World's Most Evil Killers - Season 6, Episode 12 - Robert Pickton - Full Episode | Forensic Files

[music playing] NARRATOR: March 22nd, 1997. Downtown Eastside Vancouver, Canada.
Her street name was Stitch. She was working the corner of Cordova and Princess Avenue.
A 31-year-old mother of two, with a serious drug habit. Selling her body was the quickest way to the next high.
LORI CULBERT: They were doing the best they could with the circumstances in their lives at the time.
NARRATOR: An old pickup truck approached. The driver flashed some cash, and Stitch got in.
GEOFFREY WANSELL: A straightforward transaction. Barter. Money for sex. NARRATOR: The driver was 47-year-old Robert
Willy Pickton who drove Stitch 17 miles East to his pig farm. LORIMER SHENHER: Her gut instinct
was just telling her don't go. Don't go out there. NARRATOR: They had sex in his filthy trailer,
then Stitch asked if she could use the phone. GEOFFREY WANSELL: He attacks her. He puts a handcuff around her left wrist
and stabs are in the abdomen. She's spirited and she fights back. A proper fight ensues.
She's stabbed. He's stabbed. Blood is all over the trailer. NARRATOR: Stitch escaped with four stab wounds.
She was critically injured, but alive. Pickton had been sloppy. This one had got away.
Over the next five years, at least 49 other women wouldn't be so lucky. Making Robert Pickton one of the world's most evil killers.
[theme music] 1990s Port Coquitlam Vancouver. Robert Willy Pickton had spent his entire life
living and working on the family pig farm. This is a man who is not integrated into society.
He's a man who lives in a trailer in the midst of his farm who is trained as a butcher who, in a way,
rejects society. NARRATOR: His only sexual outlet was with women working the streets of Downtown Eastside Vancouver.
Women who sold sex for survival. KIM ROSSMO: The kind of dynamics of the drug addiction
and the poverty, and then the risky nature of some of their customers made them more vulnerable to violence
either from single individuals or serial predators. NARRATOR: Pickton was one of those predators
who hunted women relentlessly. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: Pickton was targeting sex workers because sex workers are easy to access.
They're going to readily get into your car. They are going to readily go somewhere with you.
They are there to be treated how you want to treat them. They are worthless, you know.
They are less than human. NARRATOR: The pig farm gave him the perfect cover for his depravity.
Women would disappear and hardly anyone noticed. LORI CULBERT: For society to allow that to continue
for at least a decade unfettered at this farm that was surrounded by dozens of houses, it's mind boggling.
And it's awful. NARRATOR: This killer story begins in 1949. Robert Willy Pickton was born on October 24
to Leonard and Helen Louise, a family of pig farmers in Port Coquitlam on the outskirts of Vancouver.
He was one of three children. He was the elder of two brothers. They had an elder sister called Linda who'd been sent away.
And they didn't think a girl should be brought up on a pig farm. And so Linda is dispatched to Vancouver,
which is about 17 miles away. The boys are brought up on the farm. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: Pickton's mother
was very much a workaholic. She was a very industrious woman. And this had a significant impact on her children
because they had to work in this family business. So the children didn't really get much of a chance
to be children, to be carefree, to run around and play with their friends and that kind of thing.
GEOFFREY WANSELL: She was the decisive force in the family. Leonard was more remote.
Some said he was abusive to the boys. I think he was probably just a Victorian father, in a rather
old-fashioned sense. The boys were really less important to their mother than the pigs.
They were certainly not treated particularly well. LORI CULBERT: There was some suggestion
that he was always striving for approval from his parents and from his brother, and that he was a fairly weak young boy
with not a lot of confidence. He struggled in school. He struggled to make friends.
And he very much relied on his brother David for many things in life. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: Pickton was known
by the other children at school as somebody with incredibly poor personal hygiene.
And this is something that his family were-- were not particularly stringent about either.
So it was normal in this household to perhaps not wash and not look after yourself and not change your clothes
as much as other people did. This is something that would have really excluded him from his peer group.
He's that kid that smells. He's that kid that's not like us. LORIMER SHENHER: He has a prized calf that he considers a pet.
