Prince George, B.C. – It has been  a decade since  private investigator Ray Michalko  started  his quest to  find  answers  to the murdered and missing women  along  the Highway 16 corridor between Prince George  and Prince Rupert.

He has now chronicled  his efforts in a soon to be released book “Obstruction of Justice – The Search for Truth on  Canada’s Highway of Tears”. The title is rooted in  a situation Michalko found himself in when he was following tips and leads on several of the cases “at one point the RCMP sent me a letter suggesting that if I didn’t stop investigating the Ramona Wilson case and a number of others, I would face an obstruction of justice charge.”

Michalko  says he has passed  along information  he has gathered to the RCMP, but says it’s  difficult  to  do that “I feel that once  I’ve passed information along, I am obligated to forget about it, and I don’t think they  do much with the information I give them, so I prefer to follow it up as far as I can before I pass it along.”

He has been  looking  at the  cases  for more than ten years “I started doing some research in late 2005 but I  actually didn’t  get doing anything on the ground until 2006”.  When he started his search there were  7 cases of murdered  or missing women along the  highway.  In 2007,  the RCMP  would more than double that  number by adding some cases  from  highway 97 ,  highway 5 and  a couple from Northwest Alberta to bring the total to 18 but there are many who live along the  Highway 16 corridor who  believe the actual number could  be more than 30.

Michalko isn’t ready to give away  any of the secrets  in his book , but says it  will “make the public aware of some  things they may not be now aware of,  and I also think this book may  end up getting me more information.”

He  has his own theory about  some of the cases, “” I believe  the majority of them were  a case of  being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I think  there’s  a possibility that two of the murders may have been  committed by the same person, but that’s it.”

He says he continues to  work on  four of the cases, that of  Nicole Hoar, Leah Alishia Germaine, Roxanne Thiara and Alberta Williams  “I keep getting tips, and I think as  long as I  am getting them,  I  am obligated to follow them up. My gut feeling though, is  that unless someone knocks on a police officer’s door and says ‘I did it’,  that these cases are probably never going to get solved.”

While the wheels are in motion  for  a national inquiry into Murdered and Missing women,  Michalko says   he won’t be taking part  “I haven’t got a lawyer,  and  you would need one to take part in something like that.”

After a decade of  following  leads,  is he any further ahead in  knowing who is responsible for the  murdered and missing women along this  stretch of highway? “Knowing and proving are two  different things” says Michalko, ” I would say knowing,  yes, proving, no.”  And while the book has been written,  he isn’t done with  his search for answers “I’ve given up thinking about when I am going to be done with it so, I just don’t think about that anymore.  I continue  to get a lot of calls.”