You’d think that working on a book about Canada’s worst serial killer would be more of a freak-out than writing about, say, Brian Mulroney.
But Stevie Cameron, whose book On The Take: Crime, Corruption And Greed In The Mulroney Years, caused a media and legal firestorm, says no, she’d take a serial killer any day. “I wrote a speech citing the 10 reasons why,” says the author, whose latest release, On The Farm: Robert William Pickton And The Tragic Story Of Vancouver’s Missing Women, was shortlisted for this year’s Charles Taylor Prize for non-fiction.
“Among those reasons? While writing about a serial killer, I wasn’t afraid for the job of my husband. I didn’t worry that my phones were tapped or that somebody was going to break into my house.”
She’s talking about the state of her psyche as her probe of the former PM’s ethics, and payoffs in the Airbus affair, was hitting the market. Mulroney and his supporters engaged in a campaign to tarnish her journalistic rep. But the number-one reason why she prefers covering serial killers? “Serial killers don’t sue.”
And they don’t usually land journalists in the kind of muck she found herself in. Say the name Stevie Cameron: what’s your first thought? You’re probably remembering the accusation that she was an informant for the RCMP in the Airbus affair.
That’s a shame because, first off, there’s a lot of evidence she was no such thing, and second, On The Farm is a really stellar book. It peers into the mind of serial killer Pickton and sheds light on his victims and police indifference. “It’s a fascinating story,” she says. “The book starts with the police refusal to deal with the disappearance of women, why they failed and why they didn’t care.”
And while Cameron delves into Pickton’s personal background, On The Farm puts the emphasis on the 49 women he killed. She didn’t want a replication of the Montreal Massacre, about which everyone can name-check the killer but practically no one knows the name of even one of the 14 women he killed.
“I decided to tell the story of every single woman on the official victim list, because Picton admitted to killing 49 but was convicted of killing only six. I heard the testimony on the other cases, and I thought the lives of these women mattered. I’d met their families, their friends, their children. People loved these women.”
Ironically, it was while she was sitting in on Pickton’s trial that Cameron figured out how our national police force had been able to give the impression that she had shared info with them in the Mulroney case.
“There was endless wrangling over the search warrant police used to get access to Pickton’s farm, because the defence were trying to overthrow the warrant,” she says. It was then that she realized lawyers were used to the practice of police lying about informants and evidence to get warrants.
They didn’t happen to be lying in the Pickton case, but, she says, “I wouldn’t have known [how typical this was] if the police hadn’t taken such a raking through the coals by Pickton’s lawyers.”
She later discovered that the RCMP had sought a search warrant related to the probe of a helicopter firm related to the Airbus affair. The warrant indicated that they had information from an informant, and the name offered was Cameron’s.
“But I knew nothing about that company. I’d talked to police because I was trying to get them to tell me if Mulroney was under investigation. They constructed an informant.”
With the help of some high-priced lawyers, she got the Mounties to release an affidavit detailing the material they said she had given them. She’s insistent that she only provided documents and news clippings that were in the public realm.
An Ontario Superior Court judge ruled in 2007 that the RCMP superintendant in the case had a reasonable basis for treating her as an informant, but his ruling refused to resolve whether Cameron was one.
“Nobody believed me,” she says. She also had to endure Mulroney’s insulting remarks about her to the 2009 Oliphant Commission (the probe into dealings between the former PM and lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber). After further legal action, the inquiry didn’t include the comments in the official transcript.
“We knew we had to be careful about Mulroney. But Robert Pickton was never going to sue me.”
Interview Clips
On the difficulty of the material:
On picking through the dirt looking for evidence of Pickton’s victims’ human remains:
On not being a police informant:
On refusing the Oliphant Inquiry’s demand for her source materials on Mulroney and Schreiber:
susanc@nowtoronto.com
