Accused Canada killer denies he admitted murders

New Westminister, British Columbia, Jan 25: Robert ''Willie'' Pickton, a man accused of killing 26 prostitutes, dismissed a claim he had admitted to murdering women and feeding them to his pigs, a Canadian court heard.

Police, in a jailhouse interview shortly after Pickton was arrested in February 2002, played a tape of a man identified as Andrew Bellwood, who lived briefly at Pickton's farm. On the tape, he says Pickton talked of strangling prostitutes and using the animals to dispose of remains.

''That guy is out to lunch. Oh bull,'' Pickton says as he listened to the tape. He added later with a laugh: ''Funny stories aren't they.'' A video recording of the jailhouse interview was played for the jury at Pickton's first-degree murder trial in New Westminster yesterday.

Prosecutors have said Bellwood will be a witness later in the trial. The tape police played to Pickton in a bid to get a confession was almost inaudible in the hearing and has not yet officially been entered as evidence.

At the time of the interview Pickton, a pig farmer in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, was charged with only two murders. He is now charged with 26, although the current trial deals with only six of them. The judge divided the case into two trials to make it easier for jurors to handle.

Pickton has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and denies knowing any of the victims, who were among more than 60 prostitutes who disappeared in Vancouver from the late 1980s to the end of 2001.

Prosecutors have told the court that, in another interview, secretly recorded with an undercover police officer, Pickton says he killed 49 women and had planned to kill one more before taking a break.

Police say he hired the women on the streets of Vancouver's poor Downtown Eastside neighborhood, took them to his pig farm, killed them after having sex, and butchered their bodies to dispose of the remains.

In the taped interview, Pickton sits in a chair with his head often tilted and his legs crossed. Next to him is a large poster with pictures of the 48 women known to be missing at the time of his arrest.

Pickton repeatedly denies having met any of the women in the pictures, although he describes several of them as ''pretty.'' He reacts with disbelief when the interviewer, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt Bill Fordy, tells him his DNA has been found mixed with the blood of one of the victims in a motor home on his farm.

In seeming contradictions, he also says ''I'm being nailed to the cross.'' ''People will set people up for anything.'' I should be on death row'', ''I'm finished'', and ''I'm dead'', at separate times through the interview.

If convicted of all the charges against him, Pickton would be the deadliest serial killer in Canadian history, and would face life in prison. Canada does not have a death penalty.

Pickton's lawyers have asked the jury to pay attention to his reactions during the interview, and hinted they will argue he was not intelligent enough to have organised a serial killing.

Playing the recording of the police interview in the court is expected to last till today.

REUTERS>