The gate opens electronically and
the bus sloshes down a mud-covered
concrete drive. He has been overly
polite on the journey. All pleases
and thank yous. Now, at the trailer,
his manner switches. He is abusive,
foul-mouthed, and violent. He forces
her into handcuffs. She’s begging for
drugs. He waves a hypodermic at her.
But it is full of methanol, commonly
used in windscreen wiper fluid. He
shoves her onto the bed, gags her, and
has anal sex with her. Then he pulls out
a revolver with a dildo over the barrel,
and shoots her through the vagina. Still
furious, he drags a wire with looped
ends from the bottom of a cupboard,
and garrottes her. Her blood seeps into
the mattress.
In the dead of night he carries her
to one of the sheds where pig carcases
are butchered.
The stainless steel
machinery glints
in the moonlight
as he throws
Mona Wilson’s
pale body onto
a gleaming slab.
Unhooking an
electric saw, he
slices off her
pitifully skinny
arms, legs, feet,
hands and head,
and squashes
them into plastic
buckets. Then he
dismembers the
torso and feeds
portions into another machine. This one
minces dead pigs and slaughterhouse
waste into meat and bone slurry. The
“soup” is then boiled, cooled, pulverised
to powder, and sold as animal feed.
He carries the buckets through the
darkness to two large freezers, tips in
some of the severed body parts, and
covers them with packaged pork joints.
Emotional and physical exhaustion
overtakes him as the night’s manic
energy drains out of him. He dumps
the buckets in a corner of a disused
outbuilding. There are remains in the
bottom of them.F
or a week, no one noticed Mona
Wilson’s absence. Prostitutes are,
by profession, elusive and often change
their name as well as their address,
so it is difficult to say if they have
disappeared through choice or foul
play. Too often, no one cares.
But when she failed to contact her
family in the week before Christmas
2001, they reported her missing, and
Mona joined the list of 69 Low Track
women who had simply vanished.
Workers at the local drop-in centre
for drug users and prostitutes described
her as “a very sweet young woman
who had struggled to deal with a lot of
violence in her life and a serious drug
problem.” She wanted to come off
drugs, they said, but had been unable
to get into a treatment centre, as therewere not enough
places.
It took police a
long time to accept
that women like
Mona were likely to
be victims of a serial killer. But by the
late 1990s, activists and friends and
families of the missing were starting to
ask questions and refusing to accept the
excuses police were giving them.
The official search for Vancouver’s
missing women began in 1998 after an
Aboriginal group sent police a list of
victims with a demand for a thorough
investigation.
Although some of the women were
found to have died from disease or drug
overdose and others had left Vancouver,
there were enough names to shame the
authorities into forming an investigative
task force. The four-year search for
answers had begun. Was this the work
of a serial killer or several killers?
Inspector Kim Rossmo thoughtVancouver definitely had a serial
killer in its midst. As the creator of a
geographic profiling technique designed
to map unsolved crimes and highlight
any pattern or criminal “signature”
overlooked in individual investigations,
Rossmo reported an unusual
concentration of disappearances in
Low Track. His superiors rubbished
the theory, but Rossmo stood by it, and
resigned from the force after receiving a
punitive demotion.
But in the absence of a corpse orcrime scene or even a specific date for
most of the disappearances, forensic
evidence was non-existent and the
police often felt they were chasing
shadows. Pimps and prostitutes were
reluctant to co-operate with the same
police who might throw them in jail,
and resources were constantly limited
despite increasing media attention.
They plodded on, however, sifting
suspects and trying to distinguish
between the beatings and stabbings
endured routinely by women who work
the streets, and the brutality of a sadist
who may have murdered more than 60
women.Unhooking an electric
saw, he slices off her
pitifully skinny arms,
legs, feet, hands and
head, and squashes
them into plastic
buckets. Then he
dismembers the torsoAbove, Pickton pictured during a TV documentary made
at the pig farm. Left inset, murdered Sereena Abotsway.
Below, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside