Butcher (22 page)

By June 6, 2002, additional heavy machinery, which included two large conveyor belts, had been brought onto Pickton’s farm to aid the numerous investigators, technicians, and crime scene experts who had been working there for the last several months. In addition to the police personnel, more than one hundred archaeology students used the equipment to sift through several layers of dirt. As the dirt was dug up from below ground level, it was placed on the conveyor belts and carried to screens, or sifters, where everything but dirt remained behind for additional examination.

About a month after Mona Wilson’s remains had been discovered inside the slaughterhouse, the crime scene investigators dismantled many of the pigpen’s half-walls that divided the stalls and removed a raised wooden platform, piece by piece. Amid a number of rat’s nests that they had uncovered during the dismantling process, the investigators had also found fourteen hand bones, along with a green toothbrush. Tim Sleigh, who was overseeing much of the search for evidence, noted that one of the hand bones appeared to have knife marks on it, making it possible, even likely, that the hand, and whomever it had belonged to, had been hacked into pieces.

Upon further examination of the hand bones, it was determined that they had come from someone’s left hand. Later, again through DNA matching, investigators determined that the left hand, or, rather, the bones that had once been a part of it, had belonged to Georgina Papin, who, it was believed, had disappeared in March 1999. The cops recalled that it had been Papin that Lynn Ellingsen had purportedly walked in on while Pickton was skinning her as she dangled from a meat hook. Even though they would not know it for quite some time, the hand bones would turn out to be the only evidence they would find showing that Papin had actually been to Pickton’s pig farm.

During the entire crime-scene processing effort, where many things were going on simultaneously, a pathologist eventually examined the skulls that had been sawed in half and determined that Abotsway, Wilson, and Joesbury had died as a result of having been shot in the head. The pathologist also examined the half-skull from Jane Doe found in the Mission area, but there was no evidence of her having been shot. The other half of her skull had never been found, and if such evidence existed, it could very well have been inflicted on the missing half.

A tool mark expert was brought in at one point to examine the skull halves of Abotsway, Wilson, Joesbury, and Jane Doe. To everyone’s astonishment, the expert was able to show that the bisections that had been performed on all four skulls were almost identical, even though one of them had been cut years earlier. Using a plastic skull as a model, the expert was able to show the tool marks and their paths. It was believed that the skulls had been bisected using a reciprocating power saw, a type of handheld saw frequently used in construction and demolition work in which the cutting is accomplished through the reciprocating action of the blade as it moves in and out of the power mechanism. Investigators had earlier found such a saw inside Pickton’s slaughterhouse, but efforts to connect it to the bisected skulls failed. That did not necessarily mean that the saw found inside the slaughterhouse had not been used on the four victims; it only meant that investigators had been unable to conclusively show that the blade attached to it when found was the same blade that had made the cuts on the skulls.

At one point during the excavation process, Fox News reported that investigators had found bits and pieces of human remains inside a wood chipper on the farm, which, Fox said, police believed had been used to turn “the victims’ bodies…into pig feed.”

On August 21, 2002, one of the archaeology students who was working at the site of one of the conveyor belts saw an item of interest pass by in the dirt. When she picked it out of the dirt, the student saw that it was a partial jawbone that held three teeth. She promptly turned it over to one of the crime scene experts, who had it analyzed. When the DNA results came back several days later, the task force revealed that the latest partial jawbone had been that of Marnie Frey, who was last seen in September 1997. A pathologist who examined Brenda Wolfe’s and Marnie Frey’s partial jawbones said that it was possible that both had been bisected in similar fashion to the other victims.

In the same vicinity where Frey’s partial jawbone had been found, students found two additional bones. They were later identified as a rib bone and a heel bone. The finding of those two bones turned out to be an astounding discovery that partially solved the mystery surrounding Tim Sleigh’s Jane Doe—the DNA in both bones matched the DNA of his Jane Doe’s skull. Although they still did not know Jane Doe’s identity, or why half of her skull had been found miles away near the community of Mission, Sleigh at least finally knew that she had been one of Pickton’s victims. He resigned himself to the fact that he would probably never know positively what had happened to the rest of her body, nor did it seem likely that he would ever identify her. Finding one of her rib bones and her heel bone on Pickton’s property did, however, serve to move Pickton’s killing timeline back to at least 1995.

Pickton was eventually charged with the murders of Georgina Papin, Helen Hallmark, Patricia Johnson, Jennifer Furminger, and Marnie Frey. Most of the charges were based on DNA analysis of blood, personal items, bones, teeth, hair—or a combination of the aforementioned—that matched the DNA that had been collected of the missing women, typically through the cooperation of their relatives.

By October 24, 2002, Robert Pickton’s fifty-third birthday, the task force added four more first-degree murder charges to its growing list, bringing the total to date to sixteen. The latest victims for which charges were brought against Pickton were Heather Chinnock, Tanya Holyk, Sherry Irving, and Inga Hall.

