Butcher (10 page)

Robert Pickton spent the night and half of the next day in jail because of the evening raid on his farm by the RCMP. He was released from custody, however, at 1:30
P.M
., Wednesday, February 6, 2002, after making bail. He went back to the farm and was soon confronted with yet another search warrant being served on him, this time by the Joint Missing Women Task Force. Although Pickton and his brother were allowed to feed some of the animals located in a barn near Dave Pickton’s residence, but were otherwise not permitted to go onto the north end of the property, Robert Pickton seemed to take everything in stride. If he had been bothered by the RCMP news media announcement the next day, February 7, 2002, proclaiming that the task force had made a major break in the case, it did not show at that time. He did not even seem particularly bothered when the police sealed off his farm and set up a mobile command post near the old Dutch barn, which was near his own trailer. According to RCMP staff sergeant Mike Coyle, Pickton was told that he would be arrested for obstruction of justice if he did not comply and stay away from the farm’s north side.

“I can tell you a search is being conducted on that property, and the search is being executed by the ( Joint) Missing Women Task Force,” declared Constable Catherine Galliford, spokesperson for the task force, at a hastily called news conference to inform the public of their break in the case. Galliford also indicated that Pickton was being investigated as a suspect in at least some of the cases of the missing prostitutes. The public was also informed about the earlier firearms search and that Pickton had been charged with three firearms violations, and that he had been released from jail.

An undercover police officer had been placed in the cell where Pickton had been kept overnight, but he had said little—certainly nothing that could have incriminated him in the deaths of any of the missing women. Following his release from jail, the RCMP’s special surveillance unit tapped Pickton’s telephone lines and tracked his movements, to no avail.

It was all big news, the type that the citizens of Vancouver had been waiting to hear for a long time. Many of the missing women’s relatives were accepting the news as progress that was being made in the case, the type that should have been made long before now. While no one who had a missing loved one that was involved in the case was pleased by any of it, many felt a sense of relief now that the case seemed to be moving forward. They, likewise, experienced a sense of anxiousness and dread at what might turn up during the investigation. No one, after all, could possibly fully prepare himself or herself to receive news that a loved one had been murdered.

Although the press had effectively surrounded the Port Coquitlam property, they were not allowed inside the boundaries set up by the task force. No one on the task force, after getting a break of this magnitude, wanted to risk losing or contaminating any potential evidence during their processing of the pig farm, and as such followed the book completely. None of the investigators, at this point, had any idea what they would find, nor did they have a clue how long their search of the farm would take.

The views of Robert Pickton’s farm that were being shown by the press showed a property that appeared to be dilapidated and, like many things in Pickton’s life, was in a state of chaos and disorder. The photos being shown in newspapers and on television depicted trash that had been strewn here and there, and there were many broken-down vehicles of different types, as well as old appliances littering the muddy landscape. A
NO TRESPASSING
sign hung on one of the large metal gates, and another signed warned trespassers that the property was patrolled by a pit bull with AIDS. There was no mention of the purported 600-pound wild boar that ran on the property with the dogs, nor had anyone really hoped to encounter it, if it truly existed. Large groups of curious onlookers gathered outside the farm’s perimeter throughout the day, and police mapped out the farm and took photographs from the air. They also brought two dogs trained in detecting corpses to the farm, and as part of their preparations to work during the evening hours, they set up generators and bright lighting systems to assist them at night.

When asked by the media how the task force would proceed with the search of Pickton’s farm, Inspector Don Adam said: “This isn’t TV. You don’t go to a farm like this and start rushing around as if you’re on some Easter-egg hunt looking for a hot piece of evidence.” No one at that point, not even Adam, envisioned that the search effort would last for twenty months, and ultimately would become the largest crime scene investigation in Canada’s history. It would also become that country’s most expensive criminal investigation.

At one point that day, February 7, searchers found a syringe with a hypodermic needle attached to it hidden in Robert Pickton’s office. Filled with a blue liquid, it had been concealed inside Pickton’s stereo console. That same day, when word began circulating about the unusual discovery, rookie Wells’s informant, Scott Chubb, shed more light on the situation by recalling a conversation that he’d had with Willie Pickton sometime in the summer of 2000. He and Pickton, Chubb said, had been working on the farm, pulling nails from boards, when Chubb asked Pickton why Lynn Ellingsen no longer lived with Pickton inside his trailer.

