Butcher (25 page)

Brenda Wolfe’s mother, daughter, and sister also told of how Wolfe’s death, and the publicity surrounding it, had affected each of them. In part because of what she had read in the media about her mother, Wolfe’s teenage daughter said that she had grown to hate her mother because she had believed most of what she had read about her, before realizing how much had been sensationalized. She said she wondered that if Pickton had not killed her mother, whether her mother would have come back to her. She said that she felt a lot of internal pain over her mother’s death, and had turned to writing as a way to deal with it. She said that she knew that her mother was a good person, and did not deserve to die the way she did, and deserved to be portrayed in a more positive manner.

Wolfe’s mother told of how the trial had been devastating and traumatizing for her, and that she harbored an anger within her that “reacts to fear, powerlessness, and pain.” She said that the loss of her firstborn child, Brenda, had left a hole in her heart and in her soul “that will never close.” She said that she wanted to know what happened to Brenda during the last hour of her life, and that “only the person who murdered her knows that and can tell me that.”

Wolfe’s sister described her as a “remarkable person” and “the most genuine person I have ever met.” She said that Brenda’s death haunted her “deeply inside,” and that she felt scared when she thought about what Brenda went through.

After the victim impact statements were heard, British Columbia Supreme Court judge James Williams gave Robert Pickton the maximum sentence: life in prison, serving six life sentences concurrently, with no eligibility for parole for twenty-five years. British Columbia attorney general Wally Oppal said at a press conference that it would be unlikely that a parole board would ever release Pickton from prison.

On Monday, January 7, 2008, the Crown asked the British Columbia Court of Appeal (BCCA) to order a new trial for Robert Pickton on twenty-six counts of first-degree murder, citing numerous errors it believed were made by British Columbia Supreme Court justice James Williams, according to British Columbia attorney general Wally Oppal.

“The trial judge made an error in defining first-degree murder, and also in directing the jury on planning and deliberation, as well as excluding certain evidence that ought to have been admitted,” Oppal said.

According to Oppal, the fact that the jury acquitted Pickton of the first-degree murder charges, but convicted him of second-degree murder charges, paved the way for a new trial on only the second-degree murder convictions—should the defense file an appeal on its own. The Crown’s move seemed to be of a preemptive nature to ensure that Pickton would be retried on first-degree murder charges—should an appeal be successful.

“We think this is a proper case for first-degree murder, and that’s the reason the lawyers in the Criminal Justice Branch, as sort of a defensive, protective measure, are filing notice of appeal,” Oppal said.

Called a “Crown appeal against acquittal,” the filing would allow the Crown to argue that Pickton should not have been acquitted by the jury on the six counts of first-degree murder.

“We have always been of the view that there was planning and deliberation,” Oppal said. “So if the matter is going to go to the Court of Appeal, our lawyers would argue that the planning and deliberations have been proved, and there should have been convictions for first-degree murder.”

Meanwhile, the defense team appealed the verdict, as was expected, and urged that Pickton’s next trial on charges that he committed twenty murders begin as soon as possible.

“We will be asking the second trial be scheduled as soon as it can be,” Peter Ritchie said. “Our client is in custody and we want to get these cases heard as soon as we can.”

Ritchie also said that he would not be representing Pickton at his second trial. Pickton’s appeal lawyer, Gill McKinnon, however, said that the grounds for the appeal of the first trial were that Justice Williams should not have allowed the Crown to present “similar fact” evidence, such as the discovery of the Jane Doe rib and heel bones found on Pickton’s farm, to be used in its efforts to convict Pickton of the murders of the six women for which he was being tried. The defense also argued in its grounds for appeal that the testimony of Lynn Ellingsen should not have been allowed, and that his eleven-hour interrogation tape with the police, in which he made incriminating remarks, should not have been admitted as evidence.

According to Ritchie, the appeals process will be complex and lengthy, and it could take up to a year and a half before it is even heard.

Meanwhile, the province of British Columbia holds a $10 million lien on Pickton’s one-third share in the family property, which it held and used to finance his first defense.

