The Mammoth Book of New Csi (9 page)

Mona Lee Wilson, aged twenty-six, disappeared on 23 November 2001 and made the list a week later. She was the last to vanish. Her common-law husband Steve Ricks told reporters he had last seen her get into a car with two men.

“She told me many times she’d like to die,” Ricks said. “She was sick of this hell, all the hooking and drugs.”

Pickton was charged with her murder.

Then the police got a break. On 7 February 2002, Robert Pickton was arrested for the possession of illegal firearms. Meanwhile, the taskforce began scouring the pig farm once again. Pickton was released on bail, but arrested again on 22 February – this time on two counts of first-degree murder. The victims were identified as Sereena Abotsway and Mona Lee Wilson. On 8 March, it was revealed that DNA recovered from the farm had been conclusively identified as that of Sereena. Both had gone missing since Bill Hiscox had first reported his suspicions to the police.

Now a full-scale CSI investigation was in full swing and forensic experts began combing the pig farm for fingerprints, hair and the blood of the missing women. Now a top man in the RCMP’s CSI department, Tim Sleigh, who had tramped the area two years earlier, was on the case and became concerned that the regular power failures caused by the equipment they were using would spoil any evidence contained in the farm’s many freezers. He was particularly concerned about an old freezer in the back room of Pickton’s workshop that was giving off a sickening smell. Although the crime scene investigation had been going on for two months already, the forensic team had not got around to it yet as a minute search of the slaughterhouse and Pickton’s trailer was considered a higher priority.

The freezer’s lid was held down by heavy weights, so Sleigh got RMCP Sergeant Fred Hicks to hold it open while he shone a torch inside. The beam picked out two buckets, one on top of the other. When he reached in to investigate, he found that the top bucket contained a human head that had been sawn in two, along with two hands and two feet. They belonged to Andrea Joesbury. The second bucket contained the matching body parts of Sereena Abotsway.

A pathologist examined them and found that the heads had been sawn in half vertically by two cuts, one at the front and one at the back. When they had not quite met, the skull had been torn apart. Jane Doe’s skull had also been cut in two in this unusual manner.

On 5 May 2002, Sleigh was called to the site of the old piggery. This had been attached to the slaughterhouse, but had collapsed some time earlier and was now a pile of rubble and garbage. In the trough on the floor of the old piggery, embedded in manure, was part of a lower jaw with some teeth in it. Using a toothbrush, Sleigh cleaned it off to reveal a filling. This matched the dental records of Brenda Wolfe.

A month later, on 4 June 2002, more garbage pails were found hidden behind some wooden braces between the pigpen and the main wall of the slaughterhouse. The bottom bucket contained the head, hands and feet of Mona Wilson. It was surrounded by other pails containing animal offal. Plainly, Mona Wilson has been butchered in the slaughterhouse like the pigs.

Her head, too, had been sawn in half. When a pathologist drew the cuts on a plastic head, they matched one another – and the half skull of Jane Doe – exactly. They had been sawn through with a reciprocated band saw like the one found in Pickton’s slaughterhouse. The pathologist concluded that Andrea Joesbury, Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson had been killed by a bullet wound to the head. No bullet damage was found to Jane Doe’s skull, but the other half has never been found.

Body parts were found in freezers used to store unsold pig meat. It is not clear whether human flesh was used to make the sausages that Pickton gave away to guests at the Piggy Palace. Investigators also found a wood chipper thought to have been used to turn victims into swill to feed to the pigs – which may explain why the police did not find anything when they first searched the farm in 1997 and again in 1998. The body parts of Andrea Joesbury and Sereena Abotsway had also been exposed to the elements before being returned to the freezer. There were insects in the buckets in which their remains had been found.

At the beginning of July 2002, officers tore down a raised platform and a low wall by the pigpen. In the ground below was a rat’s nest that contained a green toothbrush and fourteen hand bones. One at least appeared to have been hacked at with a knife. Some of them belonged to the left hand of Georgina Papin. None of her other remains or personal effects were ever found.