He's a child, and he's considering this as his pet. This isn't livestock. He comes home from school one day
and finds out his dad has slaughtered his pet calf. And he's just devastated. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: He has learned
that I am not going to get close to anything anymore. I'm not going to love or care for anything
because when I do that, that is going to get taken away. NARRATOR: The boys learn to drive on the farm
when they were still children. One day, Pickton's brother Dave accidentally hit a young boy
on a road close to the farm. He ran to find their mother. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: She disposed of the victim's body in a lake
before he'd even died. Now, this is a really significant thing to witness, to see as a young person because this
shows you how not to do things. It also sends a message out to him that-- that other people's
lives are not valuable. Pickton was somebody who was used to death. He was surrounded by it on the farm, in the Slaughterhouse.
But this was the death of animals. When we're looking at the hit and run, this is a human being.
And-- and the fact that his mother shows such contempt for the life and for the dignity of a human being
is a message that is going to stick with him. All of these things are playing a role
in shaping his value system. NARRATOR: As a teenager, Pickton spent over six years
as a butcher's apprentice. By 1970, at the age of 21, he was working full-time on the family pig farm.
In 1978 his father died followed by his mother a year later, leaving the family estate to their children.
Robert Willy Pickton was the only one of the three siblings who had any interest in keeping the business running.
LORI CULBERT: This farm was not an idyllic beautiful pasture. It was just absolutely cluttered with old broken down vehicles,
and garbage, and debris, and outbuildings that were stuffed full of all sorts of, you know,
derelict things. And amidst all of this, Willy Pickton lived in a very rundown trailer by himself.
GEOFFREY WANSELL: I think it would be fair to say that Willy Pickton wasn't very attractive to women.
I'm not entirely surprised. He was a messy ugly man who Stank. There's no two ways about it.
He is said to have put butter in his hair to smooth it back. If you look at any picture of him,
it was grubby, stubbly, rather ugly. It wasn't anybody's idea of a boyfriend. He wasn't a man for relationships.
He was a loner in every way and knew it. NARRATOR: In 1994, the Pickton farm on the outskirts of Vancouver was prime real estate.
The brothers sold some of their land for around $2 million. For Pickton, if he wanted a woman
he now had more than enough money to pay for her. 1995, Downtown Eastside Vancouver.
Known as the poorest zip code in urban Canada, it was here that Willy Pickton found what he was looking for.
Low Track is literally the cheapest area of the city. Vancouver at that time had a number of strolls
for street sex trade workers. And some were very expensive. And others were very cheap.
And these were the cheapest. These were drug-addicted women. Many of them were engaged in very risky behavior
because of the nature of the area and the type of customers they would get. LORIMER SHENHER: This was survival sex work.
These women were-- you know, they weren't out there because they enjoyed it. They weren't out there because it
was a choice for many of them. They were out there to survive and-- and to make enough money, most of the time,
to feed an addiction or just to survive. Normally, prostitutes were very worried about money.
Because time is money, are not willing to go great distances to engage in a sex act.
But Pickton was actually reasonably wealthy, and he was able to convince them because, again,
they were drug addicted. And he offered them money. He was able to get them to come-- come back to his farm.
GEOFFREY WANSELL: That was his sexual outlet because he was paying them. It was a straightforward transaction.
Barter. Money for sex, whatever kind of sex it would be. NARRATOR: In 1996, the younger Pickton brother
Dave established a nightclub close to the pig farm called Piggy's Palace Good Time Society.
Piggy's Palace was sort of a nicely built, illegal after-hours speakeasy, or bar, were frequented
by people in that area. But that was his brother's property, not his property. GEOFFREY WANSELL: And they would invite all manner of people
to this. At one point, it was estimated they had 2,000 people at a rave on their farm.
It was good-time city. We're all gonna enjoy ourselves. LORIMER SHENHER: There was a lot of anecdotal talk of sex
parties, drug parties, parties where a lot of sex workers would be brought to the farm to party
later, kind of in an after hours kind of club in Pickton's trailer. There's probably quite a lot of-- all
manner of things going on. It was the first time, I think, that Willy Pickton had felt integrated.
