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You are now listening to True Murder, The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History and the authors that have written about him Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker VCK every week, another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Good evening. This is your host Dan Zupanski for the program True Murder, The most Shocking Killers in True Crime History and the authors that are written about them. By the mid nineties, women began begin disappearing from Vancouver's East Side street prostitutes, drug users, the most vulnerable and desperate
of women vanishing from the streets. Not until the year two thousand the police began closing in on Robert Willie Picton, who soon would pique the world's interest as one of the most prolific, shocking and bizarre serial killers of all time.
Stevie Cameron, Award winning investigative journalist and best selling author, decided to write about and report about this case, and the result was two books, The pict In Files and now the definitive, never before heard, incredibly shocking story of Robert Willie Picton, his murder victims, the lucky ones who escaped death, the investigators that worked the case, the entire fascinating story on the farm William Picton in the tragic
story of Vancouver's Missing Women, with my special guest, journalist and author Stevie Cameron. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for Greensay's interview. Stevie Cameron.
Thank you, Dan, I'm really happy to be with you.
Well, thank you very much. It's going to be a great thrill for me. It's gonna be a great program for our audience. They very much anticipated this program absolutely. Now you're investigative journalist and very successful author, having written about Canada's Prime Minister Brown Maroney and his years in politics called On the Take and The Last Amigo, a book about Carheiin Scriber Schreiber, the German Canadian arms dealer and part of the airbus scandal, and you founded a
critically acclaimed national magazine ELM Street. What exactly was it about this case and this story that made you want to write two books, The Picton Files and now On the farm. What compelled you to write and want to write about this particular case.
Well, it actually wasn't my idea. I mean, you're quite right when you say that. I was a political journalist and I wrote, I'm a white collar crime person. You know. I'm interested in corrupt politicians and how they steal and how they hide it and why they do it and where they get it, and why they never get charged and why they never get arrested, why they never go to prison. So I've done a lot of that. I've
done five books like that. And then all of a sudden my agent called me and said, how would you like to write a book on the Picton case? And I said, you can't be serious and she said, yeah, I want your connounce Here in Canada, as it is in the United States is a publishing company owned by Random House, and so it was a wonderful, wonderful company. And she said they would like you to do a
book on the Picton case. And I said I'll do it and she said no, no, no, that's not what you are I'm just offering and I have a responsibility to tell you what they want you to do. This isn't the kind of thing you do, and I think it might be a mistake. I said, no, no, I'm going to do it. Why because it's so interesting, Because I said, I, uh, I feel I just can't believe my luck and she's so finally acquiesced. And why did
I do it? Because I'm interested in criminals and I got awfully tired of working on ones and never went to jail. I also lived in Vancouver for many years, and I'm a graduate of the University British Columbia in Vancouver, so I know the city well. There a lot of family there. And another reason is that many years ago, in my church in Toronto, I was involved in starting a program to help the homeless in our church and we ran a shelter there and fed them and found
clothes for them and so on. And I ran that shelter for seventeen years, and I'm now on a couple of boards that help destitute people and one board that sends food to two hundred and fifty agencies in the city. So I have a long history of experience with homelessness, addiction and the issues around that. So when I knew that the victims were prostitutes, I knew they were destitute.
I knew they lived in terrible places in the downtown east Side in Vancouver, and in fact, I've commissioned a story on the missing women of Vancouver for my magazine Elm Street. And you know, to me, it was a perfect fit.
Did you what did you initially anticipate you would learn from this case, especially considering well, I don't want to jump ahead, but just considering what you eventually learned about the entire thing. Was there something that you initially anticipated you would learn from this, especially given the great information you did learn? Was there maybe a little naivity in the beginning, maybe something that total So you're right.
I mean I didn't know how long it was going to take, and you know, I just jumped right into it. I actually, well, to be fair to myself, I didn't jump right into it. I spent four months, four or five months reading everything I could get my hands on. I said, I'm not going out there till I know what this is about, until I've assembled a list of
people to talk to. And I brought a consultant in right away, a man called Ron McKay who was retired Mount Here RCMP inspector in Canada, and he was the first Canadian to go to Quantico, the FBI headquarters where they teach people the about serial killers, and they that's where they trained the profiles, right, and so Ron was the first Canadian to go there, and they took one more who's also a friend of mine, the following year, and then they closed the program to foreigners for I
think for financial reasons. But he was very helpful in suggesting people to talk to. And so finally when I felt, you know, I had a long list of names and I understood the story pretty well, and they had arrested picked him. They arrested him in February two thousand and two, and I finally went to Vancouver in August. It took me that long to really wrap my head around the
story and do the research. So I went to Vancouver in August, and by that time I had lined up a lot of people to talk to, and from that time till now, I've lived there part of every year, sometimes as much as two thades of the year, sometimes just half a year. And because this thing has taken eight years.
Right right now, your incredible book starts with someone named Bill Wilson, and who was he and what did he discover and what was especially unusual about what he did discover and showed police.
