Butcher (19 page)

“I know all the numbers and everything else,” he said. “But that’s neither here nor there.”

Adam reminded Pickton that Pickton had told him and others that he was not a drinker and that he did not use drugs, making it only reasonable to presume that he must have been sober and clearheaded when he committed the murders. As such, Adam suggested that Pickton should not have any difficulty remembering how many victims he had killed. Pickton just looked at him for a few moments before responding.

“What do you want me to say?” Pickton asked.

“You know how many times you’ve killed,” Adam told him. “I mean, every one of those kills is going to be a special moment in your life.”

“Umm, no,” Pickton said.

“How do you mean that? I don’t even understand that. You mean, like, it’s just nothing?”

“No, not really,” Pickton replied. “Nothing. I don’t know.”

“See, I need to understand that,” Adam said. “Like…when you killed these girls, was it a big deal to you? Or was it just like killing…one of the pigs? Or somewhere in the middle?”

“Um-hmm,” Pickton said. “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what to say, neither.”

Adam asked him if he had ever killed a woman that he regretted killing, and perhaps whether he had thought afterward that he should have let her go. Pickton, however, would not respond to that line of questioning, and just sat there, in the chair. When Adam moved on to talking about his brother, Dave, again, and said that he had been talking about possibly taking a polygraph test, Pickton spoke up.

“He’s not involved in anything. He’s protecting me.”

Pickton told Adam that other people would be charged with murder besides himself. When Adam pushed him for details, Pickton would only say that it would be a man—one other man.

Adam pointed to the photo board of missing women again, and asked Pickton how many of the women he recognized.

“How many could you reach out and touch?”

“I can touch them all,” Pickton said as he pointed toward the poster.

Adam did not know if he was being flippant, or if Pickton meant that he had killed all of them.

“No…I mean…that you killed?” Adam clarified.

“You make me more of a mass murderer than I am,” Pickton replied.

“Are you saying you haven’t killed forty-eight?”

“Hmm?”

“But you’ve killed women who aren’t on here, too,” Adam said. “So…like you said, ‘Don’t make me more of a mass murderer than I am.’ Agreed?”

“That’s right.”

“…It’s becoming clear to me that there [are] women that you have killed that aren’t on here,” Adam pushed. “You would agree with me on that….”

“Umm, no comment.”

“Why not? Why not just…tell me the truth?”

“Because if they’re not there, I’m not charged for it, right?”

“Yeah, but what’s the difference between two and twenty?…It makes no difference [with regard] to the sentence.”

“I could say one hundred fifty, too, but it’s not any truth involved in there, neither, right?” Pickton asked. “We’re grasping for something that’s not there….These are the ones you’re concentrating on?”

Pickton gestured toward the poster.

“Yup,” Adam responded.

“Now, whatever other ones are not on there, I’m not charged, right?”

“That’s right…. You’re only charged with two that are on there…. You will be charged with more, obviously, right?”

“Oh, probably. Maybe.”

“The DNA is pouring in,” Adam said. “But you see, I got to tell ya, I’m sitting here thinking, ‘Well, why am I even having this conversation with you?’”

“That’s what I’ve been asking you,” Pickton said. “Like I says, I’m the head honcho…. I’m the head guy.”

“So without you, none of these murders would have happened—is that what you’re telling me? Is that true? Or would the other guy that you haven’t told me about—”

“No,” Pickton said, interrupting Adam. “No…there’ll be guns involved, too.”

“How do you mean, guns?”

“Well, like I said, they’ll be guns involved, too,” Pickton said. “There will be at least one extra gun…involved.”

“That you’ve used to kill a girl?”

“Mmm, um, on other things. That’s over your head, like I said….”

Adam told Pickton that investigators had developed information showing that Dave had picked up some of the girls and brought them out to the farm, which Pickton quickly denied. Whether it was true or not, Pickton had no way of knowing—it could have been a form of leverage Adam was using to try and draw out information about whether other people were involved. Pickton, however, swore that his brother was not involved.

“It’s just you?” Adam asked.

“He, ah, just me?”

“Well, you…never been involved with the girls with him—”

“No.”

“Even just sexually?”

