00:00:03
[music playing] NARRATOR: March 22nd, 1997. Downtown Eastside
Vancouver, Canada.
00:00:14
Her street name was Stitch. She was working the corner of
Cordova and Princess Avenue.
00:00:23
A 31-year-old mother of two,
with a serious drug habit. Selling her body was the
quickest way to the next high.
00:00:34
LORI CULBERT: They
were doing the best they could with
the circumstances in their lives at the time.
00:00:40
NARRATOR: An old pickup
truck approached. The driver flashed some
cash, and Stitch got in.
00:00:47
GEOFFREY WANSELL: A
straightforward transaction. Barter. Money for sex. NARRATOR: The driver
was 47-year-old Robert
00:00:53
Willy Pickton who drove Stitch
17 miles East to his pig farm. LORIMER SHENHER:
Her gut instinct
00:01:00
was just telling her don't go. Don't go out there. NARRATOR: They had sex
in his filthy trailer,
00:01:07
then Stitch asked if
she could use the phone. GEOFFREY WANSELL:
He attacks her. He puts a handcuff
around her left wrist
00:01:15
and stabs are in the abdomen. She's spirited and
she fights back. A proper fight ensues.
00:01:23
She's stabbed. He's stabbed. Blood is all over the trailer. NARRATOR: Stitch escaped
with four stab wounds.
00:01:31
She was critically
injured, but alive. Pickton had been sloppy. This one had got away.
00:01:42
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.
00:01:55
[theme music] 1990s Port Coquitlam Vancouver. Robert Willy Pickton had
spent his entire life
00:02:24
living and working on
the family pig farm. This is a man who is not
integrated into society.
00:02:34
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,
00:02:41
rejects society. NARRATOR: His only
sexual outlet was with women working the streets
of Downtown Eastside Vancouver.
00:02:52
Women who sold sex for survival. KIM ROSSMO: The kind of
dynamics of the drug addiction
00:03:00
and the poverty, and then
the risky nature of some of their customers made them
more vulnerable to violence
00:03:08
either from single individuals
or serial predators. NARRATOR: Pickton was
one of those predators
00:03:16
who hunted women relentlessly. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
Pickton was targeting sex workers because sex
workers are easy to access.
00:03:25
They're going to readily
get into your car. They are going to readily
go somewhere with you.
00:03:31
They are there to be treated
how you want to treat them. They are worthless, you know.
00:03:37
They are less than human. NARRATOR: The pig farm
gave him the perfect cover for his depravity.
00:03:44
Women would disappear and
hardly anyone noticed. LORI CULBERT: For society
to allow that to continue
00:03:52
for at least a decade
unfettered at this farm that was surrounded by dozens of
houses, it's mind boggling.
00:04:01
And it's awful. NARRATOR: This killer
story begins in 1949. Robert Willy Pickton
was born on October 24
00:04:21
to Leonard and Helen Louise,
a family of pig farmers in Port Coquitlam on the
outskirts of Vancouver.
00:04:30
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.
00:04:41
And they didn't
think a girl should be brought up on a pig farm. And so Linda is
dispatched to Vancouver,
00:04:47
which is about 17 miles away. The boys are brought
up on the farm. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
Pickton's mother
00:04:54
was very much a workaholic. She was a very
industrious woman. And this had a significant
impact on her children
00:05:02
because they had to work
in this family business. So the children didn't
really get much of a chance
00:05:08
to be children, to
be carefree, to run around and play with their
friends and that kind of thing.
00:05:16
GEOFFREY WANSELL: She was the
decisive force in the family. Leonard was more remote.
00:05:22
Some said he was
abusive to the boys. I think he was probably just a
Victorian father, in a rather
00:05:28
old-fashioned sense. The boys were really less
important to their mother than the pigs.
00:05:37
They were certainly not
treated particularly well. LORI CULBERT: There
was some suggestion
00:05:42
that he was always striving
for approval from his parents and from his brother, and that
he was a fairly weak young boy
00:05:52
with not a lot of confidence. He struggled in school. He struggled to make friends.
