The Devil's Dozen (31 page)

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Women were vanishing from the streets of Vancouver, British Columbia, but since most were prostitutes or drug addicts, little attention was paid. As early as 1991, community activists insisted the police must do something, but across the decade, as many as thirty women went missing and the numbers continued to rise. A Missing Women Task Force formed, but it was only after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police got involved that the effort became organized.

Then, early in 2002, when over sixty women were unaccounted for, Constable Nathan Wells, a rookie, learned something from a man named Scott Chubb that inspired him to get a court order to search a nearby pig farm in Port Coquitlam. Chubb had allegedly seen unlicensed firearms and ammunition on the property, owned by Robert Pickton, so Wells went to check. He was unaware of Pickton’s alleged association with some of the missing women, but accompanying him were two members of the task force. In fact, this farm had been searched twice before, without results.

However, this time they found several asthma inhalers labeled with the name of Sereena Abotsway, one of the missing, so more members of the task force went in to look around. They did not realize then that they would find much more than just Sereena’s inhalers.

Canadian “Pig Man” Killer Robert Pickton. His body count may be as high as sixty.
AP/Worldwide Photos/CP, Jane Wolsak

Four people were arrested on various charges: fifty-three-year-old Robert Pickton, his friends Paul Casanova and Dinah Taylor, and a woman who had briefly lived on the farm, Lynn Ellingsen. All but Pickton were released after questioning. Pickton remained in jail, on two charges of first-degree murder filed on February 22, 2002. By October of that year, murder charges rose to fifteen, then twenty, and finally twenty-seven. However, some investigators thought Pickton might be linked to as many as sixty-nine missing women.

Details of the “Pig Man” case unfolded to the press and public through the trial, but the preceding investigation is the most fascinating part of the story. It would be the longest, most expensive, and most complex criminal investigation in Canadian history—for that matter, in the world. Even the United States had never undertaken an investigation of this magnitude, despite its worldwide reputation as the capital of serial murder. Pathologists, anthropologists, osteologists, entomologists, geologists, trace-evidence experts, latent-fingerprint examiners, DNA analysts, blood-spatter-pattern analysts, civil engineers, profilers, mass-fatality consultants, and other specialists were all coordinated to process and interpret the evidence. The trial itself lasted nearly a year, but even with all this impressive effort, it was felt that the jury’s verdict could go either way.

Detective Dave Dickson launched an inquiry about the many women who’d been reported missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside since the early 1970s. A community group had made a list of names for the police, but since some women turned up alive and others were dead, the list seemed unreliable. Dickson wrote up a new one, finding sufficient reason to wonder what had happened to them all. In 1998, the official task force was formed to look into the disappearance of forty women. When sixteen prostitutes appeared to have vanished under suspicious circumstances, investigators wondered if there might be a serial killer in the area.

Vancouver detective inspector Kim Rossmo had devised a computerized method he called geographical profiling, which highlighted killing patterns specific to geographical areas. He’d devised the first such profile in 1990, and by the end of the decade his work had been utilized extensively in Canada and Britain, with limited application in the United States. In 1999, he analyzed the Vancouver area, concluding that there was indeed a serial killer at work, but his superiors dismissed his concerns. They were not keen to go public with such an alarming notion unless solid evidence supported it. Rossmo thought the results of his analysis were proof enough. He had found an abnormally high concentration of missing women between 1995 and 1998, with no indication that any had filed a change of address for assistance checks.

A geographical-profile analysis highlights crime location, physical boundaries, and types of roads and highways that influence body dump sites. An analysis of known crime scenes or last places victims were seen provides clues about where an offender may live or work. Like behavioral profilers, those who concentrate on geographical analysis try to determine how sophisticated and organized an offender is, whether a crime was planned or opportune, and whether the offender approached a high- or low-risk victim. However, they take it a step further, using objective measurements to pinpoint as precisely as possible the locus of criminal activity.

Rossmo’s program, Criminal Geographic Targeting (CGT), assessed the spatial characteristics of a crime. (Environmental Criminology Research, Inc. developed a prototype called Rigel.) Using specific measurements, it generates numerous calculations to produce a topographic map based on key locations. Via color arrangements and graphs, the resulting map reveals the “jeopardy surface,” or likelihood that some area is the location of the killer’s home or base of operation. This map is then superimposed on a street map on which the crimes are highlighted—“fingerprints” of the offender’s cognitive map.

