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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. Episode 189. I am your Norwegian host, Tomas Roseland Weyberg Thun.
First of all, I wish you, my very dear listener, a very happy new year. It is my belief and hope that 2023 will be a better year than 2022. As of writing and recording this episode, we are in the first week of the fresh new year. January is a month I happen to quite like, perhaps unlike most other people.
This might have something to do with the fact that my birthday is the first of January. Also, I tend to find Christmas a bit stressful. So the regularity and calm of January, with its promise of fresh beginnings, is most welcome. We do not start the new year with a fresh new Serial Killer expose. Instead, we close in towards the end of the Pig Farm Serial Killer saga.
Enjoy. As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...
Thank you.
You are the backbone of the Serial Killer podcast, and without you, there would be no show. You have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.
I am forever grateful for my elite TSK Producers Club, and I want to show you that your patronage is not given in vain. All TSK episodes will be available 100% ad-free to my TSK Producers Club on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast. No generic ads, no ad reads, no jingles. I promise.
And of course, if you wish to donate $15 a month, that's only $7.50 per episode, you are more than welcome to join the ranks of the TSK Producers Club too. So don't miss out and join now. Imagine, if you will, there is an hour. A chilly spring night, the 23rd of April, 1997.
The sex workers of the downtown East Side were still warning each other about Robert "Willy" Pickton. They talked about the gruesome tribulations of Sandra Gale, how she had barely escaped the violent rat-faced pig farmer. A common misconception about prostitutes is that only girls and women engage in it.
While the majority of those walking the streets plying their trade are female, many are men, and quite a few are transsexual. In relative numbers, transsexuals are actually overrepresented among prostitutes. One transsexual, who at the time was commonly referred to as a quote-unquote tranny, was 28-year-old Kelly Little.
She was well known and well liked among her peers, and this night she disappeared. She was born Richard to a native family on the Vancouver Island. Born small, never to top five feet three inches, with a cleft palate. Kelly was addicted to hard drugs and sold sex in order to feed her habit. She lived with a friend in Port Coquitlam, and she reported Kelly missing.
The 23rd of April, Kelly had left for work, and no one, except her killer, would ever see her again. The next person to disappear was 37-year-old Janet Henry. Her sister talked to her on the phone on the 26th of June, but after that, no one ever saw or heard from her again.
Janet was the youngest of eleven children, members of the Kwakwetel Band from King Kham Inlet in north-central British Columbia. Her mother's first child, Larry, was put out for adoption, and the second, Richard, died as a baby.
Dorothy, Donna, and Lavina were next, followed by George, twins Sandra and Stan, then Debbie, Lance, and Janet, the youngest. When Janet was just a child, her father, a fisherman in Allert Bay, was washed overboard and drowned. As was unfortunately quite common back in those days, authorities soon split up the remaining family.
George and the older ones were sent to residential schools, and the little ones were sent to various foster homes. From that point on, the family fell into dire straits. When Lavina was nineteen, caring for several of the younger children, she was raped and murdered by five men in Nanaimo, who each received only a five-year jail sentence.
In 1990, a police car struck and killed Sandra's twin, Stan, leaving his widow alone with their children. The year after, in 1991, her sister Debbie, who had been brought up in an abusive foster home, swallowed enough pills to kill herself at the tender age of 23.
Janet had, in other words, quite a bit of emotional and psychological baggage by the time she grew into adulthood. She lived with a boyfriend in Vancouver in the late 1980s, and when he started doing hard drugs, she followed suit. The boyfriend then wasted no time in pimping Janet out to pay for their drug habit.
The boyfriend eventually died of an overdose, and Janet, by now an alcoholic as well, gravitated to a hotel in the downtown East Side. When Janet suddenly disappeared, her sister Sandra was frantic. Janet was about the only family she had left. Police offered little help in finding her, so she canvassed the streets, asking about Janet. After several days of this, she finally got a lead.
Apparently, Janet had been going to a lot of parties out at, quote-unquote, Uncle Willie's Farm in Port Coquitlam. No one took heed of Sandra's suspicions about this Willie, and Janet's disappearance was filed away and turned cold. Sometime in August of 1997, another woman went missing. Her name was Helen Hallmark.
