BACKGROUND
Robert William Willy Pickton was born on October 24th 1949, and is a convicted murderer from Canada. He is a serial killer. A serial killer is someone who kills a number of people over a period of time. He was the second of three children and had an older brother and a younger sister. He stayed with his workaholic mother who was managing the family meat business.
She wanted him to work long hours along with his brother, including school days. He had no interaction with his father, but his mother was very close to him. He was slow in school and so was put into special education classes. He dropped out of high school. He was anti-social and never dated and was typically ignored by girls. When he was 12, his parents slaughtered the horse he had owned and he never got over it. As a kid, he would crawl into a pig carcass and sit there for hours if he wanted to escape. He had very little basic hygiene and mostly smelled like manure as he refused to shower because of his fear of showers.
He lived in a small trailer on a family farm where he worked slaying pigs. He had a history of using crack cocaine for drug abuse. He visited Vancouver’s downtown Eastside to pick up prostitutes and drug addicts and take them to his house for food and laundering. Although he lacked social skills, he organized several parties at the piggy palace that drew up to 1800 guests. The piggy palace was a place that was meant to be used for charity that he set up along with his brother. Willy did not hold any past criminal records.
CRIMES AND INVESTIGATION
Missing women murdered and raped by Willy
(Source: The Canadian Encyclopedia)
Pickton was charged with the alleged murder of sex worker Wendy Lynn Eistetter on March 23, 1997, whom he had stabbed multiple times during a farm brawl. Eistetter had told the police that Pickton had handcuffed her, but that after suffering multiple lacerations, she had escaped. She told them that she had disarmed him and that she had stabbed him with his weapon. At Eagle Ridge Hospital, Pickton required help, while Eistetter was recovering in the nearest emergency department. On C$2,000 bail, he was released. In January of 1998, the charge was dismissed. Months later, Port Coquitlam authorities sued the Picktons for breaching zoning laws, neglecting the agriculture for which it was zoned and “altered a large farm building on the land for the purpose of organizing dances, concerts and other recreations”. The Picktons defied the legal threats and hosted a New Year’s party in 1998, during which they faced an injunction barring future parties; the police were “authorized to arrest and remove any person” attending future farm activities. The non-profit status of the organization was revoked the next year because of its failure to procure financial statements. It was disbanded afterwards.
The Pickton Pig Farm
(Source: The Canadian Encyclopedia)
Pickton was arrested on February 5, 2002, after police, working on a firearms violation warrant, discovered a missing woman’s belongings on the property. As part of the BC Missing Women Case, which investigates women’s disappearances, many from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, going back to September 1978, that of Lillian Jean O’Dare, a second court order was received to begin investigating the farm (Pickton would have been 28 years old at the time). It is the worst area in all of Canada, also known as the “Low Track” and is infected with drug trafficking and prostitution. It has the highest HIV infection rate in North America, too. The woman whose belongings were discovered on the farm is one of the women whose absence has been investigated by a task force led by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Department of Police in Vancouver.
Scene of Crime
(Source: Criminal Minds Wiki)
They discovered remnants of several victims as they searched the grounds, such as skulls split in half and stuffed with human hands and feet, 33 women’s DNA, bloody clothes belonging to a survivor, and one victim’s jawbone and teeth. They also uncovered a .22 revolver with a sex toy hooked to its barrel, .357 Magnum rounds, two pairs of faux fur-lined handcuffs, a pair of goggles for night vision, and photographs of a trash can holding a victim’s remains. Pickton believed that it was intended to act as a makeshift suppressor for the sex toy used, which had both his and the victim’s DNA on it. The pistol held a used bullet as well. When in jail, Pickton told an undercover investigator posing as a fellow prisoner that in order to raise his victim list to 50, he wished to kill one more, implying that he is accountable for 49 murders. In his trial, which began on January 30, 2006, a video clip of the assertion was later used as evidence. Pickton pled not guilty to 27 first-degree murder charges, one of which was eventually dropped because of a lack of evidence. Not all of the information concerning the trials are widely available due to the publishing ban.
