March 11, 2004. A Canadian family in Vancouver
have just finished a delicious dinner of pork loin wrapped in smoked bacon when a provincial
health official appears on the TV and announces some very worrying news: That meal they’ve
just wolfed down might have had a secret ingredient: the flesh and guts of numerous murdered women…
meat that may make them seriously ill. When they heard that news, one of Canada’s
most prolific and demented serial killers was in custody, no thanks to the Canadian
cops, who seemed to have allowed this guy to keep on killing.
Did they? That’s doubtful, but what’s not doubtful
is that this is one of the most disturbing, perplexing, and nauseating serial killer cases
in history, a story that may still contain some extremely dark secrets.
Robert Pickton was a meat lover. His entire life was centered around meat, almost from
the day he was born. It seems he couldn’t get enough of the stuff, and he certainly
wasn’t too picky about where it came from. Born on October 24, 1949, Pickton cut his
teeth on the family pig farm 17 miles (27 km) east of downtown Vancouver. As with many
serial killers, his childhood was far from pleasant. To understand the extremely revolting
things you’ll hear in this show, you need to know what shaped this madman. He wasn’t
always a monster. Little Robert, or “Willy” as he was un-affectionately known, was molded
into a beast by perhaps the worst parents a boy could have.
Willy and his brother David grew up on the farm, while their sister, Linda, was sent
away when she was young. Her parents said the farm life wasn’t suited for the young
girl. They were absolutely right. This story is about Willy, but bear in mind as we tell
you this tale that his siblings may also have embraced a dark streak.
Willy and David slaved away on the pig farm from a very young age. Their father, Leonard,
born in England in 1896, was a violent man. He ignored the kids as much as possible, interacting
with them only to dish out the occasional physical and psychological abuse.
Leonard was not a nice man, evident in one story that Willy would tell police many years
later, about the time when he was 12 and bought a three-week-old calf. He liked that calf
and made it his pet, then one day, when he came home from school, it wasn’t there.
He asked his dad about it and was told, “Oh, it must have got out.” Willy replied, “How
can it get out the door?” His father remained silent. Willy ran to the
barn, where he found his half-butchered pet hanging from a meat hook. He told his mother,
Louise, “I was going to keep that calf for the rest of my life, and now it’s gone.”
Crying, he told her, “I was going to sleep with it.”
He loved that calf, which was now a butchered piece of meat. Somewhere in this kid’s mind,
the trauma he experienced had connected love and violence, affection and slaughter. He
would tell this story later in his life as if that pet calf was the most important thing
that ever happened to him. He explained to detectives that losing his beloved calf made
him realize from a young age, “Life goes around and around…You’re only here today;
you’re not here tomorrow.” You should keep these details in mind since
Willy’s actions later in life are still a matter of debate. His childhood might hold
the keys to what is a very murky mystery. Unsurprisingly, the kids stayed away from
the father, but their mother, Louise, born in Alberta in 1912, was also the embodiment
of parental mismanagement. This gruesome guardian was loud, controlling, and obnoxious. She
didn’t look too good for her age, her balding head usually covered by a scarf, hairs sprouting
out of her chin, and her mouth containing just a few rotten teeth. She wouldn’t have
looked or sounded out of place in the movie, Deliverance.
She called Willy slow, a boy she believed was not quite right in the head, blaming the
fact when he was born, his umbilical cord had wrapped around his neck and cut off his
oxygen. All she ever seemed to do was shout at him. She was often heard screaming, “Git
over here, NOW!” And he always came running. She worked both kids like coal miners. Up
at dawn every day to slop out the pig feces. Two hundred pigs, plus the eight cows the
kids had to slop out and milk in the mornings. Both kids stank like something rotten since
Louise never taught them the importance of regular bathing. Willy was taunted in school
for that. The other kids at Millside Elementary named him “Stinky Piggy.”
And when he got home, he was faced with more hard work, often witness to the slaughtering
of livestock. Death was always around him, but blood and guts didn’t bother young Willy.
