VANCOUVER -- Try to imagine a 17-hectare crime scene. Not one room, or even one building, but an area the size of 17 football fields, a crime scene littered with abandoned vehicles, trucks, machinery, outbuildings, massive dirt piles.
And junk, lots of it, strewn everywhere on the sprawling, once-rural property now hemmed in by subdivisions, condos and big-box stores.
It is the centre of gravity, the geographic focal point, of the most gruesome murder case in B.C. history.
Hidden in the debris, clues to horrific acts of evil. Women's clothes, lipstick, jewelry and ID. A blood-soaked mattress, bloody stains and bits of bone, fingers, parts of two jaws.
It would get much worse.
Decomposing heads of three women were found, two in buckets, another in a garbage bag. The heads were cut in half vertically, the severed hands and feet placed inside.
The discoveries on Robert (Willie) Pickton's pig farm, beginning in the winter of 2002, would send him five years later into the prisoner's dock of a specially built, high-security courtroom in suburban New Westminster to be tried on six of 26 first-degree murder charges. A trial on the other counts is planned.
How he got there is the story of a police investigation of unprecedented intensity.
His journey began on a cool February night when RCMP, acting on a tip about illegal guns, moved quietly onto Pickton's Port Coquitlam property. The tipster, former Pickton employee Scott Chubb, would become a key figure in the Crown's case and a target for the defence.
Even before Chubb, looking to raise rent money, offered police the information, Pickton was on their radar.
He'd been in trouble before and was a familiar name to investigators on the Missing Women's Joint Task Force. It was set up by the RCMP and Vancouver city police amid growing public clamour about the rising number of disappearances from the city's dystopian Downtown Eastside.
Two task force members were outside the Pickton property as Mounties executed the warrant for the illegal guns, just in case.
Police found a .22-calibre handgun with a dildo on the end of the barrel, though not some of the guns Chubb had said were there.
But in the trailer where Pickton lived, and in other buildings on the property, they found women's ID, jewelry and clothes.
Police quickly abandoned the firearms search warrant and obtained a fresh one tied to their investigation of thebewildering disappearances of dozens of women connected with the lowest rung of the city's sex-trade, the one where addicts often trade sex for drugs.
The media whipped itself into a frenzy as the police presence grew on the property, with earth-moving and sifting equipment and an army of student anthropologists to scrutinize every cubic metre of soil dug up.
Pickton, arrested initially on firearms charges and released, was rearrested Feb. 22, 2002. He's been in custody ever since.
Investigators spent almost two years on the property, collecting an amount of evidence so vast some was still being analyzed as the trial went on.
"It probably took two days to just get over the feeling of being overwhelmed," RCMP Staff Sgt. Tim Sleigh testified.
Detectives, aided by the anthropologists, literally sifted through tonnes of soil from the Pickton property.
Hundreds of thousands of exhibits were gathered by police. Some spent months on hands and knees with Q-Tip swabs, wetting them with distilled water and rubbing a tiny portion of a surface in a search for the DNA of dozens of missing women.
Freezers, buckets, doors, tables, walls, saws, counters, and floors -- all were swabbed, inch by inch. Thousands of swabs were sent to labs across the country and are still being analyzed for human DNA.
Even with experts to help them make sense of it, the 12 ordinary people selected as Pickton's jury faced an unimaginably daunting task.
Jurors had to put the mountain of forensic and physical evidence into context with the often contradictory testimony from Pickton's friends and acquaintances called as witnesses by the Crown and defence, and with Pickton's own statements to police.
The Crown put up 98 witnesses, the defence another 30, to test the question: Is Willie Pickton a calculating killer who preyed for years on poor drug-addicted women?
Or is he a slow-witted, easily swayed man of poor education, bamboozled into confessing to murders he never committed?
The DNA phase alone took about two months in the 10-month trial and taxed attention spans to the limit.
The defence spent days quizzing investigators on the intricacies of their techniques: Did you wear your gloves properly? Did you wear protective clothing? What about sterile booties? Did you take the proper steps to avoid contamination?
The DNA experts offered jurors mathematical probabilities -- really big numbers -- that the odds were one in 26 billion that a particular sample belonged to someone other than the person identified in the test.
Pickton's alleged victims -- Sereena Abotsway, Marnie Frey, Georgina Papin, Brenda Wolfe, Mona Wilson and Andrea Joesbury -- had much in common, including ties to the Vancouver's drug-infested underbelly on the Downtown Eastside.
The Crown said Pickton frequented the area, picked up prostitutes and took them to his property, about a 40-minute drive into the suburbs. There, prosecutors claimed, he murdered them, dismembered them and fed some of their remains to his pigs.
The Crown believed other remains were taken to a rendering plant in the Downtown Eastside, near where prosecutors believe he picked up his victims.
Investigators found partial remains of all six women on Pickton's farm, in his slaughterhouse or close by.
In his final summation to the jury, lead prosecutor Mike Petrie stressed Pickton had the means (saws and butchering skills) and the opportunity (his slaughterhouse was next door to his trailer on a property that is dark and isolated at night) to kill the women and make them disappear.
