Butcher (5 page)

In street lingo used by some of the sex trade workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Robert Pickton was known as a bad date. That’s how the prostitutes typically refer to a john who has gained a reputation of violence for a history of committing acts of cruelty, brutality, and bloodshed against them. It appeared that some of the women knew quite well what went on at Willie’s farm, either through firsthand experience or through word of mouth from hookers who had managed to either escape or were let go before Willie reached his killing frenzy. At least one hooker would claim that the women she worked with knew him and had some knowledge about acts of violence that had occurred at Pickton’s farm, but the details, naturally, were sketchy at best—as would be expected considering the lifestyles of Vancouver’s streetwalkers. Some of the women, in their drunken and/or drugged stupors, likely numbed themselves with the alcohol and the heroin, hoping that they could forget about whatever it was that they knew. Others likely were afraid to talk about the goings-on out on Dominion Avenue. The girls who knew nothing about Willie Pickton were the ones who were in the most danger.

“When his car came around, they knew he was a bad date,” said one of the women who obviously knew about Willie’s unnatural desires.

Nonetheless, such knowledge never stopped many of the drug-addicted prostitutes from getting into Pickton’s car, or truck, as the case may have been, on the days he visited the nearby rendering plant. Willie was free with his money and was known by the women for his generosity. An employee at a Downtown Eastside hotel said that Willie liked to talk to everyone.

“All the girls used to go after him because they knew that he would give them money,” the hotel employee said. “They would run after him outside. It was sad, but they were very short of money down there.”

There was his appearance to consider as a factor as well. An employee at West Coast Reduction, a rendering plant located a short distance from downtown and Low Track, where Willie always took animal parts for disposal, offered an opinion that Willie may have balanced his unkempt and dirty appearance by drawing street women close to him with the promise of money.

“He was such a dirty guy,” employee Robert Bayers said. “He was just gross-looking actually. I kind of felt sorry for him…. Here he is, rolling these old barrels off the back of the truck, and he has got his bare hands. I mean, we work in the rendering industry, and it’s, uh, you know, it’s dead animals. It’s not a very pretty thing to be working with, with your bare hands.”

Regardless of
why
Willie was generous with his money, many of the women had come to know that they could get cash and drugs from Willie if they got into his car.

One such woman was twenty-four-year-old Sherry Leigh Irving, an attractive young woman whose life on the streets hadn’t caught up with her yet. She and her parents had lived in Comox on Vancouver Island, and her father recalled how he and his family had lost her in 1991. He had been in the military then, and had been transferred to Ontario in eastern Canada. Sherry, nineteen years old at that time, had agreed that she would move there with them. They waited for her on moving day, but Sherry never showed up.

“I couldn’t force her to come with me,” her father said. “That’s when I lost contact with my daughter. She was at the age when I couldn’t force her to come with me. Right up until the day we moved and left here, she was coming to Ontario with us.”

Sherry’s father said that she took off after apparently changing her mind about making the move. She simply had decided that she didn’t want to accompany her parents, and her father, being in the military, was unable to stay behind and begin looking for her. It was at that time, her family believed, that she began the downward spiral into a life of drugs and prostitution.

Sherry’s family described her as an innocent adolescent who loved to attend family functions, camping, and outings sponsored by their church. By the time she had reached her late teens, however, Sherry had begun to associate with a rough, streetwise crowd. That was when the drug use began as well, and in time she began running away from home. Her father believed that she gave in to the influence of her so-called friends.

“It’s the peer pressure,” he said. “And you’ve got some kids who are very streetwise, and when you have young innocent adolescents who are new to that scene, they are very easily led. With the drug scene and everything else, there are adults who thrive off that.”

At one point Sherry’s family, with about eight other families in the Comox area, formed a support group that functioned as a vehicle, in part, to help keep track of their daughters, particularly those who had run away from home. Her father said that the group had been able to keep track of their daughters as long as they remained in the local area, but that it had become impossible by the time they left and moved away.

Another of Sherry’s relatives described her as a decent person who seemed to struggle with her emotions during her teenage years, despite the fact that the family seemed close and enjoyed doing things together. It was her struggle with her emotions, the relative believed, that had led to her association with the wrong crowd.

“Generally, she was more of a happy person,” the relative said. “A sort of a go-getter kind of person. She was into track and field. She had tons of friends. She was very popular. There were ups and downs all the time, but I think it was pretty normal…. She was the type of person who would phone her family all the time.”

Then, all of a sudden, she just stopped calling.

Her family had always remained hopeful that Sherry would return to them. Her father hoped that she would enter a drug treatment program, straighten herself out, and perhaps return to school. At one point her father returned to British Columbia in an attempt to persuade her to begin a rehabilitation program, and had made arrangements for her to do so, but she just couldn’t make that crucial first step.

