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Post by ocelot on Dec 10, 2006 0:08:22 GMT -5
Pickton pleads not guilty as jury selection begins Last Updated: Saturday, December 9, 2006 | 2:49 PM ET CBC News Robert Pickton pleaded not guilty on Saturday to six counts of first-degree murder as jury selection began for a trial that is expected to get underway in January.
The one-time pig farmer from the Vancouver-area community of Port Coquitlam stood and softly said "not guilty" as each of the names of his alleged victims was read out in B.C. Supreme Court.
He entered the pleas after hundreds of potential jurors filed into the court in New Westminster to listen to instructions from Justice James Williams for a selection process that could last two weeks.
The 600 prospective jurors were among about 3,500 residents in communities near New Westminster who were chosen to report for jury duty in the Pickton case.
After a briefing, they were to be divided into groups of 30 to return on Monday to help choose 12 regular jury members and two alternates.
Prosecutor Stan Lowe said all sides are going to work hard to find jurors who are in good health, understand the proceedings and are motivated to be there for a trial that is expected to last one year.
Lowe told CBC News that in long trials such as this one, there is always a concern about keeping jurors for the duration.
"With the procedural safeguards at the outset and under our code, we're allowed to go down to as few as 10 jury members that can deliberate and reach a verdict. I want to be positive about the fact that we can do that."
But if the jury goes down to nine, a mistrial will be called and the whole process will start again.
Pickton was arrested in February 2002. If there are no delays, his trial will begin on Jan. 8.
He is accused of killing Mona Wilson, Sereena Abotsway, Andrea Joesbury, Georgina Papin, Brenda Wolfe and Marnie Frey. They were all from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.
The jurors will be paid $20 a day at first and after more than two months, they'll get $100 a day.
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Post by ocelot on Dec 10, 2006 0:09:37 GMT -5
He is only on trial for 6 murders now, but he is charged with killing 26 women. He is suspected of killing over 50 women.
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Post by ocelot on Dec 10, 2006 10:19:05 GMT -5
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Post by achebeautiful on Dec 10, 2006 10:58:39 GMT -5
Wow, I certainly hope that with all the time and effort that is expected to go into this trial that justice wins out at the end of the day. Thank you for all the links to this very interesting story. Keep us up to date.
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Post by ocelot on Jan 22, 2007 15:58:02 GMT -5
Pickton murdered, butchered 6 women: Crown
This story contains disturbing details Last Updated: Monday, January 22, 2007 | 9:47 AM PT CBC News
The Crown has begun to lay out its case against Robert William Pickton, 57, the B.C. pig farmer who is on trial on six counts of first-degree murder in connection with the disappearances of six women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
The Crown intends to prove that Pickton took the women to his home in surburban Port Coquitlam, where he murdered them, butchered their remains and then disposed of them, prosecutor Derrill Prevett told the B.C. Supreme Court jury on Monday, the first day of the trial.
Prevett also said that Pickton had the equipment and expertise to do so.
Pickton faces a total of 26 counts of first-degree murder, but only six charges will be dealt with in the trial that started Monday. He is to face the remaining 20 murder charges in a later trial.
Pickton, 57, has pleaded not guilty to all charges, none of which have been proven in court.
Prevett said that when police searched Pickton's trailer in 2002, they found belongings of missing Sereena Abotsway, and that triggered a mass search of the farm that lasted nearly two years.
When investigators checked freezers on they property, they made a disturbing discovery, he said before Justice James Williams.
They found two five-gallon laundry buckets stacked inside each other. The buckets contained the skulls, hands and partial feet of two of the missing women, Abotsway and Andrea Joesbury.
Police later discovered both heads had bullet wounds. As well, Joesbury's personal belongings were found on the Pickton property.
Prevett also told the jury that the skull, hands and feet of another missing woman, Mona Wilson, were discovered in a plastic garbage can.
He said 14 human hand bones were also found at the farm. One was identified as that of Georgia Papin, another of the six alleged victims. A tooth was also discovered, and identified as that of Marnie Frey, who had also gone missing.
All six — Abotsway, Joesbury, Wilson, Papin, Frey and Brenda Wolfe — were drug-addicted sex-trade workers who walked the streets of Canada's poorest neighbourhood.
They disappeared between 1997 and 2001.
Warns of shocking evidence
Before the Crown began its presentation, Williams warned the jury that some of the evidence would be shocking and upsetting.
"Where evidence is particularly distressing, there is a concern that it may arise feelings of revulsion and hostility, and that can overwhelm the objective and impartial approach jurors are expected to bring to their task. You should be aware of that possibility and make sure it does not happen to you."
Williams also instructed the jury to ignore all news coverage, and rely only on the evidence. The judge also ruled that family members of the women Pickton is accused of killing, who have been subpoenaed, will be allowed into court to hear the opening arguments Monday, but that those who may be called to testify in this trial will not be allowed to attend until after they testify.
Just before the trial began, the brother of one of the victims said it would not be easy to sit through the hearings.
Ernie Crey said he would force himself to attend because he wants to know what happened to the missing women, including his sister Dawn, who disappeared in 2000. She isn't among the six at the centre of this trial.
Crey said he knows at least one family whose members cannot bring themselves to enter the courtroom.
"It's affected that family so much that members of that family won't be at the trial," Crey told CBC News as he lined up outside the courtroom, waiting to be let inside.
