Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
The person known as “The Pig Farm Butcher” or “The Pig Farmer Killer” is Robert Pickton, one of Canada’s most notorious serial killers.
He was a pig farmer in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, who was convicted of the murders of six women and linked by DNA to at least 33, though he confessed to killing 49.
On this rundown farm, The Canadian police discovered an unimaginable horror …
A slaughter house for human beings…
There’s DNA ,all over the farm, body parts in the form of bones and teeth and partial jaw bones.
for more than a decade a predator, had hunted women in Vancouver. the killing, the dismembering ,it was a prosecss ,he really enjoyed
The skulls were bisected with the reciprocating saw which he used ,it is slaughterhouse on pigs.
At the time of his capture , the number of dead and missing women was staggering, he was going for an even 50 , as far as the number of victims were concerned.
His shocking crimes eanred him the name;
” the Butcher” Robert Pickton Vancouver’s most profilic serial killer.
February 1999 Willie Pickton was on the prowl,he haded to Vancouver’s Downtown East side , looking for a prostitute or a drug addict.
Any women desperate for money,he spotted a young cocaine addict and offered to buy her drugs,once snared ,he took her back to his trailer.
Once dead Pickton knew how to make his victim disappear…
Willie was suspected of literally butchering the women like the animals or the pigs he butchered ,Pickton’s gruesome methods made his crimes almost undetectable.
To stop him ,the police had to conduct the most complex investigation in Canadian history.
Robert William Pickton was born on the 24th of October 1949.
His parents Leonar and Louise Pickton ran a pig farm in Port Coquitlam 15 miles east of Vancouvermon the farm the family raised , slaughtered and butchered livestock.
The life on the farm was very primitive, the animals were always allowed run in and out of the pickon’s house.
Willie’s older sister Linda lived with relatives in Vancouver because his father believed that a pig farm was no place for a girl to grow up.
And Willie and his younger brother David stayed behind to work, and they’re demanding mother made sure that the boys stayed on task.
She really was a tyrant , she ran the roost ,the kids worked very very hard and she had this distinctive voice,she’d shout at the kids and say ” you kids get out of here right now” and she’d screech at them.
For Louise Pickton,pigs came first and cleanliness wasn’t a concern.
The pickton children were famous for stinking of manure and pigs and unwashed clothing and unwashed bodies when they got on the school bus in the morning.
Children didn’t want to sit near them, and they called them;” stinky piggy”
Willie struggled at school ,his teachers labelled him slow and he was given special lessons ,he and his brother tried to escape school in any way possible.
They would come back home and sneak into the house and hide under their beds and they would stay there all day untill school was out so their parents wouldn’t know that they had skipped .
Friendless the young Willie focused on farm work, especially caring for the family’s livestock.
When he was 11 years old, Willie used his savings to buy a calf at auction,the animal became his pet and only friend,he just really loved the calf,every day he would come home and nurture it ,take care of it ,feed it ,one day he came home and the calf was missing.
Willie went to his mother and she was very brisk with him, and said to go down to the barn ,he went down to the barnd and found that the calf had been slaughtered.
He was hysterical that numbed out any feelings he ever had for human connection and for understanding that he could love or to connect to someone that was severed at that point.
Willie continued to struggle in school and in 1963 the fourteen -year old dropped out.
He found work as a butcher’s apprentice where he discovered a talent for dissecting animals, he knew how to saw and where to saw them ,where to make the incisions in the body parts , how to skin them , in short he knew what he was doing.
For the next four years ,Willie kepy up his chores and his apprenticeship,it was a relative happy time for the 18 year old,but life on the Pickton farm was rarely happy or normal for long.
On the 16th of October 1967 Willie was taught a shocking lesson.
Dave Pickton had just got his driver’s license, he was 16 and he took the family truck out for a bit of a joyride down the road.
The inexperienced driver accidentally hit a young boy walking along a country road,David raced home and told his mother what had happened, as Willy later told friends,his mother knew just what to do.
