Butcher. Gary C. King

drugs being consumed while roasted pork, cooked outside on large spits, was served to the guests. Many of the attendees reportedly were Hells Angels and other bikers. Interestingly, the local Hells Angels clubhouse was located across the street from the main entrance to the Picktons’ farm on Dominion Avenue, adjacent to a Home Depot parking lot.

      The parties at the Good Times Society were numerous, and some events actually raised money for local charities and played host to local businesspeople and politicians. The police had been well aware of the parties, and some of the larger ones had been busted by the cops. For safety reasons local fire officials had ordered Willie and Dave to cease having parties at Piggy’s Palace, but the two brothers basically ignored the injunction and held parties anyway. It wasn’t until the Picktons failed to file financial statements for the Good Times Society that the local government of Port Coquitlam, in 2000, was able to have the society’s nonprofit status revoked and the corporation subsequently dissolved, thus permanently putting an end to the large parties at Piggy’s Palace. The officials, of course, had no idea of what else had been occurring on the farm under Willie’s design.

      It was only a matter of time, of course, before each of the three Pickton siblings went their own ways. Linda, with her real estate career, had left the farm a long time ago; Dave, with his gravel and demolition business, remained; and Robert, whom nearly everyone referred to as “Willie,” just as they had when he was a kid, stayed at home on the farm and did as little as possible. He spent much of his time walking around in the mud and the pig manure, wearing his “trademark” knee-high gum boots, which he used during the slaughtering operations. When he wasn’t slaughtering pigs and generally loafing around, he tried to sell the junked cars that he had accumulated on the property, many of them purchased for scrap, and the vehicles that he had obtained from police department auctions, to anyone who would buy them or their parts. Most of those who knew him described him as a simple man, peculiarly quiet, who liked to sit around much of the time. He rarely spoke, unless spoken to. Depending on who was doing the talking, Willie was described as either a generous man with a big heart, or just downright creepy.

      For example, a former truck driver who was engaged to be married to Heather Chinnock, one of the women on Vancouver’s list of missing women, said that Heather, a known prostitute, had visited Pickton at his farm, on and off, for at least ten years, from 1991 until 2001. The truck driver’s characterization of Willie didn’t become publicly known, unfortunately, until after Willie was apprehended.

      “Willie was quiet,” said the truck driver. “He didn’t like me, but he liked Heather. Heather went out there to party.”

      He said that there was always an abundance of drugs and alcohol at Pickton’s place.

      “She told me in so many words that she was there as a prostitute,” the trucker said. “Heather loved animals and Willie was always promising her a job working on his farm.”

      But Heather, he said, had expressed her fear of Pickton, and that she often had nightmares after she came home from the farm.

      “But then he’d call, and she’d be right back out there again.”

      According to the truck driver and others who knew him, Robert Pickton had become acquainted with Heather—and familiar with the area of Low Track, not to mention many of the other girls working there—when he made trips to a rendering plant, West Coast Reduction. The plant was located near the area where the working girls conducted business, and Pickton dropped off pig carcasses and associated waste materials, such as hog entrails, brains, nerve tissue, bones, and so forth, from his pig-farming operation. The carcasses and other waste material—and anything else that Willie may have conveniently thrown in for disposal—would eventually be turned into cosmetic products, such as soap, shampoo, perfume, lipstick, and other household items. Pickton had been coming to the rendering plant for the past twenty years or so, and many times after dropping off his load, he would cruise Low Track, which began roughly ten blocks away, looking for hookers. Pickton liked to hang out at the seediest of the seedy hotels in the Hastings and Main area, particularly the Roosevelt Hotel and the Astoria Hotel. As would eventually be seen by the Vancouver police, as well as by the RCMP, Willie had become quite well-known in the area and had girls out to his trailer on the farm on a somewhat regular basis. Some he picked up, and others called him and came out on their own, after having had previous encounters with him at the farm. Interestingly, it took what seemed an unreasonably long time for many of the girls to realize that many of their associates were not returning after meeting up with Willie.

      By the time of the Good Times Society’s demise, Dave had become a self-described entrepreneur who worked in his reasonably successful excavation and demolition business and at a landfill he also owned. Credited with being the brains of the family, according to some people who knew him and his sister’s known business savvy, Dave pretty much left Willie to his own nocturnal and often unnatural activities. Unlike Willie, Dave had worked hard for most of his life, and Linda herself at least once declared that he was the mastermind behind subdividing the farm but left the business details of the sales to her. Divorced and the father of two grown children, it wasn’t unusual for Dave to work eighteen-hour days, and then, in his off time, to party like there was no tomorrow. Dave liked bikers, and it was well-known that he liked to hang out with them. Some said that despite the shared ownership of the Good Times Society, he claimed that Piggy’s Palace was actually his idea. It was known throughout the area that he had been proud of his “after-hours” club, where he had hosted so many large parties.

      “We had eighteen hundred people at one of my parties,” he once boasted. “And my parties were cleaner than any goddamn bar downtown.”

      Dave, often appearing grimy with grease and dirt, has also had his share of trouble with the law. In October 1967, when he was sixteen years old, and right after getting his driver’s license, he was involved in a fatal accident in which he hit a neighbor boy who was walking along Dominion Avenue, according to Canadian investigative journalist Stevie Cameron. The boy was fourteen, and Dave had been driving his father’s pickup truck when the accident occurred. Although details of the incident were sketchy, in part due to the fact that juvenile court files are sealed, the boy was found the next day in a slough following a search by neighbors, as well as the police. He had multiple injuries, but drowning had been the official cause of death, according to Cameron’s account of the incident. Even though the boy’s death had been ruled accidental, evidence surfaced that called into question whether Dave had left the scene of the accident—he had asked a mechanic to make repairs to the damage done to his father’s pickup. When all was said and done, however, Dave was ordered not to drive for two years by a juvenile court.

      In July 1992, Dave had another scrape with the law. He was convicted for sexually assaulting a female construction worker a year earlier at a site that he had been hired to excavate. He purportedly had cornered her inside a construction site trailer and told her that he was going to rape her, but he backed off when another construction worker showed up. After being found guilty, he was fined $1,000, placed on probation for thirty days, and was ordered not to have any further contact with the victim.

      According to the victim, bikers would show up at her home prior to Dave’s trial, and they would make subtle threats, as well as some that were not so subtle, which prompted her to move to another town. On one of the biker visits to her home, she was purportedly told that she would be encased in cement somewhere if she testified against Dave. She took their threats seriously, and feared that she would be harmed or killed if she remained in the area.

      “You could smell him before you saw him,” the victim told local reporters. The Province, among other newspapers, printed her story. “He had no respect for women at all.”

      Other women who knew Dave Pickton concurred with the sexual assault victim’s assessment of him. He was described as being vulgar and bad-mannered when in the company of women, and he often used foul language when he was with women.

      There are always two sides to every story, however, and many of the neighbors of the Pickton brothers had nothing but praise for the two brothers, as well as for their parties. One woman said that she had taken her ninety-year-old father to social gatherings at Piggy’s Palace, and she described them as “excellent parties where local