Butcher. Gary C. King

2006 without ever knowing the final outcome, nor that Tanya would be but one of twenty young women whose deaths might never be served by the scales of justice. In all likelihood, Tanya was butchered by Pickton in the slaughterhouse adjacent to his trailer following an evening of drugs and sex, and her body parts fed to Pickton’s pigs.

      2

      The following year, 1997, proved to be a bumper-crop year for Canada’s worst serial killer and the disappearances of Vancouver’s street women. The residents of British Columbia—as well as the police—didn’t have a clue about the bloody carnage that was occurring on a fairly regular basis at the nondescript pig farm in Port Coquitlam, where women were being slaughtered, literally butchered like animals, by a sadistic, maniacal pervert for his own unnatural pleasure. When his lust for pain, terror, and blood—elicited by his actions from his chosen victims—was finally satisfied, the victims were then dismembered, sometimes ground up or sawed into smaller pieces before being fed to his hogs and pigs. These swine would, in turn, and at the proper time, be slaughtered by the same man in the same slaughterhouse where he had butchered many of his human female victims. Then their meat, in the form of pork chops, roasts, loins, and sausages, would be given to unknowing friends and neighbors and sold to the public. Unlike most serial killers, who would dispose of their victims’ bodies in a number of locations or cluster dump them in a single location, often far from the killer’s home, Robert Pickton never even left home to get rid of his victims’ remains. He would pick up his victims who, by the nature of their lifestyles, willingly but unwittingly accompanied him to his pig farm, and most would never leave—until it was time to butcher one of the hogs. Because bodies were not turning up anywhere, the police had little to go on except for a disappearance now and again, and many people merely assumed, including other prostitutes, that Pickton’s victims had simply decided to pack up a small suitcase and move on to another location.

      Between January and December 1997, no fewer than fourteen women would turn up missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. All fourteen of the disappearances would be attributed to the still-unknown killer’s handiwork, much later, of course, after a thorough investigation. When the police finally agreed that a killer was indeed at work, Robert Pickton would eventually be charged with the murders of six of those women. The list of Vancouver’s missing women was an ever-changing one, with some of the missing taken off the list because they were either found alive or their bodies were found and the cause of death was attributed to something other than the work of the killer. But as names fell off the list, new ones were added to it. By the time the Joint Missing Women Task Force was finally formed, there were still sixty-five names on the list of missing women and one Jane Doe.

      The work facing Vancouver’s missing person investigator, Constable Al Howlett, was daunting, to say the least. It seemed like each day he had one or two new files added to the pile already on his desk, and although he and his team remained determined to learn as much as possible about each missing woman, the circumstances of their shady backgrounds made the team’s work all the more difficult.

      The neighborhoods where they had to go in search of information didn’t help matters, either. In fact, in the area of Hastings and Main, where a blow job could be bought for ten dollars or a fifteen-minute “suck-and-f***” encounter could be had from any number of working girls for twice that amount, Howlett’s problems were compounded because, particularly in the early days of the disappearances, the working girl’s subculture shied away from talking to the cops about anything at all. At first, with little to build a case upon, Howlett and his team had little choice but to treat the disappearances as unrelated. In truth, it would be another two years before the cops began to put “two and two” together and were able to see that something very horrible was going on here. In the meantime, women continued to disappear on a regular basis.

      One of those women was street-tough, twenty-five-year-old Cara Louise Ellis, who often went by the street name of “Nicky Trimble.” When Cara disappeared in January 1997, she was barely three months away from her next birthday. She looked older than her years, and her face clearly showed the ravages of what living on the streets can do to a person. Bisexual and carrying a $500-a-day heroin habit, Cara grew up in Alberta. Cara was diminutive, at four feet eleven inches, and barely weighed ninety pounds. Perhaps it was because of her small stature that she liked to sport a “biker bitch” persona. She also liked tattoos, and had one of a rose on her left shoulder, a heart on her left hand, and a Playboy bunny on her chest. She also had a considerable array of track marks, where she injected her daily doses of heroin that kept her “well”—in other words, from entering withdrawal. She lived in Calgary for a while, where she was raped as a young girl barely into her teens, and where one of her friends, a young hooker, was beaten to death by a trick. It was shortly after those two experiences that Cara, forever a loner, decided to pack up her few belongings and move to Vancouver.

      She only met one good friend after reaching Vancouver, and that friendship took a few months to find her, as opposed to her finding it. As it turned out, Cara met another young woman on the streets and the friendship began soon after they moved into a recovery center for women and became roommates. They occasionally worked the streets together, turning tricks to make enough money to keep Cara supplied with heroin and her friend with cocaine. Despite trying to kick their habits in the women’s recovery center, neither had what it took to cast out their demons. The nausea, diarrhea, and severe joint and muscle pain, the effects of withdrawal, always brought Cara back to the heroin. Even a stint at a detoxification facility, Cara lasted only five days before heading back to the streets.

      “Unfortunately, she was in a position where the drugs were speaking for her,” said a family member after learning of Cara’s disappearance. “She would basically prostitute herself in order to be able to get the next fix in order to be able to prostitute herself. It was a really vicious cycle.”

      Despite her addiction to heroin, Cara’s friend described her as a person who made sure that she could take care of herself. And unlike many of the women in Low Track, Cara kept her clothes as clean as possible and bathed regularly. She also made certain that she had enough heroin on hand for a morning fix, which kept her from getting withdrawal sickness and enabled her to work as a prostitute. For reasons that were never clear, Cara chose to not have any contact with the family she left behind in Alberta, but her relatives never forgot about her.

      “She was a great auntie,” said a family member. “She absolutely love(d) my little daughter—she’s not so little anymore. She was a kid at heart when I met her, just a really wonderful girl.”

      Although she had confirmed her bisexuality a number of times, Cara told her friend that she wanted a husband and hoped to have children someday. She wanted to be happy, and she wanted to have a better life, said her friend, but she didn’t know how to attain those things. The last time her friend saw her, Cara was in a bad way, sitting in a niche off one of the main streets of Low Track, clutching her drugs in one hand. She smelled bad by then, and she had open sores on her body. She had lost a lot of weight, and her clothes were tattered and dirty. A short time later, on a cold January night, Cara had gotten into a car with an uneducated, but amiable, little man wearing nearly knee-high gum boots who drove her away, taking her from the mean streets of Vancouver—forever.

      “Cara vanished,” her friend said. “She just disappeared.”

      Over the next few weeks in January 1997, Marie LaLiberte, Stephanie Lane, and Jacqueline Murdock disappeared in a similar manner, although it was never known whether they had gotten into a car with Uncle Willie or not.

      Many murders attributed to a serial killer are of the stranger-to-stranger type in which the killer has no known connection to his victims. In the case of Robert Pickton, the police would later learn that he had known or had dealings with at least some of his victims on prior occasions, perhaps engaging in sex with them or merely bringing them to his house trailer to party with him, giving them drugs and money, and then driving them back to Vancouver unharmed. This seemed like a reasonable explanation of why many of his victims felt a strong enough comfort level with him that they did not hesitate to get into his car and drive away with him. This could also, perhaps, help explain why he was able to get away with his cruel and vicious crimes for so long without arousing the curiosity