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later learn that he had known or had dealings with at least some of his victims on prior occasions, perhaps engaging in sex with them or merely bringing them to his house trailer to party with him, giving them drugs and money, and then driving them back to Vancouver unharmed. This seemed like a reasonable explanation of why many of his victims felt a strong enough comfort level with him that they did not hesitate to get into his car and drive away with him. This could also, perhaps, help explain why he was able to get away with his cruel and vicious crimes for so long without arousing the curiosity of the community at large or of the police. No one, as will be seen, ever seemed particularly alarmed whenever Uncle Willie showed up in the vicinity of Main and Hastings—at least not at first. Few people saw the evil that lay beneath his skin—until it was too late. Another plausible reason for the lack of concern shown by the police, as well as by the residents of Low Track, at least for a time, when women left with Pickton and did not return, was because their bodies had not turned up anywhere. It seemed entirely possible that Pickton would have been looked at sooner as a suspect if at least some of the bodies of the missing women had been found.
    At least one person, however, had seen the evil that lurked inside Robert Pickton. According to a Seattle, Washington, writer, Charles Mudede, and an article of his that appeared in a Seattle weekly called The Stranger, of which Mudede is associate editor, a longshoreman had gone to a Halloween party, perhaps as early as 1996 or 1997, at Pickton’s farm in the 900 block of Dominion Avenue in Port Coquitlam, accompanied by a friend. The party was held inside a building on the farm that Pickton and his brother, Dave, called “Piggy’s Palace.” It was a dark, rainy night when the longshoreman and his friend arrived. The parking area, filled with motorcycles and cars, was muddy. One of the first things the two visitors saw was a large pig being roasted on a spit, and children dressed in Halloween costumes were outside playing in the dark.
    “There wasn’t much light,” the longshoreman said. “There were lots of women, who looked like hookers.”
    The party, he explained, was outside on the grounds, as well as inside the building and inside a trailer, where they were “doing the wild thing.” People were not only having sex, but they were doing a lot of drugs. He explained that when it came time to eat the pig, he saw Pickton tear it apart with his dirty hands. The sight was sufficient to cause the longshoreman to decide that he wouldn’t be eating anything that evening—at least not while at Pickton’s farm.
    He said that at one point he had walked past a shack where a low-wattage light burned dimly above the door, and he could hear machinery running inside. He wasn’t sure what kind of machinery he had heard that night, but it had frightened him terribly.
    “Here, I got a death chill,” said the longshoreman. “The hairs raised on the back of my neck and my feet froze to the ground. I didn’t want to be there anymore, so I left and walked home.”
    Another party attendee, a woman who said that it had been her first and last time to visit Pickton’s farm, described the partygoers as raunchy, and claimed that a lot of cocaine was being passed around that evening.
    “[There were] lots of really, really bad, badass people…. I did not want to be a part of it.”
    Piggy’s Palace, however, was more than just a party place, as the cops eventually learned. It was listed in Canadian government records as a nonprofit organization under the name Piggy Palace Good Times Society, and it routinely raised money for any organization that its operators deemed worthy. Piggy’s Palace was located in the 2500 block of Burns Road, adjacent to Pickton’s farm on Dominion Avenue, but several acres away, and was built out of tin—basically it was an elongated tin shed. It was