Well, Bill Wilson test side at the preliminary hearing and that's how we got his story. Also testified again at the I'm sorry he didn't he testified in the trial. He was he was sort of a whitler. He sold bird houses and hurligigs and so on. We called him the hurly gig Man. He sold these on the roadside near a town called Mission. And that town is probably about twenty miles from the Picton Farms, which is again about twenty five miles east of Vancouver. So if you
think of one road that's along line with Vancouver. And then he was picked and farm and foot Coquitlam. And then there's a place called Mission, and there's a river there that goes into it was a big slew and he found the skull of a woman in the slough and he reported it to the police rather reluctantly because he had a criminal record himself and he was a bit nervous about that. But they overlooked that. They took the skull into Vancouver and they tried to find out
who it was. It was the skull of a woman, and it was really only half a skull. It had been sawn in half vertically, and that skull they did a drawing of, they reconstructed the face, they did a you know, they published that face on posters, and nobody recognized her. She was part to a Native Indian and part white, but nobody knew who she was, and so she was Jane Doe. They put her skull in a box and put it in a locker and it stayed
there for years and years. And the reason that Bill Wilson's discovery was so important was that when they did go on to Pickton Farm and they started finding body parts, they found some of the leg bones of this Jain Doe on the farm, and they also found skulls that were cut in the identical way, you know, to dispose of them. He cut the skulls in half, and he had tried her skull into the emission slew. And that
to this day nobody knows who she was. She's the one woman they were not unable to identify.
I just found it very fascinated. The first police officer. It really didn't you know, it didn't ring bells or set off bells in our alarms in his mind, just from the mechanically cut a skull, like you say, very kind of unusual, I would think. But but you say that police didn't really make much of this. They didn't think. They didn't really think.
And it's interesting. There were two people who worked on Jane Doe's skull back in nineteen ninety five when they found it. And one was a woman called Tracy Rodgers who worked in the in the reconstruction of the face so that they could put a poster out, and she was a forensic anthropologist, very good, who was working quite often with the ARCMP the Mountain in British Columbia. And the other person was an RCNP officer called Tim Slay.
And both of them knew that this was a homicide back in nineteen ninety five, but they could not find anyone who knew who she was. They could not reconstruct the face well enough so the people would identify her. But both of those people, Tim Slay and Tracy Rogers, worked on the Picton case many years later. They were brought back, you know, it was just because it was
their job, not because of his skull. And finally Tracy Rogers was able to match the skull and the bones to this one woman, right, and Tim say worked them as well, both of these people.
Now, maybe you can tell us the location where Willie Pickton's family had property was called a farm, and talk about it. Technically, I guess you could call the farm. But maybe you can tell us what really the state of this was, because it wasn't so much a farm, you say, And who owned the property originally, and what business was conducted there and who resided there?
Okay, The Pictons were an old family in a small town called Port Coquitlam, which is, as I said, about twenty five miles east of Vancouver, and it's a working class community which had a lot of farms and fishing. And so it was on the Fraser River near the mouth as of the Frasers that enters the Pacific Ocean
in Vancouver. And this family were always hard working, quite poor, and they had their first farm was right on the top of a hill right beside an insane asylum, a place where the criminally insane were kept, and some of these people worked on the Picton farm. Eventually they sold that place and moved down the hill onto about to a farm quite nearby in the little town of Port Coquitlam, and Billy had a brother and a sister, and the parents worked them very hard. These kids went to school
smelling a pig manure. They were They slapped the pigs two or three times a day. The animals were allowed in and out of the house, and the children were shunned by had the kids them in school because of their smell and their poverty and the fact that they didn't fit in. And Willy was always considered a bit slow. He's actually got normal intelligence, but he sort of talks like Daffy Duck or something. He's got an odd voice,
and he's ugly and just very you know. It was it was a terrible situation and these kids were I shook permanently him by this. He certainly was.
Now, what was Willie Picked in in his life growing up? Through your investigation, what was it really like?
Well, it was very tough, he kept saying. He had a hard, hard life. Willie Picked was one of these people. He loved to talk, but he always tells the same story. And one of the stories he tells him is about how he was given a baby calf to raise and it was a pet, and one day he came home from school and he couldn't find the calf, and his mother told him fairly briskly, that he should go to the barn. He went to the barn and found his calf had been slotted and was hanging from a hook
in the barn. And he tells that story again and again and again. It was obviously a terrible experience for him. He said, well, you know, that's what happens. But he had that kind of thing happened to him many times. And one of the worst things that happened was the time his younger brother, Dave, he had just got his driver's license, and hit a young neighborhood boy on the road outside the family farm. He ran home to tell his parents, and his mother told him to take the car.
His mother and father told him to take the truck it was actually a truck to the garage and get it repaired. There was a dint in it act they were, you know, there were some problems with it because of the accident. And the mother went out to the place on the road where the boy was lying and rolled him into a deep flew of water beside the road where he drowned.
Wow.
And so you know that the Dave Pickton was. There was the assumption that Dave Pickton had just had a bad accident and he was His license was taken away from him. He wasn't allowed to drop till he was twenty one. Nobody realized for a long time that the mother had actually rolled the body into the He was still alive when he was hit by the by the car, and the coroner said later he would have lived despite the injuries. When the drug hit him, he would have
he would have lived. So I tell you that story down because that is the kind of family right It grew up in and his brother and sister made great successes of their lives in business. Even though his brother had a hell of angels want to be and you know that he they became very duty was boring. Hello.
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Wealthy and the selling off the farm property after their parents died and they had a lot of money. Willi Pickton as a serial killer who was also a millionaire.