00:05:58
And he very much relied on his
brother David for many things in life. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
Pickton was known
00:06:06
by the other children at school
as somebody with incredibly poor personal hygiene.
00:06:11
And this is something
that his family were-- were not particularly
stringent about either.
00:06:17
So it was normal in this
household to perhaps not wash and not look after yourself
and not change your clothes
00:06:25
as much as other people did. This is something that
would have really excluded him from his peer group.
00:06:30
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.
00:06:48
He's a child, and he's
considering this as his pet. This isn't livestock. He comes home from
school one day
00:06:56
and finds out his dad has
slaughtered his pet calf. And he's just devastated. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
He has learned
00:07:08
that I am not going to get
close to anything anymore. I'm not going to love
or care for anything
00:07:14
because when I do that, that
is going to get taken away. NARRATOR: The boys learn
to drive on the farm
00:07:24
when they were still children. One day, Pickton's brother Dave
accidentally hit a young boy
00:07:31
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
00:07:40
before he'd even died. Now, this is a really
significant thing to witness, to see as a young
person because this
00:07:48
shows you how not to do things. It also sends a message out to
him that-- that other people's
00:07:54
lives are not valuable. Pickton was somebody
who was used to death. He was surrounded by it on the
farm, in the Slaughterhouse.
00:08:02
But this was the
death of animals. When we're looking at the hit
and run, this is a human being.
00:08:08
And-- and the fact that his
mother shows such contempt for the life and for the
dignity of a human being
00:08:14
is a message that is
going to stick with him. All of these things
are playing a role
00:08:20
in shaping his value system. NARRATOR: As a teenager,
Pickton spent over six years
00:08:27
as a butcher's apprentice. By 1970, at the age of 21,
he was working full-time on the family pig farm.
00:08:38
In 1978 his father died followed
by his mother a year later, leaving the family
estate to their children.
00:08:49
Robert Willy Pickton was the
only one of the three siblings who had any interest in
keeping the business running.
00:09:01
LORI CULBERT: This farm was not
an idyllic beautiful pasture. It was just absolutely cluttered
with old broken down vehicles,
00:09:11
and garbage, and
debris, and outbuildings that were stuffed full of
all sorts of, you know,
00:09:19
derelict things. And amidst all of this, Willy
Pickton lived in a very rundown trailer by himself.
00:09:29
GEOFFREY WANSELL:
I think it would be fair to say that
Willy Pickton wasn't very attractive to women.
00:09:33
I'm not entirely surprised. He was a messy
ugly man who Stank. There's no two ways about it.
00:09:42
He is said to have put butter
in his hair to smooth it back. If you look at any
picture of him,
00:09:50
it was grubby,
stubbly, rather ugly. It wasn't anybody's
idea of a boyfriend. He wasn't a man
for relationships.
00:10:01
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.
00:10:12
The brothers sold some of their
land for around $2 million. For Pickton, if
he wanted a woman
00:10:20
he now had more than enough
money to pay for her. 1995, Downtown
Eastside Vancouver.
00:10:35
Known as the poorest zip
code in urban Canada, it was here that Willy Pickton
found what he was looking for.
00:10:46
Low Track is literally the
cheapest area of the city. Vancouver at that time
had a number of strolls
00:10:52
for street sex trade workers. And some were very expensive. And others were very cheap.
00:10:57
And these were the cheapest. These were drug-addicted women. Many of them were engaged
in very risky behavior
00:11:05
because of the nature of the
area and the type of customers they would get. LORIMER SHENHER: This
was survival sex work.
00:11:13
These women were-- you
know, they weren't out there because they enjoyed it. They weren't out
there because it
00:11:19
was a choice for many of them. They were out there
to survive and-- and to make enough
money, most of the time,
00:11:28
to feed an addiction
or just to survive. Normally, prostitutes were
very worried about money.
00:11:36
Because time is money, are not
willing to go great distances to engage in a sex act.
