On this rundown farm, the Canadian police discovered an
unimaginable horror. This is the largest serial
killing investigation in North America.
A slaughterhouse for human beings.
There was DNA all over the farm body parts in the form of bones
and teeth and partial jaw bones. For more than a decade, a
predator had haunted women in Vancouver.
The killing, the dismembering, it was just a process he really
enjoyed. The skulls were bisected with
the reciprocating saw, which he used in his slaughterhouse on
the pigs. At the time of his capture, the
number of dead and missing women was staggering.
He was going for an even 50 as far as the number of victims
were concerned. His shocking crimes earned him
the name The Butcher. Robert Willie Picton,
Vancouver's most prolific serial killer.
February 1999. Willie Picton was on the prowl.
He headed to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside looking for a
prostitute or a drug addict, any woman desperate for money.
He spotted a young cocaine addict and offered to buy her
drugs. Once ensnared, he took her back
to his trailer. Once dead, Picton knew how to
make his victim disappear. Willie was suspected of
literally butchering the women, like the animals or the pigs
that he butchered. Picton's gruesome methods made
his crimes almost undetectable. To stop him, the police had to
conduct the most complex investigation in Canadian
history. Robert William Picton was born
on the 24th of October 1949. His parents, Leonard and Louise
Picton, ran a pig farm in Port Coquitlam, 15 miles east of
Vancouver. On the farm, the family raised,
slaughtered and butchered livestock.
The life on their farm was very primitive.
The animals were always allowed to run in and out of the Picton
house. Willie's older sister, Linda,
lived with relatives in Vancouver because his father
believed that a pig farm was no place for a girl to grow up.
Willie and his younger brother David stayed behind to work, and
their demanding mother made sure that the boys stayed on task.
She really was a tyrant. She ran the roost.
The kids worked very, very hard. And she had this distinctive
voice. She'd shout at the kids and say
you kids get out of here right now and she'd screech at them.
For Louise Picton, pigs came first and cleanliness wasn't a
concern. The Picton children were famous
for stinking of manure and of pigs and unwashed clothing and
unwashed bodies. When they got on the school bus
in the morning, children didn't want to sit near them and they
called them Stinky Piggy. Willie struggled at school.
His teachers labeled him slow and he was given special
lessons. He and his brother tried to
escape school in any way possible.
They would come back home and sneak into the house and hide
under their beds, and they would stay there all day until school
was out so their parents wouldn't know that they had
skipped. Friendless, the young Willie
focused on farm work, especially caring for the family's
livestock. When he was 11 years old, Willie
used his savings to buy a calf at auction.
The animal became his pet and only friend.
He just really loved the calf. Every day he would come home and
nurture it, take care of it, feed it.
One day he came home and the the calf was missing.
Willie went to his mother and she was very brisk with him and
said to go down to the barn. He went down to the barn and
found that the calf had been slaughtered.
He was hysterical. That numbed out any feelings he
ever had for human connection and for understanding that that
he could love or to connect to someone.
I think that was severed at that point.
Willie continued to struggle in school and in 1963 the 14 year
old dropped out. He found work as a butcher's
apprentice where he discovered a talent for dissecting animals.
He knew how to solve them, where to solve them, where to make the
incisions in the body parts, how to skin them.
In short, he knew what he was doing.
For the next 4 years Willie kept up his chores and his
apprenticeship. It was a relatively happy time
for the 18 year old, but life on the Picton farm was rarely happy
or normal for long. On the 16th of October 1967,
Willie was taught a shocking lesson.
Dave Picton had just got his driver's license.
He was 16, and he took the family truck out for a bit of a
joyride down the road. The inexperienced driver
accidentally hit a young boy walking along a country Rd.
David raced home and told his mother what had happened.
As Willie later told friends, his mother knew just what to do.
She told him to take the truck right away to the garage that
looked after their vehicles and get it fixed and I'll take care
of the kid. Louise found the boy lying in
the road. He was badly injured but still
alive. The evidence suggests that she
rolled his body into a watery ditch where he drowned.
Although suspicious of the circumstances, the police ruled
the death an accident. None of the Pictons were charged
with a crime. It was a family where if you
could get away with something, you got away with it.
Picton's mother was extremely antisocial, and I think it was
those antisocial traits that Louise had that really affected
Willie and really shaped his feelings about what he could get
away with. In 1970, just after his 21st
birthday, Willie inexplicably left his apprenticeship.
He went to work full time on his parents farm.
There was really no one else but Willie to do the the farm work.
I think in the back of his mind he thought, if I go out in the
world, you know, there's a possibility I'm going to fail.
The feeling of being connected, maybe almost too dependent on
his mother. I think that pulled him back
towards the farm and gave him a feeling like it was it was a
safer place to be. Willie continued to feed the
pigs and shovel manure, and he added a few new jobs to his
list. He'd go to auction and buy pigs,
then bring them back to the farm.
And slaughter them. Willie's work often took him to
West Coast Reduction, an animal waste disposal facility near
downtown Vancouver. Willie was known to drop off
barrels of materials at the rendering plant, which would
take the materials and turn them into other products.
After trips to the plant, Willie often visited A seedy
neighborhood known as Low Track in Vancouver's Downtown
Eastside. The area attracted prostitutes
and drug addicts. The Downtown Eastside is
probably the biggest concentration of human misery
that exists in the developed world.
I mean, there's nothing like it anywhere else in terms of the
numbers of people that are down and out and never coming back.
People are forced to support themselves through selling
drugs, selling their bodies, stealing.
At St. Corners and dingy bars, Willie
could pay for companionship, affection and sex, things he
couldn't get anywhere else. He spent large amounts of money
on the girl, whatever she wanted for like and this month.
So when they returned they would brag about him to her, their
friends. And this guy is like really good
guy to go be with. Amid the sordid lives of Low
Track's population, Willie found his niche.
He began frequenting the Astoria Hotel, a pub on East Hastings
St. Here, men talked to him as
equals and women offered him sexual favors.
He had grown up as a very powerless person and to have
people that he could do favors for, help out, do anything, gave
him a position, gave him a feeling that he had some sort of
power. Power that he enjoyed.
But gradually Willy's need for power grew.
He picked up prostitutes with increasing regularity.
Outwardly, he seemed friendly, even caring, but once a girl got
into his car, he could turn violent.
Guys like Willie, they need more and more stimulation because
they feel restless, they feel bored.
And I think the only way to get that is to do to, to kind of up
the ante and to do something more.
Willie Picton's harsh childhood and dark desires were
transforming him into a monster, and the women of Vancouver's Low
Track would prove to be easy prey.
He just did what he knew and that was butcher and dispose of
things and you've got this recipe for murder that just
doesn't end. In 1970, five 25 year old Willie
Picton spent his days butchering pigs and his nights trawling for
prostitutes in Vancouver's CD Downtown Eastside.
Willie had two personalities, you know, He would be the kind
of, aw, shucks, simple farm boy out in the country, in town.
He was the big spender, the boss of the Astoria, handing out the
money, handing out the drugs. He'd settled into a predictable,
if not disturbing routine, but in 1978 Picton's life changed
abruptly. His parents health had been
failing and in January of that year his father died.
Soon after his mother became terminally ill with cancer.
As Willie took care of her, he saw this once all powerful woman
become sickly and frail. He changed her diapers, he
looked after her, he nursed her, and he'd also found that very
traumatic. The most basic, primitive thing
in the world is a relationship a child has with its mother.
It's the first relationship, and it's one that is very hard to
break. To have to care for her was
probably one of the hardest things he had to do.
In April, Willie's mother died, leaving the farm and
slaughterhouse to her three children.
The siblings split the modest inheritance, but Willie's
brother and sister wanted nothing to do with the family
business. They left the farm work to
Willie. After all, butchering pigs was
what he knew best. Willie's not the brightest guy
in the world. He was dirty and he lived like a
pig and his life revolved around pigs.
I really don't think he enjoyed life on the farm, but he knew it
was his responsibility, that it was something he had to do.
There was a fear that he wouldn't succeed out in the
bigger world, and there also might have been a feeling on his
part that they did have this pig farm.
