That Lonely Section of Hell

by Lori Shenher

  I took most of July 1999 off for vacation—the first time in my career I used all my vacation time in a single block. Already, I felt I needed a break from the impossible task of trying to build a 747 from wood and a few nails, and I needed to recharge my batteries. Digestive problems, headaches, and recurring nightmares began to plague me early in 1999, and I hoped all I needed was some time off. This investigation didn’t feel to me the way hard work felt; I knew hard work and welcomed a challenge, but I was becoming more and more aware that my efforts were making little difference to the victims, and that tugged at my spirit in a way I’d never experienced before. The tiniest seeds of scepticism and doubt—in what I was doing, in the support for our work, in everything I used to believe about pursuing murderers—grew slowly and silently. I hoped this just meant I needed a little time away.

  The rest of the Project Amelia team remained at work, and Alex took over my role as file coordinator in my absence. Little did I know the most vital tip of the file would come in when I was on holiday.

  While I was away, Geramy took a call from Jim Brown, a Coquitlam RCMP constable. He wanted to pass on information he’d received from a source about a male and female—and perhaps others—killing Downtown Eastside prostitutes. It quickly became evident that Brown wanted to pass on to us not only the information but also the source himself, which was highly unusual, if not unheard of, for an RCMP officer to do. Geramy assigned Mark Chernoff to follow up on the tip.

  On July 19, Mark met with the confidential source, Ross Caldwell. He told Mark about a murder that occurred on the Picktons’ Dominion Avenue property sometime between February and April. Caldwell explained that a close associate of Pickton’s, Lynn Ellingsen, had told him this story, and it was through her that Caldwell had come to know and occasionally work for Pickton. Ellingsen told Caldwell she and Pickton had gone downtown in a Chevy S-10 pickup truck and enticed a sex worker with drugs, booze, and money to come with them to the Port Coquitlam farm.

  Mark called me at home to tell me about this new break, and I immediately wanted to rush back to work. I felt invigorated and filled with a renewed sense of purpose. I knew this was exactly the boost I—and our team—needed. We shared our various theories excitedly, agreeing that this was too eerily similar to the Hiscox tip and we just had to be on the right track with Pickton.

  As with any source information, there were obvious problems with the story. The first order of business was to confirm that Caldwell was not somehow Hiscox—especially since the information was similar. We compared notes and began to realize this was probably a separate circle of people around Pickton, probably known to Hiscox and Yelds but not closely related. This information elevated Pickton from a strong possible suspect to a highly likely suspect in my opinion—we had smelled smoke before; now we could see the inferno.

  Immediately, Mark rightly wondered whether Ellingsen’s involvement could be more than what she was relating, but he also recognized that the first step would be getting her to tell us that story. According to Caldwell, Ellingsen’s story was that Pickton gave them each some money—hers was for helping to bring the woman out there, and the sex worker was paid for her time. According to Ellingsen, she went into a separate room in the trailer so that Pickton and the woman could be alone, presumably to complete the sexual arrangement. Sometime later, Ellingsen said she went out on the property to look for Pickton, wondering where he had gone. As she approached the slaughterhouse, she saw what she believed was a female human body hanging from a meat hook and Robert Pickton standing beside it removing the skin. She later told Caldwell she didn’t know human fatty tissue was yellow, an ominous indication she was telling the truth.

  There was much more work to do, and obviously we needed to interview Ellingsen in person or, failing that, enlist an undercover operator to befriend her and hear the story firsthand. My mind spun with ideas, and I felt I had a sense of Ellingsen from the start. Why was so much time unaccounted for from when Ellingsen left for the other room in the small trailer to when she saw the body? How much of what had happened might she have actually assisted with or taken part in?

  Ellingsen’s motivation would become clear: she told Caldwell she was using what she had seen to extort money from Pickton—blood money to buy her silence and ensure that she wouldn’t go to the police. Clearly, she had been bothered enough by what she had seen—and possibly done—to tell someone. And that someone was Caldwell, who told Mark that she appeared genuinely disturbed by the incident—but not disturbed enough to mess up her cozy arrangement with Pickton. We later learned that she had told her story to others as well.

