B.C. Jury to Hear Interview Taped After Police Charged Robert Pickton

NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. (CP) – Jurors will get to hear Robert Pickton’s own words in taped conversations with police about the remains of women found on his pig farm.

The Crown outlined its case on Monday and gave the B.C. Supreme Court jury some idea of the evidence it plans to put forward.

CAUTION TO READERS: the details of this case may sometimes be raw. Some content may offend.

Tuesday and Wednesday, the jurors will view a videotape that lasts for about 11 hours.

The tape was taken at the RCMP detachment in Surrey, B.C., in February 2002.

It consists of an interview police had with Pickton following his arrest after the first two charges were laid a day earlier.

The Crown said in its opening statement Monday that the Port Coquitlam man told investigators he had killed 49 women and was going to do “one more.”

The tape will be introduced by RCMP Insp. Don Adam, the lead investigator for a task force set up in 2001 to investigate the growing number of missing women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

The Crown says witnesses will describe the finding of three severed heads in buckets on Pickton’s isolated property in Port Coquitlam.

The court was told investigators later found remains of the other women named on the indictment, including partial jaws, feet, hands and finger bones.

Family members of the victims came from across the province Monday to listen to the start of the trial, in which Pickton has pleaded not guilty to six counts of first-degree murder.

“These murders of these six women were the work of one man, the accused, Robert William Pickton,” said Crown Prosecutor Derrill Prevett in his hourlong opening statement Monday.

“Over the course of several years, he had these women to his home, a somewhat isolated acreage … in Port Coquitlam. There, the Crown intends to prove, he murdered them, butchered their remains and disposed of them.”

Pickton, who was arrested in 2002, is charged with killing 26 women, most of them drug addicts and prostitutes from Vancouver’s gritty Downtown Eastside.

Jurors are hearing evidence in the deaths of six of them. A trial in the remaining 20 is expected to follow.

Defence lawyer Peter Ritchie said Monday that Pickton did not kill the women, or even participate in their deaths.

“My first suggestion to you is that you not be overwhelmed by what you’ve heard from the Crown this morning,” Ritchie told the court.

Without laying out the specifics of how he will defend the 57-year-old former pig farmer, Ritchie told the jury to pay close attention to the conversations Pickton had with police.

“Pay particularly close attention to the evidence relating to his intellectual competence and close attention to his level of understanding when you watch the videotapes,” he said. “When you listen to them, pay close attention to what Mr. Pickton says and the manner in which he expresses himself.”