Canadian True Crime - 17 Robert Pickton - Part 3

Episode Date: January 5, 2018

[Part 3 of 4] In this part, we find out what led to Robert Pickton's eventual arrest.Support my sponsors! Here's where the discount codes are:www.canadiantruecrime.ca/sponsorsPodcast recommendations:Suicide by CopThe Marble GardenThe Secret Life of Weddings - Episode 2 featuring Dellen MillardDark PoutineJoin my patreon to get early, ad-free episodes, video AMAs and more: www.patreon.com/canadiantruecrime  Social media and contact information:Visit: www.canadiantruecrime.caFacebook page: www.facebook.com/canadiantruecrime/Facebook group: /www.facebook.com/groups/478462932506209/ Twitter:  twitter.com/CanadianTCpod Instagram: www.instagram.com/canadiantruecrimepod/Email: [e-mail]:Research and writing: Meg Zhang and Kristi LeeAudio production: Erik KrosbySpecial thanks to Wednesday LaChanceSpecial thanks to Dave WolfmanInformation sources:Can be found with the episode at www.canadiantruecrime.ca.Music credits:Erik Krosby - composer and producer of original music usedMusic below is used under an Attribution License - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Podcast theme music: Space Trip. http://www.dl-sounds.com/royalty-free/space-trip/Kai Engel - DifferenceChris Zabriskie - Fly Inverted Past A JennySergey Cheremisinov- Mothers handsChris Zabriskie - Cylinders 7Igor Khabarov - StayChris Zabriskie - I Don't See the Branches, I See the Leaves by Chris Zabriskie - YouTubeDark Water - Poddington bearChris Zabriskie - There’s a special place for some peopleChris Zabriskie - Undercover Vampire PolicemanChris - I need to start writing things downChris - Brethren, ArisePhilip Weigl - Subdivision of the MassesChris - I'm a man who will fight for your honourSergey Cheremisinov - When You LeaveSergey Cheremisinov - Sea & NightArs Sonor - Cellular Fugue IIVitus Von Degen - Black glovesKevin McLeod - Marty Gots a Plan Support the show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast may contain coarse language, adult themes, and content of a violent and disturbing nature. Listener discretion is advised. Welcome to Canadian True Crime, Episode 17, Robert Picton, Part 3. This is Christy. We last left off with a terrifying encounter between Robert Picton and Lynn Ellingson, a sex worker living in his trailer, doing admin work in exchange for alcohol, drugs, food, and money. Lynn had gone with Robert to the downtown Eastside to pick up a girl and had taken her back to the farm. Lynn went to bed, woke some time later, and saw a light on in the barn. She ventured over to take a look and found the sex worker hung from a hook.

Robert threatened that if Lynn said anything, she would be next. The day after the barn incident, it was noticed that Georgina Pappin had vanished from the downtown Eastside. Georgina was 35 years old and had long thick black hair and high cheekbones, exactly like the woman that Robert and Lynn had picked up the night before. Georgina came from a well-known Aboriginal family, grew up with eight brothers and sisters, and spent her childhood being farmed out to dozens of foster homes. Despite this, the siblings made many attempts to stay close. Georgina was described as rambunctious and special.

Among her many talents were drawing, singing, sewing, and cooking. People turned to watch her when she walked into a room. Georgina was the mother of seven children. The last two were twins who were only a few months old at the time she disappeared. She didn't have custody of all of her kids, but she made the best of what she had. But in the summer of 1998, she was caught shoplifting and smoking dope, so all her kids were sent away and she was sent to rehab for a week. She turned up to the baby shower of a friend from the downtown Eastside in a state that wasn't the best.

Life and its struggles had gotten the best of her, and all she wanted to do was get high. This was one of the last nights that people remembered seeing her. Another group saw her sitting at a table at a hotel with Robert Picton, who was buying drinks for everyone. Then Georgina ended up in a hospital from a drug overdose and also had pneumonia. Five days later, she pushed her IV pole to the fourth floor to have a cigarette and never returned. She left the hospital and that was likely the last confirmed sighting of her. Why I say likely is because Scott Chubb, the former Picton employee, swore that he saw her after that with Robert Picton. He said he saw Robert's truck in Poco parked out the front of a money mark where Robert kept a mailbox.

Scott and Robert said hi to each other and Scott saw a woman waiting in the truck. Later on, when he saw missing poster pictures of Georgina, he was sure she was the same woman he saw in the truck. Regardless, Georgina was never seen again. In the summer of 1999, a constable in the Vancouver Police Department called Laura Machena, also a member of Project Emilia, met with profiler Kim Rosmo. He told Kim he believed that Robert Picton was a strong candidate for the role of the serial killer in the downtown Eastside. Even though, of course, the Vancouver PD had continuously denied the existence of this killer. Laura Machena relayed Bill Hescock's tip to the police, where Bill recounted what Lynn Ellingson had told him about finding Robert in the barn with the body of a woman hanging from the ceiling. Laura Machena told him they knew Robert had a wood chipper on his farm.

Laura Machena wanted to know what Kim thought would be a good next step. Kim suggested a surveillance operation. Laura Machena went back to his boss with a suggestion, but was told that due to the expense and resources required to mount surveillance, their department just wouldn't be able to do it. So he asked the RCMP in Coquitlam for their help. They agreed. Surveillance was set up with a few constables who were told to stop Robert if they ever saw him pick anyone up. They followed him around for a few weeks, but didn't see anything suspicious. In fact, they had a feeling he knew he was being tailed, which isn't surprising given he had discussed his paranoia about the police previously with his old friend, Lisa Yelts. The surveillance wasn't going anywhere, so it was stopped.