“He said…that…she was stealing from him and that she was costing him a lot of money,” Chubb told one of the RCMP officers.

Pickton’s inference, it was believed, was that he was being blackmailed for something by Ellingsen, and at one point he had offered Chubb $1,000 to “speak” to her about the money that he claimed she was costing him. Of course, for that kind of money, Chubb understood that Pickton expected something more out of him than having Chubb merely talk to her—Pickton had taken the conversation to the next level by conversing with Chubb about a way that someone might be killed.

“‘If you wanted to get rid of someone,’” Chubb said, paraphrasing Pickton, “‘you could take a syringe of windshield wiper fluid or radiator fluid, and inject that person and kill them.’”

According to Chubb, Pickton had said that a “junkie” has track marks, and a new injection mark would likely go unnoticed because the cops and the medical examiner (ME) would conclude that the person had died from a drug overdose and likely would not look any further for a cause of death. Chubb believed that Pickton had Lynn Ellingsen in mind as a candidate for such an injection at the time the conversation occurred. Chubb said that he did not want to have any part in such a deadly scheme, however, and he denied being involved in killing anyone or disposing of bodies.

Early in the search effort for evidence at Robert Pickton’s farm, the task force brought in RCMP sergeant Tim Sleigh, a crime scene investigation expert, to assist with the overwhelming task that was getting under way. Nearly seven years earlier, Sleigh had been involved in the search for evidence near Mission, British Columbia, where a neatly bisected skull had been found near the Lougheed Highway. Since Sleigh was just getting started with the work at Pickton’s farm, he did not know, yet, that the skull found near Mission would eventually be a Jane Doe added to the task force list of missing women and tied to his current work. Never in his wildest dreams did he know to what extent his knowledge and experience would help in this case, nor did he know that his earlier investigation at Mission would be linked to the present case at Pickton’s farm. Based on chilling discoveries that would be made at the farm, however, he would know soon enough.

After a few days to become familiarized with the farm and the overwhelming task that lay ahead, Sleigh, and many others, helped decide how the property would be searched for evidence. In addition to searching the interiors of all the buildings on the farm, the property was laid out or divided into 216 separate grids, each of which consisted of twenty square meters, and each was staked off and tagged. Each of the grids would eventually be processed in a manner that would include excavating the land until virgin ground or soil was hit. The nearly four hundred thousand cubic meters of soil would be examined by anthropology and archaeology students using soil-extracting machinery and conveyor belts to move the dirt to large sifting screens or devices where they would look for evidence, such as body parts, teeth, bones, bone fragments, hair, or any item that could be linked to a human.

Over the next twenty months, the task force would grow from a staff of thirty employees to 270. Even though they had experts of various types on their own staff, the task force would come to rely on the assistance of many outside experts as well, professionals such as an entomologist, a botanist, several pathologists, anthropologists, a radiologist, an anatomist, and a forensic odontologist. It would become an investigation unlike any that had ever been undertaken in North America.

As investigators canvassed the farm in preparation for the work that lay ahead, they observed sights that many would regard as chilling, such as the meat hook that dangled from a chain attached to the ceiling in the slaughterhouse, with the stainless-steel table next to it, and rotting pig carcasses left on the floor to decompose, creating a stench that was at times nearly unbearable. There were also knives and electric tools strewn about, some of which had either blood or rust on them. When they found cassette tapes by Cat Stevens, The Band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and others, the cops knew that Willie apparently liked to listen to classic rock while he worked. Three chest freezers sat eerily in an adjacent pigpen area of the slaughterhouse, as if beckoning the investigators to look inside, challenging them to find the mother lode.

As much as Robert “Willie” Pickton was perceived by those who knew him as being loving and caring toward his barnyard animals, crime scene investigators made some horrific discoveries during the early days of the search. One pig’s litter had died, and a pit bull dog was ravaging the dead piglets. Vancouver police constable Daryl Hetherington, who had been on the force for twenty-six years, found a group of pigs lying together trying to stay warm. One of them had a foot that was decaying, and none of them had any food or water. Hetherington brought food for them from her home, and gave them water. Many of the pigs ended up being destroyed, and the ones that were healthy enough to survive were removed and taken to another location, where they would be given proper care.

Although the crime scene investigators wore protective suits, gloves, and footwear in an effort to prevent evidence from becoming contaminated by their presence, they did not wear masks or breathing gear at first—not until some of the searchers began getting sick and health department employees came in and recommended that masks be worn.

