Butcher (4 page)

“We had eighteen hundred people at one of my parties,” he once boasted. “And my parties were cleaner than any goddamn bar downtown.”

Dave, often appearing grimy with grease and dirt, has also had his share of trouble with the law. In October 1967, when he was sixteen years old, and right after getting his driver’s license, he was involved in a fatal accident in which he hit a neighbor boy who was walking along Dominion Avenue, according to Canadian investigative journalist Stevie Cameron. The boy was fourteen, and Dave had been driving his father’s pickup truck when the accident occurred. Although details of the incident were sketchy, in part due to the fact that juvenile court files are sealed, the boy was found the next day in a slough following a search by neighbors, as well as the police. He had multiple injuries, but drowning had been the official cause of death, according to Cameron’s account of the incident. Even though the boy’s death had been ruled accidental, evidence surfaced that called into question whether Dave had left the scene of the accident—he had asked a mechanic to make repairs to the damage done to his father’s pickup. When all was said and done, however, Dave was ordered not to drive for two years by a juvenile court.

In July 1992, Dave had another scrape with the law. He was convicted for sexually assaulting a female construction worker a year earlier at a site that he had been hired to excavate. He purportedly had cornered her inside a construction site trailer and told her that he was going to rape her, but he backed off when another construction worker showed up. After being found guilty, he was fined $1,000, placed on probation for thirty days, and was ordered not to have any further contact with the victim.

According to the victim, bikers would show up at her home prior to Dave’s trial, and they would make subtle threats, as well as some that were not so subtle, which prompted her to move to another town. On one of the biker visits to her home, she was purportedly told that she would be encased in cement somewhere if she testified against Dave. She took their threats seriously, and feared that she would be harmed or killed if she remained in the area.

“You could smell him before you saw him,”
the victim told local reporters.
The Province,
among other newspapers, printed her story.
“He had no respect for women at all.”

Other women who knew Dave Pickton concurred with the sexual assault victim’s assessment of him. He was described as being vulgar and bad-mannered when in the company of women, and he often used foul language when he was with women.

There are always two sides to every story, however, and many of the neighbors of the Pickton brothers had nothing but praise for the two brothers, as well as for their parties. One woman said that she had taken her ninety-year-old father to social gatherings at Piggy’s Palace, and she described them as “excellent parties where local people used to go.”

“Dave and Willie have been pretty good guys…a little rough around the edges,” said another neighbor. “I’ve known them for quite a few years and I’ve watched them do a lot of nice things for people….”

As the Pickton siblings sold off the various parcels of their land, the locale in which the pig farm was situated became known as the Dominion Triangle and was touted as “Coquitlam’s newest commercial area,” as indeed it had become. On one side of the street were the townhomes that had quickly shot up, and in the same vicinity, but on the opposite side of the road, a new mall was installed that included Costco, Save-On-Foods, and other outlets. East of the mall there still existed a number of small farms where cornfields produced the fruit of the farmer’s labor, and some where horses roamed within the confines of their fences, with much of the rest little more than marshy grassland. While the area sprang up around the Pickton farm, Robert and Dave went about their separate businesses and continued to party heartily, whenever they could.

People, however, would later say that Willie never took drugs and did not drink, despite his fondness for the parties held by him and his brother. Women—sex trade workers, as they had come to be known—from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside also continued to disappear.

By Willie’s own account, in a tape-recorded “letter” to a woman known as Victoria, made on December 28, 1991, speaking rapidly and in nasal intonations that sounded somewhat similar to the late actor Wally Cox, Willie talked about the hardships of growing up on the pig farm. In speech that was sometimes erratic, Willie told a story that took him back to early childhood, when he was about three years old. In a voice that sounded neither threatening nor menacing, and which was laced with occasional chuckling, Willie seemed completely harmless as he joyfully recalled an incident that occurred while he was playing inside the cab of his father’s old GM Maple Leaf truck and pigs were being loaded into the back. Jumping, bouncing around, and playing with the steering wheel, as any three-year-old would, Willie somehow shifted the truck into neutral, causing it to roll forward and down a hill. Frightened pigs began squealing and jumping from the back of the truck as Willie’s father, Leonard, frantically chased the truck, pigs in tow, to try and stop it before any major damage was done. Despite Leonard’s best efforts, however, the truck didn’t come to a stop until it smashed into a telephone pole. The accident totaled the old truck, and Willie got “the hell” beaten out of him for the incident. But that was the way of life on the farm, he indicated, where punishment was doled out when it was due. In recalling the incident, it did not appear that Willie held any ill will toward his father for the beating, but he had simply accepted it as punishment that was deserved.

