Houston, thirty-nine and dying from cancer, admitted that of forty-eight photos of missing women on a poster, she recognized eight. Specifically, she had seen Sereena Abotsway and Dinah Taylor in Pickton’s trailer, sitting on his bed, “doing drugs.” She also described an incident in November 2001 in which she’d been on the phone with Pickton and heard people in the background in what sounded like a “scuffle” and a woman screaming. Pickton had ordered them to stop. Pickton later told her that the woman she’d heard—“Mona”—was one of the victims and that “she didn’t make it.”
To prove Pickton’s association with Eastside prostitutes, prosecutors had Giselle Ireson, a prostitute and drug addict, testify. She told the court that in 1998 Pickton had invited her to the farm. He said he’d “dated” a number of women from the Eastside who would vouch for him and kept urging her to come because he did not want to do a “car date.” She had declined. Pickton also invited Monique Wood, introduced to him by Dinah Taylor, and she went to his trailer. Once inside, she shot up heroin and spent the night without incident. Taylor’s association was a telling point, although the defense would use it as well.
Drama entered the courtroom during the first half of June with a controversial witness offering potentially explosive testimony. Pat Casanova, arrested early in the investigation, used to regularly butcher pigs on the Pickton farm. He claimed he could not recall using the freezer where remains from two of the victims were found, although he had seen Pickton using it. However, this testimony contradicted statements from the preliminary hearing in which he admitted he’d used it up until a month before Pickton’s arrest. Married and suffering from throat cancer, Casanova admitted he’d received oral sex from one of the victims, Andrea Joesbury, while in Pickton’s trailer. Dinah Taylor had brought her and he’d paid Taylor. He had noticed clothing and some purses that belonged to women who were not present at the time, but admitted that Pickton had never spoken with him about missing women. Regarding certain pieces of evidence, he explained the presence of his DNA on a slaughterhouse door as being the result of mucus spewed after his throat treatments.
Scott Chubb, the original informant, was another key witness, having visited the farm a great deal and been privy to certain comments Pickton had reportedly made. Chubb had met Pickton in 1993, becoming an employee, and one day Pickton had mentioned that a woman named Lynn Ellingsen was costing him a lot of money; he wanted Chubb to “talk” to her. Chubb understood that Pickton wanted her killed. (The police had suspected that she was blackmailing Pickton over something she had witnessed.) Chubb said Pickton had offered him $1,000. Then the conversation grew even darker. Pickton commented that it was easy to kill drug addicts because they had needle marks and tracks already; if a person injected windshield-washer fluid into them, they’d die and police would dismiss it as the result of a drug overdose. Since the jury had already learned that investigators had found a syringe with windshield-washer fluid in Pickton’s trailer, this was damning testimony.
Under cross-examination, defense attorney Ritchie tried to show that Chubb was an easily exploitable witness who would state whatever facts the prosecutor required, even contradicting things he’d already said. He wanted Chubb to admit he’d tried to get money in exchange for his testimony—to the tune of several thousand dollars. However, Chubb countered that the payment was for protection for himself and his family, in case Pickton’s brother, who’d threatened him, came after him. Other contradictions Chubb excused on the grounds of a poor memory resulting from a head injury. He denied and then admitted to certain facts, such as his claim that he did not know much about guns when, in reality, he had a conviction for possession of an unregistered weapon. Chubb retorted that Ritchie was free to attack his character, perhaps, but he was not the one on trial for murder.
Stunning Testimony
After introducing several witnesses acquainted with Pickton, all of whom had issues with drugs, memory, or deception, the Crown brought in its star witness, whose testimony was the most shocking to date. Lynn Ellingsen, thirty-seven, cried softly at times as she described her association with the notorious pig farmer. The woman whom Pickton had wanted Chubb to “talk to,” she had lived for a while on the farm, offering cleaning services for a place to stay. Ellingsen had been called to the trial to describe an incident she witnessed one night on the farm. It began when she went with Pickton to pick up a prostitute in Vancouver, after which they purchased drugs and returned to the farm. Pickton then asked, “Who’s first?” and the other woman volunteered. Elingsen went to her own room on the other side of the trailer.
