Pickton murders: Bloody knife fight left one victim barely alive

 

 

BY LORI CULBERT, VANCOUVER SUNAUGUST 4, 2010 5:59 PM

 

 

 

There was only one Crown witness prepared to testify at Robert (Willie) Pickton's trial that she had been brutally attacked by the accused and lived to tell about it. Pickton was charged with attempted murder following the 1997 incident, but the charges were stayed because the Crown considered the woman too unstable to testify.

Photograph by: File, Vancouver Sun

There was only one Crown witness prepared to testify at Robert (Willie) Pickton's trial that she had been brutally attacked by the accused and lived to tell about it. Pickton was charged with attempted murder following the 1997 incident, but the charges were stayed because the Crown considered the woman too unstable to testify. At Pickton's 2007 murder trial, prosecutors argued the jury should hear the woman's evidence because it would help prove who killed the six victims on the indictment who, like her, were all drug-addicted sex-trade workers with a link to Pickton's farm. However, defence lawyers maintained that the woman, who they noted had a severe substance abuse problem and a criminal record that spanned two decades, attacked Pickton that night during a drug binge and that he was acting in self-defence. The trial judge ruled the jury should not hear her story, saying it was merely speculation that Pickton planned to murder and dismember her in the same fashion as the other victims. Even though the jury never heard her speak, the woman did take the stand twice during Pickton's pretrial hearings: during his 2003 preliminary hearing and a 2006 voir dire. Here is the story she previously told to police and in court (although its veracity has never been challenged or defended in open court):

The woman was working at the corner of Princess and Cordova late on the evening of March 22, 1997 when she said Robert (Willie) Pickton pulled up in a red pickup truck and asked her how much for oral sex.

"$40," replied the woman, who was then 30.

"How about a little more?" Pickton asked her.

He suggested she come to his place in Port Coquitlam, but she thought it was too far away.

He offered her $100 and said he would have her back downtown by 1 a.m. She accepted.

While sitting in the pickup truck, she saw a bra and asked Pickton whose it was. He said it belonged to a "working girl."

Just off the Mary Hill Bypass, the woman asked Pickton to pull over at a gas station so she could use the bathroom, but he indicated his place was nearby.

The woman recalls driving through the gate at 953 Dominion Ave., and going down a long driveway until they reached a trailer with a barking dog on the porch.

Pickton checked his messages on the answering machine, and then the woman followed him past the kitchen and into a bedroom.

"As we were going, I was just looking around, checking the place out. And the kitchen was "it was a pigsty" and I noticed a big butcher knife on the kitchen table 'cause it was just plain as day," she testified.

The woman said there was no bed in the back room, just a sleeping bag on the floor and a big roll of plastic that resembled a roll of carpeting.

"He went into his pocket, took out his wallet, handed me five 20s," she recalled.

The woman said she supplied a condom and they had sex for "all of five minutes" and then got dressed and returned to the entranceway.

After the sex, however, something went terribly wrong. The woman fled the farm bleeding profusely, with a handcuff attached to her wrist. Both she and Pickton were eventually treated in the same hospital for potentially life-threatening stab wounds.

The beginning and ending of the story is agreed upon by both the Crown and defence; it is what happened in between that remains unresolved. No jury has ever decided the issue because the woman wasn't allowed to testify at Pickton's trial.

After the sex, the woman asked Pickton if she could use the telephone, but he refused.

"He told me that other girls had made long-distance [calls], and he said he would stop at Mohawk, there was a pay phone there."

The woman went into the bathroom to inject a speedball ?a mixture of heroin and cocaine. But she said she missed the vein and didn't get high.

"When I came out, I asked him for a telephone book and he showed me a telephone book. And I was leaning over the desk looking up a phone number and I could feel ? feel him behind me."

The woman said she turned around and Pickton grabbed her left hand, caressed it and then slapped a handcuff on it.