When the adults were angry at him, he’d sometimes go and hide under the gutted pig
carcasses. Forevermore, death, blood, and viscera would, for Willy, be associated with
safety. The Picktons were very well known in their
town, Port Coquitlam (population 50,000), for having one of the biggest pig farms and
slaughterhouses in the area. If you wanted pork, “L. F. Pickton Ranch Poultry and Pigs”
was the place to go. When people visited, they’d see the feral, unwashed kids running
around a house that always seemed on the verge of collapse. This, they couldn’t understand.
Everyone knew the Picktons had money from selling land. It was as if they enjoyed living
in abject filth. Pigs, chickens, ducks, dogs, and the occasional
cow, wandered around the house, leaving dirt and excrement behind. A farmer who lived nearby
later recalled, “It was just one shack after another, made up of scraps of lumber. I didn’t
go down there. It was so repulsive.” Willy, who had a good memory despite his low
IQ, later recalled how when he was two, there was no running water in the house. At that
time, his bedroom was a converted chicken coop, where he could lift a floorboard under
his bed and get cold water from the spring below.
Despite the obvious maltreatment, Louise said she loved Willy dearly. She protected him
from his father. She doted on him when she wasn’t treating him like a slave, feeling
sorry for her boy who was put into the “special education” class at school due to low grades
and the fact he looked and smelled like an animal and didn’t talk like the other kids
who wore nice clothes. Many of those kids were the children of doctors who worked at
the local Essondale Mental Hospital. One of them, many years later, admitted, “We were
all terrible to the Picktons, especially to Robert.”
No one liked Stinky Willy in school, so he was surprised one day when a girl named Lisa
started being nice to him. Willy was working in the store his family had on Shaughnessy
Street in Port Coquitlam, a shop they named the Meat Locker. That day he stared at Lisa,
her face slightly unique as her mother was Chinese and her father Caucasian. She smiled
back at him. The smell didn’t repulse her, so he gave her a free hotdog.
Many years later, he’d meet Lisa again. They’d become good friends; she was probably
his only friend. Lisa would also hold some of those keys we’ve talked about that may
solve the mystery of Willy. More about her later.
Rather than waste his time at school, Louise pulled him out when he was 14. He continued
working at the farm and also worked as a butcher, slaving away in the back cutting meat all
day. Willy became very skilled at this. One of the pivotal moments in his life came
when his brother David was 16 and learning to drive. For whatever reason, David somehow
didn’t see a kid walking down the road. The kid was 14-year-old Tim Barrett, who was
hit so hard the truck was badly bashed up. It seemed as if David had not even slowed
down or braked. Instead of doing the right thing and telling
the cops, David sped off and went to tell his mother. She raced out to the accident
scene, looked at the kid, who she thought was obviously dead, and rolled him into a
water-filled ditch about 10 yards from the road. This had a big impact on David and Willy,
who already had a warped sense of right and wrong.
Tim’s parents, Phillip and Lois Barrett reported their son missing. His body was found
the next day. The disturbing thing about this is the autopsy revealed he’d died from drowning,
not the injuries sustained when he was hit, although there were significant head injuries
and a fractured pelvis. Even so, the pathologist said those injuries would not have killed
Tim. Louise was now a killer. David was an accessory, and Willy learned a thing or two
about ethics and accountability. David and his mom were both exposed in the
investigation due to a mechanic telling police he’d fixed the Pickton’s truck. But in
the end, Louise wasn’t charged with the crime, and David only got four years’ probation
after being sentenced at a juvenile court. Many years later, Willy would tell this story
about how his mother pretty much got away with murder.
In 1978, Willy’s father, Leonard, passed away at the age of 91, the same year that
a fire at the farm killed hundreds of pigs. Then a year later, Louise also passed away.
The kids, including the sister, inherited the land, land that was worth a substantial
amount of money. They also each received about $90,000, around $380,000 in today’s money.
