Kimberly Proctor murder, Guilty, on all counts, but how much justice will be done?

It seems like everybody is growing up faster these days. This includes murderers. I am sure it is only a matter of perception, but I don't recall a lot of mass murderers haunting high schools when I was growing up.  In recent years we've had the murder of whole families by kids, as in the case of Jeremy Steinke and his accomplice, the 12 year old who joined in the slaughter of her family in 2007 in Medicine Hat, Alberta. We've had shootings in Toronto, kids blowing away kids when a profusion of handguns darkened the streets around Jane and Finch in 2009. (Police seem to have that gun play under control, touch wood.)

Cops have to work extremely hard to deal with youth crime that seems to spin out of control, and there are occasions when cops are almost ahead of the curve in containing the mayhem. Case in point: The enormity of the crime against Kimberly Proctor in Victoria, B.C., has few parallels and we can be thankful for this. We can also be thankful that it didn't get a lot worse.

The atrocious rape and murder of Kimberly Proctor was done by two youth offending knaves who confessed to all the cavalier plotting, doing so unrepentant after serpentine evasion of their responsibility by moral turpitude, unnamed due to the Young Offenders Act, but ages 16 and 17 (18 at the sentence-hearing of Mar. 28, 2011).

The two youth offenders pleaded guilty last autumn to First Degree murder and presently face sentencing in Victoria for their monstrous deeds. The reality of this case is that almost by accident it stopped at one murder. The 16 year old and the 18 year old who was 17 when he raped, mutilated, and butchered Kimberly Proctor, attempted to lure another girl over to the scene of the killing frenzy while Kimberly's remains were still in the house.

Kimberly had once spent a short period of time dating the 16 year old. She was acquainted with the 17 year old. The 16 year-old and the 17 year-old had spent the months after the dating period raising hell with Kimberly's social circle, and part of the plot in luring her to the house involved an 'apology' and an 'explanation' of why the two were making life miserable for Kimberly. This evil March 2010 event has been described in the courtroom of Victoria as the Proctor family and the public hears the evidence aired before sentences are delivered.

 

The two murderers made the last hours of Kimberly's life a trauma-event seeming without end. She was bound and gagged and raped and mutilated with tools while still breathing, still witness to her own torment. Her life was not permitted an easy ending, as the news report from the CBC describes from the courtroom: "There were gasps in the courtroom Monday (Mar. 28, 2011) as the Crown revealed Proctor was likely still alive when her killers put her in a freezer and that the two boys probably also had sex with her after she was dead and before they took her body in a duffle bag on a bus to the trail where they set her on fire."

While Kimberly Proctor is feeling her own life being extinguished in the freezer, a second girl somehow resists the intensive cellphone call entreaties from the 16 year-old, and this girl's life was undoubtedly spared a fate closely resembling that of Kimberly. Indeed, the pair of killers had plotted some kind of rape/murder atrocity against another girl from their high school in the weeks prior to Kimberly's senseless and grotesque slaying.

The police spared Vancouver Island society further atrocities from a pair of serial killer wannabes who took Kimberly Proctor's existence for granted, and who were likely going to take others' existences for granted. They intervened on a serial killing duo to prevent further mayhem, nevertheless, the question is how much justice will be done, and how much crime prevention is the correction system going to supply?

 

The reality is that over the course of time a desire for killing will remain strong in these two rapacious and mindless fiends. A sentence for either of them cannot guarantee society that promises are made to the Proctor family (nor assurances are made to wider society) that we shall never see these perpetrators in the streets as long as they shall live. Oh no. The youth offender, sentenced as an adult, is eligible for parole after 10 years. Sentenced as a youth they are scot-free after 10 years (as in the case of the 12 year-old killer of her Medicine Hat family). There is absolutely no justice in that. None whatsoever, so the harder cops work, it seems, the harder they will make it for themselves.

Mark Twitchell's trial for being the stupidest murderer in Canada in a long time

STUPID AND GUILTY, or guilty and guilty of being stupid.

He's the stupidest murderer in recent Canadian history, stupid as alleged by me, murderer as found by Alberta Justice (and Edmonton Police Service no doubt had their own opinion of Mark Twitchell's witlessness).

The account was this: 
 

I've been following the news reports of the trial that began in middle of March 2011, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I don`t think it should be such a long trial, since it is set for four weeks, the trial of Mark Twitchell. It is underway for the alleged murder of Johnny Atlinger. In fact, considering the accused made a late-stage admission of interfering with a corpse, it appears it should hardly be a trial at all, except I allege that he is far too stupid to confess.
 

