VANCOUVER, B.C. – The women began disappearing from Vancouver’s seediest streets in the 1980s, hookers and dope addicts abandoned on the margins of society. Desperate friends and families were outraged when the police appeared to do little to find them.
Now, the man accused of murdering at least 26 of those missing women is going to trial. Jury selection was to begin Saturday for the case against Robert “Willie” Pickton, a pig farmer who, if convicted of all the murders, would become the worst serial killer in Canadian history.
Some 600 potential jurors were being called in Saturday. Justice James Williams has ruled that the trial will be divided into two parts, with the first six counts being considered first.
The gruesome allegations against Pickton fall under a publication ban that prevents the media from revealing details of the alleged crimes until opening arguments Jan. 8.
Journalists covering the preliminary hearings have been so haunted by the courtroom revelations that some have sought psychological help.
What can be reported is that Pickton, 56, was arrested in February 2002 by police investigating the disappearances of sex-trade workers from Vancouver’s grubby Downtown Eastside district. Health officials later issued a tainted meat advisory to neighbors who may have bought pork from his farm, concerned the meat might have contained human remains.
Pickton and his brother, Dave, used to throw parties at the hog farm in a barn they dubbed the “Piggy Palace,” telling neighbors they were raising money for charity. Investigators have said the parties were drunken raves with prostitutes and plenty of drugs.
After Pickton was arrested and the first traces of DNA of some missing women were allegedly found on the farm, the buildings were razed and the province spent an estimated $61 million to sift through acres of soil.
Friends and family of the missing women say those who survived tell horror stories about what took place at the 17-acre pig farm outside Vancouver in Port Coquitlam.
“We deal with stories out here that would blow your mind,” said the Rev. Ruth Wright, whose First United Church has a mission in the Downtown Eastside, the most impoverished neighborhood in all of Canada, where the average life span does not even reach 40.
She knew seven of the victims from the neighborhood.
“I deal with it quite well, until somebody from the outside like you comes along,” Wright said when asked how she copes. “I know that tonight I will have the dreams.”
Wright remembers with sadness Sereena Abotsway, a sweet-faced prostitute who was 29 when she disappeared in August 2001, shortly after marching at the front of a parade demanding the city help find the missing women. The first count of murder against Pickton is in her name.
“She was very childlike, very gentle,” Wright said. “The last conversation I had with her, she was holding a teddy bear. She loved stuffed animals.”
Wright, relatives of the missing women and others who work or live on the streets of the Downtown Eastside say officials ignored them until the media began investigations of their own and relatives protested.
“I knew a lot of the girls who said they went out to Pickton’s to party; that he’d ask them to do weird sexual stuff,” said Deanna Wilvers, a 25-year-old drug user and prostitute. She said she was close to Jacqueline McDonnell, an alleged victim who disappeared at age 22.
Wright and others who have followed the case are angry that other suspects have not been named and that it took so long for Pickton to be charged.
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