Robert Pickton, one of Canada’s most notorious serial killers, whose crimes drew attention to police and society’s disregard for the violent deaths of Indigenous women, died Friday after a fellow inmate 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 the Correctional Service of Canada, which said he had been assaulted on May 19 at the Port-Cartier Institution and had died from unspecified injuries. The announcement gave no reason for the attack.
In 2007, Pickton was convicted of the murder of 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 run-down pig farm he owned outside Vancouver, where authorities carried out what was at the time the largest crime scene investigation in Canadian history. After 18 months, they found the remains of 33 women.
The victims were primarily members of indigenous groups, and most were sex workers and drug addicts who Pickton encountered in the Downtown Eastside, a vulnerable spot in picturesque and prosperous Vancouver.
Pickton was able to continue killing for so long, according to an investigation by the British Columbia provincial government, because of police bias toward the race and marginalized status of his victims.
Although relatives of the missing women had alerted authorities, Vancouver police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were slow to suspect that a serial killer was stalking the Downtown Eastside. The official investigation, published in 2012, named 67 women who had been murdered or disappeared from the neighborhood over a two-decade period before Pickton’s 2002 arrest.
“The pattern of predatory violence was clear and should have received a swift and severe response from professional and responsible institutions, but it did not,” the report says.
Evidence of Mr. Pickton’s atrocities was discovered almost accidentally, when an RCMP detachment arrived to investigate a report that Mr. Pickton had an unlicensed shotgun 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 trespassers: “No visitors, agents, peddlers or vendors allowed – entry by appointment only!! (Without exceptions.)”
Police discovered gruesome human remains, including dismembered hands and feet and severed heads of women. They believed Mr Pickton had fed body parts to his pigs or destroyed them in a wood chipper.
According to a 2002 New York Times article, 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 on October 24, 1949 in Port Coquitlam, son of Leonard and Louise Helene (Arnal) Pickton. Information about survivors was not immediately available.
He was charged with 26 murders, but the judge limited his trial to six cases so that the evidence would be manageable for the jury. Prosecutors later dropped the other 20 cases after 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 found guilty of were Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin and Marnie Frey.
In 2014, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police report found that some 1,181 Indigenous women were murdered or missing across Canada between 1980 and 2012. While Indigenous women and girls make up about 4 percent of Canada’s female population, They represent 16 percent of them. who are killed.
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 commissioner of the inquiry called the extent of the killings “genocide.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose government authorized the three-year inquiry after his Conservative predecessor blocked it, said in his post: “This is an uncomfortable day for Canada, but it is an essential day.”
A statement from the Correctional Service of Canada on Friday acknowledged the racial overtones 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.