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Robert Pickton Charged With Murdering Two Women Missing From Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

Seventeen days after a weapons search of his Port Coquitlam pig farm turned up a missing woman's inhaler, Pickton was charged in the deaths of Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson.

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Illustration of police officers at a taped-off farm gate on a muddy rural road in the rain. Not an actual scene from the case.

Dozens of women had vanished from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside over two decades. On February 22, 2002, police for the first time charged a man with murder: Robert Pickton, a Port Coquitlam pig farmer.

Pickton, 52, was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson. According to the charge sheet, Abotsway was killed sometime between July 18, 2001, and February 5, 2002, and Wilson between December 1, 2001, and February 5, 2002, at or near Port Coquitlam, about twenty miles east of Vancouver, where Pickton and his siblings owned a farm. Abotsway had been reported missing in August 2001 and Wilson in November.

The farm had been under police control for more than two weeks. On February 5, Coquitlam RCMP officers searched it for illegal weapons, a search unconnected to the missing women investigation. They quickly found an inhaler with Abotsway's name on it, a wallet with another missing woman's identification and plastic bags of women's clothing. The search was halted while Project Evenhanded, the joint Vancouver police and RCMP task force reviewing the disappearances, prepared a new warrant, and on February 6 the task force sealed off the property and began to search it. Pickton was charged with a weapons offense on February 7.

He had been in court before. In April 1997 he was charged with attempted murder, assault with a weapon, forcible confinement and aggravated assault after a woman was stabbed at the farm, but prosecutors stayed the charges in January 1998.

At a two-minute hearing on February 25, Pickton said nothing as the charges were read, and he was not asked to plead. His lawyer, Peter Ritchie, said he was shocked by the charges and would seek bail. Pickton and his relatives denied any involvement in the disappearances. He was later charged with 27 counts of first-degree murder, and in 2007 a jury convicted him of second-degree murder in the deaths of six women, among them Abotsway and Wilson.

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