Shawn Cameron Lamb, accused serial killer charged with murdering three Winnipeg women

Aboriginal women have once again been prey for an apparent serial killer.

Winnipeg police have charged Shawn Cameron Lamb, a 52-year-old career criminal, with three counts of second-degree murder, CBC News reported.

All three victims, Carolyn Sinclair, 25, Tanya Jane Nepinak, 31, and Lorna Blacksmith, 18, had at one time lived in the First Nations community of Pukatawagan, in northwestern Manitoba, CBC News said.

Sinclair, who police and family members say was pregnant, battling drugs and working as a prostitute, disappeared last December. Her body was found in a Winnipeg dumpster.

Nepinak, who police say knew Lamb, vanished on Sept. 13 when she went out for a pizza. Her body has not been found.

Blacksmith was last seen in January and her body was also found near a dumpster in Winnipeg.

Lamb, originally from Sarnia, Ont., had been arrested just last week on a sexual-assault charge.

"This individual was a person of interest and was on our radar, for sure," McCaskill said.

"Sometimes things like that happen, (they get) caught up in another type of offence and sometimes we get a break in a case, and that's what happened here."

The Canadian Press reported a police source told the Winnipeg Free Press that Lamb came under suspicion after claiming to have found the bodies of Sinclair and Blacksmith.

Court records obtained by CBC News showed Lamb had 109 previous criminal convictions ranging from robbery and forgery to uttering threats and sexual assault, which earned him four years in an prison in Alberta in the 1990s.

Winnipeg Sun columnist Tom Brodbeck said Lamb "is a striking and frustrating example of why the federal government needs to beef up its dangerous offender designation in the Criminal Code."

Lamb's offences escalated in severity over time, Brodbeck said.

"He's a poster boy for a dangerous offender designation. Yet he never got one."

Judges can designate criminals as long-term offenders, requiring strict supervision when they're not in jail, or dangerous offenders who can end up behind bars for the rest of their lives if periodic reviews show they've made no effort to rehabilitate themselves.

But Brodbeck argues Crown prosecutors have little motivation to bring dangerous-offender applications to court because the process is time-consuming and costly.

The law should be changed to put the onus on criminals such as Lamb to prove they're not dangerous enough to get an indefinite prison sentence, Brodbeck contends.

He even advocates a version of the U.S. three-strikes approach; putting repeat violent offenders in prison for good if they breach a certain threshold of offences.

Vulnerable aboriginal women are frequent targets of violence in Canada.

[Related: Vancouver police, RCMP blame each other for failure to catch Pickton]

The most notorious case was serial killer Robert (Willie) Pickton, who lured drug-addicted sex-trade workers from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside to his suburban pig farm, where he killed and dismembered them.

Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder in 2002 but investigators found DNA from 33 women on his Port Coquitlam property and it's thought he killed as many as 49 women, many of them aboriginal.

A recently concluded public inquiry heard evidence police were reluctant to investigate the reported disappearance of drug-addicted aboriginal women who made up the lion's share of Pickton's victims, The Canadian Press reported.

Many women who've disappeared on northern British Columbia's so-called Highway of Tears (Highway 16) were aboriginals thought to have been abducted and murdered while hitch-hiking.

Back in Manitoba, the 1971 abduction and murder of teenager Helen Betty Osborne of Norway House reserve from the streets of The Pas, rocked the province.

Police suspected four young local men were involved with her death but it took until 1987 for just one of them to be convicted of murder. Another was acquitted, a third received immunity in exchange for his testimony and the fourth was never charged.

The case triggered a public inquiry and a formal apology from the Manitoba government in 2000 for the justice system failing this young aboriginal woman.