VANCOUVER - The trial of accused serial killer Robert Pickton began, as two legal observers noted, with a "bang" and "trumpets blaring."
But three months in, there's a distinct sound of silence around the proceedings.
Perhaps that's not surprising for a trial that was predicted to last as long as a year. The Crown said at the outset it may call more than 200 witnesses and the first 50 to 60 people testifying are police officers, searchers or DNA analysts.
"I'm sure it's never going to become truly interesting again until real people get in the witness stand who aren't exhibit custodians or police officers or DNA analysts," Mark Jette, a prominent Vancouver defence lawyer, said in an interview.
"You want people who were dealing with Pickton, who were at the farm, people who will put a human face back in the trial," said Jette, who has no involvement in the Pickton trial.
Pickton, known by his friends and referred to by his defence lawyers as Willy, was arrested inside his trailer on his property Feb. 5, 2002, on a firearms warrant.
That warrant was quickly abandoned when police discovered items on his property connected to the missing women's joint task force investigation that had been underway in Greater Vancouver for several years.
The property in Port Coquitlam, B.C., about 45 minutes east of Vancouver, was secured and the first of dozens and dozens of investigators moved in. They worked feverishly to gather evidence for almost two years.
It was one of the largest criminal investigations in Canadian history, with some 200,000 exhibits from the microscopic to the macabre.
Eventually 26 charges were laid in the deaths of women, most from Vancouver's tough Downtown Eastside and many who struggled with addictions and eked out a living in the sex trade.
The preliminary hearing that committed Pickton to stand trial began the year after his arrest. The next three years were a long waiting game as the Crown and defence prepared for trial and mountains of evidence were analyzed.
His trial on six of those charges began in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster on Jan. 22 before a jury of seven men and five women.
The first six counts are in connection with the deaths of Marnie Frey, Georgina Papin, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson.
The judge ordered that the other 20 counts be severed and tried at a later date.
The jury has now heard about the most disturbing evidence found connected to the six women on the indictment against Pickton: three decomposing heads found in freezers, numerous bones and blood.
When the trial started in January, there was a full-blown media frenzy as the Crown's opening statement laid out the evidence that would be called. Reporters outnumbered spectators, who have never attended in great numbers.
Within the first month, as witness after witness talked about gathering evidence, the trial dropped off the radar of most news organizations until only four or five reporters turned up each day.
These days, the spectators can be counted on one hand and the adjacent overflow courtroom is rarely opened.
Each day the jurors file in and take their seats, each one lugging several thick binders of photographs and prompting Justice James Williams to remark jokingly that they should get extra pay for their efforts.
Willy Pickton's demeanour rarely changes.
He enters the courtroom each day from a nearby holding cell, nods toward the judge and sits in the prisoner's box; he rotates the same four shirts on the four days the court sits each week; he carries a binder and a folded sweatshirt and he takes notes or doodles.
He never looks at the jurors and only occasionally watches a witness. Mostly he sits motionless and stares into the middle distance.
York University law professor Alan Young draws a comparison between the Pickton trial and the criminal proceedings now underway in Chicago involving former media baron Conrad Black.
"No doubt people in general are more interested in murder stories than corporate financing," says Young, who teaches at Osgoode Hall Law School and specializes in criminal law.
So why is there so much interest in Black and not in Pickton, who is alleged to have committed heinous and gruesome crimes against some of society's most marginalized women?
"The Black trial is full of personalities, larger-than-life personalities," Young said. "The Pickton trial is about a marginalized community. There is no gripping narrative."
"When I saw how much the media invested in the first week I knew that people would backpedal because of the nature of the way this story would unfold."
But that will change. The "gripping personalities" are coming to the Pickton trial.
In the Crown's opening statement to the jury three months ago, prosecutor Derrill Prevett mentioned two of several civilian witnesses expected to testify in the coming weeks and months.
Prevett said Lynn Ellingsen, an acquaintance of the accused, would be called.
"The Crown expects that Ms. Ellingsen will testify about being at the farm with the accused and a sex-trade worker that they picked up from the Downtown Eastside, and that she (Ellingsen) saw him in the slaughterhouse engaged in butchering the woman," Prevett told the jury.
The jury is expected to hear soon from Andrew Bellwood, another of Pickton's acquaintances, Prevett said.
Bellwood is expected to testify "of a conversation he had with the accused at the farm where the accused admitted to him that he killed sex-trade workers, how he killed them, and that he would take their bodies to the slaughterhouse."
They will provide the "human face" missing so far and the element that distinguishes it markedly from the sensational Toronto trial of sex killer Paul Bernardo. In that case people lined up for hours to try to get into the courtroom.
The Bernardo case was "off the charts sensational," says Jette, given the "Ken and Barbie" nature of Bernardo and Karla Homolka, the absolute horror of what happened, and the fact that some of it was videotaped."
"You've got all the human interest elements there. This (Pickton) case started out with a bang and descended into a whimper as far as the kind of things that interest people."
Young agrees.
"Once the trial moves out of its forensic stage people will find it more interesting."
Whether the case will take a full year to try is anyone's guess. While the Crown is obliged by law to disclose its case to the defence, the reverse is not required.
No one except Pickton's defence knows its strategy once the Crown rests its case.
The defence options include calling no evidence and arguing that the Crown has not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt, said Jette.
Pickton's lawyers, led by Peter Ritchie, may call evidence from "some source or another that might serve to raise a reasonable doubt with respect to one or more counts."
The other option? Pickton himself could testify.
