Free Butcher by Gary C. King Page B

cops had either lied to her or had been mistaken about having seen Cynthia.
    Cynthia Feliks was one of the working girls not originally from Canada. Born in Detroit, Michigan, she was the second of four children. Following their parents’ failed marriage, the children lived with their father, a watchmaker, who moved them to Vancouver in 1960 after marrying a second time. Eight years later their father left his second wife, leaving the children with her, and went back to the United States. Because their father failed to provide financial assistance to their stepmother for their well-being, the children grew up having a tough time—along with the stepmother. But their stepmother did the best that she could under the circumstances, often holding down two jobs.
    According to the stepmother, Cynthia became involved with drugs following a trip to Florida at age sixteen to visit her father, who is now deceased. Her stepmother claimed that Cynthia’s father had coaxed her into smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol with him, and she alluded to the possibility that Cynthia’s father had also sexually abused her during that trip. Soon after her return to Vancouver, Cynthia began skipping school and running away from home. She finally left home for good at age nineteen, got married, and had a child, a daughter. Unfortunately, her husband, who has since died, was also a drug abuser, and neither of them provided much of a life for their child. Although Cynthia had been very proud of her daughter, the child ended up being raised by relatives and living much of her youth in foster homes.
    Cynthia Feliks became the thirty-ninth woman to disappear from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, but she wouldn’t be the last.

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    ’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the streets, not a soul to be found except two little pigs and two working girls.
    —Robert Pickton, after turning two small pigs loose in Low Track, Christmas Eve, 1997
    After Dave Pickton moved to the other side of the farm, near Piggy’s Palace off Burns Road, which was nearly a mile away from the main farmhouse, his brother, Willie, finally had the freedom to come and go as he pleased. Dave had escaped much of the stench of the pig-farming operation, and Willie could now do what he wanted without having to explain anything to Dave, or to anyone else. Dave had moved out of the main farmhouse soon after the sales of the parcels of land had gone through. A short time thereafter, he had constructed his after-hours social club. He, too, enjoyed the freedom that living away from his brother had given him, even if he was only a short distance down the road. When the wind was just right, however, he could sometimes still smell the pig shit, blood, and rotting carcasses that Willie had left unattended. Nevertheless, the separateness afforded each of the brothers the freedom that each had wanted, and needed, to do as they pleased. Willie, of course, liked to cavort with prostitutes, and Dave could continue his efforts at becoming closely aligned with bikers—particularly, some said, the Hells Angels. All the while Dave lived with a woman who seemed willing to put up with his love of partying.
     
    A number of people who had known and worked with the Pickton family painted a picture of happier times that dated back to the 1970s, when there was not so much junk lying around on the farm and there were greener pastures in wide-open spaces. There were also horses on the farm at that time. One woman, Alison Gailling, was six years old when she first visited the farm in 1979, when her older sister, Vicky, began dating Dave Pickton. Now a high-school teacher in her mid-thirties, Gailling recalled a memory that was not so pleasant. She said that there was a large sludge pit on the farm, where dead pigs and other pig waste materials were discarded. On one occasion, she said, Willie took her into the farmhouse’s basement, which she described as dark and “scary,” where he showed her