That Lonely Section of Hell

by Lori Shenher

  HUNTER S. THOMPSON, KINGDOM OF FEAR

  ON FEBRUARY 22, 2002, Robert Pickton slept on a cold mattress in a Surrey detachment jail cell. His cellmate was an undercover RCMP officer. When I arrived at the detachment early that morning, I sat down in a video room with Sergeant John Woodlock, an RCMP member and the undercover officer’s handler. We stared at the video monitor showing Pickton asleep in his cell. It felt surreal sitting there looking at him, this object of my thoughts for so many months. John and I had ski-raced together twenty years earlier in Calgary, and he shared his disgust with me. Pickton had masturbated almost immediately upon entering the cell the previous night and, to the horror of his poor cellmate, would do so several times throughout the night.

  Eventually, the members of the RCMP Forensic Interview Team arrived and began preparation for the long day of interviewing ahead. The mood was high and expectant of success—these were the best and brightest interviewers in the province, and they were not accustomed to failure: the goal was a confession. I was joined by VPD Homicide Detective Phil Little and RCMP sergeant Randy Hundt, a forensics expert, and we were taken to a larger meeting room outfitted with a large projection screen so that we could watch the interview from there. Throughout the day, several high-ranking RCMP members would come and go, but the three of us remained throughout.

  Sergeant Bill Fordy was first in the room, and he spoke to the monitor before Pickton came in. He had the most difficult job—to lay out the groundwork of the investigation for Pickton so that he could understand the case facing him. The first interviewer is much like a starting pitcher—often the confession isn’t given to the starter; it is the closer who hears it. As the first interviewer, you are in a thankless, often frustrating position and are frequently left wondering whether the person has even heard or grasped what you’ve said. Not until the person confesses do you see that you’ve done your job.

  Fordy apologized for the way he might have to speak about the women, suggesting that this would be a tactic and in no way represented his own feelings or judgments about the victims. I found this to be a sensitive and compassionate preamble that would be likely to put family members and loved ones at ease when the time came for the tape to be viewed in court. This statement moved me unexpectedly, and I had to fight to hide my emotions from the others in the room. My objective was to observe and try to understand as much as I could about this man who stood accused of such unimaginable crimes.

  For this reason, I made no notes during the interview. I would have had to provide them to the court, and that was not my function. My description of this interview is, therefore, based on my recollection of what was said and the spirit in which it was said. When I paraphrase, it is in my language, not Pickton’s—unless I specify otherwise—because his language was at times incomprehensible and so lacking in focus that it was often impossible to fully decipher.

  Fordy brought Pickton into the interview room just after ten o’clock, and the two sat down. The room was furnished with a few upholstered chairs, a video monitor and VCR, a table, and an easel. Pickton looked haggard, his hair unkempt and scraggly, and he had several days’ growth of beard. He was the personification of Charles M. Schultz’s Pig-Pen, all grown up and accused of horrific crimes. Fordy explained the two murder charges to Pickton and reiterated his right to speak to counsel, confirming that Pickton had spoken to a lawyer that morning. Pickton looked at the floor, and often his answers were incoherent mumblings, difficult for us to understand over the monitor.

  Fordy assured Pickton that he would treat him with dignity and respect and that he expected the same in return from Pickton. The two shook hands on this, and Pickton appeared taken aback at Fordy’s earnest attempt to treat him like a person; it seemed to throw off his plan to appear uninterested. It also seemed that Pickton was only half-listening; he would grunt or chuckle slightly when Fordy told him he was being investigated in the disappearances of fifty women and had so far been charged with the murders of two. Hearing that number shocked me, as it first had when I began looking at the Project Evenhanded material on my first day. I assumed these were women who had gone missing from outside of Vancouver or after my time on the case. Pickton made some halfhearted assertions that he wasn’t guilty but was the victim of some sort of conspiracy or setup.