  Caldwell appeared credible and forthright in his dealings with Mark and his partner, Ron Lepine. He had a history as an informant for the RCMP and had been paid for information in the past that turned out to be factual and useful; although later, during the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, retired RCMP corporal Frank Henley referred to Caldwell as a “treacherous” informant, meaning he was not to be trusted. I did not know Caldwell; nor did I ever meet him. When Mark and Ron began dealing with him, he sounded not unlike Hiscox, trying to clean up from a substance abuse problem and get his life back on track.

  On July 28, I met with Fred Biddlecombe, Geramy, Mark, and Ron after the two detectives’ second meeting with Caldwell a couple of days before and asked them whether anyone found this source hand-off from Brown unusual. After my informant experiences in patrol and later with Hiscox, and seeing the proprietary way police officers protect their sources from other officers, I found this a little strange. My colleagues all commented that they’d never seen a Mountie offer to share a source, let alone actually pass one on so easily with no period of transition or introduction. Still, we had a hot new source and what seemed to be useful information, so we didn’t sit around puzzling over our good fortune. I’ve certainly wondered since then what Brown’s reasons were for effectively dropping Caldwell on our doorstep with no apparent further involvement.

  Mark and Ron met with Caldwell several times from July 19 to 28, and more details emerged. Caldwell was able to get a vague physical description of the woman seen hanging from the hook—she was young, Caucasian, with short reddish hair—and we felt this could be Jacqueline McDonnell, a Vancouver woman last seen in January 1999 and the only 1999 case we had on our list at that time. Later, we would discover there were others missing that year of whom we were unaware. Again, because we were unaware of some of the victims, we couldn’t see the full picture of our investigation.

  In that July 28 meeting, Fred, Geramy, Mark, Ron, and I planned our next moves. We agreed that the Coquitlam RCMP had to take the lead, since the Pickton farm was in its jurisdiction, but Mark and Ron were the logical interviewers because they had the most knowledge of Ellingsen and the best relationship with Caldwell. Mark and Ron agreed to cancel their own vacation plans for that week and contact Mike Connor to set up a meeting. I was scheduled to fly to Washington, D.C., at the end of the week for the July 31 airing of an America’s Most Wanted segment about the missing women and wanted nothing more than to cancel and stay in Vancouver to see how this would unfold. But I was already booked and had agreed to go.

  The following day, Mark and Ron met in Coquitlam with several RCMP members, including Inspector Earl Moulton and Corporal Mike Connor. They discussed the new information and confirmed that two women and two men—Yelds, Ellingsen, Hiscox, and Caldwell—had come forward with similar information about Robert Pickton killing sex workers. When Mark returned to our office and relayed the details of the meeting to me, he was stunned that some officers were still raising doubts, questioning whether our sources were credible and whether Ellingsen had actually seen what she said she had.

  I was dumbfounded. This was more than normal investigative second-guessing or devil’s advocacy at play. There were some problems with Caldwell, without question, and the RCMP members seemed to equate drug dependency with lying, which we did not believe had to go hand in hand. Mark and Ron were working
24/7 to keep Caldwell on track; he wasn’t unstable or mentally unwell at that point, merely feeling the pressure. For us, his substance abuse issues did not change the veracity of the information we believed he’d heard firsthand from Ellingsen, but it seemed to for some RCMP members.

  While the RCMP determined its next move, we decided we would mobilize the VPD Strike Force to conduct surveillance on Pickton’s property and his activities. This began on July 31, and after meeting again with Coquitlam, Mark and Ron were able to get the RCMP to commit Special O to assist with surveillance. I took off for two days in Washington, D.C., but all I really wanted was to be in the office following the surveillances and Mark and Ron’s progress with Caldwell. Both mornings, I took long runs around the National Mall, but all I could think about was Pickton and how we could get onto that farm.

