Oh, no. Nothing bad EVER happens in Canada...

[red-beard]

Vancouver Pig Farmer Accused of Murdering Six Women
Saturday, January 20, 2007

By Catherine Philp

VANCOUVER — Marnie Frey called her parents for the last time on her 24th birthday. Lynn, her stepmother, answered the phone to hear Marnie giggling, wheedling for some birthday cash. Mrs Frey was reluctant, knowing that it would be spent to feed her heroin habit.

She told her daughter that a parcel was on its way, with clothes, food and toiletries, things low down on her daughter's shopping list for life on the mean streets of the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver. The thank-you call never came.

Rick and Lynn Frey would not learn what had become of their daughter until after a frantic search that lasted five years. Her remains were unearthed on a pig farm in Port Coquitlam, on the outskirts of Vancouver. The farm belonged to Robert Pickton, known as "Uncle Willie," a pig farmer well-known for the parties that he threw for prostitutes and bikers at his quasi- legal drinking club, the Piggy Palace.

Investigators dug up the remains of one woman after another, from body parts to minute traces of DNA, until the count came to 30. Four could not be identified. The other 26 were among the names of 67 women who had disappeared from the Downtown Eastside streets. On Monday Mr Pickton goes on trial for six murders, the only cases in which body parts survive.

Few of the details of the evidence have been made public in Canada, where strict publication bans have muffled preliminary hearings. But what has come to light is grim enough: butchered body parts discovered in a freezer; a woodchipper, confiscated by police, where the women's bodies were believed to have been disposed of; and the public health warning that the pigs believed to have been fed on human remains were then slaughtered and put into the human food chain — along with, perhaps, human meat itself.

At jury selection, the judge warned potential jurors that what they would hear would be "like a horror movie". But this time, he told them, they would not be able to switch it off.

But the friends and families of the murdered and missing women are those who are likely to suffer the most trauma. Evidence is expected to take as long as a year to hear. Yet most plan to be there, to find out what happened to their daughters, sisters and friends, and how it was allowed to happen. The women of the Downtown Eastside disappeared gradually, over the course of 20 years, unseen and apparently uncared for by those meant to protect them.

The Downtown Eastside is the poorest postcode in Canada, where life expectancy is less than 40. Its seedy bars and dank doorways shelter the huddled forms of vagrants and junkies, creating a filthy foreground to the gleaming skyscrapers less than a mile up the road. It has the highest rate of HIV infection in North America and is the only place in the developed world where infected women outnumber men. Social workers called the prostitutes here "survival sex workers". They are selling themselves merely to stay alive.

Rebecca Guno was the first to disappear, in 1983, but no one knew then that she was only the first. Fourteen years later, when Ms Frey's call never came, Mrs Frey grew worried. When Ms Frey had still not surfaced after four months and local police said that they could not help, Mrs Frey and her sister, Joyce LaChance, travelled to the Downtown Eastside to report Ms Frey missing there. "The police there, they didn't seem concerned. They said she was an adult and she'd probably taken off somewhere," Mrs Frey recalls. "They made us think we were the only ones looking for someone missing."

Infuriated by the police refusal to look for her daughter, Mrs Frey and her sister began their own search. They began to meet other people, like them, looking for their missing loved ones. One woman, searching for her sister, had been refused a missing person report and told to "go put her picture up at the needle exchange". A man, Wayne Leng, was searching for his friend Sarah de Vries, last seen on a street corner on April 14, 1998, seven months after Marnie's last call.

Ms de Vries's theory of what lay behind the disappearances was contained in a journal she left at Mr Leng's. "Am I next? Is he watching me now?" she wrote. "Stalking me like a predator and its prey? Waiting, waiting for some perfect spot, time or my stupid mistake?" The more Mrs Frey spoke to the street girls, the more she became convinced that Ms de Vries's theory of a serial killer was right. "The girls told me, ‘There's this guy who picks up girls in vans and takes them to a farm and they don't come back. He's got a woodchipper'," she said. "Then they'd run away scared and wouldn't say any more."