She told him to take the truck right away to the garage that looked after their vehicles and get it fixed and ” i’ll take of the kid”.
Louise found the boy lying in in the road ,he was badly injured but still alive,the evidence suggested that she rolled his body into a watery ditch where he drowned.
Allthough suspicious of the circumstances the police ruled the death an accident, Non of the Pickton’s were charged with a crime.
It was a family where if you could get away with something you got away .
Pickton’s mother was extremely antisocial and perhaps it was those antisocial traits that Louise had that really affected Willie and really shaped his feelings about what he could get away with.
In 1970 , just after his 21 st birthday ,Willie inexplicably left his apprenticeship,he went to work full time on his parents farm.
There was really no one else but Willie to do the farm work .
Willy continued to feed the pigs and shovel manure and he added a few new jobs to hs list,he’d go to auction and buy pigs then bring them back to the farm and slaughter them.
Willies work often took him to West Coast Reduction an animal waste disposal facility near downtown Vancouver.
Willie was known to drop off barrels of materials at the rendering plant which would take the materials and turn them into other products.
After trips to the plant Willie often visited a seedy neighborhood known as Low track in Vancouver’s down town Eastside ,the area attracted prostitutes and drug addicts.
The downtown eastside is probably the biggest concentration of human misery that exists in a developed world.
There’s nothing like it anywhere else in terms of the numbers of people that are down and out and never coming back,people are forced to support themselves through selling drugs ,selling their bodies , stealing.
But street corners and dingy bars,willy could pay for companionship, affection, and sex, things he couldn’t get anywhere else.
Amid the sordid lives of low tracks population Willie found his nich, he began frequenting the Astoria Hotel a pub on east Hastings street,here men talk to him as equals and women offered him sexual favors.
He had grown up as a very powerless person and to have people that he could do favors for, help out , do anything ,gave him a position, gave him a feeling that he had ,some sort of power.
Power that he enjoyed but gradually Willie’s need for power grew, he picked up prostitutes with increasing regularity, outwardly , he seemed friendly even caring,but once agirld got into his car ,he could turn violent.
Guys like Willie need more and more stimulation because they feel restless, they feel bored and the only way to get that is to kind of up the ante and to do something more.
Willie pickton’s harsh childhood and diark desires were transforming him into a monster, and the women of Vancouver’s low track would prove to be easy prey.
He just did what he knew and that was butcher and dispose of things, and you got this recipe for murder that dosen’t end.
In 1975 ,25 year old Willie Pickton spent his days butchering pigs and his nights trolling for prostitutes in Vancouver seedy downtown eastside.
Willy had two personalities ,he would be the kind of shucks simple farm boy in the country,in town he was the big spender, the boss of the Astoria.
Handing out the money ,handing out the drugs ,he’d settled into a predictable if not disturbing routine .
but in 1978 Pickton’s life changed abruptly.
His parents health had been failing and in January that year his father died soon after his mother became terminally ill with cancer.
As Willy took care of her ,he saw this onces all powerfull women become sickly and frail.
He changed her diaperes ,he looked after her ,he nursed her and have also found that very traumic the most basic primitive thing in the world is a relationship a child has with his mother it’s the first relationship and it’s one that it’s very hard to break,to have to care for her was probably one of the hardest things he had to do.
In April Willies mother died leaving the farm and slaughter house to her three children.
The siblings spolit the modest inheritance but Willie’sbrother and sister wanted nothing to do with the family business,they left the farm work to Willy after all , butchering pigs was what he knew best.
Willy is not the brightest guy in the world, he was dirty and he lived like a pig and his and his life revolved around pigs, he didn’t enjoyed life on the farm but he knew it was his responsibility,it was something he had to do.
Willie’s brothe Dave took over the main house…
…And Willie moved in to a trailer on an isolated part of the property.
He was still stuck on the farm but for the first time in his life,Pickton could do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted.
