Dead Ends (5 page)

When Lynn asked Marnie where she got the money for drugs, she told the truth.

“I'm selling myself—it's really scary.”

Marnie tried rehab several times, but couldn't face her fears of detox pains.

Through it all, she stayed in touch with Lynn and Rick and Brittney. She called home almost every day, often more than once, asking how her little girl was doing.

That ended after August 30, 1997, Marnie's twenty-fourth birthday. Lynn talked to Marnie for what turned out to be the last time, wished her a happy birthday. She had sent a birthday package—new clothes, homemade bread, and fifty dollars—and expected a call in the next few days from Marnie.

It never came. Lynn and Rick knew something was wrong. They tried to report their daughter missing, but the
RCMP
sent them away. It took five months to convince police to list Marnie as a missing person.

People like her, like all the women Pickton preyed on, went missing all the time, police said. Marnie would turn up.

That's one reason Pickton could kill again and again and again—forty-nine times—without getting caught. No one was even looking for the women he murdered.

If Marnie had been a university student and disappeared without a trace, police would have been searching for her.

But she was a sex worker and an addict. “They didn't give a damn,” said Lynn Frey.

So Lynn started searching. It's almost five hours, by road and ferry, to Vancouver from Campbell River, but Lynn repeated the journey a couple of times a month, walking the streets of the Downtown Eastside, showing Marnie's picture and asking for information.

“I looked in Dumpsters, terrible places. I called morgues and hospitals. The police were not looking for her so I had to.”

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside had become home to the desperate and damaged—addicts and the mentally ill and the lost. Its sidewalks showcased every kind of suffering, every day.

Lynn started to hear whispers about a man named “Willie,” hunting women from the streets, killing them one by one.

A year after Marnie vanished, Lynn learned more. A sex worker said Marnie was dead. Murdered, and her body had
been put through a wood chipper on a muddy farm about forty-five minutes from the Eastside.

Just weeks later, Lynn met a Downtown Eastside community worker who had taped a conversation with another sex worker. She said “Willie” had taken women to his pig farm and the chipper, and they would never be found again. Everyone on the street knew a serial killer was hunting women.

Lynn shared the story with a relative from Port Coquitlam, a Vancouver suburb. She knew about a pig farmer named “Willie,” with a chipper on his muddy, messy property, and a shed called the Piggy Palace, the scene of wild, drunken parties.

They drove to the farm late one night and tried to scale the fence, but were scared away by Pickton's dogs. “That night when I went there, when I was backing out of the driveway, I had a very weird feeling… . She was there.”

So Lynn went to the police and told them what she had learned.

And they did nothing. Lynn went back to the farm at least a dozen more times. That was all she could do for Marnie.

Pickton, he went on killing. It would be more than three years—and a dozen more murders—before police raided the farm on a firearms warrant and arrested him.

It was another two years, after a multi-million-dollar forensic search, until police called Rick Frey and said they had found part of Marnie's jawbone and four of her teeth on the farm.

In 2002, Robert “Willie” Pickton was charged with twenty-six counts of murder. He told an undercover police officer posing as a fellow inmate that he had killed forty-nine women.

In December 2007, he was convicted of six murder charges—including killing Marnie Frey—and sentenced to life in prison. The investigation and trial cost $115 million.

An inquiry into the missing women cost another $10 million.

It found police didn't act on clear evidence that a serial killer was preying on Vancouver women. The victims didn't matter. They were disposable.

Police, government, society didn't really care if they were killed. Pickton could have been stopped years earlier.

The pictures of Marnie Frey should break your heart.

G
eorge Booth was odd.

But no one expected that in less than an hour he would turn a hot, dry coulee in Kamloops into a killing field. And that three young Mounties would be killed on a June morning in 1962.

Booth was thirty-one. He lived in a two-room shack in Knutsford, a hamlet about seven kilometres from Kamloops, with his father, John Wilkes Booth. His being named for the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln suggests an odd quality in the family.