“At the very end she was into hard drugs,” her father said. “I was trying to help her out…. She’d just disappear on us.”

In 1996, Sherry was convicted in the Vancouver suburbs of New Westminster and Burnaby of offenses related to prostitution, one of which was never resolved because she had disappeared. As a result, the charges were eventually thrown out.

One of Sherry’s friends described her as a fun-loving, outgoing teenager with a beautiful smile. The friend expressed shock when she saw her mug shot years later.

“That mug shot of a tired-looking young woman, who had obviously had a hard time, completely shocked me because that was Sherry…my friend from long ago…who had a smile that would melt many…. Once vibrant and beautiful. Still beautiful.”

“She was a very pleasant girl,” her father said. “She was a very easygoing kind of child. Very pleasant to be with, to be around, always trying to help. It was just as she got a little bit older, she got in with the wrong crowd, and things that used to matter to her didn’t matter so much. She just wanted to go her own way.”

According to the police, Sherry was last seen in April 1997.

She was followed by the disappearance of Janet Henry, last seen in June 1997; Ruby Hardy, last seen in July 1997; Cindy Beck, last seen in September 1997.

It is interesting to note that one of the major differences between the case of Vancouver’s missing women and that of the Seattle area’s case of the Green River Killer was the fact that the bodies of the Green River Killer’s victims had eventually begun to turn up. The people, particularly the women, in the communities where the Green River Killer’s victims were being discovered were naturally frightened and demanded explanations and actions from the police. Gary Ridgway seemed to revel in the fear he was creating due to the bodies that he was leaving in the often remote outdoor areas, just waiting to be found. In essence, Ridgway had forced the hand of Washington’s law enforcement community—which many people had perceived as indifferent, at first due to the fact that the victims were prostitutes and drug addicts—by leaving his victims’ bodies outdoors, in the open, where he knew they would eventually be found. As time went on, many in the law enforcement community felt that he was mocking them, showing them that he could kill and remain undetected.

Conversely, it seemed certain that the police in Vancouver would have taken an interest in the missing women sooner if bodies had begun showing up there. Although the communities in Vancouver would become frightened, even horrified, later on, at the outset the fear had been contained mostly within the prostitution community and that of the families of the missing women. When all was said and done, everyone would realize that the situation in Vancouver was horrifying beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. To put it bluntly, Robert Pickton’s vile acts of inhumanity made Gary Ridgway look like a demented Boy Scout.

Pickton, however, wasn’t necessarily perceived as the monster that he was—at least not until he had worked himself into a killing frenzy on a particular day or night. Instead, people sometimes characterized Willie Pickton as a farmer who had become frustrated with his life; others viewed him as a backward simpleton who had not completed school; few people viewed him as the vicious killer that the government portrayed him as later, when the elements of the case began to come together. Those who got to see Willie’s violent, dark side rarely lived to talk about their experience.

Gina Houston, a woman in her mid-thirties when the case eventually broke and a close friend of Willie’s, would later tell the authorities that Willie had once told her that he loved her. Houston, a former neighbor of Willie’s, characterized him as gentle, kind, considerate, polite, and soft-spoken. Two of her children frequently referred to Willie as “Dad,” and Houston was known as one of Willie’s most unwavering allies.

According to the Vancouver Police Department (VPD), Marnie Lee Ann Frey was last seen in August 1997, although her photograph on the Joint Missing Women Task Force poster indicated that she disappeared in September 1997. Born on August 30, 1973, in Campbell River, British Columbia, a fishing village along the coast, Marnie was twenty-four at the time she went missing. Police say that she was reported missing on September 4, 1997.

As described by her father, Rick Frey, a commercial fisherman, Marnie was a generous young woman and had been so throughout much of her life. Often, when she came home, she would be missing articles of her clothing, items such as shoes, or perhaps a coat, and when her parents would ask her about the missing clothing, she would laughingly tell them that she loaned whatever was missing to a friend because her friend had needed it. Sometimes she would trade articles of her clothing with her friends for older, tattered garments. She was always concerned about helping out others who were in need, making it difficult for her parents to become angry at her for her efforts to help others who were less fortunate.

“She’d give the shirt off her back to anybody,” said her stepmother, Lynn Frey, who had loved her as if she had been her own.

According to her family, Marnie attended a Christian school as a youth, but she went to a public high school in Campbell River. She loved animals as a child and on into adulthood, and she often took care of the chickens and rabbits that her family raised. She liked the outdoors, and she could be found outside in nearly any kind of weather. She particularly liked to play in or near the chicken coop, and she was known to build forts, where she would play with her cat, Tabi, and friends from the neighborhood. Sometimes her stepmother would find her reading a book, and Marnie would tell her that life was sometimes just very difficult to handle. When she was younger, she seemed easily inspired, and sometimes the simplest things, such as going hunting with her father, made her the happiest.