But Kim Rosmo had been conducting another statistical analysis of the missing women cases in Vancouver. He studied more than 800 cases of missing women from 1995 to 1998 to see if he could identify any patterns. He concluded that 20 of them were statistically significant and unlikely to have occurred by chance. He put all this information into a report to the Vancouver PD, saying, Based on historical data, we can expect to locate no more than two women from this group. He said the most likely explanation for the majority of them is a murderer, or murderers, preying on sex workers on the downtown east side. He said in most violent deaths on the downtown east side, women died in domestic arguments or fights over drugs, and their bodies were actually found. Not at all like what was happening here, where they just disappeared completely.

Kim Rosmo's latest report included other interesting findings. He referred to a cluster body site, a site where a serial killer disposes of multiple bodies in one location. He hypothesized that potential burial sites are most likely to be in the wilderness areas of the offender's residential property. And lastly, he said that the killer would be a local person, someone who knew the Vancouver area well. And as we now know, all three of these statements would prove to be true. Kim presented his report to senior officers in the Vancouver PD. Even though they still weren't fully convinced, they put two more senior homicide detectives onto the Project Amelia team. They were aware that the growing public concern regarding the missing women was starting to reach international media.

This wasn't helped by the fact that the popular show America's Most Wanted decided to do a story on the case. Asking if a modern day Jack the Ripper was to blame. There were a lot of internal politics around this in the police force, and quite a few negotiations with the TV production company. Finally, they were able to reach an agreement and the show announced, together with the Vancouver Attorney General, a $100,000 reward for information. Even then, John Unger, the deputy chief of the Vancouver PD, expressed his doubts at the accompanying press conference. The very best outcome that we could have is that every one of these missing women would phone us and say, Here I am, I don't wish to make it publicly known where I'm located, but here I am to let you know I'm safe and sound. Again, the belief was just that sex workers had moved on from the downtown Eastside and had just chosen not to tell anyone.

The families of the missing women did not agree, and were upset that publicly at least, the police were still not on board 100% with admitting anything was going on. So they got together and held a rally and memorial service at the First United Church in the downtown Eastside. Over 300 people showed up, including the children of the missing women. 23 women were celebrated. Their families gave heartfelt messages for them about how they were loved and missed. Also, community activists protested at the event carrying signs that the women were not disposable. Laura Machena on the Project Emilia team continued to look into it. A colleague recommended he be interviewed for a Canadian documentary called Through a Blue Lens that looks at the interactions between police officers and drug addicts. Laura Machena provided many interesting insights in the interview.

He said he wondered if other large cities in Canada had problems with missing women on this scale, so he'd taken the initiative to message other police departments to find out more. He found out that only four places had a missing persons unit. Toronto wasn't seeing any such trend locally, and it seemed that Vancouver was the only city in Canada with a missing women problem. Laura Machena said he felt the problem was an economic one, one of poverty. There was a lot of mental health issues which resulted in people taking drugs to dull their pain, which leads to living a high-risk lifestyle, making them vulnerable targets for victimisation. He talked about the kind of men that are the perpetrators, saying many of them wouldn't have criminal records, but the person taking these women from the downtown Eastside was someone with basic social skills that enabled them to get a victim to trust them. Laura Machena estimated by this time they had at least 31 victims.

He went on to say that they'd just started getting to know the women in the downtown Eastside and had been working on getting their trust. Personal connections were everything. After the interview, Laura Machena told the crew and his colleague off the record that they were keeping their eye on, quote, a guy in Poco, he's a real freak, a pig farmer who has guts rendered off site. The Vancouver PD already knew that Wayne Lang, Bill Hisscox and Robert's old friend Lisa Yelds as potential sources had gone nowhere. The surveillance operation on Robert Picton was a flop because he likely knew it was happening. There were no bodies and no DNA and the police force was cutting back on staff, meaning the staff that remained had to work even harder on the case. But Laura Machena said to his colleagues that it looked like they now had another source. After having seen the woman hanging in the barn and being threatened by Robert Picton, Lynn Ellingson was utterly terrified.

She wanted to stay far away from that place, but she did tell some of her friends and acquaintances about what she'd seen there that night. People talk and eventually bits and pieces of information made their way to the police, the main piece coming through Ross Caldwell, an acquaintance of Robert Picton. Ross had called in and reported that Lynn Ellingson told him that she'd witnessed Robert Picton hang and skin the corpse of a woman she had helped him bring to the farm. Despite the severity of this accusation, police took this information with a grain of salt. First of all, they recognized this statement to be hearsay. And second of all, Lynn refused to come in to confirm this observation or to take a polygraph test. Lynn denied everything. She said she didn't see him doing anything in the barn that night. In fact, she had other plans so wasn't even on the farm to start with.

Police were also suspicious of her background as a drug addict. Because she had apparently consumed significant amounts of cocaine that night, her statement to Ross Caldwell lacked credibility in the eyes of the police. But the police did know that she was very afraid of the Picton brothers. So they had no choice but to wait and see what happened. Despite feeling terrified, Lynn worked up the courage to ask Robert to pay for her silence. In time, the checks he gave her all added up to thousands of dollars that would buy her silence for now. Just a few months later, in November of 1999, 43-year-old Wendy Crawford disappeared. She had fluffy blonde hair and high cheekbones.

In her childhood, Wendy moved with her family across British Columbia, Alberta and the Yukon, before settling in Chilliwack, BC, about an hour and 20 minutes drive east from Vancouver. There were low-income earners and struggled to make ends meet. Wendy had some health problems. She had diabetes and was later diagnosed with Crohn's disease, an inflammatory Bell disease that causes inflammation of the digestive tract. It's a debilitating disease that causes great pain and fatigue. Wendy began trying drugs as a teen, presumably to deal with her pain. A few years later, she had a son and a daughter and was raising them alone.

