Butcher (7 page)

As 1998 rolled around, there were many people, both inside as well as outside the Vancouver Police Department, who were very much aware of the terrible things that were happening to the women who lived in the single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels located in Low Track, as well as those who resided in shelters, and those who had no place at all in which to sleep. For decades the area had played host to the less fortunate, including single mothers, the mentally ill, the elderly, handicapped persons, and, of course, drug addicts and prostitutes. Women there would sell themselves for a fix of heroin, a rock of crack cocaine, a pack of cigarettes, or a bottle of booze. There was even a significant child population there, boys and girls—as young as ten or eleven—who had run away from home and who were forced to begin selling themselves in an area known as “kiddie stroll” in order to survive.

Statistics show that approximately 80 percent of the adult prostitutes living and working in Low Track began selling their bodies for sex when they were only children. Life there does become a vicious cycle for most, many of whom do not survive it, in part because of drug overdoses, HIV infections—the highest rate of HIV infection in North America—other sexually transmitted diseases, including hepatitis C, which, if gone untreated, causes rapid liver deterioration, among other things, and, of course, murder.

“To live in this area,” an SRO resident once said, “you have to know you aren’t going to walk out the front door of your hotel and find a bed of roses.”

During the late 1990s, the average income of the people who lived in the area of Main and Hastings was barely over $700 per month, even less for those on disability or on welfare. Seething with misery, the Downtown Eastside made a fertile hunting ground for those seeking to prey upon the less fortunate, knowing that just about anyone who lived there would do anything for a few dollars. Upon retrospect, there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that something could have been done about the missing women long before anything actually was done—if only enough people, aside from the missing women’s friends and family, had cared.

Some people would blame the culture of Canadian society, which had long held deep-seated disdain for those at the bottom of the human food chain, such as the drug-addicted, alcoholic sex trade workers, many of whom were aboriginal women. By 1998, however, many of the activists whose mission was to look out for the perceived “dregs of society,” as well as the friends and families of the missing women, continued to mount pressure toward the police to do something instead of handing out excuses.

“The police kept saying that the women had probably gone to live in another town, and that their lifestyles had made them so chaotic, they would forget to call home,” said a relative of one of the missing women, who asked for anonymity. “They must have thought we were stupid.”

John Lowman, a criminologist from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, was among those who wondered why it had taken the police nearly twenty years to accept the fact that there was a serious, ongoing problem in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

“These women are the most stigmatized group in society other than pedophiles,” Lowman said. “And sometimes I think more so. They are not as important to society as other women…. Some press reports on the case give the impression that for drug-addicted prostitutes, rape and murder are just occupational hazards.”

“Our justice system does not respond well to women who are black and criminalized,” said Suzanne Jay, of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter. “Prostitutes are seen as worth less than other women. They fall low on police priority.”

In Jay’s opinion it was such beliefs held by the police, including racist and sexist attitudes so in-grained into the police culture, that held back the start of the investigation into the missing women for so many years.

Few people familiar with the case would argue that the investigation into Vancouver’s missing women needlessly got off to a poor start. Had it not been for the urging of one man, Kim Rossmo, a geographic profiler and detective, the start of the investigation may have taken much longer. Rossmo, a twenty-two-year police veteran, had worked for several years in the Low Track beat and had believed for some time that the disappearances were the work of a serial killer. His beliefs, at first, were dismissed by his peers and his superiors in the police force, despite the fact that he had continued his education and had become an expert in the area of geographic profiling. He had even developed a software program to help investigators identify the location of where such a serial killer might reside.

“Crimes tend to occur at those locations where suitable victims or targets are found by offenders as they move throughout their activity spaces,” Rossmo said.

By focusing his attention on the area where the greatest number of prostitutes were disappearing, Rossmo concluded that the disappearances were occurring in far too many numbers within the same geographic area, in too brief a time span, making it illogical to think that the disappearances were not the work of the same person. Nonetheless, despite his best efforts, Rossmo’s colleagues in the department chose to either think illogically or, more likely, to live in denial that a serial killer was at work. They dismissed his theories without looking into them.

“They had great difficulty in accepting the fact that the only explanation that could account for this evidence was a serial murderer,” Rossmo said. “They failed to see the fire beneath the smoke, and acted too little, too late.”