"Then I just started fighting him. And then the first thing I remember was a knife on the kitchen table. So as I was fighting him, I was, like, going backwards so I could get to this knife, and then I reached for the knife.

"And then I leaped at him, I slit his throat.

"And then I remember him grabbing a rag and going, 'You f---ing bitch, you got me good,' and he put the rag on his neck. And then he had a big long stick and I remember just picking up plants, everything I could get a hold of and throwing it at him."

The woman said she tried to open the door and break a window to escape, but couldn't. At some point Pickton got the knife from her and stabbed her in the abdomen.

She said she must have blacked out at some point, because the next thing she remembers they were outside the trailer, standing beside his pickup truck. Pickton was holding her, she had the knife again in her right hand, and her left hand was split open.

"I was begging him to let me go, telling him I had a family and I told him I'd give $1,000 if he'd let me go."

The woman said she could feel all his weight coming down on her. "So I think he was going under, losing consciousness."

She recalled sliding out from under Pickton and staggering down the driveway. She ran across the road and knocked on the door of a neighbour's house but nobody answered. She tried to break the little window on the door with the knife and eventually smashed the picture window with her elbow.

Then she saw car lights approaching. At first she ducked, fearing it was Pickton coming after her, but she saw two heads in the car and recognized that one was a woman. The car drove to the end of the dead-end street, and turned around to drive past the house again.

"I smashed the other glass 'cause it was double ? double pane and I yelled, 'Help!'" the woman recalled. "And then they stopped and I went running out there."

The car's passenger, Maria Mills, told police in a statement read out in court that she recalled the woman "coming down the driveway -- sort of walking, staggering down the driveway -- and we heard, 'Help me, help me.'"

The car's driver, Brian Strilesky, told police: "She was covered in blood. She had a large kitchen type knife in her right hand and what appeared to be a handcuff on her left wrist. She pleaded for us to help her, that she had been stabbed."

Strilesky told the woman to drop the knife and put her in the back seat. "The girl was very concerned that she was going to be dying and she said, 'In case I die, tell them that I stabbed him in the neck,'" Strilesky told police.

The woman also pointed to Pickton's laneway, and said that was "where the accused lived," the witnesses told police.

She arrived by ambulance about 2 a.m. at Royal Columbian Hospital, where she was treated for two stab wounds to her abdomen, slashes to her hands and arms, and a knife wound to her right side, which had punctured her lung. She had lost three litres of blood and had no pulse.

Just over an hour later, Pickton was transferred to Royal Columbian from a smaller hospital, where he had driven himself. He had also lost three litres of blood, and had a large cut to the left side of his neck and to the top of his left arm.

Pickton was taken into a trauma room, where the handcuff key in his pants pocket was taken to the woman's operating room to remove the handcuffs still attached to her wrist.

According to the defence, the woman and Pickton were both slashed so badly that one or both of them could have died without medical intervention.

Defence lawyer Peter Ritchie maintained the woman had a "severe" 10-year cocaine and heroin addiction, and chronicled several run-ins with police and ambulance attendants, as well as episodes of bizarre and "psychotic" behaviour that could only be controlled by restraining her.

The defence contends that the woman did hit her vein with the speedball that night, after taking more drugs earlier in the day, and that she attacked Pickton with a knife because she was "going crazy" on a drug binge.

The woman told police shortly after the incident in 1997 that Pickton continued to try to hook the second handcuff to an object in the room, Ritchie said, rather than her right wrist. "He was trying to hook me to something and I just kept fighting. I was putting my elbow through his windows trying to get out, and he was holding his neck and I could see the blood gushing out. I was going at him, like trying to stab him some more. He gave up," Ritchie read from her police statement during a 2006 voir dire.

During a police interrogation following his arrest in the missing women case in 2002, Pickton told a police officer that he was trying to handcuff the woman to a door in self-defence and that she wanted the $3,500 he had in his pocket. (When police seized his clothes that night they noted he actually had $920 in his wallet.)

