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Robert Pickton Ordered to Stand Trial on 15 Counts of Murder After Six-Month Hearing

A judge's ruling ended the preliminary inquiry into the Port Coquitlam pig farmer, as police began searching a second site for the remains of missing women.

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Illustration of a reporter and parked camera tripods outside a suburban British Columbia courthouse with mountains in the rain. Not an actual scene from the case.

For six months a British Columbia courtroom had heard the evidence against Robert Pickton under a publication ban. On July 23, 2003, the judge ruled that the Port Coquitlam pig farmer must stand trial for 15 murders.

Provincial Court Judge David Stone ordered Pickton, 53, to trial on 15 counts of first-degree murder at the end of a preliminary inquiry that began in Port Coquitlam on January 13. Under the ban, the reasons for the ruling, like the evidence heard at the inquiry, could not be reported. The prosecutor, Michael Petrie, said about 85 witnesses could be called, depending on how much evidence the two sides agreed on, and that the trial was unlikely to begin before the following year.

The 15 women Pickton was charged with killing were Heather Chinnock, Tanya Holyk, Sherry Irving, Inga Hall, Georgina Papin, Patricia Johnson, Helen Hallmark, Jennifer Furminger, Mona Wilson, Diane Rock, Sereena Abotsway, Andrea Joesbury, Heather Bottomley, Brenda Wolfe and Jacqueline McDonell. Most of the dozens of women missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside were sex workers or drug users.

Days before the ruling, the RCMP sent 52 investigators and soil-sifting equipment to a second search site, on a reserve in Mission, about 40 miles east of Vancouver, where half of a human skull had been found in 1995. The search of Pickton's farm was continuing at the same time. The number of charges against him later rose to 27.

Al Jazeera reported that Pickton was first charged with 15 murders in early 2002, while The Seattle Times reported that he was arrested that February and charged with 15 murders over the months that followed.

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