Pickton, known to mates as Willie, confessed to murdering 49 females. Robert Pickton committed his offences from 1997 to 2001, but was charged with murders dating back to 1978. He was charged for killing female prostitutes and drug users. He is named the serial killer of the pig farmer as he murders several innocent women and feeds them to pigs. He told an undercover police officer sharing his cell after his conviction that the death toll was a shame, stopping just short of his lifelong dream. “I was gonna do another one, make it an even 50,” he said in a videotaped conversation in secret. “I wanted to do one more, make the big 5-0.”
CONVICTIONS
Instead of getting 26 offences or charges, Robert Pickton was accused of 6 charges of second-degree murder. While convicted of the murders of six people, Pickton’s Port Coquitlam pig farm, which acted as the crime scene for his murders, revealed physical and forensic evidence for thirty-three women. Numerous other missing people from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside district, mainly impoverished prostitutes with chronic opioid abuse, remain unaccounted for. This was a big concern that was dispersed through public and criminal proceedings in order not to present him with 26 allegations in court trials. The 26 charges were divided into two sessions by the Supreme Court in order for the jurors to be able to handle the trials. Since 6 victims were found dead, the first trial included only 6 murder charges and evidence that police uncovered was the bodies of only 6 women. More proof was needed to show that the other 20 women were not alive in order to get a second conviction on murder charges. The court gathered proof that 20 missing women were linked to Robert and were murdered by him, but they wanted witnesses to testify in the courtroom, which was impossible to do since about 535 witnesses were needed by the court. Robert was not guilty of murder in the 1st degree because the crown refused to claim that these killings were plotted and malicious. Not enough clear proof was present that would establish the manner of death.
MODUS OPERANDI
Pickton reported that he had taken his victims, who were prostitutes, to the farm, handcuffed them, raped them, slaughtered them by strangling them, bled and destroyed them, ran them through a wood-chipper, and then fed his pigs with their bones. It is also known that the victims were crushed, and the resulting mince was combined with the farm pork mince and the packets were given to the friends and family of Pickton. In his red pickup truck, Pickton would drive to downtown Vancouver where he was cruising downtown east in search of an appropriate victim. He made promises of drugs or payment for sex for luring people to his farm. To sedate them, he injected them with windshield wiper fluid. He forced them and then raped them. During sex, he would get abusive and accuse them of anything to intensify his anger. By either shooting or strangling them with a piece of rope, he would then kill them with plastic wrapping on the floor. Finally, at the piggy palace, he slaughtered them and combined their bodies with pork and served them to his pigs and even to the patrons. Pickton did not indicate any of the signs of Mac Donald Triad besides the killing of pigs and that was part of his farm work. Slaughtering animals may have been the spark of his murders.
JUDGEMENTS
It took the jury of seven men and five women ten days to draw a verdict after a lot of testimonies and 10 months of proceedings, and on Sunday, Pickton was guilty of second-degree murder of the six women whose bodies were discovered on his farm in Vancouver.
Robert William Pickton was sentenced to life imprisonment the next Tuesday without parole for 25 years, the longest imprisonment 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”.
REFERENCES
- https://prezi.com/lzejdy0uzrle/robert-pickton-serial-killer/
- https://www.crimeandinvestigation.co.uk/crime-files/robert-pickton/investigation
- https://criminalminds.fandom.com/wiki/Robert_Pickton
- https://www.slideserve.com/maegan/robert-pickton
- https://prezi.com/boe5nke3z8tr/case-study-robert-pickton/
- https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/human-remains-from-pickton-farm-may-have-reached-food-supply/article1129161/
- https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/ny-news-pig-farmer-killer-20190303-story.html
Author
V Alekhya Tripura
Intern, Dept. of Forensic Science and Criminal Investigation
Legal Desire Media & Insights