"I was gonna take her back [downtown] that same night but she went bananas. She went bananas," Pickton told the interrogator.

Two weeks after the knife-attack incident, Pickton was charged with attempted murder, assault with a weapon and forcible confinement. He told an undercover police officer posing as his cellmate in 2002 that he had been arrested, instead of the woman, because "I'm male."

However, all charges were stayed Jan. 27, 1998 because the woman was addicted to drugs and a Crown attorney thought she was too unstable to testify.

The woman, who was unconscious in hospital for four days after the knife attack, continued to struggle with her addictions for years.

She testified in 2003 that the attack had long-lasting effects on her and that she later had drug-induced flashbacks where she feared that "Willy" was after her. Twice, she said, she stole police cars in an attempt to flee the hallucinations and ended up in jail.

Because there had been no litigation in the courts to prove what happened between Pickton and the woman in 1997, Pickton's defence lawyer persuasively argued that it would be inappropriate for the woman to testify at the high-profile missing-women trial.

The trial judge, B.C. Supreme Court Justice James Williams, ultimately agreed, ruling the jury would never hear from the only Crown witness prepared to testify that she had been attacked by Pickton.

In a written ruling following the heated pretrial arguments, Williams decided the knife-attack incident could not be considered similar to what happened to the other women because there was no proof she was to be killed and dismembered following the knife attack. (All six of the women Pickton was convicted of killing were dismembered, and at least three of them were killed by gunshot wounds.)

"I find that there is simply not anywhere near the required degree of similarity to permit the conclusion that it is likely that the same individual committed both the 1997 incident and the murders of the six women," Williams wrote.

There was more to the woman's story that the jury at Pickton's 2007 trial also did not hear.

A police officer seized Pickton's clothes and rubber boots from the hospital that evening and they were left in an RCMP storage locked for more than seven years. After Pickton's arrest in the missing women case, the clothing was retrieved on June 28, 2004 and submitted for DNA testing.

Shockingly, the lab found evidence of two of the missing women -- Andrea Borhaven's DNA on the sole of Pickton's boots and Cara Ellis's on his jacket. Both women disappeared shortly before the knife-attack incident.

Pickton was charged with murdering Borhaven and Ellis, but the jury never heard about the clothing because these two women were not included in the 2007 trial. Charges involving Ellis, Borhaven and 18 other women were to be heard at a second trial, but those charges have now been stayed.

lculbert@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

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How the Vancouver Missing Women Task Force caught Canada’s worst serial killer

Gazette - Snaring Pickton

by Caroline Ross


On February 5, 2002, rookie Cst Nathan Wells of the Port Coquitlam RCMP Street Enforcement Unit executed his second-ever search warrant at a pig farm outside Vancouver, B.C. Two members of the Vancouver Missing Women Task Force (MWTF) stood by off-site. Wells and his unit colleagues were looking for a firearm. The MWTF was looking for a needle in a haystack. The task force — a joint RCMP–Vancouver Police initiative — was investigating the disappearances of some 50 women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The farm was on the radar because it belonged to one of the task force’s 60 persons of interest. The task force was hoping for a break. It got one.

In a trailer owned by Robert “Willie” Pickton, the search team found identification and a prescription inhaler belonging to two women who had recently gone missing from the Downtown Eastside. It was the first crack in the case against Pickton, who would later become Canada’s worst alleged serial killer, charged with the first-degree murders of 27 women whose remains or DNA were found on the farm.*

How did the MWTF arrive at this critical break? It wasn’t luck, says Don Adam, the now-retired RCMP inspector who headed the MWTF until November 2004. It was sound methodology and solid teamwork that cracked the case — that and a willingness to assess the costs and benefits of every decision upon which the investigation was founded.