It is only my opinion, that I am surprised the killer was smart enough to pull it off. He seems to be one of the stupidest killers we have seen in Canada in a long time. Apparently he aspires to being a serial killer, according to something he wrote on his laptop. The laptop contains a short 'script' for a 'short' movie. Upon closer reading, it is little more than a set of crib-notes for Twitchell to follow in case he forgets what he has to do next. He'll never make it as a script writer. I have a question: If this guy Mark Twitchell is that stupid, exactly how gullible did Johnny Atlinger have to be?
 

Online there is an Edmonton Police Service detective interview of 2:00 A.M. Oct 19 2008. This interview occurred a few hours after Twitchell had been interviewed at the garage on the city's south side. 

Twitchell lived in St. Albert, Alberta, north of Edmonton, and he was sort of unemployable by his own admission. "I like to work where I can make a difference. I worked at Telus," he says on tape. Only an eternal optimist or a borderline psychopath would think he's making a difference by working at a large multi-national telecom conglomeration.

The video tape interview with Detective Tabler begins delving into the 'disappearance' of Johnny Atlinger. This interview in fact took place several hours after a previous interview done at 6:00 P.M., the evening before, by a couple of police constables who entered the garage. They saw there a scorched steel barrel and smelled something pungent. Twitchell admitted to renting the garage, he told Det. Tabler, in September for $175 a month.
 

He explained the windows were all covered because the dingy garage was a movie-set/studio/storage place. Mark Twitchell was an aspiring filmmaker, he explains on the police interrogation video tape, and he launches into a ten minute soliloquy on why its the only life for him, making films, being a film maker, selling tickets. He claims to have memory problems during the interview after Detective Mike Tabler drags a dissembling Twitchell back to the crime scene, inquiring about Twitchell`s visitations to the garage during the disappearance of Atlinger, Oct 10, 2008.

This particular account by Twitchell is telling, as he describes the business of returning to the garage after a film shoot of late September, and a clean-up is underway, to which Twitchell brings his cleaning equipment, because in the film industry they use a lot of corn syrup and red food dye to simulate blood. If Twitchell is following the script he wrote (or consulting crib notes in the murder he committed) he had a lot of cleaning to do in that garage, or movie s set, or crime scene.

In the heart of the interview with Det. Tabler, Twitchell describes a film shooting in the garage that occurred in late September, and during the sword stabbing scene they got corn syrup all over the chair, and the floor. The stuff was everywhere, he said, without a hint of disgust. And he had to dissemble even more about the effort he would make to clean it up, and the story is haunting, surreal, hard to distinguish a sense of reality in it. At this point during the interview, Det. Tabler, not facing the camera, seems to sit uncomfortably still, listening. This is only ten days after the police received reports that Johnny Atlinger was missing, and at the same time, Atlinger-originating messages were circulating on the internet and through emails.

 The court heard testimony about a ham-handed attempt to 'cover-up' the disappearance of Johnny Atlinger, 38. Twitchell had Atlinger`s 2005 Mazda, fer instance, 'cause, duh, he bought it from a guy at a gas station in south Edmonton for $40. (I lived in Edmonton. They don't sell five-year-old Japanese imports at gas stations for $40, so don't start flocking to Edmonton for great deals on cars. Twitchell is lying.)

 Then emails and internet postings alluded to Atlinger's sudden departure to a place called heaven, which was being described as Costa Rica, with a woman that Johnny Atlinger had recently befriended (possibly post-mortem, making it thus a truly etheral romance.) A fact we shall probably learn much later is that Twitchell possibly revived Atlinger and extracted personal information like identification, passwords, etcetera, then proceeded with the plan to become a serial killer. It was in the crib-notes (okay, effen script). Or is he a serial killer already? 

Is Atlinger the first, or the last, and given Twitchell's penchant for crib notes, is there a old list somewhere (or another list of instructions to idiot rather undisguised as a lousy movie script)?

Greyhound permanently altered to higher security

Bus travel is safe today and gone are the free-wheeling days of drunken riders or drug-crazed passengers harassing everybody in their travels between towns and bus depots in Canada. This happy alteration in the travel situation came about from a terribly tragic event in 2008. It happened due to the murder of Tim McLean on a Greyhound Bus, and when it happened (Jul 30, the night of) it was because Vincent Li went nuts.

He murdered Tim McLean on the bus as it rolled east toward Portage La Prairie, Manitoba, destination Winnipeg, laden with passengers. It was a gruesome event that dozens witnessed, and today the security system on a bus ride through Western Canada is intense. Everybody who rides a bus is watched and eye contact is purposely made by every security person working in the area with passengers all around the terminals before boarding. Every carry-on bag is searched at every depot and everybody is observed in boarding procedures usually by a minimum two security guards.

Security conducts a `wand sweep`for metal objects (the massacre of Tim McLean was done with a large bladed knife). Unchecked carry-on bags are searched to satisfy a zero-tolerance policy on alcohol and drugs. Automatic 24-hour bans on travel are imposed by Greyhound Canada for any contraventions and police are called immediately to intervene if there is the slightest objection, but everybody is amply warned in advance. The entire property under Greyhound Canada supervision is patrolled by security squads at every major depot.

