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Cops: How we found killer
09/02/2007 13:58 - (SA)
New Westminster - A jury hearing finished a third gruelling week early on Thursday after a deluge of details about how police seeking a serial killer stumbled on Robert "Willy" Pickton five years ago.
The pig farmer is charged with the murders of 26 women, mostly drug-addicted prostitutes working the streets of the seedy Downtown Eastside area of Vancouver on Canada's west coast.
A jury began hearing of six of those charges on January 22. Pickton, 57, has pleaded not guilty.
Through the week, the jury heard how four police officers raided Pickton's trailer home on February 5, after a paid informant tipped them to illegal guns on the suburban property.
Because Pickton's name had been flagged in the computer system, the jury heard, the gun search was monitored by two officers from a task force investigating the disappearance of dozens of women from Vancouver streets over more than two decades.
Several guns found
The task force had asked the gun team to alert them if they came across the names of any women on the property.
Constable Howard Lew told the jury the team found several guns, including a Mac 10 assault weapon. Lew said the team also found a silver-grey sports bag containing "novels, a small pair of running shoes and an (asthma inhaler) with the name Sereena Abotsway on it."
Abotsway was one of the missing women, and shortly after her name was broadcast over the police radio, the team conducting the gun search was pulled off the case and the task force moved in.
Prosecutors earlier told the jury that Pickton murdered Abotsway as well as Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Marnie Frey, Georgina Papin and Brenda Wolfe.
At the sensational start of the proceedings, prosecutor Derrill Prevett said evidence presented at the trial would include details of butchered body parts in a freezer, bones beneath an old pig pen and a gun with a dildo on its barrel smeared with the DNA of Pickton and Wilson.
Evidence already presented included videotaped statements by Pickton that suggested he killed at least 49 women, and wanted to kill as many as 26 more.
The jury hearing is expected to last one year, with hundreds of witnesses. A second jury trial on the other 20 charges is expected later.
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