00:11:41
But Pickton was actually
reasonably wealthy, and he was able to convince
them because, again,
00:11:47
they were drug addicted. And he offered them money. He was able to get them to
come-- come back to his farm.
00:11:53
GEOFFREY WANSELL: That
was his sexual outlet because he was paying them. It was a straightforward
transaction.
00:12:01
Barter. Money for sex, whatever
kind of sex it would be. NARRATOR: In 1996, the
younger Pickton brother
00:12:14
Dave established a nightclub
close to the pig farm called Piggy's Palace
Good Time Society.
00:12:24
Piggy's Palace was
sort of a nicely built, illegal after-hours speakeasy,
or bar, were frequented
00:12:31
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
00:12:42
to this. At one point, it was
estimated they had 2,000 people at a rave on their farm.
00:12:51
It was good-time city. We're all gonna enjoy ourselves. LORIMER SHENHER: There was a
lot of anecdotal talk of sex
00:13:01
parties, drug parties, parties
where a lot of sex workers would be brought to
the farm to party
00:13:09
later, kind of in
an after hours kind of club in Pickton's trailer. There's probably
quite a lot of-- all
00:13:16
manner of things going on. It was the first time,
I think, that Willy Pickton had felt integrated.
00:13:23
He was in his late 30s. He suddenly discovered,
whew, I've got friends, you know, who are
pleased to see me.
00:13:31
And I think it gave
him something extra. All those people who turned up
to the raves, and the dances,
00:13:36
and the New Year's Eve
party at the Piggy palace, they must have thought
Pickton was pretty all right.
00:13:45
Otherwise, why would
they have gone? NARRATOR: On the
22nd of March, 1997, Pickton was cruising
the Downtown Eastside
00:13:58
when he saw a
31-year-old sex worker whose street name was Stitch. LORIMER SHENHER: She had
a fairly-- fairly heavy
00:14:07
cocaine addiction at the time. They made a deal for $100 for
sex, which is an astronomical
00:14:18
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.
00:14:26
They're nervous. And rightfully so. But she thought, you know, $100,
like, that's a lot of money.
00:14:36
Her gut instinct as
they were driving out to Port Coquitlam in
Pickton's pickup truck
00:14:41
was just telling her don't go. Don't go out there. And she said she was
sitting in the truck,
00:14:48
and she was sort of
looking down at her feet. And he was driving. And he wasn't talking.
00:14:51
He was very quiet. And she started to think
that she wanted to jump out when the vehicle slowed down.
00:15:00
NARRATOR: Pickton brought Stitch
to his trailer on the pig farm. GEOFFREY WANSELL: Sex
truly takes place.
00:15:08
But then she asks him
for the phone book. He attacks her. He puts the handcuff
around her left wrist
00:15:20
and stabs her in the abdomen. She's spirited, and
she fights back. A proper fight ensues.
00:15:28
She's stabbed. He's stabbed. Blood is all over the trailer. LORIMER SHENHER:
But at that point,
00:15:36
he seems to kind of black out. And she has an opportunity. And she's out the
door, down the steps.
00:15:41
And she is running
a couple hundred meters out to the main road. LORI CULBERT: She was
able to get away from him
00:15:49
and ran through the farm
and onto the nearest road where she stopped a
car coming down the street.
00:15:56
And you can imagine, she
was naked with one handcuff dangling from one wrist and
completely covered in blood
00:16:04
and screaming for her life. LORIMER SHENHER: They called
911 on the cell phone. An ambulance met them
shortly down the road.
00:16:11
And she was placed
in the ambulance, taken off to the hospital. And she almost died
on the operating table
00:16:17
a couple of different
times before they actually managed to save her. NARRATOR: As Stitch fought
for her life in surgery,
00:16:26
Pickton arrived at the same
hospital seeking treatment. As he was attended
to, an orderly
00:16:34
found a key in his pocket. It unlocked the handcuffs
still attached to Stitch. Pickton was charged
with attempted
00:16:43
murder, assault, and the
forcible confinement of Stitch. But sadly, for her
and for the case,
00:16:54
she had a severe
addiction problem. And eventually, the
prosecution withdrew the case
00:17:00
against Pickton because she
wasn't capable of giving coherent evidence. And eventually the
case was dismissed.