While Vincent Li conducted his mayhem after boarding at a rural location, Erickson, Manitoba, he started his summer sojourn of the macabre from Edmonton. He disembarked and spent two nights sulking on the beach (so he was perhaps familiar with the area after living in Winnipeg), then re-boarded and sat forward on the bus. Shortly thereafter he moved to the rear. He was sitting beside a sleeping McLean until his psychotic self began the methodical attack. At any rate, today. two years hence, most drivers refuse to speak to passengers. There is very little talk amongst passengers either.

There is an immense amount of tension around the process of bus travel, much 

like air travel (or those who face the gasoline bills in cross-country automobile travel for that matter). Bus travel in the Canadian west has become eerie and has a haunting quality due to the nightmarish spectre of the event that began with a reign of stabbings and turned surreal with evisceration, trophy taking (ears and nose found in perpetrators pockets), and cannibalism. The eeriness is related to what Vincent Li said when they were coaxing him out of the bus. He said,”I am staying on the bus forever.”

Vincent Li said so as they were leading his blood-splattered and soaked self off the bus. He is incarcerated under mental health provisions in a forensic ward of a mental institution in Manitoba. In mid 2010 the institute applied to the courts to allow him a 15-minute walk each day around a secure outdoor compound duly under escort. The McLean family attended the hearing and strenuously protested the inmate`s access to daylight.

Vincent Li is staying on the bus, perhaps not forever, but certainly well past the date on his ticket if only because it seems to be Vincent Li haunting every bus from Vancouver to Sudbury, Ontario. Vincent Li rides them all over Western Canada with passengers on Greyhound Canada but mainly his routes are found from Calgary and Edmonton to Winnipeg. He appears he stops haunting the buses by North Bay but that is a long way and a lot of haunting on a lot of buses. And that it is Vincent Li doing the haunting is the odd thing because he`s alive and Tim McLean is the guy who died.

In many ways bus travel is much safer and more predictable than it used to be. In other ways the ride has become even more stultifying than it ever was and customers are dealing with endless numbers of marginally courteous authorities who are panicking about every face they see. It is safer, and the driver at the scene of MacLean's murder has finally returned to duty. It has been over two years but the system remains severely traumatized about the event, and the travel situation is permanently altered to a higher degree of personal security for everybody engaged in the pursuit.

Lisa Marie Young, Disappeared from Nanaimo, June 30, 2002: A missing person that won’t disappear

  She is a missing person that won’t disappear. RCMP in Nanaimo, B.C., made another appeal in the late winter of 2011, for information on the whereabouts of Lisa Marie Young.  “Through the years we have received hundreds of tips on the car, on the male driver and her whereabouts on the evening of June 30th,” said Constable Gary O’Brien, media spokesperson for the Nanaimo RCMP. “Many of those tips were helpful in our investigation. Now we want to hear from those persons who, for whatever reason, have not contacted us. Someone knows what happened to her and the time to call is now,” said O’Brien.

  The parents of Lisa Marie Young last saw their daughter at 11 p.m. on the night of June 30, 2002, when she was preparing to leave the residence. Her father asked, "Isn't it a little late?" to be going out, because he was planning to help his daughter move to a new apartment the next day. Lisa Marie was going to start a new job the following week, and was a person who always found herself gainfully employed. She was contemplating a return to school.

  The case of the Lisa Marie Young is a baffling one that will not stop haunting the city of Nanaimo, B.C., a city of 85,000 at the centre of Vancouver Island. A few years passed on the case when (former) Nanaimo Mayor Gary Korpan, was heard to say, "They still talk about it. A lot assume they know who did it." Who did what?

  It turned out this Canada Day weekend of 2002 Lisa Marie went to Club 241 on Skinner Street, was then seen leaving the club at 2:30 A.M., and was last seen leaving a house party at approximately 3 A.M., a probable 45 minutes after leaving the nightclub. She is leaving the house party in the Cathers Lake area near Jingle Pot Road, reports confirm, in the company of a 20-something male driving an older-model red Jaguar.

  This male had come onto the scene serendipitously to act as chauffeur after the bar closed. Lisa Marie went to the house parties with two male acquaintances and the driver, first to one house party, then another. At this point, Lisa said she was hungry and the driver offered to take her to a nearby sandwich shop. The two other acquaintances stayed at the party. Police know who the driver was, as do the Youngs, and he remains a ‘person of interest’ in the case.