This was small change, though. The farm and its land were now worth close to $1 million
($4.2 million today). Willy, who was 20, was suddenly rich, but
he remained at the farm as his mother had requested in her will. Now all the animals
were his. He still barely took care of the place and never really got into the old hygiene
thing, but he made some changes. One of those changes was taking care of the animals he
loved. When his favorite horse Goldie died, he decapitated it and took the head to a taxidermist.
Goldie’s stuffed head was still on his bedroom wall years later when the horrors of the Pickton
farm came to light. Willy had never had a girlfriend. The girl
in his family’s meat shop, Lisa, was about the closest he’d come to falling in love,
the puppy kind, at least. Willy was aware that girls were disgusted by him, the pig
boy who smelled like feces. So, he found pen pals. Pen pals didn’t know what he looked
or smelled like. Just prior to his parents dying, the teenager
Willy fell for Connie Anderson, a girl he was writing to in Pontiac, Michigan, USA.
He took a few long road trips to the US, where he called on pen pals in Chicago, Kansas City,
and St. Louis. But it was with Connie, a rather heavyset girl, that he found true love. The
two were both oddballs and not popular among their peers. They didn’t bother with bars
and restaurants. They just drove around all the time. Willy spent five weeks with her,
and they later got engaged, despite never sleeping with each other. The only thing Willy
had slept with until then was pigs, pigs he sometimes had to slaughter. He seemed to have
trouble differentiating women from swine, which may have been why he and Connie never
reached third base. Fourth base with Willy usually meant the meat grinder…
One night he told her he couldn’t leave the farm forever. He had to go. Years later,
he told police, “She was supposed to come up, but she never did.” Neither did he ever
go back to Pontiac. “Well, that’s life,” Willy told interrogators decades later.
Life comes around and goes around, and in between, for Willy, at least, there’s a
fair amount of bloodshed and pain. He was almost ready, primed to kill, to become a
slaughterer and meat man who would shock the world.
Back at the farm, Willy did something unexpected. He opened the place up to the Hell’s Angels
gang that hung around the area. From then on, there were wild parties at the farm. The
bikers turned some of it into a chop shop and held cock fights in the barns. For them,
Willy was just a weirdo sitting on a lot of money. As long as he let them party, they
were good to him. They called the place Piggy Palace, always dumfounded by Willy’s relationship
with his pigs, especially his 600-pound boar that would run wild around the place. They
called Willy “weird” and “slow.” They laughed at him behind his back, but they sure
did appreciate the use of his place. It was through the bikers and the parties
that Willy met many women, women who worked the streets of the most rundown areas of Vancouver.
They partied with the bikers, often given the substances that got them through their
day. Willy was equally as kind. Well, he seemed kind at first...
In the daytime, Willy would take his meat to West Coast Reduction rendering facility,
where the non-edible parts would be rendered into grease to make soap, candy, and cosmetics.
Some of it was turned into pet food. Unbeknownst to the facility, it might have been part-human...
At night time, the parties would get louder and louder. This was kind of legal. In 1996,
Willy and David registered a non-profit organization they named “Piggy Palace Good Times Society,”
stating that it was for “special events, functions, dances, shows, and exhibitions.”
It was more like a rave organization, in which the brothers used a converted building at
the pig farm for hundreds of people to party in, including a regular cast of Downtown Vancouver’s
Eastside prostitutes. One of the parties drew in 1,800 people. Young folks danced away the
night, oblivious to the danger they were in. It was fertile ground for a serial killer.
The brothers fell foul of the law a few times, sometimes for violating city zoning ordinances,
other times for holding parties with too many people, and for not writing up mandatory financial
statements. But Willy didn’t cross onto the radar of cops for his more violent proclivities
until 1997 after he stabbed a prostitute named Wendy Lynn Eistetter. Willy was now 48. This
woman was certainly not the first that Willy hurt, but this was the first time he got caught.
He was sloppy. Her experience tells us something about how Willy worked.