“No, nothing to do with Dave.”

“Willie, you didn’t do a good job of cleaning up the girls’ blood,” Adam said. “Like, you got to agree with me.”

“That’s right,” Pickton said. “I was sloppy.”

“Yes, you were,” Adam said, breaking into laughter. “That sums it up.”

“That’s what I am,” Pickton agreed. “I’m sloppy.”

“How could Dave not see that?”

“’Cause he’s too busy,” Pickton replied. “Let’s leave it that way, there.”

“With everything that was going on, how…do you think you managed to avoid getting caught for so long?”

“No comment.”

“Come on…is it just bad police work, or…like what?”

“Carelessness on my behalf.”

Pickton told Adam that if he and his task force wanted to dig up the entire property, they could go right ahead—but he insisted that if they did, they would not find anything. Pickton mentioned that he had heard that there were people making comments about mass graves being on the property, and Adam attempted to persuade Pickton to take investigators to such locations. His reasoning was that if Pickton could pinpoint mass graves, it would simplify things for the investigators and allow them to get off the property sooner rather than later, which was what Pickton had indicated he wanted. Pickton said that he would if he could, but he indicated that he could not because such mass graves did not exist on his property. Pickton told Adam that the reason this case was so difficult for the cops was because of their own “bad policing” for so long.

“Yeah, ’cause it took so long to catch you,” Adam agreed. “You’re right. I know a lot of policemen who feel bad for the families of these people. Did you ever think of quitting?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it…that drive we talked about?” Adam asked, insinuating that Pickton was driven to kill by something inside him. “I would like to know, ’cause obviously someday I’ll be sitting here with somebody else, Willie.”

“Yeah, it’ll all come out,” Pickton said. “It’ll all come out.”

Feeling that he’d come a long way in getting Pickton to incriminate himself despite the fact that Pickton had not given up too many specifics, Adam continued to press on, looking for a motive. He asked Pickton if he had killed the women because of fantasies, and Pickton shook his head no.

“Anger then?” Adam asked. “You sort of said it was anger. Would I be right in saying, Willie, that you had reached the stage where you just no longer…really viewed these girls as being worth anything?”

“Um-hum,” Pickton replied. “…I had one more planned, but that was—that was the end of it. That was the last. I was gonna shut it down…. I was just sloppy, just the last one.”

“You were gonna do one more?” Adam asked.

Pickton said something, but it was unintelligible. Then he continued: “That was the end of it. That’s why I got sloppy…because the other thing never got that far.”

Adam was not sure what he meant by the “other thing,” but he had what he needed—an admission of guilt, of sorts. He asked Pickton why he had not simply dragged the mattress out of his motor home, where he had killed Mona Wilson, and burned it. Hadn’t he realized that there was blood underneath it, lots of blood?

“Sloppy, like I just told you,” Pickton said.

Adam asked Pickton about keeping trophies of his kills, like many serial killers do, but he quickly denied doing so. He just brushed off all the things found inside his trailer and motor home—such as the inhaler, identification cards, clothing, and so forth—simply as having been “sloppy.”

“Jesus, Willie,” Adam said. “You must be kicking yourself.”

“I know.”

“All you would have had to do…is go through [everything] and clean up…and you’d still be on the street.”

“I know.”

“It must piss you off.”

“I know.”

Adam then explained to Pickton that there was “blood cast-off” on the mattress and other locations, caused by someone being struck or hit, possibly with some kind of blunt object. He was talking about Mona Wilson, but it was not clear whether he was baiting Pickton or if what he was telling him was based on conclusive evidence that it was Mona Wilson’s blood that had been cast off from sustaining blows to her body. They had said earlier that much of the blood in the motor home had been Wilson’s, but they indicated uncertainty about whom the blood on the mattress belonged to—being only two weeks into the investigation, things were happening and changing quickly as tests were performed and new evidence continued to surface on nearly an hourly basis.

“Hitting her?” Pickton asked, appearing shocked at the accusation. “What do you mean? No, no, no…you guys are way off the deep end.”

Why did Pickton keep playing these games? Why didn’t he just tell him how he killed her? Adam wanted to know, becoming frustrated again.