  He becomes the last known contact with Lisa Marie Young, and then she’s gone. First, as the early morning hours waned, however, she made a worrisome cellphone call to a friend. It was 4:30 A.M. by the time she used her cell to call a girl friend, and this time she expresses concerns about what is happening, and about the driver. Lisa told her friend the guy didn't take her to get something to eat, rather, he drove to another house where she didn't feel comfortable about the unfolding situation.

  Police say, “The driver, like many others involved in this file,” is simply a person of interest. Turns out the red Jaguar in which Lisa was last seen was owned by the driver's grandmother, a ‘prominent’ business person in the nearby Vancouver Island community of Qualicum Beach. The police seized the car and questioned the driver, and the car was released after a thorough inspection, as was the person of interest. The grandmother sold the Jaguar and talked about suing over discussions that were implicating the grandson.

  Joanne Young told in an interviewer a couple years after the disappearance that the family knew from the outset Lisa Marie would not be coming back. "We were really tight, so we knew," says her mother. Well, fair to say, if Lisa Marie was having issues in life, she probably told her mother. Lisa Marie was part of a close family of five. Things were working out, and she had a new job and new place to live. The evening was supposed to be nothing more than a summer night on a long-weekend out with friends at a nightclub. It involved a couple visits to house parties in the Cathers Lake area of Nanaimo shortly before she disappears. Lisa Marie never called Sunday morning and never answered her cellphone.

  Don and Joanne Young have worked tirelessly to piece together a coherent picture of their daughter’s last known travels. According to the information they have gathered, Lisa Marie leaves the club with two male friends and they meet a stranger in the parking lot, who amicably invites them into a red Jaguar to drive them around to parties. First they went to one party, then another. Lisa Marie left the second house party because the driver offered to take her to a fast-food outlet. It appears no stop at any food outlets occurred, so that never happened, and by 4:30 A.M. she phones a friend to say she is nervously waiting in the Jaguar while the driver stopped at a residence.

  Joanne Young tells of meeting the person of interest in a police interrogation room. Police refuse to confirm Joanne’s discussion of late July 2002 when she was taken by RCMP to a meeting with the Jaguar driver. It was brief, she reports, and she asked the driver to tell her where her daughter was. She recollects that he replied, "I can't." Then he paused, voice fading, "I'm sorry, I don't mean to disrespect your family ..."

  The Youngs have never learned where the driver claims to have dropped off Lisa Marie. Since police call this, “a complex investigation,” they are unlikely to disclose facts that could prejudice an on-going investigation.

  Nanaimo has the typical urban problems like all cities, and drugs are part of the scene as in all corners of the country, but Cather Lake and Harewood areas are composed of middle class, family-oriented neighbourhoods. Besides Lisa Marie was familiar enough with the night-scene in the city anyway. Why wouldn’t she be? She was a bartender for three years at Club 241 (under it’s previous name, The Jungle). She was a good looking woman.

  She had a three year run behind the bar of The Jungle, a long enough employment history, and remained popular at her former place of employment that had undergone a makeover of it’s own. Lisa Marie must have been adept at navigating a nightlife scene. She told her dad she always traveled with friends. Nobody knows the spiral that leads to and from this event. Nobody knows how hers became an unfinished life, a finished one, or one finishing in a twisted scenario far away in place and mind.

  Joanne Young now deceased continued to believe the driver is holding back, while her husband Don is less doubtful about the person of interest’s story. Police are not letting the case freeze either, and investigators continue to visit the file, often with a fresh pair of investigative eyes. They speak to the family, and appeal to public for leads. The media revisits the case often. The cold case continues as an active investigation, perhaps pushed along by community efforts such as that done by Nanaimo’s Alison Crowe, high school friend of Lisa’s, and a singer/songwriter who recorded Lisa’s Song.

  No charges have yet been made in the case. Lisa's family continue to organize vigils and to conduct their own searches. If you have any information on what happened to Lisa Marie Young, please contact the Nanaimo RCMP at 250-754-2345 or call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477(TIPS). And go online at www.nanaimocrimestoppers.com to submit your tip and watch the Youtube re-enactment of her disappearance.

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico: A landscape of dead women, a legacy of disappearing ones

A lot of criminal research expertise has gone into the study of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a thriving ‘culture of death’ on the border of USA/Mexico. They study the ‘femicides,’ with forensics, anthropology, and psychological profiling. Hundreds of women have been found in ghastly condition after gruelling and often gruesome sexual torture. The femicide victims have been all ages, ten and up.

Ciudad Juarez is a Mexican border city in the state of Chihuahua, opposite the city of El Paso, Texas. The two are separated by a ‘highway’ that acts as national border, and it is a boundary lined by layers of fence. The fences are supposed to be barriers to cross-border transit, but who knows what happens in the world of the criminally powerful because perhaps this border is meaningless to them.

