Jury Gets Different Side of Pickton Through Undercover Cop Video

By STEPHANIE LEVITZ AND GREG JOYCE

NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. (CP) – Accused serial killer Robert Pickton displayed a sense of humour and a fondness for animated story-telling replete with animal imitations during a lengthy chat with an undercover cop sharing his jail cell.

The man charged with six counts of first-degree murder also told the RCMP officer that police were looking at 50 murder charges against him, a B.C. Supreme Court jury heard Monday as Pickton’s trial entered its third week. Making that revelation, Pickton raised a glass of orange juice with a sarcastic “whoopee.”

CAUTION TO READERS: This story contains graphic content. Some readers may be offended.

After watching hours of Pickton’s video-taped police interrogation in the opening days of his trial, jurors saw a different side of Pickton in the video recording of his conversations with the cell plant.

Talking with the undercover officer, Pickton mimicked ostriches, horses and gesticulated widely when recounting practical jokes.

Pickton largely sits motionless in the prisoner’s dock, and Monday was no exception as he followed a transcript of his conversation with the Mountie in Feb. 22, 2002.

Part of the conversation was before Pickton’s formal video-taped police interrogation.

The officer, who can’t be identified, hadn’t been given any information about Pickton ahead of time but told the court he’d seen some media reports.

His cover story was that he was being held on attempted murder charges originating in Ontario.

The officer testified Pickton told him he had been arrested on two counts of first-degree murder.

“He was concerned about this, said they were looking at another 50 charges against him with relation to this,” the officer testified.

Pickton worried about the media coverage and was concerned he would be hounded, yet also appeared to delight in the fame.

“Just a f**kin’ a pig man, and here he is hitting the big time,” Pickton told the officer.

The officer testified Pickton said he was supposed to be getting out of the pig business, but “now the farm was going to bury him.”

“I’m buried now,” Pickton told him. “My name is mud.”

Still, Pickton said the whole world knew who he was.

When the officer compared him to Saddam Hussein, Pickton said it would be kind of nice being similar to the former Iraqi dictator.

Pickton is being tried on six counts of first-degree murder but is charged with 26 counts in the deaths of women who frequented the grim Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.

Jurors watched as the cell plant lay on his bunk in the three-metre-square cell as Pickton entered.

The officer portrayed an angry man who didn’t want a cell mate and peppers his conversation with expletives.

Pickton appeared tentative at first, but as the discussion progressed he opened up to the officer with several tales from his childhood.

Some, like the death of a favourite horse and a trip to the United States where he ate cherry pie, he would later repeat almost verbatim the next day to the official police interrogator.

Pickton was sometimes curious about the judicial process, though completely dismissive of the cell plant’s attempt to tell his own stories.

The undercover officer was sceptical when Pickton told him why he was arrested. Police would have to prove it, the officer said.

“They don’t have to prove nothing,” Pickton said. “They can set you up.”

Pickton wore a dark track suit and appeared dishevelled, his hair unkempt and his hands dirty.

During the conversation, he fixated briefly on the police not allowing him to take a bath, instead offering a shower.

“If I want to smell . . . that’s the way I want to be,” he said.

As Pickton spoke to the cell plant, he used his hands to illustrate his stories, laughing and smiling broadly at what he found amusing.

He told a story about how he lived in a chicken coop when he was 2½ years old and drank water out of a stream that ran through the coop.

He seemed delighted as he told his cellmate about a trip with his father and some pigs in a truck. The truck rolled and the pigs went every which way.

And he laughed about a planned practical joke to release a trio of ostriches in downtown Vancouver one Christmas Eve.

He did release two pot bellied pigs onto the street, telling the story to the officer with a twist on a Christmas classic.

“Twas the night before Christmas and all through the streets,” recounted the 57-year-old, “not a soul to be found except two little pot belly pigs and two working girls.”

But Pickton kept returning to the two murder charges he said he faced.

Pickton said he “had a gun and that’s what they’re investigating the place for.”

The plant told him that sounded like a poor excuse to charge someone because many people on farms have guns.

“Now I’m a murderer,” Pickton said with a tone of sarcasm in his voice. “The only thing is, the only reason why, they haven’t got nothing, these 50 women.”

Later on, Pickton told the officer that police had no one to pin the murders on and were coming after him.

“No, I’m screwed, tattooed, nailed to the cross, and now I’m a mass murderer,” he said.

He told the plant of an incident in 1997 when he was stabbed and was charged with attempted murder. He described how he was slashed on the face, the tongue and on his back and jaw.

The cell plant told Pickton he should have fled the country, taken a plane to Cuba.

Pickton said he wasn’t one to run, but didn’t know what he should do.

He also suggested that Dave had warned him the police would find him where he was working.

“I just can’t get over this here,” said Pickton. “My brother told me not to go to the job site because he knew the cops could find me.”

Later, he returned to a concern about his arrest.

He mentioned that his brother was angry at him, and that neither he nor his sister Linda would talk to him anymore.

“I got a murder charge on me . . . and 48 more, 48 more to come. Whoopee.”

The Crown said in its opening statement two weeks ago that jurors would hear Pickton confess to his cellmate that he had killed 49 people.

The Mountie also said he told Pickton they were both being videotaped while in their cell.

When Pickton figured out the camera’s location, he approached it tentatively and for some seconds lifted his head and stared right into it.

Also Monday, the judge ruled family members called to testify as witnesses in the trial can attend court after all.

Prior to the trial, many relatives expressed outrage they wouldn’t be allowed inside the courtroom because they had been sent subpoenas as potential witnesses.

Usually, witnesses are excluded from listening to other testimony that night affect what they say to the court.

But Justice James Williams said Monday he will make an exception for relatives of the 26 women Pickton is accused of killing.

He said Victim Services must inform the Crown if there is a family member who has been subpoenaed but who would like to attend the trial.

The Crown and the defence will then have to figure out how to accommodate that person and if they can’t agree, the judge will step in.

Pickton is charged in the deaths of Mona Wilson, Sereena Abotsway, Marnie Frey, Georgina Papin, Brenda Wolfe and Andrea Joesbury.

He is to face 20 additional murder charges in a second trial.