He frequently entertained female guests,he’d bring women out to stay for a while and he would teach them butchering skills and they would go to movies and they would go shopping.
It was sort of this bucolic nice life with one of these women after another.
These friends of Willie’s didn’t mind his poor hygiene,Wille with such a distasteful character that he had to troll pretty low to get friends,most of his friends and associates were people that wanted things from him .
Pickton would often pay these women with money and drugs to clean his trailer or help around the farm.
But they never had sex with Willie-and he wanted it badly.
One evening in 1980 Pickton was cruising the streets of eastside,he spotted a young girl on Hastings streets according to the girl.
Willie picked her up in his truck and as she later told a journalist,he quickly turned violent, she was a 14 year old that he picked up in his car in downtown Vancouver and attacked her with a knife and he raped her and threw her out into a parking lot.
despite this seemingly newfound lust for violence this alleged attack seemed to satiate willie’s desires,for over a decade he resumed his routine of days on the farm and nights on the town.
Then in 1994, the Pickton’s sold the north end of the farm,the sale netted almost two million dollars,flush with cash Willy and his brother started a social events buisness in 1996.
Piggy ‘s Palace good times society was an excuse for the brothers to throw wild parties,there would be literally hundreds of people,sometimes as many as 18 00 people had showed up,Willie often took prostitutes from low track to Palace parties.
Afterwards ,they’d go to his trailer, they engaged in kinky sex,involving bondage,for the first time in his life ,Willie was in control.
He recent wealth gave him power over people , especially the wretched souls of Vancouver’s low track,he exploited the vulnerable drug -addicted prostitute in order to satisfy his disturbing sexual fantasies.
He was a pig farmer who obviously had a kind of taste for activites that most of us would consider not pleasant and when he didn’t get what he wanted he could turn violent quickly.
In March 1997,a prostitute called Wendy, went home with Pickton ,during sex Willy tried to handcuff her,but she broke free,Pickton grew enraged.
Wendy maneged to grab a knife from the kitchen,for every stab he stabbed her she stabbed him back.
Barly closed and badly wounded Wendy fled the farm , an elderly couple driving past picked her up and took her nearby hospital.
The police charged Pickto with assault but Wendy was too terrified to testify she never showed up for the trial .
The case against Pickton was dismissed, he went back to his farm ,back to his pigs and back to his butcher knives.
In August 1997 Pickton returned to the city low track, he approched a 24 year old women called Marnie Frey, Marnie was a heroin addict,Willie offered to by her drugs in exchange for sex.
He took her back to his trailer, after sex, he turned violent,Marnie was never seen again…
He probably took her body apart and buried it in pieces on the farm some of it anyway, what was left he may have disposed off at West coast reduction .
The animal wast disposal plant that Willie frequented.
The murder of Marnie Frey marked the start of a violent new chapter in Pickton’s life, along with a compelling desire to sexually dominate women, he now had a taste for murder.
Between 1995 and 1997 21 women vanished from Vancouver sleazy downtown eastside neighborhood.
No one suspected that Willie Pickton was luring women to his pig farm and slaughtering them .
Serial killes generally need bigger and bigger thrill and so they escalate their violence when you see that with Willie;
you see that he went from going to have sex with prostitutes to bring them to his home to raping someone to killing.
1998
Nine more women vanished, the police did not investigate and they discounted the possibility of foul play.
There were family members and friends and associates-the women that were missing that we’re filing police reports and being told “these women just get on the greyhound and they go somewhere else”
Police don’t like to investigate any case where there isn’t a body they didn’t want to take these cses seriously.
But the prostitutes and drug addicts on Vancouver’s skid row knew that they were being targeted…
Elain Allan ran a shelter that provided food and social services to women who work the streets,Allan reported several disappearances but the police didn’t follow them up.
The Vancouver police wouldn’t even say serial and killer in the same sentence they would say ,”well, what do you expect, these wmen will get in a car with a stranger, so who knows where they are ” like,sort of a shrinking of the shoulders kind of attitude.
