Butcher (8 page)

Constable Anne Drennan, while neither confirming nor denying the possibility that a serial killer was plucking women off Vancouver’s streets, continued to downplay the likelihood that a serial killer was at work. She insisted that it would be inappropriate to reveal police thoughts, theories, and strategies regarding an ongoing investigation.

“We’re following many different avenues of investigation,” Drennan said. “Some initiated by our department and some we’ve learned through speaking to other departments that have been through similar circumstances with multiple murders, multiple missing [persons].”

Walsh, on the other hand, said that Vancouver police may have been concerned about unduly alarming the public about what they thought was occurring.

“Law enforcement tries not to scare the public or talk about details they can’t really confirm,” Walsh said. “Hopefully, Saturday night we will be able to end some of the mystery surrounding the disappearances of these thirty-one women.”

It was the hope of everyone concerned that the
America’s Most Wanted
episode would generate solid leads that would help solve the mystery of the missing women, or at the very least would prompt any of the women who had left Vancouver for other destinations to contact their families or the police about their whereabouts. Although the show did generate telephone calls, little came out of it to help move the case forward.

If one person within the media could be credited with helping to light a fire under the Vancouver Police Department and to jump-start the case to get it moving forward, it would be
Vancouver Sun
reporter Lindsay Kines. Kines began covering the story for the newspaper in 1998, and has been credited as the first reporter to delve headfirst into the case. Kines, who developed sources within the department who revealed slipshod work and incompetence among the ranks of investigators, pressured the police through his stories and repeated questioning of officials. It was, in part, because of Kines’s work and that of his colleagues, which included reporters Lori Culbert and Kim Bolan, that the Vancouver Police Department began stepping up their efforts in 1999, and would continue and intensify over the next few years.

“Once we became aware that clearly there was something wrong here, we kicked in additional resources,” Drennan said.

“Although the police don’t have any evidence of foul play, there is a gut instinct that all of us have,” chimed in British Columbia attorney general (AG) Ujjal Dosanjh.

Rossmo, meanwhile, angry over his perceived ineptitude of his colleagues at the Vancouver Police Department and his termination from his $120,000-per-year job, began putting together a civil lawsuit against his former employer. In the meantime, as the twentieth century came to a close and the twenty-first century began, women continued disappearing, without a trace, from the Downtown Eastside.

Despite all of the fear and paranoia generated and fueled mostly through conspiracy theorists, Y2K passed with nary a significant event anywhere in the world. Many people stocked up on supplies and rations for what they believed was going to be an “end of times” event, only to find out later that they should have saved their money for the hard times that would hit much later in the first decade of the new century. Except for the colossal celebrations pertaining to ringing in the new century that was going on in major cities around the world, it was mostly business as usual.

It was, as well, business as usual in the case of Vancouver’s missing women. There had not been any takers of the standing $100,000 reward, and the police were not any closer to identifying Willie Pickton as the perpetrator who was taking many of the women away from their misery on the streets of the Downtown Eastside to one final, likely drawn-out bout of unimaginable pain and suffering. The police would eventually learn that there were plenty of people who had information about what was going on at the Pickton farm, but none of them were coming forward with it.

The year 2000 only saw four new names added to the list of missing women: Tiffany Drew, twenty-seven, was last seen in March 2000, according to the Joint Missing Women Task Force poster. However, others said that she was last seen in December 1999. Strangely, and unlike in prior years, seven months passed before the next woman, Dawn Crey, forty-three, went missing. Crey disappeared in November 2000. Sharon Abraham, thirty-five, and Debra Jones, forty-three, both disappeared in December.

As numerous detectives and police officers went about their business of investigating the cases of the missing women that had been assigned to them, a somewhat clearer picture of Robert Pickton and his pig farm began to emerge, thanks in no small part to a man named Bill Hiscox. Why it had taken so long to begin deriving a conclusion remained a mystery. Many on the outside looking in surmised that the problem was caused by too little focus and lack of communication because of the sheer numbers of missing women being investigated by officers who failed to see the forest for the trees. Nonetheless, Hiscox, thirty-seven, had been there and had seen and heard things on the farm that had disturbed him, and he had reported his concerns to the police. Either his concerns had initially fallen on deaf ears, or his information had failed to reach the appropriate investigators in a timely manner. Hiscox, however, had become a part of the story.

Hiscox apparently began using drugs and alcohol after the death of his wife in 1996, but a caring relative, who also happened to be close to Robert Pickton, came to his rescue and had helped find him a job at P&B Salvage, located in the community of Surrey and owned by the Pickton brothers, in 1998. Surrey was due south of Port Coquitlam, near Mud Bay, and was not far from the Pickton farm. Because Sandra Humeny, Dave Pickton’s former common-law partner and mother of two of his children, handled the business’s accounting operations on the farm, employees of P&B Salvage were required to go to the farm to pick up their paychecks. It was a routine that Hiscox had quickly come to dislike.

Hiscox had told the police as early as 1998 that the Pickton farm was a “creepy-looking place,” made even more so by a nasty-looking and ferocious six-hundred-pound wild boar that Willie and his brother used to help guard the property.

