Canadian Bacon
In episode one, Holly and Gemma cover Robert ‘Willie’ Pickton and Gilbert Paul Jordan….who were both absolute pricks. We talk pig farms, personal connections, barbers and how an overachieving alcoholic used his one God given skill to murder people. Find out which murderer we would pick to knock us off out of the two terrible choices.
Recording, post-production and editing done with so much thanks that he is basically guaranteed a kidney on demand, by Craig. We think he uses a combination of Skittles, cat hair and dark magic to make it all happen.
WARNING – Explicit language, content and themes (plus whatever else will cover us legally)
Recorded in a secret location somewhere in Scotland.
[Theme music ‘Kill Me Again’ by Blubend & Alex Thomas]
Holly: Hi, I’m Holly.
Gemma: Hi, I’m Gemma.
Holly: And this is Which Murderer? The podcast where we talk about which murderer we’d rather have kill us.
Gemma: Yep, and we’ve picked some good ones. This episode is called ‘Canadian Bacon’ and that’s because we’ve based these on murders that have happened in Canada.
Holly: Because I’m Canadian.
Gemma: I’m not.
Holly: All right
Gemma: If you didn’t realize that.
Holly: Yeah, definitely Scottish. Right, so, I’m gonna go.
Gemma: Yep, you go.
Holly: And my murderer is Robert Pickton as we said in the teaser. Now, I said he was the most prolific serial killer in Canadian history. I’m pretty sure that’s true, but not entirely 100 percent positive.
Gemma: From what we’ve…we’ve Googled a bit and we can’t find anything to say that he wasn’t.
Holly: Yeah, so
Gemma: We think you’re correct in that.
Holly: I’m making that a science fact. I’m putting it out there and, if I’m wrong, I don’t really care. So. I do have a bit of a personal connection with him. I can’t really say names, but one of the girls I went to high school with who was one of my best friends in the world, her dad worked on Willie Pickton’s farm.
Gemma: That’s mental.
Holly: I know. So when all this shit hit the fan and it was 2001 that everybody kind of started talking about the fact that he’s been arrested and he’s kind of killed a bunch of people, we didn’t know much because there was a gag order on it for a bunch of years. But my friend said to me, ‘oh, dad worked on that farm.’ And I was like ‘oh, did he eat people?’
Gemma: [laugh]
Holly: And she’s like ‘um, I don’t think so’ but I’ve since spoken to her again, reconnected, and I asked her and she said no. He got the freaky vibes off Willie and got the shit out of dodge.
Gemma: Well, he’s smart.
Holly: Yeah. I mean, god, can you imagine?
Gemma: Yeah.
Holly: Like, cuz, honestly, he wouldn’t have been killed, he just would have been part of it if he wasn’t creeped out.
Gemma: Exactly, yeah.
Holly: So my friend’s dad would have been a murderer, which also would have been kind of cool.
Gemma: Or at least, you know, assisting one.
Holly: Yeah, or eating people on a regular basis.
Gemma: You’re giving away spoilers there though.
Holly: I know, I know! All right, so, Willie Pickton, he was born in 1949. His mum was considerably younger than his dad. His dad was 53 when he was born.
Gemma: Ooh.
Holly: They had a farm in Port Coquitlam in British Columbia which is kind of like a suburb of Vancouver, I guess you could say. I used to live about an hour from Vancouver so drove through Port Coquitlam quite a bit. He had a fairly normal childhood, as much as you can on a place where they kill things every day.
Gemma: Well, yeah, living on a farm can’t be like what everybody else is experiencing. Lots of death around you. But also life as well. I’m sure animals were born, too.
Holly: Baby pigs, that would have been cute. So he was 13 when some, I think he was, what was he? Croatian worker on the farm taught him how to slaughter things
Gemma: Good age.
Holly: Yeah, so, you know, when you’re just experiencing your first sexual tingles, let’s teach you how to kill shit.
Gemma: Then it just gets all mixed up.
