The evidence sat in a police property locker for years. It had been seized in March 1997, after a woman ran from a farmhouse in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, with a handcuff locked around one wrist and stab wounds, and nobody sent it for DNA testing. When it was finally examined after 2002, it held the genetic profiles of three women who had disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Jacqueline Murdock's DNA was on the outside of condom packages. Andrea Borhaven's was on Robert Pickton's boots, and Cara Ellis's was on his jacket. The attempted-murder charge that had brought the items into police hands was stayed in late January 1998, days before it was due for trial. About two dozen women later connected to the farm vanished between March 1997 and February 2002, and nineteen of them went missing after the stay.
The woman who ran is known in the public record only as Ms. Anderson. At the preliminary hearing she testified that Pickton picked her up in Vancouver and drove her out to the farm, and that after they had sex he slipped a handcuff onto one of her wrists. She grabbed a knife and slashed him across the neck and arm. He stabbed her, and she ran outside. The Crown dropped the case because she was addicted to drugs and had missed several meetings with prosecutors, and it judged that a jury would not believe her. Her account stayed under a publication ban until August 2010, when the last of the appeals was over.
Pickton, known to nearly everyone as Willie, had inherited the property with his older sister, Linda, and his younger brother, Dave. It had been a working pig farm on the edge of a small town; by the 1990s the suburbs had grown up to its fences and the land was worth far more than the animals. He lived in a single-wide trailer at the back, slaughtered pigs in a shed, and with his brother ran a drinking club on the property called Piggy's Palace.
East of downtown Vancouver, a few blocks of single-room hotels, needle exchanges and street corners made up the Downtown Eastside, where sex work and addiction were the main economy and a disproportionate share of the women were Indigenous. Their disappearances were reported for years before they were counted. A former officer later told Global News that families who came in to report a sister gone were told, in effect, to "basically buzz off." The women were said to have moved on, gone home, or chosen not to be found. Community groups put up posters of the missing before the police would acknowledge that a pattern existed.
Pickton's name was not new to investigators. Besides the 1997 case, rumors about the farm had reached the police more than once, and in 2000 two Coquitlam RCMP constables sat him down, with a friend beside him, to ask about what one woman in particular had been saying. The 137-page transcript of that conversation later became an exhibit at the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry. Nothing came of it at the time.
What finally opened the farm was a gun. On February 5, 2002, officers executed a warrant to search the property for illegal firearms. Pickton was charged with weapons offenses and released under surveillance, while investigators with the joint Missing Women task force obtained a second warrant on the strength of what the first search had turned up. On February 22 he was charged with the first-degree murders of Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson. The count grew over the following years to twenty-six.
Excavation ran until November 2003. Heavy machinery stripped the farm down, and the soil was run across conveyor belts so that technicians could pick out fragments of bone and tissue. The reported cost was somewhere between C$61 million and C$70 million, depending on the source and what it counted. In the end the DNA or remains of thirty-three women were identified on the property. Health officials issued an advisory to neighbors who might have bought meat from him, because no one could say what had gone into it.
Six of the deaths would reach a jury, and the women behind them had lives the case files did not hold. Georgina Papin was thirty-five when she disappeared in March 1999. She had seven children, the youngest a year old, danced at powwows, and was trying to get off the streets. "She was a beautiful woman who had beautiful children and she loved her culture," her sister Cynthia Cardinal said. "She loved her family." Brenda Wolfe, thirty-two, of the Kahkewistahaw First Nation in Saskatchewan, was last seen in February 1999. She had two children and a hairdresser's certificate, and had worked as a waitress, a bouncer and in a print shop; a lawsuit her daughter later filed describes her as "a strong, quiet, genuine person."
Marnie Frey was twenty-five and left a daughter, Brittney. Andrea Joesbury was twenty-two when she was last seen in June 2001. Sereena Abotsway, twenty-nine, vanished that summer. Mona Wilson, twenty-six, was last seen on November 23, 2001. She was the last of the six to disappear, ten weeks before the firearms search.
