Butcher by Gary C. King Read Free Book Online Page A

language when he was with women.
    There are always two sides to every story, however, and many of the neighbors of the Pickton brothers had nothing but praise for the two brothers, as well as for their parties. One woman said that she had taken her ninety-year-old father to social gatherings at Piggy’s Palace, and she described them as “excellent parties where local people used to go.”
    “Dave and Willie have been pretty good guys…a little rough around the edges,” said another neighbor. “I’ve known them for quite a few years and I’ve watched them do a lot of nice things for people….”
    As the Pickton siblings sold off the various parcels of their land, the locale in which the pig farm was situated became known as the Dominion Triangle and was touted as “Coquitlam’s newest commercial area,” as indeed it had become. On one side of the street were the townhomes that had quickly shot up, and in the same vicinity, but on the opposite side of the road, a new mall was installed that included Costco, Save-On-Foods, and other outlets. East of the mall there still existed a number of small farms where cornfields produced the fruit of the farmer’s labor, and some where horses roamed within the confines of their fences, with much of the rest little more than marshy grassland. While the area sprang up around the Pickton farm, Robert and Dave went about their separate businesses and continued to party heartily, whenever they could.
    People, however, would later say that Willie never took drugs and did not drink, despite his fondness for the parties held by him and his brother. Women—sex trade workers, as they had come to be known—from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside also continued to disappear.

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    By Willie’s own account, in a tape-recorded “letter” to a woman known as Victoria, made on December 28, 1991, speaking rapidly and in nasal intonations that sounded somewhat similar to the late actor Wally Cox, Willie talked about the hardships of growing up on the pig farm. In speech that was sometimes erratic, Willie told a story that took him back to early childhood, when he was about three years old. In a voice that sounded neither threatening nor menacing, and which was laced with occasional chuckling, Willie seemed completely harmless as he joyfully recalled an incident that occurred while he was playing inside the cab of his father’s old GM Maple Leaf truck and pigs were being loaded into the back. Jumping, bouncing around, and playing with the steering wheel, as any three-year-old would, Willie somehow shifted the truck into neutral, causing it to roll forward and down a hill. Frightened pigs began squealing and jumping from the back of the truck as Willie’s father, Leonard, frantically chased the truck, pigs in tow, to try and stop it before any major damage was done. Despite Leonard’s best efforts, however, the truck didn’t come to a stop until it smashed into a telephone pole. The accident totaled the old truck, and Willie got “the hell” beaten out of him for the incident. But that was the way of life on the farm, he indicated, where punishment was doled out when it was due. In recalling the incident, it did not appear that Willie held any ill will toward his father for the beating, but he had simply accepted it as punishment that was deserved.
    In recalling another incident, which occurred several years later, when he was about eleven or twelve, Willie’s retelling of the story for Victoria’s benefit seemed almost poignant at times. Willie had gone to a livestock auction and had purchased a calf, which he described as “beautiful,” with a “little black-and-white face,” that was barely three weeks old. He had paid $35 for it. Willie really loved the calf, and in his young mind, he had planned to keep it for the rest of his life. He looked after the calf each day, and fed it like he was supposed to do, rarely letting it out of his sight. But he had other chores to do, such as