"This [trial] will be difficult for all the families."
Whereabouts of others unknown
The 26 women — the first of whom vanished in 1995 — are among more than 60 listed as missing from the Downtown Eastside over a period stretching back to the late 1970s. What happened to the others is unknown.
Most were prostitutes and drug addicts, which limited the chances of a public outcry at their disappearances, as well as an early police response, even though some relatives and local activists had been pressing for action since the early 1990s.
A joint Vancouver police-RCMP investigation was not launched until April 2001. It wasn't until February 2002 — after the investigation focused on the Pickton farm — that charges were laid in any of the cases. Pickton co-owned the farm with a brother and sister.
Justice James Williams, who is presiding over the case, ruled last summer that the trial had to be split because trying all 26 charges at once would take too long and place an unreasonable burden on the jury.
The voir dire phase of the trial, in which the Crown and defence argue over which evidence is admissible, began Jan. 30, 2006. No jury was present and details of that phase cannot yet be published.
Careful reporting of trial
The jurors' task is unenviable as they now face months of testimony, based partly on an inch-by-inch search and excavation of the farm by police, forensic specialists and archeologists.
News organizations have been wrestling with questions of what to publish or broadcast, and how graphic the coverage should be. The CBC has decided, among other things, to offer warnings at the beginning of stories containing disturbing facts.
In court on Jan. 12, the judge made an unusual ruling designed to help the jury follow the twists and turns of the evidence.
The defence will be allowed to make a brief opening statement immediately after the Crown's opening, rather than waiting for prosecutors to wrap up their case. In its opening, the Crown outlines what it intends to prove.
One reason for the ruling is that "given the size and complexity of this case, it makes eminent sense that anything that can be done to assist the members of the jury by bringing some order to that complexity be encouraged," Williams said earlier this month.
In the ruling, he mentioned that the Crown intends to call 240 witnesses.
Relatives expected as witnesses
CBC News had learned on Friday that among those summoned as Crown witnesses are relatives of the six women Pickton is alleged to have killed.
Some family members are angry that they have been called. Witnesses are normally barred from court until after they testify so as not to be influenced by what they might hear.
Rick and Lynn Frey, father and stepmother of Marnie Frey, who disappeared in 1997, were notified on Wednesday that they must testify.
Lynn Frey said she would go to court in hope of being allowed to sit in one of 55 seats reserved for family members.
"I want to know what happened to Marnie. I don't know if I can handle it, but I want to hear it," she said.
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Post by achebeautiful on Jan 22, 2007 16:05:27 GMT -5
This is just a horrible story. My hope is that with as much time and care that appears to have gone into this investigation and trial to this point, that they continue to be patient and do everything right so that justice can truly be served here.
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Post by ocelot on Jan 25, 2007 0:10:33 GMT -5
The Victims:
Marnie Frey
(CP) - Rick Frey never knew what his daughter Marnie would be wearing when she’d stroll through the front door of the family home after a long day at school.
Would her sneakers be gone? Her coat? Or maybe, literally, the shirt off her back. It wasn’t unusual, he says with a laugh, for the spirited youngster to show up missing a key piece of clothing.
"You’d ask her, ‘Where’s your jacket?’ and she’d say, ‘Oh, my friend, she didn’t have one, so I gave her mine,’ " the father says, chuckling at his house in Sayward, B.C., a small community on the northeastern coast of Vancouver Island.
"That’s the way she was, just help everybody out and do whatever."
It was often shoes that Marnie Frey would relinquish to a friend in need, handing off a nice new pair for scraggly hand-me-downs, and leaving her parents bemused if not a little put out at having to resupply her dwindling wardrobe.
"She’d have probably the better pair, but somebody liked it, so it was like, ‘Oh yeah, you can have them, I’ll take your old scruffy pair. It’ll be fine,’ " he says. "But how can you get mad at a person who’s trying to help somebody else who’s maybe not as fortunate as her?"
It was a streak that ran through Marnie Frey’s life as a young girl at Christian school and then at the local high school in Campbell River, B.C., a picturesque coastal fishing town where she was born and raised.
When she had a baby in 1992 at age 18, the young mother often passed on little Brittney’s clothing, formula, diapers and food to friends whom she thought needed them more, even if she was using them herself.
"She’d give the shirt off her back to anybody," says Lynn Frey, 53.
Rick Frey, 57, says his only daughter’s generous spirit and sense of fairness showed itself best with an early love of animals that took him on some headscratching adventures.
He remembers her becoming distraught at the death of one of the family’s 30-odd chickens that were being raised in a coop behind the house. The 10-year-old wouldn’t settle for having the lifeless fowl laid to rest in the yard.
Instead, the girl with nut-brown hair, chocolate eyes and a sweet, impish grin insisted her father find out exactly what happened to the critter who used to faithfully trail behind her.
"So I took it to the vet just to pacify her and the autopsy comes back and it says the chicken ate a nail, it ate some screws, and it had 10 or 15 cents in its gullet and that’s what plugged it up and it couldn’t eat and that’s why it died," he says through laughter after returning home from a shift on his fishing boat.
"It cost me, like, 30 bucks to do this autopsy on a chicken, but everyone was happy in the end, I guess."
Her affection for animals kept the lanky youngster outside much of the time, where she would cruise through the neighbourhood, knocking on doors and looking for kids to play with even if it was pouring with rain or well below freezing.