George Booth was a throwback, a man who might have been more comfortable in Kamloops in 1862 than in 1962, happier alone in the woods than with people. He got by on a meagre welfare payment and his skills as a woodsman.

He was a crack shot—his father boasted his son could split a match at fifty metres—and a master at making his own way in the rolling hills around Kamloops. He had built a fortified log cabin he planned to use as a retreat from civilization.

And he was a loner, suspicious of strangers, anyone in authority and, especially, police officers.

Five years earlier, his father had Booth committed to Essondale, a mental institution outside Vancouver. George kept claiming someone was poisoning his morning coffee. It was unnerving.

The four months of noisy, crowded confinement were nightmarish for a young man who cherished solitude and the outdoors.

RCMP
officers took Booth to the institution. His father lied and told him the police had wanted him committed.

Still, there was nothing to suggest trouble on June 18, a hot and sunny Monday, when Booth set out for town. He wanted to find out why his welfare payments were getting smaller and renew the licence for a .303-calibre rifle, his father said.

Neighbour Anthony Parrott didn't think anything was unusual. He saw Booth walking and gave him a ride into town. George looked terrible. He was dressed for the bush, in a dirty jacket and brown cotton pants and a red-and-black checked flannel shirt, his black, curly hair wild, as always. His rifle was tucked into a buckskin sheath.

But he always looked terrible, Parrott said, and he seemed in good spirits.

Parrott dropped him near the provincial government buildings on the edge of Kamloops' small downtown.

And then things began to go bad.

Around nine o'clock, two conservation officers, George Ferguson and Frank Richter, saw Booth leaving the provincial building with a rifle. He seemed edgy. Ferguson asked where he was going.

Booth pushed the rifle barrel against Ferguson's stomach. “Get the hell out of here or I kill you.”

They did. The wardens retreated to their office and called the
RCMP
.

Kamloops was a plum posting for young
RCMP
officers. With about 10,000 people, it was a comfortable size. The Thompson River runs through the heart of the city, and the hills and lakes provide the kind of recreation popular with the active young men from small towns who joined the
RCMP
in those days.

In the detachment, officers were getting ready for the day shift. They were hoping for a quiet time. The Indian Days weekend, with rodeos, sporting events, food and—inevitably—some drunkenness and brawling, had kept members busy breaking up fights and taking in drunks.

Monday was the voting day for the federal election, so bars were closed. Things should be peaceful.

Cst. Joe Keck took the call from the game wardens. He and Cst. Gord Pederson were assigned to investigate.

Keck was twenty-five and had grown up on a family grain farm in southern Saskatchewan. He was already a father, with another child on the way. He was good-looking, with a slender face and warm smile and wavy hair that drew movie star comparisons.

Pederson, from Milk River, Alberta, was two years younger, and barely back from his honeymoon. He didn't know it, but his wife was already pregnant.

Donald Weisgerber was on his day off. He had stopped in the detachment to do a few chores before heading to the golf course to try out the new clubs his wife had given him for his twenty-third birthday.

He was in casual clothes, and unarmed. But the call sounded interesting. He hopped in the cruiser with his friends.

It wasn't hard to find Booth. He was pacing outside the Motor Vehicle Office. The visit to town had not gone well.

He saw the three Mounties, and he brandished his rifle, still in its sheath. Everyone was immediately on edge.

Booth walked away from the building, and the officers followed, calling on him to stop and drop the gun—instructions he ignored.

With each step, the three young Mounties were heading toward disaster.

Within two minutes, the little group had covered 200 metres. Booth had walked along a dirt road that led to a mostly dry creek and a grassy, arid coulee. He took the rifle from its cover and dropped the sheath. Weisgerber, in his golf clothes, followed closely enough to pick it up and urge Booth to come back and get it.

Instead, Booth scrambled across the dry creek bed and waved the officers away. He pointed his rifle at them and yelled at them to leave him alone.

It was a surreal moment. Seniors from a nearby residence watched the standoff.

An angry man with a history of mental illness, armed with a rifle, faced three young, inexperienced Mounties—one of them unarmed, and the other two with revolvers.

