Crime Junkie - MISSING: Women of Vancouver’s downtown Eastside

Episode Date: October 7, 2019

For two decades, women living in a ten-block stretch of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, were disappearing without a trace. This week’s episode is part one of a two-part series. It’s a story of tragedy and triumph – and of one man who terrorized the downtown Eastside for almost two decades. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/missing-women-vancouver-downtown-eastside/      

Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brett. Today's story is one I've wanted to tell on the podcast for a long time and it's one that our listeners have requested more times than I can even count. It's the story of more than 60 missing and murdered Canadian women and the one man who terrorized Vancouver, British Columbia for over 15 years. March 22, 1997 was a night Wendy Lynn Eistetter will never forget. Wendy was 30 years old, just five, six and itty bitty. She had two children that she loved very much and they lived with their father, a fisherman in North Vancouver. And I say their father rather than Wendy's husband because although they were married, Wendy no longer lived with her family.

She lived in Vancouver's downtown east side. She was unfortunately addicted to cocaine and heroin and her drug of choice was speedball, which is a mix of the two. Her drug habit cost her almost $200 a day and she had to work hard to make enough money to buy those drugs. Sometimes she shoplifted but mostly she sold what she had and that was sex. Late that night on March 22nd, she was picked up by a man in a red truck. He offered her $100 for her services and that's more than double the going rate in the downtown east side of the time. So although she wanted to stay nearby, she decided to go with him to his place, which is what he was asking and it wasn't too far so she agreed. When they arrived, the place was a mess and super dirty but whatever,

she was willing to ignore it. He paid her and that was that. Afterward, as she was getting ready to leave, she felt the guy kind of hovering around her. He took her hand and started to caress it, which is so weird to me, but start to caress her hand and in a split second, he looped handcuffs around one of her wrists. Wendy fought back immediately, punching, hitting, kicking, screaming and the guy retaliated with punches of his own. She moved backward bit by bit, remembering that she had seen a knife in the kitchen when she arrived. So somehow, and I don't even know if she remembers exactly, she got to the knife and as she grabbed it, she actually cut through her own palm but she was able to secure it and she started slashing wildly with one hand, still kicking, still screaming.

She needed to get the heck out of there and when she saw her chance, she took it. As she's screaming and cutting, she breaks free, bolts out the door with the man not far behind her and both of them, I mean, if you can imagine it, are battered, they're bleeding, their fight continues outside and while it's happening, Wendy loses control of the knife and the man plunges it into her stomach and her chest before he actually slumps to the ground, struggling to stay conscious. So, you know, she stabbed now twice, she grabs the knife back and she starts to run and at the end of his driveway, across the street, were two houses and they both had porch lights on, so she runs to the nearest house, pounding on the door, knife still in hand, screaming for help,

but there's no response. Wendy is petrified at this point, she knows she has precious little time before the guy is up and after her again, so suddenly, just then, she sees headlights coming up the road, so she crouches down on the porch, kind of like, I mean, her initial thought is she's terrified that this guy has found her again, that those are his headlights and he's going to kill her, but it's not a red truck like he had, it's a car and she sees that there's two people inside, so kind of imagine this scene from their perspective, from like the people in the car's perspective, if you can for a second. Now, the people in the car was an elderly man and his wife and Wendy decides like, okay, this isn't the guy who's trying to kill me, I'm going to go run for

help, so she runs out to the car and in front of them is a frantic woman screaming, covered in blood, guts quite literally spilling out of her stomach with a knife in hand and she's like literally trying to break the window in the car with the other. Oh my god, I cannot even imagine, like, did they stop? Because I honestly wouldn't blame them if they didn't, that's got to be terrifying. It would have been and luckily for Wendy, they did stop. Wendy tosses the knife and the couple helps her into the back seat, so they head towards the nearest hospital calling an ambulance while they're on their way. By the time she arrives at the emergency room, it's 1.45 in the morning, her injuries are absolutely life-threatening, she's been stabbed multiple times, she has a

