Robert Pickton

Robert Pickton
Robert Christian Pickton (born October 24, 1949), also known as the Pig Farmer Killer or the Butcher, is a Canadian serial killer, serial rapist, former pig farmer and possible cannibal who is suspected of being one of the most prolific serial killers in Canadian history. After dropping out of school, Pickton left a butcher's apprenticeship to begin working full-time at his family's pig farm. He is believed to have begun his murders in the early 1980s after inheriting the farm. Arrested in 2002, he was convicted in 2007 of the second-degree murders of six women and was also the subject of a lengthy investigation that yielded evidence of numerous other murders.
Pickton was charged with the deaths of an additional twenty women, many of them from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, but these charges were stayed by the Crown in 2010. Pickton was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole for 25 years—the longest possible sentence for second-degree murder under Canadian law at the time he was sentenced. During the trial's first day of jury evidence, the Crown stated that Pickton had confessed to forty-nine murders to an undercover agent from the Office of the Inspector General, who was posing as a cellmate. The Crown reported that Pickton told the officer that he wanted to kill another woman to make it an even fifty, and that he was caught because he was "sloppy".
Early life and criminal history
Robert Pickton was born to Leonard Francis Pickton (1896-1977) and Louise Helene Arnal (1912-1979), a family of pig farmers in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, east of Vancouver. Pickton's older sister, Linda Louise Wright, was sent to live with relatives in Vancouver as their parents thought that the family pig farm would be an inappropriate setting to raise a young girl. Robert and his younger brother, David Francis Pickton, began working at the farm at an early age and their mother was very demanding, prioritizing the pigs over the brothers' personal hygiene, and forcing them to work long hours raising the farm's livestock.
She often sent them to school in unwashed, dirty clothes reeking of manure and earning the brothers the nickname "stinky piggy" from their classmates. Pickton was strongly attached to his mother and had little interaction with his abusive father. Pickton struggled in school, being put in a special class after failing the second grade. At the age of 12, Pickton began raising a calf which became his beloved pet. Two weeks later, after failing to find it after school, he was told to check the barn where he was heartbroken to find it slaughtered.
He dropped out of school in 1963 and began working as a meat-cutter. He continued to do so for nearly seven years before leaving to work full-time at the farm. In 1994 and 1995, Pickton and his two siblings inherited the family pig farm, selling parts of their inherited land and earning a total of C$5.16million. Worker Bill Hiscox called the farm a "creepy-looking place" patrolled by a 600-pound boar and described Pickton as a "pretty quiet guy, hard to strike up a conversation with", whose occasional bizarre behaviour, despite no evidence of substance abuse, would draw attention.
On March 23, 1997, Pickton was charged with the attempted murder of prostitute Wendy Lynn Eistetter, whom he had stabbed several times during an altercation at the farm. Eistetter had informed police that Pickton had handcuffed her, but that she had escaped after suffering several lacerations. She told them she had disarmed him and stabbed him with his weapon. Pickton sought treatment at Eagle Ridge Hospital, while Eistetter recovered at the nearest emergency room.
He was released on C$2,000 bond and the attempted-murder charge against Pickton was stayed on January 27, 1998, because Eistetter had drug addiction issues and prosecutors believed her too unstable for her testimony to help secure a conviction. Furthermore, David Pickton was convicted of sexual assault in 1992, being fined C$1,000 and given 30 days' probation. In that case the victim told police that David had attacked her in his trailer at the pig farm, but managed to escape. Pickton had also been sued three times for traffic offences in 1988 and 1991, settling all three claims out of court.
The Pickton brothers were eventually sued by Port Coquitlam officials for violating zoning ordinances—neglecting the agriculture for which it had been zoned, and having "altered a large farm building on the land for the purpose of holding dances, concerts and other recreations". They had begun to neglect the site's farming operations and registered a non-profit charity, the Piggy Palace Good Times Society, with the Canadian government in 1996, claiming to "organize, co-ordinate, manage and operate special events, functions, dances, shows and exhibitions on behalf of service organizations, sports organizations and other worthy groups".
Its events included raves and wild parties featuring Vancouver sex workers and gatherings in a converted slaughterhouse on the farm at 953 Dominion Avenue in Port Coquitlam. These events attracted as many as 2,000 people and members of the Hells Angels were known to frequent the farm. Subsequently, the Pickton brothers ignored growing legal pressure and held a 1998 New Year's Eve party, after which they were faced with an injunction banning future parties; the police were "authorized to arrest and remove any person" attending future events at the farm. The society's non-profit status was removed the following year, for inability to produce financial statements. It was subsequently disbanded.