Regardless, the city is home to an extraordinary amount of killing and the world hears the reports of endless gunplay and countless massacres in the drug-gang warfare that has been raging for the past few years in northern Mexico. Well, this city is one of the free-fire zones. Hundreds of people a year are murdered in Ciudad Juarez, even, “women and young girls have been slain in gangland-style shootings, in acts of domestic violence and in sexual assaults.” [Wikipedia]

A crisis centre in the Mexican city recorded seventeen cases of femicide occurring between January 1, 2008 and May 5, 2008. Victims ranged in age from ten to forty-eight years old. None could be identified. Earlier in the decade a forensic artist from New York City accepted an assignment from a Chihuahua state official to assist in identifying victims, and he decided the state police apparatus contained elements “likely behind numerous rapes and killings.”

Some of the femicide victims are killed in their homes, others are left in fields surrounding the city to be devoured by animals. Femicide victims are found surrounded with brazen evidence of their last minutes – such as a profusion of condoms. Others are thrown from cars, others are found in hotel rooms shot to death with a hundred bullets. Fifteen year old school girls disappear from bus stops after chumming with friends. The remains of countless victims are never identified, and by some speculation, far more often, never found.

There are plenty of reports and backgrounders on the internet, and Amnesty International has taken up the cause on the behalf of so many families searching for the women. The seriousness has grown steadily over the past ten years and shows no sign of abating, but it’s becoming clear these are ritualistic sex crimes. The shocking number of disappearing girls also speaks to the high likelihood of human trafficking in the sex trade.

Relating to genocide in court and in print

The question often gets aired, what prompted genocide to erupt in Rwanda? Especially after the courts hear more of the testimony in trials about this genocide. The usual explanation is that some kind of ‘political’ vacuum was left by departing colonial Belgians. What explains radio broadcasts calling day and night for Hutus to take everything out of the Tutsis, every corpuscle throughout the land?  “Kill Tutsi ‘cockroaches!’” the radio cried, endlessly, ceaselessly, and historians tell us it was a complete reversal of fortune foisted on the privileged Tutsi of society.

It was bloody and relentless tit for tat genocide, ‘legitimized’ by the reality of foisting revenge. We are informed that Tutsis were separate by dint of a mocking privilege found in skin pigmentation. None of the darker-skinned garbage men, Joe-lunch-buckets, unemployed sons and daughters of previous massacres, were going to deny a century of oppression had occurred. It was written on everybody’s face, rich as Belgian chocolate.

Follow the history leading to the large scale event in question, one imagines ever since Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness at the turn of the previous century, in a sense, the definition of a cockroach grew, uh, legs. It grew out of the lighter skinned Tutsis utilizing privilege like a club, for making slaves out of darker skinned brothers and sisters must have become second nature to the Tutsi. They must have enjoyed the privilege of committing atrocities on behalf of Belgians, establishing an apartheid or a different sort, growing Belgian-sized bellies off the fat of the land, until becoming targets in a 100 day massacre of 800,000 (light-skinned, previously privileged) Rwandans.

The light-skinned Tutsis, they say, had been Belgian-favoured who found themselves about to be victims upon the Belgian departure. Oddly, Tutsis were unprepared, or unable to continue in governance over the facile social organization. Something like this occurred in Cambodia, after French Colons were forced out, and Khmer Rouge eventually rose to commit atrocities on the ones educated and presumably favoured by the French. (A genocide trial is getting underway in Cambodia. In 1975 if you wore glasses, carried a book, or wore a tie, the KR marched you out of the city at gun point and killed you. For a segment of society, everything goes further than time standing still. Time ceases to exist.)

In Rwanda the light-skinned and educated, bureaucratic and former, ruling class Tutsis fell under the constant radio cacophony demanding door-to-door hunting for Tutsis. From the pictures, the hunt was in suburbia. People who once enjoyed the advantages conferred upon an elite, these privileged were conveniently easy to spot.

History informs that when Belgians left with all the authority, the privileged were standing around without machetes. These are the ones who fell under machetes and occasional pistol shots to the head to finish the deed.  In film and photos showing the event, and there is a surprising amount of film and footage, bodies are lying outside the entrances to decent-looking housing, prime real estate is filled with bodies. The genocide was not committed in shantytowns.

Meanwhile Hutu ‘leaders’ told Hutu people to kill or be one of the ones they kill, and this became one of the ‘distinctions’ in the selection of victims. Furthermore, besides the job of cleaning up the country of its severe cockroach infestation, some or all of the Hutu perpetrators of the genocide admit they were tempted into the action by offers of land ownership, banana trees, and so forth, post-genocide. Such promises may well be unfulfilled, according to reports, but such promises were incentive to kill those who controlled the business of land deeds (if only how to file them). By personal accounts, pictures, films, and an increasing historical record of books, the world is aware a genocide of some kind occurred. A few Tutsis are putting pen to ink. A few Hutus are pleading in courts around the world.

