Crime Junkie - SERIAL KILLER: Robert William Pickton

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

In this week's episode, we talk more about the man responsible for making Canadian women disappear for years and what horrors were found on his pig farm.  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/serial-killer-robert-william-pickton/  

Hi crime junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers and I'm Brett and today's story is part two of our two-part series on Robert Pickton and the missing women of Vancouver's downtown East Side So if you haven't listened to last week's episode Definitely head back to part one missing the women of Vancouver's downtown East Side That's where our story starts and you need that backstory to really know what's going on today Because today we're gonna pick right back up where we left off last week Police had just executed a search warrant on Willie Pickton's farm looking for illegal firearms But what they found was so much more, so are you ready Brett? Of course, let's do this

So at this point in our story Willie Pickton is back at the station He's been taken into custody and several other officers were back on his farm gathering information Now this is a sprawling pig farm just a few miles outside Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada The very first thing they noticed was a giant horse head that was mounted on the wall What? I knew you would like react to this. So you're a big horse person I guess this was like Willie's beloved childhood horse named Goldie Which so you know I had one of those and his head is not on my wall Okay, so that's my thing like I think he did it out of like love, but I think it's super strange

It's yeah, it's like people always like joke with me like when Charlie passes which he never will like are you gonna get him stuffed? And I'm like do I want like a reminder every day that he's not around it's no never it seems super super strange So yeah, again, this means nothing. It's just a very strange thing. That's the first thing they see So the second thing that they noticed was the mess. There's paper dirt garbage junk Just clothes everywhere and remember they knew from Scott Chubb that the illegal guns that they were looking for were likely Stored in Willie's laundry room. So they had their first and bingo They found exactly what they were looking for This was a big moment for police because it meant that their warrant for illegal firearms was good

And that they could continue the search of the rest of the place now next up was Willie's bedroom It took them almost no time to find some disturbing things there were several pieces of women's jewelry a purse and Pictures and in a nightstand they found a flare gun that had been adapted to take 12 gauge shells Now they also found restraints a pair of handcuffs covered with red fake fur and several large cable ties and two dildos Next to the nightstand was a box that contained a collection of kitchen knives of all different sizes Yeah, that's a totally normal thing to keep on your nightstand, right? Yeah, don't we all have kitchen knives right by our bed So in his room, there's also this TV stand and inside that they found videos books and papers

Including photo ID and a birth certificate for someone named Heather Bottomly now this was one of Vancouver's missing women Now something interesting that they had found that police wanted to get a closer look at was the gun that they found in his laundry room It was a 22 caliber revolver But it was wrapped in plastic and something about it looked really Weird and it didn't take long to figure out exactly why a curved plastic dildo Was pulled down over the barrel and the gun was loaded with five bullets and one spent casing

Oh my god Yeah, it was obvious that Willie had used this gun, but for what on who it Wouldn't take long for them to find out the answers to all of this Under Willie's chair in his room was a ski bat with a pair of women's running shoes and an orange inhaler Which was like asthma medication and the prescription was right on it It was for a woman named Serena a bot's way a woman who hadn't been seen in some time Serena was a 29 year old whose foster mother described her as sweet and bubbly but also very disturbed Her life had not been easy at all. She was born with fetal alcohol syndrome

She suffered abuse as a toddler before finding a home with two loving foster parents at age four now She lived with them until she was 17, but that's what her behavior became too much for them to handle She ended up going into a group home and eventually ended up on the downtown east side She was last seen on August 1st 2001 So we're getting more and more like items from these missing women kind of like popping up in his house But again, this search wasn't for that initially this search was just for the guns Now before the search team wrapped up in Willie's trailer an officer radioed from one of the other buildings in the Picton property He radioed from the slaughterhouse now in there

