By Chris Bartholomew
Robert William 'Willy' Pickton of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, is a Canadian pig farmer and serial killer convicted of the second-degree murders of six women. He is also charged in the deaths of an additional twenty women, many of them prostitutes and drug users from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. As of December 11, 2007 he has been sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 25 years, the longest sentence available under Canadian law.
His grandfather settled in Canada in the early 1900s and bought farmland, which his son Leonard inherited. He, in turn, left the land to his children. There were three of them, an older sister, Linda, a younger brother named Dave and Robert himself, sometimes called Willie.
When the government decided to buy the property to make way for a highway they went from fairly poor to suddenly well off.
Neighbors describe Pickton as being kind of slow, but a clean living, hard-working, nice, helpful guy.
He was close with his mother, but not his father.
When he was about 12 he bought a calf that he thought he would have all his life, but it was slaughtered. He said he would often sleep with the calf, and became emotional when recalling how he came home one day to find the calf had been slaughtered. Pickton said he didn't speak for four days, adding that the incident made him realize life was fleeting.
He said he had a pen pal when he was 24 that he got engaged to but her family wouldn't let her leave the home and he couldn't leave the farm so that was the end of that.
The accused killer would often while away his days working the land or at his brother's gravel and demolition business.
He would often be seen scavenging nearby golf courses for lost balls giving them away to friends or fixing up cars that had been bought for scrap. Neighbors said the family worked 16 to 18 hours a day.
Pickton wasn't terribly religious and was never known to use drugs or alcohol. He also never had a steady girlfriend.
Found on his pig farm were skulls cut in half with hands and feet stuffed inside. The remains of another victim were stuffed in a garbage bag in the bottom of a trash can and her blood-stained clothing was found in the trailer where Pickton lived. Part of one of the victim's jaw bone and teeth were found in the ground beside the slaughterhouse and a .22 caliber revolver with an attached dildo containing both his and a victim's DNA was in his laundry room. In a video-taped recording played for the jury, Pickton claimed to have attached the dildo to his weapon as a makeshift silencer. Also found were boxes of .357 Magnum handgun ammunition, night-vision goggles, two pairs of faux fur-lined handcuffs, a syringe with blue liquid inside, and Spanish Fly aphrodisiac.
Played for Pickton was a videotape of Pickton's friend Scott Chubb saying Pickton had told him a good way to kill a female heroin addict was to inject her with windshield-washer fluid.
A second tape in which an associate named Andrew Bellwood said Pickton mentioned killing prostitutes by handcuffing and strangling them, then bleeding and gutting them before feeding them to pigs was shown to Pickton at his trial.
Also found on the grounds were photos of the contents of a garbage can found in Pickton's slaughterhouse, which held some remains of a victim.
Although police were able to authenticate 26 murders, he was only accused of six at his trial. The province's attorney general has said Pickton will not stand trial on the other 20 murder charges, unless the courts overturn his first convictions. He boasted of 49 murders, wanting to kill one more person to make it an even fifty, to his cell-mate, who was an undercover cop.
People became aware of Robert Pickton after his name surfaced in 1997, when a prostitute and drug addict accused him of trying to stab her to death during an encounter at the farm. Pickton was charged with attempted murder, aggravated assault and unlawful confinement, but charges were later dropped. The woman, who had run screaming from the farm in handcuffs, reportedly refused to testify. Her whereabouts is unknown.
Even after several people asked the police to investigate him and the farm for missing women through the years, they didn't check it out, and many of the people in Canada believe that if they had acted sooner, a lot of lives could have been saved.
Excavations continued through November 2003; the cost of the investigation is estimated to have been $70 million by the end of 2003, according to the provincial government. Currently the property is fenced off, liened by the Province of British Columbia. In the meantime, all the buildings have been demolished. Forensic analysis is very difficult because the bodies of the victims may have been left to decompose or allowed to be eaten by insects and pigs on the farm. During the early days of the excavations, forensic anthropologists brought in heavy equipment, including two 50-foot flat conveyor belts and soil sifters to find traces of remains. On March 10, 2004, it was revealed that human flesh may have been ground up and mixed with pork from the farm. This pork was never distributed commercially, but was handed out to friends and visitors of the farm. Another claim made is that he fed the bodies directly to his pigs.
Pickton and his brother, David Francis Pickton, ran a registered charity called the Piggy Palace Good Times Society, a non-profit society whose official mandate was to organize, co-ordinate, manage and operate special events, functions, dances, shows and exhibitions on behalf of service organizations, sports organizations and other worthy groups. According to investigators, the special events were raucous gatherings that featured entertainment by an ever-changing cast of Downtown Eastside prostitutes.
People have said the brother David was the one who had the parties, and that Robert was seen but mostly it was his brother. It has also been said that it was a place where hookers and bikers partied. Robert was known to frequent a biker bar, both brothers rode Harleys. The prostitutes were from a part of town where many women disappeared through the years, and where the victims were living. Prominent local politicians, musicians and even reporters attended these parties it is said.
The Pickton family is suing Canada for damage that police caused to the farm while searching for human remains.
In a document filed in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, the siblings will sue for compensation for damage at the pig farm and a second property to buildings, residences, infrastructure, motor vehicles, stores, equipment and machinery.
The siblings say they lost the use of their properties since February 2002, but have had the expense of maintaining the properties in that time.
The police investigation unearthed human body parts, DNA and personal belongings linked to the victims, beneath a pig feeding area, in freezers, trailers, buckets and in Pickton's trailer.
Pickton in Popular Culture
The Seattle punk band The Accused wrote a song about Pickton called 'Hooker Fortified Pork Products' on their 2005 Oh Martha! album. The song's protagonist is named Willie P (Pickton is generally referred to as Willie by those who know him) and a B.C. backyard butcher who is said to have been cruising the east end, a reference to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The song describes how the hookers are thrown into a wood chipper. It includes a portion that is spoken in a caricature of a hillbilly accent which begins with the words 'well howdy eh!' (eh is common in comic impressions of Canadians). It describes the pork products as being chock full of heroin and AIDS.
The German psychobilly band Mad Sin also wrote a song entitled 'Pigfarm' on their 2007 release 20 Years in Sin Sin.
The Pickton murders were also mentioned on an episode of CSI. Although the name was not identified, the character Nick Stokes mentioned a case from Canada where the victims' remains were fed to pigs as a method of disposal which similarly happened on this episode. (Season 7, Episode 20.)
A low-budget American horror movie, Killer Pickton (2005), was released in Australia in 2007, and then promptly withdrawn from release due to legal complaints by the Canadian government.
Canadian hardcore band Fucked Up allegedly wrote their EP 'Year of the Pig' about Robert Pickton.
The book Swastika by Michael Slade used Pickton as the basis for one of its characters, a Vancouver serial killer who fed the remains of his victims to pigs.
Editor's note: this article was written in 2008. The twenty remaining charges were formally stayed in August 2010 after the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the six convictions, so Pickton was never tried for them. DNA of thirty-three women was identified on the farm. The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry reported in 2012 that the police failure the article describes was real, calling it a blatant failure and finding that the investigation had been undermined by systemic bias against the women who disappeared. Pickton was attacked by another inmate at the Port-Cartier Institution in Quebec and died of his injuries on May 31, 2024, aged seventy-four.