"...Few of the details of the evidence have been made public in Canada, where strict publication bans have muffled preliminary hearings. But what has come to light is grim enough: butchered body parts discovered in a freezer; a woodchipper, confiscated by police, where the women's bodies were believed to have been disposed of; and the public health warning that the pigs believed to have been fed on human remains were then slaughtered and put into the human food chain — along with, perhaps, human meat itself.
At jury selection, the judge warned potential jurors that what they would hear would be "like a horror movie". But this time, he told them, they would not be able to switch it off.
But the friends and families of the murdered and missing women are those who are likely to suffer the most trauma. Evidence is expected to take as long as a year to hear. Yet most plan to be there, to find out what happened to their daughters, sisters and friends, and how it was allowed to happen. The women of the Downtown Eastside disappeared gradually, over the course of 20 years, unseen and apparently uncared for by those meant to protect them.
The Downtown Eastside is the poorest postcode in Canada, where life expectancy is less than 40. Its seedy bars and dank doorways shelter the huddled forms of vagrants and junkies, creating a filthy foreground to the gleaming skyscrapers less than a mile up the road. It has the highest rate of HIV infection in North America and is the only place in the developed world where infected women outnumber men. Social workers called the prostitutes here "survival sex workers". They are selling themselves merely to stay alive.
Rebecca Guno was the first to disappear, in 1983, but no one knew then that she was only the first. Fourteen years later, when Ms Frey's call never came, Mrs Frey grew worried. When Ms Frey had still not surfaced after four months and local police said that they could not help, Mrs Frey and her sister, Joyce LaChance, travelled to the Downtown Eastside to report Ms Frey missing there. "The police there, they didn't seem concerned. They said she was an adult and she'd probably taken off somewhere," Mrs Frey recalls. "They made us think we were the only ones looking for someone missing."
Infuriated by the police refusal to look for her daughter, Mrs Frey and her sister began their own search. They began to meet other people, like them, looking for their missing loved ones. One woman, searching for her sister, had been refused a missing person report and told to "go put her picture up at the needle exchange". A man, Wayne Leng, was searching for his friend Sarah de Vries, last seen on a street corner on April 14, 1998, seven months after Marnie's last call.
Ms de Vries's theory of what lay behind the disappearances was contained in a journal she left at Mr Leng's. "Am I next? Is he watching me now?" she wrote. "Stalking me like a predator and its prey? Waiting, waiting for some perfect spot, time or my stupid mistake?" The more Mrs Frey spoke to the street girls, the more she became convinced that Ms de Vries's theory of a serial killer was right. "The girls told me, ‘There's this guy who picks up girls in vans and takes them to a farm and they don't come back. He's got a woodchipper'," she said. "Then they'd run away scared and wouldn't say any more."
Mrs LaChance suddenly thought of the farm near her home where the Pickton brothers lived. She knew a friend of theirs and had babysat for her children. The sisters relayed their suspicions to the police, who were adamant that there was no serial killer.
Family members lobbied the press and The Vancouver Sun began its own investigation. Mr Leng set up a hotline for tips about the killings and received a call from one Bill Hiscox, a former employee on the farm. He knew a woman who had been inside the trailer where Mr Pickton lived, behind the main farmhouse where his brother, Dave, lived. "She doesn't want to get involved. She's kind of scared about it," he said in the call that Mr Leng taped. "But she told me, ‘Billy, you wouldn't believe the IDs and s*** in that trailer. There's women's clothes out there, there's purses. You know, what's that guy doing? It's, like, really weird'."
Mr Hiscox also noted a case known to the police, when Wendy Lynn Eistetter, a prostitute, had fled the pig farm, handcuffed, bleeding from the stomach, claiming that Robert Pickton had stabbed her. Mr Pickton, who was also wounded in the incident, was charged with attempted murder but Ms Eistetter balked at testifying and the charges were dropped. Mr Leng handed the tape to police but heard no more about it.
The name Pickton would not come up again until 2002, four years later, when police visited the farm with an unrelated warrant to search for an unlicensed gun. They stumbled upon an asthma inhaler prescribed in the name of one of the missing women and the ID cards of several others. They returned with another warrant and began searching the property, beginning with the slaughterhouse.
In the freezers, they unearthed two five-gallon tubs. Inside were severed hands and feet, and the heads of two women among the most recently reported missing. Both were sawn in half like the carcasses of the slaughtered pigs. One, Serena Abbotsway, had gone missing only a few months after leading a protest march against police inaction over the killings. Much of the evidence may have been devoured long before police set foot on the farm. "It is believed that there is a possibility that human remains were fed to pigs but the risk of disease to those who may have had contact with the meat was negligible," a 2003 police health study said. "The psychological effects may be worse than the physical." Five years and 26 murder charges later, the cases of 39 missing women remain open. Investigators continue to sift through the samples taken from the Pickton farm in search of any trace of those still missing. An internal police inquiry has been ordered but the families are still clamouring for a public one. "If this was a rich community in the West End, all hell would have broken loose," Rick Frey said. Down on the seedy streets of the Downtown Eastside, a serial killer might no longer be stalking the women but the violence continues unabated. In 2005 Donald Bakker was convicted of the torture and sexual assault of nearly 60 prostitutes, whose ordeals he had taped. None reported the abuse to the police. More than 20 men have been convicted of killing one prostitute each in the Downtown Eastside since 1980."
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