Robert Willie Pickton

Missing and Murdered Women: May 2011

Missing and Murdered Women

HEATHER GAGRIELLE CHINNOCK, Tanya Marlo Holyk, Sherry Irving, Sarah de Vries. Recognize the names? If not their names, then perhaps their faces? Not likely. Undoubtedly, however, if you came face to face with Sarah de Vries, for example, you would be taken aback by her beauty. A young, exceptionally beautiful girl with a lot of pain, suffering, and a life lived in vain. VANCOUVER’S MISSING WOMEN WEBSITE: MissingPeople.net

New revelations show why he was able to prey with such impunity

by Ken MacQueen on Friday, August 13, 2010 8:45am - 0 Comments

JONATHAN HAYWARD/CP

Long before Robert Pickton became an infamous household name, but years after he began prowling Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a local advocacy group conducted a survey of the city’s prostitutes. It helps explain how a simple-minded pig farmer—the very definition of the banality of evil—got away with what police now believe is the largest serial killing spree in Canadian history.

The organization, the Prostitution Alternatives Counselling and Education (PACE) Society, interviewed 183 sex trade workers between 1999 and 2001. It found, not surprisingly, that 58 per cent worked to support a drug habit, and that violent “bad dates” were a frequent occurrence. More than half said they had been robbed while working the streets; 39 per cent said they had been kidnapped or confined; one-third said they had survived attempts to murder them. Remarkably, 40 per cent of those who claimed to have been targets for murder said they didn’t report the incident to police. The survey found a “gulf between acts of violence suffered and acts of violence reported”—indicative of a profound distrust of authorities.

It was the perfect combination of vulnerabilities for an urban predator. Pickton cruised  into the city, offered money and drugs to women working the Eastside “low track,” then drove them to the grotty, cluttered farm in suburban Port Coquitlam he shared with his brother Dave. If he was dead certain their disappearance would go unnoticed by authorities, it was with good reason. Trial information released last week shows Pickton skated on an attempted murder charge in 1997—freeing him to kill a further 21 of the more than 30 women investigators now believe were murdered and butchered at the farm.

With the Supreme Court of Canada upholding his six murder convictions and the Crown deciding not to proceed with 20 other murder charges, the courts were able to release testimony that wasn’t admitted at trial. Taken together, it helps show how Pickton was able to hunt humans with such impunity that he bragged to an undercover-police cell plant after his arrest in 2002 that he’d killed 49 women and was aiming for an even 50.

The Pickton File

On the Farm, Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver's Missing Women

Butcher

Criminal Investigative Failures

Robert Pickton