punctured lung and she's lost nearly three liters of blood. There is no doubt Wendy needs urgent medical attention, so they wheel her into the operating room, handcuffs literally still on her wrist. But here's the interesting part, the hospital staff pretty quickly connected the dots between Wendy and this bloodied man who'd come into the same hospital that same night. His story was that he had picked up a hitchhiker and that this hitchhiker who he said was a woman had attacked him and he had multiple stab wounds to prove it. Now the stories didn't match, but you know what did match? No. Wendy's handcuffs and the handcuff key they found in the guy's pocket. Hospital staff knew something wasn't right, so they called the cops and the guy's stuff and Wendy's stuff was

bagged up and given to police when they arrived. Within a few days, the man was charged with attempted murder, assault with a weapon, and forcible confinement. And when that happened, Wendy was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief. Now at this time, you know when Wendy's story had unfolded, in over a decade prior, women had been vanishing from Vancouver's downtown east side, mothers, daughters, sisters, friends. These were vulnerable women, often who were sex workers and often who had debilitating drug addictions. If there had been a missing persons list, which there wasn't at the time, it would have included the names of nearly two dozen women who vanished without a trace from Vancouver in the 80s and the 90s. No one knew what was happening or why or how, and Wendy had no

way of knowing she escaped something that would have connected her to these other forgotten women. But what Wendy did know for sure was that this was a dangerous man that she had encountered, a violent man, and the community was safer with him behind bars. Unfortunately, her relief was short-lived because this man was released on just $2,000 bail, and within nine months, the crown had dropped all of the charges against him. Oh my god, why? How did this happen? The reason wasn't known at the time, but years later they would find out that it had to do with Wendy's reliability as a witness. And not because she was a sex worker, although I'm sure that didn't help the matters, it was actually because of her drug addiction. And the crown prosecutor, her handle

the case, said that Wendy was in no state to proceed with those charges when the time came. So he served zero time for that vicious attack on Wendy. It may not have seemed like at the time, but she was a very lucky woman because that man, that man was Robert William Picton, the British Columbia pig farmer who would come to be known as Canada's most notorious serial killer. By the time he walked away from that attempted murder charge in January 1998, he had already killed at least eight women. And before it was over, he would go on to kill another 18 more. To understand how Willie Picton was able to get away with murder, literally for two decades, you have to understand the community to which his victims belonged. The downtown east

side of Vancouver is Canada's poorest neighborhood, the Skid Row basically. And when people talk about the downtown east side, they mostly talk about this 10 block stretch around East Hastings and Main Street. Back in the 90s, crack cocaine and heroin were everywhere. Today in 2019, though, not much has changed. Vancouver remains the drug use overdose capital of Canada. And with high rates of HIV and hepatitis C infection, poverty, homelessness, prostitution, mental illness, addiction, all of it. Now the downtown east side residents were and are a very vulnerable population. And the women of the downtown east side were the most vulnerable of all. They were poor. Many of them lived alone and their drug addictions forced them into survival sex work.

Now most of the women in this story, including Wendy, who escaped Willie Picton in 1997, worked on this so called low track, which was like a stroll of dark alleyways and dirty side streets in the bleakest parts of downtown east side. There was this 2012 article from the national post, which is like a Canadian daily newspaper that estimated that 400 sex workers were working the low track stroll at the time. And other estimates put that number even higher. But the thing about the downtown east side that I can't get out of my mind is the part of town known as the kiddie stroll. I'm sorry, what? Yeah, that's where children as young as 11 are working on the streets. And I cannot even wrap my mind around it. But like, Brent,

you have an 11 year old, I can't, I can't, I cannot process that like mentally, physically, cognitively, I cannot, I can't go there. Is there anything good about this place? So actually there is there is this section in Stevie Cameron's book on the Picton case called on the farm that I want to read to you directly because I think it's the perfect description. The downtown east side is a village dysfunctional, yes, poverty stricken certainly, ugly and sad almost everywhere. But it is still a community where most people know one another. And it is still a place where love and respect and generosity and laughter are present in surprising and gentle places. I mean, I kind of love that though. Me too. And that's another

thing. Actually, there was a lot of love in the downtown east side. The women who went missing during these decades, they had families and friends, parents and children who loved them and counted on them. And they counted on one another too, which is why when some of them didn't call when they were supposed to or show up for dinner when they normally would or arrived to visit their children, alarm bells sounded immediately for their family and friends. Again and again, missing persons reports were filed. And again and again, those reports were ignored by police. The officer taking the report might change, but their responses unfortunately were always the same. Just wait a day or two. They'll come home. They're probably off somewhere

