Author Topic: Another biker gang feeding women to pigs?!!  (Read 1973 times)

bestcho

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Re: Another biker gang feeding women to pigs?!!
« Reply #45 on: February 05, 2010, 08:13:39 AM »
May I add another theoretical explantion. Perhaps in addition to, or perhaps instead of.
For the most part, I believe the investigators on the ground, do a painful and very capable job. The Pickton case was high profile and front and center in the media. In effect, under the microscope of the public eye. But how many times have we seen investigations shut down simply due to dollars and cents. This case must have cost tens of millions. Not exactly a politically correct reason for shutting down an investigation. But strictly from a practical point of view, is it possible management said "we have enough info to make many charges stick" , so there's no point in spending millions more just to pile on more?  Just a thought!!

Hazel

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Re: Another biker gang feeding women to pigs?!!
« Reply #46 on: February 07, 2010, 11:34:35 AM »
re: OG's last post I AGREE!!!

Hazel

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Re: Another biker gang feeding women to pigs?!!
« Reply #47 on: February 07, 2010, 11:36:25 AM »
Hi Bestcho, I agree with your post too! It's taken me a while to believe that but I finally do. 

RW

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Re: Another biker gang feeding women to pigs?!!
« Reply #48 on: February 10, 2010, 10:20:23 PM »
Hi Besctcho.  Totally agree.  We would probably fall off our chairs if we knew how much the investigation cost.  The investigators did an excellent job under the most horrific circumstances imaginable.

Overgoat

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Re: Another biker gang feeding women to pigs?!!
« Reply #49 on: February 15, 2010, 08:10:53 AM »


Piggy's Pig Farm and Snuff Films


http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin...es;read=164676


By Kevin D. Annett

www.hiddenfromhistory.org

“Ten of the last dozen women to be taken to the killing site at Piggy’s Palace were accompanied by Mounties or regular cops. You think it was just Willie Picton who was killing them?”

Marion, sex trade worker, downtown eastside of Vancouver , May 10, 2006

In October of 1992, when I was still a United Church clergyman, I was approached by a colleague at my first Presbytery meeting in Nanaimo . The topic of child abuse came up, and after a few moments, the other man, a retired minister, smiled and gave me a sort of insider’s look. He lowered his voice and said to me,

“It’s easy to get a child in this town.”

I must have looked shocked, for his smile faded.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Nothing” he replied. “Some people are, you know, interested in that sort of thing.”

It all felt like an offer, masked but real, like a sort of masonic handshake: something known to insiders only.

The same man had worked in the United Church ’s Alberni Indian residential school for years, and piloted one of the “mission boats” that visited coastal Indian villages. One of my native parishioners later accused him of raping her as a child, but the RCMP threatened her not to press charges.

Later, after I was fired from the church for asking too many questions, I learned of the well-protected child trafficking network that linked the coastal residential schools with wealthy men and clubs in Vancouver . Just how many children disappeared into those clubs and never emerged is unknown; but they are among the more than 50,000 residential school children who cannot be accounted for.

“No crime ever disappears; it just adapts” a journalist once told me. And in British Columbia, the crime of abducting people is rampant, on the rise, and very lucrative, since it is part of a deadly international network in human trafficking.

George Brown is a retired aboriginal RCMP officer who was part of a community-based “Missing Persons’ Task Force” in Vancouver . His group documented hundreds of missing people until their work began to identify the complicity of local police, politicians and businessmen in the disappearances. At that point, George’s group disbanded.

“We didn’t want to get killed” George told me during a videotaped interview in the summer of 2005.

“I was called up by a senior officer in the force and told, ‘George, the number of disappeared women is nine, and it’s going to stay at nine. Stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong or you may lose it.’ The fact is I personally know two fellow Mounties who were linked with Picton and making money by bringing girls out to his place. None of the girls ever came back. Everybody knows about it.”

I asked George who “everybody” was. The world-weary man shook his head sadly.

“The Mayor. The Chief of Police. All the senior press people. Hell, you can’t get into those positions without making a deal with the drug lords who run this town. The days of organized crime as a separate thing are over. It’s all business run and legit now. It’s organized corporate crime now – the drug importers from Asia and the real estate developers and the off shore investors, they’re all part of the same gang. The cops all work for them. And body snatching pays well.”