“I never saw a pig like that, which would chase you and bite at you,” Hiscox told the cops. “It was running out with the dogs around the property.”

Hiscox had become concerned about what he had observed on the farm and at Piggy’s Palace after reading the numerous newspaper reports about Vancouver’s missing prostitutes, not to mention what he had heard from others. He had been particularly alarmed by the drunken parties at Piggy’s Palace, which had included amusement and diversion by numerous women from the Downtown Eastside. Hiscox said that Willie drove a converted bus around town, and that the bus had dark-tinted windows that made it impossible to see inside.

“It was Willie’s pride and joy,” Hiscox said. “He wouldn’t part with it for anything. He used it a lot.”

Hiscox described Willie as a “pretty quiet guy” who was difficult to engage in conversation.

“I don’t think he had much use for men,” Hiscox said. “Willie is a very strange person to talk to. He is, like, antisocial. He was very quiet to us. That’s why I found him sort of strange.”

Although Hiscox had already decided that Willie was a “strange character,” he was certain of it when he heard about the stabbing incident involving Willie and Wendy Lynn Eistetter that had occurred a year before he began his employment with the Picktons. He told the police about purses and female identification cards that had been seen inside Willie’s trailer, information that he had apparently learned from a woman he identified as Lisa.

“A good friend of mine told me lots of things,” Hiscox said. “She had her suspicions as well.”

The female constable that he had spoken to, however, informed him that there was little, if anything, that the police could do regarding evidence that Hiscox had not personally seen.

“She said they couldn’t really do anything, they can’t just go in there based on assumptions,” Hiscox said. “The constable wanted to talk to Lisa, but Lisa did not want to get involved with the police or anything.”

Hiscox refused to give up, however, and went to the police several times with his information, even if it was hearsay. He told the police that Willie frequented the Downtown Eastside, often driving his “magic bus,” as Willie sometimes referred to it, looking for girls. The police recorded his statements, and an investigator eventually went with him to the pig farm, to no avail. The detective promised to push his superiors, “all the way to the top,” to follow up on Hiscox’s information. Despite the promises and good intentions of those who had tried to get involved and intervene, little, if anything, was done at that time.

Even though the police had received several reports about the events going on at the Pickton farm from a number of people besides Hiscox, the case seemed to remain in a near-constant indeterminate state. Although women continued to vanish in 2000, at a rate that was perceived as less than in prior years, it was no secret that many of the missing women were not being placed on the official missing list for one reason or another. Some of the women eventually turned up alive, some turned up dead from drug overdoses, and still others were classified using vague characteristics. One thing was certain, however—whoever was responsible for causing the women to disappear from Low Track was still brazenly at work, almost challenging the police to catch him. It seemed, however, by that time all that the police would have had to do was place some of their own people, undercover, on the streets of the Downtown Eastside, to simply keep an eye out for Willie Pickton and his magic bus.

As the year 2000 ended and 2001 began, much was happening with regard to the case that would come to be known as “The Pig Farm Murders.” It just was not happening with regard to the police making much headway toward solving the mystery of the missing women. Instead, most of the activity—much of which the police had not learned about yet—was occurring on Pickton’s farm after Willie picked up women off the streets of Low Track, using the promise of drugs and money as lures to get them inside of Willie’s vehicle—truck, bus, or whatever he was driving on any given day or night.

The six-person RCMP/VPD Joint Missing Women Task Force was formed in 2001. The idea for a task force had germinated at a police meeting of the two agencies on November 23, 2000,
after
a senior member of the RCMP had sent out an e-mail to higher-ups suggesting that the Mounties should help Vancouver with their stalled investigation. The joint task force would be code-named “Project Evenhanded.”

Following several weeks of meetings and negotiations over who would lead the new task force, veteran RCMP inspector Don Adam won the post. Adam knew from the outset that his job would be difficult and that the task force work would be complicated, in part because the police did not have any known crimes scenes to work yet, and the responsibility of showing that the missing women had not simply moved to another location—but had, in actuality, likely met with foul play—would be theirs.

By the time the task force got down to business, the official number of missing women stood at sixty. Compounding the difficulty of their work was the need to sift through a large group of possible suspects, primarily men who were known to police for having had committed acts of violence against prostitutes. RCMP sergeant Margaret Kingsbury, a senior member of the task force, caught that assignment, among others, and immediately began reviewing hundreds of files that involved such potential suspects, as well as the victims who had reported crimes of violence committed against them.

“There might be more women missing out there that we didn’t have knowledge of,” Kingsbury said in reference to the daunting task she oversaw.

Another problem investigators faced, according to Adam, was that Vancouver police investigators had at one point attempted to link three unsolved murders of sex trade workers near Mission, a small community southeast of Vancouver and Port Coquitlam, situated along the Lougheed Highway, to the cases of the Downtown Eastside missing women. In addition to the bodies found in the Mission case, DNA of an unidentified suspect had also been recovered. Because bodies of the missing Vancouver women had not yet begun to turn up, Adam did not believe the Mission case was connected to Vancouver’s. He realized, however, that the possibility of such a connection required investigating, if for no other reason than to rule it out. Adam nonetheless acknowledged early in the task force’s work, as women continued to vanish from the Downtown Eastside, that a serial killer was at work.