getting high. Or maybe they finally cleaned up and started a fresh life somewhere else. Maybe they wanted to disappear. And sure, in some cases, maybe they did. Their families sometimes felt that way too. But while many women were reported missing right away, for others it took months or even years before people in their lives realized maybe they weren't going to come back. Okay. But is years like really realistic? Like how can someone be missing for years without anybody ever really noticing? I don't think it's so much whether or not people notice. They noticed for sure. But these women did not live very organized or predictable lives. They didn't get up at the same time. They didn't go to the same job or take the same route every single day.

Their lives were chaotic and they were a little bit hard to track. I don't know if you remember this. This was like one of our very first episodes when we started the podcast. We talked about the West Mesa case. And I remember in that case, it was in New Mexico, obviously, but a lot of the same women who lived the same kind of lifestyle. And I remember talking about how their families would try and track their comings and goings. And it wasn't always super consistent. But I remember in that case, it was like when they miss the big holidays, the birthdays, the Christmas, like not just one, but over and over and over again. So I think they noticed that they were gone, but it might have taken a little bit longer for it to like sink in. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And to

complicate things even more for police, a lot of the women who worked on like the low track went by aliases. So a family might have reported, say, Jane Smith missing, but that's not someone known to police or even to others in the community because in the downtown East Side, you know, she could have gone as like Jackie Johnson. So, you know, there are people are thinking there's like two people missing when really it's the same one and it's not necessarily getting connected. Now, in one case that I read about in Stevie Cameron's book, the sister of a missing woman went to the downtown East Side to actually look for her sister. And she had a recent picture with her or at least the most recent one that she had. And no one recognized her. And it wasn't until

they found her ID in her apartment that they realized who she was talking about. Because the woman she was looking for by now was almost unrecognizable because, you know, daily drug use, sickness, not enough food can totally change people's appearances and sometimes like, like dramatically. Yeah. Now, I'm not saying any of this is an excuse for what happened to these women or how long it took to track them down. What I'm saying is nothing about this case was easy, but no one even knew how complicated it would soon be. Here's what we know about Robert William Picton or Willie as he prefers to be called. He was raised on a farm in Port Coquitlam. I'm getting used to these Canadian towns.

And this is in British Columbia, just outside of Vancouver where his family raised pigs and they raised a lot of pigs and also some dairy cows whose milk they sold to neighbors. Now, on this farm, life and death were a daily occurrence. Babies were born, animals slaughtered, people were fed. Yeah. Having grown up on a farm, it's something that you kind of get used to after a while. Right. Now, his mother was in charge of the whole operation and she ran a tight ship. His father was a butcher and the kids, especially the boys, were expected to work, mucking out pig pens and taking care of the cows before and after school. Sounds pretty familiar. I used to make about five to feed the calves and was back out right

before dinner every single night doing the exact same thing. Yeah. Even on the weekends, when I used to say the night, you would get up at super early while I slept in to go 10 to the animals. Yeah. Totally. I mean, I would go back to bed, but it was definitely something that was a huge part of our life and was definitely expected of us. Yeah. Yeah. As the son's daughters of farmers, I don't know a single one who isn't expected to work on the farm. Now, Willie had a sister named Linda who had married and moved out of Port Coquitlam and had a successful real estate business. He also had a brother, David, who was tangled up with the local health angels chapters and basically has like this long like criminal history himself.

Aside from a few years training as a butcher, Willie didn't have any kind of formal education. He dropped out of school at just 14 years old and never went back. He earned a steady living running his own pig butchering business along with another guy named Pat Casanova. Casanova, are you serious? Yeah. I could not make this stuff up if I wanted to. Now, both of the Picton brothers were known to police and to the women on the downtown East side. Together, they ran several businesses from the farm and employed several people. When Willie's mother died, he and his siblings parceled off pieces of the family's sprawling farmland and sold them to the city and to local developers. Port Coquitlam was close enough to Vancouver to make it like a