Discovery and investigation
On February 6, 2002, police executed a search warrant for illegal firearms at the Pickton property. Both Pickton brothers were arrested and police obtained a second warrant using what they had seen on the property to search the farm as part of the BC Missing Women Investigation. Personal items belonging to missing women were found at the farm, which was sealed off by members of the joint RCMP–Vancouver Police Department task force. The following day, Pickton was charged with weapons offences. Both of the Picktons were later released; however Robert Pickton was kept under police surveillance.
On February 22, 2002, Robert Pickton was arrested and charged with two counts of first degree murder in the deaths of Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson. On April 2, three more charges were added for the murders of Jacqueline McDonell, Dianne Rock, and Heather Bottomley. A sixth charge for the murder of Andrea Joesbury was laid on April 9, followed shortly by a seventh for Brenda Wolfe. On September 20, four more charges were added for the slayings of Georgina Papin, Patricia Johnson, Helen Hallmark, and Jennifer Furminger. Another four more charges for the murders of Heather Chinnock, Tanya Holyk, Sherry Irving, and Inga Hall were laid on October 3, bringing the total to fifteen. On May 26, 2005, twelve more charges were laid against Pickton for the killings of Cara Ellis, Andrea Borhaven, Debra Lynne Jones, Marnie Frey, Tiffany Drew, Kerry Koski, Sarah de Vries, Cynthia Feliks, Angela Jardine, Wendy Crawford, Diana Melnick, and Jane Doe, bringing the total number of first-degree murder charges to twenty-seven.
Excavations continued at the farm through November 2003; the cost of the investigation is estimated to have been C$$70million by the end of 2003, according to the provincial government. The property is currently fenced off, under lien by the Crown in Right of British Columbia. In the meantime, all the buildings on the property, except a small barn, had been demolished. Forensic analysis proved difficult because the bodies may have been left to decompose, or be eaten by insects and pigs on the farm.
During the early days of the excavations, forensic anthropologists brought in heavy equipment, including two 50-foot (15-metre) flat conveyor belts and soil sifters to find traces of human remains. On March 10, 2004, the government revealed that Pickton may have ground up human flesh and mixed it with pork that he sold to the public; the province's health authority later issued a warning. Another claim was made that he fed the bodies directly to his pigs. In 2003, a preliminary hearing was held and the clothes and rubber boots that Pickton had been wearing during the Eistetter assault were seized by police from an RCMP storage locker. In 2004, lab testing show that the DNA of two women (Borhaven and Ellis) were on the items.
Trial
Pickton's trial began on January 30, 2006, in New Westminster. Pickton pleaded not guilty to the twenty-seven charges of first-degree murder in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. The voir dire phase of the trial took most of the year to determine what evidence might be admitted before the jury. Reporters were not allowed to disclose any of the material presented in the arguments. On March 17, one of the counts was rejected by Justice James Williams for lack of evidence. On August 9, Justice Williams severed the charges, splitting them into one group of six counts and another group of twenty counts.
The trial proceeded on the group of six counts. The remaining twenty counts were ultimately stayed on August 4, 2010. Because of the publication ban, full details of the decision were not made publicly available, but Justice Williams explained that trying all twenty-six charges at once would put an unreasonable burden on the jury as the trial could have lasted up to two years; it would also have increased the possibility of mistrial.
The date for the jury trial of the first six counts was initially set to start January 8, 2007, but was later postponed to January 22. On that date, Pickton faced first-degree murder charges in the deaths of Frey, Abotsway, Papin, Joesbury, Wolfe and Wilson. The media ban was eventually lifted, and the details of what was found during the investigation were publicly released:
During Pickton's trial, lab staff testified that about eighty unidentified DNA profiles, roughly half male and half female, have been detected on evidence.
A loaded .22 revolver with a dildo over the barrel and one round fired, boxes of .357 Magnum handgun ammunition, night-vision goggles, two pairs of faux fur-lined handcuffs, a syringe with three millilitres of blue liquid inside, and "Spanish fly" aphrodisiac were found inside Pickton's trailer. In a videotaped recording played for the jury, Pickton claimed to have attached the dildo to his weapon as a makeshift silencer; this explanation was impractical at best, as revolvers are near-impossible to silence in this manner.
A videotape of Pickton's friend Scott Chubb saying Pickton had told him a good way to kill a female heroin addict was to inject her with windshield washer fluid. A second tape was played for Pickton, in which an associate named Andrew Bellwood said Pickton mentioned killing sex workers by handcuffing and strangling them, then bleeding and gutting them before feeding them to pigs.