“Well, there’s impact blood,” Adam said. “There’s blood that’s cast off from…where she’s lying.”

“Umm-hmm,” Pickton said.

“Well, how do you explain that then? I don’t understand…. I know there’s bloody palm prints in there, too. Was she trying to get away? I mean, clearly, you didn’t choke her to death, Willie…because there’s blood all over the place.”

Adam asked him if he had used a hatchet or a hammer on the victim, and Pickton denied using either.

“Like, what?” Adam asked. “Tell me! Come on, man, I’m dying to know, for heaven sakes.”

“Um-hmm.”

“Share at least that much with me.”

“It’ll come out in the wash.”

“Come on,” Adam pleaded. “Come on, we sat here all night. You’re dying to tell me. I can see it in your eyes.”

“Um-hmm” was all that he would say.

“What did you use?”

“Sloppiness.”

Pickton said that he was too busy working job sites to clean up. He did not specify the job sites or what the work consisted of, however. He also did not answer Adam when he asked him if he had killed Mona Wilson on a weekend or on a weeknight, and he was silent for a few seconds before saying anything.

“You’re making me a murderer, more than I am,” Pickton finally said.

“Well, no, I’m not,” Adam argued. “You’ve made yourself a murderer. My suspicion is that with your memory, you probably know exactly what day, you know what time at night, everything. Let’s deal with just that one, Mona Wilson, in the mobile home. Firstly, why take her to the mobile home? Like, why not do it in your trailer?”

“No comment,” Pickton said.

“Just ’cause it was gonna be messy?”

“No.”

“Was she living out there, or staying there?”

“No comment.”

“Willie, come on,” Adam pleaded again. “Give it up. Come on, you owe me that much.”

“You’re not gonna…,” Pickton began, and paused. “You’ve been thinking on this one, eh? You’ve been thinking on this one for a while…. You really must be doing your—your homework.”

“I do tend to do my homework,” Adam agreed.

Pickton began laughing out loud again.

“Okay, there’s sort of three…sites, Willie,” Adam said, referring to locations where women were murdered on the farm. “The motor home—so you killed Mona—”

“Let’s work with the motor home,” Pickton interrupted.

“Okay. The motor home—you killed Mona on the bed, right? We agreed, on the foamy [mattress]. But there’s another…more blood, agree?”

“No.”

“That’s what happened, yeah,” Adam disagreed. “’Cause, well, the blood tells the truth, right?”

Before Pickton could respond, Bill Fordy entered the interrogation room. He was holding a large photograph of Pickton’s pig farm, taken from the air. Pickton’s eyes gleamed when he saw it.

“Oh, that’s nice,” Pickton said.

“They’ve got a lot of fancy pictures of your place,” Adam said. He gestured toward the motor home on the large aerial photo. “So let’s talk about it and…how many girls died in there. Mona died on the foamy, all right?”

“No comment.”

“Well, we just discussed that,” Adam said. “So, how many other girls died in there? We have other blood trails of other victims in there.”

“Why? What else you got in there?” Pickton asked.

“Ah, more blood, different…from a different person.”

“So…how many girls in there?” Adam asked. He was getting tired, but he was not about to give up now. “One, for sure…this is one way we can test your truthfulness, Willie. If you’re truthful with me and you go, ‘Well, Don, you could find up to five different women’s blood in there,’ and we do find, then we can sit there and say, ‘Okay…now we can start to believe what Willie says.’”

“Uh-huh.”

“So my question is, how many?”

“I’d say two, probably two, maybe three,” Pickton replied.

“Okay, so we’ve got Mona, obviously, right?” Adam asked.

“No. We’ve got nobody yet.”

“Yeah, we do. We got Mona. Trust me. Mona’s the one…with her blood. Did you use that dildo on her? It’s got her DNA on the tip, it’s got yours. You did, didn’t you? Was she alive or dead?”

“Alive.”

“When you used it, eh? Did you shoot her?”

“Shoot her?”

“Yeah, well, it’s on the .22—”

“No. There’s not holes through it. I put no holes through that,” Pickton said, referring to the dildo on the end of the gun.

