The headboard of Pickton’s bed, where police officers testified they found faux leopard-skin handcuffs and jewelry. RCMP Handout Photo
Bags of women’s belongings discovered on the Pickton farm when police executed a search warrant in February 2002.
Image shows a copy of an aerial photo of the north end of the Pickton farm on Dominion Avenue where Robert Pickton lived.
Robert (Willie) Pickton lived in a messy trailer on a cluttered farm, the jury in his first-degree murder trial has been told.
The jury members have seen photographs of the property, but they were not released to the media until Tuesday.
Now, the media can publish what the Port Coquitlam pig farm looked like on Feb. 5, 2002, when police first entered it with a firearms search warrant looking for illegal guns.
The 25 photographs were taken by a police officer involved in that firearms search — a search that was halted within 90 minutes after police found an asthma inhaler belonging to missing woman Sereena Abotsway.
The Missing Women Task Force got its own search warrant for the farm, and spent the next 20 months tearing down every building and digging up the ground.
These photos provide a look inside the home of Pickton, who is accused of killing 26 missing sex-trade workers.
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There are cardboard boxes piled high on a desk in Pickton’s office, and bags of clothing lying on the floor. There are pop bottles and food containers scattered around the narrow, grimy single-wide, industrial trailer that Pickton called home.
One photo shows the headboard of Pickton’s bed, and visible in the image are faux-tiger-fur-lined handcuffs that police said were found near some jewelry.
Police have said they found other sex toys in his bedroom, along with documents with women’s names on them and a flare gun with a barrel adapter and some ammunition.
One photo gives a small peek inside Pickton’s laundry room, where police found a loaded .22-calibre revolver with a sex toy attached to the barrel. The Crown says the dildo bore the DNA of Mona Wilson and Pickton. The Crown also says a pillowcase with Andrea Joesbury’s DNA on it was found in this room.
On the cluttered deck outside his home, there were old chairs, appliances and other junk. But the Crown contends there was also a garbage can on the deck containing asthma inhalers and Revenue Canada documents belonging to Sereena Abotsway.
Police say they also found an asthma inhaler made out to Abotsway on July 19, 2001 inside a silver sports bag in Pickton’s office. The woman disappeared in early August of that year.
The Crown contends two syringes with Abotsway’s DNA on them were also found in his office. Police officers also testified they found a .22-calibre bullet inside a drawer in this room.
Pickton’s trailer was beside the slaughterhouse on his pig farm. A handful of photos was released Tuesday of the inside and outside of this building, including an animal trailer with some live pigs inside.
The Crown has said a witness will testify that she saw Pickton butchering a woman in this building. The Crown also contends that Wilson’s partial remains were found in the slaughterhouse.
However, perhaps the most compelling image in the photos released Tuesday was the stuffed horse’s head hanging on the wall in Pickton’s office.
Pickton indicated during his interrogation by police and during conversations with an undercover officer placed in his jail cell that this horse was very important to him. He said the horse’s nickname was Goldie, and that he had the animal’s head stuffed after its unexpected death.
The following is an excerpt of his conversations about his “1,400-pound stallion,” who was injured in the leg after being kicked by two much smaller horses.
“I’ve got my horse stuffed,” Pickton told the undercover officer (who cannot be identified because of a court order).
Pickton claimed he remembered exactly when he bought the horse — March 20, 1977 — and could also recall putting him down on “Dec. 21, 1981, 5:30 p.m.”
“I went down to see the horse, he was like,” Pickton said, pausing to make a whinnying noise, “trying to get up. ‘Hang on, I’m coming.’ He stays very calm. Looked at the horse, phone the vet . . . . I says, ‘It’s hurt, do you — do you know how to look at a horse?’ He says, ‘I can fix it for you, it’ll cost you 5,000.’”
But Pickton said the horse couldn’t be fixed and the vet had to put him down.
“I saw him put down,” Pickton said. “I pet the horse and everything else, head of the horse, very calm, and you give him a little injection, that’s it.”
Pickton recalled an odd story about the hours of training he put into Goldie, and what the horse could do.
“I could ride that horse, he’d lay right down on the ground, me on the back . . . . Just like that, pulls right up, and all of a sudden get right back up. Don’t get a horse like that now,” Pickton told the undercover officer.
The day after this conversation, Pickton told RCMP Sgt. Bill Fordy a similar story about Goldie during an 11-hour police interrogation.
He said after the death of his horse, whose full name was Spring Golden, he wanted to “somehow keep it.”
“So I got a head mount. Took me 11 months to get it back from the taxidermist. But I’ve had about 30, 40 other horses after that, trying to get another horse to match it, match that one there — nothing.”
The judge has told the jury that it is up to them to decide if Pickton was telling the truth during his conversations with police.
Defence lawyers have suggested their client is “slow,” and that he was exhausted and hungry during the police conversations.
This trial is focusing on the deaths of six women: Abotsway, Wilson, Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin and Marnie Frey. A second trial on 20 charges is expected to be held later.
Pickton has pleaded not guilty.
CanWest News
A bizarre array of sex toys, bondage gear and women’s clothing were found inside accused serial killer Robert Pickton’s trailer, court heard this afternoon.
Among the items found by police as they searched the trailer on Feb. 7, 2002, was a bottle of Spanish fly aphrodisiac, two sets of fur-lined handcuffs, two rolls of partly used duct tape, two zap straps used by police as temporary handcuffs and various sex toys, including a sex toy on the end of a handgun.
Police found numerous cardboard boxes full of women’s clothes and shoes. In a closet, a garbage bag was found containing an empty tissue box, blue purse, hair brush, lip stick and a plastic bag with papers inside.
In a drawer next to Pickton’s bed were two white belts, condoms, a hair brush and a syringe.
Police also recovered a note stating “mellow yellow fellow andrea 201 Roosevelt hotel 166 east hastings” in the pocket of a black jacket at the end of accused serial killer Pickton’s bed, court heard Thursday.
Andrea Joesbury, who lived in Room 201 at the Roosevelt Hotel prior to her disappearance, is one of 26 women Pickton is accused of slaying. Her head, hands and feet were found in a freezer on Pickton’s farm in April, 2002.
Other items found by the Missing Women Task Force include:
• a syringe containing blue fluid.
• a set of night-vision goggles.
• A bag containing an inhaler, syringes, books, black pumps and running shoes belonging to Sereena Abotsway. Abotsway’s head, hands and feet were found in a freezer on Pickton’s farm in April 2002.
• A variety of women’s hair care products in a cardboard box.
RCMP Sgt. Margaret Kingsbury of the Missing Women Task Force said she was wearing a full body suit, latex gloves, a mask and booties when she was in the Pickton trailer helping with the search.
Kingsbury earlier testified Mounties faced major problems when they took control of the missing women’s investigation in January 2001.
She said the Missing Women Task Force was initially told by the Vancouver Police Department there were only 27 missing women. That was later revised to 45 and then to 65. Mounties also discovered the Vancouver police had 3,000 unsolved sexual assaults against sex workers on their hands.
