Butcher (3 page)

She was diagnosed early in her childhood with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and was placed on medication for it at one point. She was smoking marijuana by the time she was thirteen, and was getting into trouble at school. Her mother made her a ward of the court system in an apparent act of desperation to try and get help for her daughter. Andrea was sent to a residential facility for children in another town. After barely two months in the facility, Andrea ran away and stayed with relatives for several months.

Although relatives described Andrea as an intelligent and loving teenager, she seemed to possess little ability to channel her impulses, often harboring feelings that would lead to uncontrollable outbursts, which only added to the growing number of problems she already had. As time went on, her feelings of worthlessness, irrelevance, and despair became worse. Even though she was always welcome to come home, and had the support of her family, she always had difficulty complying with the household’s rules, according to her mother.

“You don’t get into drugs,” her mother would say. “You go back to school or you get a job.”

Her family didn’t know where she was staying much of the time, but she would occasionally show up unannounced with a boyfriend that few mothers and fathers would approve of for their daughter. During such visits she typically asked for money or a temporary place to stay, and family members usually complied. But things often went missing from the homes where she stayed, and family members noticed that Andrea would sell items that they had purchased for her as gifts so that she could obtain money for drugs.

“I asked her on occasion if that’s what she wanted for herself, and she seemed to think that she would never end up there,” addicted and on the streets, that is, said a relative. “But that’s exactly where she ended up.”

Shortly before she disappeared, Andrea’s mother had reason to believe that her daughter wanted to make another attempt at getting clean and off the streets.

“She was coming home,” said her mother. “All her clothes were sent home on the bus. I have all of her clothes. And then I didn’t hear from her.”

Andrea did eventually get off the streets—and into a car that took her on a trip of unimaginable terror and horror—never to return.

Robert William Pickton was born on October 24, 1949, and raised on a small thirteen-acre farm in an area of New Westminster, British Columbia, where little besides nature existed. His father, Leonard, was born in London, England, in 1896, and immigrated to Canada in the early 1900s. Young Leonard eventually settled in southern British Columbia, where his father, William Pickton, purchased a parcel of land next to Essondale Mental Hospital—named after its founder, Dr. Esson Young—in 1905. William raised hogs with the help of a few hired hands, and later with the help of his son, Leonard. It wasn’t a massive operation by anyone’s standards—far from it. By the time it became Leonard Pickton’s pig farm, after it had grown somewhat from its meager beginnings, the farm had anywhere from 150 to 200 swine on hand at any given time. It was enough to supply family and friends with enough meat to eat, and plenty left over to slaughter for meat sales to the public and a sufficient number to sell off at livestock auctions. There were a few milk cows on the farm as well by the time Leonard took over, perhaps eighteen to twenty, which family members, including Robert, when he became old enough, milked by hand. Since the farm was primarily a pig farm and not a dairy farm, the luxury of automatic milking machines was not feasible from either a practical sense or from a financial one during those early years. Although poor, Leonard Pickton always found a way to make ends meet and provided as many of life’s necessities as possible for his family. Although life on the farm was often harsh, Leonard and his wife, Louise, always made sure that they had food on the table and a roof over their family’s heads. Louise baked bread regularly, not out of fondness for baking but out of necessity. And they always ate pork—lots of it. Pork became one of Robert’s favorite foods.

Louise typically made clothes for the children, and Robert, who grew up being called “Willie,” frequently wore secondhand clothes. Willie never had the opportunity to wear new clothes until he was four or five years old. It was around Christmastime one year that Louise, having either earned or saved some extra money, went into town and bought Willie a new outfit for the holidays. She dressed him up in a nice shirt and pants, but the garments had been heavily starched and the newness of the clothes irritated his skin to the point of being painful. As a result, he took off all his clothes and hid in one of his secret hiding places on the farm. That was one of the few times that Willie had received store-bought, brand-new clothes as a child. He grew up wearing denim coveralls and knee-high gum boots.

Being the typical male of the period, and a late starter at fatherhood, Leonard left the duties of raising the children—Linda, Robert, and David, born in that order—to Louise. Linda, born two years before Robert, didn’t spend much time on the farm. She was fond of referring to Willie as “mama’s boy,” which Willie didn’t much appreciate. Together with their brother, Dave, who was born two years after Robert, the Pickton children played regularly on the nearby grounds of the adjacent psychiatric hospital. An institution for the criminally insane, the edifice was called Colony Farm by the locals—so named after the government installed a farm there to supply food to the hospital.

By the time Linda had reached her early teenage years, she left home to live with relatives in Vancouver, where she also attended high school. Her brothers were left behind on the farm, where their mother barked out orders and handed out chores for the two boys to perform. Linda later went on to become successful in real estate, and mothered two children in a marriage that ultimately ended in failure. Nonetheless, she managed to all but leave the farm life behind and resided in an affluent area of Vancouver, away from it all, until their parents died. At that point she became involved in divvying up the estate, but she still had as little to do as possible with the farm operations.