This much is sure: the Rwanda School of Radio Broadcasting Genocide 300 intensive 6 day program (bring your own coffee cup) makes them the most dangerous institution on earth. They churn out broadcasters to deliver convincing messages about killing formerly privileged people for being cockroaches. Now it is the publishing houses making the rounds with books. 

These stories are for hard to resist, and indeed these are important stories to expose to the reading public. More importantly, in Canada, they are listening to testimony in the trial of Desire Munyanesa, facing seven counts of crimes against humanity and on trial in Montreal. Before the trial broke for the summer they heard about a man in Rwanda, unnamed, who resides on what (must be a truly mystical place in Rwanda called) Death Row.

Rwanda has people stepping out of the woods and alleys and up from the creek beds to make reports. One landed on CBC news television at the end of May, ’07, in which appeared a woman named Eugenia, nicknamed ‘The woman with a crooked walk.’ Hers’ was a story of permanently disabling injuries and survival in the middle of genocide. She lives with a story of machete wounds, and continues to live around perpetrators of the murderous assaults.

Therein lies the crux of the story. It appears on some level the crimes against humanity are misdemeanors in Rwanda. One assumes from this posture that Tutsis must have been accustomed to the reign of death in Rwanda and probably bore a century of guilt for atrocities on Hutus. Only recently have reports emerged of people being convicted and sentenced to death for genocide in Rwanda. Indeed the Canadian court paid a visit to Rwanda to take the man’s testimony on death row. No reports are made of executions having occurred, but how surprising would it be? Usually the story is astonishing for the amount of forgiveness being displayed. Forgiveness is not always there, but that it is there at all, this is astonishing.

This level of acceptance is surreal to most sensibilities, yet, as the report on Eugenia showed, people pick up their lives in Rwanda and often go forward in lock step with the perpetrators of atrocities. This Eugenia woman had spent 13 years since the 800,000 killings of a short few months undergoing little healing and no forgetting. The reporter noted, Rwanda has many people making peace with the conflict, but Eugenia spent days mainly in recollection of a brazen massacre of her children with machetes, her children calling to the Hutus they would “stop being Tutsis.”

In this case it was a life sentence in court  for the perpetrator, however, killers after sentencing these Hutus have since been freed and they return home. This level of madness, nevertheless, calls upon the prevailing authority to permutate into an organization to deliver redress in society. Once a week, the CBC reported, across Rwanda, the “‘Gachatcha’ reconciliation program” takes over the country and citizens fall into gatherings to tell stories and give descriptions of the suffering. The reporter suggested Eugenia had been a frightened survivor and today the fear continues, because she is struggling to deal with serial Killer Eric Kasamarandi living nearby.

His explanation, after all the apologies for callously hacking her children to death on her lap, “We were driven to kill by Invisible enemies that invaded our souls.” Returning to proceedings against Desire Munyaneza, a Quebec Superior Court opened the first-ever War Crimes trial in Canada, Mar 31 07.

Identities will remain concealed from public in Canada and the world because people in Rwanda, SURPRISE, still live with the threat of unexpected death. Witnesses in the Canadian court are ID’d in court by alphanumeric designation to protect them upon their return to Rwanda) and bear horrifying testimony that is practically too much for civilized ears. Many of the testimonies are of things never heard in Canadian courts. Witness C15 said she and others took refuge at their local government office, “hoping for a quicker death by bullets, rather than being hacked to death by machetes.”

Munyaneza, 40, is faced with seven counts of ‘crimes against humanity’ (under new Canadian law) including rape, murder, and pillaging. Munyaneza arrived in Canada from Africa in 1997 and RCMP began investigating him in 1999. He was arrested in Etobicoke, Ontario, in 2005 (CanWest News Service, Mar 30 07)  The trial resumes in Sep ’07. [Rwanda: When using machetes it takes 100 days to kill 800 thousand people — an important calculation made by somebody close to the machete procurement office. Genocide trials are what the CIA, chief apologist for the Military Industrial Complex, calls BLOWBACK.

The Trial of Willy Pickton was Surreal

Testimonies are missing important details and therefore open to reasonable doubt, and some prosecution witnesses testify on behalf of the defendant!  Bystanders after listening are wont to ask, "Do prosecutors have the actual person who committed the murders?" Willy Pickton has been cloying in admitting to knowing of body parts on the premises but pleading he killed no one. He faces terrified witnesses who seem resigned to small comprehension of events. One prosecution witness expressed warm feelings for Willy Pickton.

The testimony became meaningless babble to outsiders during a parade of drug-addled recollections. Some of the variations induced by the defense were making Willy Pickton burst into laughter at the witnesses from inside the glass-encased prisoner’s box during cross examinations. (And this avuncular chap faces 26 murder charges!)  The defense implicated one of the witnesses in sex-trade homicides around Edmonton until Mr. Justice James Williams slammed the door on it.