There were no lights on just the lights from police's flashlights, which must have made the next site even creepier Inside the building was a large hook Suspended above a table on the floor beneath were two skinned pigs and several buckets of Remains, I mean, yeah, that's super creepy, but this is a pig farm, right? And it's a butcher house This is yeah kind of to be expected. No, it definitely wasn't unexpected But I think in the context of like this search It's definitely creepy and and just had like everyone's hair standing up on the back of their neck Okay, so police keep moving on with their search and at every turn they're finding more and more stuff

purses shoes Papers with names on them and one name stood out Lynn Ellingson and they knew that name. So she was one of the missing women Well, she wasn't actually but her name was familiar for another reason Lynn was actually a friend of Willie's She had stayed with him in his trailer for a while and had even worked on the farm Police knew that Lynn was alive and well. In fact, they'd actually spoken to her before about Willie I don't know if you remember from episode one last week, but Bill Hisscox. I don't know if you remember him But talking to police he was the first person to call in a tip about Willie

He said there was women's clothes and things in the trailer around the farm and that something wasn't right and most of Bill's information and his suspicions for that matter had come from Lynn this same woman So based on what they'd found in their initial search on the farm officers knew that they had enough evidence now to charge Willie For firearms possession. It wasn't however enough to keep him behind bars Even with all of that other stuff that they were turning up related to the missing women They had to let him out on bail. He was released at 1 p.m. On February 6th, just one day after police stormed Willie's trailer and took him into custody By this time the media had gotten wind of the search and about what officers were finding on the farm

And I want to share a short passage from Stevie Cameron's book on the farm that really captures what was happening at the time It says across Canada around the world people learned that Willie picked in might be the most prolific serial killer in North American history They learned that the Vancouver police had dismissed talks of serial killer years before and had fired their own expert on the subject a star Officer named Kim Rosmo whose work was valued in many countries. Just not Vancouver Kim is the geographical profiler, right? He was like right traveling everywhere and doing amazing work. Yeah, that's him And okay, there's honestly enough content to fill like an entire other episode about all of like the infighting and nonsense Happening in the Vancouver PD at this time and if you're interested, I really do recommend Stevie Cameron's book

It goes into all of that stuff in detail what happened when and how it really all affected the case It's a big part of the story of how picked in was able to do what he did over such a long period of time And it's also one of the driving forces behind the public inquiry that was held in 2012 so based on everything that they found in this initial search Police were able to get a second warrant and this second woman is much broader and was directly related to the missing women's investigation so You know for like our true crime newbies the way it works like just because you get a search warrant doesn't mean you can Actually look at everything like you have to be very specific to say like I'm gonna look at the car or the bedroom or right

And you can only look and collect items in those specific areas So once they were finding other things that were connecting Willie to these missing women That's when they were able to go back and get a much broader search warrant to say okay Like we just need to go through this place with a fine tooth comb because clearly there's some stuff to be found here Oh, and it took almost no time at all to uncover even more items connecting Willie to the missing women clothing Shoes belts purses jewelry the works and that was unsettling enough But even more unsettling was the scene police uncovered in a motor home on the property When they walked in there was literally

blood Everywhere on the mattress the floor the walls What they knew even without any bodies that people had died there They soon realized that Willie's trailer which was his main residence and the nearby buildings including the motor home and the slaughterhouse Were only the beginning their crime scene would have to be the entire Farm property all 14 acres and it remains to this day the largest crime scene in Canadian history Police were only two weeks into their search when the first DNA hit came back All of that blood in Willie's trailer. It belonged to one woman named Mona Wilson

Mona was a 26 year old Aboriginal woman from Alberta and Well known on the downtown East side where she lived for almost a decade When Mona was just six years old social workers found her hiding in the hallway of her apartment building She had been beaten and was terrified. So her entire childhood from then on was marked with trauma Sexual abuse and she never fully recovered Mona was in the care of a foster family that she loved and who loved her for several years But by the time she was a teenager her behavior had become just far too difficult for them to manage So she bounced around for a while and then ended up in Vancouver living alone with help from like social assistance

