[music playing] NARRATOR: March 22nd, 1997. Downtown Eastside
Vancouver, Canada. Her street name was Stitch. She was working the corner of
Cordova and Princess Avenue. A 31-year-old mother of two,
with a serious drug habit. Selling her body was the
quickest way to the next high. LORI CULBERT: They
were doing the best they could with
the circumstances in their lives at the time. NARRATOR: An old pickup
truck approached. The driver flashed some
cash, and Stitch got in. GEOFFREY WANSELL: A
straightforward transaction. Barter. Money for sex. NARRATOR: The driver
was 47-year-old Robert Willy Pickton who drove Stitch
17 miles East to his pig farm. LORIMER SHENHER:
Her gut instinct was just telling her don't go. Don't go out there. NARRATOR: They had sex
in his filthy trailer, then Stitch asked if
she could use the phone. GEOFFREY WANSELL:
He attacks her. He puts a handcuff
around her left wrist and stabs are in the abdomen. She's spirited and
she fights back. A proper fight ensues. She's stabbed. He's stabbed. Blood is all over the trailer. NARRATOR: Stitch escaped
with four stab wounds. She was critically
injured, but alive. Pickton had been sloppy. This one had got away. Over the next five years,
at least 49 other women wouldn't be so lucky. Making Robert Pickton one of
the world's most evil killers. [theme music] 1990s Port Coquitlam Vancouver. Robert Willy Pickton had
spent his entire life living and working on
the family pig farm. This is a man who is not
integrated into society. He's a man who lives in
a trailer in the midst of his farm who is trained
as a butcher who, in a way, rejects society. NARRATOR: His only
sexual outlet was with women working the streets
of Downtown Eastside Vancouver. Women who sold sex for survival. KIM ROSSMO: The kind of
dynamics of the drug addiction and the poverty, and then
the risky nature of some of their customers made them
more vulnerable to violence either from single individuals
or serial predators. NARRATOR: Pickton was
one of those predators who hunted women relentlessly. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
Pickton was targeting sex workers because sex
workers are easy to access. They're going to readily
get into your car. They are going to readily
go somewhere with you. They are there to be treated
how you want to treat them. They are worthless, you know. They are less than human. NARRATOR: The pig farm
gave him the perfect cover for his depravity. Women would disappear and
hardly anyone noticed. LORI CULBERT: For society
to allow that to continue for at least a decade
unfettered at this farm that was surrounded by dozens of
houses, it's mind boggling. And it's awful. NARRATOR: This killer
story begins in 1949. Robert Willy Pickton
was born on October 24 to Leonard and Helen Louise,
a family of pig farmers in Port Coquitlam on the
outskirts of Vancouver. He was one of three children. He was the elder
of two brothers. They had an elder sister called
Linda who'd been sent away. And they didn't
think a girl should be brought up on a pig farm. And so Linda is
dispatched to Vancouver, which is about 17 miles away. The boys are brought
up on the farm. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
Pickton's mother was very much a workaholic. She was a very
industrious woman. And this had a significant
impact on her children because they had to work
in this family business. So the children didn't
really get much of a chance to be children, to
be carefree, to run around and play with their
friends and that kind of thing. GEOFFREY WANSELL: She was the
decisive force in the family. Leonard was more remote. Some said he was
abusive to the boys. I think he was probably just a
Victorian father, in a rather old-fashioned sense. The boys were really less
important to their mother than the pigs. They were certainly not
treated particularly well. LORI CULBERT: There
was some suggestion that he was always striving
for approval from his parents and from his brother, and that
he was a fairly weak young boy with not a lot of confidence. He struggled in school. He struggled to make friends. And he very much relied on his
brother David for many things in life. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
Pickton was known by the other children at school
as somebody with incredibly poor personal hygiene. And this is something
that his family were-- were not particularly
stringent about either. So it was normal in this
household to perhaps not wash and not look after yourself
and not change your clothes as much as other people did. This is something that
would have really excluded him from his peer group. He's that kid that smells. He's that kid
that's not like us. LORIMER SHENHER: He has a prized
calf that he considers a pet. He's a child, and he's
considering this as his pet. This isn't livestock. He comes home from
school one day and finds out his dad has