Credible. You talk about the Hell's Angels a little bit, not to really involve them in this at all, but just certainly that in terms of proximity, the Hell's Angels were down the street, they had some parties, and then you talk about Piggy's Palace and the Good Time Society.
Tell our audience a little bit about the Hell's Angels, the parties and the relationship they had with the Picton's and Picton's idea of kind of capitalizing on their property and as I mentioned, the good Time Society that they set up at Piggy's Palace.
Well, in those days, this will probably be in the early nineties. Dave picked and the younger brother, very shrewd businessman. He had a business hauling soil, and he also did demolitions of old buildings, and he had all kinds of irons and fire and he kept all his trucks and so on on the farm property. Willy in the meantime of making a living doing odd jobs but basically running a pig slaughtering business, he had placed and so on. But they had lots of money because they were selling
off bits and pieces of their farm for development. And what's very strange about this is if you picture a narrow strip of farm, it's not even farmland. It's like a junkyard. Frankly now fourteen agus left surrounded by tracktosing, that's basically, and across the streets from their place the two things. One was a Hell's Angels clubhouse and the other one was a massive small development which and they faced directly on a home depot, so it's very weird.
And down the end of their road they bought more land and that's where they built Piggy's Palace. From Dave's demolitions. He took out a bar in a hotel and he moved it to this barn and they had parties there. They brought in bands, they had food, and it was raided several times by the police, but a lot of local politicians loved going there, so they were sort of protected.
Willie loved going there and they made a lot of money, but it was basically a place where the Hell's Angels like to hang out, and so Dave was as far as I know, he's not a patch member of the Hell's Angels, but he's certainly a Hell's Angel hang around or you know, I don't know quite what level he's reached. But the Hell's Angels clubhouse was directly across the street from the Picton's home of his farmhouse and the remains
of the farm land. So was people would go to Piggy's Palace and dance, and it was in the bands, and then they'd all go back to the Hell's Angel's Clubhouse and stay up all night and get drunk, and you know, it was a real scene. And in the city of Port Coquitlam had a terrible time trying to close them down. Eventually they closed down Piggy's Palace, but the Hell's Angels only sold that clubhouse and moved out of there after the Willie Tipton's rest was too hot for them.
In that area, now, did you, I don't know did Willie Picton was the sole person that resided at the property though even though that David Picked and his brother and his sister Linda Wright were actually co owners of this property as well, but was it Willie primarily stayed on the property.
Well, his brother was there for a long time, and the two brothers lived together for a long time after their parents died. And Dave's girlfriends who came, and you know, he had a series of girlfriends who came, and you know, the first one he had two children buy her. They all lived together in his house. But Willie and Dave fought all the time, and finally Dave kicked him out, and eventually they bought a trailer. First of all, it was a little motor home, and then they bought a trailer.
And so Willie lived in the motorhome at the back of the property for a while, a couple of years, and then he bought a trailer and they put it on a cement pad, and he lived at the back of the property. And he was where he was at the back of this strip of this back of a sort of rectangular strip. He had a garage workshop and he still had the motor homes sitting there, and he had another sort of a barn, and he had a bunch of a slaughter house for his pigs and there
was a bit of a pigoty there. It was an incredible mess, all these old cars. He also traded in old cars and he went to car auctions so he could fix anything. So he was basically living on the same property as brother as his brother, but he was at the back. And then just before a year or two before he's arrest, Dave moved out, bought his own home down near the about a mile away, and Willy was alone there.
Now you speak about Willie's relationships, you talked to he was a guy that was kind of weird, considered creepy. He had some money, he was very dirty, his hygiene was had a lot to left to desire. What was Willy's sex life? What did it consist of? He didn't he didn't much had to have many relationships. So what did his sex life consist of? What was he really like?
Well? I talked to people who knew him well, and he he was he he had great desires, but nobody wanted to go out with Willy and he he patronized the sex shop in Port Coquitlam where he bought and a great deal of you know sex what in Canada we politely called sex toys. You know, dildo's, but he bought a lot of really awful things, you know, fur furry handcuffs and restraints. He bought zap straps, all the tools of serial killers. You know, we now have this
incredible story going on in Canada right now. The man was convicted today, a colonel in our military who is a serial killer and killed two women not far from here. And again, you though, those zap straps come into that story as well. Willie was like that, and he was I think he is starting to murder women from nineteen ninety five on, because he certainly murdered Jane Doe and her skull was found in ninety five and it was
a fairly new skull. What he did because he had so much money and because nobody else, no woman in the right lines, would go out with him. He would drive it to the downtown East side of Vancouver, which is famous around the world for the saddest, poorest, most
addicted women. It's poorest postal code in Canada. And they would be wandering the streets and looking for business, and he'd pick them up in bars around the streets and take them back out to the farm and sometimes he wouldturned them but he often killed them and he would
have sex with them. They went out there in the first place because he would offer them more money than any man on the street that stopped the car or walked by, and he would offer them one hundred dollars for sex, and then he would be getting ten to twenty bucks, so of course, and he would offer them all the free drugs they wanted, so they would go out to his place. And nobody knows quite why he brought some of them back and why he murdered some
of them. Who knows what those choices are. And some women were able to talk their way out of being killed, and one woman thought him nearly killed him and she did survive.
