The Devil's Dozen (32 page)

Several weeks passed without evidence of murder, but then a stinking freezer in a back room intended for storing meat drew the attention of a cop. Heavy items sat on top, so two officers removed them to lift the lid. An even more disgusting stench issued forth when they did this. When they were able, they looked inside. They spotted two buckets lying on their sides, one inserted into the other. One officer reached down to set the top bucket upright. What he saw appeared to be a human head, sliced into two pieces. When the bucket was removed, they found two hands and two feet shoved inside the area where the head was split. Inside the second bucket was another woman’s head, hands, and feet. All items were carefully bagged for the morgue.

These remains would eventually be identified as what was left of Sereena Abotsway and Andrea Joesbury. A pathologist confirmed that the skulls had been partially sawed and then torn apart at the top, as well as shot with a .22-caliber weapon. The saw marks were similar to the treatment noted on a “Jane Doe” skull found in 1995 in a marshy area at a location off the property. This discovery sent a team of searchers to the area.

It was just the beginning. Two months later, a garbage pail near the pigpen yielded the skeletal remains of two hands and two feet, placed inside a severed skull. This was all that was left of Mona Wilson. Like the other two victims, she had been shot in the head. The sifting teams were also productive. With a backhoe and another machine, they had examined many piles of dirt, recovering three teeth and a fragile jawbone, the size of a woman’s. Another human jawbone was in a cistern, linked to Marnie Frey, and from inside a wood chipper were remains that suggested someone had ground up body parts to feed to the pigs or hide in fertilizer. Analysts eventually identified Brenda Wolfe through teeth on the jawbone, and a rib and heel bone matched Jane Doe’s DNA. After dismantling part of the building around the pigpen, searchers looked through rats’ nests and turned up fourteen hand bones, cut with a knife, one of which was linked to Georgina Papin.

With this evidence, the entire farm became a crime scene and more experts from various areas of forensic science arrived to assist. Teams ranged over the entire farm property to look for the most minute pieces of physical evidence—a bone, spots of blood, semen, teeth, hair shafts—for DNA analysis. They had to dig deep for evidence that might have been buried years before.

Over the course of some twenty months, more than 130 anthropologists and anthropology grad students worked with numerous biologists and crime-lab personnel to look for bones, distinguish between human and animal bones, and try to identify the victims. The painstaking effort produced over 600,000 exhibits. Investigators demolished all the farm buildings on the property, sifted 378,000 cubic meters of dirt and mud, and took over 200,000 DNA samples. So far, analysis had identified DNA from thirty women, twenty-seven of whom were on the list of missing women. All the evidence useful for trial was found within a hundred meters of Pickton’s residence and several items identified as victim property had Pickton’s DNA on them. During this time, other investigators questioned witnesses to amass evidence for a trial. Finding human remains was one thing; nailing a killer quite another. The main problem was that the people who could offer significant accounts had drug-hazed memories or questionable characters. Their credibility would be an issue for a jury.

The search was finally concluded in November 2003, and by this time, Pickton was already in preliminary hearings. There was also good evidence related to him, much of which was presented in this closed session. In 1997, he’d been arrested for the attempted murder of a prostitute, but charges were dropped. He was known to entice prostitutes to his farm and had been seen with some of the missing and dead. An associate of his had also told the police what he knew, and the prosecution had a secret tape of Pickton’s conversation with an undercover officer from the RCMP in which he implicated himself. He told his cell mate that the authorities were trying to “bury” him, and he considered it tantamount to a crucifixion. He also stated that his goal had been to kill fifty women, but he’d reached only forty-nine. He bragged that he’d used a rendering plant where he took pig offal to dispose of the bodies, but he’d gotten sloppy with cleanup, which was why he’d been arrested. He mentioned having planned to take a break after fifty and then kill another twenty-five. He said he was “bigger than the Green River [Killer].” He seemed to know he was being videotaped—he even looked at the camera—and not to care.