doable commute for people who worked there, but it was totally more affordable than the city. So the money that they made was divided between Willie, David, and Linda. And this move made the three really wealthy, like millionaire wealthy. Oh, wow. But money didn't change Willie. He lived a very simple life in this ramshackle trailer on the farm property. So if he wasn't driving along the low track looking for sex, he was at the bars in the downtown East side. And there, he would basically hold court with these local women listening to their stories, buying them drinks. If he saw someone he liked, he'd peel tens and 20s off rolls of bills that he kept in his pocket and send them out to buy drugs. And never for him. Here's the thing,

he didn't drink, he didn't use drugs, but he would constantly provide those things to women. And sometimes he would talk them into going back with him to his farm to keep the party going. Because of this, you know, generosity is how they saw it, women flocked to Willie. And not because he was handsome or smart or even treated them well. In fact, one of the things you hear over and over and over in this story was about how badly he smelled from life on a pig farm. So women were attracted to him because of that. They were attracted to him because they were broke and sick and wanted to believe that this was a kind man, a good man who wanted to do something nice for them. One woman who encountered Willie on the downtown East side

described him as someone who was comfortable picking up a sex worker who would pay them quickly. They even described him as a nice guy. And if anyone asked what he did for a living, he'd say, I'm a pig man. That's all I am. Just a pig man. So if you're at all familiar with the picked in case, you'll know that there is a lot to say about the police and their investigation. Like I could fill an entire episode with this, but I'm going to try and condense it for you. But before I do, there's something I want to mention. And that's hindsight bias. It's easy for me to sit here and tell you a story about the times the police let Willie Picton get away about how a monster plucked literally dozens of women off the streets and

killed them right under their noses. And it would be easy to do that because it's exactly what happened. But the truth is more nuanced. The VPD's lawyer said it best in their opening remarks at the public inquiry in this case in 2012. Now this isn't a transcript. I have basically condensed it. So if you want to read the full thing, we'll link to it in our blog post. But basically what was said was when all of us look back on the investigation now, we can't help but view the events through the prism of knowledge that we've since obtained. And there was in fact a serial killer at work and that killer was indeed Picton. The hindsight that we now have is similar to looking down at the landscape from above at a bird's eye view.

Today, we see a clear path connecting the downtown east side to the horrors of the pig farm. But at the time, the investigators stood on a flat landscape with hundreds of possibilities and few landmarks to guide them. Yeah. And I feel like we haven't really talked about hindsight bias much on this podcast, but it's super, super relevant because almost all the stories we tell, we're telling from the future. You know, it's not the cases are closed. It's all in the past. You know, we've already seen the investigation, the trial, the sentencing. And honestly, that condensement that you just said, it sums it up perfectly in my mind. It really does give us a bird's eye view to have this hindsight. Totally. And I think it's important to keep this in mind as we get into this

story because yes, it's heartbreaking. And yes, a really bad man slipped away too many times. But I don't think it was for a lack of good people doing their best work. And one of those good people I think was Kim Rosmo. Kim was a seasoned detective and a criminal profiler with a Vancouver PD. He was the only police officer in Canada at the time with a PhD in criminology. And he's basically the brains behind what we call geographic profiling, which is something I think we know well today. But for anyone who doesn't quite know what that is, do you want to kind of explain that? Sure. It's when investigators look for patterns and information based on where the crimes are committed. I mean, it's human nature for someone to want to stick to where they are

familiar with, like the area that they know really well. And it's the same thing for criminals. Geographic profiling pretty much like helps investigators narrow down where the perpetrator might live based on the location of where they're finding crimes occurring. Exactly. So it's a type of criminal profiling. So in the late nineties, Kim was in high demand speaking at conferences and teaching police forces around the world about what geographic profiling was. So he was like a star back then. But at home in Vancouver, there was really no love for him. Now, there isn't much explanation for this other than maybe like the old brass boys club, like office, politicky nonsense, like the people in charge, they just straight up didn't

like him. And even though there was an obvious pattern of disappearances in the downtown East Side during this time, and a resource in Kim Rosemont that they could call upon to maybe help solve this, no one did. Criminal profiling then was still pretty new and geographic profiling even more so. They called it back then voodoo, and mostly the VPD refused to believe that anything other than good old fashioned police work was going to solve this case if there was even a case to be solved here. Women were missing, sure, but they said, you know, there's no way those disappearances could be connected. And for sure, nothing even remotely close to a serial killer in the downtown East Side. And this attitude continued for years. The VPD had only two officers