Now you talk about how he was able to get women to come out to this remote place with him, even though he was creepy. So he offered drugs and probably picked on people that had drug problems, but he also had some assistance. He had a couple I found this incredible other drug addicted women. Gina Houston, you have a Dina Taylor. What were their role in actually helping Willie picked and find women. I thought it was fascinating what they did.
Was Gena Houston actually lived in Port Coquitlam, and she befriended him. He paid her close to one hundred thousand dollars over a few years, basically to you for her drugs and for her groceries. He almost had a kind of non sexual relationship with a girlfriend that he never harmed. And one of them was a woman called Lisa Wells Yelds, whom I am still close to. She was one of my best sources for this case, and she was one of the women that he was very fond of, and
she was a neighbor. But the other two, she never brought any women to the farm for him to kill, but the other two did. Dinah Taylor well the woman who replaced Lisa Yelds with Jennie Houston. The woman who replaced Jenny Houston was Dinna Taylor, and both of these women would go to the shelters and the drop ins that the prostitutes and addicts in the downtown Eastside would use.
For example, First United Church, a wonderful community center in church in the downtown Easide had a drop in for these addicted prostitutes, and Dinah Taylor and Jennie Houston would go there and try to talk women into coming out to the farm with them for firemen, for drugs, and Willie's great guy. And quite often these women were so
desperate they'd go and they and they didn't come back. Now, we never heard any evidence that Dinnah Taylor or Genie Houston helped him kill these women, but they certainly lured them out to the farm with promises, as I've said to you already have drugs.
And money, and.
Once in a while he'd returned them. But then he killed so many. I mean, in nineteen ninety seven, two years after that mission skull was found, thirteen women in the downtown East Side went missing. And you're convinced that he wasn't charged on all thirteen that year that we know he killed out thirteen. Wow.
Now, did you talk about Dinah Taylor and Gina Houston, whether it was evidence or not. Do you believe that they you say they didn't actually assist him per se, but do you believe that they knew these women's fate? Was there any evidence or at least could you assume that they actually knew that something had happened to these women that they didn't Were they privy to that information?
Dinah Taylor did testify during the during the trial, very briefly, and she had testified in the preliminary hearing that I attended in two thousand and three, and she suggested that Lilly had told her one of the women had died and he'd tried to save her, and this is all in a phone call she'd had with him. It was very unclear to me what her role was in the deaths of anybody, and nobody was ever able to prove that she had helped kill anyone, and she was never charged.
She died recently of cancer. The other and Danna Taylor's the Native woman who went back to her home in Ontario. You know you're here in the province of Ontario, and she did come out. She was brought back out to court once, but not during a trial. And again no charges were laid against either women by the police and they were left alone ultimately, so I don't think the police ever had enough to charge them with anything, even assisting him.
Right right now, what was the mood, like you say in ninety five women start disappearing at what time and
through what process? You talk about Vancouver's Sun articles, it seemed to awaken people to how bad or they people in the Vancouver area didn't realize how many women were missing, or how big or complex or the magnitude of the problem actually, So tell us what the mood was in the nineties and mid nineties after these women went missing, And then at what point did it seem to people became aware of that maybe a serial killer was working,
but certainly women were disappearing from the face of the earth, and a lot of women. So went give us that description of that time in Vancouver.
Well, the problem was that in Vancouver, the police ignored these women. The Vancouver police ignored these women. Their families would say, my daughter's disappeared, my sister's disappeared. And I'm talking basically about the mid nineties up until about nineteen
ninety eight, and they and nothing would happen. The man in charge of the missing person's department at the Vancouver Police, and we're talking about a huge city, a very big, sophisticated, wealthy city, with this area of incredible poverty and addiction, so that the Vancouver police seemed to have very little interest in these women. The man in charge of missing persons turned out years later to have a He spent most of his time on his computer trolling for kitty porn.
He was convicted. They only had one person really in the missing Person's unit, and that was this criminal police officer. They had one halftime assistant. They had one expert on serial killers, Kim Rosswell, who's now teaching it in Texas. He is a brilliant, brilliant profiler, and it was a doctorate in criminology. He's taught the FDI, the pure of
alcohol to background firearms. He's taught Scotland Yard. He's worked with police forces all over the world on serial killers, and Vancouver Police had him in their own department and they didn't like him. Police officers tend not.
To like profiles. You may know that the actus.
You probably know that they think that there's just all, you know, witchcraft, and it's not. It's not real police work. But Kim Osman knew that something was in this. He knew that there must be a serial killer, and other people knew that it wasn't really until nineteen ninety seven that when the thirteen women disappeared, that the you know, really it was. It was becoming very, very alarming. In nineteen ninety eight, that was when I asked a writer there to do a story for me from my magazine,
which we published in nineteen ninety nine. In about nineteen ninety nine, the Bank of the Son started a campaign and they started doing stories. A couple of reporters there, and one in particular called Lindsay Kins, started to really
go after this story, talking to the families. Police still didn't do anything, and finally, sometime between nineteen ninety nine, I can't quite remember the data, in two thousand the case was turned over to the RCMP, the Mounties, which kind of preferential police force there in British Columbia, and they started getting a file review and they put together a list. The missing Women's List from Vancouver is sixty five names, theficial list and the officers that did nothing about.
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DIC is quietly vanished. By the time I got there in two thousand and two, these officers were not available. They disappeared. They you know, they had unlisted numbers, and the Vancouver Police was in disgrace and the r FMP had taken over the case.