She relished showing her friends the family’s collection of rabbits and chickens, according to one schoolmate who spent many days hanging out with the older girl.
"Marnie and I used to play with her bunnies, sit and eat cat food with my cat Belle and she used to sneak over salted apples as a special treat," the woman, who would only give her name as Jessica, said in an online remembrance.
If she wasn’t in the chicken house or with her cat Tabi, Lynn Frey knew where to find her.
Marnie would be huddled inside one of her forts, usually the one closest to the chicken shed, so she could keep an eye on her flock.
"She’d be reading or having quiet time (and say), ‘I just can’t handle life right now, Mom. I’m just going to read for while,’ " says her stepmom, who has been raising Marnie’s daughter Brittney since she was a baby.
"But she played like a boy. She loved outside. She didn’t care if it rained, snowed, or was hailing. She didn’t care. She’d be the only kid in the neighbourhood."
Ruth McMonagle remembers seeing Marnie Frey at her prim Christian grade school, her keen enthusiasm for life setting her apart from the other kids and inspiring interests in everything from motorbikes and books to horses and hunting with her dad.
"She had a really sparkly countenance and was an extremely attractive child," says McMonagle, who got to know her when she helped out at the school.
"She was a very joyous little girl . . . She was one of the bright lights."
But friends and family say Marnie was exposed to drugs through an Asian gang in Campbell River and drifted away from home to the streets of Vancouver.
She kept in regular contact with her family - sometimes calling eight times a day to see how Brittney and her parents were doing.
Her stepmom says Marnie never forgot a birthday and would always call from the Downtown Eastside, where she nicknamed herself KitKat after Lynn Frey’s favourite candy bar.
Lynn says she’ll never forget her last conversation with her stepdaughter.
On the line, Marnie’s bubbly voice chimed through from a payphone on the Downtown Eastside, where she fed a drug addiction through the sex trade.
"She said, ‘Hey Mom, do you know what day it is today?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it’s your birthday, hon, how are you feeling?’ And she said, ‘Oh, I’m feeling great. Can you send me some money?’ That was her favourite word. And I said, ‘You know Marnie, I’ve got a whole box of stuff for you - I’ve got clothes, I’ve got candies, I’ve got cookies, I’ve got homemade bread," says Lynn Frey, her voice becoming thin.
"I said, ‘Promise me you’ll call when you get this parcel’ . . . ‘OK Mom, I’ll call you back.’ ‘OK, I love you.’ ‘I love you, too.’ That was our last words. And then she never called back."
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Post by ocelot on Jan 25, 2007 0:11:43 GMT -5
Sereena Abotsway
(CP) - The cold, dark ocean waters of Burrard Inlet offered Sereena Abotsway the spiritual home she sought but never found on the hopeless streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Abotsway wanted to be baptized in an ocean-front ceremony mere steps away from the hell-hole neighbourhood where she lived.
"She asked to be baptized," says Cheryl Bear Barnetson, who recalls Abotsway attending the street church she ran with her husband, Randy, at Vancouver’s Main and Hastings, the heart of the area known as the War Zone.
"We baptized her right near the church at what people in the Downtown Eastside called Crab Park," she says.
"It was good to see how the Lord was beginning to touch her and move in her life."
Abotsway’s life was always about hope even when the abyss was all she knew.
She lived and worked in one of Canada’s most desolate and dangerous neighbourhoods but she fought loneliness and heartbreak with an infectious laugh and selfless acts of kindness, even though she may have guessed a dark fate awaited her and many of her friends.
Friends on the eastside remember Abotsway’s raw zeal for life in the midst of human decay and despair.
"She’d gotten a grey rabbit fur coat," says Maggy Gisle, a recovering drug addict who spent 16 years on the Downtown Eastside streets before getting clean and getting out.
"And she wore that thing everywhere. I mean, it was just a cheap rabbit fur coat. But she just thought it was a million bucks, it was the best thing she had and she wore it all the time."
Gisle says one time, Abotsway was seen standing on a corner, wearing the coat and high heels and nothing else.
"When I heard that, I laughed and said, ‘Yep, she loved it.’ She absolutely loved it."
Abotsway was 29 years old when police say she disappeared in August 2001 from the area where dealers, addicts, pimps and prostitutes wander the rain-soaked alleys like zombies.
She had participated in community marches calling for deeper investigations into the disappearances of women from the Downtown Eastside before she herself became one of them.
She wanted her missing friends to know she cared, that she was concerned.
"When you went missing each and every year, we all fought so hard to find you," Abotsway wrote in a poem posted on the Internet on one of several sites dedicated to the missing women of Vancouver.
"You were all part of God’s plan. He probably took most of you home. But he left us with a very empty spot."
When she disappeared, police had a warrant for her arrest for stealing chocolate bars.
Abotsway had few teeth left in her mouth - beatings and drug use took their toll - but she insisted on ordering steak dinners. The sight of her attempting to eat a steak was a matter of humour and tragedy whenever she would get together with her foster parents, Bert and Anna Draayers.
The Draayers say she promised to be home with them in August to celebrate her 30th birthday, but she never arrived.
She lived with the Draayers from age four until she was 17, when her violent behaviour saw her placed in a group home where she was introduced to drugs and an eventual life of soul-destroying survival on the streets.
