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Hi, it's Deborah Roberts. This week on Inside the Midnight Order, the case of serial killer Robert Pickton comes to an end. Or does it? Check out Episode 5.
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A note before we begin. This episode contains graphic descriptions that may be disturbing to some listeners. Hey there, I'm ABC News correspondent Kena Whitworth. And I'm Nancy Schwartzman, the director and executive producer of Sasha Reid and the Midnight Order. From ABC Audio and Freeform, this is Inside the Midnight Order.
The final episode of the series grapples with the scrutiny around the Pickton case and what will happen next, especially now that Robert Pickton himself is dead. Nancy, what was it like to find out that Robert Pickton had been murdered right before the series came out?
We learned that Robert Pickton died when Sasha was at CrimeCon in Nashville. And we were essentially soft premiering the show to thousands of people. And all of a sudden we learn Robert Pickton is dead. He succumbed to his injuries in prison. And it's just...
Just this gasp. Sasha announced it. She herself was shaking. Lorimer was there with us. Lorimer Schenherr, who's really dedicated many years of his life, both in law enforcement, as a whistleblower, as an author. We're all there. And oh my God, this just happened and really raises the question, was this a planned hit and why?
Why? What else gets buried when Robert Pickton is killed? How do you think the Midnight Order will proceed with their investigation now that he's gone?
In a way, it feels like a door has closed. There was the person who was at the center of it all who never really used his voice. I think the Midnight Order has gotten their hands on his first unpublished book and are really digging through it. Is there more in there? Are there leads to look at? Also, there might be more people who could come forward now that this happened.
keeping eyes and ears open. And obviously the inbox is open if people should choose to come forward with more information. In a way it's, oh, this huge chapter has closed and Pickton was promising someday he was going to talk and tell it all. And now he can't, but he did leave a trail and it could open the door to other people coming forward.
As we close out this series, what do you hope the viewer and listeners of this podcast take away from it? I hope that The Midnight Order inspires audiences the way they inspired me to really understand if you have a passion for forensics, if you have a passion for crime, if you have a passion for data, there could be a place for you.
And I think certainly bringing the empathy lens isn't just being a good human being. The people who are close to the victims have information and the people that know the world, whether you think they're unsavory or not trustworthy, the people who know the streets have information and we should listen to them. And I love that the Midnight Order does that.
Kena, we talked about mentorship in episode one and how important it is for Sasha and now really how important it is for the entire Midnight Order. I know that Sasha is continuing to seek out mentors who've been in the field 20 years longer than her, women, who are turning to her and bringing her in and bringing her up and they're sharing information about cases. These are not internet sleuths.
These are academics. These are PhDs. These are people that have real skills and real knowledge. I also want to debunk the idea that if you're obsessed with crime, it's for some negative reason. I think we, myself, am very drawn to crime because it shows us who we are as a society. It shows us where our scars are. It shows us where our forgotten people are. It shows us where things have gone terribly wrong.
and how to fix them. What can we do next time to make sure people are listened to, evidence is collected, DNA is preserved, all avenues are explored, no bias is brought in. How do we fix it for the next time? For this episode, we are going to focus on the Pickton case and where it stands now.
I'll speak with Lorimer Schenherr, writer and former lead police investigator in Vancouver's Missing Persons Unit, as well as trial attorney and ABC News legal contributor Brian Buckmeyer. That's coming up after a quick break.
Hey moms, looking for some lighthearted guidance on this crazy journey we call parenting? Join me, Sabrina Kohlberg. And me, Andy Mitchell, for Pop Culture Moms. Where each week we talk about what we're watching. And examine our favorite pop culture moms up close to try to pick up some parenting hacks along the way. Come laugh, learn, and grow with us as we look for the best tips. And maybe a few what not to do's from our favorite fictional moms.
from Good Morning America and ABC Audio. Pop Culture Moms. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Progressive. Are you driving your car or doing laundry right now? Podcasts go best when they're bundled with another activity, like Progressive Home and Auto Policies. They're best when bundled, too. Having these two policies together makes insurance easier and could help you save. Customers who save by switching their home and car insurance to Progressive save over $775 on average.