assigned to investigate what was at this point, 26 missing person cases. So of course, they looked at all those cases and thought, you know who we need? Kim Rosemont, the geographic profiling unit. But not so much like the mad sarcasm there. In September 1998, public pressure was mounting, and the Vancouver PD finally established its first team dedicated to finding these missing women. They got to work figuring out who exactly was missing and when they were last seen. They also called hospitals and checked death records and followed up with friends and families and others who knew these women. And by the end of the year, they had actually taken a few names off of the list. Some were actually alive and well. Others confirmed dead from overdoses and others deceased

from different causes. But here's the thing, for every name that the team knocked off the list, two more were added. And by the end of the year, 11 more women had gone missing. The year was not a total bust for police though. They did get one important tip in 1998, straight from Willie Picton's farm. Bill Hiscox was an employee of the Picton brothers who spent time on the farm. He had suspicions about Willie Picton and thought maybe he might have something to do with the women who were going missing from the downtown east side. He knew Willie spent a lot of time on the low track. He knew that he hired sex workers and he knew that girls were disappearing. But most importantly, he knew that he'd seen women's clothes, purses and IDs in Willie's trailer.

So he told police Willie had a ton of space on the farm and that it would be easy to hide things. And that Willie had a lot of big equipment, like a wood chipper. And he said it would be super easy for him to destroy things. And his feelings about Willie were only emphasized when that attack on Wendy happened. He could not shake his bad feelings that he had about Willie. Now most of what Bill shared with the police during that call came second hand from a woman named Lisa Yelds, who was a friend of Willie Picton from childhood. So he's kind of like passing all of this off second hand. Now police followed it up, but Lisa wasn't interested in speaking to them. So this tip was great, but ultimately it was filed away because without a statement from Lisa

to corroborate the story, it just wasn't enough. Yeah, and it's basically hearsay. Right. But by early 1999, Bill wasn't the only one suspicious of Willie Picton. Finally, the pieces of the puzzle started coming together. The charge two years before for attempted murder on Wendy, the tip from Bill. For some reason in 1999, it was enough. Now they said, you know, we've got all this information. He does look fishy. It's time to start watching him. So the VPD detectives worked with the local RCMP to start surveillance on Willie. They were instructed to stop him if they saw him pick up anyone. So they're looking for something, anything that would get them a search warrant for Willie's property. So for two weeks, they followed him in unmarked cars,

and they got nothing. Well, here's the thing, the surveillance effort on him got nothing. But now that police had their sights trained on Willie, something else occurred to them. So remember when I said that police took Willie's clothes and boots from the hospital the night that he was admitted for attacking Wendy? Yeah, that's how they found the handcuff key, right? Right. So they also had gotten his DNA. And they thought, you know, if this was a serial killer, the serial killer, then surely his DNA would match the DNA that they found on three of the murder victims, all of them again, downtown East Side sex workers that had been killed in and around 1995. And this group of women was actually just a few of the missing women whose bodies had

actually shown up. So this could be their big break. They sent Willie's DNA off to a lab to get tested against what they recovered from those bodies. But it didn't match. What? And looking at this, they're saying Willie isn't our guy. Now the idea that two serial killers were hunting sex workers on the downtown East Side was more than anyone could process at the time. Police wouldn't even admit to one, and they definitely weren't going to entertain the idea of two. So they decided to stop the surveillance like his DNA didn't match. There's no way there could be two serial killers. So we're going to stop watching Willie. But by now the rumors were already swirling around Willie Picton and they did not stop. In July 1999, America's most wanted

did a piece on Vancouver's missing women and it garnished tons of interest and shown a spotlight on the case and the local police. It was enough to spur government and police to put up a hundred thousand dollar reward for information about the unsolved cases. But even as they made that announcement, they didn't really believe it would go anywhere. They were still convinced that the woman had made themselves scarce, moved away, changed their names, and eventually they would turn up at some point in another town under another name safe and sound. And no one, families, advocates, reporters, even their own colleagues could change their mind. So to give you a little bit of history, women had started going missing from the downtown East Side as early as the late