If they want to wrap this up fast the work of the prosecution becomes difficult for despite initial suggestions by the defense it appears Willy Pickton is far from a clinical idiot. The defendant realizes unless the IOC makes serial killing an Olympic event for 2010, the Crown, and indeed the society in general, prefers an end to dredging up details leaving major parts of the story to historians.

Perhaps the future holds either a long stay in proceedings of this trial, or a mistrial, because Willy Pickton would be smart to prolong the defense into the next decade and probably will, as Pickton appears comfortable in the milieu of the court and custody and so forth.

The Downtown Eastside of Vancouver remains a mysterious neighbourhood to most Canadians (and entirely understood by the amalgam of people in it). Most DES residents are raised in poverty, many on Indian Reserves and transplant ‘poverty’ along with ‘an Indian reserve’ to the city.

It is North America’s worst slum, over a dozen square blocks reserved for an overwhelmingly victimized hoard, of whom dozens (possibly hundreds) of women were led to grisly deaths, some dying at the hands of an indubitable madman and allegedly the madman is Willy Pickton.

Justice Williams decided to split the case in two parts, proceeding on six charges for the murders of Georgina Papin, Serena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, and Marnie Frey.

 So much DNA was everywhere it became confounding to the peaked capped authorities assigned to stopping this macabre conduct who upon entering the premises immediately found body parts including skulls, hands, and feet, stuffed in slop buckets. The farm went on lock down and other bones were found and Willy Pickton had nothing to say, except, “I didn’t do it,” which he's been telling the court.

On the other hand, in video-taped evidence, showing him during the opening hours of Jan 22 07, the Crown said, Willy Pickton confessed to forty-nine murders and rolled the tape of a policeman ‘planted’ in the cell. The conversation centred on why they were in lock-up. Willy proved cagey with the cop but he slyly suggested he was going to be to 'stopping' at 50. Then, suddenly, Willy Pickton was famous, face splashed across newspapers the world over.

 Then he was in police interrogation, and he replied, "You're making me more of a mass murderer than I am," mocking interrogators having difficulty distinguishing DNA in the quagmire of his farm sheds and dwelling. Once he muttered, "I was gonna stop at five-0.” They showed him newspapers and Willy Pickton parried, "That don't mean I did it.”

 He may have admitted something but added to his confession that others were doing some of the killing, namely, "Dinah did some of it." Regarding victims, Willy Pickton refused to admit feeding the pigs their remains. Others said he fed the pigs and disposed of other parts through a Pickton family garbage collection company (supplying truck driving jobs).

Crown Counsel Derrill Prevett presented a chain of evidence linked to Pickton's property, including skulls cut in half with hands and feet stuffed in them. Crown Counsel John Ahern described six women living troubled lives.  The defense have agreed wholeheartedly, noting each victim had literally dozens of ‘encounters’ with police, social workers, hospitals, clinics, outreach centres, and detox units. These women seemed to making frantic rounds in the social services dragnet. Pickton’s defense touched lightly on the subject but the dates for each disappearance can be recounted precisely by the Crown. Many victims were known for trying to leave the mean streets to return to motherhood or families.

Six victims known to be missing from particular dates are joined by many others who circulated through the over-crowded DES out to the over-crowded Piggy Palace and back to the DES. Regular contact with victims stopped abruptly (only in rare instances reports of a disappearance arrived a long time later).

These victims disappeared from ‘96 to ‘01 and police implicate Willy Pickton in missing persons related to the Lower Mainland sex trade as far back to ‘83, implying he started at age 33. On the other hand, police candidly admit Willy Pickton is joined by other suspects,. To conceive of a mob of serial killers working as a team is strange indeed, for what is the motivation?

Willy Pickton and Dinah Taylor were both heard ranting about drug debts. History informs that street level situations of mayhem often involve drugs by and large.  Scott Chubb, key prosecution witness, gave hearsay testimony to gross indignity to human remains and alluded to cannibalism, in relation to Willy Pickton selling meat over the fence. This takes the killer’s motive into the realm of strange psychosis.

 Chubb refrained from eating at the farm, noteworthy for a starving man at the end of a drug binge, but once informed of the horrors in his midst he apparently balked at the pig farmer’s generosity. It was he who initially reported in ’02 the property patrolled by an aggressive 600 lb. Boar, that it was terrifying.

 Police say Chubb broke the case after working as Willy Pickton’s employee on a garbage truck with extended periods at the wheel. Chubb’s solid work history was matched by zealous use of drugs, but he testified to seeing Willy Pickton visit a shopping mall with Georgina Papin.