Later, she woke up, heard a noise in the slaughterhouse, and saw a light, so she went to investigate. Before she saw anything, she smelled a powerful odor of offal, as if Pickton were gutting pigs. He was busy cutting something and she saw a woman’s body hanging from a chain. Pickton, covered in blood, noticed her, pulled her inside to take a look, and allegedly said if that she didn’t keep her mouth shut she’d be “right beside her.” She saw dark fluid on a table that looked like blood, near a mass of black hair. She promised not to tell in exchange for money for drugs. He got her a taxi and sent her away.
Unfortunately, Elingsen had kept this information from the police, so her statements were vulnerable. In fact, she admitted that on the night she had seen these things, she was using both drugs and alcohol. But she stated, “You can only get so high. I was high enough that I heard a sound that drew me out of my room. It was not a matter of hallucinating.” In fact, she said, the scene had shocked her into sobering up. She added that while cocaine “numbs you” and makes you sense things more acutely, it does not make you “see things that are not there.” She could not recall a date for this incident or the woman’s name. She only remembered feet with red toenail polish that hung at the level of her eyes.
The defense attorney raised the fact that Ellingsen had also been arrested in connection with the disappearance of the women, suggesting that she had a motive to lie. However, she had not been charged with anything and thus had little reason to protect herself. There was also a money angle: the RCMP had reportedly paid over $16,000 toward her living expenses over the past few years. She did not deny it.
Andrew Bellwood also gave disturbing testimony, and he took the most heat from the defense team. He was the ninety-seventh witness to date. He seemed nonchalant about sitting down to a pork dinner with Pickton in 1999, the day after Pickton had described how he had killed prostitutes before feeding their remains to the pigs. Allegedly, Pickton had sex with the women first and then murdered them there on the grounds. Hacked-off body parts were tossed to the pigs and others were mingled in barrels with pig entrails and dumped at a disposal plant. It was an easy operation, Pickton supposedly implied, after he lured them to the farm with their drug of choice.
Pickton’s murder method, Bellwood said, involved gagging the victims, handcuffing them, and using a wire with looped ends. He even acted it out. “He motioned to me he would put them doggy-style on the bed and have intercourse with them,” Bellwood told the jury. “As he was telling me the story, it was almost like there was a woman on the bed. It was like a play.”
Defense attorney Adrian Brooks found it hard to believe that after Pickton described such disgusting events, Bellwood then ate a meal with him—especially a meal whose main course was pork. Bellwood’s reply was that Pickton was a “nice fellow” who had loaned him money and he’d decided the story was probably fabricated. He wasn’t about to go to the police, since he himself was using drugs. Brooks then pointed to a serious inconsistency in the testimony: Bellwood claimed to have been alone with Pickton during the gruesome conversation, but earlier he had said that Lynn Ellingsen was with them. In response, Bellwood blustered that he would not have gone through all that he had over the past five years only to sit there now and lie. He had simply confused two events, he explained, and Ellingsen must have been present for something else.
With this, the prosecutors wrapped up their case. They had called fewer than half the number of witnesses they anticipated, but they were confident they had fully supported their position.
The Defense
In September, Justice James Williams threw out several days’ worth of evidence and instructed jurors to disregard any mention of the Jane Doe skull found off the grounds. He said it was not directly related to the charges, though other bone fragments matching the skull’s DNA had been found on the farm and the skull had the same saw-mark patterns as those from the farm.
The defense team used thirty witnesses, many of whom described Pickton as a helpful man and good person. Ritchie and Brooks had experts as well, and one point of contention was the bloodstained mattress found in the trailer. A blood expert from the RCMP had testified early in the trial that the mattress had been in place for a significant bloodletting event. The blood was a match for Mona Wilson, whose DNA was found on the sex toy attached to the revolver. Two defense experts questioned this interpretation of the bloodstains. Jon Nordby, a death investigator who was given only poor-quality crime-scene photographs, stated that from what he could see, there was not enough blood in Pickton’s mobile home to indicate a fatal event involving bloodletting (although he could not conclude that no murder had occurred there). The other expert, chemist Gordon Ashby, thought that some of the stains on the mattress came from glue.