Not only had Rossmo’s colleagues not accepted, much less acted upon, his theory, but he had, in fact, been fired in 2000 for his views, after being mired in controversy for years. His superiors just hadn’t been able to see it, and, according to Rossmo, who had been forty years old in 1995 when he had been promoted to the position of detective-inspector, his colleagues feared that they would not be able to handle a serial murder investigation of such magnitude. Rossmo, who had earned a doctorate in the area of criminology at Simon Fraser University in nearby Burnaby, was known as the first police officer in all of Canada to earn a doctorate degree. Furthermore, he had used his expertise in geographic profiling, along with the computer program that he had designed, to help identify prime suspects who committed serial crimes of nearly any type—arson, rape, or murder—by narrowing down the geographic area in which the perpetrator appeared to be the most comfortable carrying out his crimes. After entering all of the different variables of a particular series of crimes into the computer program, Rossmo was often able to identify a suspect based on the proximity of where the crimes occurred and where a suspect resided.

His colleagues feared how Rossmo’s expertise and theories might make them look. Even if it was the truth, no one on the force wanted to appear inept, or as if they didn’t care—at least not publicly. By being vocal about his belief that a serial killer was at work in Vancouver, Rossmo inadvertently threatened to expose exactly what his superiors wanted to keep hidden.

After word got out about Rossmo’s advanced degree and his geographic-profiling program, he received an offer from the RCMP for the position of inspector, a position in which he would be allowed to set up a geographic-profiling unit. A short time later, when Ray Canuel, Vancouver’s police chief at that time, was told about Rossmo’s offer from the RCMP, Canuel promoted him to detective-inspector and asked him to set up a geographic-profiling unit within the Vancouver Police Department. Because the program worked so well, the department won a number of awards and received international acclaim for their successes. Despite the program’s success rate, Rossmo wasn’t allowed to use it officially in the cases of Vancouver’s missing women after suggesting that he believed their disappearances were tied to a serial killer. Because of what Rossmo would eventually refer to as the “old boys’ network,” he was snubbed by many of his colleagues who resented his success. He was later dismissed after being given the choice of being demoted to constable and returning to his old Low Track beat.

Even with the attempted murder of Wendy Lynn Eistetter, who had managed to get away from Robert Pickton’s evil clutches and report what had happened to her to the police, and in spite of Rossmo showing them in black and white what he believed was occurring, the police still felt that they needed more, much more, to convince them that women were disappearing because of the actions of a serial killer. Furthermore, few people within the VPD could believe that the gaunt, balding pig farmer with dishwater blond hair was capable of such dreadful things. In the meantime women continued disappearing from the Downtown Eastside, one by one.

The year 1998 proved to be a very busy one for Robert Pickton. No fewer than nine women vanished from the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside that year, and there may have been more—women who did not make the official list because they might not have been reported missing or somehow had otherwise been overlooked by the police. Those sex trade workers whose disappearances did get noticed and were eventually added to the list of missing women: Kerry Lynn Koski, thirty-nine, last seen on January 7; Inga Monique Hall, forty-six, last seen on February 26; Tania Petersen, twenty-eight, believed last seen sometime in February; Sarah Jean de Vries, twenty-nine, last seen on April 12; Sheila Catherine Egan, twenty, last seen sometime in July; Julie Louise Young, thirty-one, last seen sometime in October; Angela Rebecca Jardine, twenty-eight, last seen on November 10; Marcella Helen Creison, twenty, and Michelle Gurney, nineteen, both last seen in December.

The desk clerks at many of the Downtown Eastside’s seedy hotels were in an ideal position to see many of the hard-up, desperate drug-addicted prostitutes on an almost daily basis, and the police eventually learned that they were among the first to notice when the women began disappearing. Many of the women stayed at the run-down hotels, and the first clue to the hotel clerks that something was amiss was when the women would just up and leave without giving any notice or checking out, leaving what few possessions they owned behind in their rooms.

One of the desk clerks, Helene Major, who worked at the Roosevelt Hotel at Main and Hastings, would eventually tell authorities how she noticed the women disappearing “one by one,” and how she never knew where they had gone. Major became personally acquainted with some of the women who disappeared, and knew Willie Pickton as well. Pickton, she said, would sometimes show up at the hotel to visit a friend, Dinah Taylor, a thirtysomething woman who, at least at that time, had cocaine and heroin problems. Taylor lived at the Roosevelt and had also lived on Pickton’s farm for eighteen months at the height of the disappearances.

“He was friendly. He used to talk to everybody,” Major said about Pickton. “He never stayed very long. He picked Dinah up, or picked someone else up.”

The police would eventually suspect Dinah Taylor of arranging terminal visits between Willie Pickton and several of the women who worked and lived in the Downtown Eastside, but they would never be able to prove it. Nonetheless, they never had any problem connecting Pickton with Taylor and the eastside hotels. Many of the working girls frequently waved at Pickton as he drove through the area, either on his way to or on his way from the nearby rendering facility.

The Astoria Hotel, located several blocks east of the Roosevelt, was another Willie Pickton hangout. While not quite as seedy or notorious as the Roosevelt, the Astoria had a bar situated on the ground floor that Willie would frequent and where he would have a few drinks, nearly always alone. Those who worked there did not particularly like him, and a bartender there told Seattle weekly newspaper
The Stranger
that Pickton was a “faker.”

“He was a wannabe, you know,” the bartender said. “He wanted to be a biker, a Hells Angel, a mean leather guy. Nevertheless, everyone knew he was a weasel, a wannabe. I mean, you can’t imagine hanging out with a guy like that without something bad happening.”

The scenario involving Willie seemed simple enough. He would go to the Downtown Eastside on any given day or night, and pick up women who needed money, either through prearrangement with an accomplice or on his own, and then drive his particular victim due east on Hastings on a nearly direct route to his farm almost twenty miles away in Port Coquitlam. It seemed astonishing that the police had not picked up on his routine early on, particularly after the assistance and suggestions offered by Kim Rossmo, who had become more vocal by 1999. By year’s end, however, five more women had disappeared: Jacquelene McDonell, twenty-three, vanished in January 1999; Brenda Wolfe, thirty-two, the following month; Georgina Papin, thirty-four, in March; Wendy Crawford, forty-three, and Jennifer Furminger, twenty-eight, both disappeared in December 1999.

Although she would have difficulty remembering the precise date, Robert Pickton’s longtime friend, Lynn Ellingsen, twenty-nine, at the time, had what she would likely remember as the most terrifying experience of her life, in March 1999, around the time that Georgina Papin disappeared. Although she would remain quiet for years about what she had seen one night on Pickton’s farm out of fear for her own life, Ellingsen would eventually come forward with a story that rivaled anything that Hollywood could dream up and put on celluloid in the form of a horror movie.

Ellingsen had met Pickton through Pickton’s friend Gina Houston. The two women had met at a Vancouver halfway house, where Ellingsen had been staying temporarily while breaking away from an abusive relationship. Later, on the night in question, Ellingsen had been residing on Pickton’s farm for about two months, doing odd jobs for him to help with her upkeep, after Willie had offered her the work. The work included cleaning up Willie’s trailer, and sometimes driving a truck for him. That night, which she believed was March 20, 1999, but admittedly was not absolutely certain about the date, she and Willie decided to drive to the Downtown Eastside in search of a hooker for Willie. She would later tell the authorities that she had remembered that particular date because the police had stopped Willie that evening and had given him a sobriety test. They picked up a prostitute, whom Ellingsen would identify as Georgina Papin, and went back to the farm.

They smoked crack cocaine that evening, both en route to the farm and after their arrival there. At one point Willie took Papin into one room of his trailer, while Ellingsen went into another. She continued getting high by herself, and eventually she fell asleep. Sometime later, however, Ellingsen, awakened by a loud noise, looked out the window and saw a light on in the nearby barn, where, she knew, Willie slaughtered pigs. Somewhat shaky and curious, she went outside to investigate.

As she walked toward the barn, following the light source, Ellingsen felt ill—either from the excessive drug use that night or the sickening odor that hung in the night air, which grew stronger as she reached the barn. She cautiously pushed open the barn door a bit when, suddenly and without warning, Willie Pickton, covered in blood, reached out and grabbed her, pulling her inside the barn. He pulled Ellingsen over to a table and forced her to look at the dead woman, naked and hanging from a hook. The woman, Georgina Papin, was just hanging there, covered in blood. Willie had placed her on a hook in the same manner that he always hung up the pigs that he was going to slaughter. The victim’s feet, whose toenails were painted red, were at Ellingsen’s eye level. On a “shiny table” next to the hanging body, Ellingsen saw long black hair lying there, Georgina Papin’s hair, and a lot of blood. She also saw two bloody knives. It looked to her like Willie had skinned Papin, and was preparing to butcher her like an animal.

Willie told Ellingsen that if she told anyone anything about what she had seen that night, the same thing would happen to her. Vowing to keep her mouth shut, Willie called a taxi for her and sent Ellingsen out to buy additional drugs. Fearing for her own life, she stayed with a friend and did not return to the farm. She also never uttered a word about what she had seen that night, until nearly three years later.

By April 1999, it seemed that the powers-that-be in Vancouver had begun to listen to the pleas for action from the missing women’s relatives because the Vancouver police board posted a $100,000 reward that month for information leading to an arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for whatever happened to the missing women. It was a move supported by Mayor Philip Owen, chairperson of the police board. Until that time, however, Owen had been adamant that there was not any evidence that a serial killer was at work, and he stated that he would not be responsible for financing “a location service” for hookers. Contact with family members of some of the missing women apparently helped bring about the mayor’s change of heart.

