'If he’d been slaughtering pigs, he’d chase you around with the entrails'
In May this year, Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton was fatally attacked in prison.
The 74-year-old had been serving a life sentence at Port-Cartier Institution in Quebec for six counts of second-degree murder when he was brutally assaulted, dying later in hospital.
It was a violent end to an unthinkably grisly existence.
Pickton was a pig farmer who killed scores of women on the grounds of squalid trailers and outbuildings in Port Coquitlam. Not only did he bury the evidence on the farm, but also ground some of his victims’ flesh into mince, mixed with pork and sold to meat processing businesses.
One witness said she saw him kill a woman in the slaughterhouse and hang and bleed her like a pig. Another revealed that Pickton had told him a good way to kill a female heroin addict was to inject her with windshield washer fluid.
His first offence was exposed in 1997 when he picked up a sex worker known as ‘Stitch’ in his truck.
He took the woman to his grim trailer on the farm, which she described as ‘more of a junk yard full of beaten up wrecked cars’.
Speaking in a 2011 documentary called The Pig Farm, Stitch revealed: ‘The kitchen was so dirty and grubby and I remember a butcher knife on the table.’
Feeling uneasy, she went to call her boyfriend, but then Pickton grabbed her hand and cuffed her. ‘I didn’t know if he was going to rape me or kill me,’ she remembers.
Grabbing the knife from the kitchen table, Stitch fought for her life as Pickton attacked, stabbing her four time. ‘I could feel hot stuff running down my chest. I knew it was blood. I figured I was going to die,’ she remembers.
Eventually Stitch managed to hit him back and make her escape, naked. After a passerby took her to hospital, the sex worker reported him to the police – however, despite Pickton being charged with four offences, including attempted murder, they were dropped because Stitch was a known drug user which prosecutors said would undermine her case.
Leaving Pickton to strike again.
Known as ‘Willie’ to his friends, the pig farmer was said to be unobtrusive, quiet and polite. Abused by his dad, he inherited the farm from his parents when they died in the 1970s, and Pickton and his brother made millions by selling off land for housing as the area developed.
He welcomed waifs and strays, making his bleak and muddy farm a home to drug users and offenders who would do odd jobs in exchange for cash and somewhere to stay.
Willie had a weird sense of humour, one of them remembers. ‘If he’d been slaughtering pigs, he’d chase you around with the entrails. He made a belt out of a pig penis,’ an associate told the documentary.
According to crime expert and former senior detective, David Swindle, poor treatment of animals is a well-known red flag to investigators.
David, who used to run major investigation and was responsible for bringing serial killer Peter Tobin to justice, tells Metro: ‘There is always that element of progressing from younger years; cruelty to animals, torture of animals, to killing later on.
‘Peter Tobin cut the head off a dog and threw it out of the window. As a kid at school, Moors Murderer Ian Brady killed a cat. Pickton was a slaughterman who loved seeing animals suffer… and then he moved on. It was progressive behaviour.’
Over the next few years following the attack on Stitch, dozens of women would go missing after visiting Pickton’s farm. He targeted vulnerable women; sex workers, drug users and marginalised women from indigenous communities. He would go into downtown Vancouver, pick them up and bring them back before raping them, killing them and disposing of their bodies.
Selecting women based on their vulnerability is another common trait within killers, David adds.
‘People like Peter Sutcliffe, Tobin and [Fred and Rosemary] West, target vulnerable women who won’t be reported missing,’ the former detective explains. ‘They took in lodgers, women with substance abuse issues, those who have been in care. Women that sadly nobody may care about.
‘It was the same with Dennis Nilson and Steven Port who both targeted men who were vulnerable, with chaotic lifestyles. These killers know what they are doing. Pickton targeted sex workers and got sadistic sexual pleasure from doing it.’
By 1997, Vancouver Police’s Constable Dave Dickson had compiled a list of 31 names of missing women from from downtown eastside, the poorest postcode in Canada. ‘I concluded that something was happening but I didn’t know what. My concern was that these girls had dropped off the face of the earth. I had a feeling that there wasn’t something quite right about that’, he told the documentary.