70s. Sometimes a body would be found in the woods or in a dumpster. Mostly though, they just disappeared without a trace. And while we can't rule out Willie Picton for any of the unsolved deaths or disappearances in downtown East Side in like the 80s and 90s, most people speculate that his activity began in the mid 90s, right around the time that Willie and his brother opened Piggy's Palace. Now Piggy's Palace, good time society, that's the full name, was actually a registered charity. A place community groups or politicians could basically book out the space for like a super cheap price and all the proceeds went back to charity. This seems completely different than the picture you painted for me of the Picton brothers, like a charity. So charity is a loose

term with the Picton brothers. What the Piggy Palace really was was a nightclub and a big one, full of all of Dave's friends and associates, like the Hell's Angels. And I'm sure Willie's friends and associates would have been there too, but he didn't really have a ton. So women from the downtown East Side ended up at Piggy's Palace too, and it was a place that they could get cheap drinks and easy drugs. So it kind of became like a playhouse for the brothers. Yeah. And you know, they had their like core group of people who would come, but beside those people who would hang out there, no one else liked this place. The city actually took the Picton brothers to court to try to get it shut down, but they lost. And it remained open for years, drawing in crowds of

rough men and vulnerable women. And some of those women never left. In January 2000, Piggy's Palace was finally shut down and the society lost its charitable status, which is not a great start to the year for Willie Picton, who loved Piggy's Palace and loved being part of that action and that, I guess, community he thought he created. So to make matters worse for Willie, police had their eyes on him all the time. And while they're surveilling him, while they're like kind of watching all of his actions, fewer women were disappearing. So by October of that year, there had only been one missing person's report. And the numbers had been trending downward for a while. So there was 13 missing in 1997, 11 in 1998, five in 1999. And again, all this while they're like keeping

eyes on him, he's been a suspect, tips are coming in, like, so police are looking at him. And now, in 2000, just one missing person. So here's the part that like kills me. Vancouver PD were quick to determine that, oh, the tear is over. The problem, whatever it was, is solved. But instead of realizing that maybe less women were going missing because of what they were doing, and who they were watching, they assumed that the problem was just gone. So they dismantled their dedicated team and sent them back to work on other cases. But not everyone agreed with this assessment, including the RCMP. So the RCMP began to assemble their own team and invited some of the VPD officers who'd been working the case to join them. The very first thing the new task force did was admit

something that VPD had refused to acknowledge all of this time. That there's a serial killer on the loose. Yeah, exactly. And admitting this was a critical piece, because it meant that they had somewhere to focus their energy. Instead of looking in a million different directions for dozens of missing women, they were now looking for one suspect. They asked the public for help with this. Tell us anything you know, and we'll take it. Now this task force work was just getting off the ground when Christmas rolled around in the year 2000. And with it, another missing woman. By April 1, 2001, just three months into the new year, four more disappeared. Any tiny glimmer of hope that the terror was behind them was gone for this task force. And they added more members,

now up to 10 people. And those 10 officers were busy sifting through more than 1300 tips that had come in from the public about the potential suspects. The pool of suspects was massive. And kind of like we said about hindsight, how the officers were standing on that flat landscape with hundreds of options, like that's a good description. So the officers started dividing their suspect pool into three categories. So they basically had priority one suspect, which was someone connected to the downtown East side. They either lived there or spent time there. They were a dangerous sex offender who lived in the neighborhood. So like that would put them on the list. And they would also put anyone in a priority one who had been charged with murder, attempted murder, or aggravated

assault of a sex worker. Now a priority two suspect was very similar. Someone who was charged with an offense against a sex worker or with a history of violence. The difference was that these suspects would have lived outside of Vancouver. And priority three suspects were ones who didn't fit into one of the first two categories, but who needed to be looked at anyway, people who were maybe known to the downtown East side or anyone with a charge against them that maybe could be related. Well, Willie Picton checked all the boxes right away. A charge for an attempted murder against a sex worker. Check hanging around the downtown East side. Check super creepy isolated farm property just outside of town. Check, check, check. And you know, when they're like creating this pile,