Mrs LaChance suddenly thought of the farm near her home where the Pickton brothers lived. She knew a friend of theirs and had babysat for her children. The sisters relayed their suspicions to the police, who were adamant that there was no serial killer.

Family members lobbied the press and The Vancouver Sun began its own investigation. Mr Leng set up a hotline for tips about the killings and received a call from one Bill Hiscox, a former employee on the farm. He knew a woman who had been inside the trailer where Mr Pickton lived, behind the main farmhouse where his brother, Dave, lived. "She doesn't want to get involved. She's kind of scared about it," he said in the call that Mr Leng taped. "But she told me, ‘Billy, you wouldn't believe the IDs and s*** in that trailer. There's women's clothes out there, there's purses. You know, what's that guy doing? It's, like, really weird'."

Mr Hiscox also noted a case known to the police, when Wendy Lynn Eistetter, a prostitute, had fled the pig farm, handcuffed, bleeding from the stomach, claiming that Robert Pickton had stabbed her. Mr Pickton, who was also wounded in the incident, was charged with attempted murder but Ms Eistetter balked at testifying and the charges were dropped. Mr Leng handed the tape to police but heard no more about it.

The name Pickton would not come up again until 2002, four years later, when police visited the farm with an unrelated warrant to search for an unlicensed gun. They stumbled upon an asthma inhaler prescribed in the name of one of the missing women and the ID cards of several others. They returned with another warrant and began searching the property, beginning with the slaughterhouse.

In the freezers, they unearthed two five-gallon tubs. Inside were severed hands and feet, and the heads of two women among the most recently reported missing. Both were sawn in half like the carcasses of the slaughtered pigs. One, Serena Abbotsway, had gone missing only a few months after leading a protest march against police inaction over the killings. Much of the evidence may have been devoured long before police set foot on the farm. "It is believed that there is a possibility that human remains were fed to pigs but the risk of disease to those who may have had contact with the meat was negligible," a 2003 police health study said. "The psychological effects may be worse than the physical."

Five years and 26 murder charges later, the cases of 39 missing women remain open. Investigators continue to sift through the samples taken from the Pickton farm in search of any trace of those still missing. An internal police inquiry has been ordered but the families are still clamouring for a public one. "If this was a rich community in the West End, all hell would have broken loose," Rick Frey said. Down on the seedy streets of the Downtown Eastside, a serial killer might no longer be stalking the women but the violence continues unabated. In 2005 Donald Bakker was convicted of the torture and sexual assault of nearly 60 prostitutes, whose ordeals he had taped. None reported the abuse to the police. More than 20 men have been convicted of killing one prostitute each in the Downtown Eastside since 1980.

"What's more scary, one person killing all these women, or all these men killing just one each?" Kate Gibson, the executive director of the WISH drop-in centre asked.

At the junction of Main and Hastings, known in the Downtown Eastside as Pain and Wastings, I stop to speak to a familiar-looking young working girl. She is Natasha, the sister of Ms de Vries, whose adoption by a middle-class family did not save her from ending up here. Natasha had never met Ms de Vries but came here in search of her after fleeing an abusive boyfriend in Ontario.

But her sister had disappeared only a month before. Now Natasha leads the life that her sister left behind. "We don't talk about that stuff that happened," she slurs. "You just gotta keep going."

Mass murderers

1609 The King of Hungary ordered the arrest of the Slovenian aristocrat Elizabeth Bathory for the vampiric torture and murder of about 600 young girls

1790-1830 Thug Behram, reputed to be the world's most prolific killer, is claimed to have murdered 931 victims while the leader of the Indian ‘Thuggee' gang of assassins

1888 Dubbed the first modern serial killer, Jack the Ripper caused terror in London with his spree of prostitute murders. The exact number of victims is unknown

1957 Police searching the home of Ed Gein in Wisconsin uncovered a wardrobe of clothes fashioned from human skin. He was convicted of killing one person, but probably murdered more. Gein later became the model for Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs

1974-98 Harold Shipman killed an estimated 236 people, while practising as a GP, until he was exposed by a forged will

1995 Rosemary West was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of ten young girls, including her 16-year-old daughter in Gloucester. Her husband, Fred, committed suicide before the trial

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,245118,00.html

[Joeaksa]

Sad to see but at least they got it stopped.... for now.