He picked Wendy up on the street in Eastern Downtown Vancouver and offered her $100. She
became suspicious when she saw a bra in his van, but she went to his house, which she
called a “pigsty.” She later said something didn’t feel right. She explained, “I asked
him for a telephone book, and he showed me a telephone book. And I was leaning over the
desk looking up a phone number, and I could feel… feel him behind me.” The next thing
she knew, there was a handcuff on her arm. But she fought him, managing to pick up a
knife, stabbing him near his throat. He screamed, “You BLEEP, you got me good.” He subsequently
picked up a knife and stabbed her in the abdomen. The next thing she knew, they were outside
fighting near his truck. He had her in his arms as she pleaded, “I have a family. I’ll
give you $1,000 if you let me go.” She said he suddenly became heavy against her body,
as if he was passing out from blood loss. She ran for it, leaving him staggering in
the driveway. She was picked up on the highway at 1.45 am, seen by the driver Brian Strilesky
and his girlfriend. She was handcuffed, covered in blood, and holding a knife, quite a frightening
sight for the couple. The last thing Wendy remembers saying to them was, “In case I
die, tell them that I stabbed him in the neck.” She didn’t die. Willy was charged with attempted
murder and released on a $2,000 bond after telling the cops she’d tried to steal from
him and had gone “bananas” in the process. A few months later, the case was dismissed,
which was not unusual for cases involving so-called women of the night. The cops later
had to explain this to a disgruntled public, and they admitted they dropped the case because
such women with addiction problems didn’t make good witnesses. This would come back
to bite the Canadian police big time. Many prostitutes went to the farm. They often
knew something dark lurked among the piles of animal excrement and broken shacks. They’d
heard about weird Willy, who mostly kept a low profile at the parties. It was common
knowledge among the sex workers that Piggy Palace was a dangerous place, but they went
there anyway, knowing the booze and whatever else often came free, or, at least, for ‘favors.’
When they arrived there for the first time, they were greeted by a sign at the farm entrance
that read, “This property protected by pit bull with Aids.” Willy couldn’t even get
the English right. One woman who went there one time later said,
“That farm was the dregs of the earth. It was a hellhole.” She said women went anyway,
just for what was on offer. She said the cops always knew about what went on there, but
they left the place alone for some reason. They could have shut it down whenever they
wanted, but they didn’t. Many women who survived that farm still wonder why.
In the 1980s and 1990s, scores of women went missing in Vancouver, many of whom worked
the streets at night. Such women have been called the “less dead,” meaning when they
die, no one cares about them. In the eyes of society, they hardly existed when they
were alive, and when they went missing, they still barely existed. They were less dead
in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of conventional society, despite their vulnerability
and hardships. After all, they hung out on the Eastside of
Downtown, a place known as “Low Track” and Canada’s “Skid Row.” This ten block
section of the city was an absolute wasteland, where the sidewalks were covered with the
rubber and spiked jetsam the women and addicts had dumped in the night. Pimps strolled around
among the many liquor stores and pawn shops. Biker gangs and Asian cartels openly flaunted
their wares. Oddballs like Willy were invisible in this civic failure.
Within those ten blocks were the highest rates of HIV infection in the whole of North America.
Young runaways, sometimes referred to as Twinkies, would often end up there. It was the last
stop on the line of a broken life for many, the plughole of society that sucked in the
tormented and traumatized. No gutter was deeper and dirtier than the Eastside of Downtown.
These mean streets were a neglected and rejected gaping wound oozing human puss that presented
some troubling questions about modern Western society, and because of Willy and his victims,
soon those questions would have to be confronted. The women talked among themselves about this
girl or that girl who went out for a job and never returned. The pimps started to wonder
what was going on when this happened time and again. We are not talking about a handful
of women here; we are talking about dozens of women over the years. One of them was Rebecca Guno, who, on a hot
summer’s day in 1983, vanished from the Downtown Eastside, never to be seen again.
By the time Vancouver's World Fair happened in 1986, aka Expo '86, more women had gone
missing, some of them last seen at the intersection of Main and Hastings, the bottom of rock bottom.
A face often seen lurking around that intersection was Willy Pickton, the weird guy who held
those huge parties at his rundown farm. 43-year-old Sherry Rail went missing, followed
by thirty-three-year-old Elaine Auerbach, who’d told her buddies she was moving to
Seattle but never arrived. Then there was Teressa Ann Williams, a 26-year-old Aboriginal
woman, who went missing in July 1988, but was only reported missing in March 1989.