Three generations of Picktons raised swine at the same Port Coquitlam location until the early 1960s, when the government forced the sale of their property, with payment for the land provided at the going rate so that the Lougheed Highway, also known as Highway 7, could be built. The forced sale necessitated the move to the new location on Dominion Road. The new land consisted of forty acres, much of it swampy, and a dilapidated, near-broken-down two-story farmhouse with unprepossessing white stucco siding. Robert “Willie” Pickton and his brother, David, spent their teenage years, right on up through adulthood, at this homestead. An old-style Dutch barn was eventually built on the site, along with a slaughterhouse and, later, a silver elongated structure built out of corrugated steel that had formerly been used as a plant nursery. Situated on approximately eleven acres—it had not been a part of the original Pickton farm—the building would eventually be purchased by the three siblings and become known as Piggy’s Palace.

Neither of the boys did particularly well in school, especially Willie, and they had frequent scraps with other children, who made fun of them for the way they dressed, their hygiene, and the fact that they frequently carried with them the odor of pig shit. Both Willie and Dave often skipped school so that they could stay at home to help out on the farm. This way, their parents could avoid hiring some of the mental patients from the hospital, those deemed safe and not a threat to themselves or others. If the two brothers stayed home, their parents could also save money, leaving little motivation for either parent to enforce good school attendance. Willie nearly always welcomed the opportunity to stay at home because of his aversion toward going to school. Dave spent a lot of time during his later teenage years thinking about a business that he could run, and he eventually started a gravel and demolition enterprise, which would eventually become somewhat successful. Willie would sometimes help him out with it—when he wasn’t busy slaughtering hogs and butchering women.

By then, Leonard and Louise had already passed on—Leonard died on New Year’s Day, 1978, and Louise died the following year, on April Fools’ Day, 1979. Leonard had left Louise an estate that was worth nearly $150,000, most of it in the form of real estate that the pig farm and its buildings were situated on. Although the pig farm had been valued at nearly twice that amount, Leonard had shared the ownership with his wife. He also left her three smaller parcels of land, one in Coquitlam and two others in northeastern British Columbia, with a combined value of slightly more than $42,000. Louise was also listed as beneficiary of two small insurance policies on Leonard’s life, which totaled less than $5,000. While it wasn’t a great deal of money, he at least hadn’t left her penniless. With only a year and three months left of her own earthly existence, it wouldn’t have mattered much anyway.

When Louise died, she left behind an estate comprised of what Leonard had left her and her own share of the pig farm, which totaled slightly more than $287,000. While Linda and Dave received their share of the estate almost immediately upon their mother’s death, Louise had placed a provision in her will that required Willie’s share to be held in a trust until he reached the age of forty—nearly ten years. The will’s provision directed that the trust be managed by Linda and Dave during that time, with interest to be paid to Willie on his share at regular intervals. It was naturally a very sore point between Willie and his siblings, one that he greatly resented and argued about frequently with them. Nonetheless, there was nothing that he could do—except wait—about what he felt was his mother’s treachery toward him. He never considered, even for an instant, that his mother may have been looking out for him, perhaps hoping that Willie might be more responsible with his life by the time he turned forty.

By early in the new millennium, after three parcels of land on and around the pig farm had mushroomed in value, and had been sold off through Linda’s keen business sense and negotiations at Dave’s urging, the area was promptly developed with condominium and apartment complexes, a park, a school, and a strip mall that even housed a Starbucks. It soon got to the point where it was difficult to tell which seemed more out of place—the new condominium development, the park, the school, or the pig farm, all only a stone’s throw away from one another. Nonetheless, the area grew up fast. A subdivision named Heritage Meadows went up on Elbow Place, a street located north of the farm, and Carnoustie Golf Club was situated along the east perimeter of the farm. After the parcels had been sold off, only approximately sixteen acres of the original farm remained. The acreage was dotted with out-buildings that were little more than sheds, the original farmhouse, Willie’s trailer and a slaughterhouse along the north perimeter, the Dutch barn, and Piggy’s Palace—purchased in the mid 1990s by the siblings—was nearly a mile to the east of the farm on Burns Road. The area had literally grown up around what was left of the pig farm.

Since Linda, Willie, and Dave were all co-owners of Piggy’s Palace, the three put their heads together and decided to set up a corporation. This had occurred in 1996, and they called the corporation the Good Times Society, and its nonprofit status was established to raise funding for worthwhile causes. After a kitchen and a bar had been installed on the premises, large parties, some accommodating as many as 1,700 to 1,800 people, were held there with liquor flowing and drugs being consumed while roasted pork, cooked outside on large spits, was served to the guests. Many of the attendees reportedly were Hells Angels and other bikers. Interestingly, the local Hells Angels clubhouse was located across the street from the main entrance to the Picktons’ farm on Dominion Avenue, adjacent to a Home Depot parking lot.

