On Monday, the Chronicle Herald carried an In Memoriam advertisement for Kimber Leane Lucas, a young woman who died on November 23, 1994 at the age of 25. The notice featured a photograph of a strikingly attractive, smiling young woman above a message that read, in part: “You will never be forgotten. Forever loved and missed, Mom, Charles and Ryan.”
Kimber Lucas was murdered. She was seven months pregnant at the time of her death. Her case is one of 48 murders in Halifax that currently remain unsolved.
Kimber came from a good home, loved sports, did well in school and, at one point, considered a career as a fashion model. But somewhere along the road, she became addicted to crack cocaine, and that led her into prostitution and petty crime. Before she was murdered, she had talked about getting off the streets.
The question today is whether one of the reasons Kimber Lucas’s case remains unsolved 15 years later is because she was a prostitute, a woman who, in the parlance, was “known to police.”
Last week, I did a story for The Coast on Halifax’s unusually high number of unsolved homicides. As part of my research, I spoke with Chris McNeil, the deputy chief of the Halifax Regional Police.
Essentially, McNeil argues there will always be unsolved homicides and these can usually be “categorized…many of them deal with individuals involved with the criminal subculture.”
In fairness to McNeil, his point was that such cases are harder to solve because potential witnesses won’t talk to police. But the reality is that there also does seem to be a double standard.
We hear a lot about investigations involving victims the police refer to as “pure victims”—people like 19-year-old Jason McCullough, a straight-arrow kid who shoveled snow for the elderly, and was killed in the summer of 1999 simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or Kimberly McAndrew, a 19-year-old RCMP officer’s daughter who punched off work as a Canadian Tire clerk one afternoon in August 1989 and disappeared forever—but very little about what the police are doing to solve cases like Kimber’s.
When was the last time investigators dusted off her file and began asking questions? When was the last time anyone talked with Kimber’s family about the progress of their investigation? When was the last time police made a public appeal for assistance in the case?
The fact is—as this week’s Herald In Memoriam makes clear—Kimber Lucas was someone’s daughter. And her family still misses her.
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax and co-founder of its MFA in Creative Nonfiction Program, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of two novels and eight non-fiction books. Buy his books 
kimber lucas was my mothers best friend and im named after her
Thanks for bringing attention to this important discrepancy in how the police follow-up with investigations depending on who the victim is perceived to be, which still happens all to often in the case of women, especially if they have connections to sex work.
On that note I was disappointed to see your use of the term “prostitute,” which in these kind of public discussions can contribute to the stigmatization and dehumanization of people who are sex workers, and has strong connotations of moral judgment. I hope you’ll consider using “sex worker” in the future when telling these important stories.
Thanks.