Excerpted from On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic story of Vancouver’s Missing Women. Copyright © 2010 Stevie Cameron. Published by Knopf Canada. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. all rights reserved. www.randomhouse.ca/pickton

There is a story you hear when local people get talking about the Picktons during the Dawes Hill years, that when he was little, Willie used to crawl into the carcasses of gutted hogs to hide from people who were angry with him. if this is true, the Picktons have never said so.

Willie himself has told another story, over and over again, to anyone who would listen, of an incident that devastated him when he was about twelve years old. He’d gone to a livestock auction with his parents and had enough money saved – thirty-five dollars – to buy a three-week-old black and white calf: “as really pretty as the day is long” is how he described it later to his pen pal Victoria. “It was a nice calf and I was going to keep the calf for the rest of my life.” Every day after school he looked forward to coming home to feed it. then one day when he returned, he couldn’t find his calf; frantically he searched all around the property.

“I went everywheres looking for this here calf and I couldn’t find it anywheres,” he said years later. “they says, ‘Oh, it must have got out.’ I said, ‘how can it get out the door? the door is locked.’”

Exasperated by his nagging, someone, probably his father, finally turned to him and suggested he look in the barn. Willie raced off and burst through the doors of the barn. “And here I seen the calf hanging upside down there, they butchered my calf on me. Oh boy, I was mad. I couldn’t talk to anybody for three or four days. I locked everybody out of my own mind, I didn’t want to talk to anybody.”

Louise tried to appease him by giving him an extra twenty dollars for it. But he remained upset. “like my mother says,” he told a friend later, “‘that was a good dollar for the calf.… You can go buy another.’ And I says, ‘no, I was going to keep that calf for the rest of my life and now it’s gone.’ that really upset me, but that happens. That’s life. I mean we’re only here for so long… When your time is over, your time is over.”

When he was sixteen, Dave (Willie Pickton’s brother) got his driver’s licence and would peel off in one of the family trucks as often as he could get out from under his mother’s watchful eye. Early one evening, on October 17, 1967, he climbed into his father’s 1960 GMC one-ton truck to take it for a drive. By seven thirty he had come down Burns Road from the north, turned the corner and was heading home, west along Dominion Avenue. no more than four hundred feet away on Dominion, fourteen-year-old Tim Barrett was leaving his best friend’s house. It was a beautiful, mild evening and he’d dropped by to see if his pal was free – maybe to work on building model cars or airplanes, Tim’s passion – but the other boy was busy.

Tim left his friend’s house that October night at seven thirty and walked further west along the shoulder of Dominion Avenue, heading in the direction of the Pickton farm. he was wearing slacks and a dark brown jacket and he was walking with the traffic, not facing the oncoming cars.

At eleven o’clock that night Phillip Barrett phoned Tim’s friend on Dominion but spoke to the father. “he wanted to know where Tim was,” the father said later. “I said no, he wasn’t there and I hadn’t seen him since the beginning of the evening.” Phillip Barrett, his wife, Lois, and these neighbours called each other several more times that night; they called the police, but there was no news. Early the next morning the two fathers met to search the road.

“We’d been out looking since early in the morning, as soon as it was light,” explained the neighbour. “And we started to walk up Dominion together and that was when we found Tim. mr. Barrett found Tim’s shoe. It was lying on the grass and he picked it up and he said, ‘Oh my God, that’s Tim’s shoe.’ the ditch is perhaps ten feet off the actual road and we were walking along the pavement at the time. We walked over to the ditch and we could see him there, and mr. Barrett practically collapsed.”

Take it to our garage right now, Leonard (the Pickton boys’ father) ordered Dave, and get the mechanic there to bang out that dent and paint over the scrapes and flaking paint. One of them took a cloth and tried to rub the blood off the truck’s hood and fender. And then they noticed the turn signal was broken and wire was dangling from it. Get the mechanic to fix that too, they told Dave. right now. Here’s what you tell him.

While Dave drove the truck to the garage in Port Coquitlam, Louise hurried down Dominion to look for the person Dave said he had hit. she found Tim Barrett lying at the side of the road. Louise didn’t hesitate. she hauled him ten feet to the edge of the slough and rolled him into it. then she turned around and went home.

The coroner’s jury heard from Dr. C. J. Coady, a pathologist at the Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster, who had performed the autopsy on Tim Barrett’s body. His news was a shock: Tim hadn’t been killed when the truck hit him. although he had been badly injured – suffering a fractured and dislocated pelvis, deep bruises, hemorrhaging in the back of his head and body, and a fractured skull with a sub-cranial hemorrhage – these injuries wouldn’t have killed him, the pathologist stated. Tim Barrett had drowned in the slough, in two feet of filthy brown water. they even had an idea of the time: his watch had stopped at 7:45 p.m. exactly.

<a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/pickton-family-values/article1672899/tag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/pickton-family-values/article1672899/Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:28:23 GMT 00:00″>Pickton family values – The Globe and Mail

Tags: carcasses, livestock auction, pen pal, robert william pickton, vancouver, victoria

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