Serial Killer Who Fed His Victims to his Pigs
By: Tim Connolly
Tags: True Crime, Vancouver, Serial Killers, Murder, Pigs

Serial Killer Who Fed His Victims to his Pigs

For decades, Vancouver police ignored the missing women

Image Credit: Murderpedia.org

The suburban town of Port Coquitlam is a 45-minute drive from big-city Vancouver. Robert “Willy” Pickton, owned a pig farm in this sleepy suburb. He often slept with his pigs and spent his spare time trying to win over drug-addicted sex workers he picked up on the east side of Vancouver.

When he couldn’t get the women he wanted to “save” to quit drugs, he murdered and dismembered them. He hid their remains in pits on his pig farm, rendered what he couldn’t bury, and, in some cases — ground up their flesh and organs for food, which he gifted to friends and acquaintances.

Pickton cruised East Vancouver and the notorious area known as Hastings for most of his 49 victims, and Vancouver police ignore the dozens of missing women.

A horror film childhood

Born in 1949, Pickton grew up in a dysfunctional farm family. The Picktons had a reputation as being mean and unsavory.

Louise Pickton, his mom, had few teeth and the ones she had left were rotten. She was loud, fast-talking, and often screeched. She had little hair on her head, so often wore a scarf. Louise had long hair that grew out of her chin as well as a mustache. She habitually wore only a housedress and jeans.

Like their mom, Willy and his brother Dave inherited a tendency to talk fast in high-pitched tones and had low self-care and social skills. Dave fared better than the younger Willy, however.

The family’s pigs wandered in and out of their house. As a result, Pickton’s childhood home was filled with pig excrement. The Pickton kids slopped 200 lbs every morning and evening, and the brothers constantly smelled foul.

The Pickton’s house was located at the bottom of a long hill. At the top of the hill was the town’s mental hospital, which employed a sizable portion of the Coquitlam’s residents, including health care workers. At school, these children of professionals disliked and excluded the Pickton kids.

The school was one of their few escapes; Willie and Dave spent all the rest of their time on the pig farm. (Their sister Linda fled at an early age to have a more normal life and grew up to become relatively well-adjusted).

Willy had a strong attachment to his mother and barely interacted with his abusive father.

He dropped out of school Freshman year, as his peers picked on him for the way he looked, the way he talked, and how bad he smelled. When Willy got upset, it was rumored that he would crawl into a butchered hog’s carcass to hide.

Willy Pickton has often told a favorite story that he claimed shaped the man he became, although some think it is a play for sympathy.

At the age of 12, Willy bought a three-week-old calf at a livestock show, the first-ever he’d purchased with his own money. One day, he came home from school unable to find the calf. His father sent him to the barn, where he found his calf hanging from the barn ceiling, butchered.

Teen years

At 14, Willy moved to another pig farm that he would eventually own as an adult. The acreage was littered with pits of quicksand and included a lagoon-like cesspool. Eventually, Willy filled the many acres with junked cars.

The farm had 700 pigs that needed to be slopped (fed mash) three times a day. By the time he was 15, Willy was working full-time with his brother as a pig farmer.

He bathed about once a month and rarely changed clothes or boots.

His brother Dave had a somewhat more normal life, dating and staying in school. But like his mom and brother, Dave had a nasty disposition.

At 16, Dave was driving home and saw a boy walking alongside the road. He hit him with his car, then sped off. The boy lay injured but alive. Louise Pickton went back to the scene and rolled the wounded child into a ditch filled with water.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) discovered the boy in the ditch and noted his death was caused by drowning. Dave was charged only with leaving the scene of a crime and received four years of probation. Louise received no consequences.

Career

Dave went into demolition, while Willy became a butcher and continued farming pigs. They also began keeping horses at the pig farm. Willy’s favorite, Goldie, died after four years. Willy decapitated the horse and took the head to a taxidermist, then mounted Goldie’s head on the wall of his bedroom.

Goldie, Pickton’s former horse, hanging on his wall. Image Credit: Murderpedia.org

In 1978, Willy’s father Leonard died at the age of 91. That same year a fire broke out and killed 600 pigs. In 1979, Louise Pickton passed away at 67.

Despite the rough year, the farm was worth nearly $1 million and it would be divided among the children. They each received $90,000 from their mother’s will. To get his money, Willy was required to run the farm for ten more years (till the age of 40) but he would also receive $20,000 more than his siblings.

Willy ran a slaughterhouse and butcher shop. He would kill by slitting the animal’s throat, or using a nail gun. He’d then hang the animal by its hoof. This is the procedure he would later use in butchering women.

He dumped the butchered bodies of dead animals and women into a 40-foot hole he’d dug for that purpose.

The farm and the rendering plant

The sprawling farm became a popular spot for Hell’s Angels and other outlaws as a chop shop and party center, but it was still a working farm.

Willy took his meat to West Coast Reduction, a rendering facility.