George Brown’s group documented a link between the disappeared women of the downtown eastside and the trans-pacific organ trafficking network based in China . According to sources within the network, at least a dozen women and men are abducted and murdered every month in Vancouver , their bodies disposed of in protected grave sites on the north shore, and their organs shipped overseas.

Most of the disappeared are homeless men, transient youth or sex trade workers.

A year after I interviewed George Brown, I was given more confirmation of his groups’ claims. I received a message to meet a woman named Annie Parker at Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver ’s downtown eastside. Annie was a short, timid woman with haunted eyes and scars along her neck and arms.

“I got these by threatening to go to the press with what I knew” she said matter of factly, pointing to the scars.

“Who did it to you?” I asked.

She told me the man’s name, a senior RCMP officer, and then said,

“Who doesn’t matter. They’re all doing it. It’s called the ‘hooker game’. The Vancouver cops will pick up girls off the street, drug them with scopolamine and film them as they fuck them, in a cop club downtown on Georgia street . Then sometimes they kill the girls and film that too, and sell it for $25,000 as a snuff film.”

I asked her what happens to the bodies.

“That was one of Steve Picton’s specialties. I met all the Pictons. Steve runs a snuff film operation in Coquitlam and then he dumps the bodies at a hunting camp about ten miles up from Horseshoe Bay , near the Sea to Sky highway. There’s a special grave site there with sealed containers in a metal cistern. I was taken there, I seen it. It’s watched over by the Mounties.”

Les Guerin is an aboriginal man who lives and works as a maintenance man on the Musequam Indian reserve near the University of B.C. He claims that the reserve holds at least two body dumping sites from which he personally has excavated human remains, and had them forensically examined.

“As far back as 1989 I saw a man who I later identified as Willie Picton drive onto the Musqueam reserve and bury several large bags. Later when I saw his face on the news, I dug up the bags and had them examined at a lab at SFU. The report says they contain human and pig bones remains, including the humerus, pelvis and skull pieces of a young woman in her twenties.

“The weird thing is I told the Vancouver Police, the press, everybody about this, and nothing was ever done. I sent the police the forensic report, me and my buddy Jim Kew, I told the CBC and even the lawyers for the families of Picton’s victims. Nothing. The cops roped off the site in 2006 and that was that.”

A signed letter from Musqueam Band Housing Officer Glenn Guerin dated October 29, 2004 indicates that Dave Picton was employed by the Museum Indian band for a three month contract during 1990 to provide land fill for local street construction.

Frustrated by the lack of police response, in December of 2005, Les Guerin mailed the bone fragments he obtained from the Picton deposit, along with the forensic report, to Amnesty International’s head office in London , England. The package was returned unopened the following month.

Next month, the eyes of the world will be on British Columbia and its Olympics. But will those eyes perceive the missing men, women and children whose remains lie scattered in hidden graves – and the authorities who put them there? Will the visiting world media record the truth of those who continue to disappear?

Most important, will the killings be stopped?

That depends on us.
*******************************************************************

Rev. Kevin Annett is a community minister, educator and award-winning film maker who lives and works in Vancouver ’s downtown eastside. He is a member of the revived Community Task Force into Missing Persons. For more information on this Group, and for a copy of their recent report on which this article is based, contact Kevin at: hiddenfromhistory@yahoo.ca or 1-888-265-1007 (messages).
« Last Edit: February 15, 2010, 06:00:35 PM by Overgoat »

Overgoat

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Re: Another biker gang feeding women to pigs?!!
« Reply #50 on: February 15, 2010, 05:56:23 PM »
Kevin Annett, beaten, exposes role of Canada's police and churches in sex crimes and child trafficking
Quote
Posted by Brenda Norrell - January 11, 2010 at 10:24 am

By Brenda Norrell (UPDATE Jan. 14, 2010)

Kevin Annett, human rights activist beaten in Vancouver on Wednesday, released a new article today exposing the role of Canada's police and churches in sex crimes and child trafficking, including the abuse of Native women and children.

Kevin Annett, a community minister, was assaulted by two men in Vancouver's downtown eastside on Wednesday, Jan. Jan. 6, 2010,  just two days after he published an article on church and government complicity in child trafficking on Canada's west coast.

Annett suffered cuts, bruises, and at least one broken rib as a result of the unprovoked beating by two men, one of whom is linked to a downtown church agency.