Also at issue was the fact that DNA from someone else, unidentified, had been found on some of the items and on one victim’s teeth—raising the possibility that someone else had killed the women. In addition, Pickton’s IQ was quite low—about eighty-six, low average. Ritchie insisted he could not have masterminded such a massive number of murders. As to his confession, he merely parroted back information the police fed him or responded out of fear to the lies they told. “He did not have the knowledge of the murderer,” Ritchie stated. Still, his own expert admitted that a low IQ did not preclude the ability to plan a murder or to kill and that a score of eighty-six did not indicate a mental handicap.
Closing
In review, Prosecutor Mike Petrie went over the significant testimony methodically. Among the items of physical evidence were items with DNA from several dead women, buckets of body parts, a dildo with a revolver attached, and remains of three deceased females in a freezer and a pail. Five of the sixty-one items linked by DNA to the missing women had a confirmed or possible link to Pickton, and an eyewitness had seen Pickton with a saw where a woman’s body was hung. Then there were the incriminating statements that Pickton made to the police during his interrogation and to an undercover plant in his cell. Another witness said Pickton told him about strangling and gutting women, whom he fed to pigs, and had discussed the best way to kill a prostitute.
“Let’s have a reality check,” Petrie had said. “This case is about the police finding the remains of six dead human beings essentially in the accused’s back yard.”
Adrian Brooks insisted that the victims had not been clearly linked to Pickton. He argued that the investigation was clumsy, neglectful, and contaminated. The defendant was an amiable, subservient guy with a low IQ who had allowed plenty of questionable characters onto his property, which, along with the unidentified DNA samples and an eyewitness who was a drug addict, should be sufficient to establish reasonable doubt. In addition, there was no smoking gun, Pickton could not be tied to the buckets holding the heads, the dismemberment method was unlike Pickton’s method for butchering pigs, and some of the evidence pointed to other suspects. He named Pat Casanova and Dinah Taylor as prime possibilities and said the police had failed to conduct a thorough investigation of Pickton’s associates. For example, a fingerprint on the freezer where body parts were found had never been identified.
The Crown countered that Pickton’s IQ did not matter. He had experience as a butcher and was inured to death. He had an easy means for the disposal of remains. Common sense should dictate the verdict, not the “straw man” issue of an unknown perpetrator.
Then it was Justice Williams’s turn. He instructed jurors on the fine points of the law as he read for hours from a thick binder of notes. He cautioned them to ignore their knowledge that Pickton faced a future trial for other murders. He then recounted the results of the extensive search on Pickton’s property and the points on which experts had disagreed. Finally, he explained the concept of reasonable doubt, adding that they did not need to find that Pickton had acted alone in order to decide he was guilty. But to be guilty, he had to
act,
not just be present or in the vicinity. Finally, in order to deliver a verdict, it was not necessary that all their questions be answered. “You have only to decide those matters that are essential for you to say whether the offenses charged have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The jury had a lot of evidence to get through: more than 40,000 photos had been taken of the crime scene, 235,000 items were seized, and there were some 600,000 exhibits from the lab. Ninety-eight witnesses testified for the prosecution and thirty for the defense, both lay and expert, and there were half a million pages of documents, as well as nearly twenty hours of videotape. To complicate matters, during deliberations, the judge rephrased his instructions, as he decided he’d made an error.
The jurors took nine days, all of them nerve-racking for the families of the victims, but they did reach a verdict: Pickton was guilty of six counts of second-degree murder, but not guilty of six counts of first-degree murder. The accused listened and then looked at the floor, while many in the courtroom were stunned and disappointed. While he would receive a life sentence, he would be eligible for parole, possibly in a decade. The verdict meant that the jury did not believe either that Pickton had planned the murders or that he had acted on his own. They believed only that he was somehow involved. During Pickton’s sentencing, the judge gave him the maximum—no parole for twenty-five years.