Quote a home and car bundle today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $779 by new customer surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states. Okay, Brian and Lorimer, welcome. So Lorimer, let's start here with you. I want to give listeners a sense of your work in Vancouver and then let's get into the Picton case. So first, tell me, when did you begin your tenure with the Vancouver Police?
I started in 1991, and then I was in the missing persons unit in 1998. Initially, when you started with Vancouver Missing Persons Unit, I mean, what was the one driving force in your mind? Well, I know what I was told I was supposed to be doing, which is work on all the missing persons cases that came into that office, but also to focus on what at the time were 17 cases.
missing women cases from the downtown east side, they were concerned at the time that it might represent a pattern. And they wanted me essentially to either confirm that or discount that something was going on. This Robert Pickton case has often been referred to, I mean, as, you know, North America's most heinous crime.
And Brian, you're a Toronto native. What was it like for you? When did you first hear about this Pickton case and what stood out to you the most about it initially? I think when we first heard about this case, I'm in high school. And so the headlines I recall, and I even spoke to some of my childhood friends before doing this, it was like RCMP or Mounties botched investigation. A very specific and protected class of women, those being Native American women, are not being given the due process of finding out their murderers.
the butcher, the pig farmer, those nicknames were often thrown out as this mass serial killer. And I think, especially as a Canadian, we don't hear about mass killings in the same way that you hear about them in America. And I don't mean that in a disparaging way. If there was a serial killing, you're like, oh, it happened in America, right? Like we Canadians don't do this type of thing. And so I think when we heard about it to this degree, it was really shocking.
Laura Murr, you're also the author of a book titled That Lonely Section of Hell, The Botched Investigation of a Serial Killer Who Almost Got Away.
I mean, quite a title there. But really, I mean, this book is your account of all the things that went wrong during this investigation of Robert Pickton. At what point did you feel like this book needed to be written? There was a period in the summer of 1999 where we were extremely close. I felt like we were on the cusp of breaking the case. We had a couple good sources come forward. We
We were, I thought, working closely with the RCMP and I felt like it was imminent that the case was going to break. And what happened is it didn't. And it ended up really being shelved. And I just couldn't understand why.
What was at play? And then when the search actually started on the Picton Farm in February 2002, I literally sat down that day and started banging out the first draft of the book. In episode five, they bring up the Victim 97 case. In 1997, there's a young woman who finds herself at the Picton Farm in Robert Picton's trailer,
And she says he attacks her. She's able to get away. And in doing so, Lorimer, she escapes right with like a handcuff still around her wrist. Is that accurate? That's right. So then what happens? She ends up at the hospital and, uh,
Robert Pickton drives himself to the same hospital. Because she stabbed him, right, in trying to get away? She did. She cut him across the neck and I think hit his jugular vein, actually. And he got himself to the hospital. They were each being treated in fairly close proximity. The police were called. The investigation began. And everything was proceeding for what would be a slam dunk, you know, attempted murder, forcible confinement conviction. Well, I don't want to overlook the detail, right, that...
Again, she has this handcuff around her wrist. Did they find the key to that handcuff in Robert Pickton's pocket? Yes, they did. It would have been an easy investigation. And it was. And I know that the detective that did the investigation, he did a good job. It was actually the Crown attorney that ultimately decided not to bring the case for reasons that are still completely unclear to me. The prosecutor had done no interviews for anybody else, no interviews with the couple that had picked this woman up.
No interviews with the ambulance, people that had attended to her, no interviews with doctors. So they had done nothing to shore up the story or the credibility of the case. This prosecutor just thought, oh, I don't know. I don't think she's credible. And this young woman had gone to, you know, she'd gone to every meeting with the prosecutor. She had more than fulfilled her end of things. So it was a really odd call. The whole thing really pointed, I think, to a good likelihood of conviction.
And I just want to note that the prosecutor mentioned here was questioned during the missing women inquiry, which you heard about in episode five of the docuseries. The prosecutor testified that shortly before the trial, the victim was too high on drugs to testify. And because of that, didn't feel that she would be a good witness because she was, quote, in very bad shape.
The official report that resulted from the inquiry did say, however, that more could have been done to prepare victim 97. So this is 1997. In 2002, when authorities do eventually make their way out to this picked-in pig farm, what was that like at the time?
there was something that seemed to slow or stop the RCMP from pursuing all the information that my team was bringing to them at the time around things that were happening out there and even things that were coming from source information. And, you know, it was just a really difficult thing to understand. The book obviously details this a lot, just my efforts to try to find out what was it that was thwarting this investigation or any investigation going forward.