Now you also talk about you had alluded to the BSU in quantico, the affection of the FBI that does profiling, that pioneered the criminal profiling that we now know. And then there was someone named Royal Hazelwood, which is people who read true crime will recognize this name along with the pioneers Robert K. Wrestler and John Douglas h So you talked about Ray Hazelwood. When was Ray Roy Hazelwood brought in? And again, how did the Vancouver police react
to his attempt at profiling. We already know that Kim Rosmo was was dismissed basically, and and they didn't like him, and they didn't like him claiming that it was a serial killer and didn't believe in his form of geographical
geographical profiling. So what did they say when a legend like Roy Hazelwood, who had worked with all kinds of major cases and I think even the Gary Ridgeway cave tell us about the Gary Ridgeway connection and Roy Hazelwood and the reaction to what he had said and what he had told police.
Well, it was really interesting when the when the worknated amount of police took over the case, set up a task force and they set it up with the Vancouver Police. They tried to bring peace and harmony and they brought in some of the Vancouver Police officers to work with him. But it was definitely a mounted case and they were getting ready to interview picked. And what happened was that they were able to arrest him in February two thousand
and two. They were able to get until then, they had been unable to get a search point to go on the farm. He was a prime suspect them from nineteen ninety nine on. He was the prime suspect. It took them till two thousand and two to get on his farm, to get a search point to get on the farm. And when they got on because he had illegal weapons, not because they were able to get on
on a search point on missing women. They got on a search point and put missing for the illegal guns, and when they got on the farm they found the belongings of many of these missing women. They always knew he was the right guy, but they couldn't get on the phone, so they had very very little time in which to get ready to interview him for you know,
the formal interrogation. And they were scrambling around trying to figure out what to do, and they decided to bring in down the advice of one of the police officers who was a profile. They decided to bring in Roy hazel Wood, and they the police officers who were really in charge of the case at the time, had very little faith in this. But you know, there was you know, from shame and what had happened to Kim Rossmo when he'd been dismissed from the Vancouver Police, and they thought
they'd give it a try. They bought Roy hazel Wood up. But they'd chosen a young star in the ICMP to interview, to interrogate fist and they called the interview and he had no interest in dealing with the profile. He said, they have nothing of value to teach me. He felt he was the trained, you know, trained in questioning suspects, right, and he you know, he was part of the I'm forgetting the word now for it, but polygraph unit, okay,
so he administered polygraph law detector tests. So he was a trained interviewer and he wasn't interested in having Roye Hazelwood. But there was a mountain there on the team, a woman who called Dana Lilies, who really really pushed for him to come because obviously, to someone like Dana Lillies, this man was you know, just the leader in the field. So Roy Mazelwood came up. They basically did not use him,
and they sent him home. And one of the things that happened was that he told them not to rely on Picton's conscience. They said, don't He said to them, don't, you know, don't think he has a conscience. Don't appeal to his conscience, to his sense of conscience or anything like that. It's not going to work, you know. Basically, you appeal to his ego. Exactly a great guy, he is, so almost the first question that the Canadian officer asked him.
After Roy hazel One went home without being properly used or I think he was only there a day and a half or two days. They drove him to the airport and sent him on his way. I remember the police officers saying to pick him in the interrogation because we watched it, you know, we watched the videos of it. He said, you know, Willie, think of your mother up in heaven. Do the right thing for her, you know, WILLI picked him just looked at him as if he
crawled down under the rock if it. Yeah, yeah, advice was absolutely right on the money.
Yeah, it's amazing. So they don't. They don't take his input.
And.
So then there's a lawsuit as well, which I thought was interesting that Kim Rosma there was quite a bit of him burrissment for the police force because he had already launched a lawsuit for his dismissal or his treatment by the police. So that didn't help or the look or the reputation of the Vancouver Police Department and all this at all. Now, who is Scott Chubb? And we talked about how the police got onto Picton's property through illegal weapons charges and that's how they had him arrested.
But who is Scott Chubb? Did he initially say to police and why? And what did he eventually tell police? Scott Chubb's a very important person in this story. Tell us about Scott Chubb, police, Well.
Scott Chubb is a real character, and I went to interview him. I found him in a small town in the interior British Columbia and had a long talk with him. Scott Chubb was one of Dave Pickton's truck drivers and worked in the demolition business with him and helped to build the Piggy's Palace, you know, the place that they all partied in down the road from the farm, and he was quite a character. He had a criminal record and he got into this case because he was broke.
He needed money and he had a small family, a baby and a wife, and he went to the police as a tipster on drugs and they said they weren't interested in his drug information because they already knew all about the people, you know, with marijuana grow ups and for so he said, well, he was desperate for money, and he said, well, what's it worth to you if I tell you about some illegal weapons? So they said, well,
that's interesting. So when they found out it was the Pickton farm and they'd been waiting for months to have an excuse to get on that farm. They worked very closely with Scott Chubb and he said they were these guns on the farm. He told him where they were and they said they would pay him some money if his tip proved to be true. But basically they were after picked in for the women, and so it did give them a chance to get a search warrant. They got a search WANT. They went on the farm one
night and it was all carefully planned. It was half an hour left in the search want by the time they were able to get on the property, and they did find the guns. Scott Chubb had told the truth about the guns, and several of the women that picked and killed a shot in the back of the head before they were dismembered. So those guns were very important.