After the arrest, detectives questioned Pickton for about eleven hours. The interrogation, led in its later stages by Staff Sergeant Don Adam, the officer in charge of the investigation, is the only extended record of him speaking about the case; he never gave an interview to a journalist. The most damaging words came elsewhere. Police had placed an undercover officer in his cell, and Pickton told him he had killed forty-nine women. "I was going to do one more," he said. "Make it an even 50."
His trial opened in January 2007 in the provincial courthouse at New Westminster. People lined up before dawn for the fifty seats in the public gallery. Justice James Williams had split the indictment and ordered six counts heard first: Abotsway, Wilson, Joesbury, Wolfe, Papin and Frey. In his opening address, prosecutor Derrill Prevett told the jury that as a pig farmer Pickton had "the expertise, the equipment and the means" to make women disappear.
Two kinds of evidence carried the Crown's case. The first was physical. Investigators had found two skulls in a bucket inside a freezer in his trailer, and DNA identified them as Abotsway's and Joesbury's. The second was what people said he had told them or what they said they had seen. Gina Houston, a former friend, testified that two days before the arrest he told her there were several bodies on the farm, then suggested that the two of them commit suicide together. One witness testified that she walked into the slaughterhouse and found Pickton covered in blood while Papin's body hung from a chain. Another testified that Pickton described to him how he strangled the women, bled and gutted them, and fed them to his pigs.
Pickton's lawyers did not argue that the women had not died on the farm. It argued that the Crown had not proved Pickton killed them himself, and that others with access to the property could have. In his closing on November 26, 2007, defense lawyer Michael Petrie called the Crown's central witnesses "unsavoury" and asked the jury to read the police interview as the work of a "cagey negotiator" rather than a confession. The jury was charged from November 27 and began deliberating on November 30. Williams had told the jurors to "keep an open mind, but not an empty head." When they asked about the defense theory, he re-instructed them that they could convict if Pickton had shot the victim "or was otherwise an active participant in her killing."
After nine full days, on December 9, 2007, the jury found him not guilty of first-degree murder on all six counts and guilty of second-degree murder on each. The sentence was life imprisonment without parole for twenty-five years, the most the law allowed. At the sentencing, Lynn Frey read a statement written by Marnie's fifteen-year-old daughter, Brittney. "Why did you hurt my real mother and those other women?" it asked. Patricia Evans, Brenda Wolfe's sister, also spoke.
That re-instruction became the heart of the appeal. The British Columbia Court of Appeal dismissed it in 2009 by a majority, with Justice Ian Donald dissenting, which gave Pickton an automatic route to the Supreme Court of Canada. On July 30, 2010, that court dismissed the appeal as well, finding that the jury instructions had, if anything, leaned in the defense's favor. The Crown then stayed the remaining twenty murder counts in August 2010. Six convictions already carried the maximum sentence, and prosecutors said a second trial could add nothing to it.
Twenty families would never hear their cases tried. Among them was the family of Sarah de Vries, who had written in her diary in 1995: "Am I next? Is he watching me now?" Dawn Crey and Tanya Holyk were among the others. Georgina Papin's remains, bone fragments in a small box, were released to her family in September 2010 after the appeals ended. Her funeral was held in Hobbema, Alberta, and she was buried at Enoch Cree Nation beside her mother. Several of her children met some of their brothers and sisters for the first time at the service.
British Columbia turned the failures over to a public inquiry. The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, led by former provincial attorney general Wally Oppal, reported in 2012 that the police investigations had failed the women over a period of years, and it was in the inquiry record that the 1997 survivor was given the name Ms. Anderson. Angel Wolfe, Brittney Frey and Kristina Bateman, Papin's daughter, sued the City of Vancouver, the province, the RCMP, the Crown, Pickton and his brother Dave. Legal commentators have also traced a line from the Downtown Eastside disappearances to Canada v. Bedford, the 2013 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that struck down three of the country's sex-work laws on the ground that they made the work more dangerous.
By 2024 he was held at Port-Cartier Institution, a maximum-security prison on the north shore of the St. Lawrence in Quebec. On May 19, 2024, a fifty-one-year-old fellow inmate attacked him. He was placed in a medically induced coma and died on May 31, 2024, at seventy-four. His death closed the possibility that the twenty stayed counts would ever be heard. "Because they didn't get their day in court," Cynthia Cardinal said that year, "[that's] what I'm really sad about."