MISSING: Women of Vancouver’s downtown Eastside

Oct 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. 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/      Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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hi crime junkies I'm your host Ashley flowers and I'm Britt 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 22nd 1997 was a night when deal in I stutter 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 Eastside she was unfortunately a dick

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 a hundred dollars for her Services that's more than double the going

Murray in the downtown Eastside 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 like so weird to me but start to like 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 his 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 you screaming and cutting she breaks free bolts out the door with the man not far behind her and both

them I mean if you can imagine it our battered they're bleeding yeah 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's stabbed now twice she grabs a knife back and she starts to run and at the end of his driveway across the street were too

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

she's terrified that this guy has found her again at 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 cars 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 arrived 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 when he 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

it'll 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 guys pocket Hospital staff knew something wasn't right so they called the cops and the guys stuff and Wendy 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 story had unfolded in over a decade prior women had been Vanishing from Vancouver's downtown Eastside 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

and he's 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 two thousand dollars bail and with a 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

secutor her handled the case said that Wendy was in no state to proceed with those charges when the time came so he served as 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 Pickton 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 Pickton 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 Eastside they mostly talk about this 10-block stretches 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 Eastside were the most vulnerable of all they were poor many of them lived alone and their drug addictions force them into sir

I will sex work now most of the women in this story including Wendy who escaped really picked in a 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 tracks troll at the time and other estimates put that number even higher

our but the thing about the downtown Eastside that I can't get out of my mind is the part of town known as the kitty 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 like Bert you have an 11 year old guy 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 Pickton case called on the farm that I want to read to you directly because I think it's the perfect description the downtown Eastside 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

there 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 Eastside 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 to 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 Bell 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 we're 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 start a fresh life somewhere else maybe they wanted to disappear

here 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 realize maybe they weren't going to come back okay but is is yours 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

give 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 like I don't know if you remember this was like one of our very first episodes and we started the podcast what we talked about the West Mesa case yeah and I remember in that case it was it was you know 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

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 right 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 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 Eastside you know she could have gone as like Jackie Johnson so you know their 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 Eastside 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

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here's what we know about Robert William pectin 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 two 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 wake up at like 5:00 to feed the calves and was back out right before dinner every single night doing the exact same thing yeah even on the weekends

used to say the night you would like get up it's super early why I slept in to go tend 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 as the sons Daughters of farmers like 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

East and to the women on the downtown Eastside 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 families sprawling farm land 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 million are wealthy oh wow but money didn't change Willie he lived a very simple life in this like ramshackle trailer on the Farm property so if he wasn't driving along like the low track looking for sex he was at the bars in the downtown Eastside and there he would basically hold court with these local women listening to their stories buying them drinks if he saw someone

like he'd peel tens and twenties 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 Eastside described him as someone who was comfortable picking up a sex worker who

pay them quickly they even described him as a nice guy and if anyone asks 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 Picton 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 is lawyer said it best in their opening remarks at the public inquiry in this case in 2012 now this isn't a transcript I've basically condensed it so if you want to

the full thing will 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 Eastside 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 were 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

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 the story because yes it's heartbreaking and yes it's 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 Roos Mo 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 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

oh 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 90s 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

over 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 politic e 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 Eastside during this time and a resource in Kim Rose Mo that they could call upon to maybe help solve this no one did criminal profiling then was

oh pretty new and Geographic profiling even more so they called it back then Voodoo and mostly the VPD refuse 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 Eastside 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 Rose Mo 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

published 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 check to 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 pickton's Farm

bill has Cox was an employee of the Picton brothers who spent time on the farm he had suspicions about Willie Pickton and thought maybe he might have something to do with the women who were going missing from the downtown Eastside he knew Willie spent a lot of time on the low track he knew that he hired sex workers and he knew the girls were disappearing but most importantly he knew that he'd seen women's clothes purses and IDs and 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 happen he could not shake his bad feelings that he had

out Willie now most of what Bill shared with the police during that call came second hand from a woman named Lisa yelled who was a friend of Willy Picton from childhood so he's kind of like passing all of this off secondhand now police followed it up but Lisa wasn't interested in speaking to them so this tip was great but ultimately 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 Pickton 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 local RCMP to start surveillance on Willie

they were instructed to stop him if be 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 these serial killer then surely his DNA would match the DNA that they found on three of the murdered victims all of them again downtown Eastside 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 Eastside 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 to 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 Willy Pickton 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 Shone a spotlight on the case and the local police it was enough to Spur government and police to put up

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 change their names and eventually they would turn up at some point in another town under another name safe and sound and no one family's Advocates reporters even their own colleagues could change their mind so to give you you know a little bit of History women had started going missing from the downtown Eastside 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 will he picked in for any of the unsolved deaths or disappearances in downtown Eastside 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

Palace now Piggies 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 Hells Angels and I'm sure we'll ease friends and Associates would have been there too but he didn't really have a ton so women from the downtown Eastside ended up at Piggies Palace to 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 like

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 Piggies Palace was finally shut down and the Society lost its charitable status which is not a great start to the year for Willie Pickton Who Loved Piggies 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 persons report and the numbers had been trending downward for a while so there was 13 missing in nineteen ninety-seven eleven in 1998 5

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 terror 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

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 1st 2001 just three months into the new year for more disappeared any tiny glimmer of hope that the tear 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 1,300 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 Eastside 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

been charged with murder attempted murder or aggravated assault of a sex worker now a priority to 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 are maybe known to the downtown Eastside 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 Eastside check super creepy isolated Farm property just outside of town check check check and we 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

summer of 2001 the task force had their sights trained on finding a serial killer and importantly local media really started to put the pressure on they were running stories everyday profiles on the missing women expose these 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

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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 picked in case the police had Ridgeway pegged for these crimes as far back as like 1983 but there was never enough evidence to charge him let alone convicted 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

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 15th 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

Eastside their families and friends but the support workers The Advocate 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 this guy down

by the end of December the years 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 chub just like Bill hiscox was one of those guys who spent time on the Pickton 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 operation so the cops were like interested I mean granted you know he's not calling this like specific RCMP tip line he just calling the police in general right so then he asked what about illegal guns do you guys care about those and

you know the police are like you know of course yes so Scotch I 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

good to hear to be able to search this guy's place now one police do a quick search of Willy pickton'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 alert the task force now when the task force here

is of course like the judge grants them a warrant based on the weapons allegations to search the entire Pickton 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 Willy's Place they'd just seen him jump out of his truck into the trailer the lights were on and wasting no time

I'm they busted down the door guns drawn and they entered the trailer and met Willie Pickton in the middle of the room he was arrested without Fanfare Under Suspicion of possession of illegal Firearms they let him out to a police car in handcuffs were 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 Willy'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 crime junkie podcast.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 will be back next Monday with part two of this episode

crime junkie is an audio Chuck production so what do you think Chuck do you approve