"She was sweet and bubbly but she was very disturbed," Draayers told a Vancouver newspaper in 2002.
"She gave her teachers a headache and we tried to teach her at home but there was not much you could do. At that time we did not have a name for the condition but it is now known as fetal alcohol syndrome."
Abotsway used to call the Draayers every day, but the calls stopped and then came word that her remains had been identified.
Barnetson remembers Abotsway as a regular at the church, where services - including hot dogs - started in the evenings and often continued well into the night.
A dry room and a compassionate ear were deeply appreciated by the eastside residents, who would pour out their hearts during the services, Barnetson says.
Barnetson, reached on her way to attend an aboriginal church gathering in Albuquerque, N.M., says she vividly recalls the night Abotsway helped a man nobody wanted to touch.
"I don’t know if he was high or drunk or what, but he had ... you could just kind of smell that he had gone to the bathroom in his pants," Barnetson says.
"It was just ... he was a mess. She just jumped in right away with no hesitation and just started helping him. She just knew what to do."
Gisle says Abotsway, who always had a teddy bear with her, was a special needs person.
One of Abotsway’s boyfriends introduced her to drugs and then sent her out to the streets to work as a prostitute. She endured several abusive relationships and once was beaten into a coma by a bad date.
Gisle says Abotsway would spend her days in the bars looking for men who would buy her drinks and drugs. At night, she was on the streets as a prostitute.
But Abotsway took good care of herself despite her special needs and her drug addiction, says Gisle.
That seemed to come from something in her past, that she was taught to take care of herself, clean up.
"She came with Barbie dolls and teddy bears and they filled her room," Gisle says. "She had a child-like innocence."
Abotsway’s biological parents both died young. Her father died drug-addicted on the Downtown Eastside.
Barnetson said she believed Abotsway considered the Main Street church a place of refuge.
There were times she would be crying at the altar and others where she was offering to help in any way she could.
"We did definitely see the bright side of Sereena," she said. "It was great to know her in that short period of time. She always had a smile for everybody. A big hello.
"It was really tragic when we saw her picture on the missing women’s list."
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Post by ocelot on Jan 25, 2007 0:12:54 GMT -5
Andrea Joesbury
(CP) - Andrea Joesbury was the kind of big sister little sisters dream about.
She included her baby sister in big sister things like meeting friends and sharing secrets. She was protective. She read ‘The Little Mermaid’ over and over again.
And she taught hilarious dance moves.
"We loved to dance, me and her," says little sister Heather Joesbury, who lives in Victoria where Andrea grew up.
"Dance to Madonna. ‘Like a Prayer’, that’s me and Andrea’s song. I remember this one dance move she taught me," Joesbury says. "It was pretty funny."
Andrea Joesbury was reported missing by her doctors in June 2001 after she stopped picking up her methadone treatments in Vancouver. She had been trying to kick drugs in an effort to clean up her life and win back custody of her daughter.
But in 2002, pig farmer Robert Pickton was charged in her death and the deaths of 25 others.
"I talked to her in 2000, the Christmas of 2000," Heather Joesbury says. "She said she was going to come over here and have Christmas with us. Then ... that’s the last I talked to her."
Her sister always called. Or she would write, says Joesbury, 19, the youngest of three Joesbury children.
"We always had plans."
Andrea Joesbury was beautiful, with a huge smile that leaps off the page of the poster of women missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Growing up, she witnessed alcoholism, physical abuse and mental illness. She left Victoria for Vancouver in her mid-teens after an older boyfriend persuaded her to move to the big city.
Joesbury says her big sister needed a father figure, but the boyfriend was a drug dealer and she ended up drug addicted and working as a prostitute.
"She fell for this guy because he showed her a lot of stuff," Joesbury said. "All of a sudden it came, OK, now it’s time to pay up."
Once on the street, Andrea Joesbury suffered abuse from her pimps.
"She one time got her head smashed off the coffee table," her sister says of one encounter with a pimp. "She had a big friggin’ bruise on the back of her head."
The pimps were ruthless, Joesbury says.
They would regularly come to Victoria seeking new candidates for prostitution and when her sister was too drug-sick to work, "they came here looking for me, too," says Joesbury, who was 15 years old. "To pimp me out."
Andrea Joesbury lived in room 201 of the Roosevelt Hotel, then at Main and Hastings streets in Vancouver. The area is known as one of the poorest, sickest, drug-infested neighbourhoods in North America.
It is not uncommon to see addicts sitting on street corners, openly injecting drugs into their veins. Others aimlessly stagger the neighbourhood in search of their next fix, while steps away the modern, growing, cosmopolitan city of Vancouver goes about its daily business.
Jack Cummer, Andrea Joesbury’s grandfather, says Andrea was lured to Vancouver by the kind of people who feel no guilt introducing a friendly and naive teenager to drugs and prostitution.
Cummer declined to be interviewed, saying the media has spent too much time focusing on the drugs and prostitution angle, while disregarding the real lives of the victims and the families they left behind.
In an e-mail to The Canadian Press, Cummer declared his love for Joesbury is everlasting.
"I am content with the image I have in my heart of Andrea, as well as the rest of the family," Cummer wrote.
"We know all her faults and blessings and her smiling face is with each and everyone she had met."
He disdains the media who consistently portrayed her granddaughter and the other women who disappeared from the Downtown Eastside as drug-addicted prostitutes.