He was in his late 30s. He suddenly discovered, whew, I've got friends, you know, who are pleased to see me.
And I think it gave him something extra. All those people who turned up to the raves, and the dances,
and the New Year's Eve party at the Piggy palace, they must have thought Pickton was pretty all right.
Otherwise, why would they have gone? NARRATOR: On the 22nd of March, 1997, Pickton was cruising the Downtown Eastside
when he saw a 31-year-old sex worker whose street name was Stitch. LORIMER SHENHER: She had a fairly-- fairly heavy
cocaine addiction at the time. They made a deal for $100 for sex, which is an astronomical
sum for the women in the Downtown Eastside, for any of the sex workers there. A lot of the women don't like to leave the Downtown Eastside.
They're nervous. And rightfully so. But she thought, you know, $100, like, that's a lot of money.
Her gut instinct as they were driving out to Port Coquitlam in Pickton's pickup truck
was just telling her don't go. Don't go out there. And she said she was sitting in the truck,
and she was sort of looking down at her feet. And he was driving. And he wasn't talking.
He was very quiet. And she started to think that she wanted to jump out when the vehicle slowed down.
NARRATOR: Pickton brought Stitch to his trailer on the pig farm. GEOFFREY WANSELL: Sex truly takes place.
But then she asks him for the phone book. He attacks her. He puts the handcuff around her left wrist
and stabs her in the abdomen. She's spirited, and she fights back. A proper fight ensues.
She's stabbed. He's stabbed. Blood is all over the trailer. LORIMER SHENHER: But at that point,
he seems to kind of black out. And she has an opportunity. And she's out the door, down the steps.
And she is running a couple hundred meters out to the main road. LORI CULBERT: She was able to get away from him
and ran through the farm and onto the nearest road where she stopped a car coming down the street.
And you can imagine, she was naked with one handcuff dangling from one wrist and completely covered in blood
and screaming for her life. LORIMER SHENHER: They called 911 on the cell phone. An ambulance met them shortly down the road.
And she was placed in the ambulance, taken off to the hospital. And she almost died on the operating table
a couple of different times before they actually managed to save her. NARRATOR: As Stitch fought for her life in surgery,
Pickton arrived at the same hospital seeking treatment. As he was attended to, an orderly
found a key in his pocket. It unlocked the handcuffs still attached to Stitch. Pickton was charged with attempted
murder, assault, and the forcible confinement of Stitch. But sadly, for her and for the case,
she had a severe addiction problem. And eventually, the prosecution withdrew the case
against Pickton because she wasn't capable of giving coherent evidence. And eventually the case was dismissed.
NARRATOR: Pickton had got away with attempted murder. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: It reinforces for him
his beliefs about these women. That they are low status. That they are low value.
That if you hurt them, there aren't going to be any consequences for you. So they're fair game now.
NARRATOR: Stitch had escaped the pig farm alive. She was one of the lucky ones. Other women working the Downtown Eastside weren't so fortunate.
They had disappeared. Detective Inspector Kim Rossmo, a geographic profiling expert with the Vancouver police,
was assigned to investigate. KIM ROSSMO: I was able to obtain data going back about 20 years
on the number of unfound missing persons, particularly women, from the area of interest, which is our skid road area.
And the answer was we would have zero, one, or two-- at the most-- cases in a year until we hit 1995.
Then we began to see a spike that carried on. And depending on where you draw the cutoff,
it was 27 or 28 cases, which was way too many compared to what we've seen in the past.
This was, to put it scientifically, a statistically significant spatial temporal cluster,
meaning something was happening. And the next question would be, what is happening?
Why? What's the cause of this? NARRATOR: On August 30th, 1997 Lynn and Rick Frey
were at home in Campbell River on Vancouver Island waiting for a phone call from their daughter Marnie.
It was her 24th birthday. She called that morning and said oh, do you know what day it is?
And it's like, yeah. She goes, well, it's my birthday. Maybe I'll come home. I said, great.
I'll come and get you. And she said, no, no, no. I won't come home today, maybe tomorrow.
I'm gonna go to a party tonight. She was a fairly quiet girl, you know, just a typical girl.
