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conversation Sergeant Fordy suggested that throwing corpses in the ocean was the best way to get rid of the evidence.
    “I did better than that,” said Pickton. “Rendering plant.”
    He did this so effectively that he created a massive problem for the forensic teams.
    It had baffled the police, he bragged.
    “They never seen anything like this before,” he said, boasting he was “bigger than the Green River”.
    He was referring to the so-called Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, who in 2003 had pleaded guilty to the murder of forty-nine prostitutes in Washington State – though he claimed to have killed many more – disposing of their bodies in wooded areas around King County and in the Green River itself.
    Pickton was well aware that he was being videotaped. At one point, he waved at the camera in his cell and said: “Hello!” Nevertheless, in court, he pleaded not guilty on all counts.
    In fact, Pickton may well have killed more than the forty-nine he claimed. He was anything but systematic and well organized. He rarely knew the names of his victims, picking them from the hookers and drug addicts who inhabited Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside area known as the “Low Track”. During Pickton’s rampage, at least sixty-five women disappeared from that area alone.
    Women had begun to go missing from the Low Track in 1983. By 1997, the police began to fear that more than two dozen had been murdered, though no bodies ever turned up. However, they started to compile a list that would soon include the names of a number of women Pickton was later charged with murdering.
    The police already had the first clue to the mystery. In March 1995, a roadside vendor found the right half of a woman’s skull in a marshy area outside Mission, British Columbia, just off Highway 7 on a small hill overlooking a creek that runs into the Stave River. The area was searched by a police dog and divers trawled the creek, but nothing more was found. A pathologist, an entomologist and a coroner all examined the skull. None of them could give a reasonable explanation of how the skull got there or who the victim was. In the files she simply became Jane Doe.
    Career cop Tim Sleigh was part of the investigation team. Although he was transferred to another detachment in 1996, he remained absorbed by the Jane Doe case. He even bought a house nearby and, from August 1997 to March 2000, walked the area hoping to find a clue that would tell him who she was. She could have been any one of the growing number of women who had gone missing from Downtown Eastside.
    By September 1998, an aboriginal group complained that a number of First Nation women had gone missing from the Low Track area and had probably been murdered. They submitted a list. Detective Dave Dickson took an interest and drew up a list of his own. Soon, he had enough names to persuade his superiors to set up a cold-case taskforce. They began with forty cases from all parts of Vancouver dating back to 1971. But in an effort to discover a pattern, they narrowed the roster down to sixteen prostitutes from Low Track who had disappeared since 1995. By the time that Pickton was arrested, the list had grown to fifty-four women.
    The taskforce’s investigations were given a fresh impetus in March 1999 when Jamie Lee Hamilton, a transsexual and former prostitute who went on to become the director of a drop-in centre for sex-trade workers, called a news conference complaining of the police’s lax attitude towards missing prostitutes. The problem was, despite Dickson’s growing list of names, they had yet to prove that a serial killer was at work.
    That May, Inspector Kim Rossmo began work on the case. He was the pioneer of “geographic profiling”, then a new investigative technique. Using a computer system, he mapped unsolved crimes in an attempt to highlight any pattern or criminal signature overlooked by detectives working on individual cases. Most serial criminals, it seems, work around an