Today, after being beaten, Annett released a new article on the role of Vancouver police in sex crimes http://www.censored-news.blogspot.com/

Annett begins the article with this quote: "Ten of the last dozen women to be taken to the killing site at Piggy's Palace were accompanied by Mounties or regular cops. You think it was just Willie Picton who was killing them?"

The article continues, "She told me the man's name, a senior RCMP officer, and then said, 'Who doesn't matter. They're all doing it. It's called the ‘hooker game'. The Vancouver cops will pick up girls off the street, drug them with scopolamine and film them as they f--k them, in a cop club downtown on Georgia street . Then sometimes they kill the girls and film that too, and sell it for $25,000 as a snuff film."

Annett has exposed the rape, torture and murder of Native children in Canada's residential schools, through church documents and interviews. In one case, a Native girl was raped and the infant she gave birth to was thrown into the furnace. The abuse of Native children in Canada's residential schools mirrored the abuse in aboriginal boarding schools in Australia and BIA boarding schools in the United States.

Annett is now exposing the role of the church and Canadian government in sex crimes, including the disappearance of Native children in child trafficking and murder of Native women.

Annett also released a statement today about the attack.

"I have waited to comment on the attack because of my need to rest and recover, but concerns from many people have prompted me to go public with what happened to me.

"Last Wednesday, January 6, at around 9 am, I was assisting a woman facing eviction collect her belongings at a rooming house at 566 Powell street in Vancouver's downtown eastside. Two men suddenly burst into the room, and one of them, a tall, strongly built Caucasian man named Dave who apparently is the manager of the building and a former employee of the Union Gospel Mission, began punching and kicking me. I received severe bruises on my neck and back, and a bruised and possibly broken rib because of this attack.

"At no time did he or his accomplice, another strongly built Caucasian man who witnessed the beating, say why they were attacking me. The woman who I was assisting is a former sex trade worker who is now homeless, and who in the past has provided me with information concerning the disappearance of women in the downtown eastside.

"This assault occurred just two days after an article I wrote entitled 'Child Trafficking in Beautiful British Columbia' in The Agora newspaper was widely disseminated in the downtown eastside of Vancouver. The article describes the documented complicity of churches, the police and the government in the trafficking of children in protected pedophile networks in B.C. I therefore believe there is a connection between the publicizing of this story and the attack made on me. This incident represents yet another case of repression aimed at community activists by the 2010 Olympic security forces and police, and other unknown parties," Annett said.

Meanwhile, the oppression in Canada toward those who speak out against the 2010 Olympics was exposed when border guards recently detained and interrogated Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! Although Goodman had not planned to speak out about the Olympics, the harassment at the border backfired and exposed the ongoing oppression of those in the movement: "No Olympics on Stolen Land."

Annett, who for fifteen years has led the campaign to bring to justice the churches and government responsible for genocide in Canada's Indian Residential Schools, made international news in October 2009 when he held the first memorial service for missing native children outside the Vatican in Rome.
Rev. Annett, school survivors and native elders have also led high profile protests and occupations of churches in Vancouver and Toronto since 2005, and on many occasions Annett has been threatened by church officials and police, according to a statement from Hidden From History.

Annett said he will be returning to Rome and Europe in April with residential school survivors to confront Pope Benedict over the fate and buried location of thousands of children who died in Catholic Indian schools in Canada.

William Annett, Kevin Annett's father, wrote to the Prime Minister of Canada to demand justice.

"You are fully aware who Reverend Kevin Annett is. In case you've forgotten, I remind you that more than any other individual, it was his work and sacrifice over 17 years that made inevitable your 'apology' to the victims and survivors of the Indian Residential Schools, which you delivered in the House of Commons in June, 2008.

Annett's father described the attack and said, "I cannot accuse, because we cannot identify the source of this brutality. But I do know -- and you have the means of discovering -- who those responsible are. Certainly, the perpetrators exist somewhere within the following organizations, these sanctimonious Canadian institutions (still shielded by your government) who have ostracized, vilified and persecuted Kevin Annett, trashing his life since 1992, and aided in default by the gutless Canadian media who have known the truth since 1907: The Canadian Government/ the Department of Indian Affairs; The United Church of Canada; The Anglican Church of Canada; The Roman Catholic Church; The RCMP; The Vancouver Police Department; Certain Tribal Councils and Chiefs (establishment Indians.)"

"This will not happen again," William Annett said in his letter to the Prime Minister.

