Butcher (24 page)

As Robert Pickton’s trial continued, the jurors were led through a demonstration by RCMP sergeant Tim Sleigh showing how investigators assigned numbers to the numerous exhibits in order to keep track of them. Sleigh also explained the process of how investigators identified fingerprints, and how the fingerprint identifications were verified by other officers. Sleigh often showed jurors photographs and charts that police used to identify fingerprints found at various locations on the farm, such as those of Pickton, his brother, Dave, and his friend Dinah Taylor, and how they confirmed them by comparing the prints taken from each individual.

The defense team elicited testimony from Sleigh regarding a right index fingerprint that belonged to Dave Pickton, found on a piece of cardboard inside a metal toolbox that sat atop the freezer in which Abotsway’s and Joesbury’s remains had been discovered inside the plastic pails. Similarly, Sleigh testified about how Dinah Taylor’s fingerprints had been found at a number of locations inside Robert Pickton’s trailer, such as the bed’s headboard inside Pickton’s bedroom, on a piece of paper inside the drawer of a nightstand, and on a formal letter from British Columbia’s Department of Indian Affairs, regarding an application for entitlements, that bore Taylor’s name. The jury was also told that Dave Pickton had been a subject in the investigation of the disappearances of Vancouver’s prostitutes, and that he had not been named as a suspect in the case.

The jury had also heard testimony that Dave Pickton told investigators that Taylor had committed some of the killings and that she had been arrested as part of the investigation, but she had been released without being charged with anything because the police did not believe what Dave Pickton had told them about her.

Sleigh also testified that Robert Pickton’s fingerprints had been found on a handgun that investigators located inside the same workshop where the freezer containing Abotsway’s and Joesbury’s partial remains were found. Sleigh said that a print of Robert Pickton’s right ring finger was retrieved from a cardboard box that police had found sitting atop a table in the slaughterhouse, and that a print of his right index finger was discovered on the blade of a knife. Sleigh said that Pickton’s fingerprints were also found on a syringe wrapper inside a garbage can outside his trailer, and told the jury that fingerprint evidence was significant because it verified that a person had “contact with an object, thing, or place,” and, when present, determined if a person had access to a crime scene. Sleigh’s testimony during this phase of the trial consisted simply of presenting the facts—except for what had already been stated, the significance of the fingerprint evidence was not elicited from the witness by either side.

Following several weeks of additional evidentiary testimony and presentation of exhibits, jurors heard extensive testimony from RCMP forensic laboratory employees who provided explanations about DNA, how more than 235,000 pieces of evidence had been collected from the farm and analyzed, and ultimately how approximately sixty items were linked to specific individuals, including four of the six victims whose murders Pickton was being tried for, as well as to Pickton himself. Several people who knew many of the victims prior to their disappearances also testified for the Crown and described how they had met the victims, as well as the last time that they had seen the women. Afterward, toward the end of May, testimony was heard from several people who knew Pickton.

On Tuesday, May 29, 2007, Gina Houston, described as a close friend of Robert Pickton’s who was also known to bring her children to Pickton’s farm, told the jury that Pickton once told her that up to six bodies were in his slaughterhouse. She said that she asked him on one occasion if he had killed any women on his farm and that he had replied, “No.” She also recalled an incident in which Pickton had asked her to make a “double suicide” pact with him only days before his arrest in February 2002, purportedly because he did not want to go to jail.

Houston described an incident she had overheard involving a fracas with a woman inside Pickton’s trailer during a telephone call between her and Pickton in December 2001. During her testimony, which often was tearful, Houston said that the woman’s name was Mona.

“He told me he tried to do everything he could for her, but she didn’t make it,” Houston testified.

Houston said that Pickton had told her that the woman was in an area of his slaughterhouse where he had previously held cockfights. She said that Pickton had told her that there were perhaps six bodies inside the slaughterhouse. She also testified that she had seen prostitutes, including Sereena Abotsway, at his farm. Sobbing at times, Houston said that it was difficult for her to testify against her friend who, she said, had given her between $50,000 to $80,000 to help her maintain her drug habit and to pay her bills. She described Pickton as polite, gullible, naïve, gentle, and kind, and that two of her children referred to him as “Daddy.”