slaughtered his pet calf. And he's just devastated. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
He has learned that I am not going to get
close to anything anymore. I'm not going to love
or care for anything because when I do that, that
is going to get taken away. NARRATOR: The boys learn
to drive on the farm when they were still children. One day, Pickton's brother Dave
accidentally hit a young boy on a road close to the farm. He ran to find their mother. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: She disposed
of the victim's body in a lake before he'd even died. Now, this is a really
significant thing to witness, to see as a young
person because this shows you how not to do things. It also sends a message out to
him that-- that other people's lives are not valuable. Pickton was somebody
who was used to death. He was surrounded by it on the
farm, in the Slaughterhouse. But this was the
death of animals. When we're looking at the hit
and run, this is a human being. And-- and the fact that his
mother shows such contempt for the life and for the
dignity of a human being is a message that is
going to stick with him. All of these things
are playing a role in shaping his value system. NARRATOR: As a teenager,
Pickton spent over six years as a butcher's apprentice. By 1970, at the age of 21,
he was working full-time on the family pig farm. In 1978 his father died followed
by his mother a year later, leaving the family
estate to their children. Robert Willy Pickton was the
only one of the three siblings who had any interest in
keeping the business running. LORI CULBERT: This farm was not
an idyllic beautiful pasture. It was just absolutely cluttered
with old broken down vehicles, and garbage, and
debris, and outbuildings that were stuffed full of
all sorts of, you know, derelict things. And amidst all of this, Willy
Pickton lived in a very rundown trailer by himself. GEOFFREY WANSELL:
I think it would be fair to say that
Willy Pickton wasn't very attractive to women. I'm not entirely surprised. He was a messy
ugly man who Stank. There's no two ways about it. He is said to have put butter
in his hair to smooth it back. If you look at any
picture of him, it was grubby,
stubbly, rather ugly. It wasn't anybody's
idea of a boyfriend. He wasn't a man
for relationships. He was a loner in
every way and knew it. NARRATOR: In 1994,
the Pickton farm on the outskirts of Vancouver
was prime real estate. The brothers sold some of their
land for around $2 million. For Pickton, if
he wanted a woman he now had more than enough
money to pay for her. 1995, Downtown
Eastside Vancouver. Known as the poorest zip
code in urban Canada, it was here that Willy Pickton
found what he was looking for. Low Track is literally the
cheapest area of the city. Vancouver at that time
had a number of strolls for street sex trade workers. And some were very expensive. And others were very cheap. And these were the cheapest. These were drug-addicted women. Many of them were engaged
in very risky behavior because of the nature of the
area and the type of customers they would get. LORIMER SHENHER: This
was survival sex work. These women were-- you
know, they weren't out there because they enjoyed it. They weren't out
there because it was a choice for many of them. They were out there
to survive and-- and to make enough
money, most of the time, to feed an addiction
or just to survive. Normally, prostitutes were
very worried about money. Because time is money, are not
willing to go great distances to engage in a sex act. But Pickton was actually
reasonably wealthy, and he was able to convince
them because, again, they were drug addicted. And he offered them money. He was able to get them to
come-- come back to his farm. GEOFFREY WANSELL: That
was his sexual outlet because he was paying them. It was a straightforward
transaction. Barter. Money for sex, whatever
kind of sex it would be. NARRATOR: In 1996, the
younger Pickton brother Dave established a nightclub
close to the pig farm called Piggy's Palace
Good Time Society. Piggy's Palace was
sort of a nicely built, illegal after-hours speakeasy,
or bar, were frequented by people in that area. But that was his brother's
property, not his property. GEOFFREY WANSELL: And they would
invite all manner of people to this. At one point, it was
estimated they had 2,000 people at a rave on their farm. It was good-time city. We're all gonna enjoy ourselves. LORIMER SHENHER: There was a
lot of anecdotal talk of sex parties, drug parties, parties
where a lot of sex workers would be brought to
the farm to party later, kind of in
an after hours kind of club in Pickton's trailer. There's probably
quite a lot of-- all manner of things going on. It was the first time,
I think, that Willy Pickton had felt integrated. He was in his late 30s. He suddenly discovered,
whew, I've got friends, you know, who are
pleased to see me. And I think it gave
him something extra. All those people who turned up