“Our client gave everything he owned to the government in exchange for his defense,” Ritchie said. “Our client did have considerable assets.”

It is believed that Pickton’s appeal will be heard by the BCCA sometime in 2009. At the time of this writing, however, a date had not been set and Pickton remained jailed as he awaited the outcome of the appeals process. There was also considerable uncertainty of whether he would actually be tried on the other twenty counts of first-degree murder.

As a writer who makes a living out of studying and chronicling factual cases of murder and mayhem—admittedly a somewhat macabre occupation—it seems only fitting that I would cross paths with the bizarre, violent case of serial killer Robert William “Uncle Willie” Pickton. Because of my fascination and interest in what people like Pickton are made of, and what drives them to commit the horrendous crimes that they do, and because of my inherent desire to make certain that the victims of such depraved monsters are treated as fairly as possible when I write about them, there was little, if any, chance that a story such as this would slip past me. However, it’s important that I make an ever-so-brief attempt to describe serial murder, what defines a serial killer, and the changes that have occurred over the past few years in the labels that are placed on such killers by psychology and law enforcement professionals. I don’t profess to know all of the answers, nor will I attempt to cover everything there is to know about serial murder—and the killers who commit them—here. Most people by now already know what a serial killer is, and my job is to attempt to fine-tune the information that already exists. The story of Pickton’s cruelty and inhumanity, in and of itself, takes up the slack without me having to completely reestablish what is known about serial murderers and their crimes.

According to the experts, the aberrant phenomenon known as serial murder has existed among mankind throughout history, although the degree of documentation of this type of murder has not been substantial prior to the last century. Despite the phenomenon’s long history, however, experts on such murders will tell you that the numbers of incidents, or commissions of such murders, have never been as great as they are today. According to
Serial Murder: A New Phenomenon of Homicide,
a now somewhat-dated, but still very useful and valid, 1984 study of serial murder by Robert Ressler, formerly of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, and his colleagues, Ann Burgess, Ralph D’Agostino, and John Douglas, serial murder has climbed to “an almost epidemic proportion.” Now, more than two decades later, these so-called “motiveless” crimes have come even closer to reaching epidemic proportions, with higher percentages of stranger-to-stranger murders than most sociologists, psychologists, and law enforcement professionals would have ever thought possible when they first began compiling statistics many years ago.

Despite the fact that some crime authors estimate the numbers to be in the hundreds, in reality there are likely only some thirty-five to fifty serial killers operating at any one time in the United States, according to the best law enforcement estimates currently available. Admittedly, this number even seems high, unless one looks at the total number of unsolved murders that occur in this region of the world each year and attempts to string them together by noting similarities. Indeed, those working in the various capacities of law enforcement expect the numbers to continue to move upward on the graphs, despite the advent of modern technology and better communication abilities and practices between law enforcement agencies in different jurisdictions, though not at the rapid rate that some so-called “experts” would have you believe.

But what is serial murder? And what is a serial killer?

The term serial murder was first referred to as “lust murder” by Roy Hazelwood and John Douglas in 1980, and it is generally accepted, albeit arguably, that Pierce Brooks, the mastermind behind the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) that is utilized by the FBI, and a true pioneer in the study of serial murder, first coined the term. No matter—the term is here to stay. According to Ressler et al.,
Serial homicide involves the murder of separate victims with time breaks between each, as minimal as two days to weeks or months.
Ressler and his colleagues referred to these time breaks as a “cooling-off period.” Because homicides involving multiple victims is gradually becoming more commonplace, and to facilitate an understanding of the aforementioned definition, it is helpful to differentiate serial murder from other types of murder, such as mass murder, which involves
four or more victims killed within a short time span,
and spree killings, which Ressler et al. defines as
a series of sequential homicides connected to one event committed over a time period of hours to days and without a cooling off period.