Holly: I think it did a little bit for Willie. He was okay. His sister went to private school and he worked on the farm, and I kind of think that might have been the first time he kinda sort of went ‘mm, girls? That’s not fair.’ The second sort of trigger…the only reason I’m going into this is cuz I think you’re quite fascinated by what turns people?
Gemma: Oh, yeah, completely. It’s so, so interesting.
Holly: And that’s what gets it for me. I want to know how they went from…
Gemma: So bad.
Holly: Yeah, how’d they get so fucked up. I think the second, probably the biggest trigger, is little Willie Pickton, he was 12 years old or 13, 12/13, and he saved up his money, and he went to auction and he bought himself a baby cow.
Gemma: Awww!
Holly: Awww, baby cow with Willie. He loved this cow in a platonic way.
Gemma: [laugh] You have to specify that.
Holly: But he did, he slept with the cow but in a platonic way, like he went and nurtured this thing, and then he came home from school one day and he’s like ‘hey, where’s my cow?’ and his parents are like ‘oh, have you checked the barn?’ and he’s like ‘no, my cow wouldn’t go down there, that’s where they kill things.’ So he searched the entire farm. When he got down to the barn, he saw his baby cow hanging there having been slaughtered by his father. So, Willie, obviously was scarred.
Gemma: Well, yeah! It was the only thing he loved, and it was killed by his dad.
Holly: I know. So I think that was the trigger. And then he also had a pen pal girl and he got engaged but they never had sex. He’s just, he’s broken in every way a man can be broken.
Gemma: Yeah.
Holly: So let’s get into 1995ish, Willy loses his shit, and he starts going to the east side of Vancouver, which is where sex workers and drug addicts sort of hung out, and starts picking prostitutes, taking them back to his pig farm, and they’re never seen again.
Gemma: Mhmm, right.
Holly: So, obviously in that community, they knew something wasn’t quite right, but they, it’s quite transient and hard for the police to track.
Gemma: That’s what makes them so vulnerable.
Holly: Exactly. So, all these sex workers went missing for years. One of them, in 1997, was attacked by him and got away after stabbing him. They stabbed each other, it was like a stab-a-thon.
Gemma: [unintelligible 00:06:31]
Holly: I know, fucking, she is a superhero. But, because she was an addict, they thought she wouldn’t be a credible witness so he got the fuck away with it. So fast forward and, I can’t remember what the hell tipped them off. I think it was one of the sex workers was like ‘um, you might want to check this out’ and the cop was like, there was a cop in Vancouver who put it all together. And he’s like ‘something’s not right’.
Gemma: Right, because, as far as I’m aware, just to interject here, the pig farm was quite a social gathering as far as I’m aware, it had this sort of hot bed, quite a lot of people went for parties.
Holly: They had a party hut at a pig farm which just sort of sums up the outskirts of Vancouver. I don’t even know who the fuck would go to a pig farm party, but they did.
Gemma: Pig farm party.
Holly: So they did this investigation and they started finding DNA. And essentially he had an interview with the police. I read through the entire interview and it’s fascinating because, towards the end, he does finally, I think it’s page 320 of 360, he does confess.
Gemma: Wow, that’s a lot of reading.
Holly: But he doesn’t confess to them all. But it doesn’t really matter because he’s fucked either way. They found blood, they found DNA, they cut open the piggies and found DNA in the piggies.
Gemma: So that’s how he was getting rid of the bodies.
Holly: He was getting rid of bodies. But, as it turns out, he was killing them with a gun and strangling them.
Gemma: After the gun.
Holly: No, it was a combination. I think he strangled in the beginning.
Gemma: Right, okay, strangling wouldn’t really work that well after a gunshot.
Holly: No, no, he would strangle them before, I think he killed some by strangling? And some by gunshot. He used a sex toy as a silencer which, I’m not sure what he did with that before, but I don’t think it was happy.
Gemma: That’s disgusting.