In movies, shootouts unfold with some order, some logic. In real life, they are chaotic, noisy, and deadly.

Booth headed for a rough timber bridge over the creek. From there, he had a chance to disappear into scrub brush on the rising coulee sides.

Pedersen tried to cut off the escape. He closed the distance to twenty-five metres, as Keck and Weisgerber moved closer to the bridge.

But Booth had an overwhelming advantage.

He raised his rifle and aimed at Pederson, an easy target for an expert marksmen with a .303. The first bullet ripped across his back, the second missed, and amazingly Pederson snapped off one shot before dying instantly from a third bullet to the head.

Weisgerber, unarmed, ran for his life and dived behind a gravel skid box at the side of the dirt road, protection at least for the moment.

Keck rushed the bridge and made it underneath. He was shielded from a direct shot from Booth, desperately hoping for a chance to bring him down.

Incredibly, Keck managed to shoot Booth in the stomach, and he fell, dropping his rifle.

Weisgerber saw his chance and bolted from his hiding place, unarmed, to try and get the gun. He didn't make it. Booth picked up the rifle and shot him three times in the chest.

Keck edged out from under the bridge to see if Booth was wounded, leaning a little farther because he was still wearing his
RCMP
-issue brown stetson.

Booth shot him in the head and walked into the steep, bush-covered hill.

Three Mounties were dead. And Booth was wondering how his simple trip to town to complain about his welfare payments had gone so wrong.

Back at the detachment, Staff Sgt. Bernard d'Easum started to wonder the same thing. The phone lines were buzzing
with reports of the shootings, and he couldn't reach the three officers on the car radio.

Siren screaming, he rushed to the scene. Every officer in the division scrambled to take part in the manhunt. The detachment didn't have enough rifles, so officers stopped by their homes or borrowed rifles from civilians keen to help. A helicopter hunted from the sky and dogs scoured the hillsides.

Booth's reputation as a ghost in the bush was deserved.

But no one could escape the dragnet.

Cpl. Jack White had stopped at home to get his own hunting rifle and, with two other officers, driven up into the hills to outflank Booth.

For two hours, they crept slowly down the hills. Just before noon, Booth suddenly appeared, standing in front of them. Everyone dove for cover, squeezing behind trees, pressing into the dirt.

“He was so close I could hear the action of his rifle as he worked the bolt to reload it,” White said. They exchanged shots. When Booth rolled onto his side to reload, White shot him in the head.

But the story doesn't end with the shooting.

Cst. Pedersen's wife, Betty, was working in her new job in a Scotiabank branch when she saw Carole Finch, another
RCMP
wife, go into the manager's office.

Betty was called to the manager's office minutes later.

You need to come with me, Finch said. Gordon had “received an injury.” But a bulletin on the car radio said there had been shooting and officers were dead. After a month of marriage, Pederson knew she was a widow.

Joan Weisgerber, working at her switchboard in the British Columbia Telephone building, was told by a supervisor there had been a “very bad accident” and Donald was dead.

And poor Ann Keck, pregnant with her second child, strolled into the
RCMP
detachment to remind Joe to vote before the end of the day. An officer had to tell her that Joe was dead.

More than 1,500 people attended the joint funeral service at the Kamloops arena. Thousands more lined the streets for the procession. Three flag-draped coffins.

John Wilkes Booth said the Mounties should have just let his boy walk away. He created a shrine in his tiny house, with George's blood-stained clothing on the wall. Built a concrete memorial on a mountaintop.

It was vandalized as fast as he could clean it up.

S
hayne Mulvahill was no one's idea of a criminal mastermind. He was definitely not a likely candidate to orchestrate the kidnapping of the daughter of Jimmy Pattison, one of Canada's richest men.

He had a tough childhood. His parents abused him, and he bounced through a series of foster homes. His behaviour landed him in a mental hospital for a year as a thirteen-year-old. A poor student, he made it through grade twelve in 1988 and headed straight into a series of unskilled jobs.