And then they took over the farm because they found the identification and belongings, lots of his belongings and IV cuts and you know, all sorts of identification of these women on the property. So Scott Chubb became a very important witness for them, and he told them that Willie picked and had told him that he was killing women. And he told the police how Willie picked and killed the women. You know that Willi picked and told him
how he killed the women. So all of this was made Scott Chubb an absolutely key witness, and he remained a key witness over the next few years as this process dragged on.
Now you talked about that he told Scott how he did kill the women, and I'll get you to tell us how we did that if you could.
Scott Chubb's said that one day that he and Willy were pulling nails out of out of boards. You know, Willi was the brothers were involved in many Dave's business of you know, tearing down properties and selling me whatever was useful. He was in demolition and he would go on demolished buildings, and so Willy and Day and Scott Chubb were working one day pulling nails out of some wood, and Willy decided to entertain himself by telling Scott about
how he killed women. It was just the bizarre and he said he he what he would do was after they had sex, he would get them out to the farm to pay them, and they do some drugs. And Willie never did drugs. Willy never even had a cup of coffee. He was never smoked a cigarette. He had no use for drugs. But he always had drugs to
give other people. And so he told the Scott schud that once the woman had had sex and she you know, he'd been able to get her out of the drugs, he would then handcuff her behind her back, behind her back, put her hands behind her back, and usually she was
so high by that time she couldn't exist. And then he would strangle her and take to take her out to his slaughterhouse behind his trailer, hang her up on a hook, winch her up and dismember her, and we heard testimony and evidence from the various witness in the trial that the bodies were dismembered with a suzzle and it was cut down through the He was cut down through the middle of the skull, down the front of the face, and down the back of the head and
then snapped the skull in half, which was identical to the way that Jane Doe, the skull that had been found in the mission flew in nineteen ninety five. That was exactly how that skull had been taken apart, and that's why he was charged with Jane Jane Doe's murder eventually, especially after her feet and ankle bones were found on
the firm. So he told Scottchubb all about this, and Scott Chubb eventually told the police, but initially, as far as we know, initially Scott Chubb contacted the police to try to give him information about some drug dealers that they said they weren't interested in the drug dealers they knew about them. That's when he went talked to them about Willie and the guns, and then later he told them about the Willy and the way that he talked to him about killing these women. But there was there's
been a lot of doubt about that. I mean, we wonder whether the police didn't know about Scott Chubbs what Willy had told Scott Chubb earlier than that that we have no way of knowing that. I'm just telling you what emerged at the trial right now.
The other part of this too is Scott Chubb it talked about about the plot that Willy had said to him that he wanted to silence someone named Lynn Eleix and Ellingson and and so then there was rumors that had reached police that she had told friends about her witnessing picked and slaughtering a woman in that same slaughterhouse slash barn. But there was so explain that she there was rumors police went and questioned her. Then she denied
anything like that. And then Scott Schubb talked about some that Willie Pickton had mentioned to him that he might might want to have Lynn hurt. So tell us about this whole fascinating aspect. This is another bizarre chapter in this crazy story.
Well, you know it's it's it's funny. Dan. I have a feeling that this story sounds very complicated and huge, and nothing connects to everything else. But it all does connect because and really the cast of characters is not so small. I mean, it's it's fairly small. What happened was that Lynn Ellington was an addict who had was living out in the Port Coquitlam area and she met the famous Gina Houston in a drug in a recovery house.
You know. She was she was trying to clean up her act and kick drugs, and that she had no place to go when she left this recovery house, and Gena Houston was there as well. So she said, well, I have a friend called Willie Picton and he he has room at his place, and I'm sure you could go there to find a place to live. And Lynn
Ellingson had no other place to go. And I got to know them Lynn Ellingson a bit, and I certainly saw her at court over the years, and she the good looking woman, intelligent, very you know, in many ways quite appealing, but she had a terrible addiction that she simply couldn't kick, and she would do anything for drugs.
She went out to the farm. She was one of the women that Willy never hurt, you know, was one of the sort of girlfriends that hung around the place, and many many liked that, and so she lived in his trailer at one end of his He had a big trailer, and she had a bedroom at one end and he had a bedroom at the other, and she
lived there. She helped him with his She kept the place cleaning, she did some cooking, and she took all the orders for soil and cars, anything else that anything people wanted from Willy, whether they wanted a butchered pig, you know, from his freezers, or whether they wanted him to fix a car, whether they wanted soil from the soil business that they had, you know, spreading fresh soil
on people's gardens. So she would help with that. And one day they went really after if she'd mind there, if he went into town to get a girl, a prostitute, and she went with him because he promised her drugs.
They went into Vancouver's downtown east side and picked up a woman and brought her back, and Lynn Ellingson testified that she went to one end of the trailer with her drugs it was crack cocaine, and settled down with her crack pipe and really went to the other end of the trailer with the woman and later on, she heard a scream. She was completely stoned. She didn't know, you know, really where she or whether that she was doing, but she looked out the window and she knew that
the scream that comes from outside. She went looked out the window and saw a light in the barn and the slaughterhouse went out there and saw the woman that they'd picked up in the downtown east Side hanging from a hook, and Willie was starting to cut her up, and Willie threatened to kill her, and he made her promise that she would never tell what she'd seen, and she fled from the farm as soon as she could. I think it's the next day she got someone to come and get her, and later on she talked to
the police about it. But she was talking to the police in nineteen ninety nine about this, and it took till two thousand and two for the police to get on that farm and arrest him.