Rossmo had tested the accuracy of his program on solved cases. For example, Robert Clifford Olson was arrested in 1981 in Vancouver, BC, for picking up two hitchhikers. He subsequently confessed to eleven murders, mostly young girls and boys. Rossmo generated a map of Olson’s crimes and was able to pinpoint within a four-square-block area where Olson had actually lived.

The program’s predictive power depends on the number of crime sites, the more the better (Rossmo preferred at least five). CGT takes into account an unknown offender’s movement patterns, comfort zones, and hunting patterns, as well as what is already known about the way offenders in general behave. Right-handed criminals escaping in a hurry, for example, will tend to flee to the left and discard weapons to the right. When lost, males tend to go downhill while females go up. The profiler enters information about the crime scene, suspect lists, police reports, and motor-vehicles and builds from there, modifying the parameters as needed.

The principal elements are distance, what are called mental maps, mobility, and locality demographics. Central to the approach is the idea that there is a difference between perceived distance and actual distance, which varies among individuals; certain factors influence how this disparity affects the commission of a crime. The availability of transportation, number of barriers (bridges, state boundaries), type of roads, and familiarity with a specific region all influence perceived distance.

Within this context, one of the most significant factors in geographical profiling is the concept of a mental map: a cognitive image of one’s surroundings developed through experiences, travel routes, reference points, and centers of activity. The places where an offender feels comfortable is part of his or her mental map. As they grow bolder, offenders’ maps may expand, with an increase in the range of criminal activity.

Some criminals are geographically stable and some travel around; this depends on their experience with travel, means for getting places, sense of personal security, and predatory motivations. The mental map may also depend on whether the killer is a hunter, stalker, or has some other mode of attack. In the Vancouver case, assuming the offender was a male, geographical profiling focused on the following issues:

Rossmo believed that plotting the travel routes of serial offenders makes the offender’s mobility more predictable. The more he offends and gets away with it, the more confidence he gains and the more his crime area tends to expand or the number of crimes escalates. That meant that the initial acts occurred closest to where the offender lived or worked—or both. Whoever was picking up these prostitutes was quite familiar with Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the most disadvantaged ten-block area in the province. “Low Track” was where thousands of junkies shot up, low-class prostitutes turned the cheapest tricks, and dealers exchanged drugs for money or sex. Drug overdose and HIV infections were rampant.

Despite the results of Rossmo’s analysis, his bosses dismissed his conclusion about a serial killer. Without an actual crime, body, or crime scene, just knowing that someone was picking up and doing away with a lot of women offered no leads. Getting information from pimps, prostitutes, and drug addicts was difficult, even if they feared for their lives. Yet authorities did make some effort: a substantial reward was posted for information and investigators sought DNA samples from relatives of the missing so they would have something for comparison in the event that human remains turned up.
America’s Most Wanted
even ran a feature about the women.

By 2001, after reporters published sharp criticisms of police handling of the situation, officials turned over the files to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and admitted that they probably had a serial killer taking prostitutes off the streets on their hands. The list now held thirty-one names, going back as far as 1983. That December, with forty-five women on the official list, sixteen investigators and five support personnel formed a task force; more investigators were added just in time for the first break in the case, in February 2002.

The seven-hectare farm, about seventeen acres, was where Pickton and his younger brother, Dave, ran a business butchering pigs. They also had an unofficial nightclub dubbed “Piggy’s Palace,” which hosted large parties. (Over 1,700 showed up at one, which forced authorities to close it down.) After the initial discovery of the inhalers, investigators divided the property into 216 grids, of twenty by twenty meters each, for an organized search. Dirt, excavated in layers from each section, was placed onto one of two conveyor belts for archaeologists and anthropologists to sift for bone fragments. Odontologists stood ready to examine suspicious items for teeth, as well as to assist with identifications in the event a jaw was found that could provide a bite-mark impression. Technicians could also extract DNA from the pulpy area, or freeze the tooth and smash it into a fine powder for a different kind of analysis. Pickton’s mobile home and slaughterhouse were designated as top priorities, and a painstaking search began, but the task of looking through several buildings full of pig manure and offal was not pleasant. Even the Pig Man’s residence was filthy, with blood spatters in many areas and a bloodstained mattress. Items belonging to some of the missing turned up in the place.