A young girl stands beside Highway 16 with her arm and thumb raised high. A car or truck pulls over, she hops in for a ride, never to be seen alive again. For more than a decade, young women have disappeared or have been found slain along Highway 16 in northern BC.

Posters bearing their pictures can still be found on hydro poles and laundromat post-it boards. "Missing," they shout in large letters under a photo of a smiling, unpretentious-looking young woman or teenager.

It's tragic. It's horrific. And it's happening along the quiet 720 kilometers between Prince George and Prince Rupert, a stretch now gruesomely dubbed the Highway of Tears.

A disturbing pattern of disappearances was first noticed between 1988 and 1995. Young girls mostly aboriginal in origin and aged 15 to their early twenties vanished after being seen hitchhiking along the highway.

Some consider the murder of Monica Ignas, 15, to be the first. She disappeared just east of Terrace on December 13, 1974 and was later found lying dead and discarded in a gravel pit. In 1988, Alberta Williams, age 24, was also found murdered a month after disappearing. But it wasn't until 1994 that things really began speeding up at an alarming pace.