A Team Of Women Researchers Is Stepping Up For Victims Of A Notorious Serial Killer
Serial killer Robert “Willie” Pickton confessed to 49 murders, according to an undercover investigator pretending to be his cellmate, yet the Canadian pig farmer was only ever prosecuted in the deaths of six women.
For years, that has sparked outrage from families seeking justice for other victims, many of them Indigenous women. And when Canadian police requested to destroy or return thousands of itemscollected on the pig farm in the early 2000s, it spurred developmental psychologist Sasha Reid to form a team of civilian researchers to reexamine the case — and potentially prove that Pickton, who died last week after being attacked in prison, didn’t act alone.
“It shouldn’t have to be a ragtag team of women who are doing this and trying to get follow-ups, and pushing for justice on behalf of these families,” Reid told HuffPost. “That should be the police.”
The team’s work is the subject of “Sasha Reid & The Midnight Order,” a five-part docuseries premiering July 9 on Freeform. Reid, who has built two massive databases of serial killers and missing and murdered persons in Canada, said she came up with the group’s “dark and scary” name to spark excitement about their investigations.
In 2005, Pickton was charged with the murders of 27 women, but he was ultimately prosecuted in the deaths of only six confirmed victims: Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Georgina Papin and Marnie Frey. A judge dismissed one case for lack of evidence, and the charges for 20 other alleged victims were “stayed,” or suspended, after he was convicted by prosecutors who said he had already received the harshest sentence allowed.
In the decades before his arrest in 2002, dozens of women, most of them Indigenous, went missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Police faced heavy criticism for not taking the disappearances seriously because many of the women were sex workers and used drugs. Pickton preyed on their vulnerability and lured them to his sprawling farm, where investigators who excavated his property between 2002 and 2005 found grisly remains and DNA of 33 missing Vancouver women. Prosecutors said he killed, butchered and dismembered their bodies in his slaughterhouse, and disposed of their remains at an animal waste rendering plant. One witness testified that Pickton fed some victims’ remains to his pigs.
Jurors found him guilty in 2007 on six counts of a lesser charge of second-degree murder — after the judge revised his jury instructions to say they could still convict Pickton even if they believed he didn’t act alone — and he was sentenced to life in prison with the eligibility for full parole 25 years after his original arrest date in 2002. He became eligible in February for day parole, which if graned would free him from prison but require that he stay in a residential facility or halfway house.
The last several months have been “a whirlwind for the families,” who were retraumatized with each new development in the case, Reid told HuffPost.
“Every single one [of police’s evidence destruction applications] has just been a blow to the families because it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse in terms of what they’ve disposed of. Then there was parole. Then there was Danger Cats, which was a comedy group who was making fun of Pickton victims in Vancouver. And then now there’s the death. And it’s just- it’s so much — the families in the last couple of months I think have endured extraordinary trauma.”
Pickton himself in 2020 requested that evidence in the case not be destroyed, saying that it could prove other people were responsible or involved.
In a statement shared with HuffPost Tuesday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said that “the evidentiary value of all the items seized is being preserved, so that it is available if necessary for future use in criminal court proceedings and investigations.”
But Reid disputed the RCMP’s determination of evidentiary value in a December news conference.
“I’m concerned because advances in DNA analysis are growing every single day,” she said. “There are other reasons for why that evidence has evidentiary value. How about the fact that this is an unsolved, ongoing case where there are very clear, very obvious, other suspects?”
In addition to the Pickton case, Reid and the Midnight Order continue to update the serial killer and missing and murdered persons databases, analyzing patterns, identifying clusters of unsolved murders and trying to find answers for family members.
“We are speaking with families who haven’t been heard, who feel like their cases have been completely ignored and are looking for justice and haven’t got it — and for the first time, they’re feeling like they’re actually being heard,” Reid told HuffPost.
One woman whose daughter’s killing has gone unsolved said it was a “dream come true” when the Midnight Order said they were investigating the case.
“In decades, no one’s called her, no one’s given her an update, no one’s told her what’s going on,” Reid said.
“She was crying, and you hear the joy and the mixed pain and the appreciation, and it’s incredible.”