00:17:10
NARRATOR: Pickton had got
away with attempted murder. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
It reinforces for him
00:17:16
his beliefs about these women. That they are low status. That they are low value.
00:17:20
That if you hurt them,
there aren't going to be any consequences for you. So they're fair game now.
00:17:27
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.
00:17:39
They had disappeared. Detective Inspector Kim
Rossmo, a geographic profiling expert with the
Vancouver police,
00:17:48
was assigned to investigate. KIM ROSSMO: I was able to obtain
data going back about 20 years
00:17:56
on the number of unfound missing
persons, particularly women, from the area of interest,
which is our skid road area.
00:18:03
And the answer was we would
have zero, one, or two-- at the most-- cases in a
year until we hit 1995.
00:18:13
Then we began to see a
spike that carried on. And depending on where
you draw the cutoff,
00:18:18
it was 27 or 28 cases, which
was way too many compared to what we've seen in the past.
00:18:25
This was, to put
it scientifically, a statistically significant
spatial temporal cluster,
00:18:31
meaning something was happening. And the next question would
be, what is happening?
00:18:36
Why? What's the cause of this? NARRATOR: On August 30th,
1997 Lynn and Rick Frey
00:18:45
were at home in Campbell
River on Vancouver Island waiting for a phone call
from their daughter Marnie.
00:18:55
It was her 24th birthday. She called that
morning and said oh, do you know what day it is?
00:19:02
And it's like, yeah. She goes, well,
it's my birthday. Maybe I'll come home. I said, great.
00:19:07
I'll come and get you. And she said, no, no, no. I won't come home
today, maybe tomorrow.
00:19:11
I'm gonna go to a party tonight. She was a fairly quiet girl,
you know, just a typical girl.
00:19:20
Kind of-- a little
bit maybe tomboyish. She liked the outdoors. She'd always go fishing,
hunting with me, cutting wood.
00:19:27
Stuff like that, you know,
like kids like to do. Very-- very much in nature. An animal lover.
00:19:35
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.
00:19:46
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.
00:19:55
So then she stayed in Vancouver. And every couple of months I'd
go get her and bring her home
00:20:00
and try to convince her to
come back to Campbell River. And there's no way she
was coming back here.
00:20:08
And I know for a fact if Marnie
never got into the drug scene, she would have never
ended up on that farm.
00:20:14
And that's the only
reason she went there, was because it was free
drugs and free alcohol,
00:20:19
and it was party time. It was her birthday. NARRATOR: Marnie Frey became
another missing statistic
00:20:27
from the Downtown Eastside. 1997, Downtown Eastside
Vancouver, Canada. Between 1995 and 1997 at least
a dozen women had gone missing.
00:20:43
An unusually high
number for the area. KIM ROSSMO: Any effort to
explain that cluster had
00:20:50
to account for the following. Why was this occurring now
and hadn't occurred before?
00:20:55
Why was it occurring
in Vancouver, but not in other Western
Canadian cities? Why were we not
finding any bodies?
00:21:04
And finally, why was it only
happening to women not to men? NARRATOR: In 1998, at
least nine more women
00:21:12
disappeared from the area. The Vancouver Police Missing
Persons Unit had two or three
00:21:20
officers in it trying
to deal with not just the cases in the
downtown East side but every person
reported missing
00:21:27
from the city of Vancouver. For all intents and
purposes, these cases were not being investigated.
00:21:34
Everyone took the position
that the victims were sex trade workers, that they must be
transient, that they must have
00:21:43
just picked up and moved on. NARRATOR: On the pig farm,
life carried on as normal.
00:21:55
It was a busy place for
the Pickton brothers. LORIMER SHENHER:
Dave was more social.