to the raves, and the dances, and the New Year's Eve
party at the Piggy palace, they must have thought
Pickton was pretty all right. Otherwise, why would
they have gone? NARRATOR: On the
22nd of March, 1997, Pickton was cruising
the Downtown Eastside when he saw a
31-year-old sex worker whose street name was Stitch. LORIMER SHENHER: She had
a fairly-- fairly heavy cocaine addiction at the time. They made a deal for $100 for
sex, which is an astronomical sum for the women in
the Downtown Eastside, for any of the
sex workers there. A lot of the women don't like
to leave the Downtown Eastside. They're nervous. And rightfully so. But she thought, you know, $100,
like, that's a lot of money. Her gut instinct as
they were driving out to Port Coquitlam in
Pickton's pickup truck was just telling her don't go. Don't go out there. And she said she was
sitting in the truck, and she was sort of
looking down at her feet. And he was driving. And he wasn't talking. He was very quiet. And she started to think
that she wanted to jump out when the vehicle slowed down. NARRATOR: Pickton brought Stitch
to his trailer on the pig farm. GEOFFREY WANSELL: Sex
truly takes place. But then she asks him
for the phone book. He attacks her. He puts the handcuff
around her left wrist and stabs her in the abdomen. She's spirited, and
she fights back. A proper fight ensues. She's stabbed. He's stabbed. Blood is all over the trailer. LORIMER SHENHER:
But at that point, he seems to kind of black out. And she has an opportunity. And she's out the
door, down the steps. And she is running
a couple hundred meters out to the main road. LORI CULBERT: She was
able to get away from him and ran through the farm
and onto the nearest road where she stopped a
car coming down the street. And you can imagine, she
was naked with one handcuff dangling from one wrist and
completely covered in blood and screaming for her life. LORIMER SHENHER: They called
911 on the cell phone. An ambulance met them
shortly down the road. And she was placed
in the ambulance, taken off to the hospital. And she almost died
on the operating table a couple of different
times before they actually managed to save her. NARRATOR: As Stitch fought
for her life in surgery, Pickton arrived at the same
hospital seeking treatment. As he was attended
to, an orderly found a key in his pocket. It unlocked the handcuffs
still attached to Stitch. Pickton was charged
with attempted murder, assault, and the
forcible confinement of Stitch. But sadly, for her
and for the case, she had a severe
addiction problem. And eventually, the
prosecution withdrew the case against Pickton because she
wasn't capable of giving coherent evidence. And eventually the
case was dismissed. NARRATOR: Pickton had got
away with attempted murder. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
It reinforces for him his beliefs about these women. That they are low status. That they are low value. That if you hurt them,
there aren't going to be any consequences for you. So they're fair game now. NARRATOR: Stitch had
escaped the pig farm alive. She was one of the lucky ones. Other women working the Downtown
Eastside weren't so fortunate. They had disappeared. Detective Inspector Kim
Rossmo, a geographic profiling expert with the
Vancouver police, was assigned to investigate. KIM ROSSMO: I was able to obtain
data going back about 20 years on the number of unfound missing
persons, particularly women, from the area of interest,
which is our skid road area. And the answer was we would
have zero, one, or two-- at the most-- cases in a
year until we hit 1995. Then we began to see a
spike that carried on. And depending on where
you draw the cutoff, it was 27 or 28 cases, which
was way too many compared to what we've seen in the past. This was, to put
it scientifically, a statistically significant
spatial temporal cluster, meaning something was happening. And the next question would
be, what is happening? Why? What's the cause of this? NARRATOR: On August 30th,
1997 Lynn and Rick Frey were at home in Campbell
River on Vancouver Island waiting for a phone call
from their daughter Marnie. It was her 24th birthday. She called that
morning and said oh, do you know what day it is? And it's like, yeah. She goes, well,
it's my birthday. Maybe I'll come home. I said, great. I'll come and get you. And she said, no, no, no. I won't come home
today, maybe tomorrow. I'm gonna go to a party tonight. She was a fairly quiet girl,
you know, just a typical girl. Kind of-- a little
bit maybe tomboyish. She liked the outdoors. She'd always go fishing,
hunting with me, cutting wood. Stuff like that, you know,
like kids like to do. Very-- very much in nature. An animal lover. And animals loved her. She was already doing the
drugs prior to leaving here. But I didn't realize at the time
that it was as bad as it was. And she would come home, and she
