Butcher (26 page)

In many ways Robert Pickton’s and Dayton Leroy Rogers’s murderous desires were very similar—except Pickton, when all was said and done, had made Rogers’s actions look like child’s play.

Most serial killers never take responsibility for their actions, and often use manipulation and outright lies in an attempt to shift responsibility for their crimes away from them—even after being caught and convicted. Like Rogers, David Berkowitz, the notorious “Son of Sam” serial killer who terrorized New York in the mid-1970s, exhibited many of the forgoing behavior patterns. While Rogers has steadfastly refused to speak publicly firsthand about his crimes, Berkowitz has openly discussed his case, even if only to attempt to shift responsibility for his crimes away from himself. Like Rogers, Berkowitz lived in denial of his crimes, at least partly so. Despite his guilty plea in 1977, Berkowitz once stated on
Inside Edition
that he did not act alone in the shootings that killed six people, a statement that appeared to conflict with the evidence. “I did not pull the trigger at every single (murder),” he said. Instead, he contended that he was part of an organized satanic cult.

Henry Lee Lucas was another serial murderer who could not be believed. While he confessed to having committed many, many murders, he later recanted most of his confessions and later told Dr. Steven Egger that he had never killed anyone. He told Egger that he had made the confessions because he wanted to make those in law enforcement “look bad.”

The list of serial killers and their traits could, of course, go on and on. But it should be noted that perhaps one of the most important traits of such a murderer concerns that of the killer’s motive. Serial killers do not typically commit murder for material or monetary gain, but go through the process sketched in this author’s note almost solely for the desirability of the power and control it allows him or her to have over their victims. This is, perhaps, generally speaking, one of the primary reasons that a serial killer typically chooses victims from the lower walks of life, people such as prostitutes, the homeless, the elderly, and so forth, because they are perceived by the killer as lacking power and are less likely to be missed than, say, people who have reached a higher rung on life’s ladder.

Robert Pickton appeared to have chosen his victims for that very reason—the disappearances of prostitutes and drug addicts would not quickly attract attention, nor would such disappearances, as it turned out, quickly attract the attention of law enforcement. Pickton chose his victims from Vancouver’s Low Track area because he knew that it would take some time for the police to take an interest or otherwise catch on to what was occurring. Like most such killers, Pickton was cold and calculating, and over time became addicted to the power and control he realized that he could have over others.

Many serial killers often commit their crimes over large geographic areas, traveling from place to place through numerous law enforcement jurisdictions, thus making it more difficult for the police to connect a murder that occurred in, say, Pennsylvania with a murder that occurred in Mississippi. They investigate their respective crimes without ever being able to connect the dots, often resulting in a murder that remains on the books as unsolved. Robert Pickton, however, like Dayton Leroy Rogers, committed his crimes in a very limited geographic area (his pig farm), but nonetheless he managed to get away with the murders for an unusually long time before getting caught. In both the Pickton and Rogers cases, the killers chose victims that would not be quickly missed, except by friends and loved ones, and victims that could not easily be connected to them.

The wilderness of the Pacific Northwest makes a near-perfect backdrop for a serial killer to dispose of his victims’ bodies with confidence that they won’t easily be found, and perhaps that is one of the reasons that that region of the country has produced so many of these killers. Dayton Leroy Rogers liked to cluster dump his victims in the Molalla Forest; Ted Bundy scattered them here and there, before moving on to other parts of the country; and Gary Leon Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer, liked to dump his victims in varied outdoor settings, often forests. Somewhat surprisingly, Robert Pickton picked up his victims in the same area of Vancouver, and murdered them
and
disposed of their remains in the same location—his pig farm.

Early on in the Pickton investigation, the police appeared to have initially ignored the concerns voiced by the victims’ loved ones, some say for as long as twenty years, likely because of their particular lifestyle. At first, when the police finally began to see that an erratic pattern was emerging, they were simply baffled—in part (and in fairness to the police) because they had no corpses, no crime scenes, and no suspect to investigate. Because of the initial lack of clues, the police hadn’t even
believed
that any crimes had been committed, a necessary first step to launch an investigation. By the time the massive case finally broke in February 2002, homicide investigators with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police suddenly realized that they were dealing with one of the worst serial murder cases in modern history.

By the time the police had formed a task force to try and catch the serial killer whose acts and numbers had already exceeded many of his Pacific Northwest predecessors, thirty-one women had vanished. By the time Pickton was stopped, it is believed that he was responsible for the disappearances and subsequent deaths of forty-nine women, and, by his own admission to an undercover cop, he had been planning on an even fifty, had he not become careless.

Robert Pickton has taken his place in the darkest annals of serial killer history, and he has arguably become perhaps one of the worst serial killers that the world has ever seen.