He took his concerns up the chain of command in June 1998 but with no bodies and no evidence of any crimes being committed, it was assumed that the women were transients and had moved on.
Meanwhile, strange reports started to come from the farm. One of Willie’s friends told a tip line set up by a friend of a missing woman that she had found clothing with blood on it and identification cards at the farm. When the police questioned her, she denied it.
Willie also told a friend how he liked to kill women.
Unemployed fisherman and former heroin addict Andy Bellwood tells the documentary: ‘Willie seemed to be a very generous caring person. I was feeling down and out and desperate to get back onto my feet. He offered me odd jobs, fixing his pickup truck or getting rid of scrap metal. The relationship grew very close, very quickly. We spent hours talking. I think he trusted me.
‘Willie said, “Do you know what I do?” He grabbed a leather belt, a piece of wire and a pair of handcuffs, got onto his knees on his bed and pretended there was a woman in front of him. He motioned grabbing an arm and with his other hand he pretended to slip on handcuffs. Then he grabbed his belt and put it around their neck, motioned stroking their hair, saying it was going to be okay, it will be over now,”’ he told the documentary.
‘Then he said: “Then I take them to the barn, hang them and gut them.” I think he thought I was deep enough in addiction, I would go along with it.’
When Bellwood was later attacked by two of Pickton’s associates, he left the farm.
As more women went missing, police drew up a list of suspects, Pickton among them. It wasn’t until a former offender told the police that there were illegal weapons on the property that they had enough for a search warrant. Turning up on a cold February day in 2002, the authorities recovered syringes, clothing, identification and an inhaler with one of the missing woman’s name on it. It was grounds for a full scale search of the entire farm.
Staff sergeant Doug Mackay-Dunn described it as ‘one of the most horrendous crime scenes any of them had ever investigated. Individuals in that investigation will have nightmares until the day they die. They will never be the same again’.
Indeed, what police found was harrowing; the severed heads, hands and feet of two women in freezers. Skulls in buckets and hand bones on the dirt floor of the piggery. Body parts buried underground.
Women’s possessions were also everywhere; jewellery, clothes, medication. Despite the horrifying number killed, not a single intact body was recovered.
The remains or DNA of 33 women were found on the farm and the grim site became the largest crime-scene investigation in Canadian history.
Stitch recalls watching the case unfold on TV with a girlfriend. ‘My heart stopped. I said to her: “Look, there’s that trailer I was in.” It was a whole new feeling from what he had done to me to find out he was the guy killing all these girls.’
Pickton was charged with 26 murders between 1995 and 2001 and the case was split into two trials when the judge decided it would be too much for one jury to cope with.
He was found guilty of murdering Sereena Abotsway, Marnie Frey, Andrea Joesbury, Georgina Papin, Mona Wilson and Brenda Wolfe. He was charged with killing 21 more, although he was never tried in court for those counts because Pickton had already received the maximum sentence possible under the Canadian legal system. The DNA of six additional victims was found on his farm, bringing the total number of missing women conclusively linked to the property to 33, making him Canada’s worst serial killer.
Pickton himself claimed to have killed more, bragging to an undercover officer posing as a cellmate that he had taken the lives of 49 women. He told him he was angry at not reaching his target of 50. He also implied that he didn’t work alone.
The murderer died having served just 17 years of his sentence in a Quebec hospital, following injuries resulting from an assault involving another inmate on May 19.
However, in his death, the hope for many families of finding out what happened to their loved ones has also been snuffed out. For some family members, Pickton’s conviction and death provide insufficient justice, with Kristina Batemen, daughter of victim Georgina Papin, warning that other people could have been involved in Pickton’s violence.
‘I want to feel like it’s completely closed, and I have a feeling…the whole truth is not out yet… He mentioned to authorities that other people were involved — investigators should still be looking into the allegations. I don’t feel like justice has been served completely. And I’m still going to always be trying to find the truth — more of the truth,’ she told local paper the Edmonton Journal.
The farm has been bulldozed and Pickton’s body likely cremated. The police still hold 14,000 pieces of evidence seized from the farm, but with Pickton’s death, many of the families are left only with grief and questions unanswered.
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