looked like she was just tired. She didn't look like she was
all stoned and needed a rest. So then she stayed in Vancouver. And every couple of months I'd
go get her and bring her home and try to convince her to
come back to Campbell River. And there's no way she
was coming back here. And I know for a fact if Marnie
never got into the drug scene, she would have never
ended up on that farm. And that's the only
reason she went there, was because it was free
drugs and free alcohol, and it was party time. It was her birthday. NARRATOR: Marnie Frey became
another missing statistic from the Downtown Eastside. 1997, Downtown Eastside
Vancouver, Canada. Between 1995 and 1997 at least
a dozen women had gone missing. An unusually high
number for the area. KIM ROSSMO: Any effort to
explain that cluster had to account for the following. Why was this occurring now
and hadn't occurred before? Why was it occurring
in Vancouver, but not in other Western
Canadian cities? Why were we not
finding any bodies? And finally, why was it only
happening to women not to men? NARRATOR: In 1998, at
least nine more women disappeared from the area. The Vancouver Police Missing
Persons Unit had two or three officers in it trying
to deal with not just the cases in the
downtown East side but every person
reported missing from the city of Vancouver. For all intents and
purposes, these cases were not being investigated. Everyone took the position
that the victims were sex trade workers, that they must be
transient, that they must have just picked up and moved on. NARRATOR: On the pig farm,
life carried on as normal. It was a busy place for
the Pickton brothers. LORIMER SHENHER:
Dave was more social. He ran the businesses more. And Robert was more
of an employee. Outwardly, it seemed as
though Dave controlled Robert to a large degree. But those that were quite
close to both of them said that a lot of
times it would actually be the other way around. There was a lot of people
coming and going on the farm, people who would come to pick
up pork from the pig business. Just a lot of people coming
and going from that property. [oinking] NARRATOR: Running the pig
farm was a bloody business. Pickton would slaughter and
butcher his pigs on-site. He disposed of the carcasses
at a meat rendering plant where small local suppliers
disposed of animal waste with no supervision
or paperwork. He seemed to have a fairly
big heart in terms of people he would try to
help out if someone had been released from jail
and was looking for work. He took in a lot of
people to work for cash under the table on the farm. Some of those people would
stay on the farm with him. Sometimes he had a spare
room in his trailer that people could stay in. He helped a lot of his
friends financially. NARRATOR: In 1999
one of the friends Willy Pickton helped
was Lynn Ellingsen Lynn was a crack addict
who lived and worked on the farm for several months. The job gave her a
place to stay and ready cash to satisfy her drug habit. Ellingsen knew Pickton
regularly brought sex workers back to the farm. She was also aware that
women continue to disappear from the Downtown Eastside. But it became very
clear when you started looking into the
backgrounds of these women that they were
entirely not transient. That they had very small
worlds that they lived in. They worked a certain
section of a street. They picked up their
social assistance checks on the same day. They always picked
up their methadone or their harm reduction
drugs on the same day. They always maybe
phone their mom on Mother's Day
or their daughter to wish her a happy birthday. And in every single
one of these cases, that regular routine by
these women just stopped. It just stopped. And when you started
to look into it, it became clear that these women
had not picked up and moved on. That they were actually missing. So there were a
number of problems. But probably the
biggest was the fact that no bodies have been found. That's how a murder
investigation typically proceeds. A body is found. It's analyzed. There's forensics that are
obtained, possibly DNA. But there had been no bodies,
which was very problematic and very challenging. No hard evidence made
it easy for people to make decisions that focused
on other crime problems. You combine this with budget
cuts the police agencies were facing and other murders that
took up time and attention, and this, like some
other cases, just kind of fell between the
cracks even though the available intelligence
and evidence pointed towards a serial killer. NARRATOR: On March 2, 1999
Pickton was cruising downtown when he saw 34-year-old Georgina
Papin working on the streets. Pickton paid her well
to get in the truck and return to the farm
with him where they were joined by Lynn Ellingsen. The three of them partied hard. Ellingsen got high
and fell asleep. When she awoke there was a
light on in the slaughterhouse. She went to investigate. Lynn looked through the
