Butcher (9 page)

On Monday, June 25, 2001, while the Joint Missing Women Task Force went about its business of trying to determine why so many prostitutes had mysteriously disappeared without a trace, Kim Rossmo testified in a civil lawsuit that he brought against the Vancouver police board and Deputy Chief John Unger for wrongful dismissal, stating that it was his opinion that a task force should have been formed much sooner. At the time of his lawsuit, Rossmo had moved to the United States to become director of research for the Police Foundation in Washington, D.C. He claimed that ten senior police officers had resented his promotion from constable to detective-inspector, and had acted disapprovingly and contemptuously toward him during the five years that he had held that position. Rossmo particularly blamed Inspector Fred Biddlecombe, who was then in charge of the department’s major crime unit, for much of the negativity that had been displayed toward him.

Biddlecombe, Rossmo said, had literally thrown a temper tantrum when Rossmo advised him in 1998 that the police should consider the possibility that a serial killer was responsible for the missing women and recommended that the public be told that such a possibility existed. Instead, Biddlecombe went before the public and denied that a serial killer was operating in the Downtown Eastside. A report about the situation that Rossmo had created and submitted to his superiors on May 27, 1999, had been virtually ignored. The report, which he had submitted to Deputy Chief Constable Brian McGuinness, Fred Biddlecombe, and Inspector Chris Beach, downplayed the likelihood that the police would ever be able to locate more than two of the missing women alive, contrary to the image that the department was trying to convey to an eager public that wanted answers.

In his report Rossmo outlined three possibilities regarding what may have resulted in the disappearances of so many women: 1) They had fallen prey to separate killers. 2) Each had been murdered by a serial killer. 3) They had fallen prey to multiple serial killers. Rossmo said that because serial murders are relatively rare, it seemed unlikely that more than one such killer was at work in Vancouver. He also said that because none of the women’s bodies had been found yet, the first scenario was also unlikely. His choice was that a single serial killer was picking up the women, killing them, and possibly cluster dumping their bodies at a still-to-be-determined location.

“Similarities in victimology and the short time period and specific neighborhood involved all suggest the single serial murderer hypothesis is the most likely explanation for the majority of these incidents,” Rossmo said. “The single predator theory includes partner or team killers—approximately twenty-five percent of serial murder cases involve more than one offender.”

According to Rossmo, it was not unusual for a serial killer who did not want to be identified to hide his victims’ remains in one location or area. Using several different dumping sites would naturally increase the odds of being discovered.

“When a body is found in a cluster dump site,” Rossmo said, “several others can often be located within a range of fifty meters or less. Considering Vancouver’s surrounding geography, potential burial sites are most likely to be in wilderness areas or, less likely, on the offender’s residence or property.”

In testimony given at the civil lawsuit trial, Rossmo said that his opinions about the possibility of a serial killer had gone virtually unheeded despite the aforementioned report. He blamed an “old boys’ network” for controlling the senior ranks of the police department and holding back earlier inquiries into Vancouver’s problem.

“If we believe, with any degree of probability, that we have a predator responsible for twenty to thirty deaths in a short period of time, do you think our response was adequate?” Rossmo asked during the civil trial. “I thought it was the wrong approach. We did not put together a task force anywhere near what a real serial murder investigation would involve.”

Instead of being consulted on cases by the major crime unit and the sex offenses unit, after setting up his geographic-profiling department, he was instructed to assist in cases out of the area, as well as on international cases. When his contract was not renewed and he was offered a “highly undesirable” position of going back to work as a constable, an offer that he felt was an insult and unreasonable, he left the department two years short of being eligible to retire with a pension. Rossmo ultimately lost his case against Unger and the police board.

At one point later on, Rossmo and Inspector Doug MacKay-Dunn, retired, called for an investigation into the handling of the missing-women cases by Vancouver police. Their goal, Rossmo said, was to prevent such shoddy police work in the future.

