VANCOUVER – A sex worker’s heroin addiction that prompted prosecutors to effectively drop an attempted murder case against Robert Pickton in the late 1990s didn’t prevent the woman from testifying five years later as the serial killer faced multiple murder charges, a public inquiry heard Thursday.
Crown counsel Randi Connor has already testified she stayed the charges in January 1998 because she felt the victim was too strung out and incoherent to be a reliable witness – a conclusion she reached after a single meeting with the woman less than two weeks before trial. The woman was attacked in March of the previous year.
But prosecutors preparing for Pickton’s multiple murder trial, who were again confronted with a woman they felt was too impaired to put on the stand, successfully worked with the police to clean her up and prepare her for the serial killer’s preliminary hearing, the inquiry heard.
The woman testified in April 2003, providing a vivid account of the night she nearly died of stab wounds at Pickton’s farm in Port Coquitlam.
In 2003, the victim was “in a similar condition when Crown counsel first interviewed her, namely impaired by drug usage,” Cameron Ward, a lawyer for more than two dozen missing and murdered women, told the inquiry Thursday.
“Crown counsel takes some measures in order to procure her testimony under oath. We have the transcript of her evidence (at the preliminary hearing), which speaks to her eloquence, her ability to articulate her evidence about the same incident while she was on the stand.”
- Canadian woman charged with illegally crossing into U.S., kicking border agent’s face
- A new ‘cold’ war? Canada looks to bolster Arctic security, sovereignty
- Canadian furniture industry still ‘reeling’ after Trump pauses tariff spike
- Ottawa propose fines of up to $1M for violating foreign influence registry rules
Ward was cross-examining Connor, who has acknowledged she didn’t take any steps to help the victim with her addiction before she entered the stay of proceedings.
Connor wasn’t involved in Pickton’s multiple murder trial, which followed the massive search of his farm in 2002, but she recalled speaking about the case with prosecutor Geoff Baragar.
Get breaking National news
Baragar said the victim was again in rough shape when he met with her before Pickton’s preliminary hearing and he was concerned about her ability to testify, recalled Connor.
Baragar told her two police officers brought the victim to a hotel for a night of rest so she’d be in better condition, recalled Connor.
Several lawyers who have been critical of the Crown’s decision to stay the charges against Pickton have pointed to the victim’s ability to testify in 2003 to suggest Crown prosecutors were too quick to dismiss the woman and that Pickton could have been put on trial for attempted murder in 1998.
After the charges were stayed, 19 women later connected to Pickton’s farm in Port Coquitlam disappeared.
Connor said she believed the woman’s drug problem was long-standing and severe, pointing to a drug conviction that dated back to 1985 and numerous minor theft convictions that she assumed were linked to a drug habit.
She said it appeared the victim’s drug problem had improved by 2003.
“Mr. Baragar was telling me that her drug use was much less when he dealt with her, and he still had problems,” said Connor.
Ward has requested Baragar be called to testify about how he was able to prepare the victim for testimony, though it wasn’t clear whether that will happen.
The woman’s story was never told to the jury at Pickton’s trial, after which he was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder.
The woman told his preliminary hearing that she went with Pickton to his farm and had sex with him. She said Pickton then placed a handcuff on one of her wrists, prompting her to grab a knife and slash him across the neck.
At some point, she testified Pickton grabbed the knife and stabbed her. She arrived in hospital with a handcuff on her wrist, and Pickton later arrived in the same hospital carrying the key to those handcuffs in his pocket.
The woman was expected to testify at the public inquiry this week, but her appearance was cancelled after she told commission lawyers she was still too traumatized from the attack and worried how testifying would affect her and her family.
The inquiry is looking at how police and prosecutors handled the various investigations into the serial killer, and the hearings have now shifted to the decision by Crown counsel to effectively drop the attempted murder case against Pickton.
That work has been made difficult because the original Crown file from the case, which would have contained records related to how prosecutors handled the case, was destroyed several years later, despitea policy that dictates serious files such as attempted murder cases must be archived for 75 years.
Andrew MacDonald, an acting regional Crown who looked into file’s destruction for the province’s criminal justice branch, told the inquiry the file was destroyed because of an administrative error. The inquiry heard conflicting information about whether the file was destroyed in 2000 or 2001.
MacDonald said the file was mistakenly marked for destruction along with a batch of 121 boxes of documents. The list of files to be destroyed was then reviewed twice, first by someone in the administrative Crown’s office and then by an official in Victoria, but neither noticed the mistake.
“It was an error made repeatedly,” said MacDonald, who noted there were other files in the same batch that also should have been archived .
Pickton’s arrest in 2002 set off a massive search of his farm in Port Coquitlam, where the remains or DNA of 33 women were found.
He once told an undercover police officer that he killed 49 women.
Comments