door and saw a dead woman. Pickton was gutting
her like a pig. The woman looked
like Georgina Papin. Pickton turned to
Ellingsen threatening, if you say a word
about what you've seen, you'll end up like she is. GEOFFREY WANSELL:
He's effectively butchering his victims. Time after time, he
would kill a sex worker. He would have sex with them,
and then he would kill them, and then he would
dismember them. NARRATOR: Lynn kept her
word and did not report what she'd seen to the police. But she did tell
some of her friends. And they didn't stay quiet. One of them called the police. LORIMER SHENHER: Right away
we wanted to investigate this. What happened there
was they brought Lynn Ellingsen in
for an interview completely unprepared. They were unprepared. They spent virtually 12
minutes with her to talk to her about this information. NARRATOR: Ellingson
gave the police nothing and was soon released. LORIMER SHENHER: Once
she had been questioned in this interview, she
went to him and she said, you need to pay me
more now because I want to take a
cruise, and the police are breathing down my neck. So you need to pay me more. NARRATOR: Women
continue to disappear. 31-year-old Brenda Woolf was
known as a street enforcer. She protected the women
working the Downtown Eastside. Brenda had been an addict
who worked the streets before turning her life around. She went missing
in February 1999. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
The fact that police didn't have any leads would have
made Pickton feel invincible. He would have been
following these stories in the local media. He would have been
watching the local news and scanning the local
papers to see if there was anything about it in there. And when he realized that
there wasn't, that reinforces his views about sex workers. These women don't matter. They're low status. That they disappear and
nobody really gives a damn. KIM ROSSMO: The victims
of serial killers are more likely to be
people on the fringes of society, marginal groups,
and in particular, prostitutes. So while serial
killers are rare, this was hardly a
surprising conclusion. And given the data,
there wasn't really anything else that could
explain the-- the problem of the missing women. The way he treated
these victims as if they were pieces of meat
really is outstanding for me. Here is somebody who treats
the bodies of their victims as if they are the bodies
of-- of dead animals. This is the contempt
that he feels for people. So this is-- is pure
evil, the decision, the choice to do this time
and time and time again. GEOFFREY WANSELL: This horrible
looking man with greasy hair, stubble, who stank
all the time was, in fact, butchering-- and
that's the only word for it-- entirely innocent women. There is something profoundly
chilling about that because he showed no sign
whatever of wishing to stop. NARRATOR: With no
bodies or evidence, Pickton had no reason to stop. Downtown Eastside
Vancouver, Canada. With limited official
response, family and friends took the initiative to
search for the missing women. Lynn and Rick Frey had not
spoken to their daughter Marnie since the day of her 24th
birthday over three years ago. So I go to Vancouver. And it's about a 45 minute drive
from where my parents live. And I drive to Vancouver
and park the car and go looking for her. And I'd walk up and
down the streets, looking in back alleys. You know, anybody
on the street that was not doing the floppy
chicken or, you know, too stressed out on drugs I'd
ask them if they've seen her. I had a picture of
Marnie in my hand. And I'd say her name was kit-- or a Kit Kat because they
didn't know her by Marnie. NARRATOR: The Freys
weren't the only people searching for loved ones. By January 2001, the
number of missing women had risen to over 60. Yet still no bodies or
remains had been found. But this number could
no longer be ignored. Finally, in April the Vancouver
PD and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police force launched
a joint missing womens' task force. A $100,000 reward for
information was posted. And the task force
received over 12,000 calls. One of the problems
with such investigation is information overload. But one of the names that
came up, and I heard about it, was Willy Pickton,
a pig farmer who lived out in the suburbs
of Vancouver in Coquitlam, or Port Coquitlam. And he had attacked a prostitute
from the Downtown Eastside earlier on and had been
charged with attempted murder. So he was a suspect. LORIMER SHENHER: And that was
the only entry on Pickton's criminal record that
I saw when I was alerted to him as a suspect. And I ran him through
the police computer and all I saw was attempted
murder, and assault, forcible confinement. And the charges were stayed. So that's what
prompted me to start to explore him as a suspect. NARRATOR: Because of
his attack on Stitch, the police had brought
Pickton in for questioning. Oh no.