It could be worth something someday, and it might be worth
sticking around. Willie's brother Dave took over
the main house and Willie moved into a trailer on an isolated
part of the property. He was still stuck on the farm,
but for the first time in his life, Picton could do whatever
he wanted whenever he wanted. He frequently entertained female
guests. He'd bring women out to stay for
a while and he would teach them butchering skills and they would
go to movies and they would go shopping.
It was sort of this bucolic, nice life with one of these
women after another. These friends of Willy's didn't
mind his poor hygiene. Willie was such a distasteful
character that he had to troll pretty low to get friends.
Most of his friends and associates were people that
wanted things from him. Picton would often pay these
women with money and drugs to clean his trailer or help around
the farm. But they never had sex with
Willie, and he wanted it badly. One evening in 1980, Picton was
cruising the streets of East Side.
He spotted a young girl on Hastings St.
According to the girl, Willie picked her up in his truck and
as she later told a journalist, he quickly turned violent.
She was a 14 year old that he picked up in his car in downtown
Vancouver and attacked her with a knife and he raped her and
threw her out into a parking lot.
He really saw the prostitutes as no better than the pigs.
Maybe they were sort of lowlifes to him, people that you could do
things to him getting away with it just sort of further the
thrill. Despite this seemingly new found
lust for violence, this alleged attack seemed to satiate with
his desires. For over a decade, he resumed
his routine of days on the farm and nights on the town.
Then in 1994, the Pictons sold the North End of the farm.
The sale netted them almost $2,000,000.
Flush with cash, Willie and his brother started a social events
business in 1996, Piggy's Palace Good Time Society was an excuse
for the brothers to throw wild parties.
There would be literally hundreds of people, sometimes as
many as 1800 people had showed up.
Willie. Often took prostitutes from low
track to palace parties. Afterwards, they'd go to his
trailer. They engaged in kinky sex
involving bondage. For the first time in his life,
Willie was in control. His recent wealth gave him power
over people, especially the wretched souls of Vancouver's
low track. He exploited the vulnerable,
drug addicted prostitutes in order to satisfy his disturbing
sexual fantasies. He was a.
Pig farmer who obviously. Had a kind of taste.
For activities. That most of us would consider
not pleasant. And when he didn't get what he
wanted, he could turn violent quickly.
In March 1997, a prostitute called Wendy Eisteter went home
with Picton during sex, Willie trying to handcuff her, but she
broke free. Picton grew enraged.
He said that he was. He had a knife.
He was coming at her. Wendy managed to grab a knife
from the kitchen. For every stab he.
Stabbed her and she stabbed him back.
Barely closed and badly wounded, Wendy fled the farm.
An elderly couple driving past picked her up and took her to a
nearby hospital. She's got scars everywhere, all
over the place. It's, it's horrible.
Like huge scars. Like really.
Like, gosh. Down and there and there.
The police charged Picton with assault, but Wendy was too
terrified to testify. She never showed up for the
trial. The case against Picton was
dismissed. He went back to his farm, back
to his pigs and back to his butcher knives.
In August 1997, Picton returned to the CD low track.
He approached a 24 year old woman called Manny Frey.
Manny was a heroin addict. Willie offered to buy her drugs
in exchange for sex. He took her back to his trailer.
After sex, he turned violent. Marni was never seen again.
He probably took her body apart and buried it in pieces on the
farm. Some of it anyway.
What was left he may have disposed of at West Coast
Reduction, the animal waste disposal plant that Willie
frequented. The murder of Manny Frey marked
the start of a violent new chapter in Picton's life.
Along with a compelling desire to sexually dominate women, he
now had a taste for murder. Between 1995 and 1997, 21 women
vanished from Vancouver's sleazy Downtown Eastside neighborhood.
He loved every bit of it. The pickup, the courtship on the
street corner downtown, how much he'd pay, the killing, the
dismembering. I think it was just a process he
really enjoyed. No one suspected that Willie
Pickton was luring women to his pig farm and slaughtering.
Serial clues generally need a bigger and bigger thrill, and so
they escalate their violence. When you see that with Willie,
you see that he went from going to have sex with prostitutes to
bringing them to his home, to raping someone, to killing in.