Due to her health issues, Wendy had to rely on welfare to provide for her and her kids where they lived in a mobile home. But Wendy remained close with her family, especially to her sister. She did the best for her kids, and as they grew up and Wendy had some time to herself, she would go to the downtown Eastside to earn some extra money for the family. Her sister said she did not take drugs all the time. Two weeks after Wendy went missing in November 1999, her worried family officially reported her missing. Two days after Christmas, 28-year-old Jennifer Firminger disappeared. She was Aboriginal and as a baby she'd been put up for adoption by her parents,

going to a couple in St. Catherine's, Ontario. Growing up, she was described as sweet, smart and artistic, as well as painfully shy. But when she went to high school, things changed. Jennifer suddenly realized she had darker skin and she felt out of place. She wanted to know about her birth parents and why they'd given her up, but wasn't getting any satisfying answers. It's not uncommon for adopted Aboriginal youth to struggle to find themselves. Jennifer ended up having many arguments with her parents and left to live with her friend Callie and her family for a month. Unfortunately, as teenagers tend to do, they had a falling out.

It seemed it was all a bit much for Jennifer and she ran away to Vancouver in search of her birth mother. Soon after, she wrote back home saying she'd found her mother and that was it. Jennifer ended up on the downtown Eastside, gave birth to a son and lived in a run-down hotel room with a boyfriend. Maggie Gisley, a recovering drug addict who lived on the downtown Eastside for 16 years and knew many of the women before they went missing, said she ran into Jennifer from time to time on different street corners. And then, one day, she just wasn't there anymore. In 1999, four women had gone missing in total. The number of missing women had finally started to decrease. In 1997, the highest year, 13 women went missing. In 1998, there were 11. In 1999, there were four.

Many have later speculated that the lower number was because Robert Picton had realized he was under surveillance. As we know, he was paranoid, so likely cut back on his activity and was extra cautious otherwise. The VPD encountered another issue with investigating Robert. Since Port Coquitlam was under RCMP jurisdiction, the RCMP had authority over the case, so conducted a separate investigation starting in October 1999. They designated the Coquitlam Strike Force Unit and Provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit to focus on Robert Picton. Two months later, a memo revealed that he was still being investigated but no longer considered a high priority. By the new year, there was no longer any mention of Picton and memos between RCMP investigators.

All up, at the end of 1999, the official count of missing women from the downtown east side was 31, even though most people believed it to be higher. The remaining women themselves were perpetually terrified that they were going to be next. Do you have a passion project that you're ready to take to the next level? SquareSpace makes it easy for anyone to create an engaging web presence, grow a brand and sell anything from your products to the content you create and even your time. When I launched this passion project six years ago, I needed some kind of online hub to manage all the non-podcasting tasks that come with podcasting.

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and when you're ready to launch, use offer code CTC to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com.ctc with offer code CTC, and get your passion project off the ground today. On the last day of 1999, crowds at Piggy's Palace were celebrating the turn of the century, and Robert Pickton was having a blast. It was the biggest party, 1700 people. We hired security guards, yeah?

It was a beautiful, beautiful party. People were having a grand time. It was the best time they ever had. So much money was donated for kids, so, so much. Our nightclub holds about 300 people. 1700 was a lot of people. The police didn't know nothing about it until the party was half over. There were some good times, some real good times.

The police arrived to raid Piggy's Palace, and the fire marshal shut the place down, permanently. Robert said the reason was that there were not supposed to be any nightclubs in the city of Poco. To make sure that the club shut down and stayed that way, the RCMP got a court order against the Picton Brothers Company, the so-called charitable organization named the Good Times Society. That company lost its not profit status the next year, because it didn't provide mandatory financial statements.

On January the 19th, the RCMP interviewed Robert Pickton about his stabbing attack on Wendy Lynn Eisteder three years earlier. Robert gave no information to the police, but he likely wondered what information Lynn Ellingson may have told them. He was continuing to pay her for her silence, but was it still working? Was she still keeping quiet? His former employee, Scott Chubb,

was broke and asked Robert if he had any work. As they were working together, removing nails out of old wooden floors, Robert out of the blue offered Scott $1,000 to hurt Lynn Ellingson. He said that Lynn had cost him over $10,000, obviously in blackmail hush money, and discussed several ways that Scott could potentially hurt her. Robert said he had injected someone with a syringe of antifreeze or window washer fluid, and they'd died right away. He assured Scott that the RCMP would think they'd just overdosed on heroin.

As much as he needed the money, though, Scott Chubb wasn't a murderer, so he couldn't do what Robert wanted. In the meantime, he'd seen firearms on the farm, including several in the laundry room of Robert's trailer. He had a .44 Magnum, which is a cowboy-style revolver, and a .10 Mak, which is a submachine gun about the same size as a handgun, and a .38 Browning, a semi-automatic pistol. All good quality guns that can do some serious damage.

Robert even let Scott borrow the Browning, even throwing in some free bullets. The fact that Scott Chubb had knowledge of the guns would end up being a vital piece of information later on. Meanwhile, at the Vancouver Police Department, things with Project Amelia weren't going so well. Morale was at an all-time low at the task force charge with looking into the women disappearing on the downtown east side. The Vancouver Sun investigated two years later

and found a number of issues at play. They supposedly had nine team members in 1999, but it turned out that most of them were only on the project part-time while handling their full-time police positions. Some of them were junior and inexperienced, and none of them had received any training on major cases. Also, there was internal turmoil on the team. In fighting, with holding information,

basically more of the same behavior that Kim Rosmo had grown accustomed to by now. But along with the people problems were issues with administrative process, namely data not being input properly or at all and getting lost in the system. That said, Project Amelia did have some successes. Four of the missing women had been located

due to investigative work. Two were alive, and two had died of causes unrelated to homicide. The tips about the remaining missing women continued to come in, but the understaffed Vancouver PD just wasn't equipped to follow them all up. The task force fumbled along for a while longer. By now, Robert's current best friend, Gina Houston,

was well-known on the downtown east side as The Girl, who came to entice sex workers to go back to the Picton Farm. Everyone was afraid of Gina and knew of the farm, not to mention Robert's personal reputation, so Gina would target the most addicted and desperate women she could find.