Also on that same date, the family of missing Vancouver woman Angela Rebecca Jardine, twenty-seven, who was last seen in November 1998, was notified via e-mail that their daughter’s DNA had been found on Pickton’s pig farm. He was not charged with her murder, however, because the amount of evidence yielding her DNA was considered insufficient to bring forth charges. Jardine’s case was similar in that regard to that of Sarah de Vries, whose DNA had been found several months earlier, but in scarce amounts. E-mail seemed like a terrible, insensitive method to notify a family that their loved one’s DNA had been found on a suspected serial killer’s pig farm, but for whatever reason that is how the notification had been handled.

The following day, October 25, 2002, a seller on eBay had put up a site asking for an opening bid of $9.99 for “Robert Pickton Dirt From His Pig Farm,” posted under “Collectables: Rocks, Fossils, and Minerals.” The seller claimed to be a local resident who had been to Pickton’s farm. eBay.ca pulled the site from its offerings almost immediately before any bids had been made.

The tedious search for evidence at Pickton’s farm continued for a full twenty months, until task force investigators wrapped up the massive excavation process on Tuesday, November 18, 2003. By that time the task force had seized hundreds of thousands of evidentiary items, 235,000 of which they had extracted blood, semen, hair, and other evidence from a methodical, if not mechanical, process of testing each item seized—many items more than once. Of the women that Pickton was charged with murdering, prosecutors were prepared to argue at trial that the evidence linked to those women was found within three hundred or so feet of Pickton’s trailer. During their work on the farm, the police had also found mounds of buried women’s clothing, some of it burned. Some of it had been found on Pickton’s property, and some of it down the road on his brother’s property. Although they had wrapped up the excavation of Pickton’s property, there was still much work to be done.

By the time 2004 rolled around, government estimates of the costs associated with the task force investigation and the excavation of Pickton’s property would likely exceed $70 million, in what had easily become the largest, most expensive serial murder investigation in Canadian history.

Many things occurred throughout 2004 and 2005 as Crown prosecutors worked through their massive case against Robert Pickton, methodically completing each item on their long agenda before they could bring what appeared to be Canada’s worst serial killer to trial. Pickton was moved out of the RCMP’s Surrey facility into the North Fraser Pretrial Center, a high-security remand center, in Port Coquitlam, as he and his attorneys did what they needed to do for the upcoming trial. When all was said and done, it would take months of pretrial hearings in British Columbia Supreme Court in New Westminster, nearly a year in additional legal wrangling, which comprised most of 2006, in which both sides were afforded the opportunity to present arguments on the admissibility of evidence, and yet another year to complete the actual trial.

In preparing their case against Robert Pickton, Crown prosecutor Mike Petrie, along with coprosecutor Derrill Prevett, had put together a string of witnesses and evidence unprecedented in Canadian criminal trial history. Although another dozen first-degree murder charges were leveled against Pickton in May 2005, British Columbia Supreme Court justice James Williams, during the 2006 legal arguments, pared the charges to twenty-six and then divided those charges into two separate trials in the interest of moving things along at a more rapid pace. He also believed that two trials would be less confusing for the juries.

The first trial would be for the murders of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Marnie Frey, Georgina Papin, and Brenda Wolfe. The legal arguments regarding the admissibility of evidence began on January 30, 2006, but they would not get to the voir dire proceedings, in which both sides are afforded the opportunity to examine potential jurors as to their integrity and possible preexisting prejudices before they are seated on a panel, until December. A number of publication bans were put into effect in Canada, resulting in a blackout of nearly all important news related to the case, in the interest that Pickton would receive a fair trial.

As an interesting footnote to an already very bizarre case, Robert Pickton, during that year of legal maneuvers, began a letter-writing relationship with Thomas Loudamy, of Fremont, California, a young man who corresponded with several convicted killers as a hobby. Loudamy, who used “Mya Barnett” as a fictitious name in his letters to Pickton, made two of the letters he received from Pickton public, he said, to help people learn more about a purported serial killer. The two Pickton letters, printed by hand in capital letters and with many spelling and grammatical errors, were dated in February and August 2006.

In one of his letters, he accused the police of lying and paying off witnesses to testify against him, and wrote that
the police got me as the fall guy
and
for that they look good, which is a joke.
He alleged that the police did not want to know the truth about the case but were
only interested in to charge any-one
[sic]
to get the heat off of their back….
He suggested that the police should put up video surveillance cameras if they wanted to put
the right people behind bars
for the crimes he had been accused of committing, and said that
they are the fools.
Pickton also wrote that he was
brought into this world to be hear
[sic]
today to change this world of there
[sic]
evil ways….