Only now, as some of the tragic cases are about to be heard in court, are reporters wanting to put together deeper looks into their lives, he said.
But the damage is already done: the public will continue to see the women only as drug addicts and prostitutes, Cummer wrote.
"This is the picture the media have planted in the public’s eye, heart," he said. "The media has had a field day. At no time did anyone attempt to paint a real picture.
"You are unable to change what you have caused," he wrote.
"We have ‘closure’ (Peace). Closure comes between the parties and their God. Nothing anyone can say or write will alter this process."
Cummer signed off saying: "Good luck."
Cummer did support the release of a song, ‘Missing’, featuring lyrics by award-winning Victoria poet Susan Musgrave and haunting music by Galiano Island guitarist Brad Prevedoros.
Musgrave wrote the lyrics in Andrea’s memory.
"How far from home is missing?/In our prayers you’re close beside us every day/When you left to chase the wind so high/The rain moved in to stay," goes the chorus.
Proceeds from the sale of the song go to Haven Society, a Nanaimo-based non-profit organization that for 28 years has been helping women and children escape violence and sexual exploitation.
Heather Joesbury, who has her sister’s name tattooed on her left ankle, says the missing women of the Downtown Eastside were short-changed in life and the bad news continued after they disappeared.
If the police had been investigating the disappearances as if each missing woman was one of their own daughters, some may still be alive today, she says.
"They didn’t wake one day and be like, ‘Well you know what, I’m going to be a prostitute,"’ she says.
"‘Then I’m going to have HIV and then I’m going to get murdered."’
Joesbury keeps a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings about her sister. She wants to write a book.
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Post by ocelot on Jan 25, 2007 0:14:26 GMT -5
Brenda Wolfe
(CP) - Brenda Wolfe liked country music and jazz, liked to dance, liked a joke.
Ray Robertson was surprised to learn her name was on a list of women whose remains were found at Robert Pickton’s farm.
"When somebody told me that I said‘oh, no,’ " says the longtime regular at the Balmoral Hotel pub on Vancouver’s gritty Downtown Eastside. "I know her really good. I was a little bit upset."
Robertson is one of the few people willing to sketch a bare outline of Wolfe’s troubled life.
Her mother, Elaine Belanger of Calgary, angrily refuses to discuss her daughter’s early life.
In postings on websites related to Vancouver’s missing women, Belanger has said she mourns Brenda’s loss hourly.
"There is a part of me that died with her and that part of my spirit will not be filled," she wrote in a 2004 posting.
Wolfe was born Oct. 20, 1968, and Robertson believes she came from the Lethbridge area of southern Alberta.
Her journey to the Downtown Eastside remains shrouded, but like many who end up there, drug addiction played a big part.
A woman who identifies herself only as Charlotte wrote in another web posting that she shared a room with a pregnant Wolfe - then about 17 - in a substance-abuse recovery program in 1985.
"We shared a lot of time together and grew to know each other quite well," Charlotte wrote. "I watched Brenda become an amazing, wonderful, happy woman. The picture on this website is not the Brenda that I knew and loved.
"I will always remember her smile and the beautiful son that she had while in recovery."
But Wolfe apparently didn’t say much about her child to members of her "extended family" on the Downtown Eastside.
"That’s not uncommon," said Maggy Gisle, a recovering drug addict who lived in the ravaged neighbourhood for 16 years and knew Wolfe well.
"When I was down there my street name was Crazy Jackie and I never told anybody about my son. It wasn’t because I was ashamed of him or anything like that. It was my way of trying to protect him from the life that I lived."
Tall and heavy-set, Wolfe cut an imposing figure. She worked as a waitress and bouncer at the Balmoral, not afraid to roust rowdy drunks - male or female.
"She’s quite capable to hold her own," said Gisle. "I’ve seen her in the midst of three men, whaling on all three of them all at once. She was as tough as they come."
Gisle, who turned her life around and now works as a homecare support nurse, said Wolfe was never a prostitute but sometimes worked as a street-enforcer-for-hire, carrying a knife for protection.
"She was one of the people if you had trouble on the streets, if you gave her a little bit of money, she’d go stand beside you while you straightened it out," said Gisle. "If somebody tried to intimidate you . . . you could rely on her to back you up."
It wasn’t always for money though. Wolfe sometimes intervened when vulnerable hookers were being extorted for the right to work a corner.
"Not always would they (the girls) get their money back," but they wouldn’t be harassed by the same person again, said Gisle.
"She would say‘If I have to come back here, I’m gonna beat ya.’ "
Robertson, who sat at a table near the back of the Balmoral’s old-style beer parlour, said he never saw her tough side.
"When I was around, she’s gentle like a kitten," he said as a bingo game was called in the background.
But he worried about her drug use.
"I was telling her, stop the drugs, it’s no good for you," said Robertson.
To him, there were signs of mental illness, perhaps manic depression.
"She was running after cars all the time, cars and trucks," he said. "I don’t know why. She had to take her medication."
Gisle said she was not aware Wolfe had mental problems but she had a low tolerance for the hard drugs she occasionally used.
"If she got drunk enough, she’d smoke a rock (of cocaine)," said Gisle.
"You’d have to be really close to Brenda, to hang onto her . . .You had to be with her when she used. She could run down the street."
Robertson said he thinks he saw her last sometime in 1997.