1998 Nine more women vanished. The police did not investigate,
and they discounted the possibility of foul play.
There were family members and friends and associates, the
women that were were missing that were filing police reports
and being told, you know, these, these women just get on the get
on the greyhound and they go somewhere else.
Police don't like to investigate any case where there isn't a
body. So they said, oh, she's just
visiting her family in Florida or whatever.
They didn't want to take these cases seriously.
But the prostitutes and drug addicts on Vancouver Skid Row
knew that they were being targeted.
There wasn't no notice like we weren't informed or anything
about the beware there's a monster on the street and just
girls that. We're not on the car anymore.
Elaine Allen ran a shelter that provided food and social
services to women who worked the streets.
It was horrifying watching women going missing.
We were so aware of it. I think we all felt so powerless
to do anything about it. Allen reported several
disappearances, but the police didn't follow them up.
We were just constantly rebuffed and told that, you know, well,
this this woman typically takes off and she'll take off with a,
with a John and you know, she's fine.
I'm sure she's just fine. The Vancouver police wouldn't
even say serial and killer in the same sentence.
They would say, well, what do you expect?
These women will get in a car with a stranger, so who knows?
Where they are like. You know, sort of a shrugging of
the shoulders kind of attitude. Women from low track continue to
go with Willie Picton, partly because of the money he gave
them and partly because he had developed a reputation for being
a nice guy. He even maintained friendships
with a few women. I don't think it's.
Surprising that. A serial killer has another.
Life. It's not a simple.
Direction. That.
Every woman that they encounter, they must kill.
It's a It's more complicated than that.
One of Willie's friends was a crack addict called Lynn
Ellingson. For several months in 1999, she
lived on his farm. After getting high in Willie's
trailer one night, Lynn fell asleep.
Something had awakened her that night, and she looked out and
saw a light coming from the slaughterhouse.
Curious, she went outside to take a peek and see what was
going on. Dangling in front of her were a
woman's purple painted toenails. It was Georgina Papen, Picton's
latest victim. Terrified, Lynn fled the farm.
Willie did not go after her. Well, Willie was a bit of a
conundrum. Perhaps he didn't kill Lynn
Ellingson because she was a friend and he'd gotten to know
her. Most serial killers kill people
that they don't know. Ellingson never went to the
police and Willie continued to butcher.
The pig farmer millionaire was on his way to becoming Canada's
most prolific serial killer. By February 1999, pig farmer
Robert Willie Picton had murdered at least two women, but
more than 30 women were missing from the streets of Vancouver.
As the police continued to discount the disappearances,
Picton prepared to claim another victim.
Her name was Brenda Wolfe. She was a drug addict who had
come to Willie's Pig Farm hoping to score some drugs.
She never left. He typically bound his victims
or handcuffed them in strangled some victims either with wire,
with belt. As Willie later claimed, he
carried his victims lifeless bodies to the slaughterhouse.
With the precision of an experienced butcher, he cut them
up. He just did what he knew and
that was butcher and dispose of things.
He probably never gave it any. Thought for most of his victims,
Picton would load their remains into barrels and dump them at
West Coast Reduction. Brenda was the 53rd Vancouver
woman to vanish without a trace. The missing women were all
prostitutes or drug addicts from the city's Skid Row.
Women were very scared. They saw their friends were
going missing. They they knew that I heard
women say I'm going to be the next one.
If you don't see me tomorrow, you know I'm going out tonight.
Come looking for me. As women became increasingly
nervous, Willie began having trouble convincing them to come
to his farm. Willie has diminished
capacities. He's.
A bit of a dim bulb, but. He was shifty and clever in in a
kind of animal way. The pig farmer had a few female
friends, and he found ways to use them to lure victims.
One of his friends was Dinah Taylor.
Willie sent Taylor to women's shelters in search of
prostitutes and drug addicts. Dinah Taylor would go in there
and they'd say, let's go party with Uncle Willie.
He's got drugs, he's got booze, he's got money.
I do remember seeing her in the center a few times in the
evenings. She would pop in and sometimes
pop out with with the woman with her.
And once he had them at his farm, the women were easy prey.
