His name was Robert William, or "Willy" Pickton. He was one of the most prolific serial killers in Canada and is called the Pig Farmer Killer or the Butcher. He was a pig farmer with some strange hobbies, such as raping women and then killing them. Investigators found DNA or remains from 33 women at Pickton’s pig farm, and he admitted to killing 49 to an undercover officer. He is believed to have operated from the early 1990s to 2002.
Early Life
He was born in Port Coquitlam, B.C. on a pig farm in 1949. As a child, he was a farmhand. He would spend long hours tending to the animals and slopping the pigs. He described his childhood as being good. Many who knew him said that he was strange and socially awkward. His mother put the pig farm over his hygiene, and he and his brother David were called "Stinky Piggy" at school. They wreaked of manure and were sent to school in unwashed clothes. Pickton was put in special classes at school, and he was held back at times.
He is reported to have only one girlfriend his entire life, but his mother never met her.
The Event That Changed His Life
He began raising a calf at 12, and it became a beloved pet of his. Two weeks later he came home from school unable to find it. He recalled this situation with an investigator under questioning. “I wanted to sleep with it,” Pickton said. “I played with the calf, everything else.” He asked his family members where it was, and they told him to check the barn. He said, "“No. No way. They kill animals down there. . . . I told him [the calf] not to go down there cause they butcher anim–” and he trailed off. He later said to himself he would sneak a peek, and there he saw his beloved calf hanging. He recalled, "Anyways, there’s my calf upside down, cleaned out. . . . butchered it...I finally realized that we’re not here forever. We’re here for the time we’re here for.”
Parties For A Good Cause?
In 1996, he and his brother, David, started a charity called Piggy’s Palace Good Times Society where they threw crazy parties full of alleged drunkenness and nudity. 1700 people are thought to have attended these parties to raise money for service organizations.
The Victims and Crimes
His victims were mainly prostitutes. He would cruise the strip called Low Tack of Downtown Eastside in Vancouver. This area was very low-income and high poverty with lots of open drug use and homelessness. This was the perfect hunting ground for him, since drug-addicted prostitutes were easier for him to take. In fact, he was charged with attempted murder for “Stitch”, a prostitute, because she escaped his hell, but authorities didn’t trust her as a witness due to her drug use. That incident occurred on March 22, 1997.
According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, “In the spring of 1999, an informant told the Vancouver police that a single mother and drug addict named Lynn Ellingsen had seen a woman’s body hanging in Pickton’s slaughterhouse. When questioned by police, Ellingsen initially denied the story. Only much later did she admit that on 20 March she had in fact seen the body. She did not report it because she feared Pickton and depended on him for money for drugs.”
In February of 2002, police executed a search of his property for reports of illegal firearms. What they found will forever be imprinted in their minds. They initially did find illegal guns, but also items belonging to missing women. His property was searched for 2 years. DNA or remains such as bones from 33 women were found on his farm.
He was given the name the Pig Farmer Killer, because there were claims that he would grind his victims up in the meat grinder and feed his victims to his pigs.
Unfortunately, the gruesomeness of his crimes didn’t stop there. It was reported that human remains may have been mixed in with the pig products from the Pickton farm, and BC health officials released that warning in a public statement.
"Cross-contamination could mean that human remains did get into or contaminate some of the pork meat that was produced," reporters were told by a provincial health officer, per The Globe and Mail.
The Sentencing
He was ultimately convicted of killing six women in 2008. He was also charged in the deaths of twenty more, but those charges were stayed. Justice James Williams said this at sentencing:
"Mr. Pickton's conduct was murderous and repeatedly so. I cannot know the details but I know this: What happened to them was senseless and despicable."
Mr. Pickton, there is really nothing I can say to express the revulsion the community feels about these killings…
Williams went on to say, "The women who were murdered, each of them, were members of our community. They were women who had troubled lives. Each of them found themselves in positions of extreme vulnerability. They were persons who were in the ugly grasp of substance abuse and addictions, persons who were selling their bodies to strangers in order to survive.”
He was sentenced to life without parole for 25 years, as requested by the Crown, and he is to serve the six life sentences concurrently.
B.C.'s Attorney General Wally Oppal said, "It will be difficult to ever conclude that Mr. Pickton will ever see the light of day again,” implying that it’s unlikely that Pickton would ever get a parole board to release him.
Written By:
Jennifer Brecheisen
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