Robert Pickton sends bizarre reply to reporter who requested an interview

Compared with the United States, Canada is haunted by few real monsters in our midst but one of them has made an abortive effort to tell his story.

Robert Pickton is serving a life sentence for murdering six women he picked up from Vancouver's notorious Downtown East side, and is suspected of killing dozens more, most of them drug-addicted prostitutes, at his suburban pig farm.

Canadian Press reporter James Keller, covering an inquiry into how Pickton could prey on women undetected for years before his arrest in 2002, had written the serial killer requesting an interview when he got a surprising reply.

"If you are looking for a story, 'boy do I have one for you!!!"' Pickton wrote back to Keller from Kent Institution, a maximum-security prison in B.C.'s Fraser Valley.

Pickton apparently knew prison officials would not consent to a journalist's visit so he proposed a bizarre ruse, Keller reported.

"Tell them when making appointment by telephone that you are my new defence lawyer being appointed to this case, in defending Mr. Pickton's rights," Pickton proposed in the hand-printed, grammatically challenged letter.

Pickton told Keller to prepare for a four-hour session "as we have much to talk about to fully understand this case."

"We didn't think posing as a lawyer was the right way to go," Keller explained on a Canadian Press video.

So Keller approached Corrections Canada officials formally requesting an interview, but they vetoed the request.

"At this point, what I can tell you is that the case-management team has made the decision that it's not in his correctional plan to give interviews," said spokesman Jean-Paul Lorieau.

Another corrections spokesman, David Harty, later explained this is not a blanket ban and that each request would be considered in relation to Pickton's correctional plan.

Kent prison warden Mark Kemball, who also responded to the request, did not explain why Pickton's access to journalists was being restricted. But he noted the correctional plan "establishes goals for the individual inmate, addresses the dynamic factors that contributed to his criminal behaviour and employs the most effective intervention techniques for that inmate."

Corrections officials may have been guided by their experience with Clifford Olson, who sexually assaulted, tortured and killed at least 11 children in the Vancouver area between January 1980 and August 1981. Then he forced investigators to pay his family $100,000 in return for revealing where he'd put the bodies.

Olson, a psychopath who died in prison of cancer last October, liked to be in the public eye via frequent parole applications, writing several book manuscripts and describing his crimes in detail in a series of videos. He also wrote letters taunting his victims' families.

Pickton has given only one other interview since his conviction in February 2007, to CTV News in August 2010 after his final appeal was rejected and before he was transferred to Kent.

In it, Pickton denies committing the murders and claims he was tricked into a confession by an undercover police officer planted in his cell after his arrest.