It's sort of a psychological thrill to go from being the
rejected to being the one that sits back and has women being
brought to him. And not only being brought to
him, but being brought to him to prepare for slaughter.
He would usually accuse them of stealing something from him,
stealing money from his wallet, something like that, and use
that as an excuse to work up a Rage Against them.
And then he'd attack them. By January 2001, the number of
missing women had reached 62. The authorities could no longer
ignore the problem. That April, the Vancouver Police
Department and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched
the Missing Women's Task Force. Reward posters promised $100,000
for information leading to an arrest.
Over 12,000 tip offs flooded the hotline.
Several callers mentioned a pig farmer east of Vancouver.
Willy's name was eventually added to a list of suspects.
He had a prior arrest for assault, but no convictions.
The police didn't probe any further.
They didn't really know how to look for a serial killer.
They didn't have the manpower, they had terrible records.
They didn't have Adna Bank to check the identity of these
women. The families of the missing
women were desperate for answers.
They urged the police to investigate.
It didn't matter how many times you phone them and explain to
them that we think that she could be on this farm or
somewhere else in Purkukullam. They.
Didn't seem to care. I don't know why they didn't put
more importance on him. They were tracking a whole lot
of different people and he probably just fell through the
cracks. Willie continued his killing
spree during the course of 2001. In June, he murdered Andrea
Josbury, and in August, Serena Abbotsway became his next
conquest. But unlike his other victims,
Picton didn't immediately dispose of their bodies.
Instead, he placed their heads, hands and feet inside plastic
buckets and stored them in a meat freezer.
I think he'd got sloppy. I think he got careless.
Here's a man who may not have really understood the
implications of what could happen to him.
I think he thought he was sort of invulnerable again, going
back to his mother. He, his mother got away with
murder and I think he felt sort of invincible.
In November 2001, Willie stopped on the corner of Main and
Hastings to talk to 26 year old Mona Wilson.
At his promise of free dope and booze, she jumped into his car.
Instead of taking Mona to his trailer, Picton LED her to a
camper van behind a barn. After sex, he savagely beat her.
Perhaps this particular woman tried to fight back or did
something that was outside the script that that Willie had in
his mind and that somehow it must have set off whatever
psychological rage that he had. Picton then shot her with a 22
caliber revolver. Her blood spattered the walls
and soaked into the mattress. It just could have been that as
time went on, he was escalating his violence because he had more
and more of a need just to act it out in ways that were more
violent. By the end of 2164, women from
Vancouver's low track were on the list of missing women, but
the police were no closer to breaking the case.
Finally, on the 1st of February 2002, investigators got an
unexpected lead. A truck driver who occasionally
worked at the Picton farm told an officer that he'd once seen
illegal weapons in Willie's trailer.
Curious to learn more about a potential murder suspect, the
police obtained a search warrant.
They had to move very, very carefully.
They didn't want to lose this one.
Four days later, the Vancouver police closed in on the Picton
property. Their gruesome discoveries would
trigger the largest forensic investigation in Canadian
history. The 5th of February 2002, drug
addicts and prostitutes were mysteriously disappearing from
Vancouver's Downtown East Side. What the police didn't know was
that one man had murdered at least six of these women and
sadistically butchered their corpses.
But a confidential tip off was about to lead to an unexpected
break in the case. Armed with a search warrant, the
police were preparing to raid Robert Willie Picton's pig farm.
Their search was for illegal weapons, but they soon found
much more than that. One of the investigators came
across an inhaler that had one of the missing women's name on
it. It was prescribed to Serena
Abbott's way and at that point the joint task force decided to
halt the firearms investigation and obtain new search warrants.
Willie Picton spent the night behind bars.
The police alerted the media to the break in the case.
By dawn, reporters and camera crews from across the country
had surrounded the farm. Everyone just stood there with
their mouths. Open the imaginations went wild.
It was like everyone's. Worst nightmare come true?
Inside the property, investigators uncovered a grisly
scene proof of Mona Wilson's murder.
Her blood was found soaked into a mattress, was found on the
floor, was found on cupboards. It was found on the walls all
the way to the the kitchen. In a rubbish bin outside the
campervan was all that remained of the missing woman.