Pickton quoted the Bible a number of times, and said that he was not of this world but was
from the past life,
the details of which, he claimed, would be in a book that he planned to write. In one instance he referenced Ephesians 5:5, to which he put his own take on defining the passage:
You can be sure that no immoral, impure or greedy person will in-herit the kingdom of God…. Don’t be fooled by those who try to excuse these sins, for the terrible anger of God comes upon all those who disobey him.
According to the King James Bible, Ephesians 5:5 says:
For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

Pickton’s use of the Ephesians passage raised the question of whether Pickton might have used religion to justify his actions when he was writing to Loudamy, but it also raised an even more chilling possibility of whether he had been on a religious mission by killing prostitutes to help rid the world of “evil ways.” His references to “whoremongers” and “idolaters” certainly seemed to indicate so, but then they could also have simply been the ranting of a lonely man seeking friendship wherever he could find it, since he had undoubtedly accepted the fact that he would likely never walk the face of the earth as a free man again.

Pickton also wrote passages commending Justice James Williams for his decision to reduce the count of murder charges against him and to split the charges into two trials. His words of praise for the judge seemed to have been written more out of his own self-serving wishes as opposed to the judge’s legal justifications for making them.

They had to [sever the charges], they have no choice but to, if not there will be a whole lot of coart
[sic]
time waisted
[sic]
all for nothing in which there will be in need a whole lot of answers to many questions by the police and the R.C.M.P. when this coart case is over by the way of the public of when they find out that I am not in-volved
[sic]
at all. If the coart did not drop all these charges I could be in coart for at least two or more years and it really will be hard to keep a jury to-gether
[sic]
for so long.

He added that if Williams had not made the decision to split the charges, his case could end in a mistrial.

Pickton also took the opportunity to boast about what an important defendant he had become, and told his pen pal that he went to court in a convoy of three vehicles—one in front of him and another behind him—each with two sheriff’s deputies for his protection. He said that there were also typically four additional deputies waiting for his arrival at the courthouse gates.

Time seemed to pass slowly in 2006 for Pickton, his lawyers, and the Crown’s lawyers, but before year’s end each side seemed to know how it would present its case to the jury. Petrie and Prevett, the prosecutors, would focus on the evidence tied to the six women whose murders Pickton was being prosecuted for in the first trial. Among the evidence that they would present were seven items with Sereena Abotsway’s DNA on them, including a shirt and at least one of her inhalers; at least forty items with Mona Wilson’s DNA; approximately eleven items with Andrea Joesbury’s DNA; also three items with Brenda Wolfe’s DNA. The excavation of Pickton’s farm and the searches of all the buildings on it failed to turn up any personal items that had belonged to Georgina Papin or Marnie Frey, but at least five of the aforementioned items were found to have Pickton’s DNA on them, as well as the victims’. The prosecution also planned to present, of course, much of the gruesome evidence found on Pickton’s farm, and would call approximately two hundred witnesses to testify over the course of about twelve months.

Lawyer Peter Ritchie’s defense team, led by attorney Marilyn Sandford and Adrian Brooks, would stress that investigators had been unable to conclusively tie Pickton to the buckets of body parts they had found on his property, nor could they say with certainty that the guns seized from the farm had been used to kill any of the victims. The defense contention was that Pickton had not killed any of the prostitutes that he was charged with murdering, and that he had not participated in any murders with other people. Furthermore, there was little DNA evidence, if any, that linked Pickton directly to any of the victims.

Jury selection finally got under way on Monday, December 11, 2006, and was expected to take at least two weeks to complete. It seemed that a major challenge would be finding people who would not have any difficulty sitting through a trial that would last a year. Another challenge that never seemed to present itself was how the presentation of such gruesome evidence and testimony would be viewed by prospective jurors. However, much to everyone’s surprise, a jury was seated by the end of the following day.

Because the Crown intended to call more than two hundred witnesses, which could take many months to hear their testimony, the defense team requested that it be granted the right to present an early opening statement, right after the Crown had delivered its opening statement. Typically, the Crown would begin calling witnesses immediately after making its opening statement, and the defense would normally wait until the Crown had finished presenting its case before making theirs. Justice Williams ruled in favor of the defense, with no objections being voiced by the Crown, for the unusual procedural change. Williams noted that the court system had the discretion to allow such a change in procedure, and commented that allowing the defense to make its opening statement after the Crown’s would be fair, given the circumstances of what would be a lengthy trial.

“The case…can quite readily be characterized as special or unusual in that it is anticipated that the trial will run in the order of twelve months,” Williams said.

Williams also said that the benefit to the defense in being allowed an early opening statement would be that it would boost the jury’s capacity to understand the evidence “in a meaningful way,” and that it would allow the jury to “relate that evidence to a consideration of the issues.”

Despite the Crown’s willingness to accept the early opening statement by the defense, it asked Williams to impose three conditions on the defense, including that the defense provide an indication of the evidence it intended to present, that an advance copy of its opening statement be provided to the Crown, and that it not be allowed to present a second opening statement later on, after the Crown had rested its case.

Williams rejected the Crown’s three conditions, but imposed an order requiring the defense team to provide the court with a copy of its opening statement for prior approval, in part to ensure that it did not “lapse into argument” at that time.

Satisfied that the preliminary issues had been resolved, Justice Williams sent everyone home until after the holidays. He set January 22, 2007, as the date that the trial would begin, allowing jurors ample time to get their personal affairs in order so that they could settle in for the trial that would last for a year.