ON THE FARM-ROBERT WILLIAM PICKTON-Stevie Cameron

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, an award winning investigative journalist and best selling author, decided to write about and report about this case, and the result was two books, The Picton Files and Now The definitive, never before heard,

incredibly shocking story of Robert Willie Picton. His murder victims, the lucky ones who escape 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 agreeing to this interview. Stevie Cameron.

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 pict In Files and now on the Farm. What compelled you to write and want to write about this particular case.

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 come out wants you come out 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. But 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 I feel I just can't believe my luck, and she's so finally acquiesced, and I why did I

do it? Because I'm interested in criminals and I've got awfully tired of working on once and never went to jail. I also lived in Vancouver for many years, and I'm a graduate of the University of 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. So you know, to me, it was a perfect fit.

people to talk to. And I brought a consultant in right away, a man called Ron McKay, who was retired Mount Heer 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 profilers, 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 feigners, 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 rested 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 thirds of the year, sometimes just half a year. And because this thing has taken eight.

of one road that's along line with Vancouver. And then he was picked and Fimm 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 this 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 it, 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 Picton Fawn and they started finding body parts, they found some of the leg bones of this jain Do 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 thrown her skin into the emission slew. And that to this day nobody knows who she was. She's the one woman they were not able to identify.

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 pickt In 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 on it as well. Both of these people.

place where the criminally insane were kept. And some of these people who 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 Willie had a brother and a sister, and the parents worked them very hard. These kids went to school smelling a pig manure. 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.

But I had the kids in the school because of their smell and their poverty and the fact that they didn't fit in. And Willie 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. It was a terrible situation, and these kids were I shook, permanently harmed by this. He certainly was.

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, 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, scratches was you know, there were some problems with it because of the accident. And the mother went out to replace on the road where the boy was lying and rolled him into a deep flew of water beside the road where he drowned.

he would have lived. So I tell you that story, Dan, because that is the kind of family right It's been 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. They became very wealthy and they started selling off the farm property after their parents.

And as I mentioned, the Good Time Society that they set up at Piggy's Palace.

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 acres left surrounded by track hoping, that's basically and across the street from their place the two things. One was a Hell's angel's 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 for 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 hanging 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 they remained

of the farm land. So was a people would go to Piggy's Palace and dance and lit in the bands, and then they'd all go back to the Hell's Angels clubhouse and stay up all night and get drunk, and you know, it was a real scene. And in the City of Pork equipment had a terrible time trying to close them down. Eventually they closed down Piggy's Palace, but the Hell's Angels only sold their clubhouse and moved out of there after Willie Pickton's The rest was too hot for them in that area.

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 been motor homes sitting there. And he had another sort of a barn, and he you know, he had a bunch of he had a slaughter house for 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 his arrest, Dave moved out bought his own home down near the about a mile away, and so Willy was alone there.

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 though those zap straps come into that story as well. Willie was like that, and he was I think he was starting to murder whim 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 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 sexist 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 they would be getting ten to twenty bucks, so of course, and he would offer them all the free drugs they wanted. 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.

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 Genny 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 east Side would use. For example, First United Church, a wonderful community center and church in the downtown Easide had a drop in for these addicted prostitutes and Dinnah Taylor and Juniae 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 Gene Houston helped him kill these women, but they certainly lured them out to the farm with promises, as I 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 we're convinced that he wasn't charged on all thirteen that year, but we know he killed out thirteen. Wow.

She died recently of cancer. The other woman, Dinte Taylor, is the Native woman who went back to her home in Ontario 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.

or how big or complex or the magnitude of the problem. Actually, so tell us what the mood was in the ninety these in the 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 when give us that description of that time in Vancouver, Well.

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 but 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 Roswell, who's now teaching it in Texas. He is a brilliant, brilliant profiler and was a doctorate in criminology. He's taught the FDI, the fear 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 profilers. You may know that, really sure, 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 vankorus Son started a campaign and they started doing stories. A couple of reporters there, and one in particular called Lindsay Kids 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 eight and two thousand, the case was turned over to the RCMP the Mountish, which kind of pre prudential police force there in British Columbia, and they started doing a file review and they put together a list. The Missing Women's List from Vancouver is sixty five names, theficials and the officers that did nothing about this quietly vanished.

attempt at profiling. We already know that Kim Rosmo was dismissed basically, and they didn't like him, and they didn't like him claiming that there 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.

February two thousand and two. They were able to get until then, they had been unable to get a search warrant to go on the front. 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 wind and missing for illegal guns.

