Accused serial killer Robert Pickton described how he killed prostitutes after having sex with them and used his pigs to help dispose of the remains, a Canadian court was told on Monday.
Prosecution witness Andrew Bellwood, who lived briefly at Pickton’s farm, testified that Pickton showed him handcuffs and play-acted as he described stroking their hair and telling them everything would be okay, ”it’s over now”.
”While he was telling me this story it was almost as if there was a woman on the bed,” Bellwood told the court, testifying about a conversation he said they had in Pickton’s bedroom in early 1999 while watching television.
Bellwood said Pickton told him that after butchering the dead women in the farm’s slaughterhouse, he fed some of the remains to his pigs. Any remains the pigs did not eat were put into a container and taken to an animal rendering plant.
Pickton is accused of killing 26 of more than 60 prostitutes and drug addicts who disappeared from Vancouver, British Columbia, from the late 1980s until late 2001, shortly before his arrest at his farm in nearby Port Coquitlam in February 2002.
This trial deals with six of the women.
Police say Pickton picked the women up in Vancouver’s poor Eastside neighbourhood and took them to the ramshackle farm, where he slaughtered pigs, about a 30 minute drive from the city.
Pickton (57) has denied murdering the women, although his defence lawyers acknowledge body parts and DNA were discovered on the property. An earlier witnesses testified she saw him cutting up a body.
Pickton watched Bellwood testify and wrote on a notepad in the prisoner’s box, just as he has during much of the trial that began in late January.
Bellwood (37) admitted he had a crack cocaine addiction.
Most of the major civilian witnesses in the trial have been drug abusers who Pickton befriended, although there is no evidence he used drugs or alcohol himself.
Bellwood said Pickton, who often went under the nickname Willie, began the conversation by suggesting they go to Vancouver to get a prostitute, which they did not do, and that he did not know at the time how much to believe what Pickton told him.
”I really didn’t know what to make of it. … There was part of me that thought it was pretty whacked out,” Bellwood testified, admitting he never told police about the conversation until they contacted him in 2002.
Bellwood admitted he left the farm in March 1999 after he was accused of stealing some tools and was badly beaten.
The defence will begin its cross examination of Bellwood on Tuesday, and will likely suggest that he is making the claims to get revenge for the beating. – Reuters