Holly: Yeah, it’s pretty gross. And there’s…they found night vision goggles, so they think that he used to chase these women on the farm with his night vision goggles and hunt them and then catch them almost like a game, and then he would–
Gemma: He is so sick.
Holly: He’s so sick. And he would inject them with antifreeze if they were heroin addicts because they couldn’t, well, I guess they could tell if you could find the body, but I don’t know why he did that, honestly. It was probably just to torture them.
Gemma: It does sound like that, yeah.
Holly: So, he has only been charged with 26 murders, but he confessed to an undercover cop in prison that he was one off of 50. He had gotten sloppy, as he put it, and he was responsible for 49 of these women’s deaths.
Gemma: 49.
Holly: 49 women.
Gemma: That’s a lot of women.
Holly: So we’ve only sort of found out about this since 2010 because there was a publication ban in Canada for 8 years. Canada takes their criminal justice pretty fucking seriously and they wanted to make sure he got fair trial so he would get the maximum time, which, in Canada, is 25 years.
Gemma: So he only got 25 years?
Holly: That’s the max you can get in Canada. welcome to Communist Canada.
Gemma: Wow.
Holly: So, yeah, he is serving 25 years for the murder of 49 women but I think he’s a dangerous offender.
Gemma: Okay, so what does that mean?
Holly: I think that means that he, when he’s up for parole, will not just automatically be released. He’ll be assessed on a yearly basis.
Gemma: Ok, because that comes into mine as well, they talked about dangerous offender, I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but okay.
Holly: I might have made that entire thing up that I just said, I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure that’s what it means. So, yeah, that’s my guy, and we’ll talk about the method after yours.
Gemma: Ok, that sounds…oh, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to beat him anyway. My guy is Gilbert Paul Jordan. Now, he was born Gilbert Paul Elsie in 1931. He was just a horrible person altogether. He…there wasn’t really that much information on his early life; the earliest I could get was when his criminal record started, so, he had a really long criminal record, including convictions for theft, assault, heroin possession. He was also a chronic alcoholic. He was arrested in 1961 for kidnapping a 5-year-old Aboriginal or First Nations girl. As the story goes on, we’ll sort of see how he somehow has a little bit of a fixation on first nation women.
Holly: Was he First Nations?
Gemma: No, no he wasn’t First Nations. However, he was never convicted of the kidnapping, even though the little girl was found miles away from her home, he was never convicted. In 1963, he was charged with rape after luring two women to his car. However, he was only convicted for theft and so was allowed to be set free after a very short time in prison.
Holly: What did he steal?
Gemma: Who knows.
Holly: Oh, so it wasn’t the car?
Gemma: Oh, no, it was his car that he lured the girls to.
Holly: All right.
Gemma: And raped them both and was never convicted of…maybe he stole some kind of trophy from them, but he was only convicted of the theft, not of the rape.
Holly: I take it he was single
Gemma: Yes, very much single.
Holly: Sounds like a catch!
Gemma: To get down to his main horrific crimes, he killed 8-10 women who were mostly all sex workers. As I said, he targeted native Canadian women, and his method of killing was using alcohol.
Holly: What?!
Gemma: Yeah, quite strange. So what he would do, he would stalk Vancouver’s downtown east side. So sounds like it’s going to be very similar to where you were.
Holly: Yeah, it’s not a happy place to be.
Gemma: No. And he would pay the women for company and then he would ask for them to drink with him. Now, these sex workers, they were sort of known to be alcoholics anyway, and he was a notorious alcoholic: he would drink about 1.5 liters of vodka a day. I mean, can you imagine? That makes me feel sick just thinking about that.
Holly: God, okay. I can image he has to smell fucking terrible.
Gemma: Yeah, did not smell very nice. Anyway, he would encourage these women to drink until they were unconscious and, once they were unconscious, he would pour more alcohol down their throats until they essentially died of alcohol poisoning. A lot of these women, because of their trade, their job as sex workers, because they were also known alcoholics, once they were found (quite a few of them were found in hotel rooms dying of essentially what was alcohol poisoning) it was thought that it was themselves that had drank themselves to death rather than this man who’s actually pouring alcohol down their throats to kill them.
