Did Pickton have a partner in crime?

VANCOUVER – One of the most frequent queries among court watchers at Robert (Willie) Pickton’s 2007 trial was: Did he have a partner in crime?

There were always questions about his brother Dave, who lived on the same Port Coquitlam farm as the accused and whose bedroom contained multiple sex toys, including one bearing the DNA of an unidentified woman whose DNA was also found in one of the slaughterhouse freezers. But police testified they could find no proof to connect the younger Pickton brother to the murders of the women.

And then there were the three friends of Willie Pickton – Lynn Ellingsen, Pat Casanova and Dinah Taylor –who were arrested but never charged in the case. Police said there was no evidence to support the laying of criminal charges.

RCMP Staff Sgt. Wayne Clary, then second-in-command at the Missing Women Task Force, testified at a voir dire Aug. 7, 2007 – when the jury was out of the room – that Ellingsen was arrested because information she gave to police in August 1999 about seeing a butchered body in Pickton’s slaughterhouse had not yet been confirmed.

“We had grounds to believe she had knowledge or may have been involved in the situation,” Clary said, adding police ultimately decided she was not a suspect so no charges were ever laid.

He said Taylor, who was subject to police wiretap and an undercover operation, was arrested during a police interview, and that “she may have some knowledge and/or some involvement” in the case.

Clary said the same could be said of Casanova, but added no evidence linking any of the three to the killings was ever found.

Casanova was subjected to surveillance, wiretap, polygraph, and a police undercover operation – involving the purchase of his bandsaw, meetings on the Albion ferry, and driving rental vehicles and women to hotels. (The jury heard that a bandsaw seized by police from Casanova’s Surrey home bore human DNA, but not enough to determine to whom it belonged.)

The Crown position’s during the trial was that Pickton acted alone when he killed six women on his Port Coquitlam property. The defence, however, argued the sprawling farm was a “beehive of activity,” and that other people had the access and the means to commit the crimes.

The defence focused most on Taylor – both during the 2007 trial and when the jury was out of the room during legal arguments in 2006 and 2007. Those details can now finally be revealed following the lifting of a series of publication bans.

The defence successfully argued that Taylor could be treated at the trial like an “alternate suspect” in the death of Andrea Joesbury, one of the six women Pickton was convicted of killing.

“We’re suspicious of her activity [but] there’s no evidence that she’s involved in murder,” Clary explained during a August 2007 voir dire.

However, Clary said Taylor remained a “person of interest” in the deaths of Joesbury, Mona Wilson and Sereena Abotsway — who disappeared in 2001, when Taylor was hanging around the farm. Pickton was later convicted of all three murders.

“Our suspicions are that she [Taylor] was associated with Mr. Pickton and she in fact told us that she brought Joesbury out to the Pickton farm,” Clary testified at a voir dire, at which the jury wasn’t present.

Clary said Taylor is “a difficult person” with drug addictions, whom police repeatedly tried to interview. “She remains a mystery.”

Although Taylor’s DNA was found on or near items linked to the murder victims on Pickton’s property, defence lawyer Adrian Brooks said Taylor refused to provide information to police during tough interviews.

“Here is a woman who is literally tossed around an interview room, trying to break her. Everything was done to break her, and she is the toughest person on this earth,” Brooks told the trial judge, Justice James Williams.

At one point during a voir dire, Williams said to Brooks: “Part of your position, it seems to me, is that there is good reason to believe that she [Taylor] has got blood on her hands here.”

“Yes, yes,” Brooks replied.

During another voir dire, defence lawyer David Layton said police intercepted a conversation between Taylor and Pickton’s brother Dave on May 17, 2002, three months after Willie Pickton was arrested in the missing women case. Dave Pickton asked Taylor if she knew any of the women his older brother was charged with killing.

Taylor, Layton said, answered no, but Layton noted that was a lie because she at least knew Joesbury.

Layton said Dave Pickton also accused Taylor of bringing some of the women to the farm, which she denied. Taylor, apparently, told Dave Pickton that she didn’t like the Downtown Eastside and never lived there.

That, Layton said, was also a lie.

The defence said during a voir dire that it planned to call a female witness who knew both Taylor and Joesbury. However, the witness did not show up during the defence’s case and a warrant was issued for her arrest. She never testified at the trial.

Layton told the judge that the witness had lived on the same floor as Joesbury at the Roosevelt Hotel in the Downtown Eastside in June 2001, just before Joesbury disappeared. He said the witness testified at Pickton’s preliminary hearing that Taylor, who used to live in the same hotel, asked Joesbury to attend a party on the night she disappeared.

Layton said the witness would have testified that she tried to convince Joesbury not to go, but it was in vain and she never saw her friend again. Layton said the witness would also testify that Taylor bullied Joesbury and that the missing woman was afraid of Taylor.

Layton argued that Taylor was jealous because Pickton had paid Joesbury money in June 2001 for cleaning his trailer. (A former desk clerk at the Roosevelt testified at the trial that Taylor would get jealous when Pickton gave money to sex-trade workers.)

And Crown witness Gina Houston testified that Taylor once said of Joesbury: “I’m going to kill the f—–g bitch,” but the judge ruled the jury didn’t need to hear that because it is a frequently used expression that is rarely said with intent.

Taylor appeared briefly at a voir dire but she was never called to testify by the Crown or defence.

lculbert@vancouversun.com