they come across that tip from Bill. And with the combination of all this, like being a priority one suspect, finding this tip from Bill, he goes back to the top of the list. In the summer of 2001, the task force had their sites trained on finding a serial killer. And importantly, local media really started to put the pressure on. They were running stories every day profiles on the missing women exposés about infighting among the Vancouver PD. And those stories served as a daily reminder to the task force and to the rest of the province that someone was out there roaming. And he was far from calling it quits. Now, if the details of this case sound familiar, you're not alone. This story is eerily similar to another serial murderer we've covered on our show. And another

long investigation taking place just a few hundred miles away in Seattle. If you remember, Gary Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer, is responsible for the deaths of 45 women, most of whom were sex workers throughout the 80s and the 90s. And just like in the Picton case, the police had Ridgway pegged for these crimes as far back as like 1983. But there was never enough evidence to charge him, let alone convict. So it wasn't until 2001, after decades of advances in DNA technology that police were able to finally get their guy. So the Vancouver task force knew that there would be something to learn from their colleagues in Seattle. They headed down to talk to the investigators who worked the Green River case. And their advice was clear, you have to embed

yourself in the victim's community, get to know the women, earn their trust, and find out who the bad guys are. You need to get ahead of your killer. More officers joined the ranks. And on October 15, 2001, after 20 years of denial, the Vancouver PD joined the RCMP to announce together that they were officially treating the disappearances of what was now 46 women as murders. Now imagine this from the point of view of the women in the downtown East Side, their families and friends, but the support workers, the advocates, finally, finally police were taking this seriously. And finally, they were admitting that there was a predator on the streets of Vancouver. And finally, we might start getting some answers. Four days later, another woman disappeared.

And months after that, another. Police might have finally had all hands on deck, but it wasn't slowing the sky down. By the end of December, the year's tally was seven missing women. Seven right under their noses when they knew what they should be looking for. It wasn't until early 2002, 17 years after the madness began, that police would finally get the tip that would blow the case of Vancouver's missing women wide open. A man named Scott Chubb, just like Bill Hiscox, was one of those guys who'd spent time on the Picton Farm, working for one or both of the Picton brothers. He called police hoping that they might be willing to trade information for money. He was dead broke at the time. He said he had tips on drug traffickers and grow operations.

So the cops were like interested. I mean, in granted, you know, he's not calling this like specific RCMP tip line. He's just calling the police in general. Right. So then he asks, what about illegal guns? Do you guys care about those? And, you know, the police are like, you know, of course, yes. So Scott Chubb said he'd seen guns out on a pig farm in Port Coquitlam. Handguns, automatic weapons, bullets, which not abnormal here in the US, where we don't have a ton of gun laws. But all of this is restricted under the Canadian criminal code. So this guy, he says, Willie, he has all of these things in his trailer and bingo, that's all police needed to hear to be able to search this guy's place. Now, when police do a quick search of Willie

Picton's name, that's when all of a sudden the charges for attempted murder show up from 1997 and the surveillance order from 1999 and his status as a person of interest in the ongoing investigation of Vancouver's missing and murdered women. So this officer who is just looking at him for like guns and maybe a girl operation or whatever, alerts the task force. Now, when the task force hears, of course, like the judge grants them a warrant based on the weapons allegations to search the entire Picton farm. And on February 5th, 2002, they assembled a team to execute that warrant. They were finally going in. The team arrived at the Picton farm parked near the entrance and five officers crept toward Willie's place. They'd just seen him jump out of his truck

into the trailer. The lights were on and wasting no time. They busted down the door, guns drawn, and they entered the trailer and met Willie Picton in the middle of the room. He was arrested without fanfare under suspicion of possession of illegal firearms. They led him out to a police car in handcuffs where an officer waited to take him back to the RCMP. Before they left the driveway that night, they asked, is there anything we should know about in your house? And of course, like they're probably meaning guns, traps, dangerous, deadly stuff. Right. And Willie tells them, you know, there's a 22 caliber rifle in the barn, but he did not tell them what else that they would find. Not that a warning could have even prepared police for what whores awaited them on Willie's

pig farm. And unfortunately, you won't know what that is until next week's episode. If any of you want to see pictures from this episode or a list of our sources, you can visit our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. And I know, Ashley, you left everyone on a little bit of a cliffhanger, but good news, fan club members, part two of the story is out right now. Yep. And for the rest of you, we'll be back next Monday with part two of this episode. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?