Rendering plants process non-edible body parts into by-products. The meat is processed and cooked until the grease is separated, or rendered. This grease is made into cosmetics, soap, and candy. There is also goo left over, which is made into animal food and treats.

When investigators finally began excavating the pig farm, there was forensic evidence of human remains. They found body parts in Pickton’s freezer.

Evidence from the farm also hinted that Pickton fed his victims directly to his pigs and likely group up human flesh to mix with pork for sale to the public. After these gruesome discoveries, the local health department issued a warning about any meat sold by the Picktons.

The Pickton farm. Image Credit: Murderpedia.org

The less dead

Vancouver, like all large cities, has its dark side. On the east side sits Hastings, the place to find hard drugs and sex workers for “dates.” With his parents dead, Willy Pickton began to spend a lot of time on the streets of Hastings.

He chose women who would become classified as the “less dead” among law enforcement; in other words, women of color, drug users, and sex workers whose lives, in the eyes of many lawmen, didn’t matter.

The women, however, had caseworkers, families, and friends who noticed when their daughters, sisters and friends never came home. The Vancouver Sun began reporting a raft of disappearances, too — yet the police did not make an effort to solve the mystery of the missing Hastings sex workers for over a decade.

The Vancouver Police Department (VPD) was, to put it lightly, unmotivated. They took the attitude that women who vanished from the Hastings area just decided to leave town, and good riddance.

With no bodies, it was easy for VPD to treat the crimes as if they never happened. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (a mix of the Texas Rangers and FBI) offered the VPD help but it was rebuffed.

Head honchos and even one Vancouver mayor took the attitude that the victims weren’t quite human. Racism, too, played a part: about 15% of sex workers in the East Side are Native women — yet 40% of serial killer victims are Native.

Three other serial killers were operating at the same time as Willy Pickton. Fourteen Vancouver women were killed in the 1980s when four serial killers (including Pickton) were operating in British Columbia.

When they finally began investigating the missing women, the VPD investigation to excavate Pickton’s property cost $70 million.

The Piggy Palace Good-Time Society

Another factor that dissuaded VPD from looking more closely at Willy and Dave Pickton was their “crew” who included various outlaw bikers. In addition, the pig farm was a huge, profitable business operation, making both Dave and Willy wealthy men.

In 1995, the brothers opened a club on the farm nicknamed the Piggy Palace. By now, Willy had murdered at least 20 women. The club had security, bartenders, and bands and brought in thousands a night from alcohol sales and side enterprises, like cockfighting.

Some of The Piggy Palace patrons were police. It is believed that some policemen in the ranks were aware that the farm was a likely spot where missing women could end up.

Victims and survivors

The first likely murder victim was Wendy Louise Allen, who disappeared on March 30, 1979, and the second Rebecca Guno, thought to be murdered on June 22, 1983. After these two, the murders happened more frequently: the next victim met her fate on January 1, 1984.

In 1985, Will picked Tracy Bunyan up for sex. He took her back to his trailer. She said the smell of Willy and the trailer was disgusting and his trailer was full of women’s clothes. He assaulted her with a knife, but he eventually drove her back to Vancouver. Tracy reported that Willy said he was giving her “one chance” to clean up her act — or else.

Willy used his rage over his victim’s drug addictions to justify murder. Like the Green River Killer, he believed he was a savior of street workers and was helping mankind by cleansing the world. Willy liked to play the part of the “nice guy” who wanted nothing more than to help others, especially women.

In 1997, Pickton took Wendy Lynn Elstetter to the farm for sex, then handcuffed her and stabbed her in the stomach. She stabbed him, too, and both got treatment at the same hospital. Elstetter’s attempt to get a conviction led nowhere; because she was a drug addict, prosecutors deemed her two emotionally unstable to testify.

A disjointed, sprawling investigation

In 2002, the RCMP checked out the farm on an illegal weapons charge and found the belongings of some of the missing women. They began a time-consuming investigation of the pig farm and the Pickton brothers — one that should have begun 15 years earlier.

Shortly after their investigation got into full swing, a man walking in a swamp that stretched out over Pickton’s property stumbled upon a human skull. After waiting a day and a half, the man (who had his own history of legal troubles) contacted the police.

VPD discovered the skull had been sliced in half, by the hand of a butcher rather than a surgeon. Forensic scientists estimated the skull had been there between one and two years, based on the amount of “grave wax” they found clinging to it.

The skull turned out to be a DNA match to rib bone the VPD had already confiscated from Pickton’s property. The pig farm had also yielded two human skulls that had been sliced in half in exactly the same manner.

As the evidence mounted, the case against Pickton became overwhelming.

When Willy Pickton was finally arrested and jailed, he was charged between February 2002 and May 2005 with 27 counts of second-degree murder. (Twenty more counts were added after he was convicted).

He was ultimately convicted of six counts of second-degree murder. He got a sentence of “life” with a minimum of 25 years — without the possibility of parole. In Canada, this the maximum sentence.

The Vancouver Police Department issued a public statement apologizing for their delayed and inadequate investigation.