Robert Pickton Told Cell Plant He Was Going to Do 75 Killings in All

By STEPHANIE LEVITZ AND TERRI THEODORE

NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. (CP) – Robert Pickton nonchalantly mopped up his dinner with a piece of bread while admitting to an undercover officer he killed 49 people, but wanted to go on to kill a total of 75.

And then he snickered. The admission came right at the end of Pickton’s day-and-a-half long stint in a cell with an undercover police officer. As the video played in court Tuesday, Pickton toyed with a pen in his mouth.

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

The officer testified Pickton referred to getting sloppy with four, which the officer understood to mean four bodies.

“Four I was sloppy with,” Pickton said. “I just couldn’t finish it off, so I cleaned up and that’s it.”

Pickton was put in a cell with the officer after his arrest in February 2002 on two counts of first-degree murder.

He was later charged with 24 other counts.

The current trial is for the deaths of Mona Wilson, Sereena Abotsway, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Marnie Frey and Georgina Papin.

The early parts of the jail-cell conversation were filled with banal back-and-forth chit chat, but when Pickton returned to his cell after a marathon police interrogation, the undercover officer testified Pickton’s demeanour had changed.

As the officer related elements of his cover story, Pickton said to him “but you’re nothing like mine.”

He then held up five fingers, and made a sign for a zero.

“What’s that?” the officer asked. “Five, zero, fifty. Ha, ha. . . you’re shitting me.”

Pickton slid over to sit next to his cellmate, devoured his late-night dinner and proceeded to one-up the officer’s assertion that he would dispose of a body in an ocean.

“I did better than that,” Pickton said. “A rendering plant.”

He then curled up under his blankets to chew over with the officer what the investigation would mean.

“I think most of them, based on that . . . evidence. I think I’m nailed to the cross,” Pickton said, adding that if he went down for the murders, about 15 other people would too.

But he kept going back to the fact he was sloppy.

“I made my own grave by being sloppy,” he said. “It pisses me right off. That’s what the problem is. They just, they don’t have nothing but nothing otherwise.”

“I was going to do one more, make, make the big five O,” he said, then later added: “So let everything die for a while. Then, then do, do another 25 new ones.”

Pickton also admitted to toying with the police officers as he was being interrogated, saying he “put a turn in their little attitude” and later mocked them as being baffled about the case.

He told the cell plant how police tried to get him to talk about all the women, but noted how they only had 48 on their list.

“You know the list has only got like, only got half the people in there. The other half might, might . . .” The rest of the sentence was indecipherable.

As the jurors heard earlier in the trial, police interrogating Pickton made much of the extensive search going on at his property, which happened five years ago Tuesday.

Pickton alluded to the evidence in his conversation with the officer.

“I guess they are gonna come across more. They even took my carpet up well my, my lino off the floor. Peeled it right off, peeled all the wallpaper off the walls,” he said.

Pickton delighted in comparing himself to the Green River Killer, a convicted serial killer from Washington state who murdered 42 people.

But he said he was bigger than that.

“Top of the world,” he said, laughing.

Defence lawyer Peter Ritchie took issue with Pickton’s apparent fixation on fame, asking the officer during his cross-examination Tuesday afternoon whether it was more likely the accused wasn’t pleased with the attention, as suggested by his flat tone.

But the officer insisted Pickton seemed to enjoy the notoriety.

Ritchie also took the officer through the chapters of stories from Pickton’s youth that he shared in the early part of the conversation, questioning the officer as to whether the stories painted Pickton to be a simple man whose thoughts and words were disjointed and hard to follow.

“I’m suggesting to you you start to think you’re dealing with a simple chap here,” Ritchie said.

The officer countered that he wasn’t sure what Ritchie’s definition of simple was.

The cross-examination was expected to continue on Wednesday.

Moments before the undercover plant left Pickton in the cell for the final time, he muttered quietly to himself.

“So close.”

Ritchie had the officer note the difficulty in sleeping in a holding cell.

The officer spent a full night in the cell with Pickton and testified that the accused had snored often throughout the night, though he admitted he did not watch Pickton the entire time.

The officer also testified that Pickton had not eaten his breakfast before heading out to meet with a justice of the peace.

Throughout his exchanges with Pickton, the officer made several disparaging remarks about lawyers and Ritchie seized on those, wondering if undercover officers had strategies to deal with targets advised by their lawyers to not talk to cell plants.

“It’s up to a person if they want to talk,” the officer answered.