Kind of-- a little bit maybe tomboyish. She liked the outdoors. She'd always go fishing, hunting with me, cutting wood.
Stuff like that, you know, like kids like to do. Very-- very much in nature. An animal lover.
And animals loved her. She was already doing the drugs prior to leaving here. But I didn't realize at the time that it was as bad as it was.
And she would come home, and she looked like she was just tired. She didn't look like she was all stoned and needed a rest.
So then she stayed in Vancouver. And every couple of months I'd go get her and bring her home
and try to convince her to come back to Campbell River. And there's no way she was coming back here.
And I know for a fact if Marnie never got into the drug scene, she would have never ended up on that farm.
And that's the only reason she went there, was because it was free drugs and free alcohol,
and it was party time. It was her birthday. NARRATOR: Marnie Frey became another missing statistic
from the Downtown Eastside. 1997, Downtown Eastside Vancouver, Canada. Between 1995 and 1997 at least a dozen women had gone missing.
An unusually high number for the area. KIM ROSSMO: Any effort to explain that cluster had
to account for the following. Why was this occurring now and hadn't occurred before?
Why was it occurring in Vancouver, but not in other Western Canadian cities? Why were we not finding any bodies?
And finally, why was it only happening to women not to men? NARRATOR: In 1998, at least nine more women
disappeared from the area. The Vancouver Police Missing Persons Unit had two or three
officers in it trying to deal with not just the cases in the downtown East side but every person reported missing
from the city of Vancouver. For all intents and purposes, these cases were not being investigated.
Everyone took the position that the victims were sex trade workers, that they must be transient, that they must have
just picked up and moved on. NARRATOR: On the pig farm, life carried on as normal.
It was a busy place for the Pickton brothers. LORIMER SHENHER: Dave was more social.
He ran the businesses more. And Robert was more of an employee. Outwardly, it seemed as though Dave controlled
Robert to a large degree. But those that were quite close to both of them said that a lot of times it would actually
be the other way around. There was a lot of people coming and going on the farm,
people who would come to pick up pork from the pig business. Just a lot of people coming and going from that property.
[oinking] NARRATOR: Running the pig farm was a bloody business. Pickton would slaughter and butcher his pigs on-site.
He disposed of the carcasses at a meat rendering plant where small local suppliers disposed of animal waste
with no supervision or paperwork. He seemed to have a fairly big heart in terms of people
he would try to help out if someone had been released from jail and was looking for work.
He took in a lot of people to work for cash under the table on the farm. Some of those people would stay on the farm with him.
Sometimes he had a spare room in his trailer that people could stay in. He helped a lot of his friends financially.
NARRATOR: In 1999 one of the friends Willy Pickton helped was Lynn Ellingsen Lynn was a crack addict who lived and worked
on the farm for several months. The job gave her a place to stay and ready cash to satisfy her drug habit.
Ellingsen knew Pickton regularly brought sex workers back to the farm. She was also aware that women continue to disappear
from the Downtown Eastside. But it became very clear when you started looking into the backgrounds of these women
that they were entirely not transient. That they had very small worlds that they lived in.
They worked a certain section of a street. They picked up their social assistance checks
on the same day. They always picked up their methadone or their harm reduction drugs on the same day.
They always maybe phone their mom on Mother's Day or their daughter to wish her a happy birthday.
And in every single one of these cases, that regular routine by these women just stopped.
It just stopped. And when you started to look into it, it became clear that these women had not picked up and moved on.
That they were actually missing. So there were a number of problems. But probably the biggest was the fact
that no bodies have been found. That's how a murder investigation typically proceeds.
A body is found. It's analyzed. There's forensics that are obtained, possibly DNA.
But there had been no bodies, which was very problematic and very challenging. No hard evidence made it easy for people
to make decisions that focused on other crime problems. You combine this with budget cuts the police agencies were
facing and other murders that took up time and attention, and this, like some other cases, just kind of
fell between the cracks even though the available intelligence and evidence pointed
towards a serial killer. NARRATOR: On March 2, 1999 Pickton was cruising downtown
when he saw 34-year-old Georgina Papin working on the streets. Pickton paid her well to get in the truck
and return to the farm with him where they were joined by Lynn Ellingsen. The three of them partied hard.
