The shoes just seemed to call out to Lynn Chasse.

She was walking down the aisle at Shoe Warehouse late last week, accompanied by daughter Kourtney and sister Kim Johnston, when she saw them.

Three-inch heels, that bluey red colour that is so difficult to describe accurately.

A sheer lacy black scallop and black vinyl bow adorn the eight-and-a-halves.

Chasse and Johnston knew right away these were shoes their mother, Dorothee McLaughlin, would have chosen for herself if she had been there with them.

“We looked at each other and went, ‘Oh, this is mom.

“She would have worn those red shoes’,” Chasse said.

Instead, McLaughlin’s name will be added to the pair of heels and they will sit — empty — on the steps of city hall tomorrow, along with hundreds more shoes, each bearing a woman’s name.

Hers is a name recorded on a list with 726 others, a database women like Chasse and Johnston wish didn’t exist —  a list that goes on and on of women in British Columbia who are known to have died as a result of violence.

It’s a list that would be even longer if those unidentified deaths due to violence — suicides by abused wives, substance-abuse related deaths of women who lived with violence — could be tallied.

Living with the grief of her mother’s murder in 2000 was hard enough, but knowing she needed to do something about that pain was greater, Chasse said.

She found some solace by helping organize a shoe memorial tomorrow on the steps of city hall as sombre visual reminder that, in 2008, women are still being killed by others.

It’s her way of participating in the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, created after Marc Lepine murdered 14 female engineering students at École Polytechnique in Montreal on Dec. 6, 1989.

Chasse hopes the memorial will help with awareness of violence against women.

“You hear about it, you read about it, but this will give you that feeling that a woman once filled shoes like those and now she’s gone,” Chasse said.

Along with Mary Pasacreta and supported by social agencies in Kamloops, including the Kamloops Women’s Resource Group Society, Chasse has collected more than 200 shoes that will become the memorial at noon tomorrow.

They drew their inspiration from a similar annual shoe-based presentation in Vancouver that will be also be on display tomorrow at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Volunteers will start adding the names early in the morning and putting together the display, which will remain at Kamloops City Hall until 2 p.m. Once it’s taken down, the shoes will be donated to agencies that work with women in Kamloops.