The 74-year-old criminal was sentenced to life imprisonment. He confessed to the murders of 49 women, committed between 1978 and 2002.
He succumbed to his injuries. Robert Pickton, considered one of Canada’s worst serial killers, died this Friday, May 31 after being brutally attacked by a fellow inmate on May 19, at the Port-Cartier penitentiary, in Quebec. The 74-year-old criminal was rushed to hospital and placed in an artificial coma, but ultimately could not be treated. His assailant, a 51-year-old man, was placed in solitary confinement. He had tried to stab the murderer with a “craft pick”before shoving a broomstick into his nose.
Robert Pickton had been incarcerated since 2002. At the time, this pork farmer, who only knew his family farm in the suburbs of Vancouver, lived in a mobile home adjacent to his slaughterhouse. One day in February, several police officers carried out a search on his land. They are looking for firearms that the 50-year-old is allegedly storing illegally. But the incursion into the farm takes a macabre turn when the authorities discover, by chance, human remains in a freezer.
“I’m going to kill another one, to get to 50”
From there, everything comes together. The man was arrested and the facility searched from top to bottom. Investigators found DNA traces of 33 women there. Many of them, drug addicts and prostitutes, had disappeared in previous years in a specific poor and rundown neighborhood in Vancouver. Questioned in police custody, Robert Pickton initially denied being a murderer. He denounces a cabal orchestrated by the police, who, according to him, accused an innocent person as an easy solution in the case of the missing women. He also presented himself as a man without vice, who “did not do drugs, did not smoke, did not drink”. “I’m just a farmer”he would have proclaimed.
But reality catches up with him. The police’s discoveries add up, with other human remains found. He has no choice but to confess to the murders. He goes further, claiming that he killed 49 women in total between 1978 and 2002. “I’m going to kill another one, to get to 50”, he would have said later in the cell. On February 22, 2002, he was first accused of killing two women: Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson. 19 other murders were blamed on him the same year.
“Butchering factory”
The excavations, which cost no less than 70 million Canadian dollars, continued on his farm until November 2003. In the meantime, almost all the buildings on the property were demolished to facilitate the work of investigators and forensic experts. . It is alleged that Robert Pickton, who had trained as a butcher, shot his victims in the head after taking them to his farm. Then he cut off their limbs and threw them as food for his pigs, or left them to decompose on the ground. Authorities also speculated that Pickton ground up human flesh and mixed it with pig flesh… before selling his products to the general public. Confronted with all these leads, Robert Pickton spoke to the police about a “butchering factory”. And added that if he had been arrested, it was because he had been negligent.
The investigation will reveal that the killer had already been arrested for attempted murder in 1997. And that a prostitute had told the police, the same year, that she had fled the farm after being handcuffed and stabbed. Justice considered that this testimony lacked credibility, given this woman’s drug addiction.
Robert Pickton was eventually charged with the murder of 26 prostitutes. At his trial, he pleaded not guilty to all charges. The trial involves no less than 241 witnesses. On December 9, 2007, he was finally convicted of only six murders “not premeditated”. “The Crown had to carefully assess whether it was in the public interest to move forward on the other 20 cases, and the judge ruled that it was not,” said a spokesperson for the British Columbia justice system. However, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Several relatives of victims had the “feeling of having been abandoned by the legal system”as our colleagues from Radio-Canada.
The alleged murderer of Robert Pickton was placed in solitary confinement. Aged 51, he has continued to accumulate prison sentences since the beginning of the 1990s, for assault, receiving stolen property, drug trafficking and theft. He often attacked his fellow prisoners, reports TVA News.