SERIAL KILLER: Robert William Pickton

[00:00] Hi, Crime Junkies. It's Britt, and I have big news. One of my favorite seasonal shows, CounterClock, is back with a brand new season, and it is wild. Host Delia D'Ambra is digging into the 2008 Lane Bryant murders. I mean, this isn't just a recap. It is a reinvestigation. She's talking to law enforcement, people from the community, even sources who have never spoken publicly until now. And you know I love a show that asks all the questions. Listen to CounterClock Season 8 now wherever you get your podcasts. [00:30] Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And today's story is part two of our two-part series on Robert Pickton and the missing women of Vancouver's downtown Eastside. So if you haven't listened to last week's episode, definitely head back to part one, Missing, the women of Vancouver's downtown Eastside. That's where our story starts, and you need that backstory to really know what's going on today. Because today, we're going to pick right back up where we left off last week. [01:00] 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, Britt? Of course. Let's do this. [01:13] Music

[01:44] 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. [02:14] named Goldie, which... [02:17] 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. Yeah. It's like people always like joke with me, like when Charlie passes, which he never will, like, are you going to get him stuffed? And I'm like, do I want like a reminder every day that he's not around? 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 notice was the mess. [02:47] 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.

[03:17] 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, [03:47] a collection of kitchen knives of all different sizes. [03:52] 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 Bottomley. Now, this was one of Vancouver's missing women. [04:17] 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 everywhere. [04:46] and one spent casing. Oh my God. Yeah. It was obvious that Willie had used this gun, but for what?

[04:55] 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 bag 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 Abotsway, a woman who hadn't been seen in some time. [05:25] 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 when 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. [05:53] 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. [06:10] He radioed from the slaughterhouse. [06:13] 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... [06:23] 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 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 just had like everyone's hair standing up on the back of their neck. Okay.

[06:53] 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. [07:07] 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 Hiscox, I don't know if you remember him talking to police. He was the first person to call in a tip about Willie. [07:37] 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 [08:07] at 1:00 p.m. on February 6th, just one day after police stormed Willie's trailer and took him into custody. [08:14] 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...

[08:28] Across Canada, around the world, people learned that Willie Pickton might be the most prolific serial killer in North American history. They learned that the Vancouver police had dismissed talks of a 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 terrible. [08:49] not Vancouver. Kim is the geographical profiler, right? He was like traveling everywhere and doing amazing work. Yeah, that's him. And there's honestly enough content to feel 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 [09:19] 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. Yeah. [09:30] So based on everything that they found in this initial search, police were able to get a second warrant. And this second one was 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 going to look at the car or the bedroom or. Right. And you can only look and collect items in those specific areas.

[10:00] 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. 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 [10:30] on the property. When they walked in, there was literally blood and blood. [10:36] everywhere. On the mattress, the floor, the walls. They knew even without any bodies that people had died there. [10:45] 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 [10:57] would have to be the entire farm property, all 14 acres. And it remains to this day the largest crime scene in Canadian history. [11:07] 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. [11:20] Mona was a 26-year-old Aboriginal woman from Alberta and well-known on the downtown Eastside 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.

[11:50] 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. [12:12] So now finding Mona's blood and Serena's prescription inhaler was all the convincing that police needed. 51-year-old Robert William Pickton 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. [12:42] 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've 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. [13:12] during what ended up being like 11 hours of interrogation. But he really says nothing to help police understand what happened on the farm.

[13:21] But later that same night, he would finally open up and give answers to someone. [13:28] He would tell this person the answers to the questions everyone wanted to know. How many victims and where were their bodies? [13:39] This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. For some, summer is their favorite season. Travel picks up, kids are out of school, and adventure is in the focus. For others, juggling it all can lead to overwhelm and counting down the minutes until the kids are back in school. And many worry that they're wasting the days of sunshine. Having someone with you to listen, to understand, to support can make all the difference. BetterHelp makes it easy to get started with quality, fully licensed therapists in the U.S. who follow a strict code of conduct. [14:09] million people globally. Their therapist match commitment does the initial matching work so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and if you aren't happy with your match you can switch to a different therapist at any time. It works. BetterHelp has an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. You don't have to say yes to everything this summer. Find support in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash crimejunkie. That's betterhelp.com [14:39] 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.