Police say the last time anyone saw her on the Downtown Eastside was in February 1999.
Robert Pickton was charged in her death, along with the deaths of 25 others, after he was arrested in 2002.
Gisle, who knew 33 women listed as missing from the Downtown Eastside in the years she was there, said the disappearance of friends like Wolfe pushed her to finally get clean in 1998 and win back custody of her young son.
"I was a death-wish runner," she said. "I got scared straight."
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Post by ocelot on Jan 25, 2007 0:15:40 GMT -5
Georgina Papin
(CP) - One whiff of sage and Georgina Faith Papin’s memory comes alive for her daughter.
Burned during First Nations rituals, its scent brings Kristina Bateman back to a 1997 powwow in Mission, B.C.
She was 12, her mother 33.
They hadn’t seen each other in about 10 years, since Papin had left Bateman in Las Vegas to be raised by her paternal grandparents.
As she left Las Vegas, Papin turned to Ruth Bateman, Kristina Bateman’s grandmother, to say goodbye.
"I’m glad she will have a chance that I never had," Ruth Bateman remembers her saying.
Papin and her eight siblings had been farmed out to foster homes as young children.
By the time she was 18, Papin had lived in dozens of different homes and institutions.
But despite her on-again, off-again addiction to drugs, Papin never forgot her daughter. She called on every birthday and each Christmas.
"Oh hi my girl," she’d say when Bateman picked up the phone.
She’d send her daughter parcels and pictures, always with a little note scrawled on the back.
Each time they’d hang up the phone, Bateman would look at it and wish her mother would call again.
And she always did, eventually, until the calls stopped coming in 1999.
"That’s how I knew something was wrong," Kristina Bateman said.
The last Ruth Bateman remembers hearing from Papin was in early 1999.
Papin hadn’t been feeling well and was planning on checking into some kind of care facility.
"I said,‘Georgina why don’t you get out of the life you’re living in and come back here with us, and be with Kristina?’," Ruth Bateman said from her home in Las Vegas.
"Then I never heard from her again."
Around the same time, Papin stopped in at a baby shower for her friend Maggy Gisle, whom she’d met at a recovery house.
"She’d gone to a court hearing about her children and she didn’t get what she wanted and she was really, really upset," Gisle said.
"She told me she was going downtown.
"She said she wanted to go drinking with her friends."
Police say Papin, 34, was last seen in March, 1999.
Kristina Bateman keeps in touch with one of her six siblings, all of whom were born between 1987 and 1998.
When she saw her mother for the last time, in the summer of 1997, Papin was drug-free, had two of her sons living with her, was pregnant with twins and, as Bateman remembers, happy.
The one night they stayed together, Bateman remembers talking with her mother, hearing about her life and her heritage.
"Everywhere we went, people always went‘Oh hi Georgina,’ everybody knew her," Bateman, now 22, said. "I was really proud that she was my mom."
It was important to Papin that Bateman have more than a passing association with her First Nations heritage.
At the powwow, she arranged for Bateman to be given a traditional name - Snowbird - and made her an outfit to wear for the ceremony.
"She made me a dress, I remember I was really excited for that, she made me moccasins, I had all these beads I wore," Bateman said. "And she braided my hair."
The duo also made little packets of sage to hand out and Bateman keeps one of those still.
Papin’s connection to her native heritage - she was a member of the Enoch Cree First Nation west of Edmonton - made her many friends over the years.
While serving time in now-closed Oakalla prison, she was the native sisterhood liaison, tasked with going from cell to cell trying to interest native women in their culture.
"She was really nice to me and helped me out," said Gladys Evoy, who now works as a family outreach worker in Vancouver.
"She was very strong in her belief system and in her heritage and culture."
Papin had connected Gisle with one of her brothers so she could learn to make moccasins, and she was also known for her bannock, a type of bread.
"She really liked cooking, she liked to make dreamcatchers, moccasins, she wanted to open a little store," Kristina Bateman said.
"She loved making things for people and making people happy."
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Post by ocelot on Jan 25, 2007 0:17:01 GMT -5
Mona Wilson
(CP) - Blocks away from where she sold herself in the last years of her life, Mona Wilson’s brother tries to sell her in death.
Sitting at a Vancouver Starbucks, he offers report cards, photographs of her son, full access to the story of her often cold, hard life in exchange for cold, hard cash.
Her brother hates the system, the bureaucracy that took his sister away from the O’Chiese First Nation in Alberta, the government he thinks has taken advantage of his people and contributed to the cycle of violence that led to his sister’s death.
At 26 years old, police said she vanished from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in November of 2001.
Robert Pickton was charged with her murder.
Wilson’s death needs to mean something to her brother. He needs to make her life story matter.
His family — there are five siblings — believes they’ll just get used again if they give Wilson’s story away for free, he says.
So pay for her mementoes, Jayson Fleury says, pay for her story. Pay like she was made to pay because society failed her.
The value of Wilson’s life to her foster brother Greg Garley is different.
Between the ages of eight and 14, she lived on the Garleys’ hobby farm in Surrey, B.C.
“I remember her smile, I remember what a great girl she was,” Garley says. “She would have been a great wife and a great mother, she had true love in her heart.”
Before she came to the Garleys, the young girl had been in a treatment centre after she was found cowering in the hallway of an apartment building, raw from a beating, Garley says.
