Butcher. Gary C. King

13

      Part 2: Down on Robert Pickton’s Farm

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Part 3: Interrogation

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      Chapter 24

      Chapter 25

      Chapter 26

      Chapter 27

      Part 4: Down on Robert Pickton’s Farm—Again

      Chapter 28

      Chapter 29

      Chapter 30

      Chapter 31

      Part 5: Trial

      Chapter 32

      Chapter 33

      Chapter 34

      Chapter 35

      Epilogue

      Prologue

      September 1978

      Summer was still barely hanging on when Lillian Jean O’Dare, thirty-four, disappeared without a trace from the rough-and-tumble streets of East Vancouver, British Columbia, on September 12, 1978. The temperature was still in the low-sixties during the day, but the nights were becoming somewhat chilly with the mercury hovering in the mid-to-upper forties, cold enough to bring out the onset of autumn colors and to necessitate the wearing of warm clothing in the evening. With a light breeze comprising variable minor gusts and occasional fog during the early-morning hours, and with scattered clouds throughout much of the rest of the day, Vancouver was free of precipitation as Lillian walked the streets of “Low Track,” a high-vice area that is home to prostitution and drug addicts, where overdosing had become a regular occurrence. Low Track is known for having one of the highest HIV-infection rates in North America, and would eventually become the focal point of a prolific serial killer bent on snatching unsuspecting prostitutes off its seedy streets with promises of drugs and money. Of course, when Lillian O’Dare vanished, no one had a clue, yet, of what was to come.

      Although little was known about the average-built Caucasian woman, with short reddish blond hair, who stood five feet six inches tall, Lillian was reported missing on the same day that she seemingly vanished. Years later, in 2002, when the Joint Missing Women Task Force began compiling names and backgrounds of the women who had disappeared from Low Track, Lillian’s case would become the oldest of the sixty-five women that would eventually make the list.

      The ensuing missing person investigation at first failed to turn up anything significant about Lillian. In fact, it would be nearly eleven years before any new clues turned up in what had quickly become a cold case. As it turned out, the resident of a rental house, located in the 900 block of Salsbury Drive in East Vancouver, provided the first clue to Lillian’s whereabouts when he found a human skull in a crawl space inside the dwelling, on April 22, 1989. After summoning the police, the rest of the skeleton was found in the house that had, at one time, been occupied by a motorcycle gang. According to Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) constable Annie Linteau, all the police knew at that time was that the skeletal remains were that of a female. Despite an intensive investigation in which detectives suspected foul play, it would take an additional thirteen years before positive identification would be made, due, in part, to the limitations of DNA testing at that time.

      Nonetheless, the skeletal remains found at the Salsbury Drive house were positively identified as Lillian O’Dare’s in 2002, nearly twenty-five years after she disappeared from Vancouver’s unflinchingly mean Downtown Eastside. There had been no evidence to indicate that she was residing at that location when she disappeared. By 2002, the police realized that they had a huge problem on their hands, and they placed Lillian’s information on the Joint Missing Women Task Force list, as well as the official poster, after determining that her background was similar to other missing women on that list who had some degree of involvement in prostitution and/or drug use, according to Vancouver police sergeant Sheila Sullivan. Unfortunately, the task force had been unable to immediately locate any of her relatives, and it wouldn’t be until August 2007 that authorities were able to track down her next of kin and inform them of what they knew—little as it was—regarding what had happened to Lillian. Basically, all that they had been able to accomplish in nearly twenty-five years was to put a name to a skeleton, thanks, in part, to new DNA technology that had been refined over the years since Lillian had gone missing. The new technology was called miniSTR (mini-short tandem repeat), and it provided investigators with the much-needed ability to extract and refine much smaller DNA samples. It would be used extensively in the case that they didn’t know existed, yet.

      At one point a photograph of Lillian and another woman, known only as Diana, surfaced as detectives continued in their efforts to solve her murder. Investigators circulated the old, faded photo in an attempt to generate new leads in the case, but, unfortunately, no one came forward with information. Lillian O’Dare, of course, was only one of many women that Vancouver police and, later, the RCMP investigators were faced with the overwhelming task of determining what had become of them. By the time the police had a suspect to focus on in what was beginning to look like a massive serial murder case, the list of missing women had topped out at sixty-five, after four women were found alive and removed from the list. With literally dozens of cases and volumes of leads to follow up, the task force had its work cut out for it—and then some.

      Although the families of the sixty-five missing women were naturally frustrated and angry at the police for what they perceived as having their pleas for help in finding their missing loved ones ignored, it should be pointed out that the police truly had no idea what they were dealing with here. Although they could not possibly feel the hurt, pain, and anguish that the family members of the missing women were feeling, the truth of the matter is that the police were bewildered, puzzled, and taken aback at the overwhelming prospect of finding out what had happened to the women. Many family members of the missing women felt that the police looked at their loved ones as criminals first, and humans who had been victimized second.

      “In the case of these missing women, we don’t have a suspect,” Vancouver police constable Anne Drennan said in April 1999. “In fact, we don’t have a crime.”

      Nor did they have any crime scenes with which to work, Constable Sarah Bloor said two years later as the police continued their search for clues that could help them determine what had become of so many women. “We don’t have any leads like crime scenes or anything like that to help us uncover more facts.”

      “These women frequented the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, they had dependency problems, either with drugs or alcohol or both,” said Constable Catherine Galliford, spokesperson for what would become the joint RCMP-Vancouver City Police Task Force.

      Unfortunately, the cases of many of the missing women would never be officially solved, and their families would be left forever wondering what had become of their loved ones. Some degree of closure had been attained for the families of six of the missing women with the conviction of a man who was found guilty of their murders and who remains charged with the murders of twenty others in a case that might not ever make it to trial, and only an aura of bewilderment about what had become of the remaining women on Vancouver’s list of missing women lives on.

      March 1995

      While looking for a place to set up shop for the day near Highway 7, also known as the Lougheed Highway, at a location approximately seven kilometers, or roughly 4.3 miles, from Port Coquitlam, near the community of Mission, British Columbia, a roadside merchant ambled about near a boggy area in close proximity to a creek that empties into the Stave River when he made a rather unexpected, and macabre, discovery by nearly walking upon what looked like a portion of a human