Money For Favors

It was a little anti-climatic to see him sitting in the witness box, looking around at the court. He just seemed so small...so grandfatherly...So not what I thought a potentially explosive witness and business partner of Pickton's would look like.

He spoke right off the bat about his battle with cancer in 1998 and how he lost his voice box and now spoke through a tracheotomy and a prosthesis.

He spoke for the entire morning about pigs and butchering them, the details of which I am not going to gross you out with. It is just hard to stomach if you are like me and just get your meat from the grocery store all nicely wrapped in cellophane on Styrofoam and never really consider how it got there.

Casanova sold his butchered pigs mostly in the Filipino community and had a working relationship with Pickton for about 18-20 years, except for a two-year period when Pickton said he wanted to get out of the pig business.

During their entire relationship, Casanova said he never saw any women killed or hurt on the Pickton property. Nor did he see any body parts in any of the freezers he kept his pig meat in, he said.

He testified to the general disorder of the farm and the abandoned cars everywhere.

He spoke also of the amount of people that periodically stayed on the property. Some he named were Lynn Ellingson, Dinah Taylor and a woman named Nancy, as well as two young people in their twenties who stayed in a motor home on the property.