When she was eighteen, Marnie gave birth to a baby girl, and although she cared deeply for the child, she had difficulty raising the girl, in part because she had become involved with an Asian gang in Campbell River that had initiated her into the world of drugs. She eventually moved on to the streets of Vancouver, leaving her baby girl behind with her parents to raise. Despite being on the streets of the city, working as a prostitute to support her drug habit, where she went by the moniker of “KitKat”—just like the candy bar, her stepmother’s favorite—she called home regularly, sometimes several times a day, just to check in to see how everyone was doing, especially her daughter.

The last time that her stepmother ever heard from her was on Marnie’s twenty-fourth birthday, when she called home to ask for money. Instead of promising her money, her stepmother told her that she had a box of clothing, candy, cookies, homemade bread, and other items that she promised to send her. She asked Marnie to call her when she received the package, and Marnie promised that she would. However, the telephone call never came.

By the time that Marnie Frey had vanished, enough women had disappeared from the Downtown Eastside that people had begun to take notice, including the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter. Even though women who would eventually be connected to this case in one manner or another had begun to disappear as early as the 1980s, and continued into the early 1990s, it was more commonly known that the majority of the women began disappearing during 1995 and thereafter. Newspapers also had begun suggesting that perhaps the numbers of missing women were higher than what the police had estimated, or were willing to admit. As the numbers of missing women continued to stack up, speculation that a serial killer was at work in the Downtown Eastside also increased—but fell on mostly deaf ears at the VPD.

In the autumn of 1997, shortly after Marnie disappeared, Marnie’s stepmother, Lynn, accompanied by Lynn’s sister, hit the streets of Low Track in search of the missing young woman, asking questions and carrying with them a photograph of her. It wasn’t long before they began hearing about Willie Pickton’s pig farm east of Vancouver, in Port Coquitlam.

“My sister and I were walking the beat, showing pictures of my daughter to the prostitutes,” Lynn said, speaking to reporters with the Canadian Press (CP). She said that several of the women told her and her sister that many of the prostitutes from Low Track went there to get high. They described the pig farm as a very dirty place.

“It was four or five women we were talking to,” she continued. “They were on the corner in a little group and they all knew about it…. They said you could go there anytime and party. Lots of noise, lots of alcohol. They said you just had to call and a woman would come to pick you up.”

If the women on the street knew about the Pickton farm—while women were continuing to disappear—it was only reasonable to presume that the Vancouver police knew about the goings-on there as well. The woman that the girls could call to be picked up and driven to the farm also raised questions that needed answering. Who was she? What was her relationship to Pickton? Did Willie have a willing accomplice to help him carry out his murderous deeds? No one knew, of course, but it seemed reasonable that all of the chatter on the street about Pickton’s farm, particularly with so many missing women on the ever-growing list, would have been picked up by the police and at least piqued their interest. Unfortunately, that hadn’t been the case. To the families of the missing women, it seemed as if the police couldn’t have cared less about what was happening in the city that they were hired to serve and protect.

Lynn Frey, however, had other ideas. After sifting through all the details that they had compiled from the women in Low Track, Lynn and her sister decided to drive out to Pickton’s farm on Dominion Avenue late one evening. They had found the setting very unnerving, and Lynn would later tell the police about her experience that night.

“We just drove down this dark road and stared at the house,” she said. “It was pitch-black. The dogs started barking and we thought, ‘What are we doing here? This is crazy.’”

She said that night in 1997 hadn’t been the only time that she had driven past the farm. There had been another occasion, and, like the first, she had been inexplicably disturbed by her venture. She had informed the police about it, urging them to check it out.

Lynn believed that they might have done so, but she wasn’t certain about it. She said that she believed that two of the sex trade workers that she had spoken to had told the police about Pickton’s farm, but she was careful to not be too condemning of the police action, or lack thereof. She understood how the police needed accurate, solid details before they could act appropriately, thereby giving them credit that may not have been deserved.

“I’m not knocking the street girls,” she said. “But when you’re high, all of the days blur together…. I think the police did investigate, but they can’t listen to everything. And these women weren’t known for their reliability.”

The case of Wendy Lynn Eistetter was another example of how the police had known about the Pickton farm and how Willie had attempted to kill her. Wendy’s mother believed that if Wendy hadn’t been able to reach a knife with which to stab Pickton, she would be dead today. But the fact that she was a drug addict, and the fact that she had once stolen a police cruiser and had dragged the officer whose car she had taken, presented credibility issues for her with the prosecutor’s office, which partly accounted for the reason that Willie had gotten off.

“The Crown reviewed the state of the evidence and there was no likelihood of conviction,” Geoffrey Gaul, a spokesperson with the prosecutor’s office, had said.

