A hushed courtroom heard a key Crown witness testify about how Robert Pickton told him his technique for killing prostitutes.
"He had mentioned to me, 'You know what I do with these prostitutes?'" Andrew Bellwood testified Monday in New Westminster, B.C.
Warning: Graphic, disturbing content follows
"From there he reached underneath his mattress. He pulled out a set of handcuffs that looked like a set of police handcuffs. He pulled out a belt and he pulled out a piece of wire.
"The wire had looped ends on it that looked like it had been spliced. The wire was the same consistency as piano wire.
"He had motioned to me that he would put them in what we call doggy style on the bed, having intercourse with them. As he was telling me this story it was as if there was a woman on the bed. It was pretty much like telling me he'd reach behind their back for their hand and slide it behind their back and put on the handcuffs, stroking their hair, telling them that it's going to be OK. Everything's all over now.
"After he got the handcuffs on them he would strangle them either with the belt or the piece of wire."
In the slaughterhouse, the women were bled and gutted, Bellwood said.
"He commented on how much they bled. He kept telling me, `Oh, you know how much they bleed, you wouldn't believe how much blood comes out of a person.'
"He proceeded to tell me, after he gutted them, hung them in the slaughterhouse, how much pigs ate of the carcass and whatever the pigs didn't eat, would end up in the 45-gallon drums of entrails he put the pigs in, you know, the pig guts into," the 37-year-old Alberta oilpatch worker said.
This information came out while they watched television at Pickton's Port Coquitlam farm in 1999, Bellwood said.
The conversation began after Pickton suggested they get a prostitute for themselves, but Bellwood said he wasn't interested.
Bellwood a former crack user
Like Lynn Ellingsen, who testified she saw a woman's body hanging from a hook in Pickton's slaughterhouse, Bellwood has used crack cocaine heavily at points in his life. But he said he had used neither crack nor alcohol the night of his conversation with Pickton.
Defence lawyer Richard Brooks subjected Ellingsen to a grueling cross-examination in which he suggested she was hallucinating when she thought she saw the body.
Bellwood told court he had never hallucinated on the drug or seen any other user hallucinate while under its influence.
Pickton and Bellwood were introduced in February 1999. Bellwood later lived on Pickton's property for a time.
Bellwood said he lived there about the same time as someone named Lynn, meaning Ellingsen. Pickton and her appeared to be good friends, he said.
The accused appeared to be a "sugar daddy" to her, he said.
Bellwood is expected to be one of the Crown's last major witnesses in the murder case.
Picton is on trial in B.C. Supreme Court on six charges of first-degree murder. He is accused of killing Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Georgina Papin, Marnie Frey, Brenda Wolfe and Andrea Joesbury.
He faces trial on another 20 charges at some later date.
In its opening arguments, the defence said Pickton did not kill the victims.
With files from The Canadian Press