By the time she was like just 16. Oh my god And before long she ended up addicted to heroin and turning to the sex trade to make enough money to survive So now finding Mona's blood and Serena's prescription inhaler Was all the convincing that police needed 51-year-old Robert William Picton was charged with two counts of first-degree murder on February 21st 2002 and remained under investigation for the murder not just of those two but of 48 more women. Oh my god Willie was his usual filthy self when he arrived in booking. They took his clothes and gave him prison-issued sweatpants

They tried to get him to shower, but he actually refused He was disgusting and I feel terrible for his cellmate So police booked Willie on that first day, but they didn't begin their real interrogation until the next day And I read transcripts of most of those interviews and honestly I don't know how they did it Willie says like the same few phrases over and over just kind of repeating himself It's kind of nonsensical and he talks a lot during what ended up being like 11 hours of interrogation But he really says nothing to help police understand what happened on the farm But later that same night he would finally open up and give answers to someone

He would tell this person the answers to the questions everyone wanted to know how many victims and where were their bodies? When Willie arrived at the police station after his arrest he wasn't alone in the cell He was sharing a space with another inmate a big intimidating guy who was in there for a warrant for murder Now he took a shine to Willie right away and Willie to him So they got chatty they talked a bit their first day, but it was really the second day late in the evening After those 11 hours of interrogation that the floodgates opened Willie was feeling really chatty and as they talked police just down the hallway of course are listening intently The first thing Willie revealed knocked everyone off of their feet

He hadn't just killed Mona and Serena not even close He said he killed 49 women and in fact he said he was planning to make it an even 50 But he got sloppy and that's how he got caught. Oh my god there was a lot of speculation about what Willie had done with the bodies of his victims and Most people assumed that he fed them to his pigs and honestly, that's like kind of what I knew about this case Before you know really diving into it. Like, you know this pig farmer I had always thought a hundred percent of what happened to them was they had gone to the pigs But that assumption would be wrong

Police listened while Willie told his cellmate that he'd dispose of the bodies off of the farm property At a place that anyone living on a working farm would be familiar with it was a rendering plant and Brett Do you know what a rendering plan is? Um, yeah, so anybody who raises any sort of like meat livestock would use a rendering plant as kind of their like waste disposal it converts Whatever's left of like a livestock carcass Into something like that's useful like a fat or an oil fertilizer stuff like that So like I guess what I don't understand is like how do the animal carcasses get to the rendering plant?

Um, it it kind of depends on the size of like the farm Sometimes someone from the plant will come in and pick stuff up Sometimes there's someone who goes from the farm to the rendering plant to drop stuff off And are they like actually picking up like full animal carcasses? Are they in something? Because I'm trying to figure out how he got the bodies there, right? Yeah, so again, it kind of depends on the size of the operation Sometimes it's in really big barrels like we see a lot of times in like crime stories Sometimes it's in like little buckets. It really depends on how much waste you have Okay, so so that makes sense. So this is where he is

Saying he got rid of the bodies not technically on his farm It's off his farm and actually later during picked in trial workers from the rendering plant actually Testified that they picked up drums of pig guts from his farm every single week And that the contents of those drums sometimes included chunks of burned or black meat Which was super unusual and not what you would normally see from a pig farm. Yeah, and at a rendering plant you actually can't use that product Oh, interesting. I didn't know that So the reason he was able to dispose of human remains this way is that regular customers Like Willie were free to dump waste at the plant on their own

So they could do it without any supervision. So it's not like someone was like checking He was such a regular there that he could just come with his barrels or whatever He was bringing them in and just dump virtually at any hour as well. So he could go completely unnoticed Now there's obviously much tighter security and oversight at the plant now But back then it was a perfect dump site for a serial killer who also happened to be a pig farmer So this conversation that Willie was having with his cellmate changed everything It was recorded of course and if you're interested we'll actually link out to the video on our blog Like if you really want to watch this guy eat a huge plate of baked beans while he's talking about killing 49 women and dropping their