In recalling another incident, which occurred several years later, when he was about eleven or twelve, Willie’s retelling of the story for Victoria’s benefit seemed almost poignant at times. Willie had gone to a livestock auction and had purchased a calf, which he described as “beautiful,” with a “little black-and-white face,” that was barely three weeks old. He had paid $35 for it. Willie really loved the calf, and in his young mind, he had planned to keep it for the rest of his life. He looked after the calf each day, and fed it like he was supposed to do, rarely letting it out of his sight. But he had other chores to do, such as feeding the chickens and taking care of the pigs, and he couldn’t keep the calf with him every waking minute, even though he would have liked to if it had been possible.

One day, approximately three weeks after he had purchased the calf, Willie went down to the barn to feed his new prized possession, but it wasn’t there. He looked around the barn for it, and at first thought that perhaps it had somehow gotten out. The door, however, had been closed and locked, so he reasoned that it couldn’t have gotten out on its own. After spending a few minutes looking for his calf outside, he walked over to the area that he called “the piggery,” which was really nothing more than a slaughterhouse, where the pigs were butchered. He thought that the calf might have wandered over there. When he went inside, he got one of the first major shocks of his life. His calf was there, all right, hanging upside down, slaughtered, just like one of the pigs.

“They butchered my calf on me,” Willie recalled.

He was furious, and couldn’t believe that such a thing had happened to him. He refused to speak to anyone for several days, and “locked everybody out of my own mind…. Oh boy, was I mad.”

His dad eventually paid him $40 for the calf, which was good money in those days, but it did little to placate him for what had happened to the calf that he had planned to keep for a long, long time. He was told that he could take the money and buy another calf, but Willie wanted no part of that—the calf was to have been with him for life. It was then that he realized that life held little, if any, permanence.

“We’re only here for so long, and that’s it,” he said in the tape-recorded message to Victoria. “When your time is over, your time is over.”

Although Willie couldn’t remember the precise time frame, he recalled that his mother and father had met at the Aristocratic Restaurant, a “hamburger place, where they make hamburgers and breakfast, and this and that.” They were married a short time later, in the early 1940s, he thought. In addition to the hard life that he described to Victoria, Willie told her how he and Dave frequently skipped school by “playing hooky,” particularly how Dave would pretend to go to school but would return home and hide beneath his bed until school was dismissed for the day at 3:00
P.M
.

During his youth Willie’s mother had always pushed him to learn more about butchering farm animals, and wanted him to learn by watching their family friend, Bob Korac, during the slaughtering process.

“‘Go see Bob, see how he’s doing,’” Korac would later recall Louise as having said as she urged Willie to take lessons from Korac. “‘Because maybe you need it, like tomorrow, you know.’”

According to Korac, however, Willie just didn’t seem to have much interest in slaughtering the farm animals, and would rather go fishing. He loved the farm animals, and talked more about feeding and nurturing them, as opposed to killing them. When he was away from the farm for any length of time, his first concern upon his return was always to feed the animals. When in another mood, however, Willie could go on seemingly endlessly about how he hated being stuck on the farm, and sometimes complained that it was the farm that had kept him from having dating opportunities with women. He explained to Victoria that he had hoped that “we’d be out of here long before this, but it’s holding me all back.” The truth of the matter was, after his parents died, Willie could have left the farm, permanently, any time that he so desired—but he always chose to stay.

Willie claimed that he never wanted to learn things by following in someone else’s footsteps. Instead, he wanted to learn things on his own, through trial and error and learning from his own mistakes—including the butcher trade. Perhaps Willie held such strong feelings about learning things on his own because he had been dominated for much of his life by his mother and by his brother, Dave, and had become tired of doing the things that Dave told him to do. Perhaps he held such determination because he was shy, and often awkward when it came to socializing with others and felt that if he did things on his own—even if it turned out to be a mistake—he would build his self-confidence.

Perhaps the only time that Willie had become involved in a relationship with a woman that had the potential for any permanence was on a trip to the United States, where he had traveled to the Midwest, including Illinois and Michigan, in the mid-1970s. The woman, Connie Anderson, had been from Michigan, and although Willie claimed that he had fallen in love with her and that they had become engaged to be married, the relationship fell apart because she refused to move back to the farm in Port Coquitlam with him.

When Willie made the trip to the United States, he traveled by plane from Canada to Kansas City, Missouri. Much of the remainder of his six-week trip to the United States was spent riding the bus, from Kansas City to St. Louis, and on to Chicago.

“I was on a bus there, and I think I was the only guy that was on the bus,” Willie said. “The rest was all girls. Holy geez, I was only twenty-four years old at the time…. I said, ‘What’s happening? Where’s all the guys?’ They said they’re all in the army, uh, I was supposed to go to the army, too. The only thing is, my mother says, ‘No. We gotta keep the…farm.’ I gotta stay on the farm.”

Not being very good with dates, Willie told Victoria that he thought that the year that he had made the trip to the United States had been 1974. However, he was reasonably certain that the month had been February. Cherry pies were being given away at many of the stores he had visited.

