Butcher. Gary C. King

showed up in the vicinity of Main and Hastings—at least not at first. Few people saw the evil that lay beneath his skin—until it was too late. Another plausible reason for the lack of concern shown by the police, as well as by the residents of Low Track, at least for a time, when women left with Pickton and did not return, was because their bodies had not turned up anywhere. It seemed entirely possible that Pickton would have been looked at sooner as a suspect if at least some of the bodies of the missing women had been found.

      At least one person, however, had seen the evil that lurked inside Robert Pickton. According to a Seattle, Washington, writer, Charles Mudede, and an article of his that appeared in a Seattle weekly called The Stranger, of which Mudede is associate editor, a longshoreman had gone to a Halloween party, perhaps as early as 1996 or 1997, at Pickton’s farm in the 900 block of Dominion Avenue in Port Coquitlam, accompanied by a friend. The party was held inside a building on the farm that Pickton and his brother, Dave, called “Piggy’s Palace.” It was a dark, rainy night when the longshoreman and his friend arrived. The parking area, filled with motorcycles and cars, was muddy. One of the first things the two visitors saw was a large pig being roasted on a spit, and children dressed in Halloween costumes were outside playing in the dark.

      “There wasn’t much light,” the longshoreman said. “There were lots of women, who looked like hookers.”

      The party, he explained, was outside on the grounds, as well as inside the building and inside a trailer, where they were “doing the wild thing.” People were not only having sex, but they were doing a lot of drugs. He explained that when it came time to eat the pig, he saw Pickton tear it apart with his dirty hands. The sight was sufficient to cause the longshoreman to decide that he wouldn’t be eating anything that evening—at least not while at Pickton’s farm.

      He said that at one point he had walked past a shack where a low-wattage light burned dimly above the door, and he could hear machinery running inside. He wasn’t sure what kind of machinery he had heard that night, but it had frightened him terribly.

      “Here, I got a death chill,” said the longshoreman. “The hairs raised on the back of my neck and my feet froze to the ground. I didn’t want to be there anymore, so I left and walked home.”

      Another party attendee, a woman who said that it had been her first and last time to visit Pickton’s farm, described the partygoers as raunchy, and claimed that a lot of cocaine was being passed around that evening.

      “[There were] lots of really, really bad, badass people…. I did not want to be a part of it.”

      Piggy’s Palace, however, was more than just a party place, as the cops eventually learned. It was listed in Canadian government records as a nonprofit organization under the name Piggy Palace Good Times Society, and it routinely raised money for any organization that its operators deemed worthy. Piggy’s Palace was located in the 2500 block of Burns Road, adjacent to Pickton’s farm on Dominion Avenue, but several acres away, and was built out of tin—basically it was an elongated tin shed. It was visited not only by many of Port Coquitlam’s average citizens but by the town’s civic leaders, including mayors, members of the city council, businessmen and businesswomen, and so forth. Functions, such as dances and concerts, were held there, the proceeds of which often benefitted local elementary and high schools. At nearly every function roasted pork had been served to the guests, whether they had been civic leaders or badass party animals. Truth is, although one wouldn’t know it by looking at him, Robert Pickton had become a wealthy man, not so much from his commercial pig-farming operation but from the continually increasing value of the land that the pig farm was situated on. By 1996, he no longer needed the money. Although the land had been purchased in 1963 by his father and mother, Leonard and Louise Pickton, for a mere $18,000, it was valued at $7.2 million by 1994. When Leonard and Louise died in the late 1970s, Robert, his brother, Dave, and their sister, Linda, inherited the land. Robert and David remained on the farm, while Linda was sent off to boarding school.

      In the autumn of 1994, the Pickton siblings sold off the first significant portion of their land to a holding company for $1.7 million, and town house condominiums promptly went up on the parcel. A short time later, the City of Port Coquitlam purchased another parcel of their land for $1.2 million and installed a park on it. The following year Port Coquitlam’s school district purchased yet another parcel for $2.3 million, and constructed an elementary school on the land. By then, Robert was treating his pig-farming operation more as a hobby than as an income-producing business, and he often merely sold the meat it produced to friends and neighbors, or gave the butchered meat away by holding wild parties. It was also about that time that Pickton’s generosity was becoming known in Low Track—and when people began to notice Vancouver’s women were disappearing.

      The one-per-week disappearance average for January slowed to only one in February 1997. Sharon Ward left the Downtown Eastside area sometime that month and never returned. No one has—yet—determined what happened to her.

      It wasn’t until March 1997 that another woman’s disappearance would eventually be attributed to Robert Pickton.

      Andrea Fay Borhaven, twenty-five, was believed to have disappeared in March 1997, but she was not reported missing, according to the police, until May 18, 1999, for reasons that were not made clear. A wild and tough young woman, she bounced back and forth between her mother and father, as well as between a few other relatives and an occasional stranger, frequently taking advantage of the goodwill shown to her by others. Born in Armstrong, British Columbia, a small town northeast of Port Coquitlam, but still in the southern part of the province, Andrea was often described as a troubled and unhappy little girl who often felt unloved.

      She was diagnosed early in her childhood with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and was placed on medication for it at one point. She was smoking marijuana by the time she was thirteen, and was getting into trouble at school. Her mother made her a ward of the court system in an apparent act of desperation to try and get help for her daughter. Andrea was sent to a residential facility for children in another town. After barely two months in the facility, Andrea ran away and stayed with relatives for several months.

      Although relatives described Andrea as an intelligent and loving teenager, she seemed to possess little ability to channel her impulses, often harboring feelings that would lead to uncontrollable outbursts, which only added to the growing number of problems she already had. As time went on, her feelings of worthlessness, irrelevance, and despair became worse. Even though she was always welcome to come home, and had the support of her family, she always had difficulty complying with the household’s rules, according to her mother.

      “You don’t get into drugs,” her mother would say. “You go back to school or you get a job.”

      Her family didn’t know where she was staying much of the time, but she would occasionally show up unannounced with a boyfriend that few mothers and fathers would approve of for their daughter. During such visits she typically asked for money or a temporary place to stay, and family members usually complied. But things often went missing from the homes where she stayed, and family members noticed that Andrea would sell items that they had purchased for her as gifts so that she could obtain money for drugs.

      “I asked her on occasion if that’s what she wanted for herself, and she seemed to think that she would never end up there,” addicted and on the streets, that is, said a relative. “But that’s exactly where she ended up.”

      Shortly before she disappeared, Andrea’s mother had reason to believe that her daughter wanted to make another attempt at getting clean and off the streets.

      “She was coming home,” said her mother. “All her clothes were sent home on the bus. I have all of her clothes. And then I didn’t hear from her.”

      Andrea did eventually get off the streets—and into a car that took her on a trip of unimaginable terror and horror—never to return.

      3

      Robert William Pickton was born on October 24, 1949, and raised on a small thirteen-acre farm in an area of New Westminster, British Columbia, where little besides nature existed. His father, Leonard, was