Helen worked on two well-known straws, the downtown east side, centered at Main and Hastings, and the Mount Pleasant area, further south on Main, around East Broadway. Thirty-two, when she disappeared, Helen had once been a pretty cheerleader, with a beautiful smile, hazel eyes, and long, dark blonde hair.
she had grown up in maple ridge the small fraser valley town just fifty kilometres east of vancouver on the loughhead highway in high school she had been one of the popular girls however by her late teens helen was already into drugs and prostitution
After she had a baby girl, whom she named Chelsea, she soon understood that she could not look after her own child properly and put her up for adoption. Helen was living at the Vernon Rooms when she disappeared. She was last seen in a Vancouver Police Department paddy wagon, presumably about to be charged with prostitution offences.
although the police say they have no record of taking her off the streets or booking her. For years, her mother, Kathleen Hallmark, and her younger brother and sister, Sean and Carrie, tried to find her without any success in their endeavors. The same month as Helen disappeared, on the 14th of August, a native woman named Jacqueline Murdoch also vanished without a trace.
She had four children. Police were, as usual, very reluctant in spending resources looking for her, and she was eventually just another dark statistic. In the period from August of 1997 until November of 2001, a total of 24 more women disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The names of these victims are as follows.
Cindy Beck, September 1997. Andrea Borhaven, sometime in 1997. Sherry Irving, April 1997. Cindy Felix, November 1997. Kerry Koski, January 1998. Inga Hall, February 1998. Sarah DeVries, April 1998. Elaine Dunbar,
April 1998 Sheila Egan July 1998 Julie Young October 1998 Angela Jardine November 1998 Marcella Creyson December 1998 Michelle Gurney December 1998
Ruby Ann Hardy, 1998. Tanya Peterson, 1998. Tammy Fairbairn, 1998. Jacqueline MacDonald, January, 1999. Georgina Papin, March, 1999. Brenda Wolfe.
February 1999 Wendy Crawford November 1999 Jennifer Firminger December 1999 Tiffany Louise Drew December 1999 Dawn Cray November 2000 Deborah Jones December 2000 Sharon Abraham 2000
Patricia Johnson, March 2001 Yvonne Marie Bowen, March 2001 Heather Bottomley, April 2001 Heather Chinnock, April 2001 Angela Julesberry, June 2001 Serena Abotsway, August 2001 Diane Rock, October 2001
And then there was Mona. Mona Wilson. Mona, who was twenty-six years old and used a street name Stacy, was a regular operator in the downtown Eastside. The last time anyone remembers seeing her was the 23rd of November, 2001. She was reported missing seven days later.
It was her not contacting her family at Christmas that finally convinced her sister, Ada Wilson, that something had happened to her. Mona was the youngest of five children in a native family from Alberta, Ochi's First Nation. Ada was the second youngest, and they were always close.
When Mona was only six years old, social workers found her beaten and terrified in the corridor of an apartment building. They removed her right away and placed her in a youth treatment center.
Two years later, she moved into a foster home, but by the time she arrived there, according to members of her new foster family, she had been through more trauma and sexual abuse than any other foster child they had ever known. Mona's move to Norma and Ken Garley's farm in Surrey could not have been more successful. Mona was happy there.
loved and cared for at last sharing treats and holiday trips she began to trust people and she began to learn how to be a child despite having four of their own kids and several foster children to look after the garleys had become the parents she needed
They enjoyed her tomboy nature, her love of the farm animals, her eagerness to join in family activities, and her pleasure in the simple routine of going to school every day. Summer camp was something Mona always looked forward to. To her, it was paradise come true.
though mona was easy to deal with when she was young she followed the pattern of so many other abused foster children and became unmanageable in her teen years the garleys believed she was tormented by memories of the sexual abuse she had suffered as a child
They tried to comfort and understand her. They tried to make sure she stayed in touch with a brother and sister who had been close to her. But when she reached her teens, the Garleys had to give up. She was not just disobedient, she also became violent. Mona was sent to live in the care of a new foster mother with a teenage son.
This transition, during which Mona was very unhappy, lasted for two years until she turned sixteen. At this point she was allowed to live independently in East Vancouver with some assistance from social services. All the progress she had made as a child on the Garley farm was lost. Very shortly after she started living on her own, Mona got addicted to heroin.