No. I don't drink. I don't smoke or use
drugs, and everybody does. How come your eyes
are bloodshot, I says. I turn around. I didn't take the
knife away from her. I did not take the
knife away from her. I aimed it to her, and
I knifed her twice. I did do that. I admit I did that. That's one thing I did
and shouldn't have done. OFFICER: You've never taken
any of the prostitutes back to your trailer? Not since this incident. No. Ick. OFFICER: But before
that incident? No. NARRATOR: He'd cooperated. And they found no reason
to detain him further. Nobody has any evidence
to the contrary yet. No one has done anything
to rule Pickton out. And that was always my
assertion from the beginning, is that he's our best
suspect until either we have a better one or we
categorically rule him out. NARRATOR: In June 2001
22-year-old Andrea Joesbury was in a methadone program
close to kicking her drug habit. Her pharmacist reported her
missing when she stopped collecting her prescriptions. These people were mothers. They were daughters. They were sisters. They were people who could
have turned their lives around. And had this man not taken
away that opportunity to do so, many of them would have done. NARRATOR: 31-year-old
Sereena Abotsway was a popular character
on the streets. A few weeks after Andrea,
Sereena also vanished. In November 2001 Pickton
stopped on the corner of Main and Hastings to talk
to 26-year-old Mona Wilson. He offered her free
dope and booze if she came out to the farm with him. When they arrived, Pickton
led Mona to a camper van behind the barn. They had sex, then argued. Pickton pulled out a
0.22 caliber revolver and shot her in the head. He took her body and
dumped her in a trash can. When the police finally
realized that there could be a problem here and they began
looking for possible suspects, including Pickton, as bad as
this was in the beginning, they eventually did a really
good job on trying to piece the bits and pieces
together once it became confirmed
that we-- we actually had a series of murders. NARRATOR: On February 1st,
2002, the missing womens' task force caught a break. A truck driver who'd
worked on the Pickton farm told the police there
was an illegal firearm in Willy Pickton's trailer. A search warrant was
quickly obtained. And a young rookie
policeman turned up at the farm unannounced. LORI CULBERT: He got
into Pickton's trailer with the search warrant
and came across very quickly, not guns,
but identification with women's names on them. They radioed the missing women
task force who just immediately said, get off the property. Shut it down. Control the scene, but don't-- don't spend one more
minute inside that trailer. LORIMER SHENHER: In Canadian
law you can't go on a fishing trip on someone's property. If your purpose is to be
there to find a handgun, you can't all of a sudden take
a serial killer investigation and run with it. You have to back out
and get a proper warrant specific to what you found. NARRATOR: A new
warrant was obtained, and detectives
entered the trailer. They found identification
with women's names on it, transit cards, notebooks
with women's names on it. They found garbage bags
full of women's clothes in a closet in his trailer. His trailer was just
literally strewn with the personal effects of women. NARRATOR: Within a few
days, on February 5th, 2002 the Pickton pig farm
became the largest crime scene in Canadian history. Robert Willy Pickton
was detained and brought in for questioning by the police
while a search of the farm got underway. The discovery of all those
remains all over the place must have been truly horrifying. I can't believe that the
officers who actually searched could have thought
that they were going to be dealing
with someone who'd killed on this kind of scale. And what girls that
you remember have ever been out to your place? I don't know. There's so many people who
come in and out of my place. I don't know. Had she ever been to
your place [inaudible]?? She's pretty, all I can say. NARRATOR: Pickton told
the police nothing, so they changed tactics. Pickton is put into
a cell while on remand with an undercover
policeman and proceeds to brag about what he's done. He's prompted by the
undercover officer. NARRATOR: Pickton's
