NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. - He grew up poor and worked hard, but accused serial killer Robert Pickton wanted more out of life than his farm could give him.
Jurors at his trial heard an audio tape Wednesday that police have referred to in the past as "Willie's memoirs." It was introduced into evidence as a letter dictated to a woman named Victoria on Dec. 28, 1991.
Her last name or relation to Pickton is unknown, though he thanked her for a Christmas card she sent.
The 55-minute tape began with Pickton introducing himself as Bob Pickton from Vancouver before he takes Victoria through his childhood and adolescence and his plans for the future.
He ruminated on the state of the modern world, amazed at computers, his changing neighbourhood and how the passage of time has seen his family reduced from 11 members strong to about four.
He talked about Canada being a new country and that he'd like to go down to the old country, which he characterized as being the Third World.
"They know a lot more down there than I know up here," he said.
"That's what I'm trying to get into it, is know more about where we went off from the new country to the old country. Because there's a lot of things. There's big changes between here and there."
The tapes give a glimpse into Pickton's life in the years before police descended on his farm in 2002, unleashing the massive investigation that led to him being charged with 26 counts of first-degree murder in connection with the disappearances of women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
He is currently on trial for six of those charges.
Jurors had heard earlier conflicting testimony about the role his brother played in the investigation into the missing women.
But on Wednesday, Sgt. Dan Almas testified that though Dave Pickton remains a person of interest to police still investigating missing women, there is nothing to indicate he is involved in their disappearances.
Dave was allowed to get some of his personal belongings off the farm as police scoured it for evidence, jurors heard, but Almas admitted that some items like a leather jacket and a saw were returned without being tested.
The Pickton brothers' relationship has surfaced several times during the trial and in the tape, more of its nature is revealed.
Robert talked about Dave playing hooky from school for weeks at a time, though the brothers didn't go to the same schools growing up.
He also told Victoria how messy Dave was with a truck he sold him, adding that if he still owned it, the truck would be so clean you could eat off the engine.
When Pickton took Victoria through his diminishing family tree, he told her how all that was left was himself, his brother and his brother-in-law.
He didn't mention his sister Linda at all.
The Pickton children grew up poor but always had food to eat, he said.
Pickton wore hand-me-down clothes and remembered the first new outfit his mother bought him was so filled with starch that he ripped it off and ran around without any clothes on.
He stopped school in 1964, starting work as a meat cutter and did that for almost seven years before quitting to go back to the farm.
He started working with pigs, building up his barns and driving a truck for B.C. Hydro until his piggery, as he called it, burned down in 1978.
In 1980, he lost thousands of dollars when the market for pigs collapsed.
Pickton exhibited an evenhanded outlook on the failures that marked his life, characterizing many of them with a "sometimes you make it, sometimes you don't," attitude.
After being a truck driver, he worked in a rubber factory.
"That's a dirty job," he told Victoria. "Don't ever do that."
What he really wanted to do, Pickton said, was work in a sawmill.
But by the time an opening came up, he already had another job and didn't want to trade one for the other.
He also thought about getting into auto body work, but didn't want to learn the trade by working in a shop.
"I'm not here to follow by somebody else's footsteps," he said.
"You learn by your mistakes. That's the name of the game."
He talked about the "stupid things" he'd done in his life - like accidentally putting his father's truck in neutral and sitting in it as it slid down a hill, pigs jumping off the back before it crashed into a telephone pole.
"I got the hell beaten out of me," he said on the tape.
In the prisoner's dock at the court, Pickton smiled as the story was being told.
It's one the jury had heard before, when Pickton shared the memory with police officers during his formal interview after being arrested in 2002.
He spun a number of the same tales on the tape that he'd tell police more than 10 years later, among them the story of the death of his prized baby calf as a child and his visit to the U.S. in 1974.
On that trip, he was asked to be a model, Pickton said.
He was offered $40 an hour.
It was a good opportunity, he said, but he turned it down.
"I'm here on my holidays," he said.
In the portion of the tape the jurors heard, he neglected to tell Victoria about a woman named Connie he dated while on that vacation.
He'd told police they were engaged.
But Pickton hinted that he'd like to settle down one day and hoped to get off the farm.
He talked about relationships being a two-way street.
"You gotta think on both behalfs," he said.
When he met that somebody, he said, he would build a house.
It would have six rooms, nine-feet ceilings, a spiral staircase, a balcony surrounding what he called a planetorium, a tennis court out back and probably a built-in swimming pool.
"Not that I do any swimming or anything, but you gotta build it for the year 2000," he said.
"You gotta have fancy this and fancy that."
Pickton characterizes himself as a team player who was happy to teach people how to do things. But he told Victoria while he was always around to lend a hand no one helped him.
"Sometimes they ask for a little too much," he says. "I don't get nothing back in return."
Jurors have heard in the past from police that Pickton deferred to his younger brother and seemed submissive to him.
In his letter to Victoria, he said his brother wouldn't take his advice on how to fix a truck.
"They try to do it their way but they always come back to me and want my ideas and everything else," he said.
"But believe it not, they do it my way. No matter whatever which way I say it or whatever, I'm always right."