During the official police interview, however, when asked if he had killed as many as thirty women, Pickton protested, “You’re making me more of a mass murderer than I am!” He admitted, though, that he’d been sloppy in cleaning up after the murders, and he thought that perhaps three women had died in the trailer. He told police that what they had surmised about the death of Mona Wilson, whose blood was found on the mattress, was “close.”

Charged with twenty-seven murders (one of which was later dropped), Pickton pleaded not guilty. Enigmatically, he had hinted that others might be involved.

A confession alone is worth little, especially once a defense attorney gets involved to challenge either how it was gained or the suspect’s competence for giving it. Pickton’s attorney would do both. Thus the prosecution team needed as much direct and circumstantial evidence as possible. Everyone in law enforcement could foresee that getting a conviction in the case was going to be a tough battle.

Because it was too much to ask one jury to consider twenty-six cases, the judge split the indictment between two trials, selecting six cases that appeared to be “materially different” from the others. Yet even laying out these six was expected to take a year, with over two hundred participants. Finally, the stage was set for Robert “Willie” Pickton to be tried for the murders of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Marnie Frey, Georgina Papin, and Brenda Wolfe. All were clearly dead and had been identified via DNA from bones or body parts found on the pig farm.

After a six-month preliminary hearing to determine the admissibility of several key items, the trial got under way in December 2006. With British Columbia Supreme Court judge James Williams presiding, it took only two days to seat the jury and its members were warned that it was going to be a long and sometimes gruesome experience. The press was not allowed to take photos, so artists prepared sketches of Pickton watching the proceedings from inside a specially built box surrounded by bulletproof glass.

In its opening statement, the Crown, represented by Derrill Prevett, Mike Petrie, and five others, presented its case in graphic detail, emphasizing Pickton’s own admissions in two different circumstances. Defense attorney Peter Ritchie, working with Adrian Brooks and Marilyn Sandford, asked the jurors to remain open-minded, assuring them they would see that the case against his client was anything but tight.

The first exhibit was a videotape of Pickton’s eleven-hour interview. He claimed he was just a “plain farm boy” who had nothing to do with the deaths of the women whose remains had been found on his farm. However, the videotape from Pickton’s conversation in the jail cell told a different story. Here, he looked grandiose and eager to take credit for all the murders, going so far as to double the number of victims.

Then experts and investigators took the stand, one after another, to detail their part in the investigation and analysis of evidence. RCMP officer Jack Mellis described the blood evidence from a mattress in Pickton’s mobile home, matched to Mona Wilson, whose head and hands were recovered from the farm grounds six months after she’d gone missing. Two more officers described the grisly remains found in the buckets—Sereena Abotsway and Andrea Joesbury. Yet after sixty witnesses had testified, attorneys for both sides met to try to shorten the proceedings. Since the RCMP forensic lab had processed some 235,000 exhibits, it could take many months to prove chain of custody for each. The defense agreed to stipulate that the remains had been properly handled.

Day in and day out, Pickton’s expression rarely wavered as he stared into space or glanced at a witness. Each day, he put on one of four shirts in his possession and carried a binder for his notes and doodles. His boredom seemed to mirror that of the media as the recounting of scientific evidence droned on. A law professor suggested that the drop in attendance at the trial was due to the lack of a “gripping narrative,” because the victims were drug addicts and prostitutes, and the accused was a bald, aging, uneducated pig farmer.

Yet grisly descriptions still commanded attention. Pickton showed interest—and even appeared to smile—during the analysis of a handheld reciprocating saw allegedly used to bisect three skulls and cut through other human bones. There were cut marks on Brenda Wolfe’s jawbone, as well as several ribs, two heel bones, and several vertebrae that had been collected. Ten of the saw’s forty-five blades came into evidence, only because they could not be eliminated as the blades that had caused the cuts in the bones (but also not definitely tied to them). On a plastic skull, Brian McConaghy, a firearms-and-tool-mark expert, used color-coded dots and lines to demonstrate where the saw had bisected the heads. With Mona Wilson, a cut had split her head from the back, and then bisected her jaw. Three other victims had been treated in the same manner. And while holes indicated a .22-caliber weapon, Pickton had no weapons that matched. He did own a .22, with a dildo pulled over the barrel, but it had not been fired while the dildo was on it. Biological evidence did link it to both Pickton and Mona Wilson.