Women from low trank continued to go with Willie Pickton, partly because of the money he gave them and partly because he had developed a reputation for being a nice guy…
He even maintained friendships with a few women ,one of Willie’s friend was a crack addict , called Lynn Ellingsen,for several months in 1999 she lived on his farm, after gettigng high in Willie’s trailer one night Lynn fell a sleep.
Something had awakened her that night and she looked out an saw a light coming from the slaughterhouse,curious she went outside to take a peek and see what’s going on…
... Dangling in front of her were a women’s purple painted toenails,it was Georgina Poppin,picktons latest victim,terified ,Lynn fled the farm ,Willy did not go after her.
Willie was a bit of a conundrum ,perhaps he didn’t kill Ellingsen because she was a friend and he’d gotten to know her,most serial killers kill people that they don’t know.
Ellingsen never went to the police, and Willie continued to butcher.
The pigfarm millionaire was on his way to becoming Canada’s most profilic serial killer,by February 1999 ,pig farmer Robert Willie Pickton had murdered at least two women,but more than 30 women were missing from the streets of Vancouver.
As the police continued to discount the disappearances,Pickton prepared to claim another vicitm.
Her name was Brenda Wolf, she was a drug addict who had come to Willy’s pig farm,hoping to score some drugs.-she never left.
He typically bound his victims or hand cuffed them , and strangled some victims,either with wire or with belt ,as willy later claimed, he carried his victims lifeless bodies to the slaughter house,with the precision of an experienced butcher he cut them up.
For morst of his victims, Pickton would load their remains into barells and dump them at west coast reduction.
Brenda was the 53 rd Vancouver woman to vanish without a trace,the missing women were all prostitutes or drug addicts from the city’s skid row.
As women became increasingly nervouse ,Willie began having trouble concincing them to come to his farm.Willy had diminished capacities, he’s a bit of a dim bulb,but he was shifty and clever in a kind of animal way.
The pig farmer had a few female friends and he found ways to use them to lure vicitms.
One of his friends was Dinah taylor,Willie sent taylor to women’s shelters in search of prostitutes and drug addicts. she would go in there and say ” let’s go party with Uncle Willie, he’s got drugs ,he’s got booze ,he’s got money”
Once he had them at his farm, the women was easy prey,it’s sort of a psychological thrill to go from being the rejected to be the one that sits back and has women even brought to him and not only being brought to him, but being brought to hm to prepare for slaughter.
He would usually accuse them of stealing something from him , stealing money from his wallet,something like that and use that as an excuse to work up a rage against them and then he’d attack them.
By January 2001,the number of missing women had reached 62.
The authorities could no longer ignore the problem .
That April the Vancouver Police Department and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched te missing woman’s task force.
Revard posters promised $ 100,000 for information leading to an arrest,over 12,000 tip-offs flooded the hotline, several callers mentioned a pig farmer,east of Vancouver.
Willie’s name was eventually added to a list of suspects.
He had a prior arrest for assault but no convictions, the police didn’t probe any further.
They didn’t really know how to look for a serial killer,they didn’t have the manpower ,they had terrible records,they didn’t have a DNA bank to check the identity of these women.
The families of the missing women were desperate for answers,they urged the police to investigate.
They didn’t put more importance on him ,they were tracking a whole lot different people and he probably just fell through the cracks.
Willie continued his killing spree during the course of 2001.
In June he murdered Andrea Joesbury and in August Sereena Abotsway became his next conquest.
But unlike his other victims ,Pickton didn’t immediately dispose of their bodies,instead he placed their heads, hands and feet inside plastic buckets and stored them in a meat freezer.
He got sloppy ,he got careless , here’s a man who may not have really underestood the implications of what could happened to him.
He thought he was sort of invulnerable and gangling back to his mother,his mother got away with murder and he thought he felt sort of invincible.