You could see her brain, you could see her hair.
You could see the just the bisected human head floating in
this pinkish soup. In an interrogation room, task
force officers grilled Picton for hours, but he was
surprisingly calm and he denied everything there.
Was a part of him that didn't care, the same way his mother
didn't care that he had feelings.
He put his legs up over the edge of the chair.
He was having a good time and he was really enjoying himself.
After 11 hours of intense questioning, the investigators
changed tactics. They decided to put an
undercover police officer in the cell with Willie to see if he
said anything. Willie knew he was under
surveillance, but that didn't stop him from bragging to his
cellmate. At one point, Willie told the
undercover cop that he was going for an even 50, which in
Willie's mind meant that he'd killed 49 women.
Picton also implied that he'd used a disposal plant to get rid
of the bodies. He mentioned to the undercover
policeman that he got sloppy in the end.
He finally had somebody that he could talk to about what was
really happening. One of the biggest parts for
serial killers is to get to brag about how many people they've
killed. On the 22nd of February, the
police charged Picton with the murders of Serena Abbotsway and
Mona Wilson. Meanwhile, a small army of
police and forensic specialists were converging on the farm to
search for the remains of the other victims.
The police investigators made a grid of the entire property and
they were searching it grid box by grid box.
The forensic investigation revealed A terrifying record of
murder and depravity. There were some freezers in
there. One of the freezers contained 2
buckets, with each containing the head and hands and feet of
Serena Abbott's way and Andrea Josbury.
They took literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands.
Of DNA samples. It was just a mind boggling
police operation, just a forensic search that probably is
unrivaled almost anywhere. By April 2002, the police had
enough evidence to charge Picton with five more counts of murder.
Stories about Picton's butchery made headlines across Canada and
the United States. A few times I had phone calls
from journalists asking me if I knew a particular woman, and I'd
say, yeah, sure, I know her. Why?
And they'd say, well, her remains were just found on
Robert Picton's farm. I had to process the fact that
they were talking about someone who I had assumed was alive.
Even with Picton behind bars, details about the murder spread
terror throughout the city. On the 11th of March 2004,
Canadian health officials issued a shocking statement.
Cross contamination could mean that that human remains did get
into or contaminate some of the pork meat that was produced.
We've. Been given a lot of pig meat
from that pig farm. The night that this all broke on
the news, we phoned Lynn and the first thing that my daughter had
said to her aunt was I was really sorry with Auntie Lynn
because it's possible we could have eaten Marnie.
No one brought meat forward, but for many, Picton's trial could
not start soon enough. The forensic investigation of
the evidence gathered at Willie Picton's farm lasted 22 months.
By the end of 2005, the police had catalogued enough evidence
to charge Picton with a total of 27 murders.
But their case wasn't as strong as they'd hoped.
January 2006, the trial of Canada's worst serial killer was
about to begin. Throngs of spectators, including
dozens of victims family members filled a Vancouver courtroom.
They came to see a killer brought to justice.
Pig farmer Robert Willie Picton was charged with killing and
dismembering 27 women, but the authorities believe that the
number of victims could be as high as 49.
Chilling details about his crimes gripped people in Canada
and the US. What makes?
Picton front page news. Is this almost perverse
combination? Pig farming and you know.
Serial sexual predators. It became a sort of
fascinatingly lurid case. Pretrial hearings took almost a
year. Justice James Williams dismissed
1 murder charge for lack of evidence.
He also divided the cases into two trials.
The cases were just so complex. And so long the judge.
Ordered a severance SO. That the case would become
manageable. Picton would first stand trial
for six counts of murder and to ensure a fair trial, the judge
issued A strict ban limiting what details journalists could
share about the proceedings. The first trial began on the 2nd
of January 2007 inside the New Westminster Supreme Court.
Family members came face to face with the man that many called
the Butcher. He's always got a smirk on his
face. He just gives me the creeps.
When I'm in the courtroom, he just gives me the creeps.