There was a hiatus of over a year until a 40-year-old psychiatric patient named Ingrid
Soet vanished. In 1992, 39-year-old Kathleen Wattley went missing. There was another break,
and three years later, 47-year-old Catherine Gonzales vanished into thin air. She wasn’t
reported missing until February 9, 1996. It took seven months for 32-year-old Catherine
Knight to be reported missing, who disappeared shortly before Dorothy Spence, a 36-year-old
Aboriginal woman. That Christmas, 23-year-old Diana Melnick also vanished.
The youngest victim at the time was Stephanie Lee, a 20-year woman who vanished after being
treated for psychosis. Tanya Holyk was just 24, and Olivia Williams was just 22 when they
disappeared around the same time. Unbelievably, a woman named Janet Henry had survived a close
call in the 80s with a serial killer named Clifford Olson, and on June 28, 1997, she
also disappeared. After a twenty-nine-year-old black woman named Sarah Jane deVries vanished
in 1998, police found her diary. In it, she’d written, “I feel like I’ve come a long
way on my journey, I feel like I’ve overcome a lot of stuff.”
Inspector Kim Rossmo of the Vancouver Police figured around 40 women had gone missing,
most of them from the Downtown Eastside. Even so, police still weren’t sure the many missing
women had been murdered. Rossmo employed new geographic profiling techniques, but despite
the high number of deaths, the case never became a major murder investigation. It was
believed such women often go missing and then turn up in some place like LA or Vegas.
The cops were very wrong, but they didn’t even have one body at this point. They had
no forensic evidence. It didn’t help matters that some of the sex workers and the gangs
and pimps were reluctant to speak with them, for good reason, of course. The police then
went to the families of some of the missing women in an attempt to attain their DNA. They
entered the DNA into databases for North America, trying to match it with the DNA of Jane Doe’s
from Alberta to Arizona. They checked hospitals, mental health facilities, drug rehabilitation
facilities, and witness protection programs, and they came up empty-handed. These women
really had vanished off the face of the planet. And as the years passed, 97, 98, 99, more
women disappeared. Julie Young, age 31, Angela Jardine, 28, Michelle Gurney, 30, Marcella
Creison, 20. The latter was released from jail on December 27, 1998, and was not seen
after. Her mother and boyfriend waited for her at their apartment, where they’d cooked
her a belated Christmas feast. Some men were questioned, men who had a history
of violence, but none of them, it seemed, had anything to do with the disappearances.
The cops checked the Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society’s “bad date” file,
where women had filled many pages regarding men to avoid. Willy’s name wasn’t on that
list, mostly because if you met him, you were dead.
One thing the Police should have done is listen to 37-year-old Bill Hiscox. This widower had
almost lost his life through alcohol after his wife passed, but his sister saved him
when she helped him land a job at P&B Salvage in Surrey, southeast of Vancouver. The owners
of this firm were Robert William “Willy” Pickton and David Pickton. When Hiscox collected
his weekly paychecks, he had to go to the Port Coquitlam pig farm, which he later described
as “a creepy-looking place” where the equally creepy and quiet Willy Pickton parked
his beloved “converted bus (van) with deeply tinted windows.”
But what bothered Hiscox was the wild parties and the fact so many sex workers turned up
there. He’d read about the missing women in the newspapers, and then when he heard
about Willy’s stabbing charge, he thought about something else: what he told a police
hotline were “all the purses and IDs that are out there in his trailer and stuff.”
Hiscox first gave that information to the hotline anonymously, but later he met with
a detective, a man we’ll discuss in detail later. That detective told him that he’d
push the investigation “all the way to the top” of the police force, but after that
cop was transferred off the case, the brothers were filed as “persons of interest” and
left alone. The farm was not surveilled, which was a God-awful
pity because Willy took a lot more women there in the 90s. In fact, cops were now pulling
up more names of missing women. There must have been over 50. Even so, it seemed at times
like the Vancouver Sun newspaper cared more about those women than the police. The cops
were still unwilling to call this a serial murder case. If it were, it would have been
the worst serial killing case in Canada’s history.