Back to the beginning

In December 2000, Don Adam faced a puzzle. He had been asked to lead an initiative to jump-start a stalled Vancouver Police Department (VPD) investigation into the disappearances of 27 women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a notorious hangout for sex trade workers and drug users.

The facts of the case were as follows: The VPD was looking for a serial killer — the same man who behavioural science research indicated had murdered another three women in 1995, dumping their remains off logging roads in the Fraser Valley. This “Fraser Valley killer” had left his own DNA at the crime scene, and the VPD was using that DNA profile to eliminate suspects in the Downtown Eastside investigation. VPD officers reported that no women had disappeared from the Downtown Eastside since 1999. The officers were running a historical investigation, working their suspects hard, but getting nowhere.

“When you’re faced with an enormous problem like this, the first thing to do is (conduct) an investigation of the investigation,” says Adam. “Don’t try and find the killer. Try and find out whether you believe (the previous investigators) followed a methodology that will ensure all your bases are covered.”

Adam and a small review team of RCMP and VPD officers spent the next several months assessing the foundations of the two-year-old VPD investigation. They took nothing for granted, and as such, they uncovered a few structural flaws.

False logic

The first weak point was the link between the Downtown Eastside disappearances and the Fraser Valley killings, says Adam. The Valley women had been dumped along accessible logging roads, whereas the Downtown Eastside women had all disappeared without a trace.

“If you (as a killer) have had 27 completely successful disappearances, why would you leave these three (bodies) to be found, when, by putting in a little extra effort to take them another three feet and roll them down a ravine, they could have been gone forever?” says Adam. “It didn’t make sense.”

The review team thus rejected the behavioural science link as too limiting on the investigation. “We decided not to accept that our killer was (also) the (killer) from the Fraser Valley,” says Adam. “That meant we were going back to square one.”

But the team was further ahead than they could know at the time. Pickton, who had actually been eliminated as a suspect based on the Fraser Valley DNA profile, was now back in the suspect pool — and flagged as such on Canada’s national police computer system. One year later, Cst Wells would see that flag while preparing his firearms search warrant, and he would contact the MWTF to stand by during his search on February 5.

“When you’re faced with an enormous problem like this, the first thing to do is (conduct) an investigation of the investigation."
Don Adam

Widening the net

The review team also questioned the decision to run a historical investigation. Assuming that the killer had gone to ground would completely close the door on the possibility that he was still active in some way — any way — even if it wasn’t murder.

“When killers are operating in the here and now, they will be making mistakes,” says Adam. “(As an investigator), you need to be very tuned in to any leads on similar types of offences — in our case, attempted abductions and new missing (women) — so that you can insert your task force into those investigations immediately.”

The review team wasn’t willing to accept the logic of a historical investigation until it had reviewed every bit of evidence associated with the case. Therefore, when the MWTF was officially launched in September 2001, investigators were already operating on two fronts: on one front, a section was reviewing and culling the historical files; on the other front, a section was working in the present tense, actively seeking new leads or fresh evidence that might unveil the killer. In hindsight, this multifaceted approach paid off.

Closing the noose

Throughout 2001, task force members identified another 18 women who had disappeared from the Downtown Eastside since 1999. Two of those women would provide the MWTF with its break on the farm on February 5. When human remains were unearthed months later, the victims’ identities were confirmed through familial DNA profiles that the MWTF had persevered in gathering and submitting to the Vancouver Forensic Laboratory’s DNA Data Bank.

Task force members were also actively investigating leads on sexual assaults, other assaults and abductions within their victim pool. The unit re-submitted old exhibits for DNA testing, became involved in new offences linked to their key suspects, and alerted municipal police forces to their expanded focus — hence their attendance at Wells’ weapons search on February 5.

Even without the break at the farm, says Adam, the team was slowly closing in on Pickton. Task force members were out on the streets, tracking sex trade workers and looking for any hint of suspect activity. The team knew that victims were still being taken from the Downtown Eastside at a rate of approximately one every six weeks, and investigators were closely examining the habits and acquaintances of the missing women. Prior to February 2002, members had identified a female subject who had transported a recently missing sex trade worker out of the city. Later, after the February 5 search, investigators would closely link this female to Pickton.

