We All Asked Where Are The Bodies

As a society we are still grappling with the horror that represents a legacy of casual disinterest in the fate of women addicted to drugs and alcohol, working the streets to pay for their needs. Prostitutes are beneath and beyond the concern of society, let alone those whom we task with the security and safety of society's deserving. Prostitutes who have the additional burden of representing First Nations girls and women, drug-addicted and alcoholism-prone need not apply.

So, over a period of years, even while various police forces were gathering information - not of their own initiative, but information that was thrown at them by concerned citizens of the netherworld that the missing women represented - and amassing a hefty file of allegations too gruesome to quite believe, albeit with the ring of truth allied with evidence and witness reports, nothing was done. Nothing of any substance, that is.

It was as though hardened law enforcement agents who had witnessed and cleaned up from the worst that humanity could possibly inflict upon the helpless and the vulnerable, just gave a metaphorical shrug and forged on to the next case, preferring not to linger overlong on the one that kept cropping up time and again with ever more disturbing tales.

Major crimes investigators were very well aware of the reputation of the pig farm owner Willie Pickton. They had been informed he was murdering women, he was disposing of their bodies by dismembering them, by flailing them, by chopping them up, and satisfying himself with his exploits by retaining mementoes that obviously afforded him pleasure after the fact.

What made them refrain from undertaking a serious investigation? Surely not any kind of sympathy for a truly loathsome character. Indifference to the possibility that prostitutes were being targeted by a mass murderer? Might that be possible? An RCMP corporal had been assigned to investigate Pickton's stabbing of a prostitute in 1997.

The man had brought a prostitute to his squalid Port Coquitlam farm from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. He refused later to pay for her services and an altercation took place. He handcuffed her. In the struggle that ensued she grasped a filleting knife and managed to slash his throat. He took that knife and returned the compliment. She managed to escape and flagged a car down on the highway, before collapsing.

She was revived at a hospital emergency room, then treated in hospital. On completion of the investigation, Staff Sgt.Mike Connor wrote: "Given the violence shown by Pickton toward prostitutes and women in general, this information is being forwarded to your attention should you have similar offences", distributing his report to police forces across the Lower Mainland. But the attempted murder charge was dropped, because the victim was a heroin addict.

Over the following years the file on Willie Pickton grew. Women told their tales to Staff Sgt. Connor; those who survived, telling him about those who had not. Then a man called Crime Stoppers about someone with the name of "Willie" who was slaughtering prostitutes. Willie had claimed he could dispose of bodies by putting them through a meat grinder. The man called again claiming that Willie was responsible for a horde of missing women.

"Even at this stage of the investigation, given what I knew of Pickton, I felt this person certainly could have been responsible for attacks on other prostitutes. I was not absolutely convinced on the homicides, as like most investigators of the time period, we all asked where are the bodies. Even though I was sure Pickton was capable." Staff St. Connor

One woman who wasn't slaughtered by Pickton, a friendly associate, had informed police she had picked up a prostitute with her friend Pickton. And later, at his pig farm, she had seen him skinning the woman's body inside his barn. "There was no doubt in my mind that Pickton and Ellingsen (the woman friend of Pickton's) were involved in the murders of prostitutes", Staff St. Connor wrote in documents used at the inquiry.

"It was suggested by some members [that an undercover operation on Ellingsen] would be a waste of time and money. That she was 'crazy', cocaine addicted and hallucinated and what she saw was actually a pig hanging in the barn and not a human ... There was a difference of opinion as to whether the information [was] reliable enough for the investigation to continue."

It did not. Staff Sgt.Connor was promoted and pulled from the case. He did ask for a secondment back to the investigation, but his request was denied. And Willie Pickton went on pursuing his killing spree unmolested by the short arm of the law. Until he was arrested, in 2002. And eventually found guilty of murder. He is suspected of having murdered 26 women altogether.

The inquiry into the investigation is proceeding.