Incredible, incredible, I know, it.
Just seems unreal to me that it took so long. And I mean, that's what I was writing about, what was happening during these years? Why what was the problem? Why were they not getting out there? And there was a police officer in Vancouver who had talked to her and believed her story, but they couldn't get anybody else to take an interest. I believe it. And they also couldn't get a search warrant to get on the property.
The regional Crown prosecutor, which is what they call them here, I don't I don't know what the equivalent would be in the United States, but you know, the district attorney, I guess that's what you say. It wouldn't give them a search warrant to get on because he said, you don't have enough evidence. You know, it's a serious thing. We can't issue a search warrant and we don't have and we only have the word of an addicted woman who was probably too high to know what she was talking about.
Yes, I found that aspect of this just incredible. That she was discredited because she did drugs. But it seemed to be not that this is evidence itself, but if you were to apply any kind of logic to it, why anyone would testify to that, Why anyone would make up a story like that? And there were certain again, and Scott Schubb talked about certain things. At least it was backed up by evidence that the police found, so it at least corroborated the story to a certain degree.
Now we spoke initially, you said there was an incredible amount of forensic evidence, and this case was primarily about that to be able to convict this person. Maybe you can tell us about what they did find at that farm when they finally did go on there and do the big investigative. I mean, it was incredible the amount of people that were involved and the amount of work
that was undertaken at that farm to find evidence. What I would like to know is, because we only got about nine minutes left, this hour has really gone by, is that how many victims did they actually find there? Because people have heard the number twenty six and then there was an eventual trial of only six, so it can maybe you can tell us what happened in that twenty six and six how that all worked.
They found when the police went on farm on February the fifth, two thousand and two, they did find blood and the identity of several women, and they declared the whole fourteen acres a crime scene, and they basically took it over and they dug up the entire farm. They demolished, they swabbed, every surface on the property, and they dug up every square foot of the property down to undisturbed soil.
They hired one hundred and four students, forensic anthropology students, and it was run by Tracy Rogers, the woman who had looked at that skull, the mission skull all those years before in nineteen ninety five, and she is an expert at knowing the difference between human bone and animal bone,
because don't forget it was a farm. They found aside from the freezer, bags of human flesh, ground human flesh that he kept in his freezer, d from skulls and feet and hands that he kept in buckets in his freezer, and just sitting around on his in his garage they found. After that, they found blood and enough DNA to identify I think the number was about twenty seven women initially, and then I think they found the DNA of about
another six women. But when it came to prosecuting him on these cases, they police decided, the crown attorneys decided that this actually again it was the judge. The Crown wanted to prosecute him, what you'd call the district attorney wanted to prosecute him on all these cases. They didn't care how many it was. And the preliminary hearing heard evidence on twenty seven cases, but the trial judge said this is too much for any jury, and he decided to cut the counts down to six. So he said
there would be another trial on the twenty. Now, why wasn't there twenty seven? Well, because he decided to dismiss the count. To quash the count on Jane Doe, the one who said was found in the mission flew and whose seatan and shin bungs were found on the farm, he said, we don't know who she is, and I don't know why he quashed the count. He quashed that count sore down to twenty six. Then he said we'll do the twenty the other twenty count in another trial.
A jury could only take six, and there was an uproar over that, but he was the boss, and that's what happened. They tried on six picked them. When he was interrogated by the police, he finally admitted to killing forty nine women. He said he killed forty nine and that was to an undercover cop in himself.
And didn't and what was his demeanor at that time when he said to forty nine was that he was to himself.
He was bragging because he didn't know the cop in his cell. He didn't know the man in his cell was a with an undercover cop. He was just talking. They were He knew he was a killer. He was then for you know, he was going to be shipped back to Eastern Canada to stand trial on murders and so he was. The undercover cop told him how many people he'd killed, and Willie said, that's nothing. I'd killed forty nine. And he knew that the Green River killer,
Gary Leon Ridgeway, had killed forty eight. He was quite aware he was one over that he had done one more than Gary Leon Ridgeway. But they were only ever able to find the DNA of about, you know, thirty three women. But they couldn't Even though they found the DNA of some of these women, they didn't have enough evidence to charge him with their murders. But they felt
they had enough evidence to charge him on twenty seven counts. Ultimately, he only stood trial on six because the judge thought Jerry couldn't take a trial that would have to hear evidence on twenty seven and most people the Appeal Court of British Columbia that heard this case later said that the trial judge had made a mistake when he did that.
They said he should have tried on all of accounts right, he should not have The appeal court said the trial judge should not have thrown out Jane Doe and should not have cut the numbers down to six, because you certainly had You had a lot of families who will never get over the fact that he did not go on trial for the murder of their daughter, other wife, or other sister.
