Murder at Piggy's Palace: The Bizarre Serial Murder Case of Robert "Willie" Pickton

March 20, 2008

The phenomenon of serial murder has existed among mankind throughout history, though the documentation of this type of killing humans has not been substantial prior to the last 75 years or so. Despite the long history of serial murder, however, it should be noted that the number of incidents or commissions of such murders has never been as great as they are today. Even the numbers of victims in such cases has increased. The bizarre case of Robert Pickton, the Canadian pig farmer turned serial murderer, serves as a perfect example of the latter statement—best estimates are that he may have claimed as many as 49 victims and, in his own words, he was going for "an even fifty" at the time of his arrest. If serial murder had reached "an almost epidemic proportion," according to Robert Ressler, formerly of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, by that criminal profiler’s estimate that was published in the mid-1980s, now, more than two decades later, such so-called "motiveless" crimes have come even closer to reaching Ressler’s assessment and belief.

The Pickton case began quietly, as most such cases do, when women from Vancouver’s downtown eastside, long known as being among the poorest neighborhoods in the city, began disappearing. Since many of the women were prostitutes and/or drug addicts, few people outside their immediate families likely noticed their disappearances and even fewer people likely cared that they were missing. Although some people believe the Pickton case may have actually begun in September 1978 with the disappearance of Lillian Jean O’Dare, it would be several years before an official investigation would be launched by the police. At first, the police were the first to admit that they were baffled by the disappearances, and many doubted that they were being murdered—opting instead to believing that the women had simply moved on to other locales.

"In the case of these missing women, we don’t have a suspect," said one Vancouver police officer. "In fact, we don’t have a crime."

Nonetheless, police kept up the search for clues as to why the women were disappearing without a trace. Initially, they didn’t have any crime scenes with which to work, nor did they have any suspects to investigate. If they had, they presumably would have been able to uncover more facts sooner to help them solve the case—a case that many didn’t want to believe existed. Early in the case, the police were accused by a number of people of ignoring the concerns of loved ones of the missing women, some of whom had been missing for more than a decade, because of their particular lifestyles. But the fact that the missing women were someone’s mother, daughter, sister, or granddaughter kept many people pushing the investigators actively working the case to try and solve the puzzle that became even more mysterious with each passing month and each new disappearance. It took some time before they finally began to see an erratic pattern emerging. By the time the massive case finally broke in February 2002, homicide investigators suddenly realized that they were dealing with one of the worst serial murder cases in history and formed a task force when it became almost certain that a serial killer was at work. By then, however, 31 women had vanished, and police suspected that there were others that hadn’t been accounted for yet...

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More Manson Family Victims Buried At Barker Ranch?

March 18, 2008

Although nearly 40 years have passed since Charles Manson and his "family" of followers terrorized Los Angeles with the gruesome Tate-LaBianca murders, the public still cannot seem to get enough about the case. Newspaper men and women live on headlines, and it is a fact of life that stories of murder and mayhem sell newspapers, magazines, and books—the more gruesome the crimes, the better the sales. And of course anytime old Charlie Manson makes it into the news, the public wants to read about it.

According to CNN and the Associated Press, searchers at an old Manson compound at Barker Ranch, located in Death Valley and perhaps best known as Manson’s last hideout where he was found holed up inside the cupboard of a bathroom vanity at the time of his arrest, have found new evidence of two possible gravesites. It’s never been a secret that there might be additional Manson family victims buried in that desolate, rarely visited area—runaways from Southern California, as well as hitchhikers, were known to have visited Manson and his followers at the ranch only to never be seen again. Manson follower Susan Atkins even boasted to a cellmate in 1969 that there were at least three additional bodies buried "out in the desert that they done in," and last month, February 2008, searchers riding all-terrain vehicles made a 20-mile trek from the ghost town of Ballarat to Barker Ranch, carrying with them sophisticated forensic equipment able to detect traces of human decomposition.

The search team was comprised of two lab researchers, Arpad Vass and Marc Wise from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; a police official, Sgt. Paul Dostie, from Mammoth Lakes, accompanied by a dog, Buster, trained to sniff out human remains; and an anthropologist, Daniel Larson, department head of archaeology at California State University, Long Beach, equipped with a magnetic resonance device and a ground penetrating radar device. Sharon Tate’s sister was also among those who made the journey, along with a gold prospector, Emmett Harder, intimately familiar with the area around the Panamint Mountains, who led the search team into an area of the harsh California desert where few people dare to venture. Harder also knew Manson and several of his followers personally—he ate dinner with them at times and occasionally provided work for the men in the group.

Barker Ranch, it should be noted, was one of several hideouts used by Manson and his family after things became too hot for them at Spahn Ranch, an old movie set from where they had made most of their murderous plans, following a crack-of-dawn raid by the police on August 16, 1969. Although 26 arrests had been made that day, those taken into custody had to be released because of a technicality—according to historical data, the date on the warrant used for the raid was incorrect. The police activity that fateful morning had nonetheless forced the family to move on to other hideouts, including Barker Ranch...

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Is Sitting on the Toilet for Two Years a Crime?

March 14, 2008

What you are about to read is indeed bizarre, but whether or not a crime has actually been committed has yet to be determined. According to the Associated Press, at the urging of the local sheriff the district attorney’s office in Ness City, Kansas, located some 182 miles northwest of Wichita, is considering filing charges against the boyfriend of a woman who purportedly remained inside the bathroom at her boyfriend’s home for approximately two years without coming outside.

By the time emergency medical personnel arrived at 36-year-old Kory McFarren’s home, McFarren’s girlfriend, 35-year-old Pam Babcock, had sat on the toilet seat for so long that her skin had actually begun to grow around the seat, according to what Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple told to the Associated Press. Babcock at first refused the emergency medical services of the paramedics, but was finally convinced by her boyfriend and others that she needed to go to the hospital for evaluation.

"We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital," Whipple told reporters. "The hospital removed it."

Whipple said that Babcock was not tied to the seat, nor had she been glued to it.

"She was just physically stuck by her body," Whipple said. "It is hard to imagine…I still have a hard time imagining it myself."

Although the authorities had at first refused to release the name of the couple, Kory McFarren came forward and agreed to an interview with AP. McFarren is the person who named his girlfriend to the news agency. According to the tale he told, McFarren took his girlfriend food and water every day. He also asked her to come out of the bathroom every day, but she always refused...

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