Many decided the money and drugs they had been promised were worth taking the risk. Around this time, Robert picked up a new female friend, Dinah Taylor. Dinah was an Aboriginal woman in her late 20s from Thunder Bay, Ontario. Although she was only 17,

although she was only small in frame, five feet six inches tall and very thin, she was described as menacing, aggressive, street-wise and downright dangerous. She had quite the rap sheet, mostly for drug trafficking, and was known to be a pimp. She had been living in the downtown east side for years

and people didn't like her. They tried to stay out of her way. Staff at local outreach centres like Wish reported that Dinah never wanted to engage with them and not only did she not want to go in, but she would drag other women out to send them on dates with Johns, just like Gina Houston had done.

Sometime towards the end of 1999, Dinah started staying on the Picton farm for a night here and there, and then for weeks. Before long, Robert had grown to adore her and was giving her clothes, money, drugs and whatever else she wanted. It was official.

Gina Houston was out, and Dinah Taylor was in. By early 2000, many of the downtown sex workers had peered up and started to use a sort of buddy system to keep track of each other. This was the case with Ash One, a young Fijian woman

and her best friend and roommate, Tiffany Drew. They shared a room at one of the hotels. Tiffany was another petite woman. After her parents split up, Tiffany and her sister, Kelly, grew up on Vancouver Island with an alcoholic mother who wasn't known to be very affectionate.

She threw both girls out of home when they were still in high school, so they ended up with their father, who didn't seem to care what they did, so they both quit school. Kelly later married and had three kids. Tiffany, on the other hand, ended up in the downtown east side

with at least one child who was being raised by her aunt. On the downtown east side, Tiffany was described as a beautiful young girl who was immaculate when it came to her appearance. She enjoyed doing her hair and makeup, and never was there a hair out of place. She was sassy and street-wise

and always seemed to have friends around her. One night, 25-year-old Tiffany did not come home, so her distraught best friend and roommate, Ash1, went to the Wish Drop-in Center to ask for help. A staffer there contacted the police, but the constable in charge was unconcerned, saying she would come back soon.

Elaine Allen, who ran the Wish Center, would later say the officer didn't take notes and was very casual about the whole thing. Ash1 came back each night to see what was being done and what could be done, and one time the constable sat her down and told her that Tiffany had gone into recovery and wanted to leave her old life behind.

He said Tiffany had specifically requested not to be contacted by anyone for fear she would relapse, but Ash1 and the Wish Center staff didn't believe the story. They just didn't think it seemed like something Tiffany would do. In the meantime, Tiffany's sister Kelly couldn't track her down and said she contacted the missing person's office

only to be told, quote, What do you expect? She's a prostitute. The missing person's office was revealed to be in disarray, just like the Vancouver Police Department itself. Archaic systems, officers doing the work of several, inadequate supervision and disorganized record keeping were problems. Investigation was slow and there was almost no follow-up on any leads. Things weren't much better with Kim Rosmo,

who continued to face opposition in the VPD. His already robust reputation had expanded exponentially and he was now flying all over the world to present at conferences. His methods were achieving success. For example, he'd used geographical profiling to pinpoint a four-block area where he believed a rapist lived in Louisiana and he was right.

The rapist not only lived in that block, but right in the center of the pinpointed area. But at Kim Rosmo's home base, the VPD, the jealousy continued to affect work conditions, mainly instigated by one of the superiors at the force, John Unger, who seemed hell-bent on knocking Kim down a peg or two. John succeeded in sneakily getting Kim's geographic profiling unit closed due to lack of budget

and Kim was told he would be going back and assuming the ordinary rank of police constable. But the decision wasn't cleared through the proper channels, meaning there was lots of legal wrangling. The Vancouver Sun picked up wind of the situation and printed an expose that made clear they were on Kim Rosmo's side. Quote, Police managers need to explain why an officer

whose skills are sought around the world suddenly isn't wanted by his own department. But despite the bad publicity, the legal wrangling meant that Kim was done at the VPD until court proceedings could begin. Kim Rosmo was out of a job. Around the same time, in mid-2000, it was announced that the project Amelia had been cut from nine detectives to six.

A couple of local members of the RCMP and VPD weren't happy about this and put together their own little informal group to see what could be done to look at the case again. This group solidified and ended up being named Project Even-Handed, or the Missing Women Task Force. One of the first things they did was to acknowledge and publicly announce the presence of a serial killer in the downtown east side. Following the statement, Project Even-Handed got to work.

They eventually divided their pool of suspects into three categories of priority. Priority one suspects were individuals who were previously charged with the murder, attempted murder, or the sexual assault or attempted sexual assault of a sex worker in the downtown east side. Robert Picton was classified as priority one, along with three or four other men. But it's crucial to note that at this time, the search was only file review rather than field work. There were no official homicide investigations taking place yet.

The next step was to gather DNA from various crimes, collect DNA from the suspects, and examine it all together to see if there were any connections. Back in the downtown east side, the women didn't believe for a second that the decreased number of missing women in 1999 meant the threat had lessened. They were still on high alert, and their fears were confirmed when later in the year, three women vanished. One of them was Sharon Abraham, who was 35 years old.

She was of Aboriginal descent and the doting mother of two daughters. Not a lot was known about Sharon, except an old friend said she'd escaped an abusive relationship and earlier on was a hard worker and responsible mother. It's not known how exactly she ended up in the downtown east side. Although Sharon went missing in 2000, she wasn't reported missing for another three years. Next to go missing was Dawn Cray, who was part of a large Aboriginal family. Her parents had an alcohol abuse problem and even though they'd managed to beat it, her father died of a massive heart attack dying in her arms.

