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Gruesome evidence on pig farm
16/02/2007 10:03 - (SA)
New Westminster, Canada - After an accused serial killer was arrested five years ago, police clad in white contamination suits, face masks and booties moved into a squalid mobile home trailer on his pig farm.
A jury is now hearing how their search for traces of dozens of women missing from the streets of Vancouver in Western Canada resulted in the country's biggest police investigation and a mass-murder trial the judge compared to a "horror movie".
In the fourth week of the murder trial of Robert "Willy" Pickton, a series of police witnesses explained how they found a set of handcuffs as well as night vision goggles in a cabinet in Pickton's bed, an asthma inhaler belonging to a dead woman in Pickton's trailer, and women's clothing and other possessions in the trailer home.
Pickton, 57, has pleaded not guilty to charges of murdering 26 women, most of them drug-addicted prostitutes, in Vancouver's seamy Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.
A jury is hearing the first six of the charges, in the deaths of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Marnie Frey, Georgina Papin and Brenda Wolfe.
When the trial opened, prosecutors told the jury they would hear how police found items belonging to the six dead women as well as two severed heads, hands and feet in a freezer, bones buried beneath an old pig pen and blood and DNA on Pickton's property.
The court was told a police task force looking for missing women stumbled on evidence on the Pickton farm after he was arrested on February 5 in an unrelated police search for illegal firearms.
Forensic laboratories were overwhelmed
The Pickton farm was sealed off and, over time, as many as 270 police and forensic scientists moved onto the property.
The scope of the historic trial is emerging in painstaking detail as the jury pores over photographs of evidence found on Pickton's farm, from blood spatter to an asthma inhaler with the name Abotsway on it.
On Thursday, Pickton watched from within the bullet-resistant glass prisoner's box as sergeant Margaret Kingsbury detailed the items police found.
The police investigation resulted in two million pages entered in a police database and hundreds of thousands of photographs, she said.
Earlier in the week, a forensic expert testified that Canada's forensic laboratories were overwhelmed with the task of processing 200 000 exhibits.
After an explosion of interest by the public and 350 accredited journalists from around the world, only a few reporters and two dozen family members remain in the courtroom to hear the painstaking details of the police search.
The jury trial is expected to last one year, with a second trial on 20 remaining charges later.
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