Annett's website is Hidden From History: http://www.hiddenfromhistory.org

UPDATE: Thursday, Jan. 14, 2010

From the Files of the Community Task Force on the Disappeared - Downtown Eastside of Vancouver

Memorandum on Eyewitness Evidence of the Organized Abduction, Torture, Exploitation and Murder of Women and Children on Canada's West Coast
Synopsis

1. An organized system of abduction, exploitation, torture and murder of large numbers of women and children appears to exist on Canada 's west coast, and is operated and protected in part by sectors of the RCMP, the Vancouver Police Department (VPD), the judiciary, and members of the British Columbia government and federal government of Canada , including the Canadian military.

2. This system is highly funded and linked to criminal organizations including the Hell's Angels, the Hong Kong Triad, and unnamed individual "free lance" mobsters from Vancouver and the USA . It is funded in part by a massive drug trade, with which it is intimately connected.

3. This system is decades-old and has been supplied for many years with women and children from aboriginal reserves and residential schools, with the paid collusion of lawyers, clergy and officials of the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada, along with state-funded aboriginal leaders and officials of the Department of Indian Affairs.

4. This system is international in scope, Vancouver being one spoke in a wheel of pedophilia, sex slavery, human organ black markets, "snuff" films and violent child pornography that has outlets throughout the Pacific Rim world, particularly in China and Thailand
.
« Last Edit: February 15, 2010, 06:02:12 PM by Overgoat »

Overgoat

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Re: Another biker gang feeding women to pigs?!!
« Reply #51 on: March 11, 2010, 11:32:46 AM »


http://www.canada.com/topics/entertainment/story.html?id=bb59ed12-99a8-4c2b-9900-5c6de9bf8d58&k=78041

Hells Angels probed for Pickton link
 
Day 6 of the trial of accused serial killer Robert (Willie) Pickton ended Tuesday they way it started, with the defence grilling RCMP Insp. Don Adam.
 
Warning: Potentially offensive material. Reader discretion is advised

NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. — Day 6 of the trial of accused serial killer Robert (Willie) Pickton ended Tuesday they way it started, with the defence grilling RCMP  Insp. Don Adam.

Wednesday’s session will begin at 9:30 a.m., with Adam, who spearheaded the Pickton investigation, answering more questions from Peter Ritchie, Pickton’s lawyer.

Earlier Tuesday, Adam said police investigated links between accused serial killer Robert Pickton and the Hell’s Angels.

During the lengthy cross-examination conducted by Ritchie, Adam said that police examined  two people they believed had Hell’s Angels connections.

The first was Lisa Yeles, who used to be married to "Blacky the biker".

The second was a man called Vickers who was associated with a well-known Downtown Eastside sex worker flophouse.

Adam said police ruled out any involvement between the pair and the alleged murders Pickton is being tried for.

Adams said police initially thought Vickers was a Hells Angels member but later learned that was a mistaken belief.

Adam said police also received confidential information that men were involved in "blood sport" at the Pickton farm that involved killing women.

Ritchie said Tueday that Pickton was fatigued during a marathon interview following his arrest.

When the jury was shown a recording of that interview last week they saw Pickton make a series of stunning comments, including that "I got sloppy with the last one."

"Will you agree with me at all that Mr. Pickton was fatigued during the interview," Ritchie asked Adam. Adam disagreed.

Ritchie asked Adam whether he thought the fact Pickton yawned several times during the interview and often sat with his head in his hand meant he was exhausted.

"His head on his hand I didn’t take as exhaustion," Adam said. "I thought it was a way of sitting comfortably. I would describe it as resting."

Ritchie asked Adam if he noticed that interrogator Sgt. Bill Fordy touched Pickton several times during the interview.

Adam said touching a person is an interview technique.

"Touching of a person can sometimes strengthen bonding, or show compassion," he said.

Ritchie questioned Adam about statements made by police during the 11-hour interview following Pickton’s February 2002 arrest.

Ritchie said police told Pickton that the case against him was so strong it was hopeless for him to deny he allegedly killed the women.

Earlier today, Adam revealed that only one of Robert Pickton’s two female associates agreed to help police following his arrest.

Adam said police arrested Lynn Ellingsen and during the ensuing interview her lawyer suggested an immunity agreement be signed.

He said police eventually resolved the issue and an immunity agreement wasn’t necessary.

Another associate, Dinah Taylor, fled to Ontario after Pickton’s arrest.