00:22:03
He ran the businesses more. And Robert was more
of an employee. Outwardly, it seemed as
though Dave controlled
00:22:13
Robert to a large degree. But those that were quite
close to both of them said that a lot of
times it would actually
00:22:19
be the other way around. There was a lot of people
coming and going on the farm,
00:22:24
people who would come to pick
up pork from the pig business. Just a lot of people coming
and going from that property.
00:22:32
[oinking] NARRATOR: Running the pig
farm was a bloody business. Pickton would slaughter and
butcher his pigs on-site.
00:22:45
He disposed of the carcasses
at a meat rendering plant where small local suppliers
disposed of animal waste
00:22:53
with no supervision
or paperwork. He seemed to have a fairly
big heart in terms of people
00:23:02
he would try to
help out if someone had been released from jail
and was looking for work.
00:23:06
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.
00:23:14
Sometimes he had a spare
room in his trailer that people could stay in. He helped a lot of his
friends financially.
00:23:21
NARRATOR: In 1999
one of the friends Willy Pickton helped
was Lynn Ellingsen Lynn was a crack addict
who lived and worked
00:23:31
on the farm for several months. The job gave her a
place to stay and ready cash to satisfy her drug habit.
00:23:44
Ellingsen knew Pickton
regularly brought sex workers back to the farm. She was also aware that
women continue to disappear
00:23:54
from the Downtown Eastside. But it became very
clear when you started looking into the
backgrounds of these women
00:24:01
that they were
entirely not transient. That they had very small
worlds that they lived in.
00:24:08
They worked a certain
section of a street. They picked up their
social assistance checks
00:24:14
on the same day. They always picked
up their methadone or their harm reduction
drugs on the same day.
00:24:20
They always maybe
phone their mom on Mother's Day
or their daughter to wish her a happy birthday.
00:24:26
And in every single
one of these cases, that regular routine by
these women just stopped.
00:24:32
It just stopped. And when you started
to look into it, it became clear that these women
had not picked up and moved on.
00:24:39
That they were actually missing. So there were a
number of problems. But probably the
biggest was the fact
00:24:46
that no bodies have been found. That's how a murder
investigation typically proceeds.
00:24:51
A body is found. It's analyzed. There's forensics that are
obtained, possibly DNA.
00:24:55
But there had been no bodies,
which was very problematic and very challenging. No hard evidence made
it easy for people
00:25:06
to make decisions that focused
on other crime problems. You combine this with budget
cuts the police agencies were
00:25:13
facing and other murders that
took up time and attention, and this, like some
other cases, just kind of
00:25:21
fell between the
cracks even though the available intelligence
and evidence pointed
00:25:26
towards a serial killer. NARRATOR: On March 2, 1999
Pickton was cruising downtown
00:25:39
when he saw 34-year-old Georgina
Papin working on the streets. Pickton paid her well
to get in the truck
00:25:48
and return to the farm
with him where they were joined by Lynn Ellingsen. The three of them partied hard.
00:26:00
Ellingsen got high
and fell asleep. When she awoke there was a
light on in the slaughterhouse.
00:26:14
She went to investigate. Lynn looked through the
door and saw a dead woman. Pickton was gutting
her like a pig.
00:26:28
The woman looked
like Georgina Papin. Pickton turned to
Ellingsen threatening, if you say a word
about what you've seen,
00:26:40
you'll end up like she is. GEOFFREY WANSELL:
He's effectively butchering his victims.
00:26:49
Time after time, he
would kill a sex worker. He would have sex with them,
and then he would kill them,
00:26:56
and then he would
dismember them. NARRATOR: Lynn kept her
word and did not report
00:27:06
what she'd seen to the police. But she did tell
some of her friends. And they didn't stay quiet.
00:27:14
One of them called the police. LORIMER SHENHER: Right away
we wanted to investigate this.
00:27:19
What happened there
was they brought Lynn Ellingsen in
for an interview completely unprepared.
00:27:24
They were unprepared. They spent virtually 12
minutes with her to talk to her about this information.
00:27:34
NARRATOR: Ellingson
gave the police nothing and was soon released. LORIMER SHENHER: Once
she had been questioned
00:27:41
in this interview, she
went to him and she said, you need to pay me
more now because I
00:27:46
want to take a
cruise, and the police are breathing down my neck. So you need to pay me more.
