On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver's Missing Women by Stevie Cameron

Author:Stevie Cameron [Cameron, Stevie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Crime, Murder, Mystery, Non-Fiction, True Crime
ISBN: 9780676975857
Google: pUT4AAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0676975852
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2010-08-12T23:00:00+00:00

Don Adam was staying away from the sound and fury drummed up by the Sun’s revelations. He believed a serial killer was taking women from the Downtown Eastside. His Missing Women’s Joint Task Force had determined there were eighteen more missing women than anyone had expected. He wasn’t going to wait around until the various police forces and municipalities got their acts together. It was time to take control of the investigation and do what he thought was necessary.

Looking for some guidance, Adam called police officers in nearby Seattle, Washington, less than two hundred kilometres south of Vancouver. They had carried out a hunt for the man who had murdered at least forty-five women, most of them prostitutes, and left their bodies by the banks of the city’s Green River. Because the Green River Killer, as he became known, appeared to have gone on a three-year murder spree that lasted only from 1982 to 1985, many police officers had almost forgotten about him. If they thought about him at all, it was to assume he had stopped. But he surfaced again in 1999, when another woman was found dead by the Green River.

Within a year the Seattle police were beginning to develop new DNA tests that linked killer to victims. Their hope was that these tests would allow them to charge Gary Leon Ridgway, who had worked for thirty years as a truck painter; they were almost certain he was the killer. Ridgway had been the prime suspect since 1983, but no one had ever been able to build a strong enough case to charge or convict him. In 1984 he took a lie-detector test and passed. In 1987 the police asked him to bite on a piece of gauze to get his saliva for blood typing, and he agreed. There was still no proof he had killed anyone. It wasn’t until 1997 that DNA matching became elegant enough to compare samples accurately, and by this time the samples had degraded too much to test. Be patient, the scientists told the two police officers still chasing Ridgway. Science will improve. We will get there.

And they did. In April 2001, with new DNA tests available, the Seattle police set up a new Green River Task Force to try one more time to catch the killer. On September 10 new tests matched the DNA from the gauze Ridgway had chewed in 1987 to DNA found on two victims. This was happening just as Don Adam was thinking through DNA issues for his own task force, although the Ridgway news was not yet public and he had not yet been arrested.

Adam knew enough about the Ridgway case to see that it had many similarities to his investigation. The Vancouver case had stretched from as early as 1991, he thought, to the present 2001. At least forty-six women were missing. Almost all the missing women were prostitutes and drug addicts and most of them had been living in the Downtown Eastside when they disappeared.

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