When she got to the farm, instead of being a target, she became a helper, racing after her foster mother, tugging on rain boots as she ran to help tend the garden or feed the chickens.
When the family took a trip to Disneyland, he remembers Wilson’s big eyes lighting up at the sight of rides and her favourite cotton candy.
“She went on billions of rides, she loved stuff like that, the fast ones,” he says. “We’d all feel sick getting on those kinds of rides but she just thought it was great. What’s going to happen to her? She’s got her big brother with her.”
When the Garley family went to church, as they did on many Sundays, Wilson would go along.
She liked being able to hang around with other kids her age, but hated the wardrobe.
“Oh boy, did she not like wearing dresses,” says Garley.
After much cajoling, she’d consent to the ribbons and finery but not without a fight.
“Don’t make me mad,” was her signature phrase, Garley says, and she’d invoke it each time there was a struggle, her eyes narrowing, her brow furrowed and a massive frown crossing her face.
Despite the early aversion to dresses, she played with Barbies and loved to roam the aisles at Toys R Us, where she and Garley would have Silly String fights.
The transition from child to woman was the first time Garley said he saw Wilson break down about the violence she experienced as a child.
Though the women in the Garley house had talked to her about what would happen once she got her period, the day it came, shrieks reverberated around the house, followed by sobs that lasted the whole day.
“She thought she was bleeding to death I guess, like when this man was raping her as a child,” Garley says.
“She didn’t want to be a woman, she wanted to stay a kid.”
But a woman she became, now trading jeans for skirts and swiping her sisters’ make-up.
“I remember when she got caught in the bathroom trying to put on lipstick,” he says. “Her lips were about three, four inches wide, she looked hilarious.”
She loved the colour pink and years later would be remembered by a teacher for her signature hot-pink lipstick.
After six years of being one of the family, Wilson was moved from the Garleys and placed with a single mother who had a 14-year-old son, Garley says.
From there, she moved to the east end of Vancouver, where she was living on her own at the age of 16.
What was left of her childhood ended when she left the Garleys. The stories of love ended there, too.
Though she kept calling the Garleys, usually once a month, they had no inkling she’d turned to heroin and was selling her body to finance her habit.
She refused to visit them, but sent pictures.
The year she turned 25, Wilson appeared in court for charges of theft, false pretenses and fraud.
Media reports suggest Wilson tried to get off heroin, but the addiction was too strong.
To her biological brother, Wilson ‘s death is yet another reason First Nations must continue their fight for acceptance and success in Canadian society.
To Garley, Wilson’s death means the world lost a woman who could have been a great mother, sister, friend.
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Post by ocelot on Jan 27, 2007 8:38:51 GMT -5
Rob Papin goes to Pickton's farm
By ANDREW HANON -- Edmonton Sun
PORT COQUITLAM, B.C. – Rob Papin is out of the car practically before it comes to a full stop at 953 Dominion Avenue. The engine isn’t even off and he’s already half-way across the street, striding toward the muddy construction site on the north side.
When he reaches the seven-foot fence, Papin halts and becomes very still. As he stares out over the 17-acre sea of muck and debris, his jaw works up and down slightly, as if he’s searching for words. Nothing comes out. Finally, he mutters a single word: “Horrible.”
It’s the first time Papin has seen the Pickton farm, where his cousin Georgina’s remains were discovered in 2002, three years after she disappeared from Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside. Later Papin will wonder aloud how anyone could make their homes and livings in the houses and businesses surrounding the land where dozens of helpless women met unimaginably gruesome ends.
“There’s no way I’d be able to live here,” he says. “I can’t imagine what goes through their heads when they realize the atrocities that happened here.”
The truth of what took place on the farm is slowly unfolding in a courtroom 20 km away in New Westminster, where alleged serial killer Robert Pickton is on trial for the murders of six women: Edmonton’s Georgina Papin, Mona Wilson, Sereena Abotsway, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe and Marnie Frey.
He’s also charged with the murders of 20 more women, but will be tried later on those counts. Pickton has pleaded not guilty in all cases. All of the women were living what police and social workers euphemistically call “high-risk lifestyles.” Pickton is accused of murdering them, butchering their bodies on the farm and disposing of their remains.
After a year of painstakingly searching every building, vehicle and even several metres into the farm’s soil, police were unable to find more than a few fragments of each victim. In some cases, hands, feet and vertically bisected heads were found in buckets. All that has been found of Georgina are a few bones from her left hand. They were discovered mixed in pig pen manure.
Six members of the Papin clan have traveled from Edmonton and other communities to the Lower Mainland for the opening week of Pickton’s trial. On the final day of the trip, Rob decides to go to the farm and offer tobacco, a traditional native ritual.
As dump trucks roar past, he prays silently, crouches and slips a single cigarette through the chainlink fence. Papin lights another and with the smoke, performs what’s known as smudging. Similar rituals have been performed by others at the site ever since Pickton was charged in 2002.
“It’s horrible to imagine what (the victims) were put through,” Papin says. “What were their last thoughts, last cries or screams?” He hopes their souls are able to pass on to the spirit world.
“They don’t deserve to be stuck here.” None of the buildings remain. In fact, the entire acreage is buried under 15 feet of trucked-in soil, bringing it up to the level of surrounding houses.
A huge pile of scrap sits in the centre of the property, while mounds of soil are scattered about. Cliff, who lives two houses away from the farm, said some of the mounds are remnants of the police search.
