Robert Pickton Murder Trial Begins With Gruesome Testimony
Posted January 22, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
(The following story contains details that may be disturbing to some. Reader discretion is advised.)
The jurors were warned that what they were about to hear would be gruesome and horrific.
And in an opening statement, the Crown Attorney in the Robert Pickton murder trial wasted no time in proving the judge right.
Derrill Prevett told the panel that police found two large freezer bags on Pickton’s Port Coquitlam property in 2002.
When they opened them up, they discovered human heads stuffed in plastic pails. The skulls had been cut in half.
They also found bones and teeth buried on the property, items which were later forensically proven to be of human origin and matched to DNA.
Pickton is facing 26 first degree murder counts, but is being tried initially on just six.
“These murders of these six women were the work of one man, the accused, Robert William Pickton,” Prevett contends. “He had the expertise and equipment for the task. He had the means of transportation available and the means for the disposal of their remains.”
And in a startling statement, authorities contend Pickton confessed to killing 49 women overall – and added he wanted to murder a final female to make it an “even 50”.
That revelation apparently came in a chat between Pickton and an undercover officer in a jail cell.
It’s the first of what may be a long list of sickening facts in this case, which opened Monday five years after the man at the centre of it was arrested and charged in the killing spree.
The B.C. pig farmer is accused of being behind the disappearance of mostly prostitutes and drug addicts from Vancouver’s seedy east side over a span of as long as three decades.
As the case got underway Monday morning in New Westminster, B.C., the judge warned the seven man-five woman jury not to listen to media reports on the case.
He also urged them to be strong and not swayed by sensationalism or their own emotions.
For the families of Pickton’s alleged victims, it was exactly what they feared they’d hear.
But somehow finally learning the truth is preferable to a lifetime in the dark.
“I need answers. I want answers.
“I wanna to know what happened to my lost little angel and I’m here to be the voice of people who don’t have a voice because she is no longer with us,” defends Lynn Frey, whose daughter Marnie is one of the six the pig farmer is charged with killing in the trial’s first round.
The families’ pain and suffering has been incalculable, compounded by the fact that for years they couldn’t get their voices heard when they insisted their loved ones had gone missing.
Maggy Gisle, who once worked in the gritty Vancouver neighbourhood, says police didn’t believe her when she said her friend Georgina Papin had vanished.
She claims authorities told her Papin had probably gone away on holiday, but that didn’t wash with Gisle.
“It didn’t make sense to me. Her kids were in Mission,” Gisle reasons.
About five years after relatives of the missing women started sounding the alarm bell, police finally announced that they were treating the disappearances as murder cases in 2001.
The following year their investigation brought them to Pickton’s farm, where neighbours recalled seeing police on their hands and knees at the property, looking for clues.
In February of 2002 Pickton was charged with two counts of first-degree murder – over the following three years that number would balloon to 26 counts.
Kristina Bateman, one of Papin’s daughters, said the proceeding wouldn’t cast a pall on the fond memories she has of her mother.
“It won’t bother me, I can handle a lot of things,” the 22-year-old muses. “I think she has helped me because she went through a lot and I just try to think of what she would do.”
“I want closure. I want justice,” Britney Frey, an alleged victim’s daughter, contends.
Pickton’s lawyers plan to contest many of the Crown’s allegations and insist their client had nothing to do with the murders. Pickton has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The trial is expected to last a year and more than 240 witnesses could take the stand before it finally goes to the jury.
Picton trial directly impacts one Ontario family
Who were Pickton’s alleged victims?
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