Inside the Midnight Order - Ep. 3: 'An Echo of Pain' 29:56

Hey, it's Deborah Roberts. This week on Inside the Midnight Order, our all-woman team of investigators turn their attention to one of the biggest murder cases in North America, the case of a pig farmer named Robert Pickton who claims he killed 49 women. Here's Episode 3.

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Hey there, I'm ABC News correspondent Kena Whitworth. And I'm Nancy Schwartzman, the director and executive producer of Sasha Reid and the Midnight Order. From ABC Audio and Freeform, this is Inside the Midnight Order. Nancy, in this episode, Dr. Sasha Reid and the Midnight Order examine the case of one of Canada's most notorious serial killers, Robert Pickton. How is this case viewed in Canada and beyond?

The Robert Pickton case is a huge wound for Canada.

He is the most notorious serial killer in the country. He admitted to murdering 49 women. The charges of 20 plus women were stayed. He was only convicted of six. It really exposed systemic harms that led to such a vulnerable population. 20 years of unchecked disappearances that were not properly investigated.

It really just showed so many pieces of Canadian society that needed healing, that needed addressing, that needed advocacy. Something that's interesting is Picton himself, when he confessed in his jail cell, he was trying to get the big 5-0. He was frustrated. He only got to 49. He was competing with American serial killers. So there's a way that these...

Predators compete with each other. They know about each other. They want the notoriety. Why did the Midnight Order want to focus on this case in particular? This was Sasha's passion project when we initially met. Sasha grew up learning about Picton in high school.

There she is, high school student, fresh with ideas about the world. And oh my God, how does this happen? I think the scale, the amount of victims, the images from the farm, it just is so horrifying. Unless you study crime, the average person cannot wrap their head around

around that level of depravity. Of course, because Sasha is who she is, this fascinated her. How did this happen? Who are the victims? What was going on in this perpetrator's mind? Like in a way you're fascinated by the horror and then you go deeper into the historic and systemic reasons this was able to happen. So I think there's like a level of sophistication to really analyzing this crime from a legal perspective and a societal one. And

And then there's just the dark psychology and that sort of level of fascination. In this episode, we get a sense of how much evidence there is in this Pickton case and how many threads the team would follow. But what the episode really focuses in on is who Robert Pickton targeted, these vulnerable women in Vancouver, including many Indigenous women. What did you learn about the plight of these women in Canada?

Yeah, I learned so much from digging into the Picton case. And I think there are many parallels between Canada and the United States. And I think perpetrators and predators know that these are vulnerable women. These are also women living in more rural areas. These are underserved communities. If you drive all along what's known as the Highway of Tears, there is no Wi-Fi. There are no buses.

Girls have to hitchhike to get around. If you go to reservations in the U.S. and the West, there is no Wi-Fi. It's very remote. This really sets up ways in which girls can be taken or harmed.

To learn more about why indigenous women are overrepresented in the Missing and Murdered database, Nancy's going to talk with Midnight Order members Aya and Hannah. Aya is a psychotherapist, and she works with former offenders. And Hannah is the team's database expert. Nancy's conversation with them...

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Aya and Hannah, thanks so much for being here. Can you both tell me how you became part of the Midnight Order? I know both of you are really like the OG members and have been on this ride with Sasha the longest. So Hannah, why don't you tell me how you got started?

In the third year of my undergrad, I took a law class that happened to be with Sasha. I got really interested when she started talking about having this serial offender database and a missing and murdered persons database.

I reached out to see if I could help her with those in any capacity just to learn a little bit more about the field. I thought it was really interesting that an academic would be involved in such things as learning about homicide and missing persons because I just assumed that was a matter that was almost exclusively covered by police. I started off with inputting data and helping her kind of build some of the initial profiles on the Serial Homicide Database.

And then that escalated and graduated to me helping her run the homicide database.

And what about you, Aya? How did you find Sasha? What attracted you to the work? And how did you guys hit it off? I had just started my master's degree in counseling psychology and psychotherapy. I would always come in with a book about one serial killer or another. And then one of my lab members showed me the ad that Sasha had put on the listserv for psych students saying, oh, this person is studying serial homicide and they're looking for volunteers.

So I remember emailing Sasha. We had a really passionate discussion about serial homicide. She was just like, yes, you're in. She gave us the task to find any type of information we can find on any serial killer online. So we'd spend time collecting books, reports, any legal documents if we can find them.

