The Mammoth Book of New Csi (8 page)

By then, Robert Pickton had already been charged with attempted murder. On 23 March 1997, Wendy Lynn Eistetter, a drug addict and prostitute with a wild and reckless past, had agreed to come out to the pig farm in exchange for $100. After they had sex, Pickton came up behind her and slipped a handcuff on her wrist. He then stabbed her repeatedly with a kitchen knife. But she managed to grab the knife and slashed him across the neck and arm, then bolted from the house. At 1.45 the following morning, she was picked up by a couple driving past. She was half naked and covered in blood. The handcuff was still on her wrist and she was carrying the knife.

They took her to a nearby hospital where Pickton also turned up to be treated for his wounds. He was found to be carrying a key that unlocked the handcuffs. His clothes were confiscated. Later they were found to be carrying the DNA of two women he was later charged with killing – twenty-seven-year-old sex worker and drug addict Andrea Fay Borhaven, of no fixed address, who went missing earlier that year, and twenty-five-year-old Cara Louise Ellis who was also last seen in 1997, though not reported missing until October 2002.

For the time being, however, Pickton was released on a $2,000 cash bond with the undertaking that he remained at the farm and did not have any contact with Ms Eistetter.

“You are to abstain completely from the use of alcohol and non-prescription drugs,” ordered the judge.

“I don’t take them,” Pickton replied.

The farm was searched, but nothing untoward was found.

A trial date was set, but the charges were stayed – suspended – because the attorney-general’s office decided “there was no likelihood of conviction”, despite the grievous wounds Wendy Eistetter had suffered.

This brush with the law did not discourage Pickton. He was later convicted of the murder of twenty-seven-year-old Marnie Lee Frey who was last seen alive in August 1997, though was not reported missing until 4 September 1998. She had a baby at eighteen and asked her parents to adopt the child.

“She said: ‘Mom, this is the only thing I can do for her. I love her dearly, but I know I can’t look after her as a mom,’” her mother recalled.

Her parents pretended that the child, Brittney, was Marnie’s younger sister but, in the light of the publicity surrounding the case, they were forced to tell the truth.

Twenty-three-year-old Jacqueline Michelle McDonnell disappeared in mid-January 1998 and was reported missing on 22 February 1999, and forty-six-year-old Inga Monique Hall was last seen alive in February 1998 and reported missing on 3 March. Pickton was charged with murdering both of them.

Twenty-nine-year-old Sarah Jane deVries was last seen on the corner of Princess and Hastings in Vancouver in the early morning of 14 April 1998 and reported missing by friends later the same day. Ex-boyfriend Wayne Leng said Sarah underwent “a lot of turmoil” in her twenty-nine years, particularly as an adopted child of mixed parentage in an all-white Westside family.

“This started when she was twelve,” said her mother Pat. “She has HIV, she has hepatitis C. What I do for her now is look after her kids the best I can.”

When Sarah went missing, her children were seven and two.

“It’s very hard to tell a seven-year-old that somebody is missing,” said Pat. “It’s something you can’t come to terms with, you can’t work through, because there’s never an end to it.”

Nobody had seen or heard from her since – which was unprecedented as she always called home on her mother’s birthday, Mother’s Day and her own birthday. But as Sarah herself observed in the diary she left behind: “I think my hate is going to be my destination, my executioner.”

Wayne Leng was so concerned about her disappearance that he put up posters, carrying Sarah’s picture and details of a $1,000 reward, around Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. But three phone calls he got around midnight one Saturday night left him chilled.

“Sarah’s dead,” said a man’s slightly slurred voice, with music pounding in the background. “So there will be more girls like her dead. There will be more prostitutes killed. There will be one every Friday night. At the busiest time.”

The second message had the same voice and the same music playing in the background.

“You’ll never find Sarah again,” the man said. “So just stop looking for her, all right? She doesn’t want to be seen and heard from again, all right? So, bye. She’s dead.”

The final message said: “This is in regard to Sarah. I just want to let you know that you’ll never find her again alive because a friend of mine killed her and I was there.”

Leng said the mystery caller knew things about Sarah deVries not known by many others. Pickton was charged with her murder.