Adam said police tracked her down to her home on an aboriginal reserve and met with her and her parents.

"Her parents wanted her to cooperate with police but she never got on board at all. I thought we could get her on board," Adam said.

It was revealed Tuesday that three of Pickton’s associates —Taylor, Ellingsen and Pat Casanova — were arrested in the murder of missing women.

Pat Casanova, who helped with Pickton’s pig-butchering business, was picked up on suspicion of 15 first-degree murders.

Taylor and Ellingsen were also arrested for murder, but police were able to resolve the issue of Ellingsen’s suspected involvement without extensive investigation, Adam said.

Neither Casanova, Taylor nor Ellingsen were charged with any of the murders.

Pickton was arrested for murder on Feb. 22, 2002. Police had picked up Ellingsen 12 days previously and Taylor a day before that. Casanova was arrested Jan. 25, 2003.

During the police interrogation tape played last week for the jury, an RCMP officer told Pickton that Ellingsen saw Pickton skinning a woman who was hanging from a hook.

Also heard on the videotape was a suggestion that Pickton had told his brother Dave Pickton that Dinah Taylor was involved in some of the murders.

And Pickton repeatedly told police during the interrogation that he wanted to speak with Taylor before saying anything more.

Yesterday afternoon, Ritchie asked Adam whether police lied during a marathon post-arrest interview with Pickton.

Adam said that during the interview Pickton was told police had heard he had sex with dead bodies. That was not true.

Ritchie also pointed out that the police did not use satellites in the investigation, despite telling Pickton they had.

During the interview, Pickton makes a series of stunning comments, including that Pickton "got sloppy with the last one."

He also said "you’re making me out to be more of a murderer than I really am," and when Adam asks Pickton what he should tell the victim’s families, Pickton responds "shit happens".

During the interview Pickton was shocked to see one of his employees, Scott Chubb, told police his former boss boasted he could kill a drug addict by injecting them with windshield wiper fluid. Police later found a windshield wiper fluid filled syringe in Pickton’s trailer.

Pickton, 57, who ran a pig-butchering business on his family’s Port Coquitlam farm, is on trial in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster for the first six of the 26 first-degree murders he’s now charged with.

Within six months of the February 2002 interview, police found three of the missing women’s heads and their hands and feet.

Police also recovered DNA from bones on the farm that matched the DNA from a skull found on the side of the road in Mission in 1985.

Pickton accepts those body parts were found on the property but he denies he killed the women.

Pickton is currently being tried for the murder of Andrea Joesbury, Mona Wilson, Sereena Abotsway, Marnie Frey, Georgina Papin and Brenda Wolfle.

Vancouver Province

lostlinganer

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Re: Another biker gang feeding women to pigs?!!
« Reply #52 on: March 11, 2010, 12:54:20 PM »
quite the update overgoat!  I wonder what HA think of Picton's lawyer trying to divert the killings to thier guys :-\  One can't help but think these news releases could ultimately lead to Pickton meeting his demise before the trial/s end.  Don't know how they managed to protect him this long - given the caliber and power of many of the "biggies" we hear frequented the "goings on" at that hellhole. 

Overgoat

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Re: Another biker gang feeding women to pigs?!!
« Reply #53 on: March 11, 2010, 04:11:49 PM »
I should have dated that news report, it is from 2007. Pickton
was the fall guy, but I think it likely that many others were
involved.  Did you know that Pickton's mother was responsible
for the death of a teenaged boy when Dave and Rob were
younger?  She allegedly helped her son conceal a hit and run
accident , where her son had hit a boy on a bicycle and fled
the scene.  He and his mother allegedly returned to the scene
and instead of taking the unconscious boy to the hospital,
took him for dead and rolled him into a water filled ditch so that he would
not be found immediately. He drowned.  No one was ever charged for
the murder or manslaughter or criminal negligence or whatever the charge
should have been.

I think the whole community of Port Coquitlam is satanically controlled,
which is why the bikers are so prominent there, and I think Essondale
Hospital was probably part of a whole network of clandestine activity going on
there.

also check this out, the police matched DNA from a skull found in Mission, B.C.
to bones found on the Pickton pig farm , and it turns out the Hells Angels
have a clubhouse in Mission , B.C.