Photos of the contents of a garbage can found in Pickton's slaughterhouse, which held some remains of victim Mona Wilson.
On December 9, 2007, the jury returned a verdict that Pickton was not guilty on six counts of first-degree murder, but was guilty on six counts of second-degree murder. On December 11, 2007, after reading eighteen victim impact statements, British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Justice James Williams sentenced Pickton to life with no possibility of parole for 25 years—the maximum punishment for second-degree murder—and equal to the sentence which would have been imposed for a first-degree murder conviction. "Mr. Pickton's conduct was murderous and repeatedly so. I cannot know the details but I know this: What happened to them [the victims] was senseless and despicable," said Justice Williams in passing the sentence.
Victims
On December 9, 2007, Pickton was convicted of second-degree murder in the deaths of six women:
Count One: Sereena Abotsway, 29, was reported missing on August 22, 2001.
Count Two: Mona Lee Wilson, 26, was reported missing on November 30, 2001.
Count Six: Andrea Joesbury, 22, was reported missing June 8, 2001.
Count Seven: Brenda Ann Wolfe, 32, was reported missing on April 25, 2000.
Count Eleven: Georgina Faith Papin, 34, was reported missing in March 2001.
Count Sixteen: Marnie Lee Anne Frey, 24, was reported missing on December 29, 1997.
Pickton also stood accused of first-degree murder in the deaths of twenty other women until these charges were stayed on August 4, 2010:
Count Three: Jacquelene Michelle McDonell, 22, was reported missing on January 16, 1999.
Count Four: Dianne Rosemary Rock, 34, was reported missing on December 13, 2001.
Count Five: Heather Kathleen Bottomley, 27, was reported missing on April 17, 2001.
Count Eight: Jennifer Lynn Furminger, 28, was reported missing on December 27, 1999.
Count Nine: Helen Mae Hallmark, 20, was reported missing on June 15, 1997.
Count Ten: Patricia Rose Johnson, 25, was reported missing on January 2, 2001.
Count Twelve: Heather Gabrielle Chinnook, 30, was last seen in April 2001.
Count Thirteen: Tanya Holyk, 23, was reported missing on November 3, 1996.
Count Fourteen: Sherry Leigh Irving, 24, was reported missing on February 22, 1997.
Count Fifteen: Inga Monique Hall, 46, was last seen in February 1998.
Count Seventeen: Tiffany Louise Drew, 27, was reported missing on December 31, 1999.
Count Eighteen: Sarah Jean de Vries, 29, was last seen in April 1998.
Count Nineteen: Cynthia "Cindy" Feliks, 43, was last seen in December 1997.
Count Twenty: Angela Rebecca Jardine, 27, was reported missing on November 20, 1998.
Count Twenty-One: Diana Melnick, 23, was last seen in December 1995.
Count Twenty-Two: Mission Jane Doe, discovered on February 25, 1995. Pickton refused to enter a plea on the charge involving this victim, known in the proceedings as Jane Doe, so the court registered a not-guilty plea on his behalf. "The count as drawn fails to meet the minimal requirement set out in Section 581 of the Criminal Code. Accordingly, it must be quashed", wrote Justice James Williams. The detailed reasons for the judge's ruling cannot be reported in Canada because of the publication ban covering this stage of the trial.
Count Twenty-Three: Debra Lynne Jones, 42, was last seen in December 2000.
Count Twenty-Four: Wendy Crawford, 43, was last seen in December 1999.
Count Twenty-Five: Kerry Lynn Koski, 38, was reported missing on January 7, 1998.
Count Twenty-Six: Andrea Fay Borhaven, 25, was last seen in March 1997.
Count Twenty-Seven: Cara Louise Ellis, 25, was reported missing on January 21, 1997.
Pickton is implicated in the murders of the following women, but charges have not yet been laid:
Mary Ann Clark, 25, disappeared in August 1991.
Yvonne Marie Boen, 33, was reported missing on March 16, 2001.
Dawn Teresa Crey, was last seen in December 2000.
After Pickton was arrested, witness Lynn Ellingsen came forward to authorities claiming to have seen Pickton skinning a woman hanging from a meat hook years earlier and that she did not tell anyone about it out of fear of losing her life. Additionally, Ellingsen admitted that she blackmailed Pickton about the incident on more than one occasion. The victims' children filed a civil lawsuit in May 2013 against the Vancouver Police Department, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Crown for failing to protect the victims. They reached a settlement in March 2014, where each of the children was to be compensated C$50,000, without an admission of liability.
