Robert Pickton, one of Canada's most notorious serial killers whose crimes drew attention to policing and society's contempt for the violent deaths of Indigenous women, died Friday after a cellmate attacked him in prison in Quebec, where he was serving a life sentence. He was 74 years old.
His death, in hospital, was announced by Correctional Service Canada, which said he had been attacked May 19 at Port-Cartier Institution and died of unspecified injuries. The announcement did not give a reason for the attack.
In 2007, Mr Pickton was convicted of murdering six women, although he boasted to an undercover police officer that he had killed 49 in total.
The remains of his victims were found on a ramshackle pig farm he owned outside Vancouver, where authorities conducted what was at the time the largest crime scene investigation in Canadian history. After 18 months the remains of 33 women were found.
The victims were mainly members of indigenous groups, and most were prostitutes and drug users whom Mr. Pickton encountered in the Downtown Eastside, a belly of picturesque and affluent Vancouver.
Mr. Pickton was reportedly able to continue killing for so long an investigation by the provincial government of British Columbiadue to police bias against the race and marginalized status of its victims.
Although family members of the missing women alerted authorities, Vancouver police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were slow to suspect that a serial killer stalked the Downtown Eastside. The official inquiry, published in 2012, named 67 women who had been murdered or disappeared from the neighborhood over a two-decade period before Mr Pickton's arrest in 2002.
“The pattern of predatory violence was clear and should have received a swift and severe response from responsible and professional institutions, but this was not the case,” the report said.
Evidence of Mr. Pickton's atrocities was discovered almost by accident, when an RCMP team arrived to investigate a report that Mr. Pickton had an unlicensed rifle on his property in Port Coquitlam, a suburb of Vancouver.
A sign in front of his 15-acre farm, which he owned with a brother, warned of intruders: “No visitors, agents, hawkers or vendors – Entry by appointment only!! (No exception.)”
Police discovered gray human remains, including dismembered hands and feet and severed heads of women. They believed Mr Pickton had been feeding body parts to his pigs or destroying them in a wood chipper.
According to a 2002 New York Times article, Mr. Pickton, his brother and a sister inherited the pig farm from their father, who died in the 1970s. Mr. Pickton never married and had no children.
Robert William Pickton, known as Willy, was born October 24, 1949, in Port Coquitlam, to Leonard and Louise Helene (Arnal) Pickton. Information about survivors was not immediately available.
He was charged with 26 murders, but the judge limited the trial to six cases to keep the evidence manageable for the jury. Prosecutors later suspended the other 20 cases after Mr. Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. (Canada does not have the death penalty.)
The women he was convicted of murdering were Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin and Marnie Frey.
In 2014, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police report found that approximately 1,181 Indigenous women were killed or missing across Canada from 1980 to 2012. Although Indigenous women and girls make up approximately 4% of Canada's female population, they represent the 16% of those are murdered.
In 2019, a national investigation concluded that the police and criminal justice system had failed Indigenous victims by viewing them “through a lens of pervasive racist and sexist stereotypes.”
The chief investigator of the investigation described the scale of the killings as “genocide”.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose government authorized the three-year inquiry after it was blocked by his Conservative predecessor, said upon its release: “This is an inconvenient day for Canada, but it is an essential day.”
HAS declaration from Correctional Service Canada on Friday acknowledged the racial implications of Mr. Pickton's murders: “We are aware that this offender's case has had a devastating impact on communities in British Columbia and across the country, including Indigenous peoples, victims and their families. Our thoughts are with them,” he said.