“The way we were operating, we absolutely would have got Pickton,” says Adam, noting that the entire MWTF team was focused, committed and willing to think critically from the get-go.

“The fact that Nathan Wells, a young member obtaining his second search warrant, got us on the farm — that was luck. The fact that we were there on the farm (in the first place), that’s good policing. We positioned ourselves to win.”

Sit back and assess every step you take until you’re 100 per cent certain it won’t cost you down the road.

Lessons for the future

At the end of the day, Adam has one piece of advice for any new task force faced with similarly complex missing persons’ cases: sit back and assess every step you take until you’re 100 per cent certain it won’t cost you down the road.

“In these tough investigations, we (as investigators) are desperate for anything to help give form to the investigation,” says Adam. Behavioural science, past investigative decisions, investigators’ “instincts” — all can provide form and direction, but they must be backed by sound methodology, says Adam. Otherwise, you risk casting your net too shallow, or in the wrong pond, and your investigation will sink while the target swims away.

*In December 2007, Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder. He awaits trial on 20 counts of first-degree murder. A 21st count was terminated by the trial judge.


http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/gazette/vol72n2/crime1-eng.htm

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Missing women portraits unveiled

MOA is their home

By Lori Culbert, Vancouver Sun

January 29, 2010

Pamela Masik began painting portraits of the many women missing from the Downtown Eastside five years ago in a plight to draw attention to the tragic cases. She has painted 69.

Photograph by: Arlen Redekop, PNG, Vancouver Sun

Sixty-nine massive portraits of women missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside will be hung in the Museum of Anthropology next year, Mayor Gregor Robertson is expected to announce tonight.

Robertson will join MOA director Anthony Shelton and the artist, Pamela Masik, at her studio at 7 p.m. for the announcement, and for a public viewing of more than a dozen pieces from the series titled The Forgotten. The portraits measure roughly 2.4 metres wide and three metres tall.

Masik began painting the images five years ago as a way to confront society about this tragic case. She plans to open her studio, near the Olympic Village, every Friday afternoon during the Games with the hope it will attract attention from visiting media and tourists.

"This is not a body of work that has to be a negative thing," Masik said. "I think it shows people that there are people in this community and society that care about these issues, and creating this dialogue is the beginning of change."

The police list of missing women contained 69 names a few years ago, but now sits at 64 after the whereabouts of five women were determined.

The DNA of 32 of those women was found on Robert (Willie) Pickton's farm.

lculbert@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

THE FORGOTTEN

http://www.theforgotten.ca/

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"REMEMBER THEIR NAMES"

"REMEMBER THEIR NAMES",
originally uploaded by Renegade98.

VPD (Vancouver Police) could not have been more wrong all the way through. When families and friends were telling them nothing else made sense but that a serial killer or killers were responsible, VPD ignored it. When Geo Profiler Kim Rossmo wanted to issue a Press Release about the very real possiblity of a serial killer, it was squashed by VPD. ... Read MoreThey were wrong, DEAD WRONG. Ex-cop says he suspected serial killer: http://www.missingpeople.net/vancouver_police_kept_quite_on_possible_serial_killer-june_21,_2001.htm

Exhibit focuses on missing B.C. women
Can you remember their names? A new exhibit introduces the public to the women who went missing on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

http://watch.ctv.ca/news/top-picks/remember-their-names/#clip196723

Canada AM coverage of Remember Their Names

Remember their names : Canada AM: New exhibit focuses on missing B.C. women.
Can you remember their names? A new exhibit introduces the public to the women who went missing on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.