[15:07] Willie was feeling... [15:08] really chatty. And as they talked, police just down the hallway, of course, are listening intently. [15:15] 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'd 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. [15:45] case before, you know, really diving into it. Like, you know, this pig farmer, I had always thought 100% 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 body's [16:02] off of the farm property at a place that anyone living on a working farm would be familiar with. It was a rendering plan. And Britt, do you know what a rendering plan is? [16:12] 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... [16:23] 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 um 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

[16:53] like full animal carcasses? Are they in something? [16:58] Because I'm trying to figure out how he got the bodies there, right? [17:00] 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... [17:09] crime stories. Sometimes it's in like little buckets. It really depends on how much waste you have. Okay. 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 Picton's 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 [17:39] 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. [18:09] 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.

[18:28] 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. Sounds like a fun night. Right. So Willie didn't know it. But here's the interesting thing. [18:58] inmate at all. Because when I first heard about this, I was like, oh, this is going to be a jailhouse informant. This is some kind of snitch. It might not even like stand up in court. 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 [19:28] Andre Jonesbury. [19:30] 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. She left her home of Victoria, British Columbia for the downtown Eastside in 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.

[19:59] 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 [20:29] 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. [20:59] they also had her blood on Willie's mattress. [21:03] So, [21:04] 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 confident 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. [21:25] There were a dozen freezers on the Picton property, several left over from when Willie's parents ran a much larger farming operation decades ago.

[21:35] And the team that was searching there next on their list was to look inside those freezers. So, [21:42] I think what officers were probably expecting to find, I mean, 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 horrors they've seen already, for what they actually found. Inside a freezer in Willie's slaughterhouse were two... [22:00] five-gallon buckets. Even frozen solid, the contents of those buckets were unmistakable. [22:09] two human heads. Both that had been cut in half vertically. What? And to make it worse, inside each skull... [22:20] were two hands and beneath those two feet. Oh my God. [22:26] The first goal belonged to Andre. The second... [22:29] Serena. [22:31] And it was found both women had died from gunshot wounds. And this was obviously a shocking sight. [22:38] But… [22:39] It was also a familiar sight. The forensic expert examining the remains remembered seeing this before. [22:49] 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.

[23:19] 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 Pickton. [23:35] 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. [23:49] 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. [24:04] 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. [24:34] 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 right the ship for their daughter, but she was just too deep into

[25:04] 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 Wolf. 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 [25:34] 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. [25:45] 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 and 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. [26:14] 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.

[26:35] 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 Willie's 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. [27:05] 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 Willie's property, there's one more thing that I need to tell you. [27:35] 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 picton with two more missing women because of that dna found on those items from the emergency room connected him to cara ellis and andrea borhaven [28:00] 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 Pickton and who knew him best. And Scott Chubb was one of those, for example.

[28:30] illegal firearms that had gotten them onto Willie's 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 $1,000 to kill Lynn because she was blackmailing him. [29:00] Or at least that's what he said. And in the spring of 1999, Lynn 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 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. [29:30] cash to cover her drugs, alcohol, groceries, cigarettes, whatever. 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 Willie's brother Dave 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, [29:56] 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 there are 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.

[30:26] it didn't go anywhere is... So when she brought it up to Dave, 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... [30:45] 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. [30:59] you [31:00] For decades, some cold cases have been reduced to files in a cabinet, but not anymore. I'm Ashley Flowers, and me and my team on the deck have been traveling across the country to report on these forgotten cases. And in some instances, it's resulted in these cases being solved after decades. [31:19] Join me every Wednesday as we revive these stories one card at a time. Listen to the deck now. [31:26] wherever you get your podcasts. [31:29] On a chilly night in March 1999, Willie asked Lynn 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 Willie's old stomping grounds on the downtown east side. So he pulls over first to get drugs for Lynn 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. [31:55] 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 had been going missing for some time at this point. So they preferred to stay very close to home, like just within a few blocks.