  As is often done in the rapport-building phase of an interview, Fordy spoke about himself in an effort to bond with and create empathy in Pickton. The goal is to allow the accused to see the interviewer as a human being, not merely a police officer in a position of authority. Throughout this portion of the interview, Pickton appeared to be almost slow or mentally deficient, referring to himself at various times as “just a pig man” and a simple, hardworking guy. He sat hunched over in his chair, turned slightly away from the table holding the TV monitor, his feet tucked up underneath his legs on the chair.

  Fordy told Pickton a story of the worst thing that had happened in his life, about how a hockey injury cut short his career and ended his dream of playing professionally. Fordy asked Pickton what the worst thing was that had happened to him, and Pickton talked about being stabbed in 1997. He referred to himself as being “nailed to a cross” by that event, though it was unclear what he meant by this. Pickton’s answers to Fordy’s questions were bizarre and almost ridiculously simple and inappropriate, considering the gravity of his situation.

  Eventually, the conversation led to Pickton’s mother, who died of cancer in 1979, and Pickton quoted the exact date. He told Fordy how close the two of them were, how he got his work ethic from his mother, what a strong person she had been, and how he had always tried to emulate this strength and work as hard as she had. He said he respected her strong mind and her willpower. Fordy went on to talk about the best thing that had happened in his life—having his children—and asked Pickton to tell him what the best thing in his life was. Pickton said it was hard work—work was the best thing in his life.

  After some reflection, Pickton offered that he had gone on a holiday once. I leaned in close to the monitor, expecting to hear him tell of some trip to Hawaii or Mexico to lie in the sun. Pickton said he went to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1974—his one holiday away from Port Coquitlam and the farm that both sustained and trapped him. He was twenty-four years old and had money in his pocket and friends to visit, and within a week of being there, he met a woman named Connie and they fell in love.

  They became engaged and spent the next five weeks together, hanging out, traveling around the area, and meeting people. He told of free cherry pie being given away in the streets with a hint of disdain, as though this waste was offensive to him. He said several times he figured Connie was probably married with kids by now. It was an odd thing to say—as though he still thought about her often and wondered whether she would be available today. He said he had to return to the farm, and she had a job she couldn’t leave in Pontiac, Michigan, so they went their separate ways. His resentment toward the farm was obvious as he spoke. He continued to speak in his mumbling, rambling manner.

  He and Fordy talked briefly about Pickton’s siblings, Dave and Linda, and he was clear that he and Linda weren’t close and had never spent much time together, as she had left the farm at a young age to attend Catholic school and go on to university. Pickton seemed uncertain whether she had become a lawyer or a realtor. When talking about Dave, Pickton seemed almost indifferent, as though he tolerated Dave and merely allowed him to control and dominate him. I got the sense that he enjoyed making Dave believe that he controlled him, but that, in reality, it might have been the other way around.

  Several times during the conversation, Pickton would go off on a rambling explanation of his life philosophy in connection with a particular question. He portrayed himself as having a live-and-let-live attitude and of accepting other people’s faults. He expressed the belief that we’re here today, gone tomorrow, and that’s all it’s really about—and that the best die first. He had a very casual attitude about death and several times said that
someday you won’t wake up and life will go on. He wouldn’t commit to naming anyone as his best friend but preferred to explain how he helped anyone who asked for it without judging. He said he didn’t care whether people were honest but then said he disrespected people who stole.

  Pickton told a story about being injured trying to break up a fight between two boars on his farm. He dragged himself to the hospital for treatment, but the staff couldn’t do anything for him other than wrap up his wounds. He was told to rest, but it was the height of summer and there was much work to be done. He described how he climbed up on his tractor in the midday heat and worked, puss streaming down his injured leg, heat blisters forming and breaking on his back. He told Fordy he stayed on that tractor and worked, despite his pain, despite the heat, and it was clear he took a great deal of pride in this.

  He told another story about being injured by the hogs on the farm when he was younger, and from these two stories, it seemed there arose a respect bordering on hatred for these beasts. My sense was these events galvanized Pickton. He made a decision to never be conquered by these animals again and turned into the slaughtering machine he would become locally famous for, killing up to 150 pigs a week. He had been close to other animals—a calf he raised as a young boy and a horse he would later have to put down because of injury—but they had disappointed him, causing him a great deal of sadness, and it seemed he decided not to go through the pain of losing a loved one again.