And Brian, maybe from the legal perspective, too, you can shed some light on this. I mean, I've covered plenty of stories where you really think that different entities of law enforcement work really cohesively, right? If it's a unified command on something, say even the FBI is leading a charge, but then you have all kinds of different local authorities that are also involved. How do lawyers navigate all of that while at the same time wrestling with the fact that
The Pictons essentially told law enforcement, come back when it's not so muddy, basically. There's a different relationship between local law enforcement than there is with state or federal with that community. And so how they interact with them may be different. So to your point of the Pictons kind of saying,
come back to local law enforcement when things are ready, the Pictons may be someone on law enforcement's cousin, uncle. They trust these people. They're not the Pictons to local law enforcement. It's Bobby from down the street. And so trying to kind of do that patchwork of working with a suspect or individual is different for different law enforcement. And things fall between the cracks.
And for our listeners, Lorimer is nodding his head saying, yep, yep, that is what it's like. And I also want to touch on some things. And in no way in this moment do I want to be disrespectful, but I also want listeners to understand what the search was like at the Picton Farm. I mean, this took years to even do. My understanding was it took almost decades.
every hazmat suit in the country to even conduct this search. And that, you know, it started with the inhalers and the purses. But then it
body parts were found and in the ways that they were found. I read that skulls had been split in half and that hands had been put in them. I just think that it's important that people understand what this was like for investigators and searchers to go through this and to see what they saw and
Because the outcome of the trial, I think, is a bit shocking when you know what they saw. So can you elaborate on that at all, Lorimer? I think what you outlined, Kena, is kind of an interesting almost split screen that has always existed in this case, which is the reality of the evidence and the sheer horror and nastiness of what happened.
obviously went on. Where the split screen is, and this is something I've sort of been trying to reconcile as I'm writing a new book about all these factors, you know, the RCMP and how they somehow curated this investigation to bring it to the prosecutors. But what I've discovered is that there is a institutional-wide awareness in the RCMP of not ever doing anything where they can be criticized, of making investigative choices even.
where they will be beyond public criticism versus making the right investigative choice. Your job as an investigator, especially when you're putting a case together, is to accurately portray a narrative. And that narrative is what you're going to bring to prosecutors and they're going to use that narrative to prosecute the case. It becomes the story of what happened, right?
And I believe the RCMP brought a very flawed narrative of the case forward. I believe they curated the narrative of the case right from the get-go to satisfy their own aims. And then when it was prosecuted, that's why we saw such a bizarre outcome to this case. You know, where you had the jury asking the judge, what do we do if we think Robert Pickton is guilty, but we don't think he acted alone?
I mean, that is the fundamental question in this. And I believe that it can be traced back to that narrative of the case.
Both the RCMP and the Vancouver Police Department issued public apologies for essentially not catching Pickton sooner and also acknowledged some mistakes, though they both blamed the other agency for missteps and defended their own handling of the case. They said they did the best they could based on the information available at the time. But let's dive into that big overarching question here of was Robert Pickton capable of doing this on his own?
I mean, the remains of 33 women were found on the Picton farm. Is that correct? Yeah, 33 women remains found and then also countless DNA profiles found on that farm of men and women.
that came and went on that farm over the years. It doesn't track with the kind of idea that we have of a serial killer who's maybe a single person like a Robert Pickton or a couple of people working in partnership. But this case is not that case. So Brian, the numbers here, right? So we've got the remains of 33 women found on the Pickton farm. As Lorimer points out, countless DNA profiles. Yeah.
But when we get to court, the number starts dropping, right? 27 charges against Robert Pickton. But then one of those falls off and it gets narrowed down, what, to six? So how does that happen? And even in the six, he's only convicted of second degree murder, right? How does that play out in the legal system like that? Easy answer. It's not what you know. It's what you can prove. And when it comes to a trial, especially as a prosecutor,
You don't want someone like me who can pick apart your weaker cases and then use those cases to color the entirety of the trial. Think of Harvey Weinstein, why they only go forward with certain victims and not all. Think of even as you see the investigation of Rex Hureman. They're really making sure that DNA is attached to specific victims, even though they believe that Hureman is attached to more.
