Query about crack led to ‘date’ with accused killer

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/06/2012 (4891 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I met Jane on Monday afternoon at her workplace, a nasty stretch of street just north of the CPR mainline commonly known as the low track.

Earlier that day, the Winnipeg Police Service had announced the arrest of a suspected serial killer and career criminal with a surname that is disarmingly gentle.

Lamb.

Jane — the name she wanted to use — agreed to talk about her reaction to the news, which is how I came to tell you in Tuesday’s column about the tribute stone she’d laid in the nearby Vineyard Church memorial garden that honours so many of Winnipeg’s slain and missing aboriginal women. A place that might have had a plaque for Jane, too, had it not been for the good people at the Vineyard Church who answered her call for help several years ago when she crawled to their door after a “bad date” butchered her belly with a knife.

There’s much more to Jane’s story, though, which I only learned after deadline Monday evening, when my lady of the low track called back. Jane’s voice had an urgent edge. She said she had just seen Shawn Cameron Lamb’s photo on TV, and we needed to talk again.

It was about her run-in with a man she suspects was Lamb.

So it was that late Monday night we ended up at a Main Street bar of her choice, where Jane talked about the man accused of killing three aboriginal women like her. Well, perhaps not exactly like her.

Jane was born a John.

Jane said her encounter happened about three weeks ago in front of the Point Douglas flophouse where she lives, which is in the same neighbourhood where Lamb lived.

“I was all sexified up, going to work,” Jane recalled. “He was just walking by. He said, ‘Do you know where to score some crack?’ “

There was nothing unusual about that, or threatening about him.

Quite the opposite.

“He was very charming.”

As Jane told it, they went to his place to get high, and in Jane’s case, even higher.

It was about an hour-and-a-half later when his charming manner changed.

“Totally changed,” Jane said.

“He was very mean after a while.

“He was getting really, really, really aggressive.”

And forceful.

“He had a grip on my head…”

She remembers them both ending up naked and him paying, partly in crack and partly in cash that he ended up taking back. The sun was just coming up when she got up to leave. Escape might be a better word for it, because she said he ripped her clothes off as she was trying to go.

“I walked home in my panties and bra,” Jane said. “I kind of ran home, actually.”

Which was obvious, because as Jane was reliving that night, it felt more like a post-traumatic debriefing than a newspaper interview. And there was a moment — between the time the pizza arrived and when she wanted another vodka — that Jane asked if we could stop. Although she really couldn’t.

She started talking instead about how her eyes teared up when she watched the television report on Lamb’s arrest.

“I can’t even count on both hands how many friends I’ve lost.”

Then, ever so briefly, she began to count. There was the friend whose remains were found decomposed. The body of a friend that was recovered from the river. And another friend who still hasn’t been found.

“I’ve got a gazillion friends,” Jane said, in another reflective moment. “I don’t know how many are real friends or fake friends.”

Given that sex-trade workers on the streets are supposed to watch out for each other — to help protect one another from those who would harm them — Jane’s doubts about her friends is troubling.

As is her conclusion.

“All I’ve got is myself, which gets lonely sometimes. But for some reason, I manage to get through. Suicide is the last thing on my mind.”

That, Jane suggested, is because of what she remembers her church-going grandparents telling her.

“They told me I’d go to hell,” Jane said. “But then again, I probably am already.”

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca