Pickton was able to prey on these women precisely because they wouldn't be missed
BY IAN MULGREW, VANCOUVER SUNAUGUST 7, 2010A habitue of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, a sometime prostitute and longtime drug abuser, Rebecca Guno disappeared in June 1983.
She was named the first potential victim -- the first of more than three score who comprised the official list of women missing from the Downtown Eastside.
Her round face, glasses and megawatt smile beam out of the now iconic poster asking for information about their whereabouts or fate.
There had been others before her, there is no question about that.
But after Guno's disappearance, they seemed to vanish more often until the late 1990s, when the staggering number of missing, and the Pollyanna assurances from police, triggered visceral outrage.
Blame years of political indifference, police infighting and investigative impotence.
With the Supreme Court of Canada-blessed conviction of Robert (Willie) Pickton, we have put to rest six of those vulnerable women: Sereena Abotsway, Mona Lee Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Marnie Lee Frey and Georgina Faith Papin.
Twenty more also were likely killed by him, though those charges were stayed this week.
There are others too whose blood is on his hands.
Pickton boasted of butchering 49 women and planned to take a rest after reaching 50.
He didn't make it.
Still, the Coquitlam pig farmer's ghastly, Sweeney Todd-like tale -- human flesh ground into sausage, remains diabolically trucked to the rendering plant, unspeakable suffering and dismemberment -- are only part of a larger, more important story.
This sallow-skinned man with lank, greasy hair, a wispy beard and a habit of speaking in odd, cliched aphorisms, makes a fine Saw-style bogeyman.
But his hellish culpability does not fully explain what happened.
How did this mind-numbing tragedy come to pass?
Certainly the low social status of these women, many of aboriginal heritage, contributed to the lack of societal concern and the failure of the institutional safety net.
It is trite but true to say that had they been from the affluent west side, the response would have been far different.
These women became victims precisely because of who they were and where they lived: a neighbourhood where the social fabric was most threadbare.
They were prey precisely because they were viewed as disposable and would not be missed.
The cultural and class "blindness" to their disappearance over more than two decades is unconscionable, the political indifference damnable.
The response by police wasn't simply sluggish or glacial, it was non-existent.
This isn't a case of misconduct by a single or even a few officers; it was negligence across the board that aided and abetted the killing.
Old boys' club
Former Mayors Gordon Campbell and Philip Owen, who both chaired the city's police board, always pooh-poohed the idea that someone was hunting humans in the Downtown Eastside.
Police dismissed the idea out of hand.
They said the first list of some 40 missing women was flawed, insisting the women had moved on, died of disease or succumbed to drug overdoses.
Nevertheless, Insp. Kim Rossmo, who pioneered geographic profiling, disagreed and believed there was a multiple murderer on the loose.
But he ran into an "old boys' club" who were dismissive of his technique and resentful of his rapid rise within the ranks.
Insp. Fred. Biddlecombe, head of the major crimes section, butted heads constantly with Rossmo.
While they argued, Pickton continued killing.
A killer's trophies
Unbelievably, police already had DNA evidence linking him to two recent victims sitting in a storage locker.
Pickton had been arrested in March 1997 after a knife fight on his farm with a woman.
She described a fearful scene in his sordid trailer during which he snapped a pair of handcuffs onto one of her wrists and attacked her.
She snatched a butcher's knife from a counter, slashed Pickton across the neck and escaped.
A motorist found her staggering along the road, naked and bleeding.
Pickton was charged with attempted murder -- but it was stayed in January 1998 because the prosecutor didn't think the woman was a credible witness.
(The jury at his ultimate trial wouldn't hear from her either.)
The clothes confiscated from Pickton that night sat in the evidence closet for half a decade before anyone tested them for forensic evidence. They bore DNA of two then-recently disappeared women.
In 1997 alone, 13 women vanished.
That's why it is hard to believe that the search for a predator stalking the Downtown Eastside didn't really begin until late 1998.
But the VPD stubbornly refused to commit the resources needed to catch a serial killer.
Rossmo said Biddlecombe threw a hissy fit over his suggestion they reassess the situation.
With the growing public pressure, however, the department did re-examine the open missing-persons cases in September 1998.