Remembering ‘just another junkie’
Canice Leung
24 July 2009 05:43

Sarah Jean de Vries. It’s not a name I knew before seeing filmmaker Janis Cole’s video installation, Remember Their Names, at a Toronto gallery, but I’d now be hard-pressed to forget it.

Her missing poster, case No. 98-88486, reads like this: Known prostitute and drug user; black, white, Aboriginal, Mexican Native heritage; age 28; last seen at Princess and Hastings streets on April 14, 1998.

She is one of 27 dead women Robert Pickton faces murder charges for; one of 68 women, Indians, junkies and whores, missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Not a week into her disappearance, friends and family postered and pushed police to act — not just for Sarah, but for dozens who had disappeared since the 1980s.

That inaction is Cole’s constant theme. A screen flashes quotes from police: “We’ve done as much as we could.” “We’re in no way saying there is a serial killer ... (or) the women are dead.”

The installation loops footage of Sarah shooting up. “There’s three ways you can go: Jail; dead; or end up a lifer down here,” she says.

In a 1999 Seattle Times article, Sereena Abotsway echoed Sarah’s despair, saying she feared for her safety. She joined community marches to call for police action as women disappeared. Two years later, she, too, went missing, one of six women Pickton was convicted of killing in 2007.

This is Canada’s collective shame, ignoring women like Sarah and Sereena, who felt fear and vulnerability with urgency, who asked for (and gave) help, but received none.

It’s a tired cry for a static situation: Why has nothing been done? Since 1969, 18 women have disappeared or been murdered on Highway 16, the Highway of Tears, in northern B.C. Last fall, best friends Maisy Odjick and Shannon Alexander disappeared from the Kitigan Zibi reserve north of Ottawa without even their wallets, but for months police maintained the teens had simply run away.

“No one cares, we are just junkie scum. Yet if we had been somebody important and our daughter had gone missing,” Sarah wrote, presciently, before her disappearance, “no stone unturned, no rock or cranny would be left unsearched.”

metro canada

CTV Canada AM Video - 'Remember Their Names' exhibition by Janis Cole.

Remember Their Names (Janis Cole)

Documenting grief and pain
By Fran Schechter

The notorious serial killer never appears in Remember Their Names, an installation by NOW contributor and documentary filmmaker Janis Cole about the prostitutes, many of them aboriginal, who disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Cole doesn’t need to remind us how they met their end; instead, she focuses on the women and the grief of friends and relatives who searched for them.

In a darkened room, two projections feature missing-persons posters: The larger screen switches from group to individual mug shots, the floor below it strewn street-memorial-style with flowers, photos, stuffed animals and native smudge bundles. The smaller projection is overlain with police quotes justifying their inaction. Some paper posters are crumpled on the floor.

You can’t help wondering what terrible life experiences put these women here. In a short video on the third wall, Sarah Jean DeVries, one of the dead, speaks frankly about heroin as she shoots up. A desk nearby holds a photo of her daughter and photocopied pages from DeVries’s diary, wrenching words of self-loathing and rage at the men who used her.

Though this documentary work doesn’t pack the angry, visceral punch of Vigil, Rebecca Belmore’s performance on the same subject, it’s still a moving cry of pain for those lost in this ugly chapter of our recent history.

At Trinity Square Video, to August 8. Cole gives a master class Saturday (July 18) from 3 to 5 pm.

NOW | July 15-22, 2009 | VOL 28 NO 46
Copyright 2009 NOW Communications

NOW Magazine
Remember Their Names

Darker side of killer's tale waiting to be told

Worst is yet to be released in grisly serial killing

By Ethan Baron, The Province
March 31, 2009

There are things you don't know about the Robert Pickton case.

You probably know Pickton was convicted of murdering six women, and is accused of killing 20 more. You likely know about the trailer, about the pigs. If you followed the trial closely, you know about the fur-lined handcuffs, the associate with a hole through his throat, the beloved horse Goldy whose stuffed head decorated the wall of the serial killer's squalid abode.