Bodies off at a rendering plant like that's on you, but it's there. It sounds like a fun night, right? So Willie didn't know it, but here's the interesting thing the guy in his cell those first few nights Wasn't an actual inmate at all because when I first heard about this I was like, oh, this is gonna be a jailhouse informant. This is some kind of snitch It might not even like stand up in court right this guy was no snitch He was an undercover cop a cell plant whose job was to make Willie comfortable and get him talking and he Delivered meanwhile back at the farm the evidence kept coming DNA evidence linking back to Serena Whose murder Willie had been charged with as well as another woman named Andre Jonesbury

Andre was 22 years old when she went missing from the downtown Eastside in June of 2001 and like so many of the victims in this story Her young life was one that was marked with alcoholism mental illness and physical abuse Mm-hmm. She left her home of Victoria British Columbia for the downtown Eastside and about her mid teens following a boyfriend there He was a drug dealer and before long Andre was selling her body to finance a heroin addiction Now just because they had her DNA they didn't have enough to charge Willie with her murder But they're sure they would find what they needed in time again I think it's like, you know, I often think of a search of a place as like this like one or two-day operation But 14 acres is taking them

Weeks and likely even months to really like find everything. Yeah, definitely So by the end of March 2002 less than two months since police first entered Willie's trailer Willie was charged with first-degree murder of three women Jacqueline McDonald who was last seen January 1999 her blood was actually found on a pair of handcuffs in Willie's bedroom He was also charged with the murder of Diane Rock who was a mother of five last seen in October of 2001 They found her blood and clumps of her hair in the motorhome and the third victim was Heather Bottomley whose ID and birth certificate were found in Willie's trailer during the original search for those firearms But now when they did their more thorough search, they also had her blood on Willie's mattress

So these three new charges now put the charges at five And there are still dozens of women on the missing persons list that police were more competent than ever That there was some kind of connection to and they were right and their next discovery would be the most shocking of all There were a dozen Freezers on the picked-in properties several left over from when Willie's parents ran a much larger farming operation decades ago and The team that was searching their next on their list was to look inside those freezers So I think what officers were probably expecting to find I mean as as dark as they know this guy is is they're expecting to find like pork packaged meat

But nothing could prepare them not even all the whores they've seen already for what they actually found Inside a freezer in Willie's slaughterhouse were two Five-gallon buckets even frozen solid the contents of those buckets were unmistakable Oh my god, they were two human heads Both that had been cut in half vertically what and to make it worse inside each skull Were two hands and beneath those two feet. Oh my god The first skull belonged to Andre the second Serena and it was found both women had died from gunshot wounds and this was obviously a shocking sight

Yeah, but it was also a familiar sight the forensic expert examining the remains remembered seeing this before Half a woman's skull had also been found in February 1995 and this one had also been vertically cut Now this was found in Mission, British Columbia about 40 minutes from the Picton farm and at the time police had tried to find the woman's identity But were never successful. This just became a cold case of basically a Jane Doe Mm-hmm that skull like the ones that police had uncovered in buckets on the farm was cut using a reciprocating saw which I looked up online. It's like this very small handheld electric thing

So police knew this was no coincidence. This was the work of the same killer It was the work of Robert William Picton Now the next stage of the search on the farm was meticulous work sifting through dirt and muck With machines and by hand looking for any tiny piece of bone or tissue or really anything that didn't belong there And they weren't just searching across those 14 acres, but also down They were digging up to 30 feet into the ground looking for any kind of forensic evidence any kind of remains They brought in a forensic anthropology team one of Canada's leading experts several consultants and like dozens and dozens of Students who went through every square inch of dirt on the farm looking for human remains

It was thorough. It was painstaking But the team was able to identify more victims one of which was Marnie Frey She was identified by a fragment of jaw that had a couple of teeth still intact Marnie grew up in a little quiet British Columbia town called Campbell River and her childhood was actually a really good one You could even call it idyllic when she was just 14 years old though She got tangled up with a group of boys that were involved in a gang and they introduced her to drugs It was basically a steady spiral after that her parents who were still very much involved in her life at the time Tried time and time again to write the ship for their daughter, but she was just too deep into her addiction