In terms of whittling it down to six charges associated with a limited number of victims,
The reality is the court system is not made to try that many victims at once. From a sense of how long you're going to keep these jurors here to hear 27 cases, I think ultimately it comes down to what courts call a judicial economy. The cost of trying to convict a person where six convictions will get you the same amount of jail time as 26 or 27 or 56 or 100. There is no death penalty in Canada.
Robert Pickton got the highest amount of jail time that an individual can get with a second degree charge of murder. And as I often tell people, just because you get the possibility of parole after 25 years doesn't mean you're going to get it, especially for a case as heinous as this. So I think the courts and the prosecutors look at it and say, how long is he really going to stay in jail?
How long of a trial are we going to do this for? And how many victims are we going to drag through the court system where the ultimate result is going to be he's going to spend the rest of his life in jail? And so, Brian, for those other 20 charges that were stayed, I mean, what kind of recourse do those families have legally? So, unfortunately, the short answer is none.
This is where you have to advocate it. And you have to go to the voters box because every country and then every state or province or territory has what's called victims rights. And they can at times drastically differ from state to state under the British Columbia Victims Crime Act. There's very few rights. If the prosecutor decides to dismiss your case because you're not one of the six victims,
you don't necessarily have a right to say, well, I want my day in court. Unless your province, state or territory says that you have an actual right to have your day in court, that phrase is generally meant for a defendant. And so they don't really have much recourse. We have more with Lorimer and Brian after the break.
This case is clearly not over. It took another interesting turn. So Robert Pickton was transferred from the Kent Institution in British Columbia to another institution in Quebec in 2019. And Lorimer, is there anything significant about that transfer? Any difference in these two prisons? Any idea or opinion as to why that transfer was made?
It appears that transfer was made for his safety. It took him a long way away from British Columbia. If you drew a line straight south from it and then went straight east from Boston, it would put you about 200 miles out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. That's how far east it is. I will say that it's my understanding that he really didn't intend to apply for parole. He didn't want to be released from prison because he felt like he was safer in prison than he would be on the outside.
What does that tell you about Robert Pickton? It's not that crazy of a concept. I have a lot of clients, especially in federal prison, who say, I don't want to get out. Like, I know who's waiting for me. Nine times out of 10, it's involving gangs. And they understand the community that they're in while incarcerated. And they know the rules and they know how to survive. But if you're Robert Pickton...
Outside, I would one, either fear the people who know your name and face and just have a visceral reaction to who you are. And that's a legit fear. But also to the earlier points that we're making, this doesn't look like the job of one person. And Robert Pickton is a loose end. Lorimer, in your opinion, who was Robert Pickton afraid of in that moment on the outside?
Based on everything that I've learned in the last nine months or so, he was afraid of his former friends. He was afraid of their circle in the area in which he lived and worked.
He had come to a very sad and sobering realization, I think, in the last two to three years that he had been hung out to dry by those people and that he had been scapegoated by those people. Do you think he killed no one in your assessment, in your opinion? I don't doubt that he's killed people. What I'm saying is that
I think he was part of a much broader, what I really think was an organized crime operation to eliminate people who either owed money or who were problematic in some way for what they knew about things that might have been going on out there. And I think that's what was going on here. I don't think this was a sort of a, the type of serial killing scenario that we normally associate with that term.
Brian, in your opinion, do you think that his murder had anything to do with this ongoing case and the reasons that he was there?
Just like outside of prison, inside of prison, there's a hierarchy of crimes. There are crimes that other inmates who are there for many years say, this is a despicable crime and they don't like people around them. The big one that I think comes to mind is child abuse, child rape, child killing. And so I could see, yes, I could see
The conspiracy or the thought of because of who he was and because he had information, someone had put out a hit on him to some extent. But I can also see someone saying, aren't you the pig farmer? And just for that being a very heinous crime, that is an equally plausible thing in my mind.
Lorimer, what are your thoughts here? I agree with Brian that there are plenty of sort of non-conspiracy related reasons why someone may have decided they wanted to attack him in prison. But I will say this. The RCMP began to bring an application through the courts to destroy all the evidence in the Pickton case. It was unheard of to me.
to destroy evidence from these cases, some of which were still open and are still open. You know, if you ask law enforcement across the country, how long do you hang on to evidence from a murder conviction or that could be useful in open cases? They won't understand the question at first because the answer is really never. You keep it forever or you keep it for 99 years.