A forensic entomologist, Dr. Gail Anderson, also testified that the remains of Abotsway and Joesbury had been exposed to the elements from several weeks to several months before being stashed in the freezer where they were found. Insects apparently infiltrated the buckets when the remains were picked up for storage, and their type and stage of development helped to scientifically establish a time frame.

Forensic chemist Tony Fung testified that a substance found in a syringe that came from Pickton’s office was methanol, commonly used in windshield-wiper fluid. An acquaintance of Pickton’s had mentioned his statement about using this type of fluid to kill drug addicts. However, no methanol had shown up in tests on the remains of the victims. Traces of cocaine were found in all the tissue samples, along with methadone and diazepam (Valium), but toxicologist Heather Dinn declined to state for the defense whether the concentration of drugs had been fatal.

Several anthropologists took the stand to describe the examination of tens of thousands of bone fragments from a dirt pile, most of which proved to be from animals, but a few of which were human. Specifically, they found several human toes, a heel, and some rib bones. Another investigator described clumps of human hair, pieces of clothing belonging to the victims, and a condom.

After seventy-eight witnesses, the forensic stage of the proceedings briefly gave way to the “human face,” with no challenge from the defense. A twenty-four-page booklet, made for the court, described all six victims, but testimony was notably spare, as their relatives had not been called.

Elaine Allen, employed at Women’s Information Safe House (WISH) drop-in center, had known five of the six victims and told the jury about them: how Andrea spoke softly, and Georgina was charming and outspoken; how the opinionated Sereena was often beat up and showed numerous tracks on her body from drug use, while Mona had a demanding boyfriend who sent her out to make money. Andrea, she said, had been the best-behaved client she’d ever dealt with, both polite and aware of the needs of others. She often spoke quietly about her difficult life.

Others who had known these women before they disappeared also testified. One had run a focus group attended by women from the streets, and the jury learned that in some cases, the women worked as prostitutes to feed their children, because welfare payments were insufficient. Another witness was a friend of Georgina Papin, and she described how they had spent time baking and playing cards together, but Georgina fell back into drug use and was soon gone. Then a former prostitute and drug dealer told about her friend Brenda Wolfe, who vanished in the spring of 2000. This mother of two had requested government assistance for food because she’d spent what little money she had to make Christmas good for her kids. Brenda had deteriorated to the point of not bathing or washing her clothes, and had lost fifty pounds.

The next stage involved what Pickton might have done with the women after they died. Jim Cress, a driver for a Vancouver rendering company, described how he had picked up between two and five forty-five-gallon barrels of pork offal and burnt meat chunks from the Pickton farm to take to West Coast Reduction. Before 2002, customers could dump stuff at the plant themselves, unsupervised, and Cress had seen Pickton there. While this testimony was suggestive, given the statement Pickton made about victim disposal, it was proof of nothing—just one more circumstance.

The following day, Yolanda Dyck took the stand to say she had seen Pickton in Vancouver talking with victim Sereena Abotsway. She remembered the event because he was wearing rubber boots on a summer day. However, her memory proved inconsistent: she’d been unable to ID either the victim or the accused from photos.

More interesting was Gina Houston, a friend of Pickton’s for over ten years (and a woman he’d wanted to marry), who said he’d admitted to her he knew about several bodies on the farm grounds and was pondering suicide. This conversation occurred two days before he was arrested, while police were searching the farm. Pickton estimated that there were six bodies in the “piggery,” behind the barn, and he seemed to think that Houston should kill herself with him. She believed he was trying to implicate her, although she was unsure why. Still, he stated that he was to blame “for everything.” Yet when she asked him if he had killed any of the woman, he denied it and suggested that a woman named Dinah Taylor was responsible for “three or four.” (DNA performed on items taken from Pickton’s trailer did link Taylor with several victims.)