The parties at the Good Times Society were numerous, and some events actually raised money for local charities and played host to local businesspeople and politicians. The police had been well aware of the parties, and some of the larger ones had been busted by the cops. For safety reasons local fire officials had ordered Willie and Dave to cease having parties at Piggy’s Palace, but the two brothers basically ignored the injunction and held parties anyway. It wasn’t until the Picktons failed to file financial statements for the Good Times Society that the local government of Port Coquitlam, in 2000, was able to have the society’s nonprofit status revoked and the corporation subsequently dissolved, thus permanently putting an end to the large parties at Piggy’s Palace. The officials, of course, had no idea of what else had been occurring on the farm under Willie’s design.

It was only a matter of time, of course, before each of the three Pickton siblings went their own ways. Linda, with her real estate career, had left the farm a long time ago; Dave, with his gravel and demolition business, remained; and Robert, whom nearly everyone referred to as “Willie,” just as they had when he was a kid, stayed at home on the farm and did as little as possible. He spent much of his time walking around in the mud and the pig manure, wearing his “trademark” knee-high gum boots, which he used during the slaughtering operations. When he wasn’t slaughtering pigs and generally loafing around, he tried to sell the junked cars that he had accumulated on the property, many of them purchased for scrap, and the vehicles that he had obtained from police department auctions, to anyone who would buy them or their parts. Most of those who knew him described him as a simple man, peculiarly quiet, who liked to sit around much of the time. He rarely spoke, unless spoken to. Depending on who was doing the talking, Willie was described as either a generous man with a big heart, or just downright creepy.

For example, a former truck driver who was engaged to be married to Heather Chinnock, one of the women on Vancouver’s list of missing women, said that Heather, a known prostitute, had visited Pickton at his farm, on and off, for at least ten years, from 1991 until 2001. The truck driver’s characterization of Willie didn’t become publicly known, unfortunately, until after Willie was apprehended.

“Willie was quiet,” said the truck driver. “He didn’t like me, but he liked Heather. Heather went out there to party.”

He said that there was always an abundance of drugs and alcohol at Pickton’s place.

“She told me in so many words that she was there as a prostitute,” the trucker said. “Heather loved animals and Willie was always promising her a job working on his farm.”

But Heather, he said, had expressed her fear of Pickton, and that she often had nightmares after she came home from the farm.

“But then he’d call, and she’d be right back out there again.”

According to the truck driver and others who knew him, Robert Pickton had become acquainted with Heather—and familiar with the area of Low Track, not to mention many of the other girls working there—when he made trips to a rendering plant, West Coast Reduction. The plant was located near the area where the working girls conducted business, and Pickton dropped off pig carcasses and associated waste materials, such as hog entrails, brains, nerve tissue, bones, and so forth, from his pig-farming operation. The carcasses and other waste material—and anything else that Willie may have conveniently thrown in for disposal—would eventually be turned into cosmetic products, such as soap, shampoo, perfume, lipstick, and other household items. Pickton had been coming to the rendering plant for the past twenty years or so, and many times after dropping off his load, he would cruise Low Track, which began roughly ten blocks away, looking for hookers. Pickton liked to hang out at the seediest of the seedy hotels in the Hastings and Main area, particularly the Roosevelt Hotel and the Astoria Hotel. As would eventually be seen by the Vancouver police, as well as by the RCMP, Willie had become quite well-known in the area and had girls out to his trailer on the farm on a somewhat regular basis. Some he picked up, and others called him and came out on their own, after having had previous encounters with him at the farm. Interestingly, it took what seemed an unreasonably long time for many of the girls to realize that many of their associates were not returning after meeting up with Willie.

By the time of the Good Times Society’s demise, Dave had become a self-described entrepreneur who worked in his reasonably successful excavation and demolition business and at a landfill he also owned. Credited with being the brains of the family, according to some people who knew him and his sister’s known business savvy, Dave pretty much left Willie to his own nocturnal and often unnatural activities. Unlike Willie, Dave had worked hard for most of his life, and Linda herself at least once declared that he was the mastermind behind subdividing the farm but left the business details of the sales to her. Divorced and the father of two grown children, it wasn’t unusual for Dave to work eighteen-hour days, and then, in his off time, to party like there was no tomorrow. Dave liked bikers, and it was well-known that he liked to hang out with them. Some said that despite the shared ownership of the Good Times Society, he claimed that Piggy’s Palace was actually his idea. It was known throughout the area that he had been proud of his “after-hours” club, where he had hosted so many large parties.