No leads in search for 50 missing prostitutes

Day and night for the past two weeks, swarms of police investigators have been tearing apart a squalid pig farm owned by two middle-aged brothers in suburban Vancouver.

Police believe they may be on the trail of a serial killer feared to be responsible for slaying 50 or more missing prostitutes between 1983 and last November.

But although 85 officers have been assigned to a secretive inquiry that has taken bizarre twists almost daily there are no bodies, no claimants to a reward of 100,000 Canadian dollars (£44,000), and no signs the investigators are any closer to a prosecution. Police say they do not want to release details of the search to avoid jeopardising their investigation.

The city's two million residents have been drawn into the case with a morbid fascination shared across North America as journalists have flocked to the 10-acre farm in Port Coquitlam, a working-class suburb outside Vancouver.

At the farm's gate, where a sign reads "This property protected by pit bull with Aids", the families of some of the missing women have placed votive candles and cardboard memorials. "Kind, gentle Cathy Gonzalez, our friend," says one, a tribute to a 33-year-old sex worker and drug user last seen in March 1995 in a red-light district 15 miles away in Vancouver.

Police have set up a tent nearby for grieving relatives who have come to this muddy patch in the hopes of finding out what happened to the daughters, sisters and mothers who vanished while selling their bodies. "When she was growing up Angela didn't say, 'I'm going to be a prostitute or sex worker or hooker on the streets one day'," says a despairing Deborah Jardine, whose website, www.vanishedvoices.com, is devoted to her mentally handicapped daughter, last seen in 1998 when she was 26.

The centre of attention is the farm's co-owner Robert "Willy" Pickton, 52, a loner described by his younger brother David as harmless but "too trusting". He was known to befriend street prostitutes whom he habitually brought to his untidy mobile home, across the property from his brother's farmhouse.

Five years ago, Willy Pickton was charged with a knife attack on a prostitute. The woman escaped and he was wounded but attempted murder charges against him were dropped.

The latest chapter began on 5 February when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police executed a search warrant ostensibly to look for firearms on the C$3m farm. The Mounties, with a special missing-women task force, found an unauthorised .22 calibre revolver and charges were laid against Willy Pickton. Sources say they also found something far more significant: identification belonging to at least two of the missing women.

The farm resembles a junkyard, with wrecked vehicles and rusted earth-moving machines scattered about. Huge piles of earth suggest the land is being prepared for housing development, but to recent observers their presence has taken on a sinister meaning.

Investigators have appealed to the public, asking anyone who attended parties in Willy Pickton's home to supply DNA samples. Thirty people have already volunteered.

While the story's latest setting is rural, its beginnings are in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, a blighted suburb that perennially ranks as Canada's poorest neighbourhood. Thousands of intravenous drug users, many with HIV or Aids, haunt the area. In an adjacent light-industrial area that has no residents, women stand on street corners day and night.

Critics believe the police have not taken the case or the violence often meted out to prostitutes seriously. Paul Sullivan, a columnist with The Globe and Mail, said: "For years, relatives of these women, as well as activists, reporters and editorialists, have been charging that the police have not been paying enough attention to the case because these women are drug-addicted prostitutes."

In a macabre twist, the manager of a rendering plant revealed this week that police had asked for its records of dealings with Willy Pickton. The plant, situated in the red-light district, took delivery of animal by-products from the Picktons for many years.