The task of searching the crime scene became so massive that the taskforce had to hire a hundred anthropology graduates and students. They were employed to search through the soil excavated from sites on the farm. Brienne DeForest-Rusnak was employed to monitor a conveyor belt that carried items sifted from the dirt. On 21 August, she found another partial jaw with three teeth in it. This belonged to Marnie Frey. Like Georgina Papin, none of her other remains or personnel effects were ever found. Both Brenda Wolfe and Marnie Frey’s jaws had been sawn in half in a fashion that matched the skulls of Andrea Joesbury, Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson and Jane Doe.

Near where Marnie Frey’s jaw had been unearthed, a rib bone and a part of a heel were found. DNA from their marrow matched Jane Doe’s skull. No more of her was found. Although Sleigh now knew what had become of her, he was still left wondering why half her skull had been found several miles away.

Pickton was charged with the murder of Jane Doe, but the case was disallowed as she could not be identified. However, her remains did feature in the trial. Twenty of the prosecution’s ninety-eight witnesses testified that the cuts on her bones resembled those in the six cases that did go ahead. In the end, however, Justice James Williams told the jurors to ignore everything they had heard about the Jane Doe case when it came to their deliberations about the guilt or innocence of Robert Pickton.

The crime scene investigation of the Pickton brothers’ two properties in Port Coquitlam – the main farm on Dominion Avenue and the nearby multi-acre lot on Burns Road – continued for twenty months. Throughout it all, Pickton maintained his innocence, even expressing concern, as a taxpayer, at the expense of the investigation. It cost $70 million.

The Dominion Avenue site contained the brothers’ farmhouse. In it was David Pickton’s bedroom – also known as the “heirloom room” – where the police seized sex toys and lotions. At the Burns Road site, the CSI team focused its search on the building that had formerly housed the Piggy Palace, a smokehouse and other outbuildings, including the unfinished “Willie’s House”, along with a number of vehicles, including Robert Pickton’s “Blue Phantom” bus.

So many items were seized that the police had to warehouse them. Some items had to wait for three or four years before officers got around to examining them thoroughly. Then, if necessary, they had to be sent out to one of the six RCMP labs across Canada.

In all, forensic evidence such as hair, blood, semen and other stains were removed from 235,000 items, creating a total of 600,000 exhibits to be tested. The search was so thorough that, the prosecutor said, even the lint tray from Pickton’s clothes dryer was taken away for examination. However, the evidence linking Robert Pickton to the missing women all came from within a hundred metres of his motorhome. These included eleven items carrying Andrea Joesbury’s DNA, such as her address book and jewellery, which were largely found in the slaughterhouse and Pickton’s blood-smattered trailer; seven objects with Sereena Abotsway’s DNA on them, including her shirt and inhaler; some forty objects carrying Mona Wilson’s DNA, largely found in Pickton’s trailer; and three items with Brenda Wolfe’s DNA, including her leather jacket, which was found in Pickton’s closet. Five of the sixty-one items linked to the missing women also carried DNA that linked them to Pickton, according to laboratory staff. However, the defence contested this, saying that Pickton was only a “possible contributor”. Even a dildo (which Pickton said he used as a silencer for his gun) that carried Mona Wilson’s DNA only had a “possible contribution” by Pickton. Mona Wilson’s blood was also found soaked into Pickton’s mattress.

The defence pointed out that there were at least nine items that linked the missing women to a second DNA person, not Pickton. DNA belonging to Pickton’s friend Dinah Taylor was found on Mona Wilson’s rosary, Andrea Joesbury’s lipstick, and two lipsticks and the leather jacket belonging to Brenda Wolfe. Defence lawyer Marilyn Sandford claimed that the police had concentrated their crime scene investigation on evidence that connected Pickton to the missing women, while ignoring other suspects including Dinah Taylor, Pickton’s younger brother David and fellow pig-butcher Pat Casanova, who could not be ruled out as a contributor to a stain on the slaughterhouse door, which was also thought to contain DNA from Mona Wilson.

There was no forensic evidence linking Pickton to the buckets that held the body parts and none of his guns or saws could be shown, conclusively, to have been used in the murders or dismemberments. Nor was it shown that the women’s bodies had been dismembered in the method Pickton used when butchering pigs. The Crown maintained that Pickton was a butcher skilled enough to have dismembered the women in that way.

