Robert Pickton book information, "Murder at Piggy’s Palace: The Bizarre Serial Murder Case of Robert “Willie” Pickton":
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASED
DECEMBER 13, 2007
PMA LITERARY AND FILM MANAGEMENT
PLACES GARY C. KING'S LATEST
TRUE CRIME BOOK WITH KENSINGTON
Peter Miller, President of PMA Literary & Film Management, Inc. is pleased to announce the placement of Gary C. King's latest true crime book project, tentatively titled Murder at Piggy’s Palace: The Bizarre Serial Murder Case of Robert “Willie” Pickton, to Michaela Hamilton at Kensington Publishing Corp.
The case of the missing women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, long known as the poorest neighborhood in the city, began as all such cases do: with no one noticing and no one caring. Although the case may have actually begun in September 1978 with the disappearance of Lillian Jean O’Dare, it would be several years into the future before an investigation would be launched by the police and the case made official. Early on the police seemed to have ignored the concerns voiced by loved ones of the missing women, some say for as long as 20 years, because of their particular lifestyle. Most of the victims were either prostitutes or drug addicts and, in many instances, both. But they were human beings—someone’s mother, daughter, sister or granddaughter—and someone, if not the police, cared that they had vanished. At first, when the police finally began to see that an erratic pattern was emerging, they were simply baffled, in part because they had no crime scene with which to work and no suspect to investigate. Because of the initial lack of clues, the police hadn’t even believed that any crimes had been committed for them to investigate. By the time the massive case finally broke in February 2002, homicide investigators suddenly realized that they were dealing with one of the worst serial murder cases in history.
This compelling and fascinating story is centered around Robert William “Willie” Pickton, 52 years old when the case broke, an evil and depraved sex killer who made his living as a pig farmer and how he, along with a relative, had run a registered charity known as the Piggy Palace Good Times Society. But, as the police would learn, the Piggy Palace wasn’t a charity at all. While it is true that local politicians, business people and others attended fundraising events there, Pickton also used the "palace" for far more sinister deeds. Located in a separate building on Pickton’s pig farm, it was also a place where the most depraved acts of hellish "entertainment" occurred on a somewhat regular basis in which the “stars” of the show did not return for an encore performance. After Pickton was finished with a victim, each would be killed in a variety of ways and their bodies fed to Pickton’s pigs. By the time the police had formed a task force to try and catch the serial killer whose acts and numbers had already easily exceeded those of many of his Pacific Northwest predecessors, 31 women would have vanished. By the time Pickton was stopped, it is believed that he was responsible for the disappearances and subsequent deaths of 49 women and, by his own admission, had been planning on an even 50.
Gary C. King, a freelance author and lecturer, is regarded by readers and critics alike as one of the world's foremost crime writers, a reputation he has earned over the last 28 years with the publication of 11 books and more than 400 articles in true crime magazines in the United States, Canada, and England. King's true crime books and articles are hard-hitting and factual, key elements of a style that his readers tend to appreciate. He is the author of Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer, Driven to Kill, Web of Deceit, Blind Rage, Savage Vengeance, An Early Grave, The Texas 7, Murder in Hollywood, Angels of Death, Stolen in the Night, and Love, Lies, and Murder. King’s latest book, An Almost Perfect Murder, will be published by Kensington under their Pinnacle imprint in September 2008.
For more information, contact Peter Miller, PMA Literary & Film Management, Inc. at 212.929.1222 or http://www.pmalitfilm.com/
The True Crime Website of Author Gary C. Kinghttp://www.garycking.com/
Saturday, December 15
Friday, December 14
Comedian defends Pickton satire on YouTube
Richard Lett performs "The Ballad of Bobby Pickton" at Vancouver's Roxy Nightclub
Image courtesy YouTube
Friday, December 14 - 02:10:20 PM
Reshmi Nair
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) - Only days after Robert Pickton's sentencing there is more pain for the friends and families of the six women he killed. A controversial video has appeared online with a local comedian who has turned the massacre into a six-minute parody.
There's plenty of backlash but Richard Lett isn't phased. He says the bit he did at the Roxy nearly a year ago is still part of his routine today and it's meant to shed some light on who exactly should be held accountable. "The parents of those women that were killed are responsible....yeah, I said it, and I meant it." When asked if he would say that to the faces of those who lost their loved ones at Pickton's hands, Lett says "Probably not."
Lett insists satire is intended to draw attention to social responsibility, and there are supporters of "The Ballad of Bobby Pickton" on YouTube but one post reads, ''free speech is one thing, but common courtesy should supersede it in these cases".