“But you might have taken it off and shot the girl,” Adam theorized aloud. “Like, whatever you did caused a lot of blood.”

“Um-hmm,” Pickton said. “You did some of your homework.”

“Why not just tell me?”

“What can I tell ya?”

“You’re having fun playing cat and mouse with me here, Willie. True?”

Pickton did not respond.

“Let me ask you this question,” Adam said at another point in the interrogation. “Was it hard to do at first, and then it just gets easier? You don’t think about it as much, it doesn’t make you feel bad afterward? Did you feel bad after them at first?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah, I think you do, Willie…. You know they infected you, they stabbed you, they used you, they stole from you, didn’t they, Willie? And you lashed back, not at everyone, though. How come you spared some of them?”

“They’re nice people.”

“And so the nice ones you let go?…Willie, come on. We don’t need to play games with each other. Are you just not quite convinced yet you want to tell me the details of the killings? Is that…it? Come on, tell me the truth. Are you still thinking, ‘What’s in it for me?’”

Adam turned the questioning back to Mona Wilson. He asked Pickton when he took her out to the farm and killed her—then told him that he believed it was sometime in November or December 2001. Pickton sat quietly for a few seconds, and was obviously relaxed and comfortable with Adam and his questions. He was leaning back in the chair by this time, and had his feet propped up on the desk.

“You’re close,” Pickton finally said.

“Come on, cough it up,” Adam urged.

“You’re close,” he repeated.

“But you used the dildo on her when she was still alive, is that true?” Adam asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Did she do anything to…send you into a rage?”

“No, she didn’t want to have any sex,” Pickton said. “She didn’t want to do anything.”

“So you—what?” Adam asked. “Did you just lose control of yourself?”

“No, no comment,” Pickton said, laughing loudly again. “No comment at this stage. I’m already talking to you guys, but I’m not even supposed to talk to you, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m nailed to the cross….”

“Yeah, you are,” Adam said. “That’s true…. Do you remember where you killed the other girl with the inhaler?”

“No comment, again.”

Adam, guessing, suggested that Pickton had killed Sereena Abotsway in the slaughtering area. He pointed out the slaughterhouse to Pickton on the aerial photograph that Fordy had brought into the room.

“Or was she dead by the time she made it there?” Adam asked.

“No comment.”

“If you want me to believe that you haven’t buried these girls whole…then…what you’re telling me…is that ultimately you either took them into the slaughter area alive, or took them in there dead and disposed of them.”

“No comment…. I already told you how many’s in the trailer. Probably, maybe, up to as high as three in that…motor home…. That was as far as we got.”

“Right,” Adam said.

“Possibly,” Pickton added.

Adam informed Pickton that he needed to leave the room for a few minutes, and asked him if he was getting tired. It was getting late, and Pickton had been in the interrogation room for nearly ten hours by that time. The cops had been sweating him all day, and he seemed to take it in stride. Pickton said that he was okay. However, his demeanor began to change noticeably at that point.

“Yeah, you seem okay,” Adam said. “Frankly, you’ve got more zip in you now than I do.”

“No,” Pickton replied. “It’s just I’m telling you right now because I’m nailed to the cross anyways.”

“Why not give me everything then?” Adam asked.

“Why should I do that?”

“I guess if I said it would be the right thing to do, Willie, that wouldn’t mean anything?”

“No…’cause I gotta talk to Dinah first, I told you that.”

“So the families of these people, the families of these girls—”

“That’s not…my problem,” Pickton said, interrupting Adam.

“But they’re not—” Adam said, but he was cut off again.

“Shit happens,” Pickton said.

“Well, you certainly sum up how you feel about it,” Adam said.

Pickton tried to turn the conversation back to his offer of a deal, if he could talk to Dinah, and how it would free up the property and help the investigators with their workload. Adam, however, was not having any of it.

“I mean, I’m…nailed,” Pickton said again. “What I’m saying is I’m freeing the property and taking a lot of extra work off your hands…,” Pickton said.

“You know something?” Adam asked. “I could care less about the work…. My sole reason for being with you here is to try to do something for these families.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“All right,” Adam said. “I know you…don’t understand that, and I accept that—”

“Yeah, but the problem is, I’m nailed already—so, what can I do? Honestly, you tell me. What can I do?”