00:27:56
NARRATOR: Women
continue to disappear. 31-year-old Brenda Woolf was
known as a street enforcer.
00:28:04
She protected the women
working the Downtown Eastside. Brenda had been an addict
who worked the streets
00:28:13
before turning her life around. She went missing
in February 1999. ELIZABETH YARDLEY:
The fact that police
00:28:22
didn't have any leads would have
made Pickton feel invincible. He would have been
following these stories
00:28:28
in the local media. He would have been
watching the local news and scanning the local
papers to see if there
00:28:33
was anything about it in there. And when he realized that
there wasn't, that reinforces
00:28:38
his views about sex workers. These women don't matter. They're low status. That they disappear and
nobody really gives a damn.
00:28:49
KIM ROSSMO: The victims
of serial killers are more likely to be
people on the fringes
00:28:53
of society, marginal groups,
and in particular, prostitutes. So while serial
killers are rare,
00:29:00
this was hardly a
surprising conclusion. And given the data,
there wasn't really
00:29:06
anything else that could
explain the-- the problem of the missing women. The way he treated
these victims
00:29:14
as if they were pieces of meat
really is outstanding for me. Here is somebody who treats
the bodies of their victims
00:29:23
as if they are the bodies
of-- of dead animals. This is the contempt
that he feels for people.
00:29:29
So this is-- is pure
evil, the decision, the choice to do this time
and time and time again.
00:29:36
GEOFFREY WANSELL: This horrible
looking man with greasy hair, stubble, who stank
all the time was,
00:29:44
in fact, butchering-- and
that's the only word for it-- entirely innocent women.
00:29:51
There is something profoundly
chilling about that because he showed no sign
whatever of wishing to stop.
00:30:01
NARRATOR: With no
bodies or evidence, Pickton had no reason to stop. Downtown Eastside
Vancouver, Canada.
00:30:12
With limited official
response, family and friends took the initiative to
search for the missing women.
00:30:19
Lynn and Rick Frey had not
spoken to their daughter Marnie since the day of her 24th
birthday over three years ago.
00:30:30
So I go to Vancouver. And it's about a 45 minute drive
from where my parents live.
00:30:35
And I drive to Vancouver
and park the car and go looking for her. And I'd walk up and
down the streets,
00:30:40
looking in back alleys. You know, anybody
on the street that was not doing the floppy
chicken or, you know,
00:30:46
too stressed out on drugs I'd
ask them if they've seen her. I had a picture of
Marnie in my hand.
00:30:52
And I'd say her name was kit-- or a Kit Kat because they
didn't know her by Marnie.
00:30:58
NARRATOR: The Freys
weren't the only people searching for loved ones. By January 2001, the
number of missing women
00:31:06
had risen to over 60. Yet still no bodies or
remains had been found. But this number could
no longer be ignored.
00:31:18
Finally, in April the Vancouver
PD and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police force launched
a joint missing womens' task
00:31:28
force. A $100,000 reward for
information was posted. And the task force
received over 12,000 calls.
00:31:41
One of the problems
with such investigation is information overload. But one of the names that
came up, and I heard about it,
00:31:47
was Willy Pickton,
a pig farmer who lived out in the suburbs
of Vancouver in Coquitlam,
00:31:54
or Port Coquitlam. And he had attacked a prostitute
from the Downtown Eastside earlier on and had been
charged with attempted murder.
00:32:04
So he was a suspect. LORIMER SHENHER: And that was
the only entry on Pickton's criminal record that
I saw when I was
00:32:13
alerted to him as a suspect. And I ran him through
the police computer and all I saw was attempted
murder, and assault,
00:32:22
forcible confinement. And the charges were stayed. So that's what
prompted me to start
00:32:28
to explore him as a suspect. NARRATOR: Because of
his attack on Stitch, the police had brought
Pickton in for questioning.
00:32:38
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.