It took police until 2001 to finally form the Missing Women Task Force. By now, they
had 54 missing women, possibly as many as 70, who’d all disappeared from the same
area in the 80s and 90s. And so, 18 years too late, Canada's largest murder investigation
began. Even so, they still issued a statement to the public saying, “We're in no way saying
there is a serial murderer out there. We're in no way saying that all these people missing
are dead.” It seemed to many people at the time, especially the women still working the
streets, that the cops didn’t want to admit they’d allowed a serial killer to remain
loose for almost two decades. The Pickton men’s names stood out, both
of whom had a rap sheet. They then looked at a 1998 report, when Bill Hiscox had phoned
Crime Stoppers about the farm. 14 more women had gone missing since then. Police noted
that Hiscox had accused Willy of being a “sicko.” He’d told them in ’98 about those ten
purses that he’d seen with his own eyes, and he’d explained that Willy had once bragged
about being able to “easily dispose of bodies.” He’d explained that a friend of Willy’s,
the mixed-race Chinese-Caucasian woman named Lisa Yelds, had told him that she’d seen
women’s bloody clothing at the farm, as well as various women’s belongings. This
was free-hotdog Lisa from Willy’s childhood. She suggested to Hiscox that the belongings
might be Willy’s “trophies.” Even worse, Hiscox heard that Willy got rid of these women
with his meat grinder and possibly sold on the meat to the public.
That might have sounded too much like a tall story to cops back in ’98, but in 2001,
they realized they should look into this again. It wasn’t until 2002 that there was a breakthrough,
and even that was accidental. A rookie police officer was the first policeman to find something
notable on the farm. It seems the homicide detectives were still stalling, but this rookie
cop got a warrant to search the farm for illegal guns, not pieces of ground women.
He found the guns, but he also found a bunch of personal items belonging to women, including
an asthma inhaler on which was printed the name of one of the missing women. So, it was
this young cop who wasn’t even on the murder case that was the cause of the subsequent
forensic search of the entire farm, a farm, by the way, that was worth about $70 million.
Why this guy lived in such squalor, police just couldn’t fathom.
What they eventually found at the farm were the remains of at least 27 women, parts of
them in the freezers, and lots of them mulched up into pig feed. Worse, it seemed to cops
that Willy had used human flesh and whatever other parts for pork products. Even so, it
wasn’t until 2004 that officials appeared on TV warning Canadians that they might well
have become unwitting cannibals. Don’t worry, said one official, explaining that they would
probably not get sick from it and they’d only possibly contract hepatitis B if they
hadn’t cooked the pork well enough. Given the size of Willy’s operation, there
were a lot of sick Canadians for a few weeks after that announcement, especially when the
Canadian government ordered a federal health-risk assessment study to understand if people who
ate the part-human meat could have come into contact with viruses, bacteria, and parasites,
or contracted diseases such as HIV and hepatitis. Both these diseases were very common in Vancouver
among the highly stigmatized prostitutes. They concluded the risk was “low to medium,”
but that didn’t make people feel much better. Willy had been murdering and selling meat
products for 20 years, so God knows how many people were reluctant cannibals if he had
put his victims into his products. It was a great time to be vegetarian in the Vancouver
area. People asked how the hell police had let this
go on for so long. They heard about Hiscox and the fact many women had died after he’d
told police what he knew. Maggy Gisle, known on the streets as Crazy Jackie, told the press
27 of her buddies were confirmed murdered, and over 50 were missing. She added, “There
are many more that the police won't add to the list. Whole buildings of women have disappeared,
but no one is looking for them.” Many of the victims weren’t white, which led to
accusations of racism and sexism. One thing was for certain, those women were less-dead
in the eyes of the cops. Let’s now talk about Willy’s interrogation.