As the police converged on Robert “Willie” Pickton’s farm, working into the night and returning day after day for nearly two years, the plans that Willie made in the early 1990s, and began talking about to those who would listen of someday building a dream house with six bedrooms, a spiral staircase, and high-vaulted ceilings—his escape from life on the farm—disappeared, right along with the veil of mystery of what had happened to many of Vancouver’s missing women. Although the police and the public did not know it yet, Willie had turned his vision of building a dream house into that of a charnel house, right there on the farm from which he had hoped to someday escape.

Robert Pickton has been described as “a man about farm.” Neither suave nor debonair, he was in actuality a filthy little man who could not give a hoot about personal hygiene. Although certainly not a sociable type, Willie was once characterized by a neighbor as a “good-natured little bastard” who rarely spoke, unless spoken to first. The “little old pig farmer,” as he sometimes referred to himself, walked somewhat hunched over, with his head slightly bent downward, and his oily, stringy hair, which had become sparse on top, served to accentuate his angular, bony face, rendering him quite unattractive. Willie clearly lost out when the gods handed out handsomeness and intelligence. Although he often did not get the punch line whenever someone told him a joke, and had difficulty keeping himself attuned when having conversations with workers on the farm, no one could definitively characterize him as being of lower intelligence. While his IQ of 86 did not make him the smartest tool in the shed, his level of intelligence was considerably higher than that of someone who was considered mentally retarded. His IQ was higher than 18.6 percent of the people his age that had been tested. While he was clearly lacking in the intelligence department, there was never any question that he knew right from wrong.

As task force officers and those who assisted them continued erecting fences around Robert Pickton’s farm and put up a tent next to their mobile command post, relatives of many of the missing women began stopping by the farm. Even though they were not allowed behind the police barriers, many of them just wanted to see for themselves that something was finally being done regarding the missing women. It had taken a long time for the police to get to this point, and seeing was believing for many of those who had been skeptical of the police for so many years.

By February 8, 2002, several people also began voicing their thoughts about the investigation. Among them was Wayne Leng, a man who ran a missing-women Web site and started a grassroots effort to find prostitute Sarah de Vries. He spoke out about a man who called him in 1998 after he had set up a hotline for callers to provide tips about the missing women. The man, whom Leng identified as “Bill,” had called in and said that Sarah was dead. Based on the information delivered by Leng, it seemed that Bill was most likely Bill Hiscox.

“This man, who couldn’t give me any more identity than Bill, told me a prostitute he knew had been taken to a big pig farm at Port Coquitlam, where she had been badly assaulted,” Leng told the Canadian media. “What’s more, the prostitute had told Bill she had seen numerous items of women’s clothing and pieces of women’s identification all over the place…. We were all concerned because it didn’t seem anybody wanted to take this guy seriously. We never heard whether they actually did searches of Willie’s place or whatever…but we knew he had lots of land and he was fairly well-off, it seems.”

Leng said that he had received other tips as well, and the tipsters had mentioned a pig farmer named Willie. Leng said that he had reported all of the information that he had received to the Vancouver police, but he never heard back from them and was left wondering why they did not follow up on the leads he had provided.

Leng said that posters that he had placed around the city of Sarah deVries had instigated a series of unsettling calls to his pager, which was the type that recorded short twenty-second messages. In one of the messages, a man’s voice said: “Drop the case. Stop looking. Get off the case.” In another, the same man said: “Sarah’s dead.”

“He said that he was with a man who killed her,” Leng said. “And another time he said he killed her…. He also said, ‘There’s going to be a prostitute killed every Friday night.’”

These messages, like the ones from Bill Hiscox, had been reported years ago to the police. Because the messages had come from a pager, they were untraceable and little could be done with such scant information.

Leng said that the current search was overpowering him with feelings of both “dread and hope,” and that although he wanted to know what had happened to deVries, he was fearful that he would learn that she died horribly.

“What are they going to find?” Leng asked. “How did these women die? Was it horrible? It probably was….It’s so hard when you don’t know.”

Although Willie had not shown much emotion or reaction at first about what was taking place at his farm, the next day, February 9, 2002, his lawyer, Peter Ritchie, announced that Willie was “shocked” and “flabbergasted” that he was being looked at as a person of interest by the Joint Missing Women Task Force. Ritchie, who represented Pickton in the case involving the stabbing of Wendy Eistetter, represented all three of the Pickton siblings in their varied business interests. He spoke on behalf of all of them.