And when they got on the front 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 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 Hazelwood. And they the police officers who were really in charge of the case at the time, had very long faith in this. But you know, there was you know, some shame and what had happened to Kim Rossmo when he'd been dismissed from the Vancouver Police, and they thought they give they'd give it a try. They brought Roy hazel Wood up, but they'd chosen a young star in the r CNP to interview, to interrogate Pickton, 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 a trained h you know, trained in questioning suspects, right, and he you know, he was part of the I'm forgetting the word now for it the polygraph unit. Okay, so he administered polygraph law detector tests. So he was a trained interviewer and he wasn't interested in having Roe

hazel would. But there was a mount he there on the team of woman who called Dana Lilies, who really really pushed for him to come because obviously, to someone like Dana Lilies, this man was, you know, just to lead it 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 senses of conscience or anything like that. That it's not going to work.

think of your mother up in heaven. Do the right thing for your you know, Willie picked And just looked at him as if he crawled under the advice was absolutely right on the money.

weapons charges and that's how they had him arrested. But who is Scott Chubb? What he did he initially say the police and why and what did he eventually tell police. Scott Chubb's a very important person in the story. Tell us about Scott Chubb, please, well.

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, it 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 to pick him 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 them 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 Schubb had told the truth about the guns and several of the women 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 found the identification and belongings, lots of belongings and ib 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 Willy picked and had told him that he was killing women. And he told the police how Willie picked him killed the women. You know, that Willy picked them 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 the process dragged on.

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 Scott Chubb that once the woman had it 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 resist, and then he would strangle her and 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 witnesses in the trial that the bodies were dismembered with a sazzle 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 would have been found in the mission slew 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 of feet

and ankle bones were found on the farm. So he told Scott Chubb 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 Willy 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, But we have no way of knowing that that. I'm just telling you what emerged at the trial right now.

anything like that. And then Scott Schubb talked about some that Willie Pickton had mentioned to him that he might want to have Lynn hurt. So tell us about this whole fascinating aspect. This is another bizarre chapter in this crazy story.

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 Pickton and he has room at his place and I'm sure you could go there till you find a place to live. And Lynn Ellingson had

no other place to go. And I got to know 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 willly never hurt, you know, was one of the sudd 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 Lily, 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 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 Ellingson testified that she went to one end of the trailer with her drugs it was crack cooking, and settled down with her crack pipe, and Willi 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 was, what 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 which

was the slaughterhouse. Went out there and saw the woman that they 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 was 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 they 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 or believe it. And they also couldn't get a search warrant to get on the property. D the regional Crown prosecutor, which is what they call

them here. I don't know what the equivalent would be in the United States, but you know, the district attorney, I guess is what you call district 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 when we don't have We only have the word of an addicted woman who was probably too high and know what she was talking about.

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 had 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 eventual trial of only six, So it can maybe can tell us what happened in that twenty six and six, how that all worked.

They hired a 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, aside 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 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 hurt 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 the twenty seven well, because he decided to dismiss the count, to quash the count on Jane Doe, the one who had was found in the mission flew and whose feet and shinbungs were found on the fire. He said, we don't know who she is, and I don't know why he quashed the count back count so were down to twenty six. Then he said we'll do the twenty the

other twenty counts in another trial. A jury could only take six, and there was an uproar over that, but he he was the boss, and that's what happened. They tried on six picked and when he was interrogated by the police, he finally admitted to killing forty nine women. He said he killed forty nine, well, he and that was just an undercover cop in his cell.

Willie said, that's nothing. I've killed forty nine. And he knew that the Green River killer, Gary Leon Ridgeway, it 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 the jury 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.

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 is 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 A. Malco case, but especially in the pict In case, there was a real adverse public reaction to details that were coming out, and then media media agencies responded by not publishing or reporting on some of those details. I wanted to know what you I want to know what you thought of this phenomena here in Canada.

people who loved them, many people who loved them. And so when the details started to emerge on this case, after mister Picton, mister we've 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'd 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, whos said she won't write about anything that has to do with freezer. So I think even in America, Jane Rule won't write about body parts in freezers. 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 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 where 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 William's story is different in a way. All the details had 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'd pled guilty immediately,

and there was no fooling around on this one. It happened very quick when the Picton was arrested in two thousand and two, and he didn't go on trial until two thousand and seven.

then 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 Picton 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, an expensive inquiry, and what can they possibly learn that isn't well illustrated in your book.

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. Russell Williams was a colonel of the Canadian of the Canadian Air Course. He killed two beautiful women. One was

worked in the military as well. Uh, 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 uh, you know, I think you've I think you've said it very well yourself. It's it's you can't get enough of it when these women are gorgeous and and successful, not when their 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 publicly doesn't want to hear this.

very comprehensive. It's a great, great read. 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 out of 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 fast, 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.