Bill Hiscox, a 37-year-old Surrey man, came forward shortly after that.
He worked at P&B Salvage, owned by Pickton and his younger brother David, and he had concerns about "Willie."
Both Picktons were known to police and "Willie" was a "bad trick" according to a prostitutes' warning sheet.
Hiscox explained that he picked up his paycheque at the pig farm, "a creepy-looking place" patrolled by a vicious 600-pound boar.
Pickton, he said, was "a pretty quiet guy, hard to strike up a conversation with quite a strange character."
What should have set off alarm bells, though, was Hiscox's revelation that Pickton had women's "purses and IDs ... out there in his trailer." A killer's trophies.
Hiscox told detectives Pickton "frequents the downtown area all the time, for girls" and they came back with him to the farm.
In spite of Hiscox's suspicions, surveillance was never ordered and no thorough search was made of Pickton's 10-acre suburban property.
By March of 1999, the story of the missing women was front-page news in this newspaper.
But in hindsight it appears that the VPD was more intent on punishing Rossmo for his contrary opinion than catching a killer.
Rossmo pointed out that more than 40 women had vanished, including 16 between 1995 and 1998. It could only be the work of a serial killer.
The department continued to maintain that the vanished women had left the city voluntarily in search of greener streets.
"We're in no way saying there is a serial murderer out there," Insp. Gary Greer said at the time.
"We're in no way saying that all these people missing are dead. We're not saying any of that."
No, these unskilled, impoverished women abandoned their families and friends, leaving what frail support networks they had, to chase a nonexistent rainbow.
Who could believe that?
In May 1999, detectives met with relatives of the missing women.
They collected DNA. They searched police and coroners' databases in the U.S. and Canada. They combed through rehab facilities, witness protection programs, hospitals, mental institutions, AIDS hospices and burial records. They went to great lengths to prove the official theory that dozens of women had left without so much as a word of goodbye to those who mattered most to them.
Occasionally their efforts were successful: Patricia Gay Perkins, a 40-year-old who had been missing for 22 years, telephoned from Ontario to say she was alive; 50-year-old Rose Ann Jensen turned up, too, in Toronto; DNA established that Linda Jean Coombes died anonymously of an overdose on Feb. 15, 1994; Karen Anne Smith had also died, on Feb. 13, 1999, in Edmonton of complications from hepatitis C.
But the search for the killer went nowhere.
In July 1999, to quell the mounting criticism, the Vancouver police and the attorney-general offered a reward of $100,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or people involved in the disappearances.
Even the popular U. U.S.TV program America's Most Wanted aired a segment.
Nothing.
There were some legitimate investigative hurdles.
Apart from the internal incredulity hampering the VPD, in almost all the cases there was no evidence of foul play, no known crime scene, no forensic information, and the police database didn't track missing persons unless there was the hint of a crime.
At the same time, the milieu, the lifestyle and the associates of the missing women militated against police. Pimps and prostitutes were reticent and reluctant to assist their normal nemesis.
Accusations that police weren't doing enough reached a fever pitch after Rossmo quit and filed a wrongful dismissal suit.
He was adamant a single predator was responsible for killing prostitutes in the Downtown Eastside.
"At one point," he claimed in a broadside aimed at his former department, "homicide detectives even said, 'There is nothing to do.' It's like the fire department saying: 'Well, we see smoke but we haven't seen any fire yet.' "
There were 27 women on the missing list, all since 1995.
"That was a cluster," Rossmo insisted. "That was way too many missing people."
The VPD dismissed his claims as sour grapes and successfully defended itself against his suit.
But the public and the media, particularly The Vancouver Sun, refused to be silent.
In May 2001, the RCMP was brought in to review VPD files. They were more than disorganized; they were useless and any investigation would have to start anew.
They compiled a list of missing that totalled 54 women who vanished between 1983 and 2001, starting with Guno.
By August 2001, more than 85 investigators were on the case and police reluctantly conceded a serial killer could be on the loose.
On Feb. 5, 2002, the RCMP raided Pickton's farm with a trumped-up search warrant for illegal firearms.
He was jailed.