“I’ve spoken to the sister and two brothers,” Ritchie said. “They spoke to me yesterday…. The family is shocked by this and is trying to assist police.”

Ritchie said that the family was ready and willing to offer the police the use of their farm equipment to assist them in their search. They were concerned, he said, about “underground digging, because there are wires and gas lines and various soils stored in a certain way.”

Three days later, on Tuesday, February 12, 2002, Pickton family friend Gina Houston, thirty-four, a drug user and cancer patient, came out and spoke to the media on behalf of the family, according to information published on Crimezzz.net. Houston characterized Willie as a “nice, caring man” who enjoyed helping single mothers. She said that he would not hurt a soul, and that he had befriended many prostitutes because “he kind of feels sorry for them.” She said that he was known to give them money to help them out.

Houston said that Willie would often give a prostitute $20 or more to purchase things like cigarettes, tampons, condoms, knowing that they would take the money and use it to buy drugs. The ones that he liked, she said, he would rather give them a few dollars if it kept them from working to support their drug addictions. According to Houston, the police had decided to focus on Willie Pickton regarding the missing women because of a drug addict who was known for making false accusations against the pig farmer.

“She’s got a great personality, but as soon as she gets a little heroin or a little coke, and she can’t get no more drugs, she goes right off,” Houston said.

Houston described how she had been taken to the serious crimes unit because of accusations the woman had made. Describing the woman as a crackhead, Houston said that if Willie did not give the woman money for drugs, she would purportedly call up the police and tell them that Willie was slaughtering hookers and burying them on the farm.

“This chick watched him slaughter a few pigs, and she went and phoned, and she described in detail how he slaughters and skins them and cuts them,” Houston said. “So she phones the police up and tells them that she watched him and I doing that there one night, and it was just a pig. She said it was one of the missing hookers from the Downtown Eastside.”

Houston also mentioned the 1997 Wendy Eistetter incident involving Robert Pickton, indicating that Pickton had stabbed the woman in self-defense. In her opinion, Pickton had gotten a raw deal, even though prosecutors had dropped the charges against him.

“They dropped the charges against him,” she said, “because all of the stab wounds on him were in the back. He defended himself and ended up stabbing her.”

Also by February 12, 2002, the task force, without saying why, had expanded its scope to include the rendering plant near the Downtown Eastside, where they had learned that Pickton had taken pig remains for disposal for more than two decades. Also without saying why, the task force asked relatives of some of the missing women to provide DNA samples.

“There are forensic experts, major crime investigators, family consultation experts, and a variety of other subject experts adding their own knowledge to this case,” Detective Scott Driemel said. “Investigations of this magnitude are a complex and often shadowy web of interconnected issues and bits of information. As we discover yet another link in the web, it can change the nature of what we already know. Hopefully, we will soon see the full picture.”

According to Driemel, the task force has been inundated with telephone calls since installing a special phone line for tips. More than four hundred calls were logged during the first few days of the phone line going live, which made it impossible for the police to provide immediate responses.

“The joint task force has assigned three dedicated staff to review the tips, index them according to subject matter and other details, and pass the information on to investigators,” Driemel added in a media message directed at the public. “They are asking the public to be patient. Every call is taken seriously…but it would be fair to not expect a call back right away. Please, if you do call and leave a tip, let it go for a little while before calling again, because we’re getting the lines plugged by repeat callers.”

Driemel said that some of the tips had provided significant information, and task force investigators had updated some family members of the missing women.

“Some family members have told us that they would rather not hear every specific detail about what’s going on,” he said. “Others feel some knowledge about our search may help their grieving process.”

At one point a psychologist, Richard Dopson, who had counseled a number of underage prostitutes who worked the Downtown Eastside came out and publicly talked about the investigation and the families of missing women who had been visiting the farm, watching the work that was going on from a distance. He said that family members were being drawn to the site in the hope that some form of closure was close at hand. Many relatives of the missing women had made a memorial of sorts outside the fence, placing flowers and photographs of loved ones on makeshift shelves in front of yellow police crime-scene tape.

“Here’s a place that they can go to, feel sad, talk it out, and tell their stories,” Dopson said. “There’s never been a place for them to do that…. They’re exposing themselves now…. If it turns out all for naught, this could be devastating.”

Even though the cops were keeping their cards facedown, it did not take a rocket scientist to figure out the direction in which they were moving.