That Lonely Section of Hell

by Lori Shenher

  Specifically, we thought the language of the release was inflammatory and likely to meet indifference from the sex workers while inciting panic among many outside the community. Typically, these women knew better than anyone the dangers associated with working the streets, and news of the operation of a serial killer would not come as a surprise to them. Warning the women would not stop them from working and putting themselves at risk; it would merely satisfy Downtown Eastside community leaders that we were doing something. Greer and Rossmo agreed to hold off on the release.

  After Biddlecombe left the room, I approached Rossmo.

  “Can you help me with something?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I need to analyze the number of missing women I have so far, to show it’s statistically unusual and a real problem, not just a strange blip or something. Can you do that?” His eyes lit up.

  “I can do an epidemiological analysis of the numbers to look for patterns or anomalies over the years,” he answered.

  “Perfect. Come and see me and I’ll give you what you need.” I lowered my voice. “And keep it between us. Biddlecombe will have an aneurism if he knows I’m showing you the files.”

  After this meeting, two of the participants, Sergeant Axel Hovbrender of the Sexual Offence Squad and Constable Dave Dickson, joined me back at my office. I’d known Dave from my time on patrol, and he would prove to be an invaluable ally and friend over the years. He deserves an entire book on his own; his work with the youth and sex workers in the Downtown Eastside is legendary and his compassion boundless. We talked for a few minutes about the meeting before Dave begged off to get back on the road, responding to his constantly vibrating pager for which so many desperate, disadvantaged kids had the number. As always, he left me with strict orders to call him if I needed anything. Everybody calls Dave when they need anything.

  Axel sat quietly for several long moments. I didn’t know him well, but my experience of him had always been as someone who didn’t speak often, but when he did, people listened.

  “Lor, I don’t have a lot of advice for you. You seem to know where you’re going with this.” He paused. “But I will tell you this: document everything, every single thing, and ask for help, ask for what you need to do the job. Document it every time you ask for help and document it when they turn you down.” He looked meaningfully into my eyes, and I swallowed hard, feeling a weight descend upon me. I knew he was sending me an important message in the only way he could, without scaring me right off the entire police department. He knew how this was very likely to go, and he was trying to protect me.

  More than any other moment in this investigation, I am grateful for those words, because they woke me up and forced me to see what I was getting into. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch, but I took Axel’s advice and documented everything I did as well as I could. I asked for help, and I wrote it down when help was denied. I even kept a list of what I’d written down so that when many of my most important documents seemed to disappear before the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, I could at least say I had had them at some point. As someone told me during my legal prep for the inquiry: He with the most notes wins. No one wins in this story. But I was able to stand up for my work, or at least that which wasn’t misplaced years later by Project Evenhanded, the RCMP’s exploration of missing and murdered women in British Columbia.

  4

  The Initial Pickton Information

  • • •

  “If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.”

  PYTHAGORAS

  IN A JULY 1998 conversation with Wayne Leng, Bill Hiscox said that a “Willie” Pickton had a large farm in Port Coquitlam, a suburb of Vancouver, and often bragged about his ability to grind up bodies and dispose of them. He knew a woman who had been in Pickton’s trailer and had seen several women’s purses and identification cards and “bloody clothing in bags.” Leng encouraged Hiscox to call me, but instead he called Crime Stoppers and left a tip that Pickton was someone we should look at. A few weeks later, he left a second tip with the same message. As is typical with Crime Stoppers tips, Hiscox left these anonymously. When the tips reached me, I immediately researched everything I could get my hands on about the man I would come to know as Robert William Pickton.

  A week or so before talking to Hiscox, Leng had received an eerie call to his tip line. An older man or possibly a woman with a raspy, wheezy voice said that if Leng was looking for Sarah, he wouldn’t find her because she was dead, and that’s what was going to happen to more girls just like her; every Friday one would end up dead.

  Leng released this taped message to the media, and it was played repeatedly the same week I began my new job in Missing Persons. I was inundated with calls, faxes, and anonymous letters from people with tips about whose voice it might be. Excited by so many potentially fruitful leads to pursue, I dove into the work. But after interviewing twenty suspects, I was able to quickly rule them all out. All of their voices were distinctly different from that of the caller, none of them behaved at all suspiciously, and almost none had links to any of the missing women. I found out later that the call had been made as a prank. Little did I know this would be the only point in the investigation that the public would become involved in trying to solve the mystery of the missing women.

  When I received Hiscox’s first Crime Stoppers tip, I ran the few short steps from the Missing Persons office to Crime Stoppers next door, breathless with excitement and determined to get the tipster’s information. Within moments, the constable in Crime Stoppers, Linda Malcolm, patiently explained to me that she could not identify the caller.

  “Lori, I completely understand why you’re asking, but you know I can’t give you the name, even if I had one.” She smiled, her blue eyes kind.

  “Can’t you even give me a hint?” I pleaded, my hands in prayer position in front of my chest. She laughed. “Not even for you.”

  “Can you show me how to use PIRS?”