“Unless they (the missing women) could be found, the evidence was that there was an ongoing serial killer active,” Adam said.

The fact that Vancouver police investigators told the task force that women had ceased disappearing from Low Track in 1999 created another problem. During that period Vancouver police had mistakenly believed that the killer, if one existed, had moved out of the area or was in jail somewhere. Because of such ineptitude the task force, once formed, would have to allocate at least some of their focus by going over Vancouver’s older files. Other major problems that had affected Vancouver’s ability to properly investigate the case was the fact that a DNA data bank for missing persons did not exist in British Columbia. That made it impossible for the police to check the DNA of the missing women against the corpses of unidentified women held at the morgue at any given time.

During the years that Vancouver police handled the missing persons cases in question, they collected more than 1,300 tips and stored many of them in an archaic computer system that did little, if anything, to help the investigators working on the numerous cases. By the time the task force received the computer files, they merely served to waste their time requiring them to sort them into a paper filing system until they could devise something that worked more efficiently. They eventually settled on making use of a computer program utilized by investigators of the September 2, 1998, Swiss Air flight 111 tragedy that occurred in Nova Scotia. Although it helped them, it didn’t stop the women from disappearing.

At one point Adam, realizing that no one on his team had any experience in trying to track down a serial murderer, decided to take the task force on a field trip of sorts to Seattle and Spokane, Washington, to confer with investigators in those cities. Both cities had experienced their own problems with serial killers—Seattle with their Green River Killer, fifty-two-year-old Gary Leon Ridgway, who was still a few months away from being caught, and Spokane’s Robert Lee Yates, fifty, father of five, decorated military helicopter pilot and National Guardsman, had been convicted the previous year of killing thirteen prostitutes in and around the eastern Washington city. Vancouver’s Joint Missing Women Task Force hoped to benefit by talking with the experienced serial killer manhunters, since both killers had chosen prostitutes as their prey. It was the first of several such meetings that would take place between the task force members so that they could compare notes with their counterparts south of the border. It also would not be the only time that Gary Ridgway’s name came up in relation to
their
case—soon after the Green River Killer murders stopped in Washington State, but long before Ridgway’s capture, women in Vancouver began disappearing. Ridgway, at one point, would tell the sentencing judge that “I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight.” The task force would also make another trip to Seattle to interview Ridgway.

One of the major points that Adam and his team learned by conferring with the detectives in Seattle and Spokane was that serial killers were very adept at staying ahead of the police. They typically watched news reports and read newspaper articles to find out as much as they could about what was happening in the investigation. In cases where bodies were turning up, a serial killer was typically committing his next murder, often before his prior victim’s body had been found. In cases like that of the Green River Killer and the Yates case in Spokane, the investigators always had a crime scene to work. The crime scenes didn’t always become available immediately, and in many instances it would take months before a body was discovered and detectives had a crime scene to work. Of course, in the case of the Vancouver task force, they had yet to get a crime scene related to the missing women.

So if a serial killer was at work in Vancouver, Adam kept asking himself, why hadn’t any bodies turned up yet?

Although Adam and his team had not experienced any immediate results from their meetings with the investigators in Washington State, they had learned a lot that had the potential to be very useful to them later on. They learned a lot about forensics, DNA, and processing crime scenes, and by mid-2001 additional officers were added to the task force. In an effort to become more proactive in their efforts to not only identify but to locate a suspect, the task force put together a team that would spend more time on the streets and act as a go-between that would communicate more effectively with not only the prostitutes working the streets but with the agencies that existed to provide assistance to the women. Although it was an effort that had been started later rather than sooner, it was everyone’s hope that it would pay off and bring them closer to ending the madness.

Over the course of 2001, eight more women disappeared from Vancouver’s seediest streets and were eventually placed on the official list of missing women: Yvonne Boen, thirty-three, and Patricia Johnson, twenty-five, both last seen in March 2001; Heather Bottomley, twenty-four, and Heather Chinnock, thirty, last seen in April 2001; Andrea Joesbury, twenty-two, last seen in June 2001; Sereena Abotsway, twenty-nine, last seen in August 2001; Dianne Rock, thirty-four, last seen in October 2001; Mona Wilson, twenty-six, last seen in November 2001.

It should be noted that the dates used herein are the dates that the women were last seen as recorded by the police, and that the actual dates that they were officially reported missing were often later. The dates that their names were added to the official list of missing women also came later as the task force went about its business of sorting through the names of many more missing women than those that would ultimately make the official list. Some of the women who had not made the official list turned up alive in other locations, while others had died from drug overdoses and some from disease, and part of the task force’s job was to eliminate those names that it deemed not applicable to the case. When all was said and done, the task force had come up with sixty-five names that it placed on the official list. Later, after the case broke, it would add another, a Jane Doe.