Quote

http://alt.nntp2http.com/true-crime/2007/01/243e808e128f8f4deebc5484e4805040.html

Despite several high-profile prosecutions of Hells Angels members over
the last two years, the bikers are clearly still in business. Not only
has the new Burnaby clubhouse opened, but another biker gang, the
Outcasts -- which police say is a Hells Angels puppet club -- opened up
shop just off the King George Highway in Surrey last year.

The clubhouse for the East End Vancouver chapter, at 3598 East Georgia,
is also still open despite a police raid in July 2005 and charges
against several members. It is just a kilometre from the new Nomads'
building, which has several surveillance cameras perched on the roof
and three separate entrances in the highly-secured street front.

There also are Hells Angels clubhouses in Coquitlam, Langley, Haney and
Mission.

Overgoat

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Re: Another biker gang feeding women to pigs?!!
« Reply #54 on: March 11, 2010, 04:46:36 PM »
March 23, 2006

Woodlands justice in doubt
By Roxanne Gregory

Bill MacArthur was seven in 1963 when his mother left him for the first time at Woodlands School. His mother said it was a summer school-but she didn't tell him he couldn't go home. Bill was hyperactive, but he was also highly intelligent, and he soon learned the lessons of survival at Woodlands.

"In the morning they would line us up for the washroom. I remember seeing people tied down to toilets and staff pouring hot water over their genitals to make them go. I was afraid all the time," he told the Georgia Straight in a recent interview.

"There was a nurse…She found a staff member in bed with a patient and she reported him. They fired her," he said.

MacArthur said he was sexually assaulted by staff, but what he feared most was being forcibly submerged in tubs filled with ice water until he nearly drowned. Another boy he knew was repeatedly confined inside a canvas sack and held underwater. "This was the way they controlled your behaviour," he explained matter-of-factly.

Although the recent and belated coroner's inquest into the tragic death of 19-month-old Sherry Charlie has renewed calls in B.C. for greater social-services oversight and accountability, abuse of children while in government care has a long history here-beginning decades before little Sherry's death.

And a recent court decision might deny former child victims of institutional abuse the justice they've sought for decades.

In February 2000, a chorus of complaints from former Woodlands School residents found a short-lived voice in the local press. In response, B.C.'s Liberals commissioned then-former ombudsman Dulcie McCallum to write an administrative review of the government-run facility that provided residential care for hundreds of children between 1950 and 1996.

McCallum's review, completed in August 2001 and released by the province in July 2002, found widespread sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of children at Woodlands, as well as unexpected and uninvestigated deaths. The physical mistreatment included "hitting, kicking, smacking, slapping, striking, restraining, isolating…very cold showers, very hot baths resulting in burns, verbal abuse, extended isolation, wearing shackles, and a belt leash with documented evidence of injuries including bruising, scratches, broken limbs, black eyes and swollen face".

Woodlands survivor Gary Hill told the Straight of a nightmarish practice: "Lots of kids had all their teeth pulled so they couldn't bite staff.…After I left Woodlands, when my dentist was working on me, he said my mouth looked like they used a shovel."

McCallum urged the government to apologize and compensate victims-and not by revictimizing them through a judicial process. Without success, she urged a second-stage investigation of the systemic abuse. No Woodlands staff member has ever been charged with abuse or assault.

Almost 3,000 people who died in government care and were unclaimed were buried at Woodlands between 1926 and 1957. In 1977, a Social Credit cabinet order-in-council resulted in the people's headstones-about 1,800 of them-being pulled up and the area grassed over and redesignated as a park. McCallum discovered that some of the headstones were used to construct a staff barbecue patio and stairs. After 1958, unclaimed bodies were sent to UBC as cadavers.

Although the government apologized in 2002 and pledged a $2-million fund for counselling, the money isn't just for the estimated 1,500 survivors of Woodlands. It's also for residents from three other facilities-Essondale, Valleyview, and Tranquille-and, to date, not a dime has been released to any survivors.

Survivors attempted to launch a class-action lawsuit against the provincial government in 2002, but the Liberals stalled, arguing that the suit should be brought by the office of the Public Guardian and Trustee and not by an independent North Vancouver law firm, Poyner Baxter.

In 2004, a B.C. court decided otherwise, and in March 2005 the class-action lawsuit was certified before Judge Nancy Morrison by attorneys from Poyner Baxter.

In a March 2005 news release, attorney Jim Poyner said: "We hope that government will now finally recognize that serious damage has been done to a very large number of people, and work to expeditiously correct decades of evasion." Despite the class-action certification, a year later no court dates are pending.