  “That I can do!”

  I sat down at the RCMP Police Information Retrieval System (PIRS) terminal and entered Pickton’s name and date of birth. Electrified, I read that he had one entry on his criminal record—a 1997 stay of proceedings for attempted murder and forcible confinement in Port Coquitlam. As I searched through the details, I learned the victim was a sex worker picked up from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and both she and Pickton had nearly died from knife wounds that night.

  “BINGO!” I shouted, nearly jumping up out of the chair, thinking, This is what a serial killer looks like! Linda showed me how to find the lead investigator’s name and contact information.

  I racked my brain for a way to learn the caller’s identity that would be both legal and admissible in court. I couldn’t conceive of all the ways it might play out, but I knew every step I took leading to Pickton would be scrutinized later. I waited for the caller to come forward, and when I wasn’t interviewing men in an attempt to identify the voice on the tape, I used my time to research Pickton and connect with the Coquitlam RCMP officers who had arrested him. During this brief time, I felt the most alive, the most useful, the most certain the work I was doing mattered.

  From this research, I tracked down the Coquitlam RCMP officer who had been in charge of the file, Corporal Mike Connor. A couple of days after we received Hiscox’s tip, I reached Mike on the phone. It was obvious that Pickton was someone he wanted in jail and thought about often, and that this particular event bothered him deeply.

  He told me that Pickton had picked up Anderson*, an Indigenous woman and Downtown Eastside sex worker, and taken her to his farm in Port Coquitlam for sex. Somehow, the date had gone wrong, and Pickton and Anderson ended up in a life-and-death struggle in which they each received serious stab wounds—Pickton a single wound, Anderson multiple wounds. Both managed to get themselves to the hospital, and despite having c
ardiac arrest twice on the operating table, Anderson lived. Pickton’s injuries were less severe, but he later alleged that the interaction with Anderson had left him with hepatitis.

  “Do you know why the charges were stayed?” I asked Mike, certain he’d be able to tell me the reasons behind the Crown’s decision to drop the case.

  “No. It seemed as though it had something to do with her drug use, that they didn’t think she’d make a credible witness because of her habit.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” I asked, incredulous.

  “I don’t know. I’ll go out and have a talk with the Crown prosecutor again now that this has come up,” he went on. “I never really understood it, either. If she’d died on the table, we’d have had him cold for murder.”

  We agreed that we would keep in touch and that I would let him know if I tracked down the Crime Stoppers caller we would come to know as Hiscox. After talking to Mike, I was certain Pickton was worth pursuing. In the meantime, Leng continued to push Hiscox until he finally agreed to contact me.

  Of all the people in Pickton’s circle, it is Hiscox I have the most respect for, because he is the one person who seemed driven by altruism. He became involved at his own peril and without any personal agenda that I’m aware of. He had his own problems, including drug addiction, alcohol abuse, and difficulties with his marriage. Work was scarce and he was collecting welfare benefits. For more than a decade, his substance abuse had frequently landed him in jail for violence or property crimes, and his record was long. He has since spoken quite openly about his struggles.

  But Bill Hiscox understood the concept of doing the right thing, and among the vast number of men who had been on the Pickton property over the past twenty years, he was the only one who put himself on the line and told me when we first spoke, “What’s going on at this place is wrong, and if girls are getting killed, he [Pickton] needs to be stopped.” Despite the scores of men and women who had heard the rumors, had seen the oddities, had been to the parties and participated—perhaps unwillingly, perhaps not—in the depraved games we learned about after Pickton’s 2002 arrest, Hiscox was the only one who felt it was important enough to say something, even if that meant the party would be over.

  I have never viewed human sources as “rats.” Over the course of my career—before and long after I dealt with Hiscox—I saw some police officers treat sources as roadkill to be driven over on the way to a criminal conviction, no matter how serious the crime. Too often, these people are criminals themselves and seen by the police as a means to an end, treated as though any further damage to them and their lives as a result of helping us is simply the cost of doing business. The higher the stakes—organized crime is a perfect example—the more pressure police place on human sources to perform without regard for their future lives.

  Within these short weeks, I’d been led to an excellent potential suspect, and I could barely contain my excitement. This was exactly the type of tip I had envisioned receiving when I took this case, and I eagerly followed it up. I imagined what could be happening on that farm. I knew Pickton possessed at least one backhoe, and I pictured him digging bunkers, perhaps to hold his captives alive or to bury them. My mind ran through all sorts of possibilities as I prepared myself to question Hiscox about what he knew of the place. I researched other cases like this in the U.S. and the U.K. and knew that hidden rooms and torture chambers were not outside the realm of possibility for such depraved killers. I felt an urgency to get on the farm in case there was a chance that any of the women might be rescued. I lay awake at night plotting legal ways we could get on the farm to learn more.

  I ruminated on my conversation with Mike Connor about why the 1997 charges against Pickton had been stayed. He was obviously frustrated by his impression that Crown counsel hadn’t felt confident of a conviction because of Anderson’s drug use and alleged unreliability. I found this bizarre. One hundred percent of my court experience had been in the Provincial Court of British Columbia and the B.C. Supreme Court, and if every case involving offenders and victims with drug problems or credibility issues were thrown out, those courtrooms would be vacant.