Against a sizable prosecution squad, Pickton was defended by a formidable team of his own led by Peter Ritchie, one of British Columbia's best-known lawyers.
Victoria lawyer Adrian Brooks played a prominent role, including addressing the jury in almost four days of final arguments, trying to punch holes in the Crown's case.
A key target for the defence was the cavalcade of ne'er-do-wells the Crown called to link Pickton to the killings, including Pat Casanova, his one-time partner in the pig-slaughtering business, and Lynn Ellingsen, a crack-cocaine addict who claimed she saw Pickton butchering a woman late one night.
They're liars, the defence said, and some, like Casanova, are even potential suspects. Casanova, Ellingsen and Dinah Taylor, who once lived on Pickton's farm, were briefly arrested but never charged.
Pickton and his younger brother Dave ran a number of businesses from the family property but the Crown was principally interested in Willie Pickton's small-scale pig-butchering operation.
He was, prosecutors said, practised at the art of dismemberment.
The jury was shown videotape of the 11 hours Pickton spent under police interrogation after his arrest, as well as spy-camera footage of him interacting with an undercover Mountie planted in his cell.
The Crown argued the recordings show Pickton making incriminating statements, including comments that he got "sloppy" and "had one more planned."
"You're making me more of a mass killer than I am," he told a police interrogator at one point.
He told the cell plant that he killed 49 people and intended to stop at 50.
"So close," he muttered before dozing off to sleep.
But Pickton's defence team argued these statements were planted in the malleable, uneducated pig farmer's head by crafty cops who lied to him.
Lying is a legitimate interrogation technique but in this case, his lawyers said, police manipulated Pickton into parroting things back to them and then called it his confession.
The third leg of the Crown's case -- Pickton's friends and acquaintances -- was equally shaky, his lawyers contended. These crucial Crown witnesses were hardly model citizens -- petty criminals, former or current drug addicts.
Ellingsen, easily the trial's most anticipated Crown witness, testified she'd spent an evening at Pickton's farm doing drugs and woke up to find him in the slaughterhouse adjacent to his trailer, butchering a prostitute they'd picked up earlier that night on the Downtown Eastside.
But defence lawyer Richard Brooks vigorously attacked the recovering crack addict's credibility and character, suggesting she hallucinated the whole thing.
Witness Gina Houston was a close friend of the accused, who offered to marry her and gave her as much as $80,000 over the years.
Now frail from cancer, Houston testified Pickton once told her there were "one, two, three, four, five or maybe six bodies" in one of the buildings on his farm property.
Houston told the court she was on the phone with Pickton once and overheard a scuffle -- a "skeduffle" as she termed it -- on the other end of the line. When she asked if it involved a woman named Mona, Pickton answered "yes."
Chubb, Pickton's former employee, riveted the jury by recounting a conversation he said he had once with Pickton, who said that a good way to kill female junkies was to inject them with windshield washer fluid.
A syringe with windshield wiper fluid was found in Pickton's trailer, the trial heard. The defence suggested in its final argument that it was planted by Chubb.
But Ritchie, in one of the best cross-examinations of the trial, portrayed Chubb as a man of low character who used his story to try to manipulate police into giving him money and a new identity.
Casanova, Pickton's pig-butchering partner, testified he got oral sex in Pickton's bedroom from victim Andrea Joesbury, and that he saw women's clothes and purses in Pickton's trailer.
But the defence pointed out that Casanova said in earlier court proceedings that he'd told police he didn't know Joesbury.
Off the five Pickton associates the Crown called, Andrew Bellwood perhaps withstood the defence onslaught the best.
Bellwood used pantomime movements to show the jury how Pickton described killing prostitutes. Pickton would have sex with the women, he said, handcuff them, strangle them and dismember them, then feed some of their remains to his pigs.
"I have nothing to gain to sit here and lie, nothing except heartache and more despair in my life," the former crack addict and criminal told Ritchie in one of the most emotional moments of the trial.
After the Crown finished its case in August, the defence sought to rehabilitate Pickton and point the finger elsewhere. The shocking allegations by Bellwood, Ellingsen and Chubb were counterpointed with portrayals by defence witnesses of Pickton as a decent man, a hard worker who didn't drink or do drugs.
The defence also suggested evidence police gathered at that vast crime scene pointed to other potential suspects. But it never attempted to explain how all those human remains became scattered around Pickton's property and in the outbuildings.
His lawyers suggested Pickton and his brother Dave allowed many people onto the large property, giving others the opportunity to commit murders undetected.
Petrie mocked that theory in his summation, arguing it's unlikely the killings took place in daytime, when the farm was busiest, and that Pickton was largely on his own at night.
He'd be impossibly unlucky to have all that evidence stacked against him and not be the killer, the prosecutor said.
The defence called its own experts, but some, like the witness called to analyze stains on the blood-stained mattress found in Pickton's trailer residence, faltered. Under cross-examination, he admitted to not being a blood expert at all.
Pickton himself did not testify.
Sitting in the dock with a notepad and evidence binders on his lap, the middle-aged farmer remained an enigma as the jury prepared to decide his fate.
The Canadian Press
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