Canada's Notorious Serial Killer a Momma's Boy

Robert Pickton: his mother's son?

In this shocking excerpt from Stevie Cameron's The Pickton File, Robert Pickton's mother Louise causes the death of a neighbourhood boy while covering up evidence of her younger son's crime.

I had heard enough about Robert "Willie" Pickton's family life to make me realize it had been brutal and difficult. His father was not involved in raising the children; his mother, Louise, was eccentric and tough. A workaholic who ran the family meat business in Port Coquitlam, Louise supervised the kids, expecting them to put in long hours slopping pigs and looking after other animals, even on school days. At one point during his boyhood, people told me, when Willie wanted to hide from someone, he would crawl into the gutted carcasses of large hogs. Another story, widely repeated among family friends in Port Coquitlam, told of his grief at the discovery that his parents had slaughtered a pet calf he had raised himself when he was a boy. He never got over it and repeated the story to people he grew close to over the years.

Then there was the story of when his younger brother, Dave, was learning to drive, a story that reveals much more about the mother than about the son. On the evening of October 16, 1967, when Dave was sixteen and had recently acquired his driver's licence, he took his father's 1960 red truck from the farm and headed east along Dominion Avenue towards Burns Road. It was about 7:40. Just ahead of him, on the right side, one of the neighbourhood kids, a fourteen-year- old boy named Tim Barrett, was walking down the road. How exactly it happened no one can say now, but Dave slammed right into him.

Dave knew right away that Tim, who was lying crumpled on the road, was badly hurt, and he raced home in a panic to tell his mother what had happened. Louise Pickton stopped what she was doing and hurried over to the place where the injured boy lay. After looking Tim over, she leaned down and rolled and shoved him to the edge of the deep slough that ran along the side of the road and pushed him in. Then she turned and went home.

Dave was frightened. He drove the truck to a mechanic in Port Coquitlam who handled the Pickton family's vehicles and asked the man to bang out a dent in the front of the hood and replace a broken turn signal.

In the meantime, Tim's parents, Phillip and Lois Barrett, were frantic. Phillip Barrett phoned neighbours again and again to see if anyone knew where he was. Just before one a.m., he went to the local police station to report his son missing. The next morning, one of the neighbours, a woman whose son had seen Tim the night before, went out to help Barrett search the road area. Barrett spotted his son's shoe at the side of the road. Looking around this spot, he and his neighbour reached the slough that runs about ten feet from the road. Peering down into the water, they spotted Tim's body.

The police arrived right away and pulled the body out of the murky water. An autopsy showed that the cause of death was drowning, not the injuries he had suffered when the truck hit him-although these were significant. He'd suffered a fractured skull with a subcranial hemorrhage and a fractured, dislocated pelvis, but the pathologist who did the autopsy stated that these injuries would not have killed him.

When he died, Timothy Frederick Barrett, who was born on February 13, 1953, was in grade eight at the local public school. In March 1968, a coroner's jury listened to the evidence of several people, including neighbours, the mechanic who fixed the truck and the police officer who investigated the case. The verdict was accidental death. But at the same time, as the coroner informed the five-man jury, a criminal investigation was under way into Dave's actions that night. He did not get off scot-free: he was sent to juvenile court and was not allowed to drive a car for two years. More details are not available, however, because his record is sealed and the coroner's inquest was not mandated to investigate all the little mysteries that arose on that fair October night. Louise was never charged, but the true story quickly got out among the neighbours. Many years later, in the early 1990s, Willie told the story to one of his closest friends. This friend told me.

While this event would have scarred Dave more than his brother, this chilling portrait of Louise as mother remains. And what about the father, Leonard? Russell MacKay, the court watcher and retired Port Coquitlam welder who had done work on vehicles at the farm, told me he had heard stories of Leonard's violent abuse of Willie. But I couldn't let go of the belief that it was Louise, not Leonard, who had been the main influence in Willie Pickton's life. Everyone who knew them told me Willie was very close to her.