Under cross-examination by the defense, Houston said that she might have actually heard the name Mona from news media reports at the time. She also said that a couple of days before Pickton’s arrest in February 2002, she and Pickton had a discussion in which Pickton had purportedly told her that Dinah Taylor was responsible for Mona’s death, as well as for the deaths of some of the others.

“You said to him, ‘I know you didn’t kill her—so, why don’t we go straight to your lawyer tomorrow and I’ll tell them what I heard on the phone that night,’” said Marilyn Sandford, one of Pickton’s defense lawyers.

“Yes,” Houston replied.

“You asked him, ‘Did you kill any of them?’ and he answered, ‘No,’” said Sandford.

“That’s correct,” Houston said.

“Mr. Pickton said to you on the twentieth of February in the car that Dinah Taylor shot some of the girls,” Sandford proposed.

“Not in those exact words,” Houston clarified. “That she was responsible.”

Houston described how she and Pickton had called Taylor from their car.

“Willie told me that she would do the right thing when she came back [from eastern Canada],” Houston testified. “He said she would take responsibility for what she said she would take responsibility for.”

“Did he say anything else?” Sandford asked.

“[That] she was responsible for three or four,” Houston responded.

Houston testified that she had seen Sereena Abotsway and Andrea Joesbury with Dinah Taylor, and that Taylor had become furious with someone named Andrea on one occasion, purportedly because Andrea had been paid more money for cleaning Pickton’s trailer than Taylor had. Taylor had repeatedly said that she wanted to kill her. The judge cautioned the jury not to automatically presume that the Andrea in question was Andrea Joesbury, and said that the defense and the Crown would likely take differing positions on Andrea’s identity.

When Houston testified about the purported suicide pact that Pickton had proposed to her, she said that he had mentioned a rope, a truck, or a train. Sandford, however, implied that it was possible that he had simply been talking about taking a trip.

“If he hadn’t said rope, I would have thought that,” Houston said. “You can’t take a trip on a rope.”

At one point Houston was asked to recall an incident that had allegedly occurred inside Pickton’s slaughterhouse in which Pickton, Houston, Lynn Ellingsen, and several other people watched while Pickton butchered a five-hundred-pound pig. The Crown had said during opening statements that Ellingsen would testify that she and Pickton had picked up a prostitute in the Downtown Eastside area and had brought her to the farm, and that Ellingsen would say that she had seen Pickton butchering the woman later that night in the slaughterhouse. Although Ellingsen had not yet testified, the defense used the opportunity to elicit testimony from Houston that could be used to cast doubt on Ellingsen’s statements when she did testify.

“She didn’t see things the way other people did,” Houston said.

Houston also said that she had seen Ellingsen on a number of occasions high from drug usage. Houston also agreed with Sandford’s suggestion that Ellingsen could be “delusional” at times, which prompted an objection from the Crown and the jury being escorted out of the courtroom. When the jury returned, Sandford asked Houston again about the pig-butchering incident.

“She (Ellingsen) asked me if I had seen what she seen, and I told her something to the effect that it was just a pig,” Houston testified.

Sandford questioned Houston again about the telephone conversation she said that she’d had with Pickton in which she had heard a female voice, a male voice, and others purportedly arguing.

“Willie kept saying, ‘Stop that. Don’t do that,’” Houston testified.

“You heard a woman scream, didn’t you?” Sandford asked.

“Yes,” Houston replied.

“He said, ‘Oh, my God,’” Sandford offered, referring to Pickton.

“I’m not sure. He could have.”

Following the telephone call with Pickton, Houston said, she sent her common-law husband, who was now deceased, to Pickton’s trailer to determine what had occurred there. She said that he returned with mud on his clothing and a bite mark on the calf of one of his legs.