ON WOODLANDS' bucolic 26-hectare grounds at McBride Boulevard and Columbia Street in New Westminster, almost 1,600 children lived in lock-down conditions at any one time inside outdated buildings that formerly housed B.C.'s "lunatics".

Established on the New Westminster cricket pitch in 1878, the Public Hospital for the Insane was a castlelike fortress overlooking the B.C. Penitentiary and the Fraser River. In 1950, the B.C. government, which ran the facility, decided to separate disabled children from adult lunatics (who were sent to Essondale), and the institution was renamed the Woodlands School. Woodlands became home to the province's unwanted kids.

Babies abandoned at birth in hospital, the hyperactive, the epileptic, the intellectually challenged, the disabled, wards of the court, and children displaced by the closure of Vancouver's orphanage all lived within its walls and cottages.

But Woodlands wasn't a school you could graduate from. In fact, in 1973 there were only 12 teachers there for about 1,600 residents. Once children were committed to Woodlands, they often lived there for the rest of their lives-that is, until the province closed the facility in 1996.

Despite McCallum's report and horrifying statements by former residents in news reports, on November 24, 2005, Children and Family Development Minister Stan Hagen told the legislature-in response to a query from Opposition critic Adrian Dix-that the government "disagrees" that there was "systemic abuse" at Woodlands.

Hagen also neglected to mention that Woodlands children were used in genetic research and drug experiments for more than 30 years. Between 1954 and 1978, almost three dozen research papers, including drug studies, were published by the then-medical director of Woodlands, Dr. Bluma Tischler. Research continued until 1986.

In 1978, Premier Bill Bennett praised Tischler's work at Woodlands when he announced a fellowship in her name. "Dr. Tischler has conducted outstanding research…during the past 24 years. Her more than 35 scientific publications have made such an impact that Dr. Tischler has increased the knowledge of scientists throughout the world," he said in the legislature.

(One published paper was about extracting urine samples from children by inserting a needle through the abdomen above the pubic bone and aspirating the fluid with a syringe-a method of obtaining a sterile sample that is commonly used today in uncooperative cats and dogs.)

Not everyone agreed with Bennett's adulation, but those who were critical of the way children were cared for at Woodlands met with dismissal or worse.

In the fall of 1972, Marie White had been working at Woodlands for almost 10 years. She was head nurse of the isolation ward, and she was worried. According to a letter from her attorney, Brian Stanton, to Woodlands superintendent Pauline Hughes-and copied to Opposition health critic Bob McClelland, who read it in the legislature-her complaints about alleged sexual abuse of children by a janitor fell on deaf ears. Her concerns that kids were also being overmedicated and that there wasn't enough control over access to drugs elicited no response from the administration.

When she couldn't get the administration to act, she threatened to go to the media-a threat that sealed her fate in a scenario mimicking a script from TV's The Prisoner.

According to Stanton, while working one day in November 1972, she was told by the director of nursing that she was unwell and required immediate treatment. Neither the nature of her alleged sickness nor the treatment required was revealed by her supervisor. She was escorted to Dr. Hughes's office. (Besides being superintendent of Woodlands, 10 years earlier Hughes had been involved in genetic-research experiments there.)

Once inside Hughes's office, according to Stanton (who is now dead), White was confronted by a Dr. McKenzie, whose first name is not mentioned in the letter. McKenzie told her she was being committed to a private facility for the insane for her own good.

Stanton wrote that when White tried to resign on the spot, McKenzie called for an orderly and a matron. They took her from the office and bundled her into a waiting car. Despite having no committal papers, she was admitted and sedated at the Hollywood Sanitarium in New Westminster, from where they planned to send her to Riverview for 30 days. However, according to a May 7, 1973, article in the New Westminster Columbian newspaper, her daughter intervened and secured her release with the help of Stanton's partner, Norman Einarsson.

As Stanton wrote to Hughes: "In short, our client was seized, abducted, imprisoned, drugged, and reported as insane for the purpose of protecting certain improper procedures at the Woodlands School."

As the Columbian noted on December 29, 1972, B.C.'s NDP health minister, Dennis Cocke, under pressure from the Opposition, belatedly asked for an investigation.

