Butcher. Gary C. King

father, Rick Frey, a commercial fisherman, Marnie was a generous young woman and had been so throughout much of her life. Often, when she came home, she would be missing articles of her clothing, items such as shoes, or perhaps a coat, and when her parents would ask her about the missing clothing, she would laughingly tell them that she loaned whatever was missing to a friend because her friend had needed it. Sometimes she would trade articles of her clothing with her friends for older, tattered garments. She was always concerned about helping out others who were in need, making it difficult for her parents to become angry at her for her efforts to help others who were less fortunate.

      “She’d give the shirt off her back to anybody,” said her stepmother, Lynn Frey, who had loved her as if she had been her own.

      According to her family, Marnie attended a Christian school as a youth, but she went to a public high school in Campbell River. She loved animals as a child and on into adulthood, and she often took care of the chickens and rabbits that her family raised. She liked the outdoors, and she could be found outside in nearly any kind of weather. She particularly liked to play in or near the chicken coop, and she was known to build forts, where she would play with her cat, Tabi, and friends from the neighborhood. Sometimes her stepmother would find her reading a book, and Marnie would tell her that life was sometimes just very difficult to handle. When she was younger, she seemed easily inspired, and sometimes the simplest things, such as going hunting with her father, made her the happiest.

      When she was eighteen, Marnie gave birth to a baby girl, and although she cared deeply for the child, she had difficulty raising the girl, in part because she had become involved with an Asian gang in Campbell River that had initiated her into the world of drugs. She eventually moved on to the streets of Vancouver, leaving her baby girl behind with her parents to raise. Despite being on the streets of the city, working as a prostitute to support her drug habit, where she went by the moniker of “KitKat”—just like the candy bar, her stepmother’s favorite—she called home regularly, sometimes several times a day, just to check in to see how everyone was doing, especially her daughter.

      The last time that her stepmother ever heard from her was on Marnie’s twenty-fourth birthday, when she called home to ask for money. Instead of promising her money, her stepmother told her that she had a box of clothing, candy, cookies, homemade bread, and other items that she promised to send her. She asked Marnie to call her when she received the package, and Marnie promised that she would. However, the telephone call never came.

      By the time that Marnie Frey had vanished, enough women had disappeared from the Downtown Eastside that people had begun to take notice, including the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter. Even though women who would eventually be connected to this case in one manner or another had begun to disappear as early as the 1980s, and continued into the early 1990s, it was more commonly known that the majority of the women began disappearing during 1995 and thereafter. Newspapers also had begun suggesting that perhaps the numbers of missing women were higher than what the police had estimated, or were willing to admit. As the numbers of missing women continued to stack up, speculation that a serial killer was at work in the Downtown Eastside also increased—but fell on mostly deaf ears at the VPD.

      In the autumn of 1997, shortly after Marnie disappeared, Marnie’s stepmother, Lynn, accompanied by Lynn’s sister, hit the streets of Low Track in search of the missing young woman, asking questions and carrying with them a photograph of her. It wasn’t long before they began hearing about Willie Pickton’s pig farm east of Vancouver, in Port Coquitlam.

      “My sister and I were walking the beat, showing pictures of my daughter to the prostitutes,” Lynn said, speaking to reporters with the Canadian Press (CP). She said that several of the women told her and her sister that many of the prostitutes from Low Track went there to get high. They described the pig farm as a very dirty place.

      “It was four or five women we were talking to,” she continued. “They were on the corner in a little group and they all knew about it…. They said you could go there anytime and party. Lots of noise, lots of alcohol. They said you just had to call and a woman would come to pick you up.”

      If the women on the street knew about the Pickton farm—while women were continuing to disappear—it was only reasonable to presume that the Vancouver police knew about the goings-on there as well. The woman that the girls could call to be picked up and driven to the farm also raised questions that needed answering. Who was she? What was her relationship to Pickton? Did Willie have a willing accomplice to help him carry out his murderous deeds? No one knew, of course, but it seemed reasonable that all of the chatter on the street about Pickton’s farm, particularly with so many missing women on the ever-growing list, would have been picked up by the police and at least piqued their interest. Unfortunately, that hadn’t been the case. To the families of the missing women, it seemed as if the police couldn’t have cared less about what was happening in the city that they were hired to serve and protect.

      Lynn Frey, however, had other ideas. After sifting through all the details that they had compiled from the women in Low Track, Lynn and her sister decided to drive out to Pickton’s farm on Dominion Avenue late one evening. They had found the setting very unnerving, and Lynn would later tell the police about her experience that night.

      “We just drove down this dark road and stared at the house,” she said. “It was pitch-black. The dogs started barking and we thought, ‘What are we doing here? This is crazy.’”

      She said that night in 1997 hadn’t been the only time that she had driven past the farm. There had been another occasion, and, like the first, she had been inexplicably disturbed by her venture. She had informed the police about it, urging them to check it out.

      Lynn believed that they might have done so, but she wasn’t certain about it. She said that she believed that two of the sex trade workers that she had spoken to had told the police about Pickton’s farm, but she was careful to not be too condemning of the police action, or lack thereof. She understood how the police needed accurate, solid details before they could act appropriately, thereby giving them credit that may not have been deserved.

      “I’m not knocking the street girls,” she said. “But when you’re high, all of the days blur together…. I think the police did investigate, but they can’t listen to everything. And these women weren’t known for their reliability.”

      The case of Wendy Lynn Eistetter was another example of how the police had known about the Pickton farm and how Willie had attempted to kill her. Wendy’s mother believed that if Wendy hadn’t been able to reach a knife with which to stab Pickton, she would be dead today. But the fact that she was a drug addict, and the fact that she had once stolen a police cruiser and had dragged the officer whose car she had taken, presented credibility issues for her with the prosecutor’s office, which partly accounted for the reason that Willie had gotten off.

      “The Crown reviewed the state of the evidence and there was no likelihood of conviction,” Geoffrey Gaul, a spokesperson with the prosecutor’s office, had said.

      Although 1997 had proven to be a significant year, as far as showing that the police had known about Willie Pickton and the pig farm—what with the talk on the streets, the Wendy Eistetter incident, the fact that two prostitutes had spoken to police about the farm, and Lynn Frey’s urging that the goings-on at the farm be investigated—it would be several years before Willie’s reign of terror was ended. In the meantime, women continued disappearing.

      According to the list that was eventually compiled by the Joint Missing Women Task Force—still nearly four years away from being formed—Helen May Hallmark, thirty-one, was the next woman to disappear from Vancouver’s East End and the crummy landscape of flophouses, sleazy bars, and dirty restaurants that made up so much of the area. Born June 24, 1966, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Helen was reported missing on September 23, 1998, according to the police, but she may have disappeared anytime between June 15, 1997, and the latter date. The Joint Missing Women Task Force poster lists her as last seen in October 1997, so it’s anyone’s best guess, based on witness accounts, of when she actually vanished. A relative recalled seeing Helen outside a New Westminster convenience store sometime within the aforementioned time frame, but did not stop