jail confession to the murder of 49 women
had to be corroborated with hard evidence. Forensic investigators
continued meticulously searching the pig farm. By February 22, 2002
there was enough evidence to identify remains of Mona
Wilson and Sereena Abotsway. Pickton was charged
with their murders. Two months later, another five
counts of murder were added. The Canadian Police Forces
spent $70 million Canadian dollars on searching the farm. They had archaeological
experts, more than 100. They dug a huge area. All it did was to
confirm what they by then already knew,
that Pickton was killing on an industrial scale. NARRATOR: On March 11, 2004
Canadian health officials made a shocking statement. As a result of information
that we recently received from the RCMP, we have reason
to believe that there is a strong possibility that some
of the product from the Pickton farms and how much
the RCMP do not know may still be sitting in
some people's freezers in the lower mainland. First, contamination could mean
that-- that human remains did get into or contaminate
some of the pork meat that was produced. NARRATOR: After 22 months,
the forensic investigation of the pig farm revealed
identifiable remains of 20 more women. Pickton was charged with 27
counts of first degree murder. The trial began
on January 2, 2007 with Pickton pleading
his innocence. You know, the trial judge had
a very fine line to walk here. He didn't want to
allow any evidence that was going to
permit Canada's worst serial killer to walk. So he had to find a
way that he was going to be able to avoid
future appeals, to not have charges thrown out. NARRATOR: The judge
reached an agreement with Pickton's defense
team to sever the charges and split the trial into two. The first trial would
focus on the six women where fully identifiable
remains had been found. The second trial would
focus on the 20 women where only partial
evidence was available. One count of murder
was dismissed. One of the witnesses
for the prosecution was Pickton's former
friend Lynn Ellingsen. Who said she walked into the
slaughterhouse late one night and testified that she saw what
appeared to be a human body on the slaughterhouse table. And it was very chilling
testimony in the trial. That was, I'm sure, very
important for the jurors to hear. GEOFFREY WANSELL: On
December the 9, 2007 after a very long
trial, the jury return a very interesting verdict. They find Pickton not guilty
of first degree murder, but guilty of second
degree murder. Now, I've always
wondered whether or not that jury felt that Pickton was
not working alone, that that was the reason
they didn't convict him of first degree
murder, because he ticked every single box. NARRATOR: Pickton was
sentenced to life in prison to serve 25 years without
the possibility of parole. The Supreme Court of Canada
denied his right to appeal. And the government
of British Columbia made the decision not to
proceed with the remaining 20 counts of first degree murder. Logically, it made sense. But I can tell
you, emotionally it was devastating to the
families of those 20 people who for years, generations felt
ignored by the justice system. They felt ignored by police. That no one believed them when
they said that their loved ones were missing. And they just didn't
get that day in court. He did it because he
could get away with it. He did it because
he worked out a way of dealing with the bodies. This is a man who deserves
nothing but contempt. There is nothing about Willy
Pickton that is admirable. And there's everything
that is despicable. NARRATOR: Marnie Frey
was one of the six women whose remains were
fully identified. I never liked the word
closure because there is no such thing as closure. But we had to have,
like, a ceremony just to say that, you
know, the searching for her has come to an end. Kind of a sad kind of a thing. But it was something we
felt we should-- should do. NARRATOR: Robert
Pickton was a monster preying on women who lived
on the fringes of society. He exploited their
desperation to fulfill his own sick desires. How many women died or how
they died on that pig farm is still unknown. The only man with the
answers is Robert Pickton, one of the world's
most evil killers. [music playing]