00:32:46
I turn around. I didn't take the
knife away from her. I did not take the
knife away from her.
00:32:51
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.
00:32:57
OFFICER: You've never taken
any of the prostitutes back to your trailer? Not since this incident.
00:33:03
No. Ick. OFFICER: But before
that incident? No. NARRATOR: He'd cooperated. And they found no reason
to detain him further.
00:33:12
Nobody has any evidence
to the contrary yet. No one has done anything
to rule Pickton out.
00:33:16
And that was always my
assertion from the beginning, is that he's our best
suspect until either
00:33:23
we have a better one or we
categorically rule him out. NARRATOR: In June 2001
22-year-old Andrea Joesbury
00:33:34
was in a methadone program
close to kicking her drug habit. Her pharmacist reported her
missing when she stopped
00:33:44
collecting her prescriptions. These people were mothers. They were daughters. They were sisters.
00:33:52
They were people who could
have turned their lives around. And had this man not taken
away that opportunity to do so,
00:33:58
many of them would have done. NARRATOR: 31-year-old
Sereena Abotsway was a popular character
on the streets.
00:34:10
A few weeks after Andrea,
Sereena also vanished. In November 2001 Pickton
stopped on the corner
00:34:21
of Main and Hastings to talk
to 26-year-old Mona Wilson. He offered her free
dope and booze if she
00:34:31
came out to the farm with him. When they arrived, Pickton
led Mona to a camper van
00:34:41
behind the barn. They had sex, then argued. Pickton pulled out a
0.22 caliber revolver
00:34:52
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
00:35:11
a problem here and they began
looking for possible suspects, including Pickton, as bad as
this was in the beginning,
00:35:20
they eventually did a really
good job on trying to piece the bits and pieces
together once
00:35:28
it became confirmed
that we-- we actually had a series of murders. NARRATOR: On February 1st,
2002, the missing womens'
00:35:40
task force caught a break. A truck driver who'd
worked on the Pickton farm told the police there
was an illegal firearm
00:35:50
in Willy Pickton's trailer. A search warrant was
quickly obtained. And a young rookie
policeman turned up
00:35:59
at the farm unannounced. LORI CULBERT: He got
into Pickton's trailer with the search warrant
and came across very
00:36:07
quickly, not guns,
but identification with women's names on them. They radioed the missing women
task force who just immediately
00:36:17
said, get off the property. Shut it down. Control the scene, but don't-- don't spend one more
minute inside that trailer.
00:36:26
LORIMER SHENHER: In Canadian
law you can't go on a fishing trip on someone's property.
00:36:31
If your purpose is to be
there to find a handgun, you can't all of a sudden take
a serial killer investigation
00:36:36
and run with it. You have to back out
and get a proper warrant specific to what you found.
00:36:43
NARRATOR: A new
warrant was obtained, and detectives
entered the trailer. They found identification
with women's names on it,
00:36:51
transit cards, notebooks
with women's names on it. They found garbage bags
full of women's clothes
00:36:59
in a closet in his trailer. His trailer was just
literally strewn with the personal effects of women.
00:37:11
NARRATOR: Within a few
days, on February 5th, 2002 the Pickton pig farm
became the largest crime
00:37:18
scene in Canadian history. Robert Willy Pickton
was detained and brought in for questioning by the police
while a search of the farm
00:37:30
got underway. The discovery of all those
remains all over the place must have been truly horrifying.
00:37:40
I can't believe that the
officers who actually searched could have thought
that they were
00:37:46
going to be dealing
with someone who'd killed on this kind of scale. And what girls that
you remember have
00:38:00
ever been out to your place? I don't know. There's so many people who
come in and out of my place.
00:38:06
I don't know. Had she ever been to
your place [inaudible]?? She's pretty, all I can say.
00:38:12
NARRATOR: Pickton told
the police nothing, so they changed tactics. Pickton is put into
a cell while on remand
00:38:21
with an undercover
policeman and proceeds to brag about what he's done. He's prompted by the
undercover officer.
