He was considered one of Canada’s greatest killers. Sentenced to life in prison for the murder of six women but suspected of having caused more victims, Robert Pickton died on Friday May 31.
Inmate of the Port-Cartier establishment, in the province of Quebec, he had been hospitalized since his stabbing attack by another 51-year-old inmate on May 19, 2024. He succumbed to his injuries, indicated the Canadian Prison Services in a press release.
“We recognize that this offender’s case has had a devastating impact on communities in British Columbia and across the country, including Indigenous peoples, victims and their families. Our thoughts are with them,” they added.
Vancouver police were criticized at the time Robert Pickton was arrested and his murders uncovered for not taking the disappearances seriously because many of the women were prostitutes, drug addicts or Aboriginal people.
The DNA of 33 women
These women, all from Vancouver, were killed between 1997 and 2001. At the time, Robert Pickton, who had never known anywhere other than his family farm in the suburbs of Vancouver, lived in a mobile home adjacent to his slaughterhouse. .
Robert Pickton was arrested in 2002. A bit by chance. During a search for illegally stored firearms, authorities accidentally discovered human remains in a freezer. The man was then arrested and his installation searched from top to bottom for almost twenty months.
The remains or DNA of 33 women were eventually found on his farm in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. He initially denied being a murderer. But the reality of the evidence caught up with him.
Historic trial
During his trial, one of the most expensive and longest in Canadian history, a witness, an undercover police officer in prison, explained that he had told her how he strangled his victims and gave their remains to eat his pigs.
But he also boasted to his fellow inmate of having killed 49 women in total, whose bodies were cut up and fed to his pigs or sold as pork, regretting not having reached the round figure of 50. Canadian authorities have launched an administrative investigation into “consider all the facts and circumstances surrounding the attack.”