The Columbian reported in January 1973 that Cocke had ordered the month previous that White be reinstated without loss of wages, and the attorney general, Alexander Barrett MacDonald, announced his office would also conduct an investigation, but in January White had still heard nothing about her reinstatement and Hughes refused comment when the Columbian came calling.

At the time, White told the newspaper: "I am quite willing to go back to Woodlands to work. But I haven't heard from Woodlands at all. When I receive instructions to return to work in writing, I will go back. But they haven't written to me yet, nor have they sent me any money."

Three months later, White was still not working. By May 1973, though, Woodlands gave her five months' salary, a lump sum to pay her lawyers, and another job in an undisclosed government institution. The Georgia Straight was unable to ascertain her present-day whereabouts.

COCKE'S INVESTIGATION wasn't the first review of abuse at Woodlands. Ten years earlier, there had been the so-called Amos Gill inquiry into abuse and the misappropriation of funds at the facility.

After the March 2005 class-action lawsuit became certified, hope was beginning to dawn for Woodlands survivors, but in October of last year many of them learned they may never be compensated for the abuse they suffered-even if the class action is successful.

A little-known court decision in October 2005-the Arishenkoff ruling-may have decided the fates of Woodlands survivors who were abused before 1974. In 1974, the government passed the Crown Proceedings Act, which allowed the Crown to be held liable for the actions of its employees.

The Arishenkoff case arose out of abuse at residential schools where Doukhobor children were interned by the B.C. government in the '50s and '60s. But the Arishenkoff ruling meant that liability for injury or abuse can't be laid at the government's door retroactively-if the alleged wrong was done before the Crown Proceedings Act became law.

The Arishenkoff case wasn't even before the courts when lawyer Jim Poyner first tried bringing the Woodlands class-action suit.

On October 31 last year, a frustrated Poyner told Woodlands survivors at one of their regular meetings: "If we hadn't had to fight to represent this group for the last three years, we might have already reached a settlement. This is really bad…Only a political decision can make this right."

Len Zimmer, who lived 18 years at Woodlands, was devastated by the news of the Arishenkoff ruling. "I thought I was going to have a heart attack," he told the Straight. "It's just so unfair." Zimmer was born in Essondale (now Riverview)-B.C.'s psychiatric hospital where, post-Second World War, up to 4,000 B.C. residents languished in the care of only seven doctors at any one time.

Zimmer spent the first years of his life at Essondale, until he was moved to Woodlands in 1954 at age seven. Conditions inside Woodlands weren't better; they were worse. Zimmer said he was repeatedly sexually abused and tortured by staff until he finally won his freedom by escaping in 1972. For years, Zimmer said, he tried to tell his story, but the police didn't believe him and no one else listened.

Sexual abuse of children was widespread within the institution, members of the Woodlands Survivors group told the Straight. McCallum's review found sexual "assault, intercourse and in the result, injuries and in a few cases pregnancy".

Bill MacArthur, the boy who was dropped off at "summer school", is angry at the way Woodlands survivors have been treated by government. "I want everyone to remember what happened at Woodlands so that it never happens to anybody again…A whole group of people will be denied justice with this [Arishenkoff] ruling," he said.

Luann Bradshaw was 12 in 1961 when her parents' divorce divided her family. Her mother, Amy Reiter, told the Straight that she put Luann in B.C. government care at Woodlands for a weekend to get some doctor-ordered rest for herself. When she tried to bring her daughter home, staff refused to release her. She said she was assured Luann would get good care at the facility. But that didn't happen.

Bradshaw is an independent and outspoken critic of Woodlands. "I was determined not to let myself become permanently damaged. I'm a long-time survivor because of that," she told the Straight. "I've been in the [survivors'] community for 22 years. The physical, social, mental, and psychological torture at Woodlands was ongoing. They would make you go hungry. They took your home visits away, even your phone calls…They made you kneel for hours at a time on a hard wooden floor until you could hardly move…

"There was an all-male ward where everyone getting out of the bathtub got badly whipped. They became so scarred they could hardly stand.

"And there was slavery. I'd make 30 to 50 beds a day, every day, and I folded thousands of diapers each month for $12. Woodlands was a deadly prison. No one deserves to go through what we had to go through."

Will there be justice for the forgotten children of Woodlands?

 

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SHARIN'

A documentary casefile about the murder of nine year old Sharin' Morningstar Keenan on January 23, 1983, Toronto. Radio, Television, and Online versions of this story are all unique in their own way and together form the whole program. click here