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charged with attempted murder by the Crown after the attack on Wendy, he hired big-time Vancouver lawyer Peter Ritchie to represent him. The charges were later dropped when Wendy did not show up to testify against him—despite the fact that the police knew that he had been the person who had provoked the attack by stabbing Wendy first. It seemed just as well from the Crown’s viewpoint—Pickton had hired a private detective for $10,000, according to Pickton, to investigate Wendy’s background, leaving prosecutors believing that they would have had a tough time convincing a jury that a millionaire pig farmer had tried to kill a hooker who was also a junkie. The incident should have been one of the first clues that something very wrong may have been going on at the Pickton farm, but it seemed to just fly right over the heads of the local police, who chalked it up as an isolated incident.

Part 1
The Missing Women

1
    The city of Vancouver, British Columbia, with a metropolitan area population of 2,249,725, is the largest metro area in the western part of Canada and the third largest in that country. Located along the coast and sheltered from the Pacific Ocean by Vancouver Island, the major seaport is ethnically diverse, with 43 percent of the area’s residents speaking a first language other than English, and is ranked fourth in population density for a major city on the North American continent, behind only New York City, San Francisco, and Mexico City. Because of its rapid growth, it is expected to take over the number two spot by 2021. Idyllic in appearance because of its surroundings of natural beauty, Vancouver is repeatedly ranked as one of the world’s most livable cities. In Canada it is among the most expensive places in which to live. But Vancouver is a major city, and with that distinction comes the grim reality that, like all major cities, it has a dark side that most tourists rarely get, or even want, to see.
    One of Vancouver’s unpleasant sides, an understatement to be sure, is its Downtown Eastside, also known as Low Track, long recognized as the poorest neighborhood in all of Canada. Rife with heroin addicts and prostitutes, Low Track is an area of Vancouver where misery and despair rarely—if ever—subside. The area abounds in grubby tenements, some of which are not fit for human habitation, run-down hotels that can easily be described as flophouses, and many of its back alleys and some of its streets are just plain filthy. Cigarette butts, used hypodermic needles discarded by addicts, and empty liquor and beer bottles are strewn about and broken. Discarded articles of furniture, such as sofas, chairs, and mattresses, which some of the homeless use to sleep on, can be found without having to look very hard. The smell of urine and vomit is often overpowering, and used condoms discarded by hookers or their johns are a frequent sight. The sounds of emergency vehicle sirens are frequent, day and night—the police are either making drug busts or other arrests, or medical teams are rushing to the scene of daily drug overdoses. It is also known as the place where many of the resident prostitutes began disappearing in the late 1970s and continued vanishing past the turn of the century. Few people would dispute that Low Track is aptly named.
    A number of theories about what may have happened to the missing women have surfaced over the years and range from opinions that one or more serial killers were at work, such as a copycat of the “Green River Killer,” to hookers who visited the freighters that docked in the city’s harbor, only blocks from Low Track, and were kidnapped. The women were kept as sex slaves, only to be thrown overboard at sea when the sailors were finished with them.
    Finding out what happened to the missing women has been especially troubling for the police who, according to Vancouver police constable Anne Drennan, had few leads with which to work because in most cases the police