Although Pickton had not been prosecuted, the stabbing of Wendy Eistetter had aroused the suspicions of one of his employees, thirty-seven-year-old Bill Hiscox. A relative of Robert Pickton’s girlfriend, he worked for a salvage firm that the brothers owned in Surrey, south-east of Vancouver. On several occasions, Hiscox had to drive out to the pig farm to pick up his pay cheques and described it as “a creepy-looking place” that was guarded by a vicious 600 lb (272 kg) boar.

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

Hiscox read a newspaper article about the missing women from the Low Track and put two and two together. He was particularly suspicious of Robert Pickton, who was “a pretty quiet guy” and drove a converted bus with heavily tinted windows. Towards the end of 1998, Hiscox went to the police, saying that Pickton “frequents the downtown area all the time, for girls”. To back up his story, he said that the girls’ “purses and IDs . . . are out there in his trailer”.

Again the police searched the pig farm and found nothing. The Pickton brothers were now “persons of interest”, but the farm was not put under surveillance. Meanwhile, the list of missing women grew longer. This was not just because women had continued to vanish from Low Track. Other women who had disappeared earlier were now coming to the attention of the authorities.

Forty-two-year-old Laura Mah was last seen on 1 August 1985, but was not reported missing until 3 August 1999. Mary Ann Clark – aka Nancy Greek – was twenty-three when she was last seen on the evening of 22 August 1991 in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia on Vancouver Island, across the strait from the city of Vancouver itself. Concerns about Clark’s wellbeing were raised the day after her disappearance because she had failed to return home to look after her two daughters, aged eight years and eight months. This was out of character.

“It was the birthday of her child that day and, for a sex street-worker, she was a bit of a homebody. That’s what was suspicious at the start, because she would never have done that,” said Victoria policeman Don Bland. However, he expressed doubts that she should be on the Low Track list as she had no connection to Vancouver and only worked the streets of the provincial capital. Nevertheless, Pickton was implicated in her disappearance, although he was never charged.

Forty-two-year-old Cynthia “Cindy” Feliks was last seen on 26 November 1997 and reported missing on 8 January 2001, while Sherry Leigh Irving was last seen in April 1997 and reported missing the following year. Pickton was charged with the murder of both Cynthia Feliks and Sherry Irving.

Native Americans Georgina Faith Papin and Jennifer Lynn Furminger vanished in 1999 along with Wendy Crawford, but did not make the list until March 2000. Pickton was convicted of the murder of Georgina Papin, and charged with the murders of Jennifer Furminger and Wendy Crawford.

Thirty-year-old Brenda Ann Wolfe, who went missing on 1 February 1999, made the list a month later. Tiffany Louise Drew was twenty-seven when she disappeared on 31 December 1999, but she was not reported missing until 8 February 2002. Pickton was convicted of Brenda Wolfe’s murder, and charged with that of Tiffany Drew.

Publicity surrounding the list encouraged the reporting of more missing persons. Forty-two-year-old Dawn Teresa Crey was last seen on Main and Hastings on 1 November 2000 and was reported missing on 11 December. Pickton was implicated in her disappearance. Debra Lynn Jones, aged forty-three, disappeared on 21 December 2000 and was reported missing four days later on Christmas Day. Pickton was charged with her murder. Twenty-five-year-old Patricia Rose Johnson went missing from Main and Hastings on 3 March 2001, but took three months to make the list. Heather Kathleen Bottomley, aged twenty-four, made the list the same day she was last seen – 17 April 2001 – even though the police described her as a “violent suicide risk”. But it was Tricia Johnson’s disappearance that attracted the most attention. Shortly before she disappeared she had been befriended by photographer Lincoln Clarkes, who was recording the lives of the drug-addicted prostitutes of Low Track for his book,
Heroines
. She took time off from her revolving-door hustle for heroin and sex to talk to him about her world – how she had broken her boyfriend’s heart, abandoning him and their two young children for heroin and crack cocaine.

Throughout the project Clarkes stayed close to Patricia Johnson, who was his original “heroine”. They became friends. She tried to quit drugs for the sake of her kids, but her father’s suicide sent her into a tailspin. She quit rehab and was repeatedly arrested for breaking and entering.

The last time Clarkes heard from Johnson was when she left a message on his home answering machine in February 2001.