Willie Picton pleaded not guilty to murdering Marnie Frey, Serena
Abbott's Way, Georgina Papen, Andrea Josbury, Brenda Wolf and
Mona Wilson. The prosecution led the jury
through a staggering array of evidence, including gruesome
crime scene photographs, blood spatter analysis, forensic and
DNA evidence. There was all kinds of evidence
presented like. Woman's jacket and lipstick and
night vision goggles, manacles, Just really ugly, terrifying
stuff. Among the witnesses who
testified against Willie Andrew Bellwood was a man who had lived
at the Picton farm for several weeks in 1999.
He testified that Willie had play acted the murder of
prostitutes on his bed, kneeling down and pretending that he was
strangling a prostitute with a belt or a piece of wire.
The defense attacked Bellwood's credibility, citing his criminal
record and former drug use, But Bellwood's story still chilled
the courtroom. His descriptions were very, very
detailed. Equally compelling was the
testimony of Willie's one time friend, Lynn Ellingson.
She was the only person that was going to testify that she'd seen
Willie picked in with a dead woman.
Picton's defence team shredded Ellingson's testimony.
They exposed inconsistencies in her story and reminded the
jurors that she'd been using drugs the night of the alleged
murder. The defence worked very hard to
undermine her credibility with a great deal of.
Success As the trial continued, the defence team portrayed
Willie as a simpleton who wasn't capable of committing these
elaborate murders on his own. In some sense, he was almost a
primitive animal. People talk about how smart he
is, but wolves and animals kill all the time and Willie was
probably one step removed from them.
Picton's lawyers suggested that friends like Ellingson or Dinah
Taylor could have been responsible.
Final arguments concluded on the 26th of November 2007.
The jury deliberated for two weeks.
On the 8th of December, the victims, families and
journalists gathered to hear the jury's verdict.
Suddenly they realized that some of the jurors were in tears and
that told me right away that there was going to be a problem
with this verdict. And from the family's point of
view, there was. The jury found Picton not guilty
on all counts of first degree murder.
The families that were in the courtroom started to scream.
But Picton did not escape justice.
The jury did find him guilty on 6 counts of second degree
murder. Judge Williams gave him the
maximum sentence, 25 years in prison and.
It's essentially about premeditation and see wonder how
someone who killed six women didn't premeditate that that it
wasn't planned and orchestrated? The jury just couldn't reconcile
in their mind whether or not he acted alone.
A date for the second trial has not been set.
Friends and family members of Picton's other 20 alleged
victims are still waiting for their day in court.
To think that we still have 20 charges that have never been
tried against Robert Pickton feels like unfinished business
to me. Investigators may never know
exactly how many women were murdered on the Picton farm.
And another haunting question What turned a lonely boy on a
Canadian pig farm into possibly the country's most prolific
serial killer? Is that combination of nature
and nurture, of learning, of psychology and also maybe
genetics? Maybe he had a predisposition to
be in this way, but he also learned that life didn't really
have. Much meaning I know a lot of
women on the Downtown East Side who would say just let him walk,
just let him be free for 5 minutes and we'll deal with
them. On this rundown farm, the
Canadian police discovered an unimaginable horror.
This is the largest serial killing investigation in North
America. A slaughterhouse for human
beings. There was DNA all over the farm
body parts in the form of bones and teeth and partial jaw bones.
For more than a decade, a predator had haunted women in
Vancouver. The killing, the dismembering,
it was just a process he really enjoyed.
The skulls were bisected with the reciprocating saw, which he
used in his slaughterhouse on the pigs.
At the time of his capture, the number of dead and missing women
was staggering. He was going for an even 50 as
far as the number of victims were concerned.
His shocking crimes earned him the name The Butcher.
Robert Willie Picton, Vancouver's most prolific serial
killer. February 1999.
Willie Picton was on the prowl. He headed to Vancouver's
Downtown Eastside looking for a prostitute or a drug addict, any
woman desperate for money. He spotted a young cocaine
addict and offered to buy her drugs.
Once ensnared, he took her back to his trailer.
Once dead, Picton knew how to make his victim disappear.
Willie was suspected of literally butchering the women,
like the animals or the pigs that he butchered.
Picton's gruesome methods made his crimes almost undetectable.
