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Pickton-style Serial Killings Could Recur Warns Cameron

Little has changed in Downtown Eastside to prevent it, says author.

Stanley Tromp 8 Oct 2010TheTyee.ca

Stanley Tromp is a Vancouver-based journalist.

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Stevie Cameron, author of 'On the Farm.'

Journalist Stevie Cameron said the mandate of a public inquiry on the case of B.C. serial killer Robert Pickton is far too narrow, and warned that similar murder rampages could easily happen again.

Cameron was speaking on Oct. 6 about her new book, On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the tragic story of Vancouver's missing women, at the Japanese Hall on Alexander Street in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

To begin the event, the audience of about 150 in the darkened cavernous hall was asked to stand as a First Nations elder onstage pounded a drum while singing a lengthy prayer for the victims.

Speaking about the public inquiry on the Pickton case due to be held under former B.C. attorney general Wally Oppal, she objected the inquiry mandate was to narrowed to begin as of 1997, because 26 women on the official disappearance list vanished before that year. The largest sore point amongst the listeners was the reduction of murder counts at Pickton's trial down to six victims.

"My issue is not Wally Oppal," said Cameron. "I know he's a terrific person and will most likely do a great job. But his biggest hurdle, in my opinion, will be overcoming the distrust of the families, who are still furious with his decision not to go ahead with a trial on the 20 counts.... Did it matter? Yes, because it created what I call an aristocracy of victimhood, with four layers."

The first layer in the hierarchy, she explained, was the families of the six women, receiving most of the attention. The second layer was the families of the 20 other women, who prayed for a trial and felt "betrayed and abandoned." The third was families whose victims' DNA was found on the farm but not enough to lay charges on, and the fourth was the families of victims of whom no remains were found at all.

This division in counts, she added, caused much division and grief amongst families, besides police and prosecutor unhappiness.

'We know there are other serial killers'

In the question and answer session afterwards, one questioner complained that the Oppal Inquiry would not deal with what he called the Silent Era of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when street prostitution was being pushed out of the Downtown Eastside and into Mt. Pleasant, and women disappeared from there.

She agreed, and recalled the case of the Valley Murders in the Mission-Aggasiz area, adding that one reason the RCMP were slow to pursue Pickton is that he did not have the same DNA as the Valley Murderer. "They thought there could not be two serial killers, so they stopped looking for Pickton.... We know there are other serial killers."

Aboriginal women in the audience also complained about lack of public interest in missing aboriginal women on northern B.C.'s Highway 16, sometimes called the Highway of Tears.

When asked if she believed that Pickton acted alone, she replied, "We never heard any evidence that showed that anyone else was involved in the killing of these women.... But I feel very awkward answering these questions when I have two crown prosecutors in this room."

'Everybody cares about this story'

Cameron said Pickton's 18 defense lawyers did a "brilliant" job. "In the voir dire I was shocked that the defense could argue for the exclusion of evidence and the judge agreed with it.... They were the bad guys. As one of my friends here told me years ago, 'The mark of British Columbia's justice system is that they ask the very best to defend the very worst.'"

She regretted that when she began working on the story, a new Vancouver police chief was appointed, Jamie Graham, her first cousin. This family tie turned out to be far more of a liability than an asset. "I was hamstrung. I couldn't talk to him. He couldn't talk to me, I felt very awkward. I felt I couldn't go to the police and try to get interviews from them because they might feel they should talk to me because he was the boss."

In reply to host Hal Wake's query on the public interest in the rest of Canada, Cameron replied that even small town Ontarians know as much as Vancouverites. "I have a cottage in Quebec.... They debate it at dinner with me, at the grocery store, when I'm getting my gas, everybody cares about this story."

The Tyee asked, "If the police and the government say, 'This is all in the past, we learned so much, it could never happen again,' how would you respond?"

Cameron replied, "Of course it could happen again. Has the Downtown Eastside changed that much? Somebody said to me 'This is a pool, and he went straight to it. And if he went straight to it, others could go straight to it too."

(The Vancouver Writers Festival event was presented in partnership with the Carnegie Centre and the Vancouver Japanese Language School & Japanese Hall.)  [Tyee]

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