SEE Magazine
Issue #380: March 15, 2001
Copyright © 2001. All Rights Reserved

News BY ANDREW HANON Chances are you’ve never heard of John Martin Crawford. In an era when the likes of Karla Homolka, Paul Bernardo and Clifford Olsen enjoy a perverse sort of celebrity status, it’s puzzling that a serial killer with Crawford’s impressive body count will live out his days in obscurity. Crawford is presently serving time in Saskatchewan Penitentiary in Prince Albert for savagely raping, torturing and murdering three women. In the early 1980s, when he was just 19, he was convicted of manslaughter for an equally barbarous killing. Police are presently questioning him in three other murders, hoping to clear them off the books. All of these killings took place in Saskatchewan and Alberta, most in the last decade. Chances are you had no idea one of the most cold-blooded, ruthless murderers in Canadian history was committing atrocities in your own back yard. Author Warren Goulding thinks he knows why. He also has a theory about why so many of the people who are aware of Crawford’s legacy of terror seem ambivalent. All of his victims are aboriginal women. Goulding was a reporter at the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix when Crawford’s story began to unfold. When police discovered several decomposed bodies in a clearing near the edge of town, he thought they were on the brink of one of the biggest stories ever to hit the placid prairie city. But when it was discovered the victims were all aboriginal and female, enthusiasm quickly cooled. "I was quite excited," Goulding told SEE Magazine. "But even in the newsroom there were a lot of people who didn’t think it was that big a deal." In 1996, the Star-Phoenix did manage to give Crawford’s trial extensive coverage, which can’t be said for any other media outlets. The story was virtually ignored by the national media, save for a few articles in Maclean’s magazine and a half-hearted effort by a Globe and Mail reporter based in Winnipeg. Interestingly, at the same time another horrible crime, this one involving a beautiful white woman, was unfolding in B.C. The entire country was transfixed by images of Melissa Carpenter and nightly updates on the desperate search for her when she vanished. After her body was discovered several weeks later, it seemed all of Canada held its breath during the search for her killer. Goulding sees a chilling dichotomy between the indifference to Crawford’s multiple native victims and the collective grief and outrage over a single white victim. "It sounds horrible, and I don’t want to minimize what happened to Melissa or what her family went through, but why does the national consciousness kick into high gear when this happens to a white person and not when the victims are native women?" Justine English, sister of Mary Jane Serloin, Crawford’s first victim, gave the most blunt assessment: "It seems that any time a native is murdered, it isn’t a major case. It’s just another dead Indian." * * * In Canada, some lives are worth more than others. That’s the premise of Goulding’s book, Just Another Indian – A Serial Killer and Canada’s Indifference, published by Fifth House and due on book-store shelves next month. On the surface, it’s a true-crime story of a low-life predator and his victimization of the bottom strata in Canada’s social pecking order – aboriginal prostitutes. But beneath the prurient detail lies a stinging indictment of greater Canadian society, police and the mainstream media. In the book, Goulding claims that at least 450 aboriginal women have vanished in Western Canada and no one’s looking for them. "It’s a huge number. Nobody really knows how many are out there," he said. Goulding said he knows of cases in which aboriginal families, desperate to find their missing daughter or sister, approach the media and police for help, but are virtually ignored. They’re forced to generate their own publicity and conduct their own searches, which usually is limited to stapling hundreds of posters to telephone poles. The problem, he explained, is that the media and authorities automatically dismiss the missing girls as runaways and the adults as drug addicts working the streets to feed their habits. The underlying inference, of course, is that these women bear some of the blame for what’s happened to them. If they choose to live on the streets, they must be prepared to accept some of the risks. If they don’t like it, they can go back to the reserve. "There’s the suggestion these women deserve their fate because of the nature of their lifestyle." * * * While Crawford’s acts fit him into the textbook definition of a serial killer – random murders, each followed by a "cooling off" period – he doesn’t come close to fitting the media image. A lumbering, monosyllabic brute, there’s no comparing him with a charmer like Ted Bundy or a Hollywood-handsome Paul Bernardo. Unlike Clifford Olsen, he shuns publicity. Goulding tried repeatedly to interview him for the book, but all requests were refused. Goulding is careful not to paint Crawford as a criminal mastermind or as someone systematically targeting a specific ethnic group. "He wasn’t a racist in the conventional sense. It just happened to be that the most vulnerable women around were aboriginal." What marked Crawford’s acts was his sheer, ruthless callousness and randomness. When he killed a woman, it was with no more regard than if he were swatting a mosquito. A loner and petty criminal, his only pleasures in life were television and illicit sex with street prostitutes. For most of the early 1990s Crawford could be found every night cruising Saskatoon’s stroll in his mother’s car. Some of the regulars remember servicing Crawford dozens of times without incident. Others claim he stiffed them on payment, while there are several allegations that he raped women after coercing them into the car. Goulding learned that the reason Crawford always picked up aboriginal women was because he knew it was highly unlikely they would be undercover police officers. Once he tried to pick up a white woman and received a $250 fine. "Ninety-nine per cent of the time things went according to plan," Goulding told SEE. "But every now and then one would do something that would enrage him, and boom, they were dead. That was it. He thought nothing of killing them." Goulding doesn’t consider himself a crusader for aboriginal rights and readily admits that his book doesn’t begin to address the crushing social inequity of Canada’s present apartheid-like system, which is largely responsible for the high numbers of aboriginal women in the sex trade. But he does hope that in some small measure it helps change public perception toward aboriginals. Just Another Indian’s dedication, to Crawford’s known victims – Shelley Napope, Calinda Waterhen, Eva Taysup and Mary Jane Serloin – says it all. The book, he says, "is a tribute to the families they left behind. May they come to know that many Canadians share their sadness. I hope that this book will honour the aboriginal peoples of Canada and shed light on the plight of the victims of a justice system that is anything but fair."

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