At the station, Willy is quiet, giving one or two-word answers to questions, only to
explode with vivid descriptions of his past when he starts to talk about his dead calf
or about how his father was harsh with him. To his interrogators, he seems a few sandwiches
short of a picnic, as the saying goes. Willy refers to himself as the “Pig Man,” seemingly
impressed when telling investigators repeatedly that his face is in the newspapers.
At one point, he stares at the posterboard with pictures of dozens of missing women he’s
supposedly murdered and churned up. After being asked about them, he turns to Sergeant
Bill Fordy and says, “There’s so many millions of people out there; they look so
much, so much alike and everything else you know.” Then he starts talking about how
he was once mauled by a bull and another time chased by a black bear.
Instead of discussing the case, he explains to the bemused cops, “That was a scary feeling
that one,” referring to the bull attack. “Turn the other hoof, and if your arm’s
out there, rip your arm right off.” Talking about once trying to split two boars up when
fighting over a sow in heat, he excitedly explains, “I got in between ’em, and then
they went after me…Got all slashed up.” What on Earth did the police have on their
hands here? “Those are the good old days,” Willy says,
“Those are the days when I could say I got scars and really enjoyed myself . . . all
black and blue.” Detective Fordy cuts in. “You do know you are never going back to
that farm or that life?” Willy then says there’s nothing he likes about the farm,
anyway. Meanwhile, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
was saying that in the last two decades, 144 prostitutes have been murdered or are missing
in British Columbia, with foul play suspected. Soon Vancouver will be sued for not doing
their job. Families of victims will come forward to reprimand the cops, who certainly wouldn't
have acted in the same fashion had scores of middle-class women had gone missing.
The farm was fenced off as forensics did their job. It was thought many of the bodies had
already been eaten or were possibly sitting in someone’s freezer somewhere, in parts
anyway. In Willy’s house, they found what looked like instruments of torture, kinky
devices, and syringes filled with liquid. They found parts of a woman in a wood chipper.
It seemed that Willy had strangled most of them, possibly after knocking them out with
a substance, maybe windshield cleaner, after which he slaughtered them the same way he
did his pigs. According to court transcripts, he told an undercover police officer, “I
filled the syringes up with antifreeze, and you inject the stuff, and you’re dead in
about five to 10 minutes.” He’d likely also shot some of the victims,
and many of them had their bones cut with Willy’s handheld reciprocating saw. But
many of the women, the very last shreds of them, were missing completely, leading some
people to question if slow Willy was being set up.
Canadian news outlets did not discuss the very worst details. AP issued a report, asking
“anyone who may still have frozen pork products from Pickton's farm to return those products
to the police.” More shock followed when a woman named Lynn Ellingsen came forward
and said she’d once seen Willy skinning a woman hanging from a meat hook.
She was blackmailed by Willy and didn’t say anything anyway out of fear for her life.
But her friend had at the time tipped off the police. This friend told them that Willy
made “strange meat,” and he explained in detail how Ellingsen had seen Willy strip
a body down. She’d told him she was surprised when she saw that human fat was yellow, not
white. This testimony sounded like the real thing.
Detective Constable Lorimer Shenher was the one who took that tip and the one who’d
first dealt with Hiscox in 1998, but he said as much as he wanted to search the farm, he
couldn’t because it fell under the jurisdiction of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They
apparently talked with Ellingsen on two occasions, but each time she remained silent.
Shenher later said the RCMP visited the farm but were told to come back when Willy and
David weren’t so busy. For whatever reason, they actually did that. They interviewed Willy
again, and he told them they could search the farm, but according to Shenher, they never
even returned. God knows why. This investigation was botched with a capital B. Shenher said
he had nightmares because of those missing women, and later, he had to be taken off the
case due to PTSD. This also slowed the investigation down, as Shenher was onto Willy more than
anyone else was. In total, there were more than 40,000 photos
taken of the crime scene. 235,000 items were taken from the farm, while the lab received
a massive 600,000 exhibits. For the prosecution, ninety-eight testified, and another thirty
testified for the defense. It was a long and gruesome trial.