  I also knew from my time on the Downtown Eastside that a drug problem didn’t automatically turn a person into an idiot or a liar or give them amnesia. We agreed that had Anderson died from her injuries, the case would be a slam-dunk murder or at least manslaughter conviction. Mike told me he was exploring ways to have that case reopened, and I sensed he was understating how important this was to him. We agreed to meet and review the file, which we did a bit later in August, after Mike returned from summer vacation.

  Reading Mike’s file filled me with a deep sense of foreboding. I felt even more strongly that we were onto something with Pickton. Over and over, I kept thinking, Nobody tries this the first time out of the gate; he’s done it before. I viewed the entire case rather clinically at this point; there was no room for emotion or thinking of my victims as real people. I felt the protective professional detachment from emotion that had served me so well in my career thus far—though that wouldn’t last.

  As I looked more closely at the files of the missing women reported to our office, I saw the spike in numbers starting in 1995. From 1978 to 1992, six women remained missing and I couldn’t see any who were missing from 1993 to 1995. With a jolt, I realized there were three women still missing from 1995, two from 1996, and five from 1997. And 1998 was shaping up to surpass them all with eleven, and the year wasn’t over. Twenty-one Downtown Eastside women missing since 1995. I didn’t need Rossmo’s analysis to tell me someone was killing these women, but backing up my suspicions with science might help me get the resources I was going to need.

  I became more convinced that Pickton was our man. Mike and I agreed to place an entry in the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) system flagging Robert Pickton as a person of interest in the missing women investigation and asking any police members who came in contact with Pickton to page both Mike and me at any time, twenty-four hours a day.

  FROM THE TIME I first became aware of Pickton, in July, I had been trying to locate Anderson for an interview, but she had been living on the street, and whenever I would find out where she had slept the previous night, she’d be gone by the time I got there. On August 21, my opportunity finally arrived. Anderson had been arrested. After a wild cocaine binge in skid row, she resisted arrest and drove off in a police car left running at the scene when the officers it belonged to—one of them a very good friend of mine—had tried to arrest her. She drove into a wall in the same block and found herself facing a number of charges in the Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women.

  Anderson and I knew each other from my patrol days on the Downtown Eastside, and when I asked to interview her at the correctional center, she was cooperative and affable; she had been there several days, free of the drugs that made her paranoid and violent. We talked for nearly two hours, and she told me about that fateful night in March 1997 when she had met Robert Pickton. Her story was riveting. I had no doubt that she was telling the truth and that she had been in a fight for her life.

  Her recollection of the events mirrored her previous statement perfectly—typical for someone who has been through significant trauma and is telling the truth. Lies are easy to tell once, but they are almost impossible to retell identically. Listening to her, I couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t find her or her story credible. She would have made an excellent witness in court; she just would have needed someone to take care of her and ensure that she wasn’t using drugs the days of her testimony.

  In those days, before I had learned that the taped message was a hoax, I recorded a voice “lineup” cassette tape to try to determine who the mystery person on Wayne Leng’s tip line could be. I reasoned that if photo lineups worked, there was no reason a vocal lineup couldn’t be used the same way. I knew it might not be admissible in court, but I carried on, believing it might still have some investigative value. I recorded several of
the homicide detectives in my office speaking the same lines as the raspy-voiced person for comparison with the original caller.

  Anderson believed she would know Pickton’s voice if she heard it again. I played the tape for her in our interview and asked her to stop me if she heard any voice she knew. She listened intently as each of the six men said there would be more women “just like Sarah”—dead—every Friday. When the tape was done, I asked her if she recognized any of the voices. She shook her head sadly, so eager to help, not wanting to be wrong. She didn’t recognize any of the voices.

  I tried to impress on her how important it would be for her not to return to the streets on her release from the correctional center, because I believed there was a real possibility Pickton would try to pick her up again. She was genuinely afraid, but her addiction would prove far more powerful than her fear. In less than a year, she was back smoking crack and getting into cars with strange men to support herself, a little more cautious but every bit as much at risk. I felt sick with worry for her, but I was powerless to do anything more.

  A Letter to Anderson

  • • •

  DEAR ANDERSON,

  It’s been years since we last spoke, but I think of you often. Resilient. Feisty. Indomitable. All words that describe you. All words that describe many of your sisters now inconceivably missing and dead.

  I know you’re haunted by them.

  I’m thinking back to that 1998 morning I was driving into work, listening to the news. As I heard the announcer tell the story of a woman—high on cocaine and running in and out of traffic on the Downtown Eastside—I wondered if she could be you. Several cops tried to get hold of her, and finally they did. But she was not to be held. She escaped. Jumped into a running police car, drove a few yards, and crashed into a building. The woman’s name was Anderson, and I shouted Bingo! knowing I had finally found you. You were in custody.