Her mother ended up drinking again after that and a misguided attempt to deal with her own grief. Dawn and her siblings ended up split up in various foster homes after that. At the first home, Dawn suffered abuse by the regimented parents who used their foster kids for child labour. Finally, Dawn found a good family at last. Her early teens were happy times and she was known to be into clothes and fashion and had a friendly smile. She was also a talented musician, but her family problems came back to haunt her in her teens

and she ended up pregnant at 16 and drifted into drug addiction and survival sex work on the downtown east side. She was attacked by two women who threw battery acid on her, scarring her face permanently and sending her into a time of pain, anger and desperation. She relied more and more on drugs and had several criminal charges for stealing and assault. She'd made several attempts to get clean though and always remained in contact with her sister Lorraine who recalls Dawn was extremely paranoid about the missing women situation. Lorraine was immediately alarmed when Dawn stopped calling her back. She went to look for her.

All Dawn's stuff was still in her room at the single occupancy hotel she was staying in but there was no sign of Dawn herself. However, Dinah Taylor, Robert Picton's latest best friend admitted she had seen Dawn in the time immediately before she'd been reported missing and in fact rumours among the sex worker community were that Dinah had persuaded Dawn to go with her back to the Picton farm. The last to vanish in the year 2000 was 43 year old Deborah Jones. Deborah was described as friendly and had amazing musical talent that included playing guitar, piano

and a singing voice similar to Janice Joplin. Not a lot is publicly known about Deborah's background except that she was a mother and that she was close with her four brothers and sisters. Her sister asserted that at the time of her disappearance she had cleaned up and wasn't even in the survival sex trade. 2001 rolled in with another disappearance, 27 year old Patricia Johnson or Paddy. She was born to a mother who had been in the foster system and was pregnant as a teenager. Her mother Marion later admitted that at the time she didn't have what it took to raise a child.

That said Paddy was loved by everyone, described as sweet, caring, goofy and someone who would light up the room with a sparkling personality and a smile to match. At age 16 Paddy left school as she had to support herself so she got a job at the mall. She was living with her boyfriend and at age 17 gave birth to a baby boy and not long after that a baby girl. She got two rose tattoos on her left shoulder, one for each child but an unknown but unfortunate set of circumstances saw her living on the downtown east side by age 20 addicted to heroin and relying on sex work.

Her two children ended up being taken in by her ex-boyfriend's mother but she still visited them often, she never missed their birthdays and called them all the time. Paddy desperately wanted to get clean and tried many times to shake her addiction. One day she came across a photographer called Lincoln Clarks. He noticed her, thought she was stunning despite the evidence of being ravaged by drugs and asked to take her photo. Paddy said yes and after he took a photo by herself he took one of Paddy and her two friends sitting on the steps looking bored, desperate and a bit out of it. This ended up being an iconic portrait and eventually led to a series of photographs

of other women in the downtown east side called heroines. There's a link in the show notes and on my website. The month that she went missing Paddy planned to find a place of her own with the help of her uncle. Finally a safe space she could visit with her kids but the day it was all supposed to happen Paddy didn't show up. She'd also failed to pick up her welfare check. Her uncle raised his eyebrows and thought it wasn't really like her but waited. Five days passed and it was her son's birthday. She never missed her kids' birthdays so at this point everyone knew something was definitely wrong.

Her mother went to the police and reported her missing but said the police told her that Paddy had gone to Montreal which was odd given Paddy had never left the Vancouver area in all her life. Project Evenhanded increased in size up to seven then up to ten people. Robert Picton was their prime suspect even though they knew all efforts so far to get evidence on him had been dead ends. Since it had been reported that the number of missing women had started to decline many thought the threat was now over. But as they continued to sift through the police files they realized that more women had gone missing from the downtown east side than they had been told. And in March and April 2001 three more women would vanish. Heather Bottomley was 24 years old and came from a loving ordinary home in a nice neighbourhood in New Westminster a city in the greater Vancouver area.

Heather's friends described her as funny with a quirky sense of humour. She was petite with thick curly hair but in grade nine she felt disillusioned when her parents got a divorce and dropped out of school. During this time she met a boyfriend who was a bit of a drop kick and at 17 she had a baby girl. Her boyfriend was a drug user and it wasn't long before Heather was using two. She had another baby and sometime after that ended up in the downtown east side well known to the locals in the area. Her uncle would later say she told him she wanted to get clean and the family had been discussing it but she didn't get back to them. Weeks went by before they started looking for her in local hospitals and recovery centres but nothing. She too had disappeared into thin air.

A month or so later was the last time Yvonne Marie Boone was seen. Yvonne was born in Saskatchewan and suffered some upheaval as a child first with her father who died in a car accident and then the separation of her mother and abusive stepfather. Her mother was able to support Yvonne and her siblings by working as a nurse and for a while things seemed to go well. But at 13 Yvonne's rebellious streak came out and she refused to go to school anymore. No one could make her go back. At age 15 she married a man who was 25, 10 years older than her. Over the next three years she had as many children in quick succession, three boys. Yvonne and her husband separated and she found herself unable to care for her kids and sadly they ended up split up.

Two of them with different family members and one in foster care. Yvonne loved and missed them but couldn't provide for them. She ended up working for a travelling carnival and by the mid 1980s she had moved to Vancouver. Her sons said she did keep in touch with them and visited them often. There were some good memories. Unfortunately Yvonne started using cocaine and soon became addicted. Now here's where the story is a little different from the others. Yvonne's family had known she'd spent time with Robert Picton.

