Drugs, sex prevail in slum where Vancouver, B.C., farmer allegedly trolled for victims.

VANCOUVER, B.C. — The man who may be the Northwest's most prolific murderer sits each day in a booth of bulletproof glass, staring blankly as a grim cast of ex-friends detail the way he allegedly butchered women.

The trial of Robert "Willie" Pickton, British Columbia's notorious pig farmer, is filled with testimony and evidence so gruesome that news accounts carry a warning label for graphic content.

Five years after his arrest, the trial for six of the 26 murders he's charged with was anticipated to be a grisly sensation. More than 350 journalists from around the world got credentials.

But as the prosecution winds down — six months and 97 witnesses later — it is clear that Vancouver is ready to move on. The courtroom is rarely full. Public-opinion polls show strong interest in the trial in the single digits and dropping. Few news stories now make the front page of Canadian newspapers.

An estimated $100 million (Canadian) has been spent on the Pickton case, the largest investigation in Canadian history. Police dug for bones at Pickton's squalid suburban property for 18 months after his arrest in early 2002.

They unearthed remains or DNA traces of dozens of women, all drug-addicted prostitutes, most picked up from Vancouver's Skid Row. The scope of the evidence is so huge that the case was split into two trials; Pickton is to face 20 more murder charges when the first trial wraps up later this year. And police are still investigating the disappearance of dozens of other women.

"It hangs like a dark cloud over the city," said Dr. Evan Wood, a researcher who studies the neighborhood where Pickton is said to have regularly picked up prostitutes. "It's a source of shame and concern among Vancouverites."

The disappearance of so many women in such a small strip briefly shined a spotlight on woes of the neighborhood, called the Downtown Eastside.

But it remains the same wasteland today as it was when Pickton was allegedly trolling there, where underage prostitutes walk the "Kiddie Stroll" and where addicts convulse through drug overdoses on the sidewalk. A United Nations official recently called it one of the world's worst slums in an affluent city.

Fearing that the neighborhood's ills could stain the image of the 2010 Winter Olympics, city and regional leaders have pledged huge increases in public housing to reduce homelessness.

But victims' families see the same civic neglect that allowed loved ones to disappear, one after another, for decades.

"I see my sister all the time down there. I see the same problems. I see the cops cruise by, and I see girls getting into a stranger's car, and I see the cops not doing anything," said Jason Fleury, brother of Mona Wilson, whose murder Pickton is on trial for now. "The only thing that's changed here are the buildings."

Bigger than Green River

In February 2002, days after his arrest, Pickton shared a chuckle with a cellmate, an undercover police officer planted by investigators. Pickton said his crimes were "bigger than the one in the States," referring to Green River killer Gary L. Ridgway, convicted of 48 murders.

Pickton told the cellmate he had killed 49 women.

"I was gonna do one more, make it an even 50," Pickton said during the taped conversation, which prosecutors played for the jury. "I make my own grave by being sloppy."

He is widely described as mentally slow and foul-smelling, with stringy hair and a receding chin. But he was also a sugar daddy for drug-addicted prostitutes, his pockets stuffed with the profits of his family's land sales to housing developers in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam.

It was on one of the family's remaining parcels — 17 acres that included Pickton's pig slaughterhouse — that police found the remains of women. Three severed heads, hands and feet in buckets. Jawbones buried among pig manure.

Last month, a former friend testified that Pickton had once described how he handcuffed and strangled prostitutes, then butchered the bodies and fed them to his pigs. What was left after the pigs ate went to a rendering plant.

"You wouldn't believe how much blood comes out of them," Pickton said, according to the testimony.

If the allegations are true, the biggest question of the trial is how Pickton got away with it for so long.

The first murder he is charged with occurred in 1995. For seven years before Pickton's 2002 arrest, his brother, Dave, lived on the property. A cast of underworld characters, including women who worked as madams for Pickton, procuring prostitutes on the Downtown Eastside, also were frequent guests.

Stevie Cameron, an investigative journalist and author of the book "The Pickton File," said Pickton's lawyers will likely try to pin blame on his brother or the unsavory friends.

"Pickton was very social. There were tons of people coming and going" from the property, Cameron said. "What I'm waiting for is an effort by the defense to show the other guy did it, but they haven't shown who the other guy is."

"Lack of accountability"

The Pickton property today is dotted with dirt hills the size of mega-mansions, created when archaeologists hired by police sifted the land looking for bones.

If only police had been so diligent in the years before Pickton was caught, said Ernie Crey.

Since 1978, 65 women have been reported missing from the Downtown Eastside, including Dawn Crey, whose DNA was found at the Pickton property in 2004. Ernie Crey, like other victims' family members and civic leaders, criticizes the police's flat-footed response to the disappearances.

"If there'd been a real investigation under way, there might have been many lives saved, including my sister's," said Crey, looking out over the dirt piles.

The Vancouver Police Department did an internal investigation on the case but will not release it until both trials are completed to avoid the perception of jury tainting. That means it could be 2008 or later before Vancouver knows if police messed up the biggest serial-murder case in Canadian history, said Mary Lynn Young, a journalism professor at the University of British Columbia.

"As an American, you'd be horrified about the lack of accountability in the police," she said. "We don't know how 65 women could go missing over 20 years in a city like Vancouver. To even get to whether the police are at fault, we need to understand how it could happen."

Larry Campbell, a former Mountie and mayor of Vancouver from 2002 to 2005, said he believes police worked doggedly to find the killer but didn't have much to work with.

"You've got no crime scene, no body, and how many suspects out there?" said Campbell, now a member of the Canadian Senate. "You're starting with nothing. And many times in those cases, people went missing and were [only] reported missing years later."

"Certain kind of denial"

Mona Wilson was wearing Total Spice running shoes and a crucifix around her neck when she was seen hopping into Pickton's vehicle in November 2001, at the Skid-Row intersection of Hastings and Princess. She was reported missing a week later. She was 26.

She was an aboriginal Canadian raised in a series of foster homes, said Fleury, her brother. She lived in the suburbs and tried drug treatment many times, he said, but kept returning to the Downtown Eastside to feed a drug habit. Her drug of choice was codeine; she got 270 prescriptions in the last year of her life alone.

If Wilson's murder, and all the others, was a wake-up call to the neighborhood's squalor, the city's leaders were slow to respond.

The Downtown Eastside's vital statistics have remained unchanged for years: About half of the 15,000 residents are drug users; about 90 percent of them have hepatitis C; about 30 percent have HIV/AIDS, the same rate as Botswana.

Mayor Sam Sullivan, who is championing an effort to get more public housing, drug treatment and mental heath for a neighborhood lacking in all three, said remaking the Downtown Eastside will be the legacy of the 2010 Olympics.

"In the past, it's been very difficult for Vancouver to get the attention of federal and provincial governments, but I know we have this rare window of opportunity," he said.

But David Eby, a legal-services lawyer in the neighborhood, said the Olympics are already having a negative effect. Apartments are being converted into higher-priced homes so quickly that the homeless population has nearly doubled. Eby's firm, Pivot Legal Society, predicts that homeless people will number about 3,500 by 2010, about one-third more than Seattle's 2,000.

"There is a certain kind of denial for the city, the province and the federal government to do nothing in the face of Pickton and with the world coming here in 2010," said Eby during a tour of the neighborhood.

He gestured toward an alley next to a decrepit apartment, the Roosevelt Hotel, near the Downtown Eastside's core. It is there, according to testimony, that Pickton would pull up to meet prostitutes. They would drive away and never again be seen alive.

On one recent night, prostitutes clustered in the alley, shooting up, waiting for a john.

Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com