Oh, and in her final months I mean her entire life basically revolved around her addiction and survival sex work She was officially reported missing in early September of 1997 another victim that was identified through this work was Brenda Wolfe and again She was identified because they found a jawbone with some teeth and one of the teeth had a filling Brenda was an indigenous woman originally from Alberta who'd become a mainstay in the downtown east side She was a bartender and a bouncer at a local bar But she also used sex work to finance her drug addiction like many of these women did and Brenda was last seen sometime in late February

1999 so this is just two examples of some of the women that were found and again not found because they found all of them or even an Entire skull but pieces of them and those detailed searches through the dirt an inch by inch on the property Revealed many more women had died on the farm and the victim list would go on to include Wendy Crawford Heather Hallmark, Patricia Johnson, Sarah DeVries, Jennifer Firminger, Heather Chinook, Tanya Holick and Sherry Irving Police were also able to officially connect a Jane Doe to this case and that Jane Doe was that half skull that was found in a swamp in that other town And they were actually able to do that not just because of how similar it was But because they also found a small piece of rib bone buried in the mud that matched

And finally they were able to connect another victim Georgina Pappin whose bones were buried on the farm and whose DNA was found in several of willies buildings Georgina was 35 and a mother of seven children including twins who were born just months before her disappearance And you know, she was smart and tough and connected. She knew her way around the streets as a child She was shuffled from foster home to foster home in and out of institutions I mean again like all of these women so many of these women She didn't have an easy life and like her mother before her Georgina struggled with addiction

And Georgina Pappin was one of the many indigenous women who were a victim in this case So before I move on from talking about the physical evidence in the search of willies property There's one more thing that I need to tell you Do you remember in last week's episode the story about wendy lin and it's how we started the whole story So you might remember that police took willies clothes and rubber boots that night when he rolled into the emergency room for treatment for his stab wounds Yeah, well, they decided to go back to those items seven years later to test those for dna against the missing women And wouldn't you know it? They were actually able to connect picked in with two more missing women because of that

DNA found on those items from the emergency room connected him to Cara Ellis and Andrea Borehaven So the crime scene and the physical evidence as huge as it all was was just a fraction of the work police were doing at the time Tips and leads and stories were pouring in they were coming in by phone They were coming to the officers who were stationed at the entrance of the farm And police outside those gates had their own investigation to do too They needed to talk to the people who knew willie picked in and who knew him best And scott chubb was one of those for example and this was the guy who had the tip originally about the illegal firearms That had gotten them on to willies property to begin with right and scott was willing to talk

And when he talked he had a lot to say like how willie told him a good way to kill someone Was to inject them with windshield washer fluid because they would die within 10 minutes And he said no one would notice the needle mark on like their full body So he also told them how willie offered to pay scott a thousand dollars to kill lin because she was blackmailing him Or at least that's what he said And in the spring of 1999 lin was 29 years old. She's pretty outgoing Fun, but she was also doing drugs every day and struggling to make ends meet And so there was actually a time again. She didn't just like kind of come up with all of this stuff

There was a time where she lived with willie in his trailer And basically their arrangement was she would keep it clean and answer phone calls that came in for the business in exchange For like a place to live willie didn't pay her as an employee But he did give her enough cash to cover her drugs alcohol Groceries cigarettes whatever and then and then she got to live there And while she was grateful for the support and really reliant on it She was also super suspicious and at one point she approached willies brother dav to ask about a rumor that she'd heard And not just any rumor. She heard that willie had arms and legs in a freezer

so like I don't know where she's hearing this from but like this stuff is going around town And it's amazing to me how this happens in so many cases where they're like these rumors around town That like clearly everyone's talking about. Yeah, but somehow don't make it to police Or maybe they seem so outrageous that they don't make it to police Well, and like the rumor that your friend might have body parts on his property is one heck of a rumor to just ignore Right. Well, and I think maybe part of the reason that it didn't go anywhere is So when she brought it up to dav his brother