I was tasked with art. I remember looking at John Wayne Gacy's art and I was like, this is creepy. But it was all like we're collecting anything that can help us understand their psyche better. And then slowly I became more involved with Missing and Murdered Database in the sense of managing it and assigning profiles to volunteers as she just grew the lab bigger and bigger.

I love that. I love that you were able to like plug into your passion of trying to understand the minds of serial killers, but also looking at their art and their development. And really that Sasha was so encouraging of whatever sort of direction you wanted to explore. Aya, you are a psychotherapist. What does your career look like outside of your work in The Midnight Order?

I work with a private practice in Toronto. So under supervision, I provide sex offender treatment to people who are on probation. And I also work with Corrections Canada. So I provide treatment to individuals who are on parole reintegrating into society. Do people sometimes ask, oh, Aya, your work is so dangerous? Or why do you do it? I don't know.

I remember when I was in my master's and I chose to do my internship in a correctional facility. Someone asked me that and I said, "They are people, aren't they?"

They're people who need help and they are underserved and marginalized and they don't have access to these services. That makes sense. The Robert Pickton case, one of the largest serial homicide cases in North America. He's admitted to killing as many as 49 victims. Aya, tell me a bit about Robert Pickton's background. Who was he and what are some of the factors that you think made him who he was?

When we talk about how someone is made the way they are, we're describing several systems like family system, the environment that they live in, the educational system, socioeconomic system, and so on and so forth. It's important to look first at home life. We understand that his mother was a domineering, controlling person. There's history of abuse. Children who experience early life abuse can develop

develop difficulties with emotional regulation, executive functioning skills like problem solving, decision making, judgment planning, building relationships with others, experiencing violence at an early age can, but not always,

lead to relying on violence to resolve conflict or regulate oneself or maybe regain or maintain power or status. So like the best way to get this information is from the person themselves or from like psychological assessment reports.

and we don't have a lot of that information but we can see like certain markers. His personality and temperament more of a follower, passive, he's a loner and appeared to have had like a codependent relationship with his mother and his mother was not a healthy role model and you could also see it in his brother's early involvement in crime as well like seeing that in the family would have an impact on the person as well. Yeah that makes sense.

Hannah, can you describe some of the victims whose deaths Robert was charged with? What are some of the characteristics they share? A good majority of his victims were women who lived in and around the Vancouver downtown east side. Many were engaged in sex work. They were people who used drugs.

Many were indigenous women. And so when you have even just one of those characteristics, but a lot of them had multiple, there was intersecting identities for a lot of these women that just made them especially vulnerable. And perhaps in the eyes of Picton made them really ideal targets because they

They were on the margins of society, especially after the fact and after seeing kind of how the investigation was handled. It was pretty clear that they were never prioritized by law enforcement or given the attention that they deserve with this case.

In episode three of the series, the team discusses how the type of victim or the victimology may influence how an investigation is handled. As you said, the women in the Picton case were often indigenous, sex workers, people battling substance use disorders. I want to focus on the indigenous women for now. Aya, can you explain from a historical perspective why there's such a large at-risk population

Indigenous population in Canada? It's long-term impacts of colonization and systemic racism and discrimination. The systems, the healthcare system, the educational system, have been all built to subdue, control, and put Indigenous folks at a disadvantage, essentially taking away their power. The systems do not hear them, do not listen to their needs, actively oppresses them, limiting their access to resources.

There's history of genocide. There is the child welfare system and family separation, all that leading to intergenerational trauma that really continues to be untreated because they don't have access to resources or help.

But also it all creates stereotypes that lead to further ostracization and discrimination. So when you hear that an Indigenous woman has gone missing, the police are always so slow to respond. The system's already set for people to respond callously. And in a victim-blaming way, it's kind of like, oh, what was she doing? Where is she going? Oh, she was drunk. It makes it very difficult.

Yeah, I think we can really relate to that in the United States with marginalized populations that have been shut out of society or purposefully kept in poverty or overly criminalized. Not only does that make the day-to-day so challenging, it also creates bias in law enforcement communities.

Hannah, what kind of information has the Midnight Order been able to collect on missing Indigenous women or murdered women? It's a lot easier to find information on missing and murdered people online.