But just you wait. Revelations are coming. I would say, "Brace yourself," but it would do no good. You will not be prepared.

You may wonder, how could this case get darker? Women were killed, dismembered, their body parts left to rot, while the greasy-haired, malodorous killer chuckled and grinned his way through a life of petty enterprise, butchering pigs, pushing dirt, and wrenching on cars.

The case gets darker, all right, but I can't tell you how.

Judge-ordered publication bans imposed for the trial remain in place, preventing the media from revealing information from pre-trial proceedings.

When this information is finally made public depends on the outcome of the appeal process. If Pickton loses his appeal and the case is put to rest, the bans will be lifted and The Province will publish stories that would be hard to believe if they weren't the truth.

If he wins his appeal, and is subsequently tried on the other 20 murder charges, some of the information will come to light in that trial, with the rest spilling out after its conclusion.

So it may be that we can reveal to you, within a matter of weeks, all that you don't yet know. Or it could be years before those stories can be published.

In the meantime, we have this appeal, in which the killer's legal team argues that the trial judge failed to properly prepare the jury to make a decision on Pickton's guilt or innocence. The pig butcher's right to a fair trial was compromised, they contend.

Pickton's trial was hugely expensive and, for many, the appeal appears an added, unnecessary burden on the taxpayer. But clearly, trial judge James Williams gave the defence an avenue for appeal. Williams himself admitted he'd erred in his pre-deliberation instructions to the jury, and he attempted to correct his mistake with an amendment.

The defence's introduction yesterday laid out five grounds for Pickton's appeal, all of them related to Williams' jury instructions and his response to a question from the jury during deliberations.

It's too early to say whether the Pickton team has any chance of persuading the three-judge B.C. Court of Appeal panel that Pickton's six murder convictions should be tossed.

Whatever the outcome, the proceedings that began yesterday are a step toward the day when you will find out the complete story behind Canada's most infamous serial-killing case.

ebaron@theprovince.com

© Copyright (c) The Province

Pickton Appeal March 30 2009 Day 1

Please support rally for our missing and murdered girls and women: Appeal process on for the next 8 working days.. 800 Smithe Street. In Honor of the following and many many more...
Marie Laliberte
Morenda Isaac
Helen Lessard
Sarah De Vries
Lillian Jean O'Dare - September 1978.
Wendy Louise Allen - March 1979.
Rebecca Guno - June 1983
Sherry Rail - January 1984.
Yvonne Marlene Abigosis - January 1984.
Linda Louise Grant - October 1984.
Sheryl Donahue - May 1985
Leigh Miner - December 1993.
Laura Mah - August 1985.
Teressa Williams - July 1988.
Ingrid Soet - August 1989.
Nancy Clark - August 1991.
Mary Lands - 1991.
Kathleen Wattley - June 1992.
Elsie Sebastien - October 1992.
Gloria Fedyshyn - January 1993.
Sherry Baker - 1993
Teresa Louis Triff - April 1993.
Angela Arseneault - August 1994.
Catherine Gonzalez - March 1995.
Catherine Knight - April 1995.
Dorothy Spence - August 1995.
Diana Melnick - December 1995.
Tanya Holyk - October 1996. ( Pickton charged with 1st-degree murder)
Olivia Williams - December 1996.
Frances Young - April 1996.
Stephanie Lane - January 1997.
Sharon Ward - February 1997.
Cara Ellis - 1997.
Maria Laura Laliberte - January 1997.
"Kellie" (Richard) Little - April 1997.
Helen Hallmark - August 1997. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder)
Janet Henry - June 1997.
Marnie Frey - August 1997.
Jacqueline Murdock - August 1997.
Cindy Beck - September 1997.
Andrea Borhaven - sometime in 1997.
Sherry Irving - April 1997. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder)
Cindy Feliks - November 1997.
Kerry Koski - January 1998.
Inga Hall - February 1998. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder)
Sarah deVries - April 1998.
Elaine Dumba - Apri 1998.
Sheila Egan - July 1998.
Julie Young - October 1998.
Angela Jardine - November 1998.
Marcella Creison - December 1998.
Michelle Gurney - December 1998.
Ruby Anne Hardy - 1998.
Tania Petersen - 1998.
Tammy Fairbairn - 1998.
Jacqueline McDonell - January 1999. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder)
Georgina Papin - March 1999. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder)
Brenda Wolfe - February 1999. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder)
Wendy Crawford - November 1999.
Jennifer Furminger - December 1999. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder)
Tiffany Louise Drew - December 1999.
Dawn Crey - November 2000.
Debra Jones - December 2000.
Sharon Abraham - 2000.
Patricia Johnson - March 2001. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder)
Yvonne Marie Boen - March 2001.
Heather Bottomley - April 2001. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder)
Heather Chinnock - April 2001. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder)
Angela Josebury - June 2001. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder)
Sereena Abotsway - August 2001. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder)
Diane Rock - October 2001. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder)
Mona Wilson - November 2001. (Robert Pickton charged with first-degree murder).

