Butcher. Gary C. King

neighbor. “I’ve known them for quite a few years and I’ve watched them do a lot of nice things for people….”

      As the Pickton siblings sold off the various parcels of their land, the locale in which the pig farm was situated became known as the Dominion Triangle and was touted as “Coquitlam’s newest commercial area,” as indeed it had become. On one side of the street were the townhomes that had quickly shot up, and in the same vicinity, but on the opposite side of the road, a new mall was installed that included Costco, Save-On-Foods, and other outlets. East of the mall there still existed a number of small farms where cornfields produced the fruit of the farmer’s labor, and some where horses roamed within the confines of their fences, with much of the rest little more than marshy grassland. While the area sprang up around the Pickton farm, Robert and Dave went about their separate businesses and continued to party heartily, whenever they could.

      People, however, would later say that Willie never took drugs and did not drink, despite his fondness for the parties held by him and his brother. Women—sex trade workers, as they had come to be known—from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside also continued to disappear.

      4

      By Willie’s own account, in a tape-recorded “letter” to a woman known as Victoria, made on December 28, 1991, speaking rapidly and in nasal intonations that sounded somewhat similar to the late actor Wally Cox, Willie talked about the hardships of growing up on the pig farm. In speech that was sometimes erratic, Willie told a story that took him back to early childhood, when he was about three years old. In a voice that sounded neither threatening nor menacing, and which was laced with occasional chuckling, Willie seemed completely harmless as he joyfully recalled an incident that occurred while he was playing inside the cab of his father’s old GM Maple Leaf truck and pigs were being loaded into the back. Jumping, bouncing around, and playing with the steering wheel, as any three-year-old would, Willie somehow shifted the truck into neutral, causing it to roll forward and down a hill. Frightened pigs began squealing and jumping from the back of the truck as Willie’s father, Leonard, frantically chased the truck, pigs in tow, to try and stop it before any major damage was done. Despite Leonard’s best efforts, however, the truck didn’t come to a stop until it smashed into a telephone pole. The accident totaled the old truck, and Willie got “the hell” beaten out of him for the incident. But that was the way of life on the farm, he indicated, where punishment was doled out when it was due. In recalling the incident, it did not appear that Willie held any ill will toward his father for the beating, but he had simply accepted it as punishment that was deserved.

      In recalling another incident, which occurred several years later, when he was about eleven or twelve, Willie’s retelling of the story for Victoria’s benefit seemed almost poignant at times. Willie had gone to a livestock auction and had purchased a calf, which he described as “beautiful,” with a “little black-and-white face,” that was barely three weeks old. He had paid $35 for it. Willie really loved the calf, and in his young mind, he had planned to keep it for the rest of his life. He looked after the calf each day, and fed it like he was supposed to do, rarely letting it out of his sight. But he had other chores to do, such as feeding the chickens and taking care of the pigs, and he couldn’t keep the calf with him every waking minute, even though he would have liked to if it had been possible.

      One day, approximately three weeks after he had purchased the calf, Willie went down to the barn to feed his new prized possession, but it wasn’t there. He looked around the barn for it, and at first thought that perhaps it had somehow gotten out. The door, however, had been closed and locked, so he reasoned that it couldn’t have gotten out on its own. After spending a few minutes looking for his calf outside, he walked over to the area that he called “the piggery,” which was really nothing more than a slaughterhouse, where the pigs were butchered. He thought that the calf might have wandered over there. When he went inside, he got one of the first major shocks of his life. His calf was there, all right, hanging upside down, slaughtered, just like one of the pigs.

      “They butchered my calf on me,” Willie recalled.

      He was furious, and couldn’t believe that such a thing had happened to him. He refused to speak to anyone for several days, and “locked everybody out of my own mind…. Oh boy, was I mad.”

      His dad eventually paid him $40 for the calf, which was good money in those days, but it did little to placate him for what had happened to the calf that he had planned to keep for a long, long time. He was told that he could take the money and buy another calf, but Willie wanted no part of that—the calf was to have been with him for life. It was then that he realized that life held little, if any, permanence.

      “We’re only here for so long, and that’s it,” he said in the tape-recorded message to Victoria. “When your time is over, your time is over.”

      Although Willie couldn’t remember the precise time frame, he recalled that his mother and father had met at the Aristocratic Restaurant, a “hamburger place, where they make hamburgers and breakfast, and this and that.” They were married a short time later, in the early 1940s, he thought. In addition to the hard life that he described to Victoria, Willie told her how he and Dave frequently skipped school by “playing hooky,” particularly how Dave would pretend to go to school but would return home and hide beneath his bed until school was dismissed for the day at 3:00 P.M.

      During his youth Willie’s mother had always pushed him to learn more about butchering farm animals, and wanted him to learn by watching their family friend, Bob Korac, during the slaughtering process.

      “‘Go see Bob, see how he’s doing,’” Korac would later recall Louise as having said as she urged Willie to take lessons from Korac. “‘Because maybe you need it, like tomorrow, you know.’”

      According to Korac, however, Willie just didn’t seem to have much interest in slaughtering the farm animals, and would rather go fishing. He loved the farm animals, and talked more about feeding and nurturing them, as opposed to killing them. When he was away from the farm for any length of time, his first concern upon his return was always to feed the animals. When in another mood, however, Willie could go on seemingly endlessly about how he hated being stuck on the farm, and sometimes complained that it was the farm that had kept him from having dating opportunities with women. He explained to Victoria that he had hoped that “we’d be out of here long before this, but it’s holding me all back.” The truth of the matter was, after his parents died, Willie could have left the farm, permanently, any time that he so desired—but he always chose to stay.

      Willie claimed that he never wanted to learn things by following in someone else’s footsteps. Instead, he wanted to learn things on his own, through trial and error and learning from his own mistakes—including the butcher trade. Perhaps Willie held such strong feelings about learning things on his own because he had been dominated for much of his life by his mother and by his brother, Dave, and had become tired of doing the things that Dave told him to do. Perhaps he held such determination because he was shy, and often awkward when it came to socializing with others and felt that if he did things on his own—even if it turned out to be a mistake—he would build his self-confidence.

      Perhaps the only time that Willie had become involved in a relationship with a woman that had the potential for any permanence was on a trip to the United States, where he had traveled to the Midwest, including Illinois and Michigan, in the mid-1970s. The woman, Connie Anderson, had been from Michigan, and although Willie claimed that he had fallen in love with her and that they had become engaged to be married, the relationship fell apart because she refused to move back to the farm in Port Coquitlam with him.

      When Willie made the trip to the United States, he traveled by plane from Canada to Kansas City, Missouri. Much of the remainder of his six-week trip to the United States was spent riding the bus, from Kansas City to St. Louis, and on to Chicago.

      “I was on a bus there, and I think I was the only guy that was on the bus,” Willie said. “The rest was all girls. Holy geez, I was only twenty-four years old at the time…. I said, ‘What’s happening? Where’s all the guys?’ They said they’re all in the army, uh, I was supposed to go to the army, too. The only thing is, my