Ellingsen got high and fell asleep. When she awoke there was a light on in the slaughterhouse.
She went to investigate. Lynn looked through the door and saw a dead woman. Pickton was gutting her like a pig.
The woman looked like Georgina Papin. Pickton turned to Ellingsen threatening, if you say a word about what you've seen,
you'll end up like she is. GEOFFREY WANSELL: He's effectively butchering his victims.
Time after time, he would kill a sex worker. He would have sex with them, and then he would kill them,
and then he would dismember them. NARRATOR: Lynn kept her word and did not report
what she'd seen to the police. But she did tell some of her friends. And they didn't stay quiet.
One of them called the police. LORIMER SHENHER: Right away we wanted to investigate this.
What happened there was they brought Lynn Ellingsen in for an interview completely unprepared.
They were unprepared. They spent virtually 12 minutes with her to talk to her about this information.
NARRATOR: Ellingson gave the police nothing and was soon released. LORIMER SHENHER: Once she had been questioned
in this interview, she went to him and she said, you need to pay me more now because I
want to take a cruise, and the police are breathing down my neck. So you need to pay me more.
NARRATOR: Women continue to disappear. 31-year-old Brenda Woolf was known as a street enforcer.
She protected the women working the Downtown Eastside. Brenda had been an addict who worked the streets
before turning her life around. She went missing in February 1999. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: The fact that police
didn't have any leads would have made Pickton feel invincible. He would have been following these stories
in the local media. He would have been watching the local news and scanning the local papers to see if there
was anything about it in there. And when he realized that there wasn't, that reinforces
his views about sex workers. These women don't matter. They're low status. That they disappear and nobody really gives a damn.
KIM ROSSMO: The victims of serial killers are more likely to be people on the fringes
of society, marginal groups, and in particular, prostitutes. So while serial killers are rare,
this was hardly a surprising conclusion. And given the data, there wasn't really
anything else that could explain the-- the problem of the missing women. The way he treated these victims
as if they were pieces of meat really is outstanding for me. Here is somebody who treats the bodies of their victims
as if they are the bodies of-- of dead animals. This is the contempt that he feels for people.
So this is-- is pure evil, the decision, the choice to do this time and time and time again.
GEOFFREY WANSELL: This horrible looking man with greasy hair, stubble, who stank all the time was,
in fact, butchering-- and that's the only word for it-- entirely innocent women.
There is something profoundly chilling about that because he showed no sign whatever of wishing to stop.
NARRATOR: With no bodies or evidence, Pickton had no reason to stop. Downtown Eastside Vancouver, Canada.
With limited official response, family and friends took the initiative to search for the missing women.
Lynn and Rick Frey had not spoken to their daughter Marnie since the day of her 24th birthday over three years ago.
So I go to Vancouver. And it's about a 45 minute drive from where my parents live.
And I drive to Vancouver and park the car and go looking for her. And I'd walk up and down the streets,
looking in back alleys. You know, anybody on the street that was not doing the floppy chicken or, you know,
too stressed out on drugs I'd ask them if they've seen her. I had a picture of Marnie in my hand.
And I'd say her name was kit-- or a Kit Kat because they didn't know her by Marnie.
NARRATOR: The Freys weren't the only people searching for loved ones. By January 2001, the number of missing women
had risen to over 60. Yet still no bodies or remains had been found. But this number could no longer be ignored.
Finally, in April the Vancouver PD and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police force launched a joint missing womens' task
force. A $100,000 reward for information was posted. And the task force received over 12,000 calls.
One of the problems with such investigation is information overload. But one of the names that came up, and I heard about it,
was Willy Pickton, a pig farmer who lived out in the suburbs of Vancouver in Coquitlam,
or Port Coquitlam. And he had attacked a prostitute from the Downtown Eastside earlier on and had been charged with attempted murder.
