Pig farmer 'hung dead prostitute from a chain' - Telegraph

Pig farmer 'hung dead prostitute from a chain' - Telegraph


By Tom Leonard in New York12:01AM BST 27 Jun 2007

Canada's most prolific serial killer told a court that she once found him in his slaughterhouse smeared in blood and next to a woman's body hanging from a chain.

Lynn Ellingsen said that Robert "Willie" Pickton, who is accused of murdering 26 women, pulled her inside and threatened that she would end up "right beside her" if she didn't keep quiet about what she had seen.
Ellingsen, a self-confessed crack cocaine addict, said she had recognised the dead woman as a prostitute whom she and Pickton had picked up earlier that night and brought back to his ramshackle farm outside Vancouver, British Columbia.
She said: "He was cutting something. There was blood everywhere. I just remember staring at her feet."
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"My eye level is where her legs were. I saw red nail polish and this big shiny table."
She said she couldn't recall looking directly at the rest of the woman but recalled seeing a bloody train of long black hair on the table.
Ellingsen, 37, admitted that she initially omitted to tell police about the incident. Pickton is being tried on the first six of 26 murder charges relating to the deaths of women, most of them prostitutes and drug addicts, from Vancouver's poor Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.
Almost 40 more names remain on an official police list of local women who have been declared missing.
Pickton, 57, denies the charges although he has acknowledged that human remains were found on the property. The trial is now in its sixth month, largely because of the volume of prosecution evidence.
The court heard that Pickton told an undercover officer that he had intended to kill 50 women but only managed 49 because he "got sloppy".
Investigators believe he chopped up his victims and fed them to his pigs. Ellingsen said that on the night in question, Pickton had gone to his room with the prostitute after they had gone out to buy drugs.
She said she later heard a noise, saw a light in the slaughterhouse and went to investigate.
Asked how the body was hanging, she said: "The same way he hung his pigs. There was a chain right there. That's where she was, where he does his pigs."
Ellingsen denied that she could have been hallucinating on drugs, insisting that crack cocaine "doesn't make you see things that are not there".
However, Ellingsen said she could not remember the date of the alleged incident, and said years of drug abuse have left her with little concept of time.
“These dates and these times – they don’t mean anything to me,” she said under questioning from the defence. “Time was immaterial to me”.