Robert Pickton: The Gruesome Crimes of a Serial Killer

Robert Pickton is one of Canada's most notorious serial killers, responsible for the murders of several women in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The Beginning

Robert Pickton was born in 1949 in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. He was raised on a pig farm. As their parents believed that the family pig farm would not be a suitable environment to raise a young lady, Robert's older sister Linda was sent to live with relatives in Vancouver. From an early age, Robert and his younger brother David started working on the farm.

Robert's mother, Louise Pickton, would sometimes send Robert and David to school wearing unwashed, dirty clothes that carried a strong odor of manure, earning the brothers the unflattering nickname "stinky piggy" from their classmates.

Robert Pickton faced academic challenges during his school years, eventually dropping out around 1964. He subsequently worked as a meat-cutter for almost seven years before eventually leaving to work full-time on the family farm.

Life as a Criminal

In the 1970s, Miyazaki's parents passed away, and he and his siblings inherited the family farm.

The Pickton brothers neglected their farm operations in Port Coquitlam, Canada and instead registered a non-profit charity called the Piggy Palace Good Times Society, which hosted parties and events, attracting up to 2,000 people including Hells Angels members.

With roughly 3,500 members and hundreds of charters located across the world, the Hells Angels are widely considered to be the largest motorcycle club in existence.

In March 1997, Robert Pickton was charged with the attempted murder of Wendy Lynn Eistetter, a sex worker who had visited his farm. During an altercation, Eistetter's hand was handcuffed, and Pickton stabbed her. He was also injured in the incident and sought treatment at a local hospital, where he was arrested for attempted murder.

Although the charge was later dismissed because Wendy's account was treated with contempt because she was a drug addict. However, the incident prompted farmworker Bill Hiscox to become more aware of a larger problem occurring on the farm.

The brothers were sued for violating zoning ordinances but ignored legal pressure and continued to hold parties until their non-profit status was removed in 1999.

Canadian police received a tip in 1999 that Robert Pickton had a freezer filled with human flesh on his farm. Despite interviewing Pickton, who denied any involvement in the disappearance of the women, and obtaining his consent to search the farm, the police did not conduct a search at that time.

Over the next three years, Hiscox observed that women who visited the farm tended to go missing. He eventually reported this to the police, but it wasn't until 2002 that a search of the farm was conducted. During the search, items belonging to missing women were found on the farm property.

Further investigations and searches of the farm revealed DNA evidence of at least 26 women who had been reported missing.

Robert Pickton was arrested and charged with the murder of the missing women, it was the largest investigation of any serial killer in Canadian history. Excavations at the farm continued until 2003 and forensic analysis proved difficult due to the decomposition of the bodies. It was revealed that Pickton may have ground up human flesh and mixed it with pork that he sold to the public, and that he may have fed the bodies to his pigs.

Initially, Robert Pickton was arrested on two murder charges, but three more were added soon after, and eventually, by 2005, he faced a total of 26 murder charges. As a result, he became one of the most notorious and prolific serial killers in Canadian history.

During the investigation, police discovered the gruesome details of how Pickton had murdered the 26 women. Through police reports and a taped confession from Pickton, it was determined that the women had been killed in various ways. Some were handcuffed and stabbed, while others were injected with antifreeze.

After killing the women, Robert Pickton either took their bodies to a nearby meat rendering plant or ground them up and fed them to the pigs on his farm.

Although he was charged with 26 murders, Pickton was only convicted on six counts of second-degree murder because those cases were the ones which was proven that he committed. During the trial, the charges were separated to make it easier for the jury to evaluate.

A judge sentenced Pickton to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years, the maximum sentence for a second-degree murder charge in Canada. All other charges against him were dropped, as the courts determined that they could not increase his sentence, which was already the maximum possible.

The Police Negligence- How Wendy Lynn Eistetter's Testimony was Treated With Contempt

The attempted-murder charge against Pickton was stayed on January 27, 1998, due to concerns that the woman who accused him had drug addiction issues and was considered too unstable to provide testimony that could help secure a conviction.

However, police seized the clothes and rubber boots that Pickton had been wearing that evening, which were left in a storage locker in the police station for more than seven years. It wasn't until 2004 that laboratory testing revealed that the DNA of two of the missing women, Borhaven and Ellis, was found on the items seized from Pickton in 1997. If this had been determined earlier, the serial killer would have been stopped early enough.