So he was a suspect. LORIMER SHENHER: And that was the only entry on Pickton's criminal record that I saw when I was
alerted to him as a suspect. And I ran him through the police computer and all I saw was attempted murder, and assault,
forcible confinement. And the charges were stayed. So that's what prompted me to start
to explore him as a suspect. NARRATOR: Because of his attack on Stitch, the police had brought Pickton in for questioning.
Oh no. No. I don't drink. I don't smoke or use drugs, and everybody does. How come your eyes are bloodshot, I says.
I turn around. I didn't take the knife away from her. I did not take the knife away from her.
I aimed it to her, and I knifed her twice. I did do that. I admit I did that. That's one thing I did and shouldn't have done.
OFFICER: You've never taken any of the prostitutes back to your trailer? Not since this incident.
No. Ick. OFFICER: But before that incident? No. NARRATOR: He'd cooperated. And they found no reason to detain him further.
Nobody has any evidence to the contrary yet. No one has done anything to rule Pickton out.
And that was always my assertion from the beginning, is that he's our best suspect until either
we have a better one or we categorically rule him out. NARRATOR: In June 2001 22-year-old Andrea Joesbury
was in a methadone program close to kicking her drug habit. Her pharmacist reported her missing when she stopped
collecting her prescriptions. These people were mothers. They were daughters. They were sisters.
They were people who could have turned their lives around. And had this man not taken away that opportunity to do so,
many of them would have done. NARRATOR: 31-year-old Sereena Abotsway was a popular character on the streets.
A few weeks after Andrea, Sereena also vanished. In November 2001 Pickton stopped on the corner
of Main and Hastings to talk to 26-year-old Mona Wilson. He offered her free dope and booze if she
came out to the farm with him. When they arrived, Pickton led Mona to a camper van
behind the barn. They had sex, then argued. Pickton pulled out a 0.22 caliber revolver
and shot her in the head. He took her body and dumped her in a trash can. When the police finally realized that there could be
a problem here and they began looking for possible suspects, including Pickton, as bad as this was in the beginning,
they eventually did a really good job on trying to piece the bits and pieces together once
it became confirmed that we-- we actually had a series of murders. NARRATOR: On February 1st, 2002, the missing womens'
task force caught a break. A truck driver who'd worked on the Pickton farm told the police there was an illegal firearm
in Willy Pickton's trailer. A search warrant was quickly obtained. And a young rookie policeman turned up
at the farm unannounced. LORI CULBERT: He got into Pickton's trailer with the search warrant and came across very
quickly, not guns, but identification with women's names on them. They radioed the missing women task force who just immediately
said, get off the property. Shut it down. Control the scene, but don't-- don't spend one more minute inside that trailer.
LORIMER SHENHER: In Canadian law you can't go on a fishing trip on someone's property.
If your purpose is to be there to find a handgun, you can't all of a sudden take a serial killer investigation
and run with it. You have to back out and get a proper warrant specific to what you found.
NARRATOR: A new warrant was obtained, and detectives entered the trailer. They found identification with women's names on it,
transit cards, notebooks with women's names on it. They found garbage bags full of women's clothes
in a closet in his trailer. His trailer was just literally strewn with the personal effects of women.
NARRATOR: Within a few days, on February 5th, 2002 the Pickton pig farm became the largest crime
scene in Canadian history. Robert Willy Pickton was detained and brought in for questioning by the police while a search of the farm
got underway. The discovery of all those remains all over the place must have been truly horrifying.
I can't believe that the officers who actually searched could have thought that they were
going to be dealing with someone who'd killed on this kind of scale. And what girls that you remember have
ever been out to your place? I don't know. There's so many people who come in and out of my place.
I don't know. Had she ever been to your place [inaudible]?? She's pretty, all I can say.
NARRATOR: Pickton told the police nothing, so they changed tactics. Pickton is put into a cell while on remand
with an undercover policeman and proceeds to brag about what he's done. He's prompted by the undercover officer.
NARRATOR: Pickton's jail confession to the murder of 49 women had to be corroborated
with hard evidence. Forensic investigators continued meticulously searching the pig farm.
By February 22, 2002 there was enough evidence to identify remains of Mona Wilson and Sereena Abotsway.
