VANCOUVER — Cindy Dawn Feliks was a pretty blond toddler who overcame abandonment, first by her birth mother and then her father, to become a popular high school student in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood with the usual pastimes of boys and parties.

She ended up as packaged meat in Robert (Willie) Pickton's freezer.

As a young woman, Feliks became a mother who dabbled in drugs and graduated to addiction, supported by petty theft and the sex trade. But she was much-loved and her disappearance in 1997 was grieved by the only mother she knew, stepmother Marilyn Kraft.

The snapshots of Feliks as a demure little girl in school and a mother with her own blond baby on her lap still fill Kraft's Calgary home, standing as the memories Kraft wishes she could cling to, especially after one brutal day when Marilyn screwed up her courage to attend the preliminary inquiry of serial killer Pickton.

In an airless courtroom in Port Coquitlam, B.C., Kraft listened in dawning horror to a police witness testify that her once-beautiful blond daughter had been murdered and turned into six packages of "ground meat."

No one had prepared Kraft for what she heard in court, not even the three victims-services workers from the B.C. Solicitor-General's Ministry who attended court virtually every day but hadn't briefed any of the victims' families.

"When I was at the trial that week, I found out through the DNA expert and the Crown prosecutor how they got my stepdaughter's DNA," Kraft wrote in an outraged letter to then-Vancouver police chief Jamie Graham.

"They found ground meat in one of the freezers, like hamburger, and checked it for DNA and, yep, you got it, it was my stepdaughter, six packages of her. Do I sound bitter? You're damn right I am. Another insult to injury I didn't need, but I listened, and stared and hated Mr. Pickton even more. Talk about being traumatic."

Feliks was only five years old and had just seen her birth mother for the last time when Marilyn Kraft married Feliks' father, Don Feliks, and became an instant mother to four challenging kids: Cindy; Richard, the second-eldest; Terry who was just three years old; and Audrey, the baby.

When Kraft's marriage to the children's father foundered a few years later amid domestic violence and the revelation that Don Feliks had a male lover, Kraft became sole parent to the four kids she considered her own.

"Cindy was a cute little girl and a very high-spirited teenager, but no real trouble until she was 16," recalls Kraft.

Retired from the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Kraft moved to Calgary.

In an interview in her tidy northeast Calgary duplex, Kraft smokes cigarette after cigarette as she recalls Feliks' life.

"When she was 16, she felt she wanted to meet her father, so she went all the way to Florida on her own to meet him where he was living in some trailer park," recalls Kraft. "Some father he was — seeing this pretty blond teenager, he told her that the only way to really get to know him was to have sex with him."