Woman Tells Tale Of Escape From Serial Killer Robert Pickton: Book

A year before serial killer Robert Pickton is said to have nearly stabbed a woman to death, another survivor says he held her at knifepoint.

Two other women say they threw themselves out of his truck around the same time as women he was later convicted of killing disappeared.

Their stories are part of a new book is called “On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing Women” by Canadian journalist Stevie Cameron.

It will be published by Knopf Canada electronically on Saturday, with a hard copy expected by the end of the month.

Pickton was convicted of second-degree murder for killing six Vancouver women and was charged for the deaths of 20 others.

Those charges were not proceeded with, and the Crown also closed the books on the cases of six other women whose DNA was found on Pickton’s farm but for whose deaths he was never charged.

He told an undercover police officer in his cell after his arrest that he was responsible for as many as 49 deaths and wanted to stop at one more to make it an even fifty.

Many of the women he’s been linked to have their stories told in Cameron’s book, which reveals new details about the women whose families tried for years to get police to take their disappearances seriously.

Cameron also describes the walls thrown up at the few enterprising police officers who tried to do something about the dozens of women seemingly vanishing without a trace from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

The case came to its final legal conclusion earlier this month, prompting the judge to lift almost all the publication bans on evidence.

Once the ban was lifted, another story of a woman who escaped Pickton in 1997 became public.

The woman was handcuffed and stabbed by Pickton before stabbing him and escaping down the street. While Pickton was charged with attempted murder in her death, the charges were stayed in 1998.

The publication of her story has fuelled further calls for a public inquiry into why police weren’t able to stop Pickton sooner. The string of murder charges against him were laid in 2002.

But in Cameron’s book, she tells the story of another woman, Tracey Buyan, who went out to Pickton’s trailer in 1996.

After they had sex, she said he pulled out a knife and accused her of having his wallet. She pushed back and he cut two buttons off her shirt before she left the trailer.

He came out and then drove her back to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Buyan said they talked about women and he said he liked helping prostitutes try to get off drugs.

“If they go back to dope, well then, they don’t deserve to live,” Buyan said Pickton told her.

“They’re useless. They’re better off dead.”

Buyan told other sex trade workers what had happened and Pickton was added to a bad-date list.

On the Farm is the second book Cameron has written about the case. The first, the Pickton File, was published in May 2007.

None of the women who tell their stories in Cameron’s second book testified at the trial.

Terrie Gratton didn’t report the incident to police.

In the book, she recounts how one night late in 2001, she climbed into Pickton’s truck with the promise of free drugs and money.

“It was a brownish yellow thing, a pickup,” she said of his truck.

“He used to park in the side streets and watch all the girls.”

The stench of animals was overbearing and Gratton had an asthma attack, yelling that she had to get out of the car.

When Pickton finally stopped, Gratton said, he hit her across the face.

She stumbled home, deciding not to call the police because it wouldn’t do any good.

Two years before, she’d told police she’d been raped and beaten by a truck driver and reported his license plate number. They couldn’t get him in for questioning.

Around the same time as Gratton met the now-infamous pig farmer Pickton, he also picked up a woman named Katrina Murphy by the side of the highway, Cameron writes in the book.

She’d been visiting her husband in B.C.’s Kent prison and was hitchhiking home.

Murphy, Cameron recounts, was sometimes known as “Ma Barker of British Columbia” by police in B.C., for the 19 bank heists to her name. At the time of the incident, she was out on bail, awaiting trial.

Murphy said she was uneasy when she got into his truck, especially when she realized there was no inside handle to the door.

Pickton introduced himself as Willie and offered her a marijuana joint to smoke. She took it, trying to calm down while at the same time, she kept thinking of ways out of the vehicle.

She become frantic when Pickton drove past her stop.

She searched through her purse for something to hurt him and as he slowed the van to move into reverse, Murphy stabbed the pencil into the side of his neck and gouged his eye.

She threw herself across Pickton’s lap and pushed open the door to land on the gravel at the side of the road.

All she could hear was Pickton laughing.

Murphy reported the incident to police who left her standing at a gas station.

A few weeks later, Murphy went back to prison, convicted of armed robbery.

The three women believed to be Pickton’s final victims were killed over the next three months.