 As time wore on between the two in the late 90’s Willy Pickton offered Chubb a moonlighting job, suggesting, 'Kill them with a syringe filled with windshield washer fluid,' because drug addicts never get autopsied."

 Chubb fled when upon learning about the inhuman conduct. He added penetrating testimony about a serial killing machinery facing exposure by David Francis Pickton, Willy Pickton's brother. Chubb reported the brother’s threat against a conspiracy of killers if Willy Pickton was convicted of murder.

 Next came Gina Houston discussing a conversation with Willy Pickton, in Feb. 20 02, after it was established he was the primary suspect. Willy Pickton might have been entering the denial phase of an alleged killing spree (if such a phase exists), and prosecution witness Houston agreed with defense lawyer Marilyn Sandford, stating, “Pickton said, ‘I did not kill Mona,’” or anyone else.

Instead, said defense attorney Sandford, he too pointed the finger at Dinah Taylor, a pig farm roommate of 18 months who was once investigated but never charged.  Houston said Willy Pickton said Dinah Taylor shot some of the girls, and Houston testified Willy Pickton was unable to stop events occurring down on the pig farm. The killing swirling around the place was beyond Willy Pickton's control.

She described a telephone conversation with a mellow Willy Pickton interrupted by a screaming woman followed by another screaming woman, then a screaming man, and a plea from Willy Pickton, “Don’t do it here,” and finally, possibly, a life-emitting gasp.

The prosecution’s problem lies in credibility of these witnesses. The defense keeps asking if they are lying and about the accuracy of memories. Piggy Palace Good Time Society facilities hosted recurring drug-drenched orgies, entree into which does not permit those of a clear head. Some nights this Pickton property held over 2,000 drug-crazed denizens. Police forced Piggy's Palace to scale back in ’98 after a rape victim escaped, partially shackled, but police never stopped it completely.

Gina Houston returned to testify about continued affection for Willy Pickton.  She said it was his close friend Dinah Taylor killing women on his property. Dinah Taylor is from a central Canadian First Nation presently living without police protection who vehemently, categorically, and dismissively denies involvement in murder. She lived on the pig farm for 18 months at the height of disappearances and knew several victims from shared experiences in the DES. 

It was the testimony of Lynn Ellingsen placing Willy Pickton “standing covered in blood next to a dead woman who was hanging from a chain." Defense lawyer Richard Brooks wanted Ellingsen to admit to suffering psychotic episodes of drug-induced hallucination instead of seeing Willy Pickton in the barn with a dead Georgina Papin. Questions fell upon Ellingsen in two separate times on the witness stand to explain dates, which she finds impossible to remember.

Demonstrating a classic case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Ellingsen wept through much of her testimony. She was bad at remembering dates and testified Willy Pickton took her on a ride in his magic bus to the DES in Vancouver. They picked up Georgina Papin and together the crack cocaine use rose to a fever pitch, and Ellingsen was the first to say Willy Pickton directly influenced her drug use.

From all of these sketchy descriptions taken together Willy Pickton emerges as a pretty generous guy,  perhaps an enabler of drug use doling out portions to maintain control over situations and people. Most witnesses are in a state of denial about his role in the drug frenzy but Ellingsen testified Willy Pickton managed the drug program down on the pig farm and at the registered charitable Piggy Palace.

Here was a world disguised by 'philanthropy' with needy addicts the potential volunteers. Ellingsen testified she had fallen for this philanthropy and one night Georgina Papin, too, fell to a different level. First they shared a crack pipe in Willy’s company at Willy Pickton’s behest. Ellingsen said Georgina was alive and wiped on crack cocaine in the evening but dead and mutilated before the crack of dawn.

Ellingsen alone has spoken to these monstrous details. "I saw this body. It was hanging. Willy pulled me inside behind the door. Walked me over to the table. Made me look. Told me if I was to say anything, I'd be right beside her." The defense implied Ellingsen was coached to say what police want because she has long been a dependent of theirs and will say whatever they need.

Before the two week break, 37 year old Andrew Bellwood was prosecution witness 97 and the last long-time crack-cocaine addict to testify. He was down and out meeting Willy Pickton in Jan ‘99 at the Pickton farm, then hanging around the property from Feb ‘99 to mid-Mar ‘99, and, on a couple of occasions, staying over in Willy Pickton's trailer.

  The guy-talk was over the top with Pickton telling Bellwood about prostitutes, “sometimes hesitant about leaving the DES,” so he offered incentives like a choice of drugs, heroin or cocaine, or more money.  It was Bellwood who testified how Willy Pickton demonstrated a modus operandi for sex and murder, and Willy finished with Bellwood by saying he gutted the bodies and fed the remains to the pigs.

  The trial adjourned for a two-week break after Bellwood’s testimony concluded. Still nobody has testified about why the rampant killing spree might have occurred.