When one employs these definitions, it can easily be seen that murderers such as Richard Speck, who, on July 14, 1966, broke into a peaceful Chicago town house and murdered eight female nursing students while engaged in a sexual frenzy after binding each victim (see
The Crime of the Century,
by Dennis L. Breo and William J. Martin, Bantam Books) would be classified as a spree killer; his blood fest was
connected to one event
and was
committed over a time period of hours…without a cooling off period.
Charles Whitman, conversely, would be classified as a mass murderer because he killed his victims within a short period of time while sitting atop a Texas clock tower. An example of a true serial killer can be found in John Wayne Gacy, who claimed thirty-three male victims in Illinois (see
Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders,
by Terry Sullivan, with Peter T. Maiken, Pinnacle Books) over a considerable time period.

Henry Lee Lucas is another example of a prolific serial killer, who claimed to have killed at least 157 people, many of whom, according to Lucas, were murdered with the help of his “partner,” Ottis Toole. However, it became difficult to establish precisely how many victims Lucas and Toole claimed, because Lucas attempted to manipulate the system by leading investigators from around the country on a number of wild-goose chases, only to later recant many of his confessions after obtaining favors for his disclosures.

It is important to note that most serial murders are sex-related; many of a serial killer’s victims are nude when discovered, and evidence has shown that many such murders were committed during episodes of sadistic fantasy on the part of the killer. Ted Bundy, as well as Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, the so-called “Hillside Stranglers,” are prime examples of serial murderers addicted to periodic bouts of sexually sadistic fantasy.

Dayton Leroy Rogers, who holds the appalling distinction of being Oregon’s worst serial killer, was afflicted with such a cycle of sexually sadistic fantasy. In the Rogers case the evidence clearly showed that his crimes were sexual in nature and were driven by fantasy. This is in agreement with Ressler et al., who contend that serial murders are more often than not carried out within
the context of power, sexuality, and brutality.
Rogers’s foul deeds were, without question,
clearly sexual and all evil,
and were committed because, despite being married and having a child, he got to the point where he could not achieve sexual gratification in any other way.

This was also true in the case of serial child killer Westley Allan Dodd, who claimed three young male victims and was planning his fourth murder when apprehended, and is true about the subject of the case at hand, Canadian “pig farmer turned serial killer” Robert Pickton. There is little question that the gratification experienced by such anomalies of nature is psychological, whether sexually motivated or not.

In the past many researchers—particularly those in the field of psychology—have used the terms “psychopath” and/or “sociopath” to place a label on those who have committed motiveless serial murders. Now, according to serial murder expert Dr. Steven A. Egger, those terms have become obsolete. Egger says that the preferred label is now “antisocial personality disorder,” and that such killers “are not considered mentally ill or grossly out of touch with reality,” but lack the ability to “experience love or empathy, due to family rejection and needs frustration.” As such, Egger says, they are unable to “postpone drives for immediate gratification,” which results in the ease with which they can rape and murder their victims without feeling the remorse that a “normal” person would feel about committing a crime against another human being.

Although the behavior exhibited by most serial murderers is ritualistic in nature, as Dr. Joel Norris so aptly pointed out in his writings, and whose crimes more often than not are of the stranger-against-stranger variety, it is important to note that not all serial murders are committed against strangers, and sometimes the investigators do not even know whether the killer and victim were strangers because of an inability on the part of the investigator, for any number of reasons, to establish the relationship—if one existed. On a more certain note, according to Norris and others, a serial killer’s crimes are nearly always repeated within a framework of definite observable patterns, which, of course, form the ritual. In most cases these patterns rarely digress from crime to crime, although it has been shown that some serial killers make meager attempts to alter, veil, or otherwise disguise their modus operandi.

In almost all instances serial killers typically choose easy victims of opportunity, such as prostitutes, as in the Pickton case, as they troll city streets searching for prey, like an animal with a voracious, nearly insatiable appetite. Sometimes the victim will initiate contact with the killer instead of the other way around, as in the case of Gacy when boys and young men sought out employment with Gacy’s construction business. Despite attempts to disguise their modus operandi, however, the ritual remains crystal clear in most cases and often includes bondage, torture, sexual deviancy, mutilation, dismemberment, and, of course, the eventual murder of the victim. Sometimes serial murder cases even involve cannibalism, as in the cases of Jeffrey Dahmer, Henry Lucas and Ottis Toole, to name only a couple. Simply put, the ritualistic behavior provides the framework in which the killer can carry out his or, in rare instances, her darkest fantasies.