“They were going day and night,” he recalls. “If you even went near the fence, loudspeakers would come on telling you to back off.”
Papin looks at one of the mounds and says, “I can’t imagine the amount of work the police went through.”
He takes a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. “In any one of these piles could be my family’s or the other families’ relatives.”
Before he turns to leave, Papin toys with the idea of reaching through the fence to collect a stone, or branch to bring back to Edmonton as a talisman to pray over. He decides against it.
“When I get home I have to put my dad hat back on,” he explains. “I don’t want to carry this heaviness with me when I see my kids.”
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Post by ocelot on Jan 27, 2007 8:46:05 GMT -5
Georgina Papin's sisters find strength in tragedy
By ANDREW HANON -- Edmonton Sun
NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. -- Cynthia Cardinal sits forward in her chair and collects her thoughts. A tear wells in her eye, but as she's been doing all week, she conquers her emotion so she can focus on the task at hand.
"I want to tell Georgina that our experience here has helped us grow as women," she says as her sisters Elana Papin, 38, and Bonnie Fowler, 36, nod in agreement.
"We want to make sure people remember her as a mother and a sister, not just a victim and not just an addict or a prostitute."
HISTORIC
The trio have come to this historic suburb on the shores of the Fraser River for the trial of Robert Pickton, who's been charged with killing their sister, Georgina Papin, and five other women who frequented Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside.
Pickton will be tried later on 20 more murder counts.
As world attention has focussed on the first week of the trial, the Edmonton-born sisters have achieved a macabre celebrity status with international media.
Their grim calmness, articulate speech and unshakable unity have made them extremely popular with the horde of media camped outside the New Westminster Law Courts, where they spend each day trolling for comments from various victims' relatives.
The sisters are no strangers to tragedy.
Georgina, who disappeared in 1999, had eight siblings who were raised in foster care and didn't know each other in childhood. They reunited as adults.
Only Cynthia and the oldest sister, Debbie Bennett, - who has since died - grew up together.
Three siblings, Ricky, 44, George, 41 and Tammy, 40, are presently incarcerated, either serving prison sentences or in remand awaiting trial.
They had lost all contact with one brother, Randall Knight, 39, who had been adopted and moved to New York.
He tracked them down but later lost contact again.
"The only Christmas that all living siblings have spent together was in 1986," said Elana.
Bonnie said that while only three of them have been able to make it out to the opening of the trial, she knows everyone is there in spirit.
Cynthia said they've been thinking especially of Randall, who was last heard from shortly after Georgina's remains were found on Pickton's pig farm in 2002.
THEY'RE PRAYING
They added that they're praying especially for Georgina's seven children, most of whom like their mom and her siblings, are being raised in foster homes throughout B.C.
Fowler lives in B.C. and Cardinal said she's in the process of moving from Edmonton to the Vancouver area so she can be in the courthouse throughout the year-long trial.
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Post by ocelot on Jan 27, 2007 8:48:16 GMT -5
Cop warned bosses about potential serial killer in '99
By CARY CASTAGNA -- Edmonton Sun As the first week of the sensational Robert Pickton trial wrapped up yesterday, former Vancouver cop Kim Rossmo said he couldn’t help but feel a sense of failure.
Rossmo is the veteran officer who warned his bosses in 1999 about the possibility of a serial killer preying on prostitutes in the Downtown Eastside – several years before Pickton’s arrest. At the time, Rossmo’s superiors stubbornly dismissed the theory.
“There was a key individual whose mind was made up quickly,” he told the Sun today, accusing his former supervisors of contracting a “serious case of tunnel vision and a little bit of group think.”
Eight years later, Rossmo is in a position to say, “I told you so,” but he finds no comfort in gloating.
“It’s one of those cases where you wish you were wrong,”_he added. “How can you feel good about it? It’s hard to feel any sort of satisfaction.”
By his count, there were 10 more confirmed deaths before the Port Coquitlam pig farmer was arrested.
“It’s frustrating and it’s a tragedy,” he said.
In 1998, the criminal profiler began looking at Vancouver’s missing women cases. He wasn’t ready to buy into the widely held belief that all these transient women from skid row had simply moved.
“If they moved, you’d expect them to notify the welfare office to collect their cheques and that wasn’t happening,” he said, calling that a significant warning sign. Rossmo obtained records of missing people dating back 20 years and discovered the tally jumped dramatically in 1995.
After further investigation, Rossmo refused to chalk it up to a statistical anomaly.
“You have too much happening in too short a time period in too small an area for it to be random,” he explained.
Among the questions he asked were: Why was it happening here? And why weren’t they finding any bodies? “To me, the only explanation was a serial killer,” he said.
Rossmo, whose sister lives in Edmonton, is now a research professor at Texas State University’s criminal justice department and a management consultant with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He won’t say if he’s involved with Project KARE – the RCMP-led investigation looking into the deaths and disappearances of 70 people, including prostitutes – in Edmonton and surrounding areas because the investigation is ongoing. But he readily admits Mounties and Edmonton cops have learned a lot from the Vancouver snafu.
“That’s arguably one of the good things that came out of the missing women mess,”_he said.
Rossmo wrote a book on geographic profiling, which is based on the premise that most criminals commit their crimes close to home. He advised that the public – “the greatest group that helps solve crimes” – must stay informed and vigilant.
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