“This is unprecedented,” Rossmo said of the missing women investigation. “This wasn’t investigated in an optimal fashion, and an inquiry would help determine what went wrong and why. Most of these problems are systemic and it could help lead to improvements in policing….”

Vancouver mayor Philip Owen and senior members of the police department countered the call for an investigation into how the case was being handled by saying that there was nothing wrong with the manner in which the police conducted the case. The mayor and police officials also argued that the timing for such an inquiry was inappropriate because the investigation was ongoing.

“I’m not sure that the victims and their families would agree with the mayor’s assessment,” Rossmo said, adding that the suggested delay was “clearly a stalling tactic.”

“Right now, they’re saying they want the investigation to be over,” Rossmo added. “Well, then they’re going to say they want the court case to be over (before starting an inquiry), then they’re going to say they want the appeals to be over, and then we’ll be ten years down the road. If things aren’t working well, we want to fix them now, not in a decade.”

The case of Vancouver’s missing women was not the first time that Kim Rossmo’s colleagues and superiors had chosen to ignore his theories. In 1994, the remains of three murdered aboriginal women were found in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, two provinces east of British Columbia. After examining the three sets of remains, Rossmo suggested that a serial killer had murdered the women. Despite the fact that the police in Saskatchewan had been keeping convicted rapist John Martin Crawford under surveillance, Rossmo’s theory was disregarded. Crawford, however, was eventually arrested and charged with murdering the three native women, in 1992, two years before their remains had been found, and was convicted of the charges in 1996.

Kim Rossmo today works as a research professor for the Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. The center primarily studies ways to improve response to crime and homeland security issues, and provides specialized training for law enforcement agencies, as well as the military and intelligence communities. He has also written and published a book on the subject of his expertise called
Geographic Profiling
.

Meanwhile, by November 2001, the task force investigating the missing women stated that it had catalogued approximately one hundred possible suspects that its investigators deemed a “high priority.” A month earlier their list of potential suspects had exceeded six hundred, but through the process of categorizing those of highest priority, the task force had been able to shrink the list significantly, thus making it more manageable. They were aided in their effort by using case management software, Specialized Investigative Unit Support System (SIUSS). Investigators would enter each piece of evidentiary information into the complicated program, which would then analyze the new information by checking it against thousands of other records as it looked for a common denominator. The hope that everyone using the system had, of course, was that it would return the name of potential suspects that detectives could scrutinize further.

Following the arrest of Green River Killer suspect Gary Leon Ridgway on Friday, November 30, 2001, as he left the Renton, Washington, factory where he worked, witnesses began coming forward during the month of December, and later, to report that they had seen Ridgway in the Downtown Eastside area on several occasions during the time frame in which women had been disappearing. After seeing his photo on television and in newspapers, Vancouver prostitutes began saying that they recognized him, according to Vancouver detective Jim McKnight.

“There is some indication that he was in British Columbia,” McKnight told reporters from a Seattle television station. “I can’t be too specific, because I don’t know for sure yet.”

Ridgway’s neighbors told police and reporters after his arrest that he and his wife frequently traveled to British Columbia in their motor home. Because of the reported sightings of Ridgway in Vancouver in the area where prostitutes had been disappearing since about the time that the Green River murders ended, the Vancouver task force naturally wanted to speak to him. After all, he had been charged with murdering several Seattle-area prostitutes over several years and was suspected of murdering many more, making him a high-priority suspect in the eyes of the Vancouver Joint Missing Women Task Force. Canadian investigators made another trip to Seattle in December 2001 to talk to Ridgway and members of the Green River task force, but any information they received was kept secret. Ridgway would, however, soon be ruled out as a major suspect in the Vancouver probe, but detectives would continue looking at him as somehow possibly being involved after rumors surfaced about him being seen at Piggy’s Palace. Two years later, Ridgway would plead guilty to murdering forty-eight Seattle-area prostitutes, even though he had made claims that he had killed seventy-one.