  On August 3, we met with the RCMP in Coquitlam to discuss committing money and resources and forming an investigative team and an operational plan to pursue Pickton. Someone suggested that Crown counsel be consulted about how Ellingsen should be approached—as a witness or as a suspect—and a member was assigned to do this. The VPD agreed to supply Mark and Ron to assist the Coquitlam and Unsolved Homicide members. E Division—the name for the British Columbia division of the RCMP—was asked to review its commitment to the file.

  On August 4, the newly formed investigative team met in Coquitlam. Coquitlam RCMP provided three members, including Mike Connor, and Unsolved Homicide supplied Detective Bruce Ballantyne, a VPD member seconded to that team. Mark and Ron were to continue working with Caldwell, who was becoming difficult to manage. He was living in a seedy hotel in Surrey and slipping deeper into heavy drinking and drug use. Mark and Ron met with Caldwell later that day, and he provided information that concerned them deeply. A man named Ron Menard worked on the farm and hung around with Ellingsen, Pickton, and the others. Menard told Caldwell that Pickton was tired of paying Ellingsen “extortion money.” Menard had an abusive relationship with Ellingsen, and it was difficult to determine how all the players fit. It was then that Caldwell agreed to act as an agent for the police, and Mark and Ron provided him with a pager so that they could reach him anytime.

  The next day, Caldwell attended an interview with the investigative team looking tired and worn. His mental state seemed precarious, and some suspected he was under the influence of drugs, alcohol, or both. The RCMP members, with the exception of Mike Connor, were increasingly sceptical about his credibility, to the frustration of Mark and Ron, who knew that Caldwell was feeling under pressure.

  Ellingsen had told another friend, Leah Best, the story of the hanging body. Best was deeply upset by the information and was horrified when Ellingsen told her she was hoping to extort enough money to take a cruise—something she had never been able to afford because of her drug habit and poor circumstances. Best thought Ellingsen was telling the truth—she found the suggestion that anyone would make up such a story ludicrous—and took the information to the Burnaby RCMP.

  The group agreed to locate Ellingsen and bring her in for an interview, though Mark, Ron, and I questioned whether interviewing her would serve our goal of getting onto the Pickton farm and thought it would be better to make her the target of an undercover operation. We were concerned that the RCMP wanted to write her off as unreliable and stop pursuing Pickton, but this was not our jurisdiction and we were forced to do things their way. Our fears would turn out to be well founded.

  Lynn Ellingsen was first interviewed on August 10. I felt this was poorly planned, because the RCMP had rebuffed Mike, Mark, and Ron’s suggestions that surveillance and wiretap be put in place first. We had all thought that surveillance was necessary so that Ellingsen could be followed afterward and that an authorized wiretap should be set up to see and hear whether she went straight to Pickton from the interview. I also suggested that an undercover operator would be the best way to get Ellingsen to retell this story so that we could judge its truthfulness. Because she was a heavy drinker and drug user and worked at a seedy bar, I thought a female undercover operator planted there working behind the bar or waiting tables could befriend her easily, share a few beers, and engage her in a conversation about what she had seen.

  These ideas were rejected, and to this day, I don’t know why, though I suspect it was because Unsolved Homicide members refused to believe our witness information and to believe that anything sinister was going on at the Pickton farm. I later heard Missing Women Commission of Inquiry testimony from RCMP members that they feared an entire undercover team would have to be called in, an operational plan would need to be created, and the safety of members would be in jeopardy because of so much drug use among the Pickton associates. In my experience, this did not sound much different from most undercover operations involving drug users that police embark upon every day.

  It seemed no one wanted to go to the bother or expense because no one believed this was a murder investigation. I’d always worked on the premise that you rule things in until you can conclusively rule them out, so I failed to understand how the Unsolved Homicide members could so blithely discount our source information without any evidence to support dismissing it.

