Pickton's personality emerging as trial goes on

NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. - Robert Pickton often refers to himself as just a plain old pig farmer, but after five years of obscurity, the public and the jury are getting an unadulterated view of his history, his habits, his thoughts and even his hygiene.

Before the accused serial killer walked into court last month for his first trial, the public knew the pig farmer moniker, knew that he was known to some as Willie and knew that he is charged with 26 counts of first-degree murder.

The public also knew he was 52 at the time he was taken into custody and that when he turns 58 this autumn, his trial may still be underway.

But testimony - and especially the airing of two videotaped discussions between Pickton and police officers - has given trial watchers some answers to the common questions: Who is he? What's he like? What's his background?

As an undercover policeman who posed as a cell plant learned the day Pickton was arrested, the accused appeared to love telling stories involving himself, spicing them with imitations of animal sounds and vigorous flourishes of his hands, arms and head.

Jurors watched the videotapes of Pickton's time with the cell plant and his 11-hour interview with police and saw as he made faces, smiled broadly, grinned mischievously and wide-eyed, then as quickly turned introspective, staring into the middle distance as he cast his mind back to some unhappy time.

Pickton is uneducated, inarticulate and used odd expressions, but he seemed to have an uncanny knack for certain dates and times.

He told police the precise day and year when he acquired his favourite horse and the exact time it was put down. When he recounted the stunts he has pulled, he recited the exact date and year they occurred.

He bragged about the time he butchered several pigs in one day, nailing the precise number over an exact number of hours.

He is little travelled but was apparently engaged to an American woman when he was in his early 20s.

He is a workaholic, a man who clearly relished hard labour and bragged about it.

An accomplished butcher of pigs, he also bought cars at auction and stripped them for parts. He toiled at demolition work sites run by his brother.

He is the oldest of three siblings and was close to his younger brother Dave, but the brother dominated Pickton.

While close to Dave and his deceased mother, he is not so close to his sister and deceased father.

When she was on the stand early in the trial, RCMP Const. Dana Lillies said Pickton's sister told police Dave Pickton was protective of brother Robert and was mostly responsible for handling the family business.

The sister said Dave even routinely told Robert when to go to bed.

"At one point during the conversation she described him as slow," Lillies testified.

"But then she went on later to say he was not slow. He's good mechanically. He's good at what he does with the farm. And (she said) that Dave handled the business end of things."

The court heard Pickton's share of his parents' will was put in trust.

The defence's theme in the trial's early going is that the police took advantage of an unsophisticated man, someone with little education who may not have understood the police warning that he had the right to remain silent.

Those following the trial learned that Pickton failed Grade 2 and was put in a special class and that he quit school at age 16 to work full-time on his parents' farm.

But though Pickton is no scholar, he displayed a sense of humour and enjoyed a good practical joke - especially when he was the centre of attention.

Cooped up in a cell the day he was arrested with an undercover cop, Pickton demonstrated a self-absorbed nature as he launched into one story after another, showing little interest in learning about his cell mate.

He mimicked the horses, cows and ostriches he once owned, whinnying like a horse, using his hands to show a milking motion and taking the steering wheel as he recounted a childhood memory of a truck crashing and pigs scattering.

Some of these stories, like the death of a favourite horse and a trip to the United States where he ate cherry pie, he would later repeat almost verbatim the next day to the official police interrogator.

He told the cell plant a fanciful story about how he lived in a chicken coop when he was 2� years old and drank water out of a stream that ran through the coop.

His greatest delight seemed to come when he told the plant about some practical jokes he once played, such as releasing some pigs in the Downtown Eastside one Christmas Eve and watching as police tried to capture them.

"'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the streets," he recited rapturously and in a sing-song voice to the plant. "Not a soul to be found except two little pot belly pigs and two working girls."

He got a great kick out of relating another joke that never came off - a plan to release some ostriches in downtown Vancouver one Christmas Eve.

After more than five decades of crushing obscurity, Pickton appeared to alternate between surprise and fascination at his celebrity.

RCMP Staff Sgt. Bill Fordy showed him newspaper clippings and told him he was famous.

Pickton couldn't seem to get over it and asked a few times: "So my picture is all over the front page?"

The videotapes also indicate a man with a sense of pride, a fatalist who could be a wily negotiator, but who had some quirks.

He was adamant and serious about the topic of showers and baths, telling the cell plant he would not take a shower while in custody, only a bath. The authorities couldn't make him take a shower, they had no right, he said.

He also picked his nose and ate the results.

But when the lead investigator in the missing women case, RCMP Insp. Don Adam, took over the interrogation, Pickton's demeanour changed.

He expressed a concern that the police would be on the farm for a long time, preventing his brother from working there.

He tried to see if Adam would trade his information for a promise to get off the property sooner.

However, he used odd expressions and unusual speech patterns, an observation made by his lawyer Peter Ritchie and agreed to by Fordy.

During the 11-hour interview with police, Pickton said "I'm mind baffling."

When Pickton was asked by Fordy what qualities he respected in a person, Pickton replied incomprehensibly: "How does that word out."

He twisted phrases such as: "That's neither here or there" and "I'll keep you in suspicion" and "The wrong place at the right time."

Among his favourite phrases are "life goes on, life goes on" and "we're here today, we're not here tomorrow."

He appeared to regard his life on the farm as the thing that sustained him, but that would eventually "bury" him.

He mentioned at one point he was engaged to a woman in the U.S. named Connie and spent several weeks with her when he was in his 20s.

"She couldn't leave her job and I couldn't leave my job," he said.

"I had to get back to the farm."