Butcher by Gary C. King Read Free Book Online

came out on their own, after having had previous encounters with him at the farm. Interestingly, it took what seemed an unreasonably long time for many of the girls to realize that many of their associates were not returning after meeting up with Willie.
    By the time of the Good Times Society’s demise, Dave had become a self-described entrepreneur who worked in his reasonably successful excavation and demolition business and at a landfill he also owned. Credited with being the brains of the family, according to some people who knew him and his sister’s known business savvy, Dave pretty much left Willie to his own nocturnal and often unnatural activities. Unlike Willie, Dave had worked hard for most of his life, and Linda herself at least once declared that he was the mastermind behind subdividing the farm but left the business details of the sales to her. Divorced and the father of two grown children, it wasn’t unusual for Dave to work eighteen-hour days, and then, in his off time, to party like there was no tomorrow. Dave liked bikers, and it was well-known that he liked to hang out with them. Some said that despite the shared ownership of the Good Times Society, he claimed that Piggy’s Palace was actually his idea. It was known throughout the area that he had been proud of his “after-hours” club, where he had hosted so many large parties.
    “We had eighteen hundred people at one of my parties,” he once boasted. “And my parties were cleaner than any goddamn bar downtown.”
    Dave, often appearing grimy with grease and dirt, has also had his share of trouble with the law. In October 1967, when he was sixteen years old, and right after getting his driver’s license, he was involved in a fatal accident in which he hit a neighbor boy who was walking along Dominion Avenue, according to Canadian investigative journalist Stevie Cameron. The boy was fourteen, and Dave had been driving his father’s pickup truck when the accident occurred. Although details of the incident were sketchy, in part due to the fact that juvenile court files are sealed, the boy was found the next day in a slough following a search by neighbors, as well as the police. He had multiple injuries, but drowning had been the official cause of death, according to Cameron’s account of the incident. Even though the boy’s death had been ruled accidental, evidence surfaced that called into question whether Dave had left the scene of the accident—he had asked a mechanic to make repairs to the damage done to his father’s pickup. When all was said and done, however, Dave was ordered not to drive for two years by a juvenile court.
    In July 1992, Dave had another scrape with the law. He was convicted for sexually assaulting a female construction worker a year earlier at a site that he had been hired to excavate. He purportedly had cornered her inside a construction site trailer and told her that he was going to rape her, but he backed off when another construction worker showed up. After being found guilty, he was fined $1,000, placed on probation for thirty days, and was ordered not to have any further contact with the victim.
    According to the victim, bikers would show up at her home prior to Dave’s trial, and they would make subtle threats, as well as some that were not so subtle, which prompted her to move to another town. On one of the biker visits to her home, she was purportedly told that she would be encased in cement somewhere if she testified against Dave. She took their threats seriously, and feared that she would be harmed or killed if she remained in the area.
    “You could smell him before you saw him,” the victim told local reporters. The Province, among other newspapers, printed her story. “He had no respect for women at all.”
    Other women who knew Dave Pickton concurred with the sexual assault victim’s assessment of him. He was described as being vulgar and bad-mannered when in the company of women, and he often used foul