A man who found a human skull near a B.C. highway said he waited a day to tell police because he had "things to do," Robert William Pickton's murder trial was told Tuesday. 

Bill Wilson told jurors he found the skull, which had been sawed in half, in Ruskin in 1995.

Police have said the skull, which has never been identified, was cut in the same way as the remains of three of the women Pickton has been accused of killing.

Pickton, a pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, is on trial for the first-degree murders of six women who disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Pickton faces 20 other murder charges that will be dealt with at another trial later.

'I had hoped it would have floated away, or however it got there it would have left the same way.' —Bill Wilson testifies about finding skull on highway

Arrested in 2002, he has pleaded not guilty to all 26 charges. He is not charged in connection with the skull.

Wilson said he came across the skull while selling wooden crafts by the side of Highway 7, something he did almost every day. 

On that particular grey day in February, sales were slow, so Wilson ran across the highway to get water from a stream to clean his car.

"When I turned around, about 40 to 50 feet [12 to 15 metres] away from me, [there] was this object on the ground," Wilson testified in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster.

"I thought it looked like it was an old bowl because of the colour, and I thought it looked like it maybe could have been an Indian artifact. Then I walked over to it and realized what it was."

DNA belongs to Jane Doe 

Wilson told jurors he returned to his roadside stand hoping a police car would drive by that he could flag down, but one didn't come. 

He said he couldn't go to police because he had appointments to keep that included shopping for supplies, seeing a doctor and playing bingo.

Wilson, who lived three kilometres from where he found the skull, said he couldn't call police from home because he didn't have a telephone. At the time, he lived in a camper next to his parents' trailer.

When Wilson saw the skull in the same spot again the next day, he packed up his business early and went to police in the nearby town of Mission, B.C.

Police went to the site and seized the skull.

Earlier in the trial, jurors were told that the skull belonged to a female known only as Jane Doe. Its DNA profile matched the DNA of a rib and heel bone found in the slaughterhouse on Pickton's property.

The saw marks on the skull match the marks on the remains of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson and Andrea Joesbury. Pickton is accused of killing the three, as well as Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin and Marnie Frey.

Wanted skull to float away

In the defence's cross-examination on Tuesday, lawyer Peter Ritchie questioned Wilson vigourously about why he did not call police right away.

Wilson maintained that he had things to do and really did not want to get involved. 

"But you had found it," Ritchie said. "Did it concern you that you had found a human skull? Did it bother you?"

"Of course it concerned me," Wilson replied. "But I had hoped it would have floated away, or however it got there it would have left the same way."

Ritchie then suggested it was Wilson's prior criminal convictions that stopped him from calling police. 

Wilson has a long criminal record that includes one conviction of indecent assault, two convictions of sexual assault, four impaired driving convictions and one conviction of obstructing a peace officer. 

Wilson maintained his record was not a reason he took so long to call police.

2,700 pieces of evidence involved

Earlier on Tuesday, the defence challenged Const. Fred Strikwerda, a retired Vancouver police constable who took the stand as a witness.

The defence claimed police only focused on evidence that would point the finger at Pickton. The defence alleged that any exhibits related to Pickton's brother, Dave, were not a priority and not tested in a significant way until the fall of 2006.

Dave Pickton, who lived on the pig farm with his brother, has never been arrested or charged in connection with the murders.

Strikwerda maintained that he simply worked in the evidence warehouse and did not set the priorities on exhibits. He testified he oversaw more than 2,700 pieces of evidence.

Defence lawyer Patrick McGowan asked Strikwerda about an alleged briefing in 2003 where police discussed the high volume of evidence and how not all items could be examined by the time the trial began.

"Do you recall being told that the priority will be to close doors against defence, focusing on exhibits to convict Pickton?" McGowan asked Strikwerda.

Strikwerda said he was not sure about that meeting and that he did not recall that statement.

He said all of the thousands of exhibits in the case have been examined, but there is a backlog of DNA testing.