NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. -- Robert Pickton once had dreams of life beyond his filthy trailer on a junk-strewn property pockmarked with abandoned vehicles, piles of dirt and the remains of 26 human beings.
The self-described "little old pig farmer" planned to build a house with six rooms and a spiral staircase, with three-metre ceilings all around.
The dream turned to nightmare for his victims and their families, culminating Sunday when the 58-year-old pig farmer was found guilty on six counts of second degree murder.
Still to come is a second trial in the deaths of the other 20 women.
The long trial helped the public and the friends and relatives of his victims strip away a shroud of mystery that had fascinated and repulsed.
For years, as Pickton awaited trial for the murders of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin and Marnie Frey, the world knew him only as that pig farmer on whose farm all the women's remains were found.
Bits and pieces about his life surfaced through friends and the media; a former neighbour once described him a "good natured little bastard."
The sparse pictures of him aren't flattering -- angular facial features framed by stringy, greasy hair and a mysterious aura magnified by an almost complete absence of public comment or speech.
Over those 10 months of trial, the broader picture surfaced of the man who shuffled into court each day from his nearby holding cell, sometimes bowing slightly towards the judge before walking about 10 steps to the prisoner's box.
He walks hunched over, head slightly bowed, hardly the strutting peacock one might expect of the male model he says he was asked to be during a trip to Chicago in 1974.
From anecdotes he told police, to the testimony of others about him, the life of Robert Pickton emerged as a Kafkaesque house of curiousities.
His own twisted words and slow, twangy voice provide the script for some of his years -- stories about a favourite calf butchered when he was a child, a beloved horse named Goldie that died and was mounted in his trailer, his professed love for his mom and younger brother Dave contrasted with an apparent emotional vacuum toward mom and older sister Linda.
He told police he had a "bad mind for faces," but those childhood stories were clearly implanted in what the defence characterzied as a child's brain frozen in Grade 5 education.
While witnesses at his trial -- including police, neighbours and a slew of drug addicts and ner'er-do-wells -- described his domain as a filthy property of junk and vehicle wrecks, they also provided a contrasting portrait of Pickton as a man who didn't use drugs, was a teetotaller and workaholic.
Pickton dropped out of school in either 1963 or 1964, jurors heard, and had been in special education programs before that.
He wore hand-me-down clothes and remembered the first new outfit his mother bought him was so filled with starch that he ripped it off and ran around without any clothes on.
When he stopped school, he started work as a meat cutter and did that for almost seven years before quitting to go back to the farm.
He started working with pigs, building up his barns and driving a truck for B.C. Hydro until his piggery, as he called it, burned down in 1978.
By then, his younger brother Dave was living with a woman named Sandy Humeny, who was a witness for the defence at trial.
Pickton couldn't get a joke, she told the jurors, and had trouble following conversations with co-workers.
But when the Crown tossed a list of words like prejudiced and presumed at her and said Pickton knew how to use them, she said she wasn't surprised -- but doubted he could use them in context.
No one will mistake Pickton for a Rhodes Scholar, but testimony at the trial provided a far more in-depth look at the man's education, intelligence and limited education.
A defence witness, an expert on testing for intelligence quotient scored Pickton's full general IQ score at 86, putting him well above the level of mental retardation, which is below 70.
The score, the jury learned, was better than 18.6 per cent of the population of his age.
But the trial also revealed a startling contrast to his inadequate education, and that was a desire to keep learning.
While he was held in custody at the North Fraser Pretrial Centre in Port Coquitlam, Pickton signed up for a couple of correspondence courses in high school agriculture.
He got a B grade in the Grade 9 course and a 78 per cent but withdrew from the Grade 11 class, because it required field work outside the facility.
The Crown at trial tried to convince the jury that Pickton was not nearly as unsophisticated as the defence suggested.
Jurors were urged to pay close attention to his statements and mannerisms while he was in a cell with an undercover cop after his arrest in February 2002.
Among them -- a maniacal laugh that raises hairs on the back of the neck.
But he also takes on the persona of a hardened criminal, seeming to brag that he's known all over the world.
His greatest delight seemed to come when he told the undercover officer about some practical jokes he once played, such as releasing some pigs in the Downtown Eastside one Christmas Eve and watching as police tried to capture them.
"'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the streets," he recited rapturously and in a sing-song voice to the plant. "Not a soul to be found except two little pot belly pigs and two working girls."
Pickton has none of the panache that has made celebrities out of other serial predators, his victims none of the sweet innocence of other helpless prey.
All of them lived in the beleaguered neighbourhood of the Downtown Eastside, selling sex to feed their addiction to drugs.
Sometimes women would chase after his car, knowing that he'd give them money.
He told Humeny he was bringing the women to his farm to help them get off drugs.
But he also told another friend that a good way to kill junkies was to inject them with windshield washer fluid.
A syringe filled with the liquid -- though not enough to kill someone -- was found among the lipsticks, women's clothes and papers on Pickton's farm.
The Canadian Press
PREVIOUS