“Hey, it’s Tricia, Lincoln,” she said in a sing-song voice. “Trying to get a hold of you, trying to find what’s up! I wish I had a number you can call me back at, but I don’t. So all I can do is keep trying.”

Soon after, she stopped cashing her welfare cheques, stopped phoning her family and even stopped any contact with her two children. Her mother, Marion Bryce, spoke of the terrible warning she had given her daughter who had already survived five years on the streets.

“She was here on New Year’s Day,” she told reporters, “and I told her: ‘Patty, you’re not even going to see twenty-five if you keep on – you’ll be missing like those women down there.’”

Marion Bryce also contacted Clarkes, who gave her a photo of Patricia with shoulder-length hair, wearing a leather jacket, her lips puffy, burnt by a crack pipe. Later, he brought her another portrait. Followed by a film crew, he was greeted by Bryce and her daughter Kathy.

Days after this blaze of publicity, Patricia Rose Johnson was listed as Missing Woman No. 44. Her last known possessions were recorded as “a book (title not given), a comb, condoms, water, a spoon, cigarettes, a lighter, belt, watch, rings and a chain”.

Weeks after Johnson disappeared, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the federal law enforcement agency, joined the case and promptly assembled a team of investigators. But that did nothing to stem the growth of the list. Six years later, Pickton was charged with the murder of Patricia Rose Johnson and that of Heather Kathleen Bottomley.

Thirty-three-year-old Yvonne Marie Boen, who sometimes used the surname England, was listed only five days after she disappeared on 16 March 2001. Her mother, Lynn Metin, began to worry when her daughter, who had three sons, failed to show up in March 2001 for a visit with her middle son Troy, whom Metin was raising.

“She was supposed to be here that Sunday to pick him up and she didn’t show up,” Metin told the
Vancouver Sun
in 2004. “She never contacted me. That just wasn’t her. Every holiday, Troy’s birthday, my birthday – it just wasn’t like her not to phone.”

Pickton was implicated in her disappearance.

Heather Gabriel Chinnock, age twenty-nine, vanished the following month. Pickton was charge with her murder. Then twenty-two-year-old Andrea Joesbury disappeared on 6 June 2001. Her grandfather Jack Cummer said Andrea was straightening out her life and providing a good home to her infant daughter in an East Vancouver apartment before she disappeared.

“She was working very hard, she needed a lot of things, but she was doing it all herself,” Cummer told the
Vancouver Sun
. “Andrea was worn to a frazzle, but the baby was well cared for.”

However, he said, social services received a complaint about the well-being of the girl and seized her, which sent his granddaughter into a downward spiral of drugs and prostitution.

“The thing is that she lost her whole reason to live,” Cummer said.

The child was adopted and the Cummers were not able to see her. Andrea, he said, either didn’t realize or wouldn’t accept the finality of the adoption, and would tell her grandparents that she was going to try to get her daughter back.

“She decided that she was going to straighten up and her prime objective was to get the baby back. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was never going to do that,” he said.

Pickton was convicted for Andrea Joesbury’s murder.

Twenty-nine-year-old Sereena Abotsway went missing on 1 August 2001. Adopted at the age of four, she had always been in trouble.

“She was sweet and bubbly but she was very disturbed,” said her adoptive mother, Anna Draayers. “She gave her teachers a headache and we tried to teach her at home but there was not much you could do. At that time we did not have a name for the condition but it is now known as foetal alcohol syndrome.”

The Draayers never lost contact with Sereena.

“She was our girl, and we loved her a lot,” they said. “She phoned daily for thirteen years since she left our home at age seventeen.”

And hope was at hand.

“She had come home in July,” said Mrs Draayers, “and she agreed to come home and celebrate her thirtieth birthday on 20 August, but she never showed up.”

Pickton was convicted of her murder.

Diane Rosemary Rock, aged thirty-four, was last seen on 19 October 2001 by the owner of the motel where she was living and was reported missing on 13 December. Diane, her husband and three children moved to British Columbia in 1992 for a fresh start in life. But in their new home, Rock’s personal problems resurfaced and she was back using drugs again. After a while her marriage fell apart and she was on her own. The last member of the family to see her was her teenage daughter. That was in June 2001 when they met to celebrate the teenager’s birthday. Pickton was charged with Diane Rock’s murder.