He reacted violently like he backed her into a wall slapped her across the face Oh, wow And yeah, she like bolted and he followed after her and they literally got into this like huge fight She's fighting back. She tossed like a vase at him So I think maybe people could have been afraid to say something, you know what I mean? And that's not her only story about her time on the farm In fact, it's nothing compared to the experience that she had in march of 1999 On a chilly night in march 1999 willie asked lin if she wanted to join him for a drive

So they went to see a friend of his before driving back toward vancouver And back toward willies old stomping grounds on the downtown east side So he pulls over first to get drugs for lin and willie asked her if she minded if he picked up a girl for the night And she says no, I don't mind like do whatever so Willie drove around until he found someone that he liked and invited her back to his place to you know, quote party And by this point sex workers in the downtown east side were wary of going anywhere with their clients because you know Women have been going missing for some time at this point. So they prefer to stay very close to home like just within a few blocks

But lin was in the car So the women would ask lin if she was going to and lin says Yes, you know, she lives there or whatever and this was all the proof that they needed that this guy was okay Like if there's a woman coming and going with him like obviously he's not doing bad things to women, right? And they're gonna feel super super comfortable going with him, right? And then there is this angle of desperation like they need the money. They need the drugs So the woman hopped into the truck and off they went When they arrived in willies trailer the girl sat together and smoked

Eventually willie and the woman went back to his room and closed the door And lin went to her room and did the same thing and she was gonna basically just continue to use drugs in her room Well at some point shortly after she heard a noise from outside the trailer and it sounded like a scream But at first she trying to kind of like write it off like that couldn't be right, you know, she knows she's high She's probably dreaming it making it up But she had to go check So she peeked inside willies room, but it was empty So she headed to the kitchen

And she heard the noise again It was not a noise that she could place but again a full night of drugs and you know, probably alcohol didn't help her like Process what was going on, right? But she's got to know what's happening. So she heads out of the trailer toward the barn Where there's a light on And lin was not prepared for what greeted her when she opened the barn door When lin opened the door, she saw a woman's body hanging from the ceiling Her toes painted red dangling from above and below a shiny

Butcher's table with a slick of black hair on it And now do you remember that hook suspended from the ceiling that I mentioned earlier in the search? Of course Lynn said that she saw willy doing what will he had done hundreds of times before when he butchered pigs cutting pulling stuff out dropping it into a bucket on the floor and

Lynn couldn't run. She couldn't even move. She was just stunned and in that moment willy spotted her almost right away And she was overcome with fear for her own life and he basically told her if you say anything You're gonna find yourself hanging from this very same hook So she swore that she wouldn't say a word and miraculously willy gave her $100 and sent her away in a cab and told her that he'd pick her up the next day But she couldn't get out of there fast enough. She spent the next several days drinking and getting high I assume trying to forget everything that she just saw. I mean, yeah She called willy and eventually told him that she was back with her ex

And it was a total lie, but it basically gave her an excuse to stay away from the farm to stay away from him Like I no longer need a place to stay. Everything's fine. Like I swear to god I'm I'm not leaving because of that woman on a hook. I'm leaving because I'm back with my ex Now it's worth noting that the night that this all happened was in march And it was around the same time that one of our missing women georgina pappin was last seen Though we don't know obviously a hundred percent for sure that that's the woman she saw hanging from the hook that night Now there was one more guy who had a story to tell police about willy picked in and his name was andrew bellwood Andy was another one of those guys who hung around the farm doing odd jobs here and there

Mostly for cash sometimes just to stay in the trailer rent-free kind of the same way lin had done Andy was in the trailer one night just him and willy when willy asked if he wanted to go into town and get a girl a sex worker And and he said no, but then willy asked want to know what I do with them Andy said willy reached under his bed grabbed handcuffs a belt and a piece of wire And he told andy that he would stroke the woman's hair While she was face down on his bed, and he would tell them it's going to be okay It'll all be over now