Pickton was charged with their murders. Two months later, another five counts of murder were added.
The Canadian Police Forces spent $70 million Canadian dollars on searching the farm.
They had archaeological experts, more than 100. They dug a huge area. All it did was to confirm what they
by then already knew, that Pickton was killing on an industrial scale. NARRATOR: On March 11, 2004 Canadian health officials
made a shocking statement. As a result of information that we recently received from the RCMP, we have reason to believe that there is
a strong possibility that some of the product from the Pickton farms and how much the RCMP do not know
may still be sitting in some people's freezers in the lower mainland. First, contamination could mean that-- that human remains did
get into or contaminate some of the pork meat that was produced. NARRATOR: After 22 months, the forensic investigation
of the pig farm revealed identifiable remains of 20 more women. Pickton was charged with 27 counts of first degree murder.
The trial began on January 2, 2007 with Pickton pleading his innocence. You know, the trial judge had a very fine line to walk here.
He didn't want to allow any evidence that was going to permit Canada's worst serial killer to walk.
So he had to find a way that he was going to be able to avoid future appeals, to not have charges thrown out.
NARRATOR: The judge reached an agreement with Pickton's defense team to sever the charges
and split the trial into two. The first trial would focus on the six women where fully identifiable remains had been found.
The second trial would focus on the 20 women where only partial evidence was available.
One count of murder was dismissed. One of the witnesses for the prosecution was Pickton's former friend Lynn Ellingsen.
Who said she walked into the slaughterhouse late one night and testified that she saw what appeared to be a human body
on the slaughterhouse table. And it was very chilling testimony in the trial. That was, I'm sure, very important for the jurors
to hear. GEOFFREY WANSELL: On December the 9, 2007 after a very long trial, the jury return
a very interesting verdict. They find Pickton not guilty of first degree murder,
but guilty of second degree murder. Now, I've always wondered whether or not that jury felt that Pickton was not working alone, that that
was the reason they didn't convict him of first degree murder, because he ticked every single box.
NARRATOR: Pickton was sentenced to life in prison to serve 25 years without the possibility of parole.
The Supreme Court of Canada denied his right to appeal. And the government of British Columbia
made the decision not to proceed with the remaining 20 counts of first degree murder.
Logically, it made sense. But I can tell you, emotionally it was devastating to the families of those 20 people
who for years, generations felt ignored by the justice system. They felt ignored by police.
That no one believed them when they said that their loved ones were missing. And they just didn't get that day in court.
He did it because he could get away with it. He did it because he worked out a way
of dealing with the bodies. This is a man who deserves nothing but contempt. There is nothing about Willy Pickton that is admirable.
And there's everything that is despicable. NARRATOR: Marnie Frey was one of the six women
whose remains were fully identified. I never liked the word closure because there
is no such thing as closure. But we had to have, like, a ceremony just to say that, you know, the searching for her
has come to an end. Kind of a sad kind of a thing. But it was something we felt we should-- should do.
NARRATOR: Robert Pickton was a monster preying on women who lived on the fringes of society.
He exploited their desperation to fulfill his own sick desires. How many women died or how they died on that pig farm
is still unknown. The only man with the answers is Robert Pickton, one of the world's most evil killers.
[music playing]

The story of one of the most prolific serial killers in Canadian history, dubbed 'The Pig Farmer Killer' by the media.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers. New episodes including Lee Ford, Pawel Relowicz, John Shaw, John Allen Muhammad, Derrick Todd Lee and more.

Brief Summary

Robert Willy Pickton exploited vulnerable women in Vancouver, leading to a horrific series of murders and a flawed police investigation.

Key points

Stitch's Escape. Stitch fights back against Pickton, escaping with critical injuries but alive.
The Rise of a Predator. Robert Pickton becomes one of the world's most evil killers, targeting vulnerable women.
The Horrifying Discovery. The Pickton pig farm became the largest crime scene in Canadian history after remains were found.
Trial Verdict. After a long trial, Pickton was found guilty of second degree murder but not first degree.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Don't go out there.

Stitch's gut instinct warning her before getting into the truck.

1:03WatchAug 10, 2022

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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