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Missing Women Inquiry: Ex-Pickton worker echoes lawyer allegations of police cover-up

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But to this day, Hiscox's story has not been heard in court – and despite being invited to be interviewed last week for a potential affidavit submission in the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, he has been so far rejected from the witness list despite first-hand experience of the botched police investigation and a two-month standing request from Inquiry lawyers. 

Hiscox began working with Pickton in the spring of 1998, helping salvage materials from the demolished King George Motel in Surrey. Like others who knew Pickton, he described the serial killer – convicted of six second-degree murders, although he confessed to a police interrogator he had killed 49 women – as “unsociable” and quiet. But as someone introverted himself, Hiscox didn't hold it against him.
 
In fact, what disturbed him most were stories he began to hear from his sister-in-law, Lisa Yelds – Pickton's best friend at the time – about Aboriginal status cards and bloody women's clothing she said she saw inside Pickton's trailer.
 
“I saw clothing piled up outside the trailer – women's blouses and that sort of thing,” Hiscox said. “Not clean, not bloody – just dirty. It was around the corner of the trailer.
 
“I put the information together when me and Lisa were talking about what she was finding and what I was seeing. We sat and talked about it, in 1998. She said, 'I've got a feeling that's where all the women are going, Bill.' And I said, 'I'm getting the same feeling, as well.' She said that someone has to go to the police with this.”
 
A few months after starting salvage work for Pickton, Hiscox was walking in Surrey when he saw a disturbing poster on a telephone pole. It was for Sarah de Vries, one of Vancouver's many missing women, most of them Indigenous sex trade workers from the Downtown Eastside.
 
The poster was one of many plastered around the Lower Mainland by de Vries' friend, Wayne Leng. Like Hiscox, Leng journeyed from Alberta to Vancouver last week to attend the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry as well as the annual memorial march for missing and murdered women, which this year drew roughly 5,000 people.
 
Hiscox phoned the number on the poster and spoke to Leng.
 
Since de Vries' disappearance, Leng has campaigned unceasingly for police to investigate missing women cases with greater urgency. Leng recorded his conversation with Hiscox and passed on the tip to the Vancouver Police Department's Det. Cst. Lori Shenher, who testified last week at the inquiry.
 
“Wayne Leng received a call from male (later identified as Hiscox) who provided information that Willie Pickton had bragged about being able to dispose of bodies and grind them up for feed for his pigs on his property in Port Coquitlam,” according to a summary of Det. Shenher's source log marked July 27, 1998, submitted as an inquiry exhibit. “The caller told of a female named Lisa Yelds who had been in Pickton's trailer and seen women's identification and clothing.”

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