“Something about…somebody chopping a cherry tree down,” he said. “They were giving all these cherry pies away…every store I went into. ‘Here, take this with you.’ ‘What’s this here, another pie? Holy geez, how come they’re giving so many pies away?’ And he said that this was on the house…something about somebody…I forgot who it was…somebody chopped a cherry tree down and it was…his birthday or something, or whatever. I can’t quite remember.”

Willie hadn’t cared much for Chicago, and had told Victoria that it could be pretty rough and that caution was needed when going out at night. From Chicago, however, he had gone to Michigan, where he had met Connie. He claimed that he had met a lot of nice people along the way, and had even been offered a job as a model.

“Once I had a chance for me, believe it or not,” Willie said. “Me, I’m just a plain old farm boy….They want me for a model.”

Willie said that he had explained that he was there on holiday, but he had become somewhat interested when he was offered $40 per hour and new clothes. He ultimately turned down the opportunity, however, because he said that he was on vacation and was there to learn more about what the United States was like. He also claimed that he had turned down the modeling job because he was unsure about what he might be getting himself into. In the end he returned to life on the farm and continued complaining about the long hours and the hard life that farm living entailed. He said that he would have liked to have started over, and at times he had wanted to sell his part of the farm. His goal, if he’d had his way, was to build a dream house, “with a nice high ceiling,” and a swimming pool.

“I am going to start a whole new life, in a whole new place, start everything over,” he said. “You’ll never own a piece of land, the land owns you. This land has been here for many years before you’ve been here, and the land will be here many years after you’re gone.”

Willie talked about his work and the various jobs that he had held over the years, including that of a house framer and builder, truck driver, body shop repairman, and at recapping tires. He claimed that he had always wanted to work in a sawmill, but when positions opened up at the one where he wanted to work, he was always already employed somewhere else.

In addition to talking about some of the hardships and mishaps that he had experienced over the years on the farm, including how he had been “mauled by bulls” and “torn apart by wild boars,” he spoke of having been on his own for a long time since the deaths of his parents. “Wanting out” of life on the farm and starting a new life seemed to be a common theme of Willie’s desires. He mentioned the death of his father in passing, or so it seemed, by saying that Leonard had died of old age, at seventy-seven. He had much more to say about his mother’s death from cancer, as if it had affected him more profoundly than his father’s.

“Hard to believe,” he said of his mother’s death. “She was up and going, and going, and going…. You never keep her down…. Even almost…right to the end, we had to put her on a stretcher when she left here. She said, ‘I want to have a look at this place one last time.’ So we sat her up…. She had a look at the place…allover the place, and said, ‘I will never see this place again.’ And she’s right, she never did…come back.”

He said that she spent about two months in the hospital before succumbing to the cancer.

“That’s life,” he said. “I mean, life comes and life goes. You’re here today, you’re gone tomorrow.”

Willie seemed intent on talking about life’s experiences, particularly the deaths of friends and how new ones always came along after the old ones had died, but he seemed especially concerned about the dwindling numbers in his own family. As he was growing up, he said, he thought there had been eleven or so relatives on his father’s side of the family still living in Canada, but at the time that he had made the tape for Victoria, he thought that perhaps only four relatives still existed, presumably including himself and his siblings.

“Accidents happen,” he said. “All our family been logging all of our lives…. My dad’s brother got killed on a bicycle on the last day of work from the mill…. He was retiring…and he was on his way back home, just—just—just retired,” he stuttered. “He never drove, he always rode his bike.”

In retrospect, Willie’s discourse on death and dying, particularly his position about people being here one day and gone the next, gives one cause to wonder whether such an attitude had somehow overlapped into his reasoning, or perhaps justification, for all of the killings for which he would ultimately be so well-known. Perhaps such reasoning in Willie’s mind had also played a part in relieving any of his guilt feelings—if he’d had any—over the atrocities that would be attributed to him.

Throughout much of Willie’s tape-recorded letter, he rambled vocally about one subject and then another, with little transitioning between them. Though it seemed that he had mentioned nearly every aspect of his life, including butchering meat for neighbors to providing
lechon
for the area Filipinos to barbecue, he never mentioned going to the Downtown Eastside to pick up prostitutes to bring back with him to the farm. Perhaps he had not mentioned it because he had not yet begun the routine in 1991 of cavorting with hookers, or if he had already started his bizarre behavior, he apparently possessed enough judgment or foresight that it might not be prudent to mention it anywhere.

At one point Willie explained how he had put in long hours as a meat cutter, going to school two days a week and working the other five days as a butcher in a position away from the farm. He claimed that he had worked as a meat cutter for six and a half years, and complained that if he had only stayed with it for another six months, he could have satisfied Canada’s requirement of attaining the equivalent of a journeyman meat cutter and could have held a butcher’s job anywhere in the country. However, he had thrown it “all out the door at six and a half years.” His dream of starting over had apparently failed him again. Fed up with cutting meat, Willie decided to return to the farm to look after the pigs, cows, and horses once again, where he would eventually put some of his meat-cutting experience to use in a macabre and ghoulish sort of way—butchering women—instead of “starting over.”