Holly: Oh my god! That’s almost a little bit genius for an alcoholic to figure out he can kill people by being alcoholic.
Gemma: Isn’t it? Well, yeah, I mean, it’s hard to know with this man if he was intending to kill them. I think he was. I think deep down he was really intending to kill them and killing them in this way because, who in their right mind is going to pour alcohol down a person who is unconscious if they didn’t want to kill them. And continually do it.
Holly: I was going to say, cuz he, like, the first one or two you might be like ‘oops!’ but I think by, how many did he kill?
Gemma: Ten.
Holly: Maybe by four–
Gemma: He was convicted of eight but thought to have killed up to ten women. His first victim, Ivy Rose, was known as Doreen. She was found in a Vancouver hotel room with a blood alcohol level of 0.51. Now, death by alcohol poisoning usually occurs around about 0.4.
Holly: Oh, ok.
Gemma: Which is, I had to look this up because I didn’t actually know what the numbers meant, but that essentially means, 0.4 means 0.4 grams of alcohol for every 100 milliliters of blood in the body. And it said here, just as a sort of comparison, Murderpedia said that, if a person ‘chugged 12 beers would result in a blood alcohol level of 0.3’.
Holly: Twelve beers doesn’t seem like a lot.
Gemma: But the thing is about alcohol poisoning is that you need to drink a lot and you need to do it in a really short space of time because the body sort of processes the alcohol but if you drink a lot in a really short space of time, that’s when it becomes dangerous and that’s when people die of alcohol poisoning. So, Doreen’s death was ruled accidental until Jordan confessed 22 years later.
Holly: All right.
Gemma: So, her death was always thought as accidental. And then a few days after her death is when Gilbert actually changed his name from Gilbert Paul Elsie to Gilbert Paul Jordan. So many names, they all seem like first names to me so it’s really confusing. After her death, after her murder, he just continued to sort of break the law, he continued kidnapping people, he kidnapped a woman from a mental institution.
Holly: [laugh] That seems like a bad idea for both people.
Gemma: Well, yeah, and then he was charged with sexual intercourse with a, and this was the legal term, sexual intercourse with a feeble-minded person.
Holly: Go Canada [laugh]
Gemma: I mean, it just seems that could be worded better!
Holly: Yeah!
Gemma: And he served 26 months in prison for that. And so here’s when the area names, the street names come into play, so see if you know any of these, Holly. Jordan’s hunting ground was an area called Hastings between Columbia and Main Street.
Holly: Yes.
Gemma: There was a lot of bars in this area that seemed to sort of cater for chronic, hardcore drinkers, and had higher levels of drug use and then between the years 1980-1987, he killed at least a further 7 women, luring three of them to his barber shop. Now that’s where we get the name–
Holly: He had a job!
Gemma: He was a barber, yeah, he owned a barber shop.
Holly: Jesus! Okay.
Gemma: And that’s where we get his nickname, The Boozing Barber. These three women were found dead in his shop, in his barber shop, dying of alcohol poisoning, and the police never investigated. They just thought ‘oh yeah, that’s fairly normal for a person to have 3 people die in his barber shop of alcohol poisoning. Let’s not investigate.’
Holly: Listen, if it was on Hastings Street, it probably would be fucking normal.
Gemma: Sounds like a fun place to be. But then, he sort of changed his MO for one woman. He murdered a white woman called Vanessa Buckner. She was found in a hotel room with a blood alcohol level of more than 11 times the legal limit, and the police were pressured into action by her family and they traced an anonymous call to Jordan who had called in the fact that Vanessa was dead in this hotel room. And so they sort of put a surveillance on him.
Holly: So white woman, crime gets solved.
