VANCOUVER — Marnie Frey called her parents for the last time on her 24th birthday. Lynn, her stepmother, answered the phone to hear Marnie giggling, wheedling for some birthday cash. Mrs Frey was reluctant, knowing that it would be spent to feed her heroin habit.
She told her daughter that a parcel was on its way, with clothes, food and toiletries, things low down on her daughter's shopping list for life on the mean streets of the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver. The thank-you call never came.
Rick and Lynn Frey would not learn what had become of their daughter until after a frantic search that lasted five years. Her remains were unearthed on a pig farm in Port Coquitlam, on the outskirts of Vancouver. The farm belonged to Robert Pickton, known as "Uncle Willie," a pig farmer well-known for the parties that he threw for prostitutes and bikers at his quasi- legal drinking club, the Piggy Palace.
Investigators dug up the remains of one woman after another, from body parts to minute traces of DNA, until the count came to 30. Four could not be identified. The other 26 were among the names of 67 women who had disappeared from the Downtown Eastside streets. On Monday Mr Pickton goes on trial for six murders, the only cases in which body parts survive.
Few of the details of the evidence have been made public in Canada, where strict publication bans have muffled preliminary hearings. But what has come to light is grim enough: butchered body parts discovered in a freezer; a woodchipper, confiscated by police, where the women's bodies were believed to have been disposed of; and the public health warning that the pigs believed to have been fed on human remains were then slaughtered and put into the human food chain — along with, perhaps, human meat itself.
Uncle Willie 
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