In fact at least one of her sons had met the man aptly describing him as someone who smelled and didn't shower. She also hung out at Piggy's Palace. Yvonne disappeared in March 2001 and sometime after that her family found out she likely took Robert Picton to a Surrey drug den as her date. Someone else there said that he quote had a ponytail dressed really grubby and smell bad. Two weeks after Yvonne went missing Heather Chinook was next. She was born in Colorado but her mother married a Canadian and she moved to British Columbia to the Kootenays an area of BC with gorgeous mountains, rivers, lakes, waterfalls and beaches. But Heather wasn't settled there and kept taking off and sometime along the way she got into alcohol and drugs.

Heather had two children who she had to give up to someone else to raise when she couldn't give them what she knew they deserved. She didn't like to think of herself as a sex worker. In fact she insisted she wasn't despite being charged for solicitation once. She insisted that she was a booster someone who stole items and sold them. She would steal to order saying what do you want I'll get it for you. Heather was known to spend time at Robert Picton's farm thinking it was a fun place to go. Her boyfriend Gary wasn't impressed especially when hearing Heather's stories of biker gangs with drugs and pornography and her fear that there was a prostitution ring running out of the farm.

When she went missing Heather wasn't even living in the downtown east side. She was living in an apartment in Surrey with Gary. On April 1st they had an argument. She left in a cab and her boyfriend never saw her again. Heather was 30 years old. Five weeks after Heather was last seen 23 year old Andrea Joesbury was next to disappear. She was described as stunning with a gorgeous smile and long blonde hair. She'd known a childhood with alcoholism mental illness and witnessed her father physically assaulting her mother many times

including one occasion that resulted in him serving four years in prison for it. Andrea's wish was to have a normal loving family resulting in her being vulnerable to people who would take advantage of her. When she was 16 her friend introduced her to a man who was 30 and she instantly clung to him thinking this might be the opportunity for the family she wanted. She moved to Vancouver and had a baby girl with him but it turned out that he was a pimp and a drug dealer that just wanted to use Andrea for sex work. As per his plan she was addicted to drugs and he had children's aid come and take her baby away. She was understandably devastated and clung to the drugs even more.

She ended up testing positive for HIV. Her family made some desperate attempts to rescue her and there was some relief when her pimp boyfriend was arrested and put in jail. Andrea began a methadone program, nightly visits to the Wish Dropin Centre and found a good doctor. She was on the up and up. But one day she missed a methadone appointment. Her doctor had called her grandfather to let him know.

Straight away her brother went to the downtown Eastside to look for her before going to the police to report her missing. By now the community was again reeling with shock. The disappearances clearly hadn't slowed down. The threat hadn't lessened. Women were still going missing at an alarming rate. The media constantly challenged the Vancouver Police Department about their failure to do anything meaningful in terms of taking action.

In the meantime, Kim Rosmo had found a new position as the director of research at the Police Foundation in Washington DC, an organization that was outspoken about how thrilled they were to have a person of his caliber there. But his court case with the VPD went into full swing. The general public were shocked as the damning details came out. Kim Rosmo's main complaint was that in 1998, he'd believed there was a serial killer snatching women from the downtown Eastside and a warning needed to be issued straight away.

Kim described not only the immediate rejection of his suggestion, but also the fact that the police went out of their way to issue a news release saying they didn't believe there was a serial killer. The public was distressed, especially the family of the missing women. If the police had have issued the warning, surely they would have taken extra precautions if they had have known. After some time, the court case was dismissed. The conclusion was that the VPD was within its rights not to renew Kim's contract,

and Kim did not suffer from this given that he'd secured an even better job. The VPD made technically of one, but the damage from the details revealed during the trial left them with a very badly damaged reputation. In her book On the Farm, Robert William Picton and the tragic story of Vancouver's missing women, author Stevie Cameron tells the story of 35-year-old Katrina Murphy, who was visiting her husband in British Columbia's Maximum Security Kent Institution. Kent is about an hour and a half's drive in the East direction from the downtown Eastside. Katrina and her husband were long-time criminals, having robbed at least 19 banks,

but she was currently out on bail waiting for her trial. After she had visited her husband in prison, the woman who came with her could only take her half the way back to where she lived in Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver, so she decided to hitchhike the rest of the way. It was starting to get dark as Katrina walked along the Trans-Canada Highway, waiting for a ride. Luckily, she didn't have to wait long because a van stopped to pick her up. She said the van was absolutely filthy, so dirty in fact that she couldn't even really make out what color it was. She was hesitant to get in, but decided she needed that ride enough to take the risk.

As she hopped in the van, she realized the inside was just as disgusting as the outside. It smelled like dirty clothes, rotten meat, and excrement. The driver said, Hi! She saw he was the man we're familiar hearing about now. Toothy grin, bald on top, matted hair at the back, wearing dirty, stinky clothes with dirt-caged black rubber gumboots. He said he was going to Poco and she asked him to drop her in Sydney, which was just a short detour off the way he'd been driving to get to Poco anyway. The man said, My name's Willie, and asked Katrina if she wanted to smoke a joint.

He took one hit attached to the car's sun visor and gave it to her. She lit it up and asked if he wanted a drag, he shook his head. Remember, he never took the drugs himself, he only kept them to give away. Robert Picton remarked to Katrina that since her husband was in Kent Institution, he wouldn't miss her if she didn't get home that night. She was starting to feel very anxious and looked around for a way to get out, but discovered there was no handle on her door. She was literally trapped.

She noticed they were getting close to where he was supposed to exit the highway and drop her home, and said, Hey, that's my stop. But Robert kept driving. He said he would double back, but he was in the fast lane of the highway, and when he didn't slow down, Katrina's anxiety about the situation went into overdrive. She said to him, You try anything and I'll fucking kill you. He seemed amused by the comment, as his response was to look at her and laugh. She started grabbing around in her bag for something she could use as a weapon, anything.

Robert had now taken an exit and turned into an industrial park, but it was a dead end, so he needed to turn around. Katrina finally found a pencil in her bag, and as Robert slowed to turn the van around, she stabbed it into the side of his neck while gouging his eye with her left thumb. As he yelped in pain, the petite woman dove over his lap and out his side of the door. She landed face first on the gravel. She ran for her life expecting that he would run after her. She quickly looked back, but he was just standing there beside his van,

cackling to himself as he watched her run away in terror. Katrina continued to run, and finally came to a gas station where the attendant noticed she was bleeding pretty badly. She'd grazed herself from when she fell. An RCMP officer arrived and wanted to know what happened. He looked her up and saw she was out on bail, and said he was going after the van. He left, Katrina got a ride with a kindly old man at the gas station, and within a few weeks she was back in prison.

Katrina Murphy was the third woman to have escaped an encounter with Robert Picton. Serena Abbotsway was not so lucky. She was of Aboriginal descent and had been born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. After suffering severe physical and sexual abuse in her first few years of life, she was taken away from her family and put with new foster parents, Bert and Anna Dreyers, at four years old. Despite the damage she'd suffered, Serena came out of her shell and was described as bubbly, caring and sweet, and her new family adored her straight away.

She had problems in the school system, so her new family tried homeschooling her, which saw some success, but in her mid teens Serena started acting out. Finally at age 17, the Dreyers found her to be so disruptive that she was affecting their other foster children, so they felt like they had no choice but to ask her to leave. She moved into a group home, but continued to call her foster family every day for the rest of her life. Serena learned a lot from the street-wise teens she met in the group home, and gravitated to the downtown east side, addicted to drugs. She was subjected to more abuse.

In 1997, she was physically assaulted by one of her Johns and almost died. She ended up in a coma with a fractured skull and had to get a steel plate in her head. She was back on the streets after her recovery. Everyone loved her at the Wish Droppen Center, as well as at church where she loudly sang hymns. 29-year-old Serena was last seen in July 2001. It was coming up to her 30th birthday, and she was excited to celebrate with the foster family she had spent 14 years with and had stayed close to since she left. But one day, she stopped calling.

The Dreyers were distraught. Meantime, the press reported that Project Evenhanded's findings that the numbers of missing women were much higher than anyone knew. The new number was 45 women missing, 18 more than the 27 that the VPD had been reporting. The Vancouver Sun had published a series on the problems within the Vancouver Police Department, which sent waves around the province. And because the public were outraged even more, the VPD were forced to take the missing women seriously. The Missing Women's Task Force decided it was time to officially open the lines of communication with the victims' families.

They held a meeting with 50 family members and 10 police officers and for the first time told them where they were up to with the investigation and that they intended to keep the communication up. Most of the family members left the meeting feeling reassured, or at least like they'd finally been heard. The next day, October 15, 2001, police publicly announced that they would be treating the missing women cases as homicide cases. This was a huge moment for everyone involved. 34-year-old Diane Rock had been born in Welland, a small town in Ontario, close to Niagara Falls.

Her mum was a teenager and she was adopted by the Marin family as a baby. They doted on her, but when she got into the teenage years, Diane showed her strong-willed nature. At 16, she had a baby girl of her own and her family set her up in her own place and helped her take care of her child. But a year after that, her adopted father died suddenly and Diane dropped out of school and married the father of her child. Soon, she was pregnant with her second child and then a third. The marriage didn't last and she now had three kids to support. She began working by dancing in bars where she started taking drugs to take the edge off and make her more confident on stage. She moved with her kids to Brantford, a town about an hour's drive away from Welland, and met a man there called Darren Rock.

They got married and decided to move to British Columbia. Diane was hopeful that this would be an amazing, fresh start for the family. After they had moved to Vancouver, the couple had two more boys, meaning Diane now had five children. Unfortunately, her second marriage then broke down and Diane started doing drugs again to cope. She spiralled out of control and wasn't taking care of her children, so they were rescued by family members from a situation fast becoming hopeless. One night, Diane called a friend called Janice to come and pick her up from Port Coquitlam. She'd been physically assaulted, but the only thing she said was that she'd been to a party on a farm. That was all she would say.

Next, Diane ended up with a drug dealer boyfriend in a relationship marked with domestic violence. Once she got out of that, she had nowhere to go but the downtown Eastside. One night, Diane called her friend Janice again, asking her to pick her up from Port Coquitlam. When Diane got into the car, she had a swollen lip and bruises everywhere. She was terrified. Diane said she'd been in a party on a farm where the girls got free drugs. She said she ended up a prisoner in a basement there for two or three days, raped repeatedly by several guys. Janice insisted that Diane go to the hospital, but she refused.

She was scared for her life. Diane's daughter, Carol Ann, just 14, came back to the downtown Eastside to look for her mother. She said it was really scary down there, but she just wanted her mum back. But they didn't connect, and Carol Ann went back to Welland empty-handed. Diane's welfare checks started to pile up, and she wasn't seen again. This was October 2001. 26-year-old Mona Wilson disappeared a month later. She was one of those characters in the downtown Eastside that everyone knew.

Mona was from an Aboriginal family and was the youngest of five children. At only six years old, she was found by social workers cowering in the corridor of an apartment building, bruised and battered from a beating she'd survived. She went into a treatment centre before ending up in a foster home. Her new family, the Garleys, reported that she'd been through an intense amount of trauma and abuse, more than any of their other foster children, and she'd also never ever been to school. But Mona had a big smile and loved the hobby farm that the family lived on. She adored helping out in the garden or feeding the animals.

She went to Disneyland with the family, her eyes lighting up when she saw the rides. She lived with this family for six happy years until she was 14, but in that often familiar pattern, the demons of her childhood began to haunt her and she became disruptive and violent. The Garleys didn't know what to do with her so made a heartbreaking decision to contact childcare workers. Mona was placed with a single mother for a year or two before leaving to live on her own at age 16. She kept in contact with her old foster family, calling them once a month or so, but they didn't know she was now addicted to heroin and in the survival sex trade. She ended up having a son and was reported missing in late November 2001.