So I took some steps to make that court application a little more public. And I believe that that could have contributed to the risk to Robert Pickton because I think that several people stood to benefit from the destruction of that evidence. He was in the federal prison system for 12, 13 years, was never attacked. And now, you know, we have this evidence destruction attempt in the media and lo and behold, he's attacked. Do you have any thoughts on that, Brian? So the lawyer in me says,
That's a reasonable inference. It definitely is a possibility. But I also want to touch on the destruction of evidence. At least in New York, they cannot, for example, differentiate who has touched a gun if five or more sources of DNA are on it. It's just it's too complicated for them. But that's today.
That doesn't mean that in three years, they can't figure out if 10 different people touch that item. And so law enforcement, defense attorneys, prosecutors, everyone in the criminal justice system is keenly aware of our limitations today. But looking back,
What we could do five years ago compared to today is like leaps and bounds. And so it's hard to measure what you should or shouldn't be throwing out today when you don't know what the technology is tomorrow. And so it's a bizarre thing that law enforcement doesn't typically do just because of that very thought process.
Yeah, I mean, the way that DNA technology is advancing is unbelievable. It's moving at such a fast clip here. The RCMP says they have exhausted all investigative leads associated with the materials that are being destroyed. But it's clear that some of the victims' families want things to go in a different direction and are very invested in what happens next. And so in light of that, I want to share with you both that we did reach out to Robert Pickton's lawyer very recently.
His name is Ian Runkle. And we asked him about the future of this case. And I'll just read you what he said. He said, there is more to uncover. And I hope that Mr. Pickton's death will not be the end of the case.
I want to try to translate what Ian Runkle is saying there and give some context to help people understand. In America, people are probably very familiar with the attorney-client privilege. I was a public defender for about eight and a half, nine years in Brooklyn, New York. I have clients who are still living. I have clients that are dead, but I still maintain confidentiality. I'm not allowed to tell any of you about who actually committed the murders, who actually did the crimes, whether they're living or dead.
I can only give up that information if those clients at one point in time either explicitly or implicitly said that I can give up that information. And the other thing is I can only give up information that may further the interests of my client. So when you have an attorney who is saying, I cannot speak
to specifics of a case, what they are saying is there is potential information that can implicate my client that I cannot give you. However, giving you that little nugget of there's something that could be uncovered is like saying my client did something bad, but not so bad and that the so bad information you might hear is
will not completely exonerate them, but it may give context as to what they did, if that makes sense. So while that statement seems very dry and that attorney is not saying a lot, they are actually saying a lot. I mean, I think you're doing a really good job of trying to take apart what could be viewed as a cryptic message here from the lawyer.
I know that Ian is doing all that he can do, you know, within the kinds of restrictions that Brian has so well outlined. I know there are a lot of advocate groups that are doing what they can do. I know Sasha is doing what she can do. I've met with the Attorney General of British Columbia. I have tried to push them to understand even what's at play here. But we're all just pushing and continuing to push.
Brian and Lorimer, I am so grateful to you both for this conversation. So thank you for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, thank you. Inside the Midnight Order is a co-production of Freeform and ABC Audio and a companion podcast to the Freeform true crime documentary series, Sasha Reed and the Midnight Order. Now streaming on Hulu. You can also stream the soundtrack. It's available now on all platforms.
I'm Kena Whitworth. My co-host is Nancy Schwartzman, director and executive producer of Sasha Reid and The Midnight Order. This series was produced by Camille Peterson, Meg Fierro, Amira Williams, and Jalyn McDuffie, with assistance from Freeform's Katie Celia and Megan Watera. Susie Liu is our supervising producer. Music by Nick Sena.
Special thanks to ABC Audio's Liz Alessi, Josh Kohan, Madeline Wood, and Ariel Chester. And Freeform's Amanda Kell, Allie Braman, Lindsay Chamness, Jasmine Karamzada, Heather Taylor, and Mike Wong. Laura Mayer is Executive Producer of Podcast Programming at ABC Audio.