November 2001
Willie stopped on the corner of Main and Hastings to talk to 26 year old Mona Wilson at his promise of free dope and booze ,she jumped in his car.
Instead of taking Mona to his trailer , Pickton led her to a camper van behind the barn, after sex , he savagely beaten her.
Perhaps this particular woman tried to fight back or did something that was outside the script that Willie had in his mind and that somehow it must have set off whatever psychological rage that he had.
Pickton then shot her with a 22 caliber revolver,her blood spattered the walls and soaked into the mattress.
By the end of 2001,64 women from Vancouver’s low track was on the list of missing women ,but the police were no closer to breaking the case.
Finally on the 1st February 2002,investigators got an unexpected lead , a truck driver who occasionally worked at the Pickton farm told an officer that he once seen illegal weapons in Willie’s trailer,curious to learn more about a potential murder suspect the police obtained a search warrant.
They had to move very carefully, they didn’t want to lose this one.
Four days later, the vancouver police closed in on Pickton property, their gruseome discoveries would trigger the largest forensic investigation in canadian history.
The 5th of February 2002, drug addicts and prostitutes were nysteriously disappearing from Vancouver’s downtown eastside, what the police didn’t know was that one man had murdered at least six of these women and sadistically butchered their corpses,but a confidential tip- off was about to lead to an unexpected break in the case.
Armed with a search warrant , the police were preparing to raid Robert Willie Pickton’s pig farm, their search was for illegal weapons but they soon found much mpre than that…
One of the investigators came across an inhaler, that had one of the missing woman’s name on it, it was prescirbed to Sereena Abotsway.
At that point the joint task force decided to halkt the firearms investigation and obtain new search warrants.
Willy Pickton spent the night behind bars.
The police alerted the media to the break in the case by dawn reporters and camera crews from across the country had surrounded the farm.
Everyone stood there with their mouths open,the imaginations went wild .
It was like everyone’s worst nightmare come true.
Inside the property investigators uncovered a grisly scene,proof of Mona Wilson’s murder..her blood was found soaked into a mattress.
It was found on the floor ,as on cupboards, it was found on the walls, all the way to the kitchen.
In a rubbish bin outside the camper van was all that remains of the missing woman .
you could see her brain ,you could see her hair and you could see the bisected human head and floating in this pinkish soup.
In an interrogation room , Task Force officers drilled Pickton four hours but he was surprisingly calm and he denied everything.
There was a part of him that didn’t care the same way his mother didn’t care that he had feelings,he put his legs up over the edge of the chair ,he was having a good time and he was really enjoying himself.
After 11 hours of intense questioning ,the investigators changed tactics.
They decided to put an undercover police officer in the cell with Willie to see if he said anything.
Willie knew he was under surveillance ,but that didn’t stop him from bragging to his cellmate, at one point Willie told the undercover cop that he was going for an even 50 which in Willie’s mind meant he killed 49 women.
Pickton also implied that he’d used a disposal plant to get rid of the bodies and he mentioned to the undercover policeman that he got sloppy in the end.
He finally had somebody that he could talked about what really happening one of the biggest parts for serial killers is to get to brag about how many people they’ve killed.
On 22nd February the police charged Pickton with the murders of Sereena abotsway and Mona wilson.
Meanwhile a small army of police and forensic specialists were converging on the farm to search for the remains of the other vicitms.
The police investigators made a grid of the entire property and they were searching at grid box by grid box.
The forensic investigation revealed a terryfing record of murder and depravity,there were some freezers in there , one of the freezers contained two buckets with each containing the head and hands and feet of Sereena Abotsway and Andrea Joesbury.
They took literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of DNA samples it was just a mind -boggling police operation,just a forensic search that probably is unrivaled almost anywhere.
By April 2002 the police had enough evidence to charge Pickton with five more counts of murder.
Stories about Pickton’s buthchery made headlines across Canada and the United state.
Even with Pickton behind bars, details about the murder spread terror throughout the city,on the 11th of March 2004 Canadian Health officials issued a shocking statement.