And then he would strangle them with the belt or the wire And then take their body to the slaughterhouse. Oh my god And based on lin's story, we can all figure out what happened at the slaughterhouse Oh willy told andy that he fed their bodies to the pigs and whatever didn't get eaten got sent to the rendering plant Now there's a theory here that I want to share with you about why the search team uncovered skulls and hands and feet and little else The theory is that all of the other bones like an arm or a rib Could easily be mistaken for in animals, but a human skull or a human feet and hands Looked distinctly human and they likely wouldn't be confused and would stand out to someone if someone came across them

willy couldn't risk being found out at the rendering plant by putting anything in buckets that might cause alarm So he disposed of those parts on the farm and in at least one case a swamp several communities away In addition to finding the skulls hands and feet of serena and andre the team also found the head hands and feet of Mona the same woman whose blood was found all over willy's motor home Now before we talk about the picked-in murder trial There's one more farm discovery I need to tell you about the one that caused the most mayhem of all About five months into the search of the farm a couple of officers were tasked with clearing out two more old chest freezers in one of the buildings Inside were bags of packaged ground meat the kind of thing you might expect to see in a freezer on a pig farm

Right, but the officers took the meat out of the freezer moved it to a refrigeration truck that was on the property Which was like one of the many pieces of equipment that the team had that they brought in for this And they didn't think a ton of it, but four months after this they decided to examine the meat more closely And when they did they found that mixed in with the pork were ground human remains DNA evidence showed those remains belong to igna hall who had disappeared in march of 1998 And cindy felix who was last seen in january of 2001 Oh my god That means some of this ground meat had been kicking around the picked-in's freezer for over

Four years and it was entirely possible that some of it had been sold to people Through the small butcher shops that willy supplied So at this point the picked-in murder investigation was breaking records before the trial even began This was a 14-acre crime scene again biggest in canadian history 500 investigators were involved in the case We had a staggering number of victims and the cost which by the time the dust settled in the courts Would cost the government more than 100 million Dollars. Oh my god because we have so much here

It took a staggering five years from the time of willy's arrest until his criminal trial finally began That seems like a really long time. Is that Like does it have anything to do with canada's court systems or Not that I can tell I mean from everything I can find it was just the length of time it took to do the investigation I mean the we talked about how extensive the search was of the farm in total it took them 18 months Before they like were ready to say like yeah, we've gathered organized everything and we've tested like hundreds of thousands of dna samples So in the end will he was actually just tried on six counts of first-degree murder and that was for the death of marnie fray Georgina pappin brenda wolf andre jonesbury serena abatsue and mona wilson

After nine days of deliberation the jury found willy picked in Not guilty on the charges of murder in the first degree Okay But they did find him guilty of second-degree murder and they did that because the jury wasn't convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt That someone else wasn't involved like willy's brother dav for example or The butcher that he worked with all the time who's you know, we talked about him last episode pat casanova There was no solid proof of anyone else being involved But I guess the jury had enough doubts to lessen the charge to second degree

And if you're curious about all of the other murder charges against willy picked in the crown decided to stay those charges So even if he had been tried and convicted of 20 more counts of murder His maximum sentence would remain the same which was life without parole for 25 years And that's the absolute Maximum a judge could hand out in canada at the time for six second degree murder convictions And so that's what willy got life without parole for 25 years In 2011 the canadian government made changes to the criminal code to allow for consecutive life sentences And consecutive parole ineligibility periods

Unfortunately, willy picked in was tried before that change which means that he could be eligible for day parole in less than five years Oh my god. Yeah, february 2024 He'll be 74 years old and he'll be eligible for full parole in february of 20 27 Most people though are confident that he won't get out And we'll never get the opportunity to do this again so, you know, I was kind of curious what happened to the farm after this and pretty much Nothing like it did not go on the family didn't keep it the search team dismantled and destroyed every building on the property as they

Conducted their search and it's kind of interesting the last one to come down was the old farmhouse and The police investigators actually invited all of the victims families to come watch it fall To see all of our pictures and videos on this case and to see all of our sources You can go to our website crime junkie podcast dot com and be sure to follow us on instagram at crime junkie podcast And we'll see you next week with a brand new episode Crime junkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think chuck do you approve