'I was set up,' Svekla tells sister on wiretap

Thomas Svekla, accused of murdering two Edmonton-area prostitutes, told his sister the only thing he did was get caught with a dead body.

The comment was part of a secretly recorded telephone conversation between Svekla and his sister, Donna Parkinson, while he was being held at the Edmonton Remand Centre in August 2006. It was entered into evidence Thursdayat Svekla's trial on two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Theresa Innes, 36, and Rachel Quinney, 19.

Three months before theconversation, Svekla was arrested and charged after Parkinson found a body in a hockey bag her brother had left at her home in Fort Saskatchewan, just northeast of Edmonton, andreported her discoverypolice. The body turned out to be that of Innes.

"It's like being caught with stolen property," Svekla said in the telephone call. "Just because you have it doesn't mean you stole it. They have no evidence."

Svekla has admitted to transporting Innes's body from High Level to Fort Saskatchewan.

But in the conversation played in court Thursday, he insisted someone in High Level set him up.

"Cause people are jealous, and everybody knew that was my truck in town, and everybody in town knew about that story. About Rachel Quinney. Right?"

Svekla says he discovered Quinney's body in a wooded area east of Edmonton in May 2004 while smoking crack cocaine with another prostitute. He reported it to police, who questioned him at length.

The Crown started playing the wiretap evidence on Wednesday, when the court heard Svekla say that "he feared for his life" in jail because he was seen by other inmates as "the Pickton of Alberta."

Robert William Pickton, a B.C. pig farmer, was convicted in December of the second-degree murder of six women who went missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

In the recorded conversation, Svekla also told his sister that he wasn't mad that she called the RCMP about the discovery.

"You did good," he told her. "You did what was right."