For those of you who are south of the border, or who live in a bubble, you probably don’t know about Robert Pickton. I’ll give you the short version right now. He’s charged with several murders in Port Coquitlam, outside of Vancouver. Over several years it is rumoured that he killed 49 women.
Now, one would think that 47 missing women might cause a bit of attention from the police, right? Well, not if the women are all economically marginalized, sex trade workers. That, naturally, is one aspect of the trial, after all nothing sells like sensationalist coverage of serial prostitute murder.
There are other aspects to the trial. Pickton was a pig farmer and owned a hog rendering operation. As to where the bodies of 40 or so victims went, I will leave it up to your imagination. The media started playing up the horrific and grisly while the farm was under police control as a crime scene. The cops used all of the white disposable coveralls in Canada as they obtained the evidence of the crimes, over a four-month forensic investigation.
Now, is Pickton guilty? That’s what is going on in trial. The prosecution is presenting their very meticulously gathered evidence. I’ll go along with the "innocent until proven guilty" as that is how the system works, but it does not look too good for Robert Pickton. If half of what the Crown is presenting is vaguely true, then Pickton is not well-adjusted and should be made to pay for his crimes, if found guilty.
Every evening the television meat puppets give us the stern voiced "some details may be disturbing to some viewers". No kidding. In a particular corner of Hell, Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy are watching FOXNews, swapping high-fives and going "Daymm. He’s goood."
I’m a firm believer in the rights of the press to report the trial, as it is an open trial and it is newsworthy from a judicial and sociological point of view. Even from the standpoint of justice being seen to be done, I can accept the coverage of trial.
The question that is not being asked in all the coverage is why wasn’t he wasn’t captured sooner? If one woman were to disappear from a "nice" Vancouver suburb, the police would be crawling everywhere to find out what happened. Except that Pickton’s alleged victims were almost all street prostitutes and junkies. The lost people of our society. They weren’t women from a nice Vancouver suburb.
Why didn’t the cops get involved earlier, say, after the first suspicious disappearance? Or was the reaction "Well, its just some whores gone missing, who cares?" Apparently the street workers told the police that something wasn’t right. Rumours existed amongst those in the sex industry that the pig farm and the guy associated with it were bad news. These warnings were unheeded by the police as best I can tell. That’s not right.
The list of questions gets longer. Why were the victims doing what they were doing? How did we, meaning you and me, fail them? Nobody chooses being a street whore as an avocation. Nobody chooses mental illness or being a crack head as a career path. Supposedly our society has ways and means to help, to provide choices or a hand up. Or did we decide to throw these women away? Is it because they were women?
I’m not going to wonder why Robert Pickon though his actions were acceptable. Monsters have lived amongst us since the day after our species climbed out of the water: They simply are. We just have better methods of communications these days. This mean more people know of the existence of the darkest side of humankind in minute detail, meticulously covered by our media in every ghastly aspect.
But the other questions still stand. Nobody in the media is asking the difficult questions.
RoadDave 