If they're young white women, when you look at Indigenous women in particular, the lack of information is really stark in comparison to other victims. Like it won't really be in your typical news outlet. It'll be families who are sharing information about their loved one to try and put the word out for

for others to keep an eye out for them or to contact them with information and different type of information too. You might get information that they have been living a really troubled lifestyle or things like that and you don't get the full picture of who they are as a person. That's information that's provided

by the family. And so I think when we've looked at the profiles that we put together of missing and murdered people in that database, they're a lot more filled out for some and a lot more sparse for Indigenous people. Right. And that can create the perception that

they don't have family ties or they don't have full lives, right? I think part of what the Midnight Order does so beautifully is really try to create a full portrait so that someone's not just a mugshot or a photograph or their name, right? There's like more to them. Would you agree with that? Totally. And that was definitely something that Sasha emphasized with both databases. She always wanted us to work really hard to find an image of

the victims because she was like, I really want to put faces to names and give us this opportunity to humanize them, to not just exclusively focus on the offender or the potential suspect and to really give these victims the focus and the attention that they deserve. And so she emphasized the photo a lot.

but also going beyond the photograph and humanizing them and recognizing the different roles that they played in their life, not just as this potential victim, but as daughters, children, mothers, whomever.

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This is Brad Milkey from the ABC News podcast Start Here. As hard as it is to imagine, family doctors used to frequently make house calls. If you were sick, they would pack up their little black doctor's bag and they would come to your home to examine you. Those days seem long gone, but one company is giving new meaning to the term house call

Teladoc Health. You can choose a board-certified doctor that's right for you and get primary care from the comfort of your own home. Connect via phone or online with a board-certified doctor who will get to know you and provide whole-person care. Advice, prescriptions, even mental health support and referrals.

Teladoc Health is not only convenient, it's affordable too, and it's covered by a surprising number of insurance plans. Download the app to get started today or go online to register or schedule a visit at teladochealth.com. That's teladoc, T-E-L-A-D-O-C, health.com.

That's the ecosystem that's the victim population. I want to talk specifically now about the case itself and how it was handled from a sort of behind-the-scenes perspective. In the show, it's mentioned there's a large amount of evidence, hundreds of thousands of pieces of evidence. This evidence is both the number of potential victims and also just the massive scope of the crime scene.

Hannah, how can the amount of evidence affect an investigation? There's a lot to go through. So even if it were thoroughly examined, like that would just take so much time. My understanding is that there's a lot of public pressure to to get this case wrapped up for various reasons. And so I think when you have that kind of public pressure contradicted with this like mountain of evidence, like it can just get really overwhelming. And I think police may have succumbed to some of that pressure. Yeah.

In the series, Sasha brings out this large map of the Picton farm and demonstrated how many hits of DNA, how many different people touched part of that crime scene. How did the Midnight Order get that info and categorize it? Sasha requested this information from the Supreme Court of Canada and

Spent hours just categorizing everything, the location on the farm, whose DNA it is, and just color coded everything. Obviously we can't go back in time and see how things were set up. It's helpful to have something like that so that we can know the logistics of how things worked or how messy the place was.

How everything was scattered and it just gives us like a better picture of what was going on and what environment did these people come into. It definitely gives a better image.

You can really see how chaotic and, as you're saying, just messy that whole world was. And then back to the point about a high volume of evidence, it's kind of a perfect storm to really have a hard time gathering all the evidence and giving it the treatment it deserves. Aya, you spoke to the cousin of Tanya Holick, Lori Lee Williams.

Tanya herself was a victim of Picton. Her cousin Lorelai mentioned Stephanie Lane, also a friend of Tanya, was an indigenous woman who,

And her skeletal remains were found on the Picton farm, a vertebra. So a very significant piece of evidence was found, but it sat in a storage locker for over a decade. When this came to light, the British Columbia Coroner's Service released a statement saying,

saying they couldn't explain the delay because whoever had worked there prior was no longer there. What could have been the implications of actually having that vertebrae 10 years earlier? And if you have an opinion about what that means for the family and what that means for the case. If it wasn't lost for over a decade, the family might have had an answer and some justice in her case. It's really horrific to

Because there were multiple instances where the police failed. Not just like in evidence side of things, but also informing families and communicating and following up and interviewing people. Picton was only accidentally caught by a rookie RCMP member who happened to stumble on the property when he got information about an illegal weapon on the Picton farm.

