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Karen Jordan's husband charged almost eight years after her disappearance

Last Updated Apr 10, 2021 at 5:11 am MDT

Photo courtesy of RCMP

FORT MCMURRAY (660 News) — On March 19, 2021 57-year-old Paul Tamasi of Prince George British Columbia was arrested in connection with the death of his wife, Karen Marie Jordan.

During their investigations police determined that Jordan was last seen in November of 2013, yet wasn’t reported missing until February of 2016. At the time she was reported missing, her family said they had not seen Jordan since 2011.

In September of 2020, The Alberta RCMP Special Tactical Operations Teams were aided by local search crews in a ground search near Wembley, about 24 kilometres West of Grande Prairie. The search culminated in the recovery of Jordan’s remains, information that was not made available to the public at the time.

The World Health Organization considers intimate partner violence a major global health concern, affecting millions of people around the world. The Canadian Women’s Foundation reports that every six days a Canadian woman is killed by her partner or spouse. The 2019/2020 Family Violence Death Review Committee report from the Government of Alberta found that the majority of family homicides in the province are committed in urban areas, including Edmonton, Calgary, and central Alberta. However, Domestic Violence Prevention expert Kira-Lynn Ferderber says that women in rural communities such as Grande Prairie face a unique set of barriers in escaping domestic abuse.

“It’s likely that you don’t have public transit. It’s likely that you don’t have a lot of privacy if you look to seek resources,” Ferderber says, adding “privacy is almost always an issue for survivors seeking services. But in small communities, in rural communities, it’s much more likely that everyone at the hospital knows your family. If there even is a hospital nearby!”

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Data from the Canadian Government shows that intimate partner violence made up 30 percent of all violent crimes reported to police in 2018. While this number is staggering, experts suggest that about 70 percent of domestic violence goes unreported. The government reports that in 2018 alone, 99,452 Canadians reported experiencing domestic violence. Of those people, 79 percent of them were female. Reports also show that of the 945 intimate partner homicides that happened in Canada between 2008 and 2018, eight in 10 victims were women. Six in 10 of those deaths were preceded by reports of family abuse.

Ferderber says that there is only one way to stop the pandemic of violence against women around the world.

“The end to domestic violence is a huge culture shift,” she says “All male violence against women has to do with entitlement. Men have to stop feeling so entitled to women’s bodies, time, attention, and servitude. The only way that we change that is changing the way that we raise boys.”

Karen Marie Jordan is survived by her mother, two brothers, four children, and seven grandchildren. Her obituary describes her as a woman who loved baseball, dancing, and her animals.

Paul Tamasi is set to appear in Grande Prairie provincial court on unspecified homicide charges on Monday, March 22.