Family members of victims, Lorelei Williams, left, and Sarah Jean de Vries comfort each other while speaking during a news conference in response to the RCMP’s applications to destroy evidence from Robert Pickton’s Farm, in Vancouver, on Dec. 11.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
The families of women believed to have been murdered on Robert Pickton’s pig farm and a group of dozens of justice organizations are calling on the RCMP to not dispose thousands of pieces of evidence linked to Canada’s largest serial-killer investigation.
Lorelei Williams told a news conference Monday at the Vancouver office of non-profit Justice For Girls (JFG) that she was traumatized when she recently heard the RCMP has applied for the destruction of an estimated 14,000 exhibits collected as part of the investigation into Mr. Pickton.
Mr. Pickton was found guilty in 2007 of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole for 25 years in the deaths of six women. The Crown stayed murder charges against him for the deaths of 20 other women, including Ms. Williams’s cousin, Tanya Holyk.
“They never informed my family, and there’s already no justice in Tania’s case because it’s a stayed case – I don’t understand why he and others can’t be charged in her case,” said Ms. Williams, who is a member of the Skatin and Sts’ailes First Nations. She was 16 when her cousin disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) in 1996 and was missing until her DNA was found on the Port Coquitlam farm.
A letter endorsed by JFG and more than 40 organizations, academics and Indigenous groups was sent Monday to the federal Public Safety Minister, B.C.’s government and RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme, asking them to “take immediate steps to preserve Pickton evidence.” The letter also calls for changes to the law governing evidence disposition, particularly in unsolved cases involving Indigenous and marginalized women and girls and more accountability for the RCMP.
“Disposal of the exhibits will quash any remaining hope they have and solidify their perception that their daughters, mothers, sisters and aunties are less important than the space required to keep that evidence,” it says.
Preserving such evidence is necessary in order to be used to convict other people or solve some of the dozens of unsolved cases of women who went missing from the DTES, said Ms. Williams at the news conference. She was alongside Sue Brown, lawyer for JFG, and Sasha Reid, who runs a database of missing people and unsolved murders in Canada.
JFG said it is aware of five similar applications to dispose of exhibits related to the Pickton case that have been granted since 2020, but they didn’t know how many exhibits have already been dispersed or destroyed.
Sarah Jean de Vries told the news conference someone other than Mr. Pickton transported her mother, who shared the same name, from the DTES to the suburban farm where her DNA was found.
“Who was that person that drove her out to that farm?” she said, alleging police have not fully investigated whether Mr. Pickton had any conspirators in the deaths he was either convicted for, or was charged for but had charges stayed, such as her mother.
British Columbia RCMP spokesperson Staff Sergeant Kris Clark said in a statement that all the evidence is being preserved until a judge rules on its evidentiary value.
“To put it simply, the RCMP is not authorized to retain property indefinitely and is making application to the court for disposition of that property,” the statement says.
In 2010, when the Supreme Court of Canada upheld Mr. Pickton’s life sentence, first-degree murder charges involving 20 other women were stayed because Mr. Pickton was already serving the maximum sentence. The decision noted that Mr. Pickton’s statements to police “implied the involvement of others but not to the exclusion of the accused.”
Wally Oppal, a former B.C. attorney-general whose 2012 Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry focused primarily on the botched police investigations of Mr. Pickton, said he has heard lots of speculation that others were involved in the killings, which Mr. Pickton once told a cellmate had amounted to 49 women. But, he said Monday, there does not seem to be any credible evidence that anybody else was involved.
When asked what should be done with the evidence, Mr. Oppal said he trusts the “professional expertise” of the RCMP.
“What they’re saying is, ‘We’ve had all these pieces of evidence, massive numbers of exhibits, since the 1980s the 1990s and there hasn’t been any type of evidence that has come forward that would compel us to make use of that.
“‘So it’s just sitting there and we’re not in a position to do anything with it, so we have to dispose of it.’”