Robert William Pickton was born in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia on October 24, 1949, and lived on the family pig farm, which by the 1990s was surrounded by suburbia and worth a great deal as land. He and his brother ran a drinking club on it called Piggy's Palace. He was known as Willie.
Women had been disappearing from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver since the late 1980s, an area of single-room hotels, addiction and street sex work, and a disproportionate number of them Indigenous. Families reported them missing and were told they had moved on. By 1998 the number was in the dozens and community groups were putting up posters the police were not.
In 1997 a woman escaped from the farm handcuffed and stabbed. Pickton was charged with attempted murder. The charge was stayed. He killed for another four years.
He was arrested on February 22, 2002 on an unrelated firearms warrant, and the search of the property became the largest crime scene investigation in Canadian history: a hundred officers, twenty months, soil sifted through conveyors. The DNA of thirty-three women was recovered.
He was charged with twenty-six counts of first-degree murder. To a cellmate who was an undercover officer he said he had killed forty-nine and had meant to make it fifty.
He was tried on six counts and convicted on December 9, 2007 of six counts of second-degree murder, in the deaths of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin and Marnie Frey. He received life with no parole for twenty-five years, the maximum available. The remaining twenty charges were stayed in 2010.
The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry under Wally Oppal reported in 2012 and found blatant failures by police, rooted in bias against poor, Indigenous and addicted women. Its findings remain the reference point for the wider Canadian inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women.
He was attacked by another inmate at Port-Cartier in Quebec and died of his injuries on May 31, 2024.
Six convictions, twenty-six charges, thirty-three women's DNA on the property, and forty-nine claimed by him. The gap between the first and last of those figures is not an evidentiary puzzle. It is the record of how long it took anyone with the power to stop him to treat the disappearance of a woman from the Downtown Eastside as a crime.