“It looked like human teeth marks,” Houston said.

At another point in the trial, jurors heard testimony from Pat Casanova, a man who had not previously been mentioned publicly, except perhaps peripherally, in part because he had been a subject in an undercover police investigation. Nonetheless, Casanova had known the Picktons for many years and had spent many weekends butchering pigs at the farm. He was well-versed in pig slaughtering, and the Crown intended to show that the manner in which pigs had been slaughtered at Pickton’s farm were similar to how some of the victims in Pickton’s case had been butchered.

Under questioning by the Crown, Casanova testified that Pickton often shot pigs in the head with a nail gun, and afterward stabbed them with a knife and hung them up to drain their blood. He said that they typically were cut in half, vertically through the spine, and that a handsaw had been used for a number of years. Later on, however, he said, the handsaw was replaced with a reciprocating saw. According to his testimony, he had been held in custody for only a few hours. He denied killing any of the women, and said that he had never witnessed any of the killings. He also denied ever helping anyone dispose of any of the victims’ remains.

Information brought out at trial about Casanova’s perceived connection to the case raised questions, and at times it seemed like the revelations helped the defense’s case instead of the Crown’s. For example, a band saw that police seized from his property revealed the presence of human DNA, but in amounts insufficient to determine to whom it belonged. Casanova also testified that he did not have an explanation for how the DNA got onto his band saw. His DNA was also found at other locations on the farm, including inside the freezer in Pickton’s workshop, and near a second freezer where human remains were also found. Although he said that he had never used the freezer where human remains were found, he admitted under cross-examination that he had placed pig carcasses inside one of the freezers prior to Pickton’s arrest in February 2002. Although Casanova had been arrested in connection with Pickton’s case and questioned, he was never charged with any crimes associated with the case.

A bit later, Scott Chubb testified for the Crown and repeated much of what he had told the investigators, including what Pickton had purportedly told him about killing “junkies” by injecting them with windshield wiper fluid. He also testified about anger that Pickton allegedly exhibited toward Lynn Ellingsen, who had been “costing him a lot of money,” and he inferred that he wanted her harmed.

At one point during his nearly three days of testimony, Chubb was shown a poster board of photos of the missing women and was asked if he had seen Pickton with any of them. He pointed out Georgina Papin’s photograph and said that he had seen them in Pickton’s flatbed truck parked at a strip mall in Port Coquitlam. Although he was unable to remember the date that he had seen them, he said that the woman had been wearing a baseball cap.

It was also pointed out that Chubb had been the person who had provided the tip to the police about Pickton’s weapons, which had led to the search of his farm and, ultimately, his arrest. Chubb’s memory was often hazy, and the defense lawyers seized the opportunity to question his reliability as a witness, as well as his credibility—in part because of the fact that the RCMP spent more than $25,000 to help him relocate under a witness protection program of sorts, and for paying for some of his living expenses after becoming a witness.

Chubb testified that he did not have anything to do in connection with the disappearances of the women, and said that he had not helped dispose of any bodies.

Lynn Ellingsen took the witness stand on Monday, June 25, 2007, and provided some of the more dramatic testimony of the trial as she recounted how she had witnessed Robert Pickton skinning a woman believed to have been Georgina Papin. Ellingsen, who had resided in a spare room in Pickton’s trailer for several months, told of how she had walked into the slaughterhouse one evening and saw a female body dangling on a meat hook from the ceiling. She described the victims feet, which were at eye level, and recalled that the woman’s toenails were painted red. She told of seeing blood and long black hair lying on a stainless-steel table near the body. Covered in blood, Pickton had been slicing an object, which she did not name, with a knife when he saw Ellingsen. She said that he forcefully pulled her over to the table and threatened her.

“I saw this body,” Ellingsen testified. “It was hanging. Willie pulled me inside, behind the door. Walked me over to the table. Made me look. He told me if I was to say anything, I’d be right beside her. I told him, ‘I wouldn’t say a word—I promise.’”

