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NEW WESTMINSTER, British Columbia - Police told Robert "Willie" Pickton, who is accused of killing 26 Vancouver-area women, they had a witness who would testify she saw him skinning a woman at his farm, a Canadian court heard on Thursday.
The police, interrogating Pickton shortly after his arrest in 2002, said they also knew that the woman was blackmailing him, something Pickton acknowledged in the taped interview.
"She said it was because she had walked in and saw you skinning a woman on a hook," an officer told Pickton, as police attempted to get him to confess to murder.
A videotape of the interview was played for the jury at his first-degree murder trial in New Westminster on Thursday.
At the time of the interview, Pickton, a pig farmer in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, was charged with only two murders.
He is now charged with 26, although the current trial deals with just six of them. The judge divided the case into two trials to make it easier for jurors to handle.
Pickton, 57, has pleaded not guilty to all the charges, and denies knowing any of the women, who were among more than 60 prostitutes who disappeared in Vancouver, on Canada's Pacific Coast, from the late 1980s to the end of 2001.
Prosecutors said earlier in the trial, which began on Monday, that they plan to call the witness, who would testify that she had seen Pickton butchering women after he had killed them at the farm.
Police say Pickton hired the women on the streets of Vancouver's down-and-out Downtown Eastside neighborhood, took them to his farm, killed them after having sex, and butchered their bodies to dispose of the remains.
In another taped interview played in court on Wednesday, Pickton reacted with disbelief when a Royal Canadian Mounted Police interrogator told him his DNA was found mixed with the blood of one of the victims in a motor home on his farm.
On the tape, Pickton contended he was being set up. "I'm being nailed to the cross," he said.
If convicted of all the charges against him, Pickton would be the deadliest serial killer in Canadian history, and would face life in prison. Canada does not have a death penalty.
- REUTERS