RCMP constable Nathan Wells joined the Mounties in 2000, and he was assigned to the Coquitlam street enforcement unit. His job as a rookie was to develop and nurture informants who had knowledge of the district’s drug traffickers. Although he had heard about the work that Inspector Don Adam’s task force was doing regarding the missing women, he had not concerned himself with Adam’s investigation—until he met Dwayne Scott Chubb, a thirtysomething heroin addict, a year later in the autumn of 2001. A longtime employee of the Picktons’, Chubb had worked intermittently for the two brothers, sometimes for the dump truck business and at other times for the topsoil business, from 1993 to 2001.

In April 2000, following an assault outside a Coquitlam bar, Chubb sustained a head injury that required 160 stitches and, according to Chubb, had inadvertently led to his heroin problem. When his physician stopped prescribing morphine for his pain, he turned to heroin for the next few months. Afterward, he entered a methadone program for heroin addicts. During the period that he began talking to Wells, Chubb sometimes worked as a bagman of sorts for area drug dealers in which he picked up money for them.

When they first began talking, Chubb had reportedly provided Wells with some information about drugs initially. However, during subsequent cop-informant meetings that occurred in early 2002, Chubb took Wells down a different path. During a meeting on Friday, February 1, 2002, Chubb told Wells about firearms and ammunition that he had seen on Robert Pickton’s farm, dating from a year or two earlier. One of the firearms was illegal, a MAC-10 fully automatic handgun; some of them were illegally stored in Robert Pickton’s trailer, contrary to Canadian firearms laws, which required them to be kept under lock and key. The new information was enough to cause Wells to do a computer search on Robert Pickton. After checking out Pickton, Wells considered whether he might be in over his head.

The computer search involving Pickton turned up a note attached to the electronic file advising anyone interested in Robert Pickton to speak to the Vancouver police. Since the note had been vague, Wells continued putting together information for the search warrant for firearms for which he would soon be applying through the court system. Before he could make much progress, however, a staff sergeant on Monday, February 4, 2002, advised Wells to contact the Joint Missing Women Task Force before proceeding any further.

Wells did contact the task force, but was initially told little aside from the fact that the task force knew about Pickton. After being made aware of Wells’s inquiry, Staff Sergeant Wayne Clary, the task force’s second-in-charge, informed Sergeant John Cater that he could speak with Wells if he so desired. Cater did, in fact, call Wells back, and suggested ways of how they might help each other during the search. There seemed to be little information at this point to suggest that the task force believed that anything significant pertaining to their case would turn up, and task force members seemed to be participating in the effort with a matter-of-fact attitude.

Arrangements were made to get Wells the search warrant for firearms at Robert Pickton’s farm, and the plans to execute the search warrant were coordinated with the task force with Cater’s help. It was agreed that Cater and another member of the task force would observe the search, but they would do so only from a vantage point that was not on the property itself. Their purpose, according to Wells, was to remain nearby with a police radio in the event that Wells’s search turned up anything that might pertain to the task force investigation. Based on the information contained in Wells’s search warrant, the police would be looking for a MAC-10 fully automatic handgun, a .38-caliber handgun, and a .44-caliber handgun on Pickton’s farm.

On Tuesday evening, February 5, 2002, at a few minutes before eight-thirty, Wells and three other Mounties, each dressed in plain clothing, slowly made their way from their vehicles parked inconspicuously a short distance away toward Robert Pickton’s residence, the run-down white trailer located on the north side of the farm. It was dark, cold, and damp as the police officers, walking through thick mud and carrying a battering ram, saw headlights in the distance and soon heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. It was headed toward the trailer. They stopped for a few moments, then proceeded after they heard the vehicle’s door close, followed moments later by the opening and closing of the trailer’s front door. Aware of the risk that the purported firearms inside the trailer posed, now that someone was there, the Mounties nonetheless gave the signal to proceed as planned.

Wells and the other three officers walked up onto the low deck, battering ram in hand, while another group of Mounties, which had arrived separately, remained nearby as sentries. It wasn’t until the police cruiser, with its lights flashing and its ear-piercing siren sped down the muddy drive—the agreed-upon signal to assault the trailer—that Wells and his team shouted out from their positions on the deck, “Police! We are serving a search warrant!” Moments later the cops used the battering ram to break open the front door at about the same time that Pickton was headed toward another door to see what was happening.