After she disappeared, her heartbroken brother tried to sell information about her to people on the street in the downtown east side. It was less a money-making scheme than a stand-on principle. His reasoning was that Mona was made to pay because society failed her, so people should have to pay for details of her life after she died. Terry Wilson was the last reported woman who went missing on the downtown east side during that time period. Robert Picton didn't know it, but the end was drawing nigh for his rampage on the women on the downtown east side. Late in 2001, Terry Graton was living on the downtown east side away from her kids who lived in Alberta. She was immensely proud of her kids, but as a drug addict of many years, she just couldn't provide for them.

One night, Robert Picton had a couple of other women in his truck when he stopped and asked Terry if she wanted to join them. The promise of free drugs and $100 was too good to pass up, so Terry agreed to go to the farm. Her memories of the encounter are vivid. His truck was a yellowish-brown color, and once she got inside it, she was overcome with the stench of animals. Terry was an asthma sufferer, and straight away, the inside of the truck sparked a full asthma attack. Terry screamed at Robert to let her get out of the car, so loudly that when Robert stopped, he belted her across the face before allowing her to get out. Gasping for air and crying in pain, she decided not to report it to police, as she didn't know what good it would do.

In early February 2002, Scott Chubb, the former Picton employee who saw the guns, was desperate. He and his spouse had separated. He owed thousands of dollars in child support, and to make matters worse, he'd lost his job and rent was due in a week. He knew he had information, so he contacted the RCMP Coquitlam Drug Section to see if he could sell any of it as an informant. After hearing the various tidbits of information he had, the RCMP's ears pricked up when Scott asked if they would be interested in illegal, unregistered firearms. When he said it was Robert Picton, the RCMP were virtually salivating. Finally, this was the opportunity they'd been waiting for, a legitimate chance to get to search the Picton farm. Court permission to execute the warrant came quickly, and a team was assembled to conduct it.

This would take the form of a raid. Timing was tight, and there was no formal plan, so the officers had to act on their feet. They were all designated different tasks to do during the raid. The team got together at a car park of a school nearby to the Picton farm. They agreed that they needed to be careful, and concentrate on what they were there for, the guns. But take care not to disturb anything else in case it might damage anything that could be used in another investigation. The implication that everyone understood was the missing women. It was now just after 8.30pm, and the search warrant had to be executed by 9. Just as the entry team made their way up the driveway, they saw a truck drive in.

They hid, and didn't say a word. The truck stopped in front of the trailer, and Robert Picton hopped out and went into the trailer, closing the door behind him. The men moved forward, and the search started with one of the officers taking a battering ram and knocking down Robert Picton's door. Police! Police! Search warrant! When they saw Robert inside, they threw him to the ground and handcuffed him, telling him he was being arrested for possession of prohibited and restricted firearms. And that's where we're going to leave it for this episode. In part 4, we'll go through the ghastly, horrifying details of what they found on the farm, and what happened after that. I really hope that that will be the last episode in this series.

If you left a review on Apple Podcasts or my Facebook page recently, I wanted to say thank you so much. Your feedback really keeps me going. For those of you who don't like the advertising in this show, did you know that you can get early copies of ad-free versions of my episodes on Patreon, starting at just $2 a month? I also offer other rewards like shoutouts on the shows, PDF scripts of each transcript, AMAs, and now I'm offering stickers and magnets. Speaking of shoutouts, I wanted to say a massive thank you to these patrons. And now for the podcast recommendations. For the rest of this picked-in series, I'm going to play some promos from some new shows that I've been enjoying. Some of them are true crime, some are not, but they are all Canadian. You're likely to find something new and cool to listen to.

The Toronto team was armed with a knife. When he refused to drop it, Constable Forcillo opened fire nine times. A bystander captured the whole thing on video. Officer Forcillo was eventually found not guilty of murder, but guilty of attempted murder. He was sentenced to six years in jail. But Forcillo was appealing, saying the judge in the original trial made a mistake when he didn't allow evidence that Samia team may have been trying to commit suicide by cop the night he died. Suicide by cop covers this case from the shooting through the trial to the appeal, which started in October and will continue in April 2018. I hope you can join me. Hey guys, this is Lisa from the Secret Life of Wedding's podcast. My friend Rebecca, who I do the podcast with, she's not here, but she's on every episode. We're both wedding photographers here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I actually started loving podcasts because of true crime. So that's how I got obsessed with them. Ironically, though, we do a comedy podcast. We tell crazy, but true wedding stories.

But just to reel you true crime fans in a little bit, I think you might like episode two where I actually talk about a wedding that I photographed where Dylan Millard was a guest. And I actually went into my archives and found photos and I talk all about them in episode two of our podcast, The Secret Life of Weddings. Hi there, I'm Mike Brown. And I'm Scott Hemanoi. We're the hosts of a podcast called Dark Poutine. And it's not a cooking show. No, it's not. We chat about actual crimes committed within our borders. We take on other creepy Canadian historical topics.

If you want to listen to a couple of goofy canucks pretending to know what they're talking about, then Dark Poutine is for you. Check us out on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn, or other podcast directories. Don't forget to be a good egg and not a bad apple. This episode of the Canadian True Crime Podcast was researched and written by Meg Zhang and me, with audio production and scoring by Eric Crosby. Thanks to Robin Water from The Trail Went Cold podcast for being the voice of Robert Picton. That's not the last you'll hear from him. Dave Wolfman was my firearms consult. Special thanks to Wednesdayla Chance, who provided valuable information and input.

And the show's disclaimer was voiced by Tyler Allen from The Minds of Madness. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you soon. .