“Well, let me ask you a question,” Adam said. “If it was your niece or nephew…what would you want?”

“If it was my niece or nephew?” Pickton asked. “They’re at the wrong place at the right time. What else can I say?”

Adam mentioned that he and his investigators had heard about a thing called “blood sport” that had been occurring at the farm, and that other people had been involved. The so-called blood sport, Adam said, involved a number of people—a group—that would kill the girls. Pickton laughed at the suggestion, and even though he acknowledged that there were other people involved,
but
he would not say what they had been involved in, he refused to name them. Instead, he simply told Adam that he would “just take the fall.”

Adam also asked Pickton if he or others had made any snuff films at the farm; to which Pickton responded that they had not made such films.

If Adam was not disgusted with his interview subject throughout the interrogation, he must have been by now. His revulsion and loathing of Pickton was beginning to show as he was having difficulty holding his true feelings in check. He was tired, and he was sick of the games that Pickton seemed to enjoy playing with him. He had tried to appeal to Pickton’s good side, if he had one, and had failed. Sure, he had dragged bits and pieces of information out of the pig farmer, and had actually managed to get him to admit to some of the killings. But it had become clear to him by eleven hours into the interrogation that Pickton, like most serial killers, had no sense of empathy and was unable to put himself into the shoes of others, unable to see what they saw and unable to feel what they felt. Any sympathy that he had exhibited, such as the occasional tears and the wiping of his eyes, had been for himself, not for the victims or their families.

Pickton was a very basic human being, but at the low end, only slightly above the animals, which lacked the ability to reason, that he had slaughtered all his life before turning to humans. Like all normal humans, but unlike the lower animals, Pickton had the
ability
to reason, and he had free will. He simply chose to make the wrong choices and decisions, likely out of a basic need for instant gratification to satisfy some inner urge, or perhaps rage, that he chose not to reveal. “Monster” was probably too kind a word to describe him.

Adam sat down again, instead of leaving the interrogation room like he had planned, and told Pickton that his complete lack of caring about the women that he had killed was his business—but Adam could not understand him, no matter how hard he tried. Pickton tried to counter his remarks, but again Adam did not want to hear it.

“I respect them for worrying about their offspring,” Pickton said of the victims’ relatives, “and for worrying about where they’re located, or where they are, or [whether] they’re inside a cave, or here or there. Yes, I would be in the same position as they are. But at my stage right now, I haven’t got nothing to say, at this stage…. The part that bothers me the most is you got the whole place tied up and my brother can’t do anything. That’s all I’m saying.”

Adam told him that it was his job to sit there and try to see things through Pickton’s eyes, and that he had to do that in order to try and move the case forward. He was giving Pickton a glimpse of how he really felt about it all, all the while trying to hold back—in the event he needed to talk to Pickton again later. But it showed that he was having a tough time with it, and Pickton could see it.

“I have to try to understand you,” Adam said. “And I have to talk lightly about what you did, because otherwise I’m gonna shut you down and you won’t talk to me. All right? But at the same time, I’m seized with the fact that while you and I are talking about this, as if it’s so many, ah, used cars…[but] there are people whose hearts are being broken, and…well, I just want you to know how much it bothers me to have to sit here and act as if this is just a chess game.”

“Do I get to go back to my cell?” Pickton asked.

“Yup. Let me talk to my people and I’m sure we can arrange that.”

It was 9:47
P.M
. when Adam walked out of the interrogation room and left Pickton alone for a few moments to admire the aerial photograph, which had been taken of his farm. A short time later, as he was taken out of the interview room, Pickton glanced at several boxes that had been stacked against one of the walls. Some were labeled
DNA evidence,
and others were labeled
Toxicology reports, informants, and surveillance.
Pickton did not know it, but they were there merely for show—each was fake. But seeing them would give him plenty to think about and, Adam hoped, might cause him to have a change of heart and divulge more about the killings than he had during the lengthy interview. He was led into the visitor’s area of the facility, where he met for a short time with his lawyer, and afterward he was taken back to his cell. He seemed unusually upbeat as he walked into his cell.