Lett's response? He says he'll leave that to Oprah. "Everyone wants to think that I'm some sort of loudmouth bully - I'm not. I'm in this, I'm deliberately saying this, and I’m challenging our society to care about those thrown away people." He also points the finger at the hundreds of people who drive through the downtown eastside everyday, and turn away.
Little & Bruckert . Tough on prostitution
Sex trade workers need not be doomed to live in fear of violence or death -- but societal attitudes, police practices and the law must change
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| Nicholas Little and Christine Bruckert |
| The Ottawa Citizen |
Friday, December 14, 2007
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The families are renewing calls for an inquiry into the police handling of the case. Certainly there are important questions to ask: Why did police refuse to investigate the disappearances of the women? Why did they keep insisting that these women were transient despite considerable evidence to the contrary, including abandoned possessions and an uncharacteristic lack of contact with their families? Why did they not look into the Pickton farm in 1998 (before five of the six women were murdered) when it was flagged by victims' families and by a former farm employee? Why, when his propensity for violence against sex workers was evidenced by the serious physical assault on Wendy Eistetter (charges stayed on the basis of her criminal record) was Mr. Pickton not questioned in relation to the disappeared women? Why, as the toll kept rising, did the police reduce the size of the investigating team?
That said, we must also be wary of a witch hunt that demonizes the police and ignores the broader context that puts sex workers at risk of violence in the first place. The sad truth is that Mr. Pickton is the tip of the iceberg. There are still 39 disappeared women unaccounted for in Vancouver. Scores of sex workers have been killed in communities across the country, including Ottawa. Statistics Canada estimates that between 1991 and 2004, 171 female sex workers were murdered. Simon Fraser University criminologist John Lowman has estimated that street sex workers are 60 to 112 times more likely to be victims of fatal violence than non-sex workers.
The crucial question is why? Are the murders of these six women merely the work of a solitary monster who wandered far off the path of our collective values, or is Robert Pickton a horrifying example of those very same values manifest to their extreme? Contrary to what the media and the police would have us believe, sex work is not inherently violent and workers are not doomed to be victimized. It is societal attitudes, policing practices and criminalization that render sex workers vulnerable to the next Robert Pickton.
It is certainly worthy of reflection that fatal violence against sex workers has increased exponentially since 1985, when section 213 of the Canadian Criminal Code was enacted and, at the communities' urging, police "got tough on prostitution." In practice this meant displacing sex workers to poorly lit areas, where there is no one to witness whose car they entered. Moreover, in response to increased policing, sex workers stopped working in pairs -- eliminating witnesses and peer protection.
In effect, the laws and police enforcement have created a situation whereby misogynist men (and many men charged with violence against sex workers have histories of violence against non-sex-working women as well) can act out their aggression with impunity. It also means that women are hesitant to turn to the police for help -- and with good reason. They know full well that they (like Wendy Eistetter) are not afforded the same consideration as other victims.
While Toronto has started a special victims unit to address violence against sex workers, Ottawa has taken the opposite approach. Here we are adopting tactics that will further marginalize sex workers and increase their vulnerability to predators.
On Nov. 19, the Ottawa Police Service announced a new nine-person unit focused on street crimes including prostitution. Previous to that, on Oct. 1, the Ottawa Police Service announced a new "crime prevention" initiative whereby the owners of vehicles that visit "neighborhoods for solicitation" and are seen speaking to a "known prostitute" receive a "community safety letter" in the mail. Deeply flawed from a criminological perspective, this tactic should be a red flag for anyone who is concerned about the erosion of civil liberties and/or violence against women.
This initiative was extra-legal, operating entirely outside the normal parameters of our judicial system and the rights enshrined therein. Namely, the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial and the right to defend oneself against accusations of criminal wrongdoing.
Here's how it works: Prostitution is not illegal in Canada; however, communicating for the purposes of prostitution is. Of course this can be difficult to prove when we don't know what is said in the private conversation between a woman on the street and someone in a car pulled up beside her. Burdened by the expectation of proof, the police substituted the actual criminal charge (with its attendant democratic process) for a tactic of intimidation.
Without any evidence, an officer decides which of us on the street is negotiating a sexual transaction. Then he or she will send a letter to the registrant of the vehicle -- who may or may not have been driving -- politely advising them (or their wife, or their boyfriend) about the health risks of prostitutes. No proof, no transparent proceeding, no way to defend oneself.
Yet lives are potentially left in ruins. At the root of all this is what Mr. Lowman calls the "discourse of disposal" that renders any woman who engages in sex work a non-citizen devoid of human or social rights. It is that discourse that the communities and our police are reproducing as they actively construct workers as vectors of disease, marginalize the women and render them social pariahs -- not to be approached or acknowledged whether they are working or not. Of course, proponents may argue that it is not sex workers but clients who are being targeted. This paternalistic discourse manages to simultaneously infantilize sex workers as incapable of making (good) choices, at the same time as it minimizes their ability to exercise agency.