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But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night. For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it.
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never skip therapy day with betterhelp visit betterhelp dot com slash serial killer today to get ten per cent off your first month that's betterhelp h e l p dot com slash serial killer by her late teens mona now a young woman with thick dark hair large expressive eyes and a warm smile was living in the downtown east side
prostituting herself to pay for her drugs. She had no trouble finding dates, but she was unlucky in her choice of boyfriend. His name was Steve Ricks. Ricks was an abusive, loud-mouthed, obnoxious bully. Why Mona was with him confused everyone who knew the amiable, lovable, and beautiful Mona.
Steve Ricks says he was the last person to see her before she disappeared. It was the night of the 23rd of November, 2001. According to Ricks, she was getting into a car with two men who said they did not want to have sex with her, but would pay for her time. Ricks told people that the men chased him off with a piece of wood, but he could not remember who they were.
After this, Mona was never seen again. During the last few weeks of 2001, events began to overlap. Mona Wilson vanished. A woman who worked as a prostitute named Terry Gratton had survived a close call when she scrambled out of Robert aka Willie Pickton's van after he had punched her in the face.
And an officer named Don Adam had a task force team that was working feverishly to narrow down the key suspects in what they by now suspected was the biggest serial killing case in Canadian history. This one, they thought, could even be bigger than the Green River case.
Public pressure was intense. Reporters from Europe and the United States were beginning to follow the case closely. The police needed a break. When it came, it was almost by accident. Police in Vancouver regularly used low-life, small-time criminals for information about bigger and more serious crimes. One such informant was a man named Chubb, who was desperate to get some money to pay rent.
claimed he was done with drugs for good and that he wanted to turn his life around. He had tried to get the police to give him reward money for tips regarding marijuana and cocaine operations, but the police already had control of those. So it was that on the 1st of February 2002, Chubb called an officer named Wells about having knowledge of illegal firearms.
This was a high priority for the police, and they agreed to follow up on Chubb's tip and to give him monetary reward if the tip resulted in confiscated firearms and arrests.
Chubb told them that Robert, a.k.a. Willie Pickton, had three guns in his trailer at 963 Dominion Avenue, including a Smith & Wesson Mach 10, a .38 caliber and a .44 caliber revolver, all possibly hidden in the laundry room. The two officers who followed up Chubb's lead was Wells and Petrovich.
The latter was familiar with Robert Pickton. He had worked on the 1997 investigation when Pickton had assaulted Sandra Gale Ringwald. Petrovich had met the driver of the car that had picked up Sandra, and Petrovich had stayed with Sandra until the paramedics arrived. Petrovich told Wells how Pickton had escaped justice as Sandra had refused to testify against him.
This case was the main reason that Picton was a person of interest in the Missing Women Task Force. When Wells got a search warrant for Picton's place, two members of the Missing Women Task Force asked if they could tag along, which they could. It turned out that several officers ended up joining Wells to execute his search warrant for illegal firearms. They had started to believe that
that they might have found the man responsible for all the missing women, and they did not want to mess up an opportunity to stop him. The group moved out of the Coquitlam headquarters in demarked police cars, driving east with the headlights on but without sirens. An officer named Morwood Clark drove a Chevrolet Savannah van.
They stopped in the parking lot at Blakeburn Elementary School, the designated staging area. Once everyone had gathered there, the main searchers went to the lane at the back, the north end of the Picton property. A mound of earth between the trailer and the road would prevent anyone from seeing them coming in.
Two other officers hovered close to the front entrance at south, as inconspicuously as possible, waiting to secure the entrance if necessary. Two additional officers drove around the area in a wide perimeter, but close enough to get into the property in a hurry, if need be. The entry team to the north stopped their cars and got out.
Silently they crept forward and then froze as they could see truck lights down the old laneway near the front gates. They crouched down and no one said a word. A muddy pickup truck bounced forward and stopped in front of the trailer. Robert Pickton stepped out, shut the door and walked up the front steps to the trailer's porch. He opened the main door and went in, closing it behind him.
The lights went on inside. The men quickly moved forward again. One officer stayed at the rear corner of the trailer. Five officers climbed onto the porch and huddled by the door Picton had entered. They did not realize there was another door a few meters to their right. At a given signal, one officer stepped forward and slammed the door open with a battering ram.