00:38:47
NARRATOR: Pickton's
jail confession to the murder of 49 women
had to be corroborated
00:38:53
with hard evidence. Forensic investigators
continued meticulously searching the pig farm.
00:39:02
By February 22, 2002
there was enough evidence to identify remains of Mona
Wilson and Sereena Abotsway.
00:39:12
Pickton was charged
with their murders. Two months later, another five
counts of murder were added.
00:39:23
The Canadian Police Forces
spent $70 million Canadian dollars on searching the farm.
00:39:29
They had archaeological
experts, more than 100. They dug a huge area. All it did was to
confirm what they
00:39:37
by then already knew,
that Pickton was killing on an industrial scale. NARRATOR: On March 11, 2004
Canadian health officials
00:39:49
made a shocking statement. As a result of information
that we recently received from the RCMP, we have reason
to believe that there is
00:39:59
a strong possibility that some
of the product from the Pickton farms and how much
the RCMP do not know
00:40:08
may still be sitting in
some people's freezers in the lower mainland. First, contamination could mean
that-- that human remains did
00:40:15
get into or contaminate
some of the pork meat that was produced. NARRATOR: After 22 months,
the forensic investigation
00:40:29
of the pig farm revealed
identifiable remains of 20 more women. Pickton was charged with 27
counts of first degree murder.
00:40:42
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.
00:40:53
He didn't want to
allow any evidence that was going to
permit Canada's worst serial killer to walk.
00:41:01
So he had to find a
way that he was going to be able to avoid
future appeals, to not have charges thrown out.
00:41:10
NARRATOR: The judge
reached an agreement with Pickton's defense
team to sever the charges
00:41:15
and split the trial into two. The first trial would
focus on the six women where fully identifiable
remains had been found.
00:41:26
The second trial would
focus on the 20 women where only partial
evidence was available.
00:41:33
One count of murder
was dismissed. One of the witnesses
for the prosecution was Pickton's former
friend Lynn Ellingsen.
00:41:46
Who said she walked into the
slaughterhouse late one night and testified that she saw what
appeared to be a human body
00:41:57
on the slaughterhouse table. And it was very chilling
testimony in the trial. That was, I'm sure, very
important for the jurors
00:42:09
to hear. GEOFFREY WANSELL: On
December the 9, 2007 after a very long
trial, the jury return
00:42:20
a very interesting verdict. They find Pickton not guilty
of first degree murder,
00:42:27
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
00:42:40
was the reason
they didn't convict him of first degree
murder, because he ticked every single box.
00:42:47
NARRATOR: Pickton was
sentenced to life in prison to serve 25 years without
the possibility of parole.
00:42:56
The Supreme Court of Canada
denied his right to appeal. And the government
of British Columbia
00:43:04
made the decision not to
proceed with the remaining 20 counts of first degree murder.
00:43:12
Logically, it made sense. But I can tell
you, emotionally it was devastating to the
families of those 20 people
00:43:20
who for years, generations felt
ignored by the justice system. They felt ignored by police.
00:43:29
That no one believed them when
they said that their loved ones were missing. And they just didn't
get that day in court.
00:43:43
He did it because he
could get away with it. He did it because
he worked out a way
00:43:47
of dealing with the bodies. This is a man who deserves
nothing but contempt. There is nothing about Willy
Pickton that is admirable.
00:43:57
And there's everything
that is despicable. NARRATOR: Marnie Frey
was one of the six women
00:44:03
whose remains were
fully identified. I never liked the word
closure because there
00:44:09
is no such thing as closure. But we had to have,
like, a ceremony just to say that, you
know, the searching for her
00:44:19
has come to an end. Kind of a sad kind of a thing. But it was something we
felt we should-- should do.
00:44:35
NARRATOR: Robert
Pickton was a monster preying on women who lived
on the fringes of society.
00:44:42
He exploited their
desperation to fulfill his own sick desires. How many women died or how
they died on that pig farm
00:44:53
is still unknown. The only man with the
answers is Robert Pickton, one of the world's
most evil killers.
00:45:03
[music playing]