What I thought was very interesting, and I see the same phenomena with the you spoke of the Colonel Russell Williams case as well, and we see unlike America, where this audience primarily one we're playing this program too, is that the Canadians do not want to know the truth, whether it's about the legal system or it's about vulnerable
people being murdered. They just they are reviled by the details and protests vehemently that they don't want to hear any more details, where in America is a completely different animal, where there is a lot of people that crave every single graphic detail, not so much out of any morbid curiosity, but just to understand some of these cases as a
real fascination. I wanted to ask you about the public's reaction to the pict In case, because again it seemed that Canada, like very much like the Bernardo and Malple case, but especially in the pict In case, there was a real adverse public reaction to details that were coming out, and the media media agencies responded by not publishing or reporting on some of those details. I wanted to know what, I want to know what you thought of this phenomena here in Canada.
Well, I thought it was a disgrace. I felt that they you know, I felt that it devalued the women yet again, you know, and they weren't investigated because they're missing, their disappearances, were not investigated because they were addictive prostitutes from the downtown East Side, and because you know, they had terrible, terrible tragedies in their lives and they didn't have any power or any clout, but they did have
people who loved them, many people who loved them. And so when the details started to emerge on this case, after mister Picton, mister West that used to have to call them mister Picton, after Willie Pickton went on trial. You know, people would complain to the newspapers, into the broadcasters, and so they've cut back. They buried the story in the back of the paper. They told their reporters not to report much detail, just keep it simple. We don't
want to gross out our readers. You know, this was all body parts. This is bags and freezers. This you know, I'm sort of laughing. Jane Rule has said she won't write about anything that has to do with freether. So I think even in America, Jade Rule won't write about body parts contriugers. But it was, Yes, the trial was underplayed, and you know, all the details were underplayed, and I thought it devalued them one more time because it wasn't
their stories were not being told. And so my decision when I wrote my book was I was going to write about every single one of the women on the official list. I was going to say who she was, what happened, you know, how she grew up, how she
got into this life of prostitution and addiction. And I talked to many of the families as many as I could reach, and I met many of them at the trial and met many of I traveled across the country, talked to them, got to know them over the years, and they told me the stories of these women, and I decided that there would be one place where their stories would be told, and well we wouldn't turn away back from what happened to them. And so that's one of the goals I had in writing this book. But
you're quite right now. The Williams story is different in a way. All the details have been broadcast in endless you know, loops on television and the papers and so on over the last four or five days, but this has been condensed into four or five days. He pled guilty immediately, and there was no fooling around on this one. It happened very quickly. Where the Picton was arrested in two thousand and two and he didn't go on trial until two thousand and seven.
But it seems like the pict In case where I found it very I found it disturbing and surprising that it wasn't really well attended the trial apparently no considering. And then with the Williams case, it seems like, again if the criminal's high profile and the victims are high profile, then we can get some reporting on it. But if it's prostitutes, or gay alcoholics, or people of lesser stature.
It seems, you know, it seems bizarre to me that there's this much attention for this and all these details, where again the pict In case being ignored because there's not much analysis from what we're going to learn from the pict In case. And I want to ask you too, what you thought, what you thought about the inquiry. Now we're going to have probably long and drawn out and expensive inquiry, and what can they possibly learn that isn't well illustrated in your book.
I don't know. I mean, it's very interesting. I was in Vancouver last week and the man who's in charge of the public inquiry is a very highly respected politician and former judge, but he's unfortunately, he was the Attorney general of the province who decided, who said he didn't believe it would be in the public interest to go ahead with the trial on the twenty. So you have the families who have just thrown up their hands. They say, we don't believe in this public and great, we don't
think this is a sham. This is the man who said that it wasn't worth going ahead with trying him on the twenty and that was our daughter was one of the twenty. So you know, he's been undermined by that right from the beginning. So it was an unfortunate choice. And I don't know what will happen, but you're quite right. Rufsell Williams was a colonel of the Canadian notary of the Canadian Air Force. He killed two beautiful women. One
was in the military as well. Lovely women, good families, nice lives, pretty not drug addicts, not prostitutes, and every single details put out there. It's a very odd situation. But you know, I think you've I think you've said it very well yourself, right. Uh, it's it's you can't get enough of it when these women are gorgeous and and successful, when they're prostitutes. I care, and a lot of people care, and a lot of Canadians care, and
their families care. But you certainly had a big problem with the police, and we had a big problem with broadcasters and publishers who said public doesn't money hear this.
Yeah, I think the media is wagging the dog and I think they're in a completely wrong direction. I think that they do not side enough with the prosecution, especially in clear cut cases like this and and also involve the public, which the public has a lot of the public has a sympathy for the victims. I think the media is is misguided or misinformed or misplaced loyalties to I'm not sure who, but I think that you've done a great service by providing all of the information. Is very,
very comprehensive. It's a great, great read's. I mean, it's the complete, definitive story about this and every aspect of this completely fascinating story. And it is a tribute to the victims because you do find out who these people are. You do find out about the families and the incredible people that were brave enough to come forward despite we know about the system. It's a thankless job to come and be a witness at a trial and jeer across examination.
But you've captured every single exciting and fascinating moment of this case. And it's great to have you on the program talking about this incredible book. So I want to thank you very much Stevie for coming on the program and sharing your incredible book on the farm with our audience and myself. I want to thank you very much.
Dan. It's been a great pleasure for me, and I very much appreciate your interest in it.
Well, Thank you very much, and you have a good evening studie you too. Thank you very much, Bye bye bye. You've been listening to the program True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them, with your host Dan Zupanski. Have yourself a good evening, Good night,