They all shouted, ''Police! Police! Police! Search warrant!'' Suddenly the door they had been unaware of popped open, and Robert Pickton's face appeared there, looking confused. He calmly asked what was going on. When the officers replied by shouting, ''Police!'' Pickton slammed the door shut.
With guns drawn, the officer swarmed in through the rammed doorway and met Pickton in the middle of the trailer. They threw him to the floor so that he was lying face down, then pulled his arms behind his back and snapped cuffs on him. He was told he was under arrest, and then he was read his rights. Now, dear listener, there are quite a bit of minutiae regarding the interrogation of Robert Pickton after his arrest.
To be honest with you, it is a bit tedious. Suffice to say that the detectives, mainly Detective Don Adam, used all the techniques in the book to get Picton to talk. It was not easy. The police were impressed with Picton's ability to go hours upon hours without food, water, or going to the toilet. He just sat relaxed in his chair and never really answered the questions and statements put towards him.
This went on for over eleven hours. During this time, Picton went far in insinuating that he was responsible for several murders, but he never flat out admitted to it. As stated in earlier episodes, Picton was not stupid. Odd and strange and creepy, yeah, but not stupid.
What Picton did not know was that his cellmate, in the jail he was kept while he was being interrogated, was in fact an undercover police officer. And it worked. The undercover officer bragged to Picton about how he had killed several people, usually using an ice pick, since it did not leave much blood and was difficult to investigate for police. Picton replied that this, and I quote,
End quote.
As Picton was toying with his interrogators and confessing to his cellmate, the police were hard at work canvassing the Picton farm. The farm became the largest crime scene in Canadian history. Investigators took 200,000 DNA samples and seized 600,000 exhibits.
Archaeologists and forensic experts needed heavy equipment to sift through 383,000 cubic yards of soil in search of human remains, of which there was a lot, usually ground up so that only teeth, pieces of jawbones, and so on remained.
but they did find several frozen decapitated heads that had been sawed in half as well as several kilos of human meat ground into minced beef it is suspected that this meat had been sold to local butchers in vancouver as pig meat
"'Picton never formally admitted to his crimes, "'and it has been quite difficult getting details "'regarding exactly how Picton killed his forty-nine victims. "'Luckily, there is a witness who has given, in my view, "'a very credible account of Picton's modus operandi.'
Andrew Bellwood, who lived on Picton's farm for a short period of time in 1999, told the court about one night in March 1999 that Picton suggested the two of them go get a prostitute. After Bellwood refused, he said that Picton asked him, and I quote, "'Do you know what I do with prostitutes?'
Bellwood then said what happened next was like watching a play. He explained how Picton reached under his mattress and pulled out handcuffs, a belt and a wire. Picton described to Bellwood putting the prostitutes on their stomach on the bed and having sex with them. Then Bellwood said Picton, who was kneeling on the bed at the time, gestured as if stroking a woman's hair.
He told the court that Pickton said he would handcuff the women and tell them, and again I quote, it's going to be okay. Everything is all over now, end quote. Bellwood further testified that Pickton said he would then reach under the mattress and grab a piano wire or belt and then strangle the women to death. Pickton said he would take the body to the slaughterhouse and bleed them and gut them.
According to Bellwood, Picton said of this process the following, and I quote, Oh, you know how much they bleed? You wouldn't believe how much blood comes out of a person. End quote. Picton then told Bellwood he would feed the body to the pigs, and whatever was not eaten he would place in large barrels destined for a Vancouver rendering plant.
Surprisingly, Picton was never convicted of first-degree murder. Even with massive amounts of physical evidence, his own confessions to undercover officers, and witness statements, he was only ever convicted of second-degree murder. On the 11th of December 2007, after reading 18 victim impact statements, British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Justice James Williams said,
sentenced picton to life with no possibility of parole for twenty-five years the maximum punishment for second-degree murder and equal to the sentence which would have been imposed for a first-degree murder conviction
During a court hearing on the 4th of August 2010, Judge Williams stated that Pickton should be committed to a federal penitentiary. Up to that point, he had been held at a provincial petriole institution. In June 2018, Pickton was transferred from Kent Institution in British Columbia to another penitentiary in Port Cartier, Quebec.
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