When one studies the backgrounds of serial killers in more depth, it becomes easier to see that most, if not all, manifest what are now considered classic behavior patterns, or symptoms, of what has come to be known in law enforcement and psychology circles as “episodic aggressive behavior,” or their psychosexual offender cycle. Norris identified a number of behavior patterns exhibited by serial killers that include some of the aforementioned ritualistic behaviors, including, but not limited to: wearing a mask of sanity so that they can live and work among normal people; compulsive behavior; a chronic inability to be truthful; a history of serious assault; deviant sexual behavior and hypersexuality; having suffered forms of abuse as a child; a history of drug and/or alcohol abuse; and committing extreme acts of cruelty to animals, to name but a few examples.

Norris also identified other patterns a serial killer goes through during their ritualistic commission of murder, including the aura or fantasy phase; the trolling phase, in which he is searching for his victim; wooing the victim; capturing the victim and carrying out the murder; the totemic phase, in which the killer, according to Norris, tries “to preserve the intensity of the murder, to prolong the feeling of power and triumph over their pasts by attempting to preserve the body” by performing a ritualized dismembering of the victim. Sometimes the killer cuts off the victim’s genitals, removes limbs, or decapitates the victim. At any rate, when the killer has accomplished what he has set out to do, he enters the final phase, known as the depression phase, after which the vicious cycle begins anew.

Dayton Leroy Rogers exhibited many, if not all, of the aforementioned ritualistic phases of serial murder that such killers act out. For example, Rogers always started out in a fantasy state that involved bondage in which he displayed the tremendous power that he held over his female victims, all prostitutes, who had been incapacitated by him. Official police files indicated that he nearly always began his cycle by trolling high-vice areas of Portland, Oregon, where he wooed his potential victims with the promise of money—just like Robert Pickton, except that Pickton operated in Vancouver, British Columbia.

After Rogers had his baited victim securely in his vehicle, it never took long for him to begin exercising his power over her, the “capturing” phase of the ritual, after making them comfortable by drinking vodka and orange juice with his victim. Rogers’s victims were nearly always bound, according to police and trial records that included testimony from some of his surviving victims. Sometimes his victims felt comfortable enough with him that they allowed themselves to be tied up, unaware that they would be seriously harmed, often murdered, during the game that they played with the sadistic monster. The bondage and power turned him on, elevated his mood, and became the springboard that hurled him further into his destructive mind-set and the murderous action that followed.

It often took Rogers hours to reach the apex of his sexual frenzy by torturing his victims. The torture he inflicted on his victims included cutting and biting the women’s feet, breasts, and buttocks, and when he was finished, he would murder his victim in the most horrifying ways imaginable. Using a hacksaw, he sawed off the feet of several of his victims at the ankles, while, the police contended, the victims were still alive and conscious. When they went into shock and became unresponsive—or not responsive enough to satisfy his sick desires—from the unbearable pain and the knowledge of what was happening to them, he would either attempt other methods of torture in an attempt to bring them around, or he would end their lives and begin coming down from his sadistic psychosexual high. He inserted what police believed was a machete into the vagina of one victim, and ripped her up the middle from her vagina to her sternum, again, police believed, while she was alive and conscious. After finishing with his victims, Rogers would take souvenirs of his kills, things like clothing and jewelry (some serial killers take body parts), to aid him in reliving the episode again and again within the confines of his tormented mind. Eventually, however, after growing tired of reliving what he had already done, and his blood-lust no longer satisfied, Rogers’s desire for a new victim and fresh blood became uncontrollable and he would become depressed. It was always within days, or sometimes merely hours, before Rogers entered the depression phase of his cycle during which the vicious, murderous phases would begin all over again.