[32:15] But Lynn was in the car. So the women would ask Lynn if she was going to. And Lynn says, yes, you know, she lives there, whatever. And this was all the proof that they needed that this guy was OK. 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 going to 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. [32:40] And off they went. [32:42] When they arrived in Willie's trailer, the girls sat together and smoked. Eventually, Willie and the woman went back to his room and closed the door. And Lynn went to her room and did the same thing. And she was going to 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 tried 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. [33:12] but she had to go check. So she peeked inside Willie's room. [33:17] but it was empty. [33:18] 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 probably alcohol didn't help her process what was going on. 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 Lynn was not prepared for it. [33:43] for what greeted her when she opened the barn door.

[33:48] When Lynn 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 Willie gobbling. [34:13] doing what Willie had done hundreds of times before when he butchered pigs, cutting, [34:18] pulling stuff out, [34:20] 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, Willie 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 going to find yourself hanging from this very same hook. So she swore that she wouldn't say a word. And miraculously, Willie gave her $100. [34:50] 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 Willie 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 not leaving because of that woman on a hook.

[35:20] 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. [35:32] Though we don't know, obviously, 100% 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 Willie Pickton, 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 Lynn had done. [36:02] a sex worker. And Andy said no, but then Willie asked, "Wanna know what I do with them?" [36:08] Andy said Willie 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. [36:26] 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 Lynn's story, we can all figure out what happened at the slaughterhouse. Oh, my God. [36:40] Willie told Andy that he fed their bodies to the pigs and whatever didn't get eaten got sent to the rendering plant. [36:48] 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 look distinctly human. And they likely wouldn't be confused and would stand out to someone if someone came across them.

[37:18] 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. [37:30] 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 Willie's motorhome. [37:44] Now, before we talk about the Picton 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. [38:14] 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 belonged to Igna [38:44] Oh my god.

[38:49] That means some of this ground meat had been kicking around the Picton'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 Willie supplied. [39:04] So at this point, the Picton 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. Oh, my God. [39:34] So much here. It took a staggering five years from the time of Willie's arrest until his criminal trial finally began. That seems like a really long time. Is that... [39:44] 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, we talked about how extensive the search was of the farm. In total, it took them 18 months before they were ready to say, like, yeah, we've gathered, organized everything. And we've tested like hundreds of thousands of DNA samples. [40:14] First-degree murder.

[40:24] After nine days of deliberation, [40:27] the jury found Willie Pickton not guilty on the charges of murder in the first degree. Okay. But they did find him guilty of second degree murder. [40:39] And they did that because the jury wasn't convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone else wasn't involved. Like Willie's brother, Dave, 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. [41:02] And if you're curious about all of the other murder charges against Willie Pickton, 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 forever. [41:21] 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 Willie got. Life without parole for 25 years. [41:34] In 2011, the Canadian government made changes to the criminal code to allow for consecutive life sentences and consecutive parole ineligibility periods. Unfortunately, Willie Pickton 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 2027.

[42:04] Most people, though, are confident that he won't get out and will never get the opportunity to do this again. So... [42:12] I was kind of curious what happened to the farm after this. [42:18] 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. Oh, wow. And it's kind of interesting. The last one to come down was the old farmhouse. And... [42:34] The police investigators actually invited all of the victims' families to come watch it fall. [42:41] to see all of our pictures and videos on this case and to see all of our sources you can go to our website crimejunkiepodcast.com and be sure to follow us on instagram at crimejunkiepodcast we'll see you next week with a brand new episode [43:11] Thank you.

[43:34] you [43:35] you [43:37] you [43:40] you [43:42] Crime Junkie is an audio Chuck production. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? [43:50] Okay, Crime Junkies, you know, I absolutely love a twist and a turn, especially when it comes to people who turn out to be someone they're not. That's why I have been obsessed with the podcast Chameleon. Every Thursday, host Josh Dean deep dives into a scam so bizarre, it will leave you wondering, how did they get away with that? [44:09] It is truly one of my favorite podcasts right now and I've been listening for years. [44:12] I think you'll love it too. [44:14] Listen to Chameleon wherever you get your podcasts.