  The story of his horse was bizarre. Fordy asked him about it because the head of a horse was mounted on the wall of the trailer on Pickton’s property. Again, Pickton quoted the dates and times of the horse’s birth and death as though they were yesterday, even though both events had taken place more than twenty years ago. His command of dates was almost savant-like, and I suspected that if he had killed these women, he would probably be able to recite every detail surrounding the events. I wasn’t at all certain I was prepared to hear that.

  He had to put the horse down because another of the horses kicked his horse in the leg and the damage was irreparable. He put it down, then loaded it into his truck to take to a taxidermist for mounting, but there was some problem with the truck and Pickton ended up hauling the head—blood leaking from the burlap sack he carried it in—onto a city bus. The people on the bus stared at him, but no one spoke to him, and he just sat there, stunned in his grief. Thinking back, he said, they must have thought he was crazy.

  He also told a story about the calf he had raised, which was another pivotal event in his life. Pickton wasn’t more than ten years old and played with the calf like a pet. He came home from school one day and couldn’t see the animal anywhere in the yard, so he set out to find it. Because he had trained the calf to stay away from the barn, where the slaughtering was done, he didn’t think to look there first, telling himself his calf wouldn’t go there after being told not to. Finally, after exhausting all other options, he went to look in the barn and found his calf—his special friend—hanging upside down, butchered. He was clearly devastated, though he seemed to try to downplay the event’s effect on him in front of Fordy. He said he had never spent time in the barn before that incident. He didn’t like the killing.

  Fordy asked Pickton how he got into butchering pigs, and Pickton explained the process to him, stressing the need to do it cleanly and not rush, because the meat is for the public’s consumption. He was obviously proud of this work and became quite self-deprecating when Fordy suggested that Pickton was the best butcher around—he said that everyone has their own way of doing things and they all butcher animals. He was unable to estimate how many pigs he had killed but allowed it could have been more than ten thousand over the years.

  Fordy began to introduce the evidence against Pickton and to explain DNA profiling and blood spatter evidence. Pickton appeared to become lost and uninterested almost immediately, asking Fordy more than once what this had to do with him. Eventually, Fordy and Pickton agreed that for DNA to be at a scene a person must have been there physically. I sat watching, wondering if this man had any clue what was happening or if he really was the stunned, slow hayseed he was making himself out to be.

  Fordy left the room for a moment and brought in a large poster board displaying photos of the fifty missing women and set it off to the side. I couldn’t see whether their names were beneath their photos; nor could I make out each woman’s identity. But the board was a looming and ominous presence in the room, and I knew it bore many of those same images I had stared up at for long hours in our project room. Pickton would not look directly at it until Fordy began to point to various photos and ask questions about the women.

  Fordy asked Pickton to tell him which of these women had been out to his farm. Fordy began with number one, and Pickton said she had been out to the farm “lots.” For some of the other photos, Pickton said he didn’t know the woman; others he commented were pretty. When shown number twenty-six, he said she looked like Lynn. I leaned forward, thinking he must be referring to Lynn Ellingsen. Fordy asked Pickton whether he would want that to be Lynn in the picture, and Pickton didn’t respond. Pickton then asked Fordy to show him which ones he was charged with murdering, and Fordy pointed to Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson. Pickton exclaimed, “Who the hell is she?” to one of their pictures, and it came out sounding phony and rehearsed. This was the first indication I saw that perhaps the dumb pig farmer persona really was an act.

