Author and former police officer talks to class

An honors seminar class conducted a webcam discussion with Canadian author Lori Shenher April 4.

The students of Professor Teresa Bean’s HON 470: Investigating Serial Killers class interviewed Shenher via Skype about his book “That Lonely Section of Hell.” All the students read the book and wrote reviews beforehand.

In “That Lonely Section of Hell: The Botched Investigation of a Serial Killer Who Almost Got Away,” Shenher recounts his career-changing investigation of the serial killer Robert “Willie” Pickton who was charged with killing 26 female sex workers in Vancouver, British Columbia. Blending the structures of true crime novel and memoir, Shenher shares with readers intimate details of working with the Vancouver Police Department and how the case affected him and gave him Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

Today, Shenher has a “lot more emotional distance from it,” he said. “I’m excited about the amount of speaking about it now.”

The students had the opportunity to ask Shenher about what he was thinking during specific sections of the book, how he chose what to include and why he wrote it in the first place.

Shenher said he wanted discussions around the book to be helpful. “You don’t know what you don’t know before going through one of these things,” he said. There is no way to prepare for that kind of work, he explained.

He chose policing because he wanted to help people, but then found out “the system was not built for that,” Shenher said. There are many problems in police systems that citizens are not aware of, he said.

He discovered the discrimination of sex workers is more subtle than of others, such as racial or gender discrimination. Many of Pickton’s victims were Indigenous, and assumptions of the victims got in the way of the investigation, according to Shenher.

Shenher wanted what happened to be known, which is why he is so detailed in his writing. The Vancouver PD “messed up” and could have caught him much sooner and saved more lives, he said.

Before joining the police Shenher was a journalist, so he saw the investigation more from a journalistic perspective while writing “That Lonely Section of Hell”, he said. “Every story that you have personal knowledge about…will be wrong in the media”, Shenher advised the class.