Robert Pickton
Canadian serial killer (1949–2024)
Robert William Pickton (October 24, 1949 – May 31, 2024), also known as the Pig Farmer Killer or the Butcher, was a Canadian pig farmer and serial killer. He is believed to have murdered at least 26 women, many of them sex workers from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. He confessed to forty-nine murders to an undercover RCMP officer. In 2007, he was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years—the longest possible sentence for second-degree murder under Canadian law at the time.
In 2010, the Crown attorney officially stayed the remaining 20 murder charges, allowing previously unrevealed information to be made available to the public, including that Pickton had previously had a 1997 attempted murder charge dropped. Crown prosecutors reasoned that staying the additional charges made the most sense, since Pickton was already serving the maximum sentence allowable.
The discovery of Pickton's crimes sparked widespread outrage and forced the Canadian government to acknowledge the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, with the British Columbia provincial government forming the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry to examine the role of the police in the matter. Pickton died on May 31, 2024, after being attacked in prison by another inmate.
Early life and criminal history
Robert William Pickton was born on October 24, 1949, to Leonard Francis Pickton (1896–1978) and Louise Helene Arnal (1912–1979), pig farmers in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, 27 kilometres (17 miles) east of Vancouver. Pickton's older sister was sent to live with relatives in Vancouver when her parents decided a pig farm would be an inappropriate setting to raise a young girl.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Pickton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.