“This is developing into a very major issue,”
Owen said to
The Province
reporter Bob Stall.
“Everybody’s jumping on to it and getting connected. I think it’s worth having a very close look at it because the press are pointing that out and the public are wanting it, and certainly the families are wanting a little more attention and a little more seriousness.”

Owen pointed out that the reward offer needed to be very clearly worded before going public with it.

“We have to make sure we don’t have a big reward out there for a missing person’s issue,”
Owen said.
“We don’t want a person in Vancouver saying, ‘My sister Carol is now in Portland. Send me a hundred thousand bucks.’ So then you think of making it a reward for information on a homicide of some kind, or some kind of serial activity…. Do we want to go on the assumption that they’ve all been brutally murdered? Families could say, ‘You’ve already written off my daughter? What if she’s badly wounded somewhere? What if she’s kidnapped somewhere? Or a hostage somewhere? What if somebody’s got her locked up in a cabin somewhere? You’ve concluded that she’s dead. I don’t want to conclude that.’”

The mayor even expressed concern that the reward offer, if worded poorly, might elicit one or more murders that had not yet occurred. He cited a case in Belgium to make his point.

“I have a horror of something like those girls in Belgium who were locked up for almost a year in a basement,” he said. “And because we put this one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward out, he murders them and then two months later, he says, ‘I found these bodies.’ Maybe I’m getting out of line. Maybe my imagination is running ahead, trying to think of all the parameters of it, but it’s my job to think of all sides.”

He said that his goal, at that point, was to encourage anyone with information about the case to come forward with it, hopefully with evidence to back it up.

“But we’ve got to craft it so that it solves the issue and gives us the evidence we need and doesn’t cause some kind of negative situation.”

Rossmo, along with retired police inspector Doug MacKay-Dunn, spoke out about the tragedy of the missing women, which had been encouraged, in part, by the inaction of the police department over the past several years. While stressing that stranger-to-stranger crime is among the most difficult type of crime to solve, Rossmo said that if his profiling system of geographic profiling had been used sooner, it could have helped trim some of the information overload experienced by the Vancouver police.

“Police forces have limited resources and these cases take extraordinary resources, so they have to come from somewhere and usually that involves politics, a political decision,” Rossmo said later in hindsight.

Deborah Jardine, mother of missing woman Angela Jardine, told the
Vancouver Sun
that her daughter—as well as many other women—might have been spared a horrible fate, had the police, sooner rather than later, issued a public warning that a serial killer was at work.

“I think it might have made a difference,” Deborah Jardine said. “The women would have taken extra precautions, including my daughter.”

Deborah was among those who believed that officials within the Vancouver Police Department should have listened to Rossmo’s warnings and taken action. Deborah believed that the police should have taken her daughter’s disappearance, as well as the disappearances of all the other missing women, more seriously.

“I was told that it wasn’t a serial killer, that she just disappeared and started a new life somewhere,” Deborah Jardine said. “I’ve said all along it was a serial killer or killers.”

There were those, of course, who publicly disagreed that a serial killer was operating in the Downtown Eastside area, including Detective Scott Driemel, VPD media liaison officer. When asked if the department had purposely disregarded Rossmo’s warnings, Driemel told the Canadian Press that there was no firm evidence that a serial killer was at work in the area, citing the fact that no bodies had been found yet. He added, however, that such a possibility was not being ruled out.

Groups that provide assistance to those in need in the Downtown Eastside area did not agree that the police had been remiss in their handling of the disappearances. Judy McGuire, chairperson of the Women’s Information Safe House, defended the police work on the case.

“There was a unit set up and a number of officers worked incredibly diligently,” McGuire said. “The police obviously took (the disappearances) very seriously and acted on…a lot of fronts.”

The fact that sexual predators operated regularly in the area was “common knowledge,” McGuire said. She added that the police did as much as possible to increase the sex trade workers’ knowledge of that fact.

“A lot of officers were getting the word out that women were going missing,” she said. “That sexual predators were out there. Whether they should have issued a particular notice, I don’t know.”

By Tuesday, July 27, 1999, John Walsh and the crew of the popular crime-fighting television show
America’s Most Wanted
had arrived in Vancouver at the request of the police, and at the continued behest of families of the missing women, to film a show that would air the following Saturday evening, July 31, 1999. Outspoken Walsh made it clear from the get-go that he believed it was obvious that the missing women were the work of a serial killer. Although it was not what the police had wanted to hear, they nonetheless went along with Walsh’s assessment.

“Anybody can put two and two together,” Walsh said. “When there are thirty women missing and no bodies have been found, and they’re all of the same type of background, that always smacks of a serial killer…. By putting the millions of eyes of American viewers and Canadian viewers of this case, there might be a chief of police or a coroner who has a Jane Doe or unidentified body or a similar case they can link together.”