Free Butcher by Gary C. King

only reasonable to presume that the Vancouver police knew about the goings-on there as well. The woman that the girls could call to be picked up and driven to the farm also raised questions that needed answering. Who was she? What was her relationship to Pickton? Did Willie have a willing accomplice to help him carry out his murderous deeds? No one knew, of course, but it seemed reasonable that all of the chatter on the street about Pickton’s farm, particularly with so many missing women on the ever-growing list, would have been picked up by the police and at least piqued their interest. Unfortunately, that hadn’t been the case. To the families of the missing women, it seemed as if the police couldn’t have cared less about what was happening in the city that they were hired to serve and protect.
    Lynn Frey, however, had other ideas. After sifting through all the details that they had compiled from the women in Low Track, Lynn and her sister decided to drive out to Pickton’s farm on Dominion Avenue late one evening. They had found the setting very unnerving, and Lynn would later tell the police about her experience that night.
    “We just drove down this dark road and stared at the house,” she said. “It was pitch-black. The dogs started barking and we thought, ‘What are we doing here? This is crazy.’”
    She said that night in 1997 hadn’t been the only time that she had driven past the farm. There had been another occasion, and, like the first, she had been inexplicably disturbed by her venture. She had informed the police about it, urging them to check it out.
    Lynn believed that they might have done so, but she wasn’t certain about it. She said that she believed that two of the sex trade workers that she had spoken to had told the police about Pickton’s farm, but she was careful to not be too condemning of the police action, or lack thereof. She understood how the police needed accurate, solid details before they could act appropriately, thereby giving them credit that may not have been deserved.
    “I’m not knocking the street girls,” she said. “But when you’re high, all of the days blur together…. I think the police did investigate, but they can’t listen to everything. And these women weren’t known for their reliability.”
     
    The case of Wendy Lynn Eistetter was another example of how the police had known about the Pickton farm and how Willie had attempted to kill her. Wendy’s mother believed that if Wendy hadn’t been able to reach a knife with which to stab Pickton, she would be dead today. But the fact that she was a drug addict, and the fact that she had once stolen a police cruiser and had dragged the officer whose car she had taken, presented credibility issues for her with the prosecutor’s office, which partly accounted for the reason that Willie had gotten off.
    “The Crown reviewed the state of the evidence and there was no likelihood of conviction,” Geoffrey Gaul, a spokesperson with the prosecutor’s office, had said.
    Although 1997 had proven to be a significant year, as far as showing that the police had known about Willie Pickton and the pig farm—what with the talk on the streets, the Wendy Eistetter incident, the fact that two prostitutes had spoken to police about the farm, and Lynn Frey’s urging that the goings-on at the farm be investigated—it would be several years before Willie’s reign of terror was ended. In the meantime, women continued disappearing.
     
    According to the list that was eventually compiled by the Joint Missing Women Task Force—still nearly four years away from being formed—Helen May Hallmark, thirty-one, was the next woman to disappear from Vancouver’s East End and the crummy landscape of flophouses, sleazy bars, and dirty restaurants that made up so much of the area. Born June 24, 1966, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Helen was reported missing on September 23, 1998, according to the police, but she may have disappeared