  Mark and Ron were initially set to conduct the Ellingsen interview and were the most logical and prepared for the job. At the last moment, they were told they would not be doing the interview. VPD Detective Bruce Ballantyne and his Unsolved Homicide partner RCMP corporal Frank Henley would take over—with little preparation and even less confidence that Ellingsen had indeed seen a hanging body. Mark and Ron were understandably upset. They were relegated to watching from the observation room of the Whalley RCMP suboffice, where they observed an eighteen-minute-long discussion between Ellingsen, Ballantyne, and Henley.

  The recording began with an acknowledgment that they had been speaking casually for a few minutes before recording. They asked Ellingsen some questions about her knowledge of Robert Pickton and her relationship with him. There were no questions about her extortion of Pickton for what she saw in the barn. The interview continued with Ellingsen alternately denying seeing a body hanging in the barn and defending her memory and asserting that being drunk doesn’t make people forget something upsetting. Ellingsen’s answers were one-word denials and short sentences, like “that’s the truth,” which many who study statement analysis believe are intended to slam the door on any further questioning but may not be indications of innocence. Unfortunately, the interviewer’s questions were not open-ended, enabling Ellingsen to answer in the negative without the need for elaboration.

  They didn’t ask any behavioral observation questions—designed to gauge truthfulness—just old-school two-on-one interrogation with no plan. After eighteen recorded minutes of conversation, Ballantyne and Henley stepped out of that room and told Mark and Ron they believed Ellingsen—they believed she had not seen what Caldwell and Best said she told them she saw.

  Mark called me from Coquitlam, his voice shaking with rage. As I listened, I had the sensation of air leaving me like a gigantic tire deflating. Ellingsen left the Coquitlam RCMP detachment without surveillance, without wiretap in place, without an undercover operation ready to launch, the object of no further plans to try to determine the veracity of her information. I was stunned and completely baffled at the apparent complete lack of a cohesive plan to rule Pickton in or out as a killer.

  As Mark and I began to puzzle through the events, we wondered whether perhaps the Mounties knew something. Maybe they have a plan and they just aren’t telling us. It had to be something like that, because it was inconceivable that they didn’t see this the way we did. We both recalled instances where we’d dealt with the RCMP before in our careers—Mark more than me—and they’d habitually failed to share information or their plans with us lowly “munis.” It certainly wouldn’t be the first time, we reasoned.

  We ended the call hopeful that maybe the RCMP were just doing their “Mountie thing” and preferred to pursue Pickton without our input. We agreed that woul
d be fine by us, and Mark returned to the office. When he got back, Mark, Ron, Geramy, and I continued to puzzle over what could make the RCMP think they could flat out deny the credibility of this information without any proof to the contrary.

  13

  Another Opportunity with Lynn Ellingsen

  • • •

  “I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.”

  LANGSTON HUGHES, I WONDER AS I WANDER

  MARK AND RON continued to pressure the Unsolved Homicide Unit, and, amazingly, Ellingsen agreed to return to the Coquitlam detachment for a second interview on August 26. To me, this was consistent with someone who had a story to tell and only needed the right prompting and reassurance to tell it, and credit must go to Henley for completing his assignment, which was to get her back in the door. She certainly hadn’t been shy about telling several friends about her experience in Pickton’s barn. In the meantime, Mike was promoted to sergeant, and we were told he would no longer be working in the General Investigation Section of Coquitlam RCMP. The Pickton investigation had just lost its best advocate in the RCMP. It was a huge loss, but we had no idea just how huge.

  The August 26 interview with Ellingsen proved little better than the first. Again, in light of their knowledge of the case and the information provided by Caldwell, Mark and Ron hoped to conduct it, but the RCMP pressed to have one of their members in the room. RCMP Constable Ruth Yurkiw and Ron began the interview together, only to have Ellingsen object to Ron’s presence when he dared to press her on what she had witnessed in Pickton’s barn. Ron voluntarily left the interview rather than compromise Ellingsen’s information by making her more uncomfortable.