Butcher. Gary C. King

the trip to the United States had been 1974. However, he was reasonably certain that the month had been February. Cherry pies were being given away at many of the stores he had visited.

      “Something about…somebody chopping a cherry tree down,” he said. “They were giving all these cherry pies away…every store I went into. ‘Here, take this with you.’ ‘What’s this here, another pie? Holy geez, how come they’re giving so many pies away?’ And he said that this was on the house…something about somebody…I forgot who it was…somebody chopped a cherry tree down and it was…his birthday or something, or whatever. I can’t quite remember.”

      Willie hadn’t cared much for Chicago, and had told Victoria that it could be pretty rough and that caution was needed when going out at night. From Chicago, however, he had gone to Michigan, where he had met Connie. He claimed that he had met a lot of nice people along the way, and had even been offered a job as a model.

      “Once I had a chance for me, believe it or not,” Willie said. “Me, I’m just a plain old farm boy….They want me for a model.”

      Willie said that he had explained that he was there on holiday, but he had become somewhat interested when he was offered $40 per hour and new clothes. He ultimately turned down the opportunity, however, because he said that he was on vacation and was there to learn more about what the United States was like. He also claimed that he had turned down the modeling job because he was unsure about what he might be getting himself into. In the end he returned to life on the farm and continued complaining about the long hours and the hard life that farm living entailed. He said that he would have liked to have started over, and at times he had wanted to sell his part of the farm. His goal, if he’d had his way, was to build a dream house, “with a nice high ceiling,” and a swimming pool.

      “I am going to start a whole new life, in a whole new place, start everything over,” he said. “You’ll never own a piece of land, the land owns you. This land has been here for many years before you’ve been here, and the land will be here many years after you’re gone.”

      Willie talked about his work and the various jobs that he had held over the years, including that of a house framer and builder, truck driver, body shop repairman, and at recapping tires. He claimed that he had always wanted to work in a sawmill, but when positions opened up at the one where he wanted to work, he was always already employed somewhere else.

      In addition to talking about some of the hardships and mishaps that he had experienced over the years on the farm, including how he had been “mauled by bulls” and “torn apart by wild boars,” he spoke of having been on his own for a long time since the deaths of his parents. “Wanting out” of life on the farm and starting a new life seemed to be a common theme of Willie’s desires. He mentioned the death of his father in passing, or so it seemed, by saying that Leonard had died of old age, at seventy-seven. He had much more to say about his mother’s death from cancer, as if it had affected him more profoundly than his father’s.

      “Hard to believe,” he said of his mother’s death. “She was up and going, and going, and going…. You never keep her down…. Even almost…right to the end, we had to put her on a stretcher when she left here. She said, ‘I want to have a look at this place one last time.’ So we sat her up…. She had a look at the place…allover the place, and said, ‘I will never see this place again.’ And she’s right, she never did…come back.”

      He said that she spent about two months in the hospital before succumbing to the cancer.

      “That’s life,” he said. “I mean, life comes and life goes. You’re here today, you’re gone tomorrow.”

      Willie seemed intent on talking about life’s experiences, particularly the deaths of friends and how new ones always came along after the old ones had died, but he seemed especially concerned about the dwindling numbers in his own family. As he was growing up, he said, he thought there had been eleven or so relatives on his father’s side of the family still living in Canada, but at the time that he had made the tape for Victoria, he thought that perhaps only four relatives still existed, presumably including himself and his siblings.

      “Accidents happen,” he said. “All our family been logging all of our lives…. My dad’s brother got killed on a bicycle on the last day of work from the mill…. He was retiring…and he was on his way back home, just—just—just retired,” he stuttered. “He never drove, he always rode his bike.”

      In retrospect, Willie’s discourse on death and dying, particularly his position about people being here one day and gone the next, gives one cause to wonder whether such an attitude had somehow overlapped into his reasoning, or perhaps justification, for all of the killings for which he would ultimately be so well-known. Perhaps such reasoning in Willie’s mind had also played a part in relieving any of his guilt feelings—if he’d had any—over the atrocities that would be attributed to him.

      Throughout much of Willie’s tape-recorded letter, he rambled vocally about one subject and then another, with little transitioning between them. Though it seemed that he had mentioned nearly every aspect of his life, including butchering meat for neighbors to providing lechon for the area Filipinos to barbecue, he never mentioned going to the Downtown Eastside to pick up prostitutes to bring back with him to the farm. Perhaps he had not mentioned it because he had not yet begun the routine in 1991 of cavorting with hookers, or if he had already started his bizarre behavior, he apparently possessed enough judgment or foresight that it might not be prudent to mention it anywhere.

      At one point Willie explained how he had put in long hours as a meat cutter, going to school two days a week and working the other five days as a butcher in a position away from the farm. He claimed that he had worked as a meat cutter for six and a half years, and complained that if he had only stayed with it for another six months, he could have satisfied Canada’s requirement of attaining the equivalent of a journeyman meat cutter and could have held a butcher’s job anywhere in the country. However, he had thrown it “all out the door at six and a half years.” His dream of starting over had apparently failed him again. Fed up with cutting meat, Willie decided to return to the farm to look after the pigs, cows, and horses once again, where he would eventually put some of his meat-cutting experience to use in a macabre and ghoulish sort of way—butchering women—instead of “starting over.”

      5

      In street lingo used by some of the sex trade workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Robert Pickton was known as a bad date. That’s how the prostitutes typically refer to a john who has gained a reputation of violence for a history of committing acts of cruelty, brutality, and bloodshed against them. It appeared that some of the women knew quite well what went on at Willie’s farm, either through firsthand experience or through word of mouth from hookers who had managed to either escape or were let go before Willie reached his killing frenzy. At least one hooker would claim that the women she worked with knew him and had some knowledge about acts of violence that had occurred at Pickton’s farm, but the details, naturally, were sketchy at best—as would be expected considering the lifestyles of Vancouver’s streetwalkers. Some of the women, in their drunken and/or drugged stupors, likely numbed themselves with the alcohol and the heroin, hoping that they could forget about whatever it was that they knew. Others likely were afraid to talk about the goings-on out on Dominion Avenue. The girls who knew nothing about Willie Pickton were the ones who were in the most danger.

      “When his car came around, they knew he was a bad date,” said one of the women who obviously knew about Willie’s unnatural desires.

      Nonetheless, such knowledge never stopped many of the drug-addicted prostitutes from getting into Pickton’s car, or truck, as the case may have been, on the days he visited the nearby rendering plant. Willie was free with his money and was known by the women for his generosity. An employee at a Downtown Eastside hotel said that Willie liked to talk to everyone.

      “All the girls used to go after him because they knew that he would give them money,” the hotel employee said. “They would run after him outside. It was sad, but they were very short of money down there.”

      There