It is also wrong-headed. First, the customer base for street workers has been eroded; consequently workers are more likely to take chances with customers of whom they are unsure.
Second, the good clients have been scared off -- street workers report that a higher percentage of the customers are "more dangerous," wanting rougher sex or particular types of services.
Finally, due to fear, sex workers have much less time to assess a customer before agreeing to provide services for him. And because all clients are now nervous it is much harder for street sex workers to "read" clients to determine if they are dangerous.
And it's not only hypothetical johns who have a lot to lose. So too do our sisters, mothers and daughters -- be they sex workers or not. With this threat of receiving a potentially life-altering letter in the mail hanging over us, there is a strong disincentive to stop and assist any woman on the street. In this way, the police are undermining the very sense of community, of neighbourliness, they discursively support. The result is more dangerous communities for everyone and the exact inverse of the idyllic version the neighbourhood associations are seeking to promote.
We acknowledge that the community feels "victimized by prostitution" and appreciate that police are raising some legitimate concerns. But ultimately, framing the issue as one of competing rights (or even competing victimization) is a zero sum game.
Through endless studies we have already determined what works best for all sides: innovative strategies that enable sex workers to work safely and securely. The obvious first step is to decriminalize consensual commercial sexual activity between adults.
We are doomed to suffer many more disappearances or violent attacks on prostitutes if we don't look at the structural and social issues affecting those employed in the sex industry. The message of these murders is obvious: evidence must come before ideology.
Nicholas Little is the gay men's outreach co-ordinator for the AIDS Committee of Ottawa. Christine Bruckert is an associate professor at the department of criminology at the University of Ottawa. They are organizers of the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, Monday evening at the Human Rights Monument in Ottawa.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
Let the healing process begin
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| Adam Dunbar |
| Special to the Times |
Friday, December 14, 2007
It hasn't been an easy load to haul if you have anything to do with the justice system in our province and in our country. It's been an ugly and shameful run through a sewer while tied to the back of a plague-ridden rat. All I'm saying is that when you finally emerge from the cesspool reeking, fetid and carrying the plague, you're probably not welcome in the more fashionable parts of town.
That being said it's been quite a week for justice. I don't know how many of you actually read my column, but last week I ended with the hope that those who can will and without a shadow of a doubt they have. Judges, lawyers and even the Attorney General brought justice to the table of our province and though we may not be able to smile about it, we can, at least, breathe a little easier tonight.
I am not going to dwell on the horrifying tragedies of the delays in justice for women who move as ghosts through our communities. Women seen by many as whores, addicts and burdens. Women who are not seen at all, and ignored, abused and forgotten by our communities. Well, it may have taken years, but Sereena Abotsway, Marnie Frey, Andrea Joesbury, Mona Wilson, Brenda Wolfe and Georgina Papin are no longer un-people, whores, addicts or burdens. They are justice, patience, belief and hopefully the beginning of a healing process between the survivors, the other victims, the nameless dead and the society that helped create and then bring to justice a monster like Robert William Pickton.
My heart goes out to the families of all Pickton's victims and I can only hope that as a society we can look at marginalized women, vulnerable women, women in the sex trade and not see disposable people, but people, period, worthy of our compassion, care and empathy.
I would also hope that the next time someone says to you that prostitution is a victimless crime you recite the names of six women who paid a price for nothing more than existing on the fringes of our society where any one, could, for almost any price, continue the nasty circle of victimization that these women had to endure right to the very end of their lives.
Finally, a special shot goes out to our Attorney General who ordered a judicial review of the 20-month conditional sentence that was given to Tuan Minh Nguyen for his role in the brutal beating of Michael Levy. I am sure that you were as horrified as I when, watching the news about the Michael Levy story; heard the raucous laughter from Nguyen's party as the elevator doors closed on the news cameras. I was disgusted and so, apparently, was our Attorney General and enough MLAs so that those who could, did and with any luck Nguyen will come to know and understand the full measure and weight of the justice system.
The view from here tonight is sad but not without hope and not without love for the wounded who share our community and suffer in silence. If there is any good to come from any of this, it's that maybe, just maybe the mute will be heard and the lady in the blindfold will finally take it off and see our world for what it is and weep and through her tears wash away the years of apathy, cruelty and shame victims of crime have had to suffer under for far too long.
