Robert Pickton

But how and who Pickton killed is still difficult to comprehensively establish even today because of both the method of his disposal and the judicial ban on reporting. The prosecution allege that he would lure his victims with money and drugs and cocaine traces were found in a lot of recovered tissue samples. After sex, he then strangled or shot his victims. (Bizarrely, a revolver was found with a dildo on its end, believed to have been an improvised silencer.) He would then feed their remains into his wood chipper, and serve the remains to his pigs.

As Harold Schechter points out in ‘The Serial Killers’, Pickton is not the first to use animals to dispose of evidence. Joe Ball, a 1920s bootlegger, used the bar he opened after Prohibition to lure waitresses and ex wives to his adjacent alligator pond. And as The Wineville Chicken Murders showed, (depicted in the Angelina Jolie/Clint Eastwood film, Changeling) a farm set up for the slaughter of animals, is also suitable for the slaughter of humans.

One of the few first hand witnesses to Pickton’s work was Lynn Ellingson. She lived briefly in a trailer on Pickton’s farm and said she walked in on a blood covered Pickton as a Ms Georgina Papin’s body dangled from a chain in the farm’s slaughterhouse. He disposed of Sereena Abotsway’s head, hands and feet in a bucket which he placed in a freezer where he also left bits of Andrea Joesbury’s body including her severed head. He disposed of other parts, such as the jawbones of Marnie Frey and Brenda Wolfe, and the head and hands of Mona Wilson in dustbins, manure and pig pens.When Pickton slaughtered the pigs that had been fed on slaughtered humans, he would sell on the pork.

Large numbers of women started disappearing off the streets of Vancouver in the 1980s. But they were mainly prostitutes, drug addicts or aboriginal women who operated in Downtown Eastside, ‘Canada’s poorest postcode.’ With no public pressure, and without any bodies to start a murder case, the police refused for years to treat the women as anything but missing, let alone connect them to becoming prey to a single predator.

But then an aboriginal group provided a list of missing women to the police and Detective Dave Dickson officially started an investigation in 1998. The first Vancouver policeman to suspect a serial killer was at work was Kim Rossmo. He would later become a criminology professor and originator of ‘geographic profiling’. He speculated that the killer was deliberately targeting women who would be ‘invisible’ to the authorities. Even when the police realised they had a serial killer, and that Pickton was a suspect, he was not placed under surveillance.

On 5 February 2002 police, armed with a search warrant, entered the Pickton farm looking for illegal firearms. Within hours of the 57 year old being in custody, the police obtained a second court order to search the farm as part of the ongoing 20 year police investigation into the disappearance of over 60 women from downtown. The search by dozens of forensic suited investigators amongst the slurry and dirt turned up an asthma inhaler belonging to one of the many missing, but the police could only charge Pickton with minor firearm contraventions. Later released, he was now under police surveillance.

A few weeks later, the police arrested and charged Pickton with two counts of first degree murder for the killings of Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson. A fortnight later, the names of Heather Bottomley, Jacqueline McDonell and Diane Rock were added to the charges. One week later, Andrea Joesbury became the sixth charge.With the addition of Heather Chinnock, Tanya Holyk, Sherry Irving and Inga Hall, the total murder charges reached fifteen, making Pickton Canada’s biggest formally charged serial killer. By this stage, large conveyor belts were being used to shift through tons of soil, going as deep as 30 feet down for sifting and DNA analysis by over 100 forensic specialists. It broke new ground for forensics. They had found blood-stained clothes and pieces of human bone and teeth. Amongst a pile of animal bones, human toes, heels and rib bones were found.

By November, there were nearly 30 charges against Pickton but investigators were constantly thwarted by the conditions on the farm and the fact that Pickton’s pigs had helped in the disposal of the evidence.

While Pickton was waiting for the trial, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer had gone undercover and pretended to be a cellmate. Pickton confessed to 49 murders. He expressed annoyance not to have rounded up to a 50 and regretted only that he become sloppy which had lead to his arrest.

During the trial, Pickton sat expressionless behind a bulletproof screen as relatives of more than 60 women looked to him for answers.

Fearing a mistrial due to contempt or prejudice, the judge had banned any reporting of the case details of Canada’s most prolific serial killer. The sheer volume of DNA evidence meant that the judge divided the trial into two. The first part would deal with just six of the charges with the remaining 20 to be heard at a later date.

After 130 witnesses and 10 months of trial, it took the jury of seven men and five women ten days to reach their verdict and on a Sunday, Pickton was convicted of second degree murder of the six women whose remains were found on his Vancouver farm. On the following Tuesday, Robert William Pickton was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years, the longest sentence possible under Canadian law. Justice James Williams said "Mr. Pickton there is really nothing that I can say to adequately express the revulsion the community feels about these killings".

As the verdict was read, two female jurors wiped away tears while Pickton finally showed some emotion. He smirked.