Gemma: White women and then that’s when they start sort of jumping into action, the police. A month later, Edna Shade was found dead in another hotel room, and Jordan’s fingerprints were found on the vodka bottle and several glasses around the room. Now, even though he was under surveillance, he was caught in the act of pouring vodka down unconscious women’s throats as they laid unconscious and was just let go.
Holly: Oh, ok.
Gemma: Quite a few times, the police would interrupt his drinking binges, and he was heard to be egging them on, telling them to drink more, telling them to drink more and, yeah, he was just let go until, finally, he was arrested and charged with seven counts of murder. However, he was only ever convicted of the murder of Vanessa Buckner.
Holly: Ok.
Gemma: He was linked to the deaths of ten women altogether, and he received 15 years for manslaughter, however the sentence got reduced to nine years and he served six.
Holly: What? Fuck off.
Gemma: So, the appeals judge, when he reduced his sentence, basically was blaming the victims for getting themselves into this situation. This is a quote he said: “Although the appellant has left a trail of seven victims, the last was the first occasion when persons in authority, in a forceful and realistic manner, brought to the appellant’s attention the fact that supplying substantial quantities of liquor to women who were prepared to drink with him were a contributing cause of their deaths, for which he might be held criminally responsible.” So basically he’s saying, because these women agreed to drink with him that they are also responsible for their own deaths, even though this man was pouring alcohol down their unconscious throats.
Holly: What year was he convicted?
Gemma: Well, he was released in 1994, so he only served–
Holly: Oh, so this was the eighties!
Gemma: Yes, he only served six years, so it must have been the late eighties, 1988 he was convicted. So he was released in 1994 and placed on parole. He was charged again in 2000 for sexual assault and also for administering a noxious substance, alcohol; basically he was attempting to try and continue with his murders until he was arrested for sexual assault. He has no remorse, no guilt, and no empathy for his victims, stating to a journalist in 2000: ‘They were all on their last legs, I mean, we’re all dying sooner or later.’ And he, thankfully, eventually died in 2006 at the age of 74, much older than any of his other victims, sadly.
Holly: He was a big prick.
Gemma: He was a massive prick, yeah. Horrible, horrible person.
Holly: So, which murderer would you rather have kill you?
Gemma: If I’m honest?
Holly: Yeah?
Gemma: Probably my guy.
Holly: I think I’m gonna go with your guy, too. Simply for the fact I don’t want to be chopped up and fed to pigs and then fed to people in sausages.
Gemma: Well, no, I don’t think anybody would really want that, but that is definitely one of the worst ways to have your body used after death.
Holly: Yeah, and I kinda, you know, like, if I’m going to go out, I want to go out in style, I want to have, like, a big funeral, I want to have, like, fluffy pink things all over my coffin, people have to look at my face and feel bad about the fact I’m dead.
Gemma: Right, ok.
Holly: But there was nothing found at the farm other than the DNA and fragments and, like, personal property, there was no people. So, I’m gonna say, getting really shitfaced drunk and passing out?
Gemma: Passing out, not really knowing what’s happening.
Holly: Yeah.
Gemma: Seems to be a better way to go than being strangled.
Holly: I think I’d choose Jordan.
Gemma: Yeah, no I would definitely, it’s a kinder way to go than being strangled and shot and cut up and fed to pigs and fed to people.
Holly: Yeah, I think the underlying theme here is women in vulnerable positions not being taken seriously by police.
Gemma: well, yeah, exactly, I mean to let go for so long in both Robert Pickton’s situation and Jordan’s as well, yeah, they just weren’t listened to at all. I’ve got a little thing here, there was, for Vanessa Buckner, she was left to die with black fluid oozing out of her mouth and nose which most likely would have been her own vomit. So, I mean, if you were drunk enough to not realize you were vomiting, then you would probably choke on your own vomit without realizing.
Holly: So kind of asphyxiation and alcohol poisoning, although I would imagine if she was to wake up, she probably wouldn’t do well either.
Gemma: Well, no, because the alcohol would stop all the sort of oxygen going to your brain and it doesn’t take very long for you to become disabled because of that. And also because it was black vomit, it was thought that–
Holly: Yeah, what is that? Explain that to me.