© Chilliwack Times 2007
Ignoring dangers to women
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| Dan Gardner |
| The Ottawa Citizen |
Friday, December 14, 2007
Almost six years ago, I was in the departure lounge of the Vancouver airport after spending a week wading through the misery of the city's infamous Downtown Eastside. It was late, I remember, and I was exhausted. Journalism has put me in contact with a lot of tragedy over the years but few experiences have shaken me like listening to drug-addicted street prostitutes talk about surviving from one horrible day to the next.
A news bulletin flashed across a television monitor. A man had been arrested in the missing women case. His name was Robert William Pickton.
This week, Pickton was found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life with no chance of parole for 25 years. Another 20 murder charges remain outstanding but, in all likelihood, Robert William Pickton will be declared a dangerous offender and he will die in prison.
So that's it, right? The murderer has been caught and punished. The victims are mourned. It's all over. Case closed.
I wish that were true. But it's not. Not even close.
The first thing we need to understand about violence against street prostitutes is how utterly routine it is. Every night on the street, women are robbed, beaten and raped.
We almost never hear about any of this because prostitutes almost never report these crimes to the police. Why would they? The law says they are criminals and the job of the police is to catch and punish criminals. For women on the street, the police are a threat to be avoided whenever possible.
Fear of the police isn't universal, however. Some officers do manage to earn the trust of prostitutes by, in essence, ignoring the law. They don't arrest women for solicitation or possession. They don't arrest them on minor outstanding warrants when they report crimes. Instead, they are supportive, pragmatic and reasonable.
They are, in short, all the things the criminal law is not. And that -- not Robert William Pickton -- is what this is really all about.
Lock up one woman-hating killer and "it's just a matter of when the next one's going to come along," says John Lowman, the Simon Fraser criminologist who has studied prostitution in Vancouver more closely than anyone. Up to 1993, he says, there were 50 murders of prostitutes in B.C. Of those 50 murders, 17 resulted in charges "and there were 17 different offenders. I suspect that three of those, or perhaps even four, were also serial killers."
In part, men who want to beat and kill women seek out street prostitutes because society deems them to be criminals and junkies. They are nuisances. Pests infesting the neighbourhoods of decent people. They are the most worthless of women. They are whores.
But there's a far more pragmatic reason why men who hate women go after street prostitutes. As Gary Ridgeway told a Seattle court after being convicted of murdering 48 women, street prostitutes are "easy to pick up without being noticed."
Most prostitution is off-street but violence is rare in off-street prostitution for the simple reason that it rarely gives men the opportunity to meet women in complete anonymity. In a massage parlour, someone sees customers going in and out. Escorts are dispatched to known addresses.
Street prostitution is very different. If women work on busy streets, or in groups, or in residential neighbourhoods where people watch from behind living room windows, they are more likely to be arrested. So they work alone, on dark, deserted streets where men who hate women can find them and drive away without ever being seen.
It is the criminal law that makes street prostitutes especially vulnerable. It is the criminal law that aids and abets the likes of Robert William Pickton.
In 1985, a special committee of Parliament known as the Fraser Committee came to precisely this conclusion. It recommended prostitution -- which is technically legal anyway -- should be permitted under carefully regulated circumstances. It was ignored.
"If those laws had been changed back in 1985 in the way the Fraser Committee recommended," Lowman says, "I don't think we'd be talking about 200 to 300 homicides of street sex workers in Canada since that time."
What I saw of regulated prostitution when reporting in the Netherlands suggests Lowman is right. The Dutch red light districts are famous, of course, but some Dutch cities also permit street prostitution in carefully designed "tolerance zones." There, prostitutes who are too addicted or mentally disturbed to work inside can at least work in groups on well-lighted streets without fear of arrest or attack. Residential nuisances are reduced. And the women learn to trust the police and social workers, who can get them the help they need.
It's still very sad and seedy, but it's a hell of a lot better than what's happening on the streets of this country.
And yet, aside from the MP for the Downtown Eastside, the redoubtable Libby Davies, very few federal politicians are interested in talking frankly about prostitution. When John Lowman sent a compilation of his research to the federal justice minister -- a Liberal at the time -- he didn't get so much as a letter of receipt in return.
I worry that the indifference of politicians reflects the public mood. In 10 years writing for this newspaper, I have never gotten less reaction to my work than I did when I published an extensive series of articles making the case that the law is aiding and abetting crimes against women. No e-mails. No letters. Nothing. Is it a fatalistic belief that prostitutes will always be victimized? A lack of feeling for junkies and whores? I simply don't know.
I do know, however, that somewhere in Canada tonight, vulnerable women will be beaten. Others will be robbed or raped. Someone may even be murdered.
I also know the media won't talk about it. Neither will politicians or the public. It seems we all have more important matters to attend to than the suffering of whores.
Dan Gardner writes Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
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