She explained that the woman she had seen hanging in the slaughterhouse was a woman that they had picked up earlier that evening after cruising Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside looking for a prostitute for Pickton to take back to the farm. She described how she had smoked crack that evening, and how Pickton had taken the woman they picked up into another room while Ellingsen went into her room. She also recalled how she had been awakened by a loud noise and had seen a bright light in the slaughterhouse next door, and the horror that she encountered when she went to investigate.

“This woman that we had picked up,” she said, “at my eye level was where her feet, like her legs were. I seen red toenail polish. On this big shiny table, I don’t know what it was, but it was lots of blood and, uh, hair, black hair.”

Mike Petrie, the prosecutor, asked her if she had seen the person’s face.

“Not her face,” Ellingsen replied. “But it was her hair, like she had long black hair and that’s what was laying on the table…. I just remember her toes.”

“Was Pickton doing anything to the woman?” Petrie asked.

“There were knives with blood on them,” she replied. “He was full of blood himself.”

Responding to Petrie’s questions, Ellingsen said that she had met Pickton through Gina Houston, whom she had become acquainted with at a halfway house where Ellingsen was living to get out of a violent relationship. Pickton eventually allowed her to move into the spare room in his trailer, and paid her to clean it on a somewhat regular basis. She said that Pickton knew about her drug problems, and he helped her acquire drugs.

The defense team made Ellingsen’s known drug use an issue regarding her competence as a witness, and at one point Petrie, apparently in an effort to counter the defense’s efforts to discredit her, asked her to explain how the use of the drugs affected her mentally and physically.

“It numbs you,” Ellingsen explained. “It doesn’t make you see things that are not there. It doesn’t make you hallucinate…. I know what I saw. I did see…this woman’s body.”

During a police photo lineup, Ellingsen picked Georgina Papin’s photo as the person she had seen dangling from a meat hook inside Pickton’s slaughterhouse. However, she could not provide the precise date that she and Pickton brought Papin from the Downtown Eastside to his farm.

After seven months of testimony, given by nearly one hundred witnesses, the Crown wrapped up and rested its case on Monday, August 13, 2007. Three weeks later, Pickton’s defense team began their effort to prove their client’s innocence by continuing their attack on the credibility of the Crown’s main witnesses. They would take nearly seven weeks to present their side of the case. The defense strategy was simple, yet powerful, and consisted primarily of sowing seeds of doubt on the Crown’s case against Pickton.

Bill Malone, one of Robert Pickton’s friends and business associates, testified that he had witnessed visitors coming and going at Pickton’s farm at all hours of the day and night—nearly nonstop. Those visitors, he said, included friends, employees, complete strangers, and a few thieves, and that due to a lack of security, all of those people had nearly unlimited access to Pickton’s trailer. The inference, of course, was that any number of people could have committed any or all of the crimes for which Pickton had been charged.

The defense team also presented expert witness testimony to refute some of the Crown’s earlier bloodstain evidence. One of the expert witnesses testified that it was his opinion that some of the stains that were previously identified as bloodstains were not even blood, but were, instead, various types of glue. A second expert witness testified that the blood found inside Pickton’s motor home did not make that site one of bloodletting, and that whatever had occurred there had not necessarily been a fatal incident.

All in all, Pickton’s defense team was well-organized and raised many questions leading to a defense of reasonable doubt. For example, if Pickton had actually killed the women, why had he killed them? The Crown had attempted to show that he had killed them because he was angry over having contracted hepatitis C from one of them, but their argument was weak and largely based on the interviews Pickton had with investigators after his arrest. Another important issue raised by the defense was why investigators did not find more DNA evidence that would tie him directly to the crimes—if he had, in fact, killed all of the women he had been charged with killing. After all, RCMP crime labs had received more than six hundred thousand exhibits for testing, and the defense contention was that more conclusive DNA evidence tying Pickton to the murders should have been found if he had killed all these women.

