, said The Oregonian, a Portland newspaper.



Read more: http://www.theprovince.com/Highway+...+killer+RCMP/7297030/story.html#ixzz27VbrJwi8

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RCMP in B.C. are asking the public to help reconstruct the movements of a convicted U.S. murderer suspected of killing at least three women in the B.C. interior during early 1970's.

Police say the DNA of American convict Bobby Jack Fowler was found on the body of Colleen MacMillen, 16, whose body was discovered nearly 40 years ago. MacMillen was last seen alive hitchhiking in 1974 along Highway 97 near Lac La Hache, B.C., south of Prince George, on her way to see friends.

Her death is one of 18 cases in B.C.'s so-called Highway of Tears slayings, a series of cases involving women who were murdered or went missing, mostly while hitchhiking along highways in the province's central Interior as far back as 1969.

Police say they also suspect Fowler may be linked to at least two more of those cases -- the deaths of Gale Weys, who was murdered in 1973 and Pamela Darlington, who was murdered in 1973 -- and as many as 10.

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