To stop him, the police had to conduct the most complex
investigation in Canadian history.
On the prowl, he headed to Vancouver's Downtown East Side
looking for a prostitute or a drug addict, any woman desperate
for money, He spotted a young cocaine addict and offered to
buy her drugs. Once ensnared, he took her back
to his trailer. Once dead, Picton knew how to
make his victim disappear. Willie was suspected of
literally butchering the women, like the animals or the pigs
that he butchered. Picton's gruesome methods made
his crimes almost undetectable. To stop him, the police had to
conduct the most complex investigation in Canadian
history. Robert William Picton was born
on the 24th of October 1949. His parents, Leonard and Louise
Picton, ran a pig farm in Port Coquitlam, 15 miles east of
Vancouver. On the farm, the family raised,
slaughtered and butchered livestock.
The life on their farm was very primitive.
The animals were always allowed to run in and out of the Picton
house. Willie's older sister, Linda,
lived with relatives in Vancouver because his father
believed that a pig farm was no place for a girl to grow up.
Willie and his younger brother David stayed behind to work, and
their demanding mother made sure that the boys stayed on task.
She really was a tyrant. She ran the roost.
The kids worked very, very hard. And she had this distinctive
voice. She'd shout at the kids and say
you kids get out of here right now and she'd screech at them.
For Louise Picton, pigs came first and cleanliness wasn't a
concern. The Picton children were famous
for stinking of manure and of pigs and unwashed clothing and
unwashed bodies. When they got on the school bus
in the morning, children didn't want to sit near them and they
called them Stinky Piggy. Willie struggled at school.
His teachers labeled him slow and he was given special lessons
he and his brother tried to escape school in any way
possible. They.
Would come back home and sneak into the house and hide under
their beds and they would stay there all day until school was
out so their parents wouldn't know that they had.
Skipped friendless, the young Willie focused on farm work,
especially caring for the family's livestock.
When he was 11 years old, Willie used his savings to buy a calf
at auction. The animal became his pet and
only friend. He just really loved the calf.
Every day he would come home and nurture it, take care of it,
feed it. One day he came home and the the
calf was missing. Willie went to his mother and
she was very brisk with him and said to go go down to the barn.
He went down to the barn and found that the calf had been
slaughtered. He was hysterical.
That numbed out any feelings he ever had for human connection
and for understanding that that he could love or to connect to
someone. I think that was severed at that
point. Willie continued to struggle in
school and in 1963 the 14 year old dropped out.
He found work as a butcher's apprentice where he discovered a
talent for dissecting animals. He knew how to solve them, where
to solve them, where to make the incisions in the body parts, how
to skin them. In short, he knew what he was
doing. For the next 4 years Willie kept
up his chores and his apprenticeship.
It was a relatively happy time for the 18 year old, but life on
the Picton farm was rarely happy or normal for long.
On the 16th of October 1967, Willie was taught a shocking
lesson. Dave Picton had just got his
driver's license. He was 16, and he took the
family truck out for a bit of a joyride down the road.
The inexperienced driver accidentally hit a young boy
walking along a country Rd. David raced home and told his
mother what had happened. As Willie later told friends,
his mother knew just what to do. She told him to take the truck
right away to the garage that looked after their vehicles and
get it fixed and I'll take care of the kid.
Louise found the boy lying in the road.
He was badly injured but still alive.
The evidence suggests that she rolled his body into a watery
ditch where he drowned. On this rundown farm, the
Canadian police discovered an unimaginable horror.
This is the largest serial killing investigation in North
America. A slaughterhouse for human
beings. There is DNA all over the farm
body parts in the form of bones and teeth and partial jaw bones.
For more than a decade, a predator had haunted women in
Vancouver. The killing, The dismembering,
it was just a process he really enjoyed.
The skulls were bisected with the reciprocating saw, which he
used in his slaughterhouse on the pigs.
At the time of his capture, the number of dead and missing women
was staggering. He was going for an even 50 as
far as the number of victims were concerned.
His shocking crimes earned him the name The Butcher Robert
Willie Picton, Vancouver's most prolific serial killer.
February 1999. Willie Picton.