There was also the question of why there had not been more eyewitnesses, besides Lynn Ellingsen, to the actual murders and subsequent butchering of the victims, since there were so many people always coming and going at the farm. Lynn Ellingsen had been the only witness to actually see Pickton in action—and considerable doubt had been cast on her credibility. Had she really seen a woman being butchered? Or had she really seen Pickton butchering an animal, such as a pig? Or had she been so high on crack cocaine that night that she really did not know what she had seen? The defense had done a very good job of tearing apart the Crown’s case against Pickton, which had mostly been a case built on circumstantial evidence.

The defense also had cast considerable doubt on Scott Chubb’s testimony about Pickton, saying that a good way to kill junkies is to inject them with windshield wiper fluid. For starters, it was shown that aside from the windshield wiper fluid found in the syringe inside Pickton’s trailer, no additional windshield wiper fluid was found anywhere on the farm. The defense also presented testimony from a chemist who said that it would take 150 syringes of the type found in Pickton’s trailer filled with windshield wiper fluid to kill a person.

The defense team argued a number of significant points that refuted the Crown’s theory that Robert Pickton lured prostitutes to his farm to kill and dismember them there, including the fact that there was no conclusive evidence that any of the women were ever inside his vehicle; the manner in which the women’s bodies were dismembered was dissimilar to the way Pickton butchered pigs; the guns found on Pickton’s farm could not be conclusively shown to have fired the bullets retrieved from the remains of two of the victims; DNA linking Pickton to the victims’ remains was minimal at best; and investigators were unable to match the saw blades seized from his property to the cuts found on the victims’ partial remains. As the defense closed its case, lawyer Adrian Brooks argued that Robert Pickton was focused on exclusively by the police and prosecutors when there were several other possible suspects that could have been more closely investigated.

“Think about how all the evidence holds together and you will see the Crown has not proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt,” Brooks argued.

Prosecutor Michael Petrie, however, argued that the evidence, taken as a whole, logically pointed to Pickton as the killer. He admitted that many of the Crown’s witnesses were “unsavory,” but he argued that their testimony should not be dismissed or thrown out.

“Let’s have a reality check here,” Petrie said. “This case is about the police finding the remains of six dead human beings, essentially in the accused’s backyard. Could you accept for a moment that someone else snuck onto that farm with a bunch of body parts, bones, personal belongings? And somehow this real murderer got into Mr. Pickton’s trailer and put the personal belongings of these victims there, all without him knowing about it? In my submission you’re not going to entertain that bizarre theory.”

The case was finally handed to the jury on Friday, November 30, 2007, with an admonition from Justice Williams to “keep an open mind, but not an empty head…. Don’t just talk, listen, too.”

Following nine days of deliberations, the jury was unable to convict Pickton of six counts of first-degree murder. Instead, they had found him guilty of six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin, and Marnie Frey.

Prior to sentencing, Justice Williams heard victim impact statements from several relatives of the victims. Mona Wilson’s sister described how Pickton’s actions had totally changed her life, and that she now lived in fear because of how Wilson had been murdered. She said that she had lost considerable weight and had little interest in food now, and that she believed her sister would only rest in peace after Pickton received justice for what he had done.

Andrea Joesbury’s mother described how the loss of a child was one of the most difficult things a parent had to experience. She said that the loss of her daughter had placed her and her family into a never-ending nightmare, and that the case itself had affected her health and her relationships with her family and other people. She said that the “gruesome, gory details” were something out of a horror movie and that such images plagued her. She said that her daughter’s murder had forced her into seclusion, and that she now trusted no one. Stress and isolation, she said, had taken its toll on her, and she had felt suicidal at times. She said that tension and stress and “worrying about my other children fills my days.”

Andrea Joesbury’s grandmother described her family as “small” and “precious,” and said that Andrea had been like her own child because she and her family had often helped Andrea’s mother with Andrea’s care because her mother had been ill a lot. She spoke of beautiful memories she held of Andrea, trips to beaches and parks, and how Andrea liked to dress up as a little girl. She talked of how Andrea wanted to return home, and that “she was ready to come back.”