” Crosss contamination could mean that human remains did get into or contaminate some of the Pork meat that was produced”
The forensic investigation of the evidence gathered at Willie Pickton’s farm lasted 22 months by the end of 2005, the police had cataloged enough evidence to charge Pickton with a total 27 murders.
But their case wasn’t as strong as they’d hoped ….
January 2006, the trial of Canadas worst serial killer was about to begin.
Throngs of spectators,including dozens of victims family members filled a Vancover courtroom,they came to see a killer brought to justice .
Pig farmer Robert Willie Pickton was charged with killing and dismembering 27 women,but the authorities believe that the number of victims could be as high as 49.
Chilling details about his crimes gripped people in Canada and the US,
What makes Pickton front- page news is this almost perverse combination, pig farming and serial sexual predators.
It became a sort of fascinatingly lurid case.
pretrial hearings took almost a year, justice James Williams dismissed one murder charge for lack of evidence, he also divided the cases into two trials.
The cases were so complex and so long the judge ordered a servant so the case would become manageable.
Pickton would first stand trial for six counts of murder and to ensure a fair trial,the judge issued a strict ban limiting what details journalists could share about the proceedings.
The first trial began on the 2nd of January 2007,inside the New Westminister Supreme court .
Family members came face -to -face with the man that many called;
The butcher.
Willie Pickton pleaded not guilty to murdering Marnie frey, Sereena Abotsway,Georgina Papin,Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolf and Mona Wilson.
The prosecution led the Jury through a staggering array of evidence including gruesome crime scene photographs, blood spatter analysis,forensic and DNA evidence.
There was all kinds of evidence presented like woman’s jacket and lipstick and night vision goggles, manacles, just really ugly terrifying stuff.
Among the witnesses who testified agains Willie , Andrew Bellwood was a man who had lived at the Pickton farm for several weeks in 1999.
The defense atack Bellwoods credibility,citing his criminal record and former drug use,but bellwood story still chilled the courtroom.
His descriptions were very ,very detailed, equally compelling was the testimony of Willie’s one – time friend Lynn Ellingsen .
She was the only person that was going to testify that she’d seen Willie picked in with a dead woman.
But Pickton’s defense team shredded Elingsen’s testimony, they exposed inconsistencies in her story and reminded the jurors that she’d been using drugs the night of the alleged murder,the defense worked very hard to undermine her credibility with a great deal of success.
As the trial continued the defense team portrayed Willie as a simpleton who wasn’t capable of committing these elaborate murders on his own.
Pickton’s lawyers suggested that friends like Elingsen or Dinah Taylor could have been responsible.
Final arguments concluded on the 26th of November 2007,the jury deliberated for two weeks.
On the 8th of December ,the victims families and journalists gathered to hear the jury’s verdict.
Some of the jurors were in tears, and that told right away that there was gonna be a problem with this verdict- and from the families view there was.
The jury found Pickton not guilty on all counts of first -degree murder.
families that were in the courtroom started to scream.
but Pickton did not escape justice,the jury did find him guilty on six count of second degree murder.
Judge Williams gave him the maximum sentence,25 years in prison.
its essential about premeditation and see wonder how someone who killed six women didn’t premeditate that , that it wasn’t planned and orchestrated
The jury couldn’t reconcile in their mind wheter or not he acted alone.
A date for the second trial has not been set.
Investigators may never know exactly how many women were murdered on the Pickton farm and another haunting question , what turned a lonely boy on a Canadian pig farm into possibly the country’s most prolific serial killer?
Is that combination of nature and nurture of learning of psychology and also maybe genetics,maybe he had a predisposition to being this way but he also learned that life didn’t really have much meaning .
Highlights
Willie Pickton ‘appeal for a new trial was rejected,he is now appealing his case to the Canadian Supreme Court.
To date ,police still cannot account for 38 of Vancouver’s 64 missing women