British Columbia Court of Appeal
Crown appeal
On January 7, 2008, the Attorney General filed an appeal in the British Columbia Court of Appeal, against Pickton's acquittals on the first-degree murder charges. The grounds of appeal related to a number of evidentiary rulings made by the trial judge, certain aspects of the trial judge's jury instructions, and the ruling to sever the six charges Pickton was tried on from the remaining twenty. Although Pickton had been acquitted on the first-degree murder charges, he was convicted of second-degree murder and received the same sentence as he would have on first-degree murder convictions. The relatives of the victims expressed concern that the convictions would be jeopardized if the Crown argued that the trial judge had made errors. Opposition critic Leonard Krog criticized the Attorney-General for not having briefed the victims' families in advance.
Oppal apologized to the victims' families for not informing them of the appeal before it was announced to the general public. Oppal also said that the appeal was filed largely for "strategic" reasons, in anticipation of an appeal by the defence. Under the applicable rules of court, the time period for the Crown to appeal expired thirty days after December 9, when the verdicts were rendered, while the time period for the defence to appeal expired thirty days after December 11, when Pickton was sentenced.
Defence appeal
On January 9, 2008, lawyers for Pickton filed a notice of appeal in the British Columbia Court of Appeal, seeking a new trial on six counts of second-degree murder. The notice of appeal enumerated various areas in which the defence alleged that the trial judge erred: the main charge to the jury, the response to the jurors' questions, amending the jury charge, similar fact evidence, and Pickton's statements to the police.
Decisions of the Court of Appeal
The British Columbia Court of Appeal issued its decisions on June 25, 2009, but some parts of the decisions were not publicly released because of publication bans still in effect. The Court of Appeal dismissed the defence appeal by a 2:1 majority. Due to a dissent on a point of law, Pickton was entitled to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, without first seeking leave to appeal. His notice of appeal was filed in the Supreme Court of Canada on August 24, 2009.
The Court of Appeal allowed the Crown appeal, finding that the trial judge erred in excluding some evidence and in severing the twenty-six counts into one group of twenty counts and one group of six. The order resulting from this finding was stayed, so that the conviction on the six counts of second degree murder would not be set aside.
Supreme Court of Canada
On June 26, 2009, Pickton's lawyers confirmed that they would exercise his right to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. The appeal was based on the dissent in the British Columbia Court of Appeal. While Pickton had an automatic right to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada based on the legal issues on which Justice Donald had dissented, Pickton's lawyers applied to the Supreme Court of Canada for leave to appeal on other issues as well. On November 26, 2009, the Supreme Court of Canada granted this application for leave to appeal. The effect of this was to broaden the scope of Pickton's appeal, allowing him to raise arguments that had been rejected unanimously in the British Columbia Court of Appeal. On July 30, 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada rendered its decision dismissing Pickton's appeal and affirming his convictions. The argument that Pickton should be granted a new trial was unanimously rejected by the Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada.
Although unanimous in its result, the Supreme Court split six to three in its legal analysis of the case. The issue was whether the trial judge made a legal error in his instructions to the jury, and in particular in his "re-instruction" responding to the jury's question about Pickton's liability if he was not the only person involved. Writing for the majority, Madam Justice Charron found that "the trial judge's response to the question posed by the jury did not adversely impact on the fairness of the trial". She further found that the trial judge's overall instructions with respect to other suspects "compendiously captured the alternative routes to liability that were realistically in issue in this trial. The jury was also correctly instructed that it could convict Mr. Pickton if the Crown proved this level of participation coupled with the requisite intent." Justice Louis LeBel, writing for the minority, found that the jury was not properly informed "of the legal principles which would have allowed them as triers of fact to consider evidence of Mr. Pickton's aid and encouragement to an unknown shooter, as an alternative means of imposing liability for the murders".
Aftermath of the court proceedings
Discontinuance of prosecution
British Columbia Crown spokesman Neil MacKenzie announced that the prosecution of Pickton on the twenty other murder charges would likely be discontinued. "In reaching this position," he said, "the branch has taken into account the fact that any additional convictions could not result in any increase to the sentence that Mr. Pickton has already received."
Families of the victims had varied reactions to this announcement. Some were disappointed that Pickton would never be convicted of the twenty other murders, while others were relieved that the gruesome details of the murders would not be aired in court.
Management review of investigation
In 2010, the Vancouver Police Department issued a statement that an "exhaustive management review of the Missing Women Investigation" had been conducted, and the Vancouver Police Department would make the Review available to the public once the criminal matters are concluded and the publication bans are removed. In addition, the Vancouver Police Department disclosed that for several years it has "communicated privately to the Provincial Government that it believed a Public Inquiry would be necessary for an impartial examination of why it took so long for Robert Pickton to be arrested".
