ocean, Vancouver is lauded for multicultural livability, ranked host the 2010 Winter Olympics. But lately a grim pall has blanketed the western Canadian city of 2.2 million, for reasons far worse than the freak winter storms.
The harrowing details of a grotesque serial killer case are bringing to the surface the city's seamy underworld, usually Pickton, charged with murdering 26 drug-addicted prostitutes. The trial, which an earlier judge warned would be "as bad as a horror movie," began Jan. 22 and is expected to last a year.
A jury will hear evidence on the first six charges of murder. (The remaining 20 charges will be brought to court after the first six.) Prosecutor Derrill Prevett's described in his opening statement how police searching Pickton's ramshackle suburban pig farm abuot 15 miles east of Vancouver in 2002 found two women's heads in a freezer, cleaved in two and packed with their hands and feet.
Human bones were found buried deep under an old pig pen. In Pickton's mobile-home trailer, said Prevett, police discovered a gun and a sex toy with DNA from Pickton and Mona Wilson, one of the alleged victims. nearly wordless.
"Something like that happening to somebody in my family." Garley and her family took Wilson in at age seven, after the girl was sexually abused by family members. When Wilson was 14 social workers moved her, but the Garleys kept in touch and Wilson telephoned them just before Dec.
2001, when she vanished. Until the trial, the Garleys had no idea the girl they called "Running Bear," the name honoring Wilson's aboriginal heritage, Eastside streets. In her last call to the Garleys, Wilson told them she was engaged to be married and doing well, Garley sobbed in an interview with TIME.
"Mona always wanted us to have a good opinion of her." The fates of Wilson, Sereena Abotsway, Andrea Joesbury,Brenda Ann Wolfe, Marnie Frey and Georgina Faith Papin are emerging in British Columbia Supreme Court, in the gritty Vancouver suburb of glass, an unimposing slim man with a fringe of lank grey hair around a bald pate. Now 57, he has become well-known in legal circles since his arrest in February 2002.
But only now has the end of a Canadian publication ban, intended to ensure an impartial jury hearing, revealed the gruesome details of his case. Pickton has become instantly famous. "You're like the pope," a police officer told Pickton in a recorded interrogation played before the jury.
Some 350 journalists are accredited and the trial is making global as well as local headlines. Each day curious spectators, including a class of teenagers from a local Christian school and several elderly people, jostle with family The attention is new, but that Downtown Eastside prostitutes die gruesome deaths is old news, and largely ignored. Scores of women from that area have vanished since 1978.
Only in 2001 did Canada's national police force, then investigating a separate case of prostitute serial killings in the province, team up with Vancouver police. The joint task force now lists more than 60 missing women; police said the DNA, remains or belongings of about half of those have been linked to Pickton's pig farm. public attitudes to illegal drugs in British Columbia.
Vancouver now leads North America in treating addiction as a health and social problem as well as a crime. It hosts the continent's only supervised heroin injection site, as well as a clinic dispensing free heroin in a scientific trial. But not much has at street level in the Downtown Eastside.
Some 15,000 injection-drug addicts, many of them mentally ill, are concentrated in Canada's most impoverished neighborhood. An sex," at all times and in all weather. Reporters interviewing the didn't know about it, or care.
died and gone missing," said Kate Gibson, executive director of WISH, a drop-in centre for sex-trade workers. "They are still out there working on the street, and they still face the same violence, stigmatization, and discrimination every day." Pickton's lawyer Peter Ritchie says his client is innocent, and that he will refute the prosecution's evidence.
Pickton's own voice is directly the first two charges were laid in Feb. 2002. Played to the jury, the of events.
"I'm just a pig farmer," Pickton tells police. "I'm a working guy, that's all I am." When told he was charged with two more women, he laughed.
"Hogwash," he said, slouched over a chair in the interview room beside some potted palms. "I'm nailed to the cross," he said repeatedly. And when police asked if he killed as many as 50 women, Pickton complained: "You make me out to be more of a mass murderer than I am.
" As Pickton's tale unfolds in court in a local suburb, the streets outside throng with police and sheriffs, panhandlers and patients released from a local mental hospital, college students and office workers who line up at local coffee shops. A stone's throw from the court is a strip joint advertising, in neon, "Mugs and Jugs." Nearby, a shop displays armor standing tall beside a Queen of Hearts.
It's a costume shop, of course.
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