  The conversation turned to sex, and Fordy asked Pickton to explain what he meant by sex. Pickton seemed particularly obtuse on this point, ignoring Fordy’s questions. Pickton asserted that he hadn’t had sex in more than a year and that had been with a woman named Roxanne. Fordy asked questions about Roxanne’s sexual skills, and Pickton replied that she was a very, very nice person. He was indifferent about his first sexual experience, first saying there wasn’t much to tell about it, then saying he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember his first sex worker experience. He said he hadn’t had sex with Connie, his fiancée from Michigan. Pickton’s responses to this whole line of questioning seemed to be deliberately obtuse and out of place for someone who demonstrated such a solid memory in so many other areas.

  Fordy played a videotape for Pickton. It was difficult to hear the tape, but it contained an interview with a man named Scott Chubb, a Pickton associate and frequent visitor to the farm, who would later testify in the criminal trial. The gist of the tape seemed to be that Chubb had seen Pickton do things to women, including injecting them with antifreeze. Pickton seemed shocked by this tape, stunned that someone would actually come to the police and say these things. He shook his head over and over saying, “What? What? Is that Scott Chubb? Is that Scott Chubb?” He told Fordy he had spoken to Chubb on the telephone just a couple of nights earlier. Fordy told him Chubb would be giving evidence against him, and Pickton responded by asking, “He’s going to give evidence? After everything I helped him with?” He seemed to imply that Chubb was involved in the same type of behavior as he was, but he refused to elaborate. Later in the interview, Pickton repeated his disbelief at Chubb’s involvement.

  At this point in the interview, Dana Lillies—the female RCMP constable who had been talking with Pickton at the jobsite before his arrest—arrived and brought lunch for Pickton and Fordy. Fordy left, and Lillies offered to sit with Pickton and keep him company. Pickton seemed pleased to see her, and she acted as though she was genuinely concerned about his well-being. As they talked, we saw another, very different side of Robert Pickton.

  He was very quiet and non-confrontational and said several times that he didn’t deserve to live, didn’t deserve Lillies’s kindness, didn’t deserve to eat and that he should be on death row. It was like watching a child try to elicit sympathy from his mother, saying demeaning things about himself so that she would respond that he was wrong and that he did deserve all those things and so much more.

  Lillies played the role well and managed to portray a level of caring I know she did not truly feel. S
he told Pickton she had seen a side of him others hadn’t and she cared about him as a human being. He seemed to lap this up, and it was obvious he wanted nothing more than to believe that this professional, attractive, bright woman could actually be interested in him. Lillies tried to steer the conversation toward the investigation, but Pickton seemed wary and said little about the specifics of the case. Still, her mere presence served to illuminate the complexity of Pickton’s personality—seeing him with Fordy and then with Lillies was like watching two different people.

  Pickton repeatedly told Lillies he was finished, that his life was over, that he was “nailed to the cross.” She made some bold attempts to get him talking, asking questions about a dildo that was found on the end of a handgun and wondering aloud how Pickton’s DNA and Mona Wilson’s DNA could both have been found on the end of that dildo. He said he sometimes used the dildo as a silencer for the gun because of the new subdivision beside his property. She said that didn’t explain how DNA ended up there, and he didn’t respond.

  He kept going back to Scott Chubb, shaking his head incredulously and saying, “Of all guys, Scott Chubb.” Lillies asked Pickton whether he had some dirt on Chubb, and Pickton answered that was neither here nor there. But the implication was that perhaps Chubb had a few skeletons—proverbial or real—of his own in his closet.

  Lillies played a videotaped compilation of all the local media coverage since the search began on the Pickton farm on February 5. He watched for a few moments but then asked Lillies to stop the tape and asked to go back to his cell.

  Lillies left, and Fordy resumed his task of laying out the evidence against Pickton. This was a particularly difficult job, because all of the evidence at this point was purely circumstantial. Pickton had a contract with the City of Vancouver to buy abandoned vehicles that were headed for the junkyard, and they began to talk about this. Pickton seemed to believe that he could explain some of the evidence—such as Abotsway’s asthma inhalers—as actually having come to his property in one of these vehicles. He seemed to focus on some black gym bag and told Fordy that Dinah Taylor would straighten the whole thing out and that the bag belonged to Nancy, Pickton’s girlfriend.