Human slaughterhouse
Staggeringly, given the house of horrors found at the farm, Pickton was granted bail and not arrested again until two weeks later when he was charged with the first-degree murder of Abotsway and Wilson.
Both women vanished three years after Pickton was first accused of involvement.
He was charged a month later with three more counts, then a sixth, all killed after Pickton had been fingered.
More than 100 forensic anthropologists worked on sifting through the soil on his farm, separating human tissue and bone from the detritus.
Body parts were found in garbage pails, in buckets, in a cistern, in Pickton's trailer. Victims were turned into ground meat in what was a human abattoir, an unthinkable slaughterhouse.
In the end, the police investigation and the excavation of the Pickton property cost $122.6 million. The cost of the legal proceedings has yet to be tallied.
Much could have been avoided had police paid attention in 1997 and 1998 when the alarm was sounded.
Dragging their heels
Immediately after the Supreme Court confirmed Pickton's conviction, the VPD was quick to respond.
"I wish that the several agencies involved ... that we could have done better in so many ways," deputy chief Doug Le-Pard lamented.
He emotionally apologized to the families "for your losses."
"We're sorry from the bottom of our hearts that we didn't catch him sooner and protect more women from being harmed. When faced with the worst ... we should have done better."
The force and the RCMP both said they would welcome a public inquiry.
We have yet to see LePard's 2002 internal report of the police performance.
No matter how thorough it was, it is not a replacement for an independent assessment of this tragedy.
As in the case of the Tasering of Robert Dziekanski and the bombing of Air India, there is much to learn from this inter-generational disaster.
"We need to ensure that we draw lessons from this case and do all that we can to prevent anything of this sort from happening again," said Mayor Gregor Robertson. "There are many outstanding questions, and the families of the victims and the public deserve truth, accountability and reconciliation. To end the process now is unacceptable."
Ernie Crey, whose sister Dawn died at the farm, agreed: "What we can do is look in our own backyard and ask, 'How did this happen? How could it happen?' "
How did such a slow-witted killer get away for so long with the most heinous of crimes in Canadian history?
Why did police drag their heels?
This is not a case of misconduct by one or even a handful of officers, this is about institutional indifference and collective failure.
Thirty years ago, Canada's first modern serial killer, Clifford Olson, preyed on children in southwestern B.C. because the patchwork quilt of policing agencies didn't cooperate well with each other and no one believed such an animal was on the prowl.
Pickton looks like a gruesome repeat.
B.C. At torney-Genera l Michael de Jong is considering an inquiry.
"I think there are very compelling reasons to take a comprehensive look at all aspects of the investigation," he said
Indeed there are.
For a start, there are 20 poignant individual reasons, one for each of the 20 first-degree murder charges that were stayed: Jacqueline Michelle McDonell, Dianne Rosemary Rock, Heather Kathleen Bottomley, Jennifer Lynn Furminger, Helen Mae Hallmark, Patricia Rose Johnson, Heather Chinnock, Tanya Holyk, Sherry Irving, Inga Monique Hall, Tiffany Drew, Sarah de Vries, Cindy Feliks, Angela Rebecca Jardine, Diana Melnick, Debra Lynne Jones, Wendy Crawford, Kerry Koski, Andrea Fay Borhaven and Cara Louise Ellis (a. k.a. Nicky Trimble).
There are others: Mary Ann Clark (a. k.a. Nancy Greek), Yvonne Marie Boen, Dawn Teresa Crey and, of course, all those anonymous women Pickton claimed to have killed.
We need an examination of why so many of our mothers, sisters and daughters, why so many, many women end up on the meanest streets across this country and easy prey for monsters.
We need an inquiry into why far, far too many of them, such as Guno, come from first nations.
We do not need an inquiry into Pickton's crimes. We need an inquiry into why we didn't care -- into why we don't care.
We need an inquiry because the list of missing women continues to grow.
imulgrew@vancouversun.com
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
LINKS:
Pickton tape give to police in 1998
Vancouver police kept mum about a possible serial killer preying on women because of stubbornness and the high cost of tracking him, former detective inspector Kim Rossmo charged yesterday.
Rossmo sought unit to probe women's deaths
Geographic profiling expert working on case of missing women
LACK OF CARING REAL ENOUGH
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