Gemma: That usually comes from gastric bleeding, so if you have a stomach ulcer or there’s sort of a stomach injury and your stomach is bleeding, that’s usually why you would get–
Holly: That’s the one thing that freaks me the fuck out is internal bleeding. I actually feel sick, okay.
Gemma: So that can usually come from sort of chronic drinking or just bad lifestyle choices, stress can result in stomach ulcers and that’s usually why you could get black vomit.
Holly: So it’s old blood?
Gemma: Yeah, it’s old blood.
Holly: That’s so disgusting, oh god.
Gemma: It’s kind of thought to be, I saw this quite a few times, coffee grounds it looks like? Yeah, so when you vomit, it looks like coffee grounds, that’s sort of typical for gastric bleeding.
Holly: That is so disgusting. Obviously neither one of these ways is perfect to go, but, yeah, I think, between strangulation and not being able to breathe, which just must be horrible, or being shot? Hopefully you get shot in the head, I mean, that’s the one thing you could hope for in life if you’re stuck on a pig farm about to be murdered is that you get shot in the head. But yeah, no I’m definitely gonna go with alcohol in this one.
Gemma: I mean, it’s not just the actual finish, it’s the terror these women must have felt beforehand. The girls in this, they thought they were just having a drink with some old alcoholic, you know? They just thought, you know, that was how they were going to go, and they were just drinking until they passed out, not knowing that would be the last time they would ever be alive. Whereas your girls were probably terrified.
Holly: Yeah, well, he would handcuff them and then not give them the key, and then torture and do whatever he wanted to them, and then murder them.
Gemma: So that came from him admitting that?
Holly: It was the women who got away. And there was actually one woman who was a “friend” who said that, one time, she went out to the shed and saw a body that had been skinned there, hanging up.
Gemma: Oh my goodness.
Holly: And you think at that point ‘why are we friends?’ but she continued being friends with him, I don’t fucking know why. But, yeah, it was the one that got away and, I think, he had confessed to friends what he’d been doing. And they found the handcuffs as well. As well with the other paraphernalia. Disgusting!
Gemma: Yeah. So yeah, I think we both agree we would rather drink to death than be strangled and cut up and fed to pigs. We agree on this one
Holly: I think so. Let’s agree on this one.
Gemma: I was thinking maybe we could put something on Instagram, see what other people think, one of those wee poll things? You’re more the Instagram person.
Holly: I was legitimately about to hand that over to you and say that I don’t understand how those work.
[both laugh]
Gemma: Ok, we’re going to have to figure that out together.
Holly: We’ll rock paper scissors that one. But, I’m going to put up some pictures of Willie if you want to put up some pictures of Gilbert.
Gemma: Will do, will do.
Holly: Yeah, Willie looks like an actual pig farm murderer. He’s got the bald mullet. And can I just say, men of the world? If you go bald? Don’t grow it in the back. It doesn’t make up for the bald.
Gemma: It does not. Combovers and bald mullets are a big no.
Holly: No, shave it off. Dear god, all women everywhere are telling you to shave it off.
Gemma: Just rock the baldness.
Holly: Yeah.
Gemma: Well, that was our first episode!
Holly: Yeah, first episode down! Thanks for listening, if you made it this far.
Gemma: Yes, thank you.
Holly: And if you didn’t, who cares, cuz you’re not here anymore so you can’t hear us. Bye!
Gemma: Bye!
Holly: So we will be working on the next episode and we’ll get that to you soon…ish. No commitment.
Gemma: We don’t like commitment here.
Holly: No commitments.
Gemma: Okay, bye!
Holly: Bye!
Gemma: We’re Which Murderer. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram @whichmurderer. You can find us on Facebook: facebook.com/whichmrdr. And you can email us whichmurder@gmail.com.
Holly: Theme music is Kill Me Again by BluBend. Artwork was designed by Wild Creations found on fiverr.com.
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