There's also a failure to follow up on important lines of questioning, like what about the pills that were found on Dave Pickton's headboard that were also in Andrea Jones Berry's body? Why wasn't there more information about that? Was that even investigated? Yeah, definitely. And I just want to note that initially the Vancouver Police Department apologized for

for its handling of the case and acknowledged failures. But later on, in response to a series of lawsuits, the VPD said their officers made reasonable efforts to locate and investigate the disappearances. So speaking of lawsuits, let's pivot to the legal side of the Pickton case.

Robert Pickton essentially was only charged with six murders. He was charged and convicted of second-degree murder, not first. Do we know specifically why Pickton wasn't convicted of first-degree murder?

My understanding is that in first-degree murder, they have to prove that it was premeditated. While second-degree murder, there is intention to kill, but it's not premeditated. It's more so in the heat of the moment. They weren't able to find evidence that he planned any of these murders in advance, and that's why he got second-degree murder.

And for you all both who have been out there and know the distance to go to the downtown east side, which is a very specific neighborhood where you know you're going to encounter people who are vulnerable, people who are walking the streets at all hours, and to drive them 35 minutes plus to the farm, that does not seem spur of the moment to me. What do you all think?

I think that it's fair to say that there was planning of some kind, but I don't know about homicide. With that particular example of going to seek out women in a vulnerable neighborhood and then taking them a decent ways away back to a more isolated farm, I think that would suggest some type of planning. I just don't know if we can conclusively say that shows premeditation to commit homicide.

That's me going off on a tangent that gets debunked instantly by the Midnight Order. I know listeners may have more questions about the legalities of the case, and that's something we're definitely going to discuss in later episodes.

For now, I want to end this episode with the victims. You both spoke with family members of those who may have been victims of Robert Pickton. Kara Ellis' family, Tanya Holick's family, also Cynthia Papin and Georgina Papin. What did you take away from those conversations?

There's just so much fresh and raw pain. It doesn't matter that this has happened years ago. There's just an echo of pain in the generations to come that are going to really be impacted by these massive losses and massive acts of injustice.

But at the same time, what I took away is a lot of love as well. These families were still so warmed despite what they have went through. They were so open to sharing and to just connecting with us.

You could really see the importance of community in these families. It's so important to have someone to lean on and to have a robust sense of community to just experience a tragedy like this because the grief is never going to end. It's never going to be, oh, okay, I'm okay with it now. I'm healed. It's a process, really touching to see that they had each other in that way.

Piggybacking off of that, how lovingly they talked about other families and about each other, that sense of community was just really apparent. They obviously took the time to tell us about their loved ones, but then they also would go out of their way to mention other women and their families and how upset that they were for them. And so there's just zero selfishness. And it was all about how they could communicate

work together to help one another. The work that they've taken on to shed light on these cases, to address the missing and murdered women issue that we have in Canada and in particular in BC and the Vancouver area is just really amazing. I just want to say a big thank you to both of you, I and Hannah, and I really appreciate you spending time with us today. Thanks, Nancy. Yeah, thank you for having us.

That was Nancy's interview with Aya and Hannah. We'll be back next week with Anjali, a medical student who specializes in forensic psychiatry, and Hasty, a legal powerhouse who puts victims first. We'll dig deeper on Robert Pickton's family and also revisit some of those horrifying details from the crime scene.

Inside the Midnight Order is a co-production of Freeform and ABC Audio and a companion podcast to the Freeform true crime documentary series, Sasha Reed and the Midnight Order. Now streaming on Hulu. You can also stream the soundtrack. It's available now on all platforms. I'm Kena Whitworth. My co-host is Nancy Schwartzman, director and executive producer of Sasha Reed and the Midnight Order.

This series was produced by Camille Peterson, Meg Fierro, Amira Williams, and Jalyn McDuffie, with assistance from Freeforms, Katie Celia, and Megan Watera. Susie Liu is our supervising producer. Music by Nick Sena.

Special thanks to ABC Audio's Liz Alessi, Josh Kohan, Madeline Wood, and Ariel Chester. And Freeform's Amanda Kell, Allie Braman, Lindsay Chamness, Jasmine Karamzada, Heather Taylor, and Mike Wong. Laura Mayer is Executive Producer of Podcast Programming at ABC Audio.