Although 1997 had proven to be a significant year, as far as showing that the police had known about Willie Pickton and the pig farm—what with the talk on the streets, the Wendy Eistetter incident, the fact that two prostitutes had spoken to police about the farm, and Lynn Frey’s urging that the goings-on at the farm be investigated—it would be several years before Willie’s reign of terror was ended. In the meantime, women continued disappearing.

According to the list that was eventually compiled by the Joint Missing Women Task Force—still nearly four years away from being formed—Helen May Hallmark, thirty-one, was the next woman to disappear from Vancouver’s East End and the crummy landscape of flophouses, sleazy bars, and dirty restaurants that made up so much of the area. Born June 24, 1966, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Helen was reported missing on September 23, 1998, according to the police, but she may have disappeared anytime between June 15, 1997, and the latter date. The Joint Missing Women Task Force poster lists her as last seen in October 1997, so it’s anyone’s best guess, based on witness accounts, of when she actually vanished. A relative recalled seeing Helen outside a New Westminster convenience store sometime within the aforementioned time frame, but did not stop to avoid being late for an appointment. It had been the last time anyone in her family had seen her.

Helen was the oldest of three children that her mother had with as many fathers, and according to a relative, there had been significant abuse at home, much of it directed toward Helen and her brother committed by one of their mother’s spouses or live-in partners who was now deceased. According to one of her siblings, Helen had taken much of the abuse to protect her younger siblings from having to go through the same horrible experiences as she had been forced to endure. The purported abuse was one of the reasons that she had eventually decided to leave home, though her mother had described her as being a rebellious teenager who didn’t want to be told what she could or couldn’t do—particularly clubbing and partying with her peers. She had been placed in a group home at age thirteen, and later into a foster home, which is where her mother contended that her problems actually started. Nonetheless, regardless of the reasons that she took to the streets, Helen never forgot about her family, particularly her siblings.

“We all meant a lot to her,” said one of her siblings. “She was actually a strong enough person, she forgave a lot of the things that she experienced growing up a lot easier than maybe some of us did.”

Following two failed marriages and a number of boyfriends, Helen, at age nineteen, gave birth to a baby girl, whom she gave up for adoption when the girl was a year old. Much later that daughter’s DNA would play a major role in an effort to identify her mother’s remains. Helen’s life on the streets consisted of little more than drugs, prostitution, and attempts being made to rescue her by those who loved her—efforts that ultimately always ended up with Helen going back to her pitiful life in Low Track. Her family finally realized that something was terribly wrong when she failed to come home for the Christmas holidays in 1997—she never missed spending Christmas with her family until that fateful year.

The cold and rainy month of November seemed to have passed without any known or reported disappearances of women from the Downtown Eastside. In fact, according to police, the next known disappearance did not occur until December 1997. That was when the police added forty-two-year-old Cynthia Feliks to the roster of missing women. The police were not certain when Cynthia actually disappeared; they backtracked a little and said that she might have disappeared in November, but they went with December because of sketchy reports indicating that she had been seen during that month. It was difficult to pinpoint an actual date because she had a history of disappearing, often showing up later in jail or at a relative’s home, sometimes even at a hospital, but nearly always because of her ongoing drug problem.

One of the first clues that something was wrong was when her friends and associates, those who used drugs just like her, began calling her relatives’ homes to speak with her. They were concerned because they had not seen her for some time, they said. When her family began making their usual inquiries, Cynthia was nowhere to be found. When family members reported her missing to the police, the cops took the same cavalier attitude that they had taken with family members of several of the other missing women and simply told them that she would show up sometime. They even told one of her siblings that they had seen her on Kingsway, one of the busy streets where hookers try to drum up business. However, the relative believed that the cops had either lied to her or had been mistaken about having seen Cynthia.

Cynthia Feliks was one of the working girls not originally from Canada. Born in Detroit, Michigan, she was the second of four children. Following their parents’ failed marriage, the children lived with their father, a watchmaker, who moved them to Vancouver in 1960 after marrying a second time. Eight years later their father left his second wife, leaving the children with her, and went back to the United States. Because their father failed to provide financial assistance to their stepmother for their well-being, the children grew up having a tough time—along with the stepmother. But their stepmother did the best that she could under the circumstances, often holding down two jobs.

According to the stepmother, Cynthia became involved with drugs following a trip to Florida at age sixteen to visit her father, who is now deceased. Her stepmother claimed that Cynthia’s father had coaxed her into smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol with him, and she alluded to the possibility that Cynthia’s father had also sexually abused her during that trip. Soon after her return to Vancouver, Cynthia began skipping school and running away from home. She finally left home for good at age nineteen, got married, and had a child, a daughter. Unfortunately, her husband, who has since died, was also a drug abuser, and neither of them provided much of a life for their child. Although Cynthia had been very proud of her daughter, the child ended up being raised by relatives and living much of her youth in foster homes.

Cynthia Feliks became the thirty-ninth woman to disappear from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, but she wouldn’t be the last.