Families appalled by lurid case of 'serial killer' pig farmer

Relatives of more than 60 women who have vanished from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver over the past 25 years are this week getting their first look at the man they think was their killer. The scene is an overflowing courtroom and the accused, Robert Pickton, sits expressionless behind a screen of bulletproof glass.

Mr Pickton, a 53-year-old livestock farmer, is not on trial yet. What started this Monday was a preliminary hearing in his hometown of Port Coquitlam, a suburb of Vancouver.

Over the next few months prosecutors will seek to persuade the judge that they have enough evidence to try him formally for the murder of 15 of the women.

For Canada, this is the most dramatic case of a generation. Mr Pickton, who raised sheep and pigs, is suspected of being the most prolific serial killer in the nation's history and one of the worst anywhere in North America. The likelihood is that in the months ahead the number of first-degree murder charges against him will rise.

Moreover, it is a multiple-murder mystery with many macabre ingredients. Prosecutors will argue that Mr Pickton abducted the women, most of whom were drug addicts and prostitutes, took them to the muddy farm he owns with two siblings in Port Coquitlam and disposed of them among the slurry and muck of his pigs. Police officials have never given voice to what all the public imagines: that he then fed their bodies to the animals.

Also swirling around the case is the anger of the victims' relatives, who accuse the Vancouver police department of ignoring for years signs that a serial killer was on the loose, possibly allowing other murders to take place. Not until August 2001 did police in the city first hint that a serial killer might be responsible for the ever-lengthening list of missing women – almost 20 years after the first, Rebecca Guno, vanished in 1983.

Speaking up for the police, experts note that most of the victims, the last of whom disappeared in late 2001, were engaged in a profession that is by nature risky. The streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside are dangerous and sleazy. Because prostitutes tend to be drifters, detectives took longer to join up the dots when they started to vanish.

The police first showed up at the ramshackle Pickton farm on 5 February last year, bearing warrants first of all to investigate an improperly stored firearm. But within hours, they obtained a second warrant that allowed them to search the farm for evidence of the missing victims.

What began then was a gruesome forensic hunt, with teams of white suited investigators painstakingly sifting the slurry and dirt on the farm for bone fragments and human remains. The search, which has a needle-in-a-haystack quality, continues to this day. The teams have analysed mounds of DNA evidence and prosecutors will allege in court that matches have been made so far to at least five of the listed victims.

The hunger of the Canadian public is meanwhile being frustrated by the judge. He has barred coverage of the hearing in the Canadian media, even though the trial is open to the public, because of fears that the publicity would prevent the empanelling of an unprejudiced jury when and if the full murder trial finally began.

No such restrictions apply to American reporters. In the first day of the hearings, Judge David Stone began considering whether to admit as evidence an 11-hour interview that Mr Pickton gave investigators after his arrest last February as well as two videotapes of conversations in his cell with an undercover Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer. Through the first day, Mr Pickton did not speak but took notes on a yellow legal pad.

Ernie Crey, whose sister Dawn is among the missing but whose remains have not yet been found, said: "They've obviously garnered a great deal of evidence." Mr Crey has become an unofficial spokesman for many of the victims' families over recent months, some of whom say they are too upset to attend the hearings and set eyes on the accused. "Perhaps in time, they will have the strength to be able to come," Mr Crey told reporters.

Mr Pickton had pigs on two farms in the area. For a while he ran a social club on one of them that he called "Piggy's Palace". A bachelor, he kept himself to himself and some neighbours are still incredulous at the allegations against him. "I would trust Robert with my life," said Della Grant, 63, who lives between the properties. "He didn't party, didn't drink, didn't smoke."

Mr Pickton is yet to enter a plea in the case. In a separate civil suit, he denied killing the victim in question or handling her remains.