MONTREAL — Toronto psychiatrist Mark Berber was in line for a coffee at his medical building this week when a colleague approached him to talk about the Pickton trial.
Dr. Berber probes the darkest recesses of the human mind for a living. This topic, however, was a no-go.
“I didn't want to talk about it,” Dr. Berber recalled. “I find it so horrific and disgusting, I don't want to discuss the details.”
Dr. Berber is not alone. The first-degree-murder trial of Robert William Pickton is supposed to the most sensational to ever hit Canada — the biggest serial-killer case in the nation's history, a magnet for media outlets from as far as Britain and Germany.
Yet evidence suggests many Canadians simply don't have the stomach for it. They want justice to be done; they just want to be spared the details.
“The normal, natural response is disgust, of not wanting to know every detail, because it's so alien,” said Dr. Berber, a lecturer at the University of Toronto.
Mr. Pickton, 57, is charged with murder in the deaths of six drug-dependent women who sold sex at the street corners of Vancouver's bleakest neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Killers and mass murderers normally fascinate us. We want to understand what fuels the youthful alienation of a Kimveer Gill or the paranoid rage of a Timothy McVeigh.
The Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka sex slayings of two teenage girls riveted and horrified Canadians, in part because the couple appeared so normal and middle class.
Mr. Pickton has been portrayed by the Crown as a pig farmer who allegedly murdered, dismembered and butchered women. All that's left is the horror.
The start of his trial this week has already sparked early stirrings of a public backlash. Letter writers to newspapers complain that if they wanted a horror story, they'd go to the movies. “No decent person could desire the ghoulish level of coverage you give to this sorry event,” wrote one reader to The Globe and Mail.
The public's prickly reaction creates an ethical high-wire act for news media outlets, which are trying to provide coverage without turning off — and even losing — their customers.
The first survey on the topic suggests they need to step carefully. A poll this month of 800 British Columbians found respondents about evenly split in their interest in the Pickton case.
A majority wanted the media to limit the violent or sexually explicit details, according to the poll for the University of British Columbia's School of Journalism. And while 53 per cent of respondents felt the level of media coverage was “just right,” one-fifth already felt they had seen too much.
And the trial hadn't even started yet.
Even at ground zero — Vancouver — people are showing little appetite for the macabre. The local CBC morning radio show had a talk-back line about its trial coverage Monday and got a record level of response — which was overwhelmingly negative.
“Although some listeners supported extensive coverage,” the broadcaster reported on its website, “the vast majority said that when it comes to this story, less is better.”
Could less be more? If so, the Pickton trial is the opposite of a car wreck: We should want to gawk, but avert our eyes instead. The squeamishness seems especially odd in a day when viewers tune in by the millions to TV shows like CSI, which offer up gruesome forensic examinations of crime scenes. Isn't TV violence supposed to inure us to the real thing?
“You can watch CSI and it's completely divorced from the real experience,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University.
If CSI had an episode featuring human body parts, people would simply say “gross,” he said.
“When a news anchor reports it, you'd want the kids to leave the room. I don't think CSI has made us shrug our shoulders at the real story of people being beheaded. We make these distinctions.”
Jean Proulx, a criminologist at the University of Montreal, says the public follows serial murders because, at a deep level, they're looking for clues to their own safety.
“What scares us, we want to understand,” said Prof. Proulx, a specialist on sex murderers. “Maybe if I understand it, I can protect myself against it.”
In that sense, the Pickton trial holds less prurient interest to most Canadians, because both the victims and suspect come from a demimonde to which few Canadians belong or easily relate.
“People want to know what happened to those women, and they want to see the right people held accountable,” said Mary Lynn Young, an assistant professor of journalism at UBC. “But it's a question of degree. People don't want irrelevant, gory details for the sake of titillation.”
The school plans a follow-up poll to gauge public response down the road, but Ms. Young already predicts diminishing interest.
“There's going to be overload,” she said, “because there is just way too much pain and trauma.”
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