Willy admitted to killing 49 women, but not at trial. He’d told an undercover officer
while in custody that he’d wanted to make it 50. He was charged with killing 26 and
convicted of just six murders. He was found innocent of first-degree murder but guilty
of second-degree murder, likely because the jury didn’t think the prosecution had proved
beyond any reasonable doubt that he’d planned the murders.
The Deputy Chief Constable of the Vancouver Police Department apologized, saying in a
statement, “I wish from the bottom of my heart that we would have caught him sooner…I
wish that all the mistakes that were made, we could undo. And I wish that more lives
would have been saved.” More people came forward to say they knew
Willy. Some had survived the usually deadly encounter with him.
In 1985, he picked out a sex worker named Tracy Bunyan. He took her back to his disgusting
trailer, which she immediately saw was stacked with women’s clothes. Willy physically hurt
her but then drove her back to the city, warning her on the way that he was giving her “one
more chance” to clean up her act or she was getting it like the others. His belief
that he was helping women was just an excuse to justify his perverted, murderous acts.
There were other survivors, such as Lenore (not her real name), a self-described “hardcore
alcoholic” who was in and out of foster homes all her childhood, experiencing the
most horrific of existences a child could have. She said Willy picked her up in a white
van, but when she saw the rear seats had been removed, she knew something was wrong. She
asked him to stop the car, but he kept driving, and in the end, she had to jump out. She later
saw Willy’s face in the newspaper. In 2007, Judge Justice James Williams sentenced
Willy to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole after 25 years, meaning his parole
date is coming up soon in 2035. Willy is 73 now, currently serving out his sentence at
Port-Cartier maximum security prison in Quebec, where he still claims his innocence.
In 2008, David Pickton and Linda Wright sued the attorney general and solicitor general
of British Columbia. They said the police destroyed much of the farm in their search,
saying they “disturbed, disrupted, killed and destroyed various plants, trees, groundcovers
and other vegetation.” They’ve been pretty quiet about their brother, which isn’t surprising,
given that four children of four victims have sued them, saying they knew all along what
their brother was doing on that farm. Many serious allegations have been made against
David over the years, but he’s denied everything and filed statements of defense.
In 2016, the book Willy wrote in prison titled “Pickton: In His Own Words” was published
after the manuscript was smuggled out of the prison. The book was soon withdrawn due to
the public outcry. In the book, he claimed the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police made him a fall guy for the murders. He stated that some of the body parts
found on his farm were in cars he’d bought at a police auction and that some women were
killed by the Hell’s Angels when he held those parties. He even claimed that the blood
of one victim that police found on a mattress was nothing but spilled wallpaper glue.
Before the book was taken down, a reviewer said it was “incoherent, illiterate ranting,”
while another reviewer said. “It is tedious and boring drivel filled with tirades against
the police, asinine theories about the Hell’s Angels.”
Nothing Willy says in the book sounds remotely true, but he has some conspiracy theorists
on his side. They have asked why did the Vancouver cops not investigate the case for so long,
even when they’d been told about the women’s purses and a “sicko” who stripped the
flesh of a woman? Why wasn’t the farm at least put under police surveillance? If he
murdered 49, or even 26, they say it’s strange that even with the most advanced forensics
equipment, they could only convict Willy of six murders.
Willy himself managed to write to people from prison. In one of the letters, letters filled
with umpteen spelling mistakes, he said, “I my-self is not from this world, but I am born
into this world through my earthly mother and if I had to change any-thing I would not,
for I have done no wrong.” He also kept writing to the Canadian media,
making cryptic claims that there was more to the story than everyone knew. Still, he
never managed to convince anyone he was innocent. Willy was also a compulsive liar. He once
told a cellmate that as a killer, he was “bigger than the ones in the States,” likely in
reference to the likes of serial killers John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy. This might have been
one time he’d told the truth. Now you need to watch “How These Sneaky
Serial Killers Finally Got Caught.” Or, take a deep dive into “How Insanely Creative
Prisoners Escaped From Maximum Security Prison.”