Apology
At a press conference, Deputy Chief Constable Doug LePard of the Vancouver Police Department apologized to the victims' families, saying, "I wish from the bottom of my heart that we would have caught him sooner. I wish that, the several agencies involved, that we could have done better in so many ways. I wish that all the mistakes that were made, we could undo. And I wish that more lives would have been saved. So on my behalf and behalf of the Vancouver Police Department and all the men and women that worked on this investigation, I would say to the families how sorry we all are for your losses and because we did not catch this monster sooner."
Missing Women Commission of Inquiry
After Pickton lost his final appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada, the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry chaired by Wally Oppal was called to examine the role of the Vancouver police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the disappearances and murders of women in the Downtown Eastside. Families of the missing and murdered women have been calling for public hearings since before Pickton was arrested and eventually convicted of six murders. The commission's final report submission to the Attorney General was dated November 19, 2012, and was released to the public on December 17. During the inquiry, lawyers for some of the victims' families sought to have an unpublished 289-page manuscript authored by former police investigator Lorimer Shenher entered as evidence and made entirely public. Several passages were read into the inquiry's record but Commissioner Oppal declined to publicize the entire manuscript.
Transfer to penitentiary
During a court hearing on August 4, 2010, Judge Williams stated that Pickton should be committed to a federal penitentiary; up to that point he had been held at a provincial pretrial institution. In June 2018, he was allegedly transferred from Kent Institution in British Columbia to another penitentiary in Port-Cartier, Quebec.
In media
A major plotline in the Canadian crime drama Da Vinci's Inquest deals with a spate of missing women thought to be victims of a prolific serial killer hunting in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Pickton is not directly referred to by name, but starting in the show's fifth season characters and advertisements made reference to "the pig farm" in relation to the case.
In August 2006, Thomas Loudamy, a 27-year-old Fremont, California, resident, claimed that he had received three letters from Robert Pickton in response to letters Loudamy sent under an assumed identity. Loudamy, an aspiring journalist, claimed that his motivation in releasing the letters was to help the public gain insights into Pickton.
Killer Pickton is a 2005 American horror film loosely based on Robert Pickton's killings. In 2015, a film with the working title of Full Flood began production in Vancouver by CBC-TV. Based on Stevie Cameron's book On The Farm, it was to use the life experiences of Pickton's victims for a fictional story about women in the Downtown Eastside who became victims of a serial killer. Pickton was portrayed by Ben Cotton in the film. In 2016, the film was released under the title Unclaimed, and also as On the Farm in certain markets.
In 2016, a book that was claimed to have been written by Pickton entitled Pickton: In his Own Words was released for sale. The publication and marketing of the book initiated controversy, critical petitions, and actions by government to stop Pickton from profiting from the work.
See also
Gilbert Paul Jordan
List of serial killers by country
List of serial killers by number of victims
References
Further reading
External links
Women Commission of Inquiry ("Oppal") Report (November 19, 2012)
R. v. Pickton, (July 30, 2010)
R. v. Pickton, decision of the Court of Appeal for British Columbia (June 25, 2009) (defence appeal)
R. v. Pickton, decision of the Court of Appeal for British Columbia (June 25, 2009) (Crown appeal)
R. v. Pickton, decision of the Supreme Court of British Columbia (December 13, 2007) (ruling re: re-instructing the jury)
R. v. Pickton, decision of the Supreme Court of British Columbia (January 16, 2007) (ruling re: media application to access and publish exhibits #1)
Robert William Pickton Trial Information (Court Services, Ministry of Attorney General)
Covering The Trial: Former Sex Trade Workers Work As Citizen Correspondents For Orato
Backgrounder
TruTV article on Robert Pickton
BBC Article on Pickton (2007-01-21)
Pat Casanova testimony, June 4–6, 2007
History of Sex Work in Vancouver (downloadable PDF book written by sex workers)
PDFs of the Pickton letters obtained by The Vancouver Sun.
Interviews and oral histories with victims' families and community workers, part of research stored at Simon Fraser University Library.
1949 births
1980s murders in Canada
1990s murders in Canada
2000s murders in Canada
20th-century Canadian criminals
21st-century Canadian criminals
20th-century Canadian farmers
Canadian cannibals
Canadian male criminals
Canadian people convicted of murder
Canadian prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment
Canadian serial killers
Crimes against sex workers
Criminals from British Columbia
Downtown Eastside
Living people
People convicted of murder by Canada
People from Port Coquitlam
Prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment by Canada
Publication bans in Canadian case law
Violence against Indigenous women in Canada
Violence against women in Canada