VANCOUVER — The families of Robert Pickton’s victims, many of whom never saw the serial killer stand trial for the murders of their sisters, mothers and grandmothers, entered the public inquiry into the case skeptical but nonetheless hoping it would bring them answers.
More than seven months later, as the hearings draw to a close, those same families are denouncing the inquiry as a complete failure that will be unable to tell them or the public why Pickton was able to murder impoverished sex workers with impunity for so many years.
“This commission has failed to uncover the true reasons why this enormous tragedy was allowed to happen and exactly how it was that the criminal justice system utterly failed these women and their families,” Cameron Ward, who represents the families of more than two dozen missing and murdered women, told the inquiry during his final submissions Monday.
“My clients are disappointed, discouraged and, most of all, angry at the way this commission has unfolded. They feel this commission has perpetuated the attitude of indifference and disrespect that they themselves first experienced when they reported their loved ones missing.”
Ward had an hour to sum up more than half a year of testimony as the inquiry entered its final week, and he used much of that time to list off what he argued were the failures of the process and of commissioner Wally Oppal.
Ward said Oppal ceded to an unfair deadline imposed by the provincial government, rushing through witnesses and skipping others, including numerous police officers who had yet to talk about their role in the investigations of Pickton and missing women in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
At the same time, Oppal relied too heavily on evidence from the Vancouver police and the RCMP, said Ward, taking their own internal reviews of the Pickton case at face value and allowing them to withhold hundreds of thousands of documents.
“From the perspectives of my clients, this public inquiry has not nearly finished its work,” said Ward. “This could be called the missing-evidence inquiry.”
Outside the inquiry, Ward’s clients could barely contain their distaste for the inquiry and for Oppal, a former judge and one-time Liberal attorney general.
“I’m so pissed off, this is totally unfair,” said Cynthia Cardinal, whose sister Georgina Papin was among the women Pickton was convicted of killing.
“This is an injustice.”
The families have not forgotten that it was Oppal who, as attorney general, broke the news in 2008 that Pickton may not stand trial for 20 outstanding murder charges.
By then, Pickton had already been convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and prosecutors were waiting to deal with an additional 20 charges until after his appeals had run out. At the time, Oppal said if the convictions were upheld, a second trial wouldn’t be in the public interest.
The Supreme Court of Canada upheld Pickton’s convictions in the summer of 2010, and the remaining charges were stayed. One of those charges involved Cara Ellis, whose DNA was found on Pickton’s property after his arrest.
“I’ve sat here every day and watched this sham of justice,” said Ellis’s sister-in-law, Lori-Ann Ellis. “When they stayed the 20 charges on our girls, we were angry and disappointed that these girls would never see their day in court,” she continued, through tears. “We sat every day of this inquiry and we watched Mr. Oppal kick our girls.”
The inquiry began last October and has heard from dozens of witnesses, including current and former police officers, relatives of the missing women, advocates and service providers in the Downtown Eastside and academics.
Pickton was arrested in February 2002 and convicted in December 2007 of the six counts of second-degree murder.
The remains or DNA of 33 women were found on his farm. He once told an undercover police officer that he killed 49.