Corporal Howard Lew was the first to confront Robert Pickton, who was standing off to Lew’s left. He shouted, “Police! Get down!” Pickton immediately dropped to the floor, apparently noticing that Lew’s gun was drawn and pointed at him. Lew carefully approached Pickton, ordering him to keep his hands where he could see them. With Pickton facedown on the floor, Lew handcuffed him with his hands behind him, brought him to his feet, and, moments later, placed him in the waiting police cruiser outside. The arrest went off without a hitch, quickly and without incident or resistance, and within a short time Pickton was driven off his farm and taken to the police station.

The interior of the filthy trailer consisted of six rooms, and each of the Mounties who had gone inside was assigned a section of it to search. Although Corporal James Petrovich had been instructed to search one of the bedrooms, he had heard that one of the guns might have been placed in the laundry room. Unable to control his curiosity, Petrovich checked out the laundry room first. He was not disappointed in his decision. He discovered, on a shelf situated above the trailer’s heater, a .22-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. When he retrieved it, he saw, much to his shock and surprise, that it had a dildo attached to its barrel. When he examined it further, he noted that it had five live rounds of ammunition and one spent casing in its cylinder.

Over the next ninety minutes or so, Mounties searching Pickton’s bedroom discovered several sex toys, including fur-lined handcuffs. Inside the headboard compartments of his bed, they found items of jewelry and a purse, and in another area they discovered a notebook containing the name of one of the women that the task force had placed on their list of missing women.

When Lew searched Pickton’s cluttered office, with its untidiness, he noted that it was more orderly than other areas of the trailer. Phone books lay atop his desk, and many papers were strewn about the desktop as well. Directly behind the desk a cuckoo clock hung on the wall, right above a large corkboard that had items mostly related to the farm and the businesses neatly pinned to it, filling it to capacity. There were also a number of boxes stacked on the floor at one end of the room, and bags of clothing lay piled on the floor.

On the wall directly to the right of the desk, assuming that one were sitting or standing behind it, hung the head of what appeared to be a light-colored stallion. The head, which hung on the wall right above a watercooler, was well-preserved, complete with bridle, and appeared to have been stuffed and mounted by a professional taxidermist—or at least by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. An award ribbon of some type also hung from the right side of the horse’s head. The horse’s head appeared to be staring toward the desk, and appeared to the casual onlooker to be more of a macabre oddity than anything else. No one knew yet that the head belonged to Pickton’s prized 1,400-pound horse, Spring Golden, which he had nicknamed “Goldie.” The horse, they would learn, had to be put down after it had been kicked and injured by another horse.

At one point while going through the clutter in Pickton’s office, Lew found an asthma inhaler inside a silver sports bag lying on the floor. It had been prescribed to Sereena Abotsway. Although the name on it did not mean anything to him, Lew nonetheless called it in to Cater, sitting in a car on the outside perimeter of the farm. Cater, recognizing Abotsway’s name as one of the missing women, dutifully called his boss, Staff Sergeant Wayne Clary, and described the inhaler—along with the date that it had been prescribed, July 19, 2001, which was merely a few weeks before she disappeared in August of that year. The inhaler was a major find, an important piece of evidence, and both Cater and Clary recognized it as such. A few minutes after calling in the discovery, Clary ordered that the firearms search be called off immediately. Aside from leaving guards posted around the outside of the farm’s property line, everyone was ordered to leave. Clary instructed Cater to tell Wells that he was not to deal with Pickton from that point forward. Wells was ordered not to speak to Pickton, and not to obtain his fingerprints.

Clary hurriedly scheduled a task force meeting for the next morning, and Wells was left with the distinct impression that his investigation was being formally turned over to Inspector Don Adam, who would then proceed in an entirely different manner after the task force obtained its own search warrant for the Pickton farm.