Serial killer ground prostitutes into mince and sold them to cops hunting him
Robert Pickton was angry with himself as he brooded inside his jail cell. He hadn't achieved his criminal goal and he blamed himself for being "sloppy".
He turned to his cell mate, a talkative man who had befriended the instinctive loner Pickton, and said: "I made my own grave by being sloppy. Doesn’t that just kick you in the ass now. I wanted one more to make the big 5-0." But he wasn't talking about robberies but murders and little did he know his words to the cell mate - an undercover officer from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police - were the confession which would seal his life sentence.
Pickton had killed 49 women and disposed of their remains in the most gruesome manner - by feeding them to the herds of pigs he kept on his farm. He even ground some of the human flesh into mince, mixed it with pork, and sold it to meat processing businesses, family members, friends, and even the local police.
He had lured the women who mostly worked as sex workers in Vancouver's Red Light district to his home where he imprisoned them, tortured and then murdered them. Their bodies were then either fed to his pigs or put through an industrial meat grinder.
When the police finally arrived Pickton's pigs had foraged so furiously on the victims that there was nothing left of them. He was only caught after a search of his property revealed an asthma inhaler belonging to one of his victims. But he refused to co-operate with police and as a result an undercover Mountie posed as a cellmate - as they spoke Pickton began to brag about his crimes.
Man in 30s dies after being stabbed in park sparking police probe
Robert Pickton seen working on his farm (Rex Features)For years rumours had circulated about strange comings and goings at his pig farm but it was dismissed by local police - many of whom bought meat from him - as drunken gossip. The reality was the wealthy pig farmer mainly preyed upon drug addicts and prostitutes, picking them up in Vancouver’s red light district before driving them to his farm, where he had sex with them before murdering them in a variety of horrific ways.
He allegedly handcuffed and stabbed other victims, including one woman who managed to escape, naked and bleeding, in 1997 after stabbing Pickton with his own knife. At the time the woman was considered an unreliable witness by police and Pickton was not prosecuted.
The clothes and rubber boots Pickton had been wearing that evening were seized by police and left in an police storage locker for more than seven years. Not until 2004 did lab testing show that the DNA of two missing women was on the items seized from Pickton in 1997
When he was finally arrested in February 2002, it was almost by chance. Investigators had raided his pig farm looking for illicit weapons, only to find items belonging to long-missing women. A search of Pickton’s farm revealed DNA evidence of 26 missing women, mostly of indigenous origin, and he was charged with their murders.
No-one had known the eccentric scruffy farmer was one of the deadliest serial killers in history. In a documentary crime author Wensley Clarkson said: "Robert Pickton was a serial killer who made the Texas Chainsaw Massacre look like an attraction at Disneyland.
"There was nothing about him which made him standout, he didn't have great personal hygiene and he would hold barn dances with bikers and women and alcohol. He was known locally for using prostitutes and had a perchant for indigenous women but when large numbers went missing no one made the connnection."
Christopher Berry Dee, criminology, "Rumours circulated but no-one took it seriously. "It's a ghostly place to go at night and you wouldn't go there on your own." A depraved loner who did not have the skills for normal social interaction he often arranged barn dances at his farm and invite local bikers and women to come.
He held notorious drunken raves in a barn on his property dubbed ‘The Piggy Palace’, where prostitutes would entertain revellers. It is thought that some women went missing after attending his parties but no-one alerted the authorities. He even had a friend who lived on the farm with him who knew he'd killed at least one woman but was blackmailing him for money to buy her silence.
In a police interview he was asked which girls had come to his farm and he said he could not remember and did not show any emotion. Investigating officers were certain Pickton had killed dozens of women but without physical evidence needed a confession so planted an officer in prison. Pickton began to confess to his cell mate and talked in a bragging way.
The Mountie used the same slang and language to show Pickton they were similar and get him to open up. He eventually bragged about how he disposed on the women during a discussion about the best way to get rid of a body. During Pickton's trial, forensic staff said that about 80 unidentified DNA profiles, roughly half male and half female, had been detected on evidence.
Russian model killed after calling Putin a 'psychopath' was strangled by her ex
The items police found inside Pickton's trailer included a loaded .22 revolver with a dildo over the barrel and one round fired, boxes of Magnum handgun ammunition, night vision goggles, two pairs of faux fur-lined handcuffs, a syringe with three millilitres of blue liquid inside, and a liquid aphrodisiac called Spanish Fly.
The court was also played a videotape of one of Pickton's friends saying he had told him a good way to kill a female heroin addict was to inject her with car screen wash. A second clip showed another friend saying Pickton mentioned killing prostitutes by handcuffing and strangling them, then bleeding and gutting them before feeding them to pigs.
In 2007 a court found him guilty pf six counts of first degree murders, there was a enough evidence to charge him with 20 more but prosecutors decided not to because he had already been given life sentences. But it has never been satisfactory proven how many he really did kill only that his evil might not have stopped had he not been caught.
Christopher Berry Dee said: "These women to Pickton were nothing more than meat, he would use it abuse it and recycle it and put it back into the community, the man is an animal." In 2016 he released a book written in prison which was described as "rambling” and “interspersed with passages from the Bible,”. The book claims that Pickton was set up by investigators without offering any hint at who might have killed the 26 women or why their DNA was found at the farm.
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