The DNA of people yet to be identified was also present at the crime scene. The DNA of two unknown men were found in the bucket containing the body parts of Andrea Joesbury, while the DNA of three unidentified people were found on the teeth of Joesbury and Sereena Abotsway. Defence lawyer Marilyn Sandford cited over eighty incidents where she maintained that DNA evidence had been contaminated before being sent to the laboratory.

One veteran crime scene investigator found a fingerprint on Pickton’s freezer that contained the remains of Andrea Joesbury and Sereena Abotsway but did not match Pickton’s prints, yet it was not compared to anyone else’s who might have been involved. Head of the investigation Inspector Doug Adam said that the huge task of collecting the evidence had “stressed” the resources of the RCMP – to the point where every white contamination suit in the country was in use at the pig farm. More than 40,000 photographs were taken of the crime scene and testing 600,000 items “very much challenged” the lab system in Canada. As a result, new robotic systems were brought in to handle the testing procedures very much more quickly than humans could do. However, when Pickton came to trial over six years after the crime scene investigation had begun, some items were still waiting to be tested.

The defence argued that, despite the vast mass of evidence that had been collected, the prosecution had found no smoking gun. The defence even sought to undermine the testimony of Pickton’s friend Andrew Bellwood, who said that Pickton had told him that he had sex with women, then murdered them and fed hacked-off body parts to his pigs. Other remains were mixed up with the pigs’ entrails and taken to a disposal plant. Pickton told him that he lured his victims out to the farm with the promise of drugs, then would have sex with the women when they were handcuffed and gagged. Finally, he garrotted them with a wire. Bellwood said that Pickton acted out the whole thing for him.

“It was like a play,” he said. Nevertheless, he still sat down with Pickton afterwards and enjoyed a dinner of cooked pork.

Drugs were found among Pickton’s effects, though he was not a user, and toxicologists identified traces of narcotics in the remains. Syringes full of windscreen-cleaning fluid were found in Pickton’s office. He had once boasted of killing intravenous drug users with lethal injections of the substance, suggesting that police informer Scott Chubb use this method to get rid of Wendy Lynn Eistetter. He would pay him $1,000 for the favour.

Paul Casanova admitted that he had been given oral sex by Andrea Joesbury, who had been brought to the farm by Dinah Taylor, but denied any knowledge of her death. He also noticed items of clothing left by other victims. Lynn Ellingsen claimed to have seen Pickton skinning a woman hanging from a meat hook years earlier. She said she did not tell anyone about this out of fear for her life, perhaps understandably.

It took the jury nine days to reach a verdict. In the end they decided that Pickton was guilty of six counts of second-degree murder, but not guilty of six counts of first-degree murder, seemingly on the grounds that he had either not planned the murders or had not acted on his own.

T
HE KILLER OF
a sixteen-year-old girl was convicted twenty-six years after the crime by a trace of DNA left on a paper towel. On the evening of 30 October 1983, trainee hairdresser Colette Aram set out on the mile-long walk to her boyfriend Russell Godfrey’s house in the village of Keyworth in Nottinghamshire, UK. He usually picked her up. Colette refused a lift from her mother, who was baking cakes that evening. The walk should have taken her about twenty minutes.

“She left my house, perfectly happy, a normal sixteen-yearold,” said her mother. “She said: ‘I will be fine, Mum.’ That was it, I never saw her again.”

At approximately 8.10 p.m., she turned into Nicker Hill. Witnesses reported hearing a woman’s scream at around that time. Then a car drove off at speed. By 10.30 p.m., there were frantic phone calls between the Arams and the Godfreys, and friends and family set out to search the surrounding area. It was not until nine o’clock the next morning that Colette’s brother Mark found her naked body in a field near Thurlby, around a mile-and-a-half (2.4 km) from where she had been abducted. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Her body had been left in an overtly sexual position.

The police spent months questioning 20,000 people during a house-to-house enquiry of Keyworth and the nearby villages. Some 2,200 statements were taken and 5,300 separate enquiries were made. The case also featured in the BBC’s first
Crimewatch
television programme.

The investigation focused on a red Ford Fiesta belonging to the principal of a riding school in Lady Bay. It had been stolen from Adbolton Lane in Holme Pierrepoint at around 4.30 p.m. on the afternoon of the murder. It was seen again three hours later at Willow Brook in Keyworth, near Russell Godfrey’s house. One witness said that the man seen driving the car was carrying a knife.