Inquiry urged for B.C.'s missing women

BY LORI CULBERT | VANCOUVER SUN
March 11, 2009

VANCOUVER - A group of native leaders, community activists and victims’ families gathered in Oppenheimer Park this morning to collectively call for a public inquiry into missing and murdered women in British Columbia.

The inquiry should look into the case of the 65 women missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, six of whom serial killer Robert (Willie) Pickton has been convicted of killing.

It should also examine the case of 18 murdered or missing women in the so-called Highway of Tears case in rural B.C., Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, said in an interview.

Phillip and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association sent letters outlining their request Wednesday to Premier Gordon Campbell, Attorney-General Wally Oppal, and Solicitor General John van Dongan. Victims’ families attended the rally today, and have long believed that society paid little attention to their loved ones vanishing from the Downtown Eastside because they were poor, marginalized women, many of them Aboriginal.

“This situation was allowed to continue a very, very long time. It spanned a couple of decades. Had there been an immediate response on behalf of the Vancouver police, the RCMP and the criminal justice branch, we suggest lives could have been saved,” Phillip said.

Phillip argued the same systemic issues exist in the Highway of Tears case, which has not resulted in any suspects being arrested yet.

Oppal repeated Wednesday what he has said in the past: It is unlikely any inquiry would be held until the Pickton case is no longer before the courts. "I'm really sympathetic to [the victims’ families]. We all want to find out what happened. But the missing women's case is really a part of the Pickton case, and that matter is still before the court of appeal,” Oppal said in Victoria. "We can't order any inquiry, it would be totally improper for us until the courts have finally and completely disposed of the charges."

Pickton was convicted in 2007 of six counts of second-degree murder.

An appeal of the verdict is scheduled for two weeks, starting March 30.

However, Phillip and others fear the case could drag through the courts for years while Pickton exhausts the appeal process.

Pickton has also been charged with killing 20 other missing women, but it is also not clear whether that trial will ever be held.

Waiting several more years for an inquiry would be wrong, “given the frailty of human memories, the loss or destruction of relevant evidence with time, and the retirement or death of key witnesses,” says the letter sent to the politicians.

If the government does not grant an inquiry soon, Phillip said, those in attendance at today’s rally threatened to stage demonstrations during the 2010 Olympics to “draw this to the attention of the international community.”

“The families are sick and tired of being stonewalled,” he added.

David Eby, of the civil liberties association, also called on the government to cover expenses for victims’ families to attend Pickton’s appeal, as it did for the families during his 2007 trial.

And Eby said the group would like assurances that Pickton’s second trial on 20 counts of first-degree murder will proceed.

The government has indicated it may not, should the defence fail in its appeal bid, as Pickton is already serving a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.

lculbert@vancouversun.com

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