[Dottore]

Yes, this is one of those stories that no one here can believe took place in their neighbourhood.

Sadly, although they have the swine who did (found bodies in his freezer etc), and countless bits of evidence, the trial could take up to two years because the case is all built on DNA evidence. And even then there is no death penalty here.

[Joeaksa]

They need to feed him to his pigs.

[Dennis Kalma]

"They need to feed him to his pigs"

No, just leave him in a room with the families of the victims, along with the woodchipper. Tell them they have only a month to deal with Mr. Pickton in whatever fashion they feel is appropriate....

Dennis

[M.D. Holloway]

Those darn pigs are nasty - great way to get rid of a body. That guy (actually it was more than one I guess) is a head case for sure. At least he didn't BBQ the girls.

[onlycafe]

i hope he doesn't get a book deal.

[dtw]

Hope this helps the families move on. That guy needs to get shipped off to gen pop with a truckload of old splintery broom handles for the other inmates to practice on him with.

[dentist90]

Will probably be a TV movie of the week as soon as the verdict is in.

[tabs]

Ummm this is makin me hungry for some nice BBQ Baby-backs..

[notfarnow]

My cousin is a heroin addict, and lives in that neighborhood. Heroin and hard living have been killing her slowly for 8 years.

Debate all you want about the fate of Pickton.

I want to know when the Vancouver police are going to answer some hard questions.

Family member and community activists had been going to them for years, saying there was a serial killer. Their concerns were brushed off; the prostitutes had probably just drifted out of town.

Mr Leng handed the tape to police but heard no more about it.

That was 1998.
22 girls went missing between then, and Pickton's arrest in 2002.

[David]

From the movie Snatch:

Brick Top: And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig ****, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig".

[SLO-BOB]

Nothing bad ever happens in Canada? Have you ever driven in Toronto??

[Sonic dB]

Whomever wrote that article is terrible...
Its unreadable and incomprehensible in that awkward form.

[Brian 162]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by SLO-BOB
[B]Nothing bad ever happens in Canada? Have you ever driven in Toronto?

Huh???

[SLO-BOB]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Brian 162
[B]

Originally posted by SLO-BOB
Nothing bad ever happens in Canada? Have you ever driven in Toronto?

Huh???

I see you live in Toronto. Maybe you've never driven anywhere else or maybe you ride the subway, but Toronto has the 2nd (it's a very close 2nd to L.A.) worst traffic I've ever had the misfortune of driving in. I would drive in the worst Chicago rush hour before driving anytime in Toronto. Your version of metered on ramps consists of nothing or a lowered crossing gate and a sign that says "closed". The biggest industry in your area must be producing "no parking" and "no left turn" signs. I've never been in a traffic jam in a parking lot before Toronto. Nice city but the traffic blows.

[Christien]

Originally posted by SLO-BOB
I see you live in Toronto. Maybe you've never driven anywhere else or maybe you ride the subway, but Toronto has the 2nd (it's a very close 2nd to L.A.) worst traffic I've ever had the misfortune of driving in. I would drive in the worst Chicago rush hour before driving anytime in Toronto. Your version of metered on ramps consists of nothing or a lowered crossing gate and a sign that says "closed". The biggest industry in your area must be producing "no parking" and "no left turn" signs. I've never been in a traffic jam in a parking lot before Toronto. Nice city but the traffic blows.

+1. And the public transit (subway, commuter trains) suck.

[notfarnow]

Is Toronto traffic worse than Montreal? I lived in Montreal for 2 years... traffic and the winters were enough to get me back to the east coast.

On the upside, Montreal's transit system is fantastic.

[cool_chick]

Who said crime is nonexistent in Canada? I have to admit, I NEVER, EVER heard anyone say that....

[SLO-BOB]

Originally posted by notfarnow
Is Toronto traffic worse than Montreal?

Yes. Much worse. Montreal's roads are abandoned compared compared to Toronto's. Granted, Montreal is no picnic during rush hour, but at least one can navigate the side streets once off the highway. I stick mostly to the subways and cabs which are the way to go in the city for sure.