When you think of Canada, you think of kind helpful, generous, hard working people. The sort of people who would gladly give you the shirt off their back if you were cold, give you their last piece of bread if you were hungry, and welcome you inside. It’s hard to imagine that Canada is also home to Willie Pickton, one of the most vile serial killers ever known.
Robert “Willie” Pickton was born in 1949, in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia to a family of pig farmers. He had an older sister, Linda, who had been sent away to live with relatives in Vancouver. Their parents didn’t believe a pig farm was a place to raise a lady. He and his younger brother David were left to work on the farm.
Their mother was very demanding and pushed the boys hard. To her, the pigs came first, leaving the boys to go unwashed, stinking of slop and manure. They even had to go to school, unwashed, in dirty clothes. Their peers referred to them as “stinky piggy.” Willie struggled in school, and was placed in special ed classes. But as often as he could, he and David would slip away, go home, and hide so they wouldn’t get into trouble with their parents.
When Willie was eleven, he took his savings and bought himself a calf. He loved it, and cared for it. The calf became his only friend – until one day he returned home from school and couldn’t find it anywhere. He asked his mother who told him to check the barn. There, he discovered that his calf had been slaughtered. He was hysterical, and became numb to any feelings toward other living beings.
In 1963, when he was just 14, Willie dropped out of school. He took on a position in town as a butcher’s apprentice and found that he had a real knack for dissecting animals.
On October 16, 1967, Willie’s little brother, David, had finally gotten his drivers’ license. He took the family truck out for a drive, and accidentally struck a young boy in the road. Scared, he raced home and told his mother who instructed him to take the truck to the garage and fix it, and she would take care of the boy.
She took care of the boy by finding him, in the road, still alive, and rolling his body down into a watery ditch where he ultimately drowned. When the boys’ body was found, authorities ruled it an accident – no further investigation was conducted.
In 1970, Willie left his apprenticeship to work on the family farm full time. He started buying pigs at auction, and slaughtered them. He regularly visited West Coast Reduction – an animal waste disposal facility, leaving behind barrels of animal waste.
He started to frequent Low Track, on the east side of downtown Vancouver. This wasn’t a nice area of town, home to drug addicts and prostitutes. Willie felt right at home. He started picking up women, bought them gifts and gave them plenty of money. He earned himself a reputation among the working girls as a “really good guy.” He felt at home at the Astoria Hotel, a pub where he was treated as an equal by the men, and women lined up to do him favors.
Things changed in 1978. In January, Willie’s father passed away, and soon after, his mother became terminally ill with cancer. He took care of her, feeding her, changing her, doing everything he could for her until she died in April. The farm was left to Willie, David, and Linda, but neither David nor Linda wanted anything to do with it. Instead, David took over the family house, and Willie moved into a trailer on a remote area of the property. Willie was free to run the farm on his own. Free to do as he wished.
This new found freedom meant Willie could start to entertain guests. He had all sorts of people over to his trailer, including women he paid to clean up. Despite his wishes to have sex with these women, they were not interested, so he continued to pick up prostitutes from Low Track. On one of these occasions, he picked up a fourteen year old girl. Once she was in his car, he turned violent, and attacked her with a knife. Willie then raped her, and tossed her out into a nearby parking lot. This gave rise to his new routine. Working during the day, night out in the town.
In 1990, Willie and his brother Dave decided to sell off the north end of their farm. This netted them nearly two million dollars. Together they started a social events business called “Piggy’s Palace Good Times Society.” This business was registered as a non-profit charity, however it was nothing more than an excuse to party. These parties were big, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, wild, and loud; most of them on drugs. Even the Hells Angels were known to show up.
Neighbors complained about the noise, the drugs, and overall rowdiness. On December 31, 1998, David and Willie were sued for violating zoning laws, and were legally forbidden to throw any more parties. Their charity was officially disbanded in January 2000, when they failed to provide mandatory financial statements.
Often times, Willie would pick up a prostitute from Low Track and take her to the party. Afterward, they would go to his trailer, where they would engage in bondage-type sex. Women began to go missing. Though most of them were prostitutes, and considered “low priority” it was becoming evident that something was going on. Women had been disappearing since the early 80’s and disappearances were escalating. Rumors of a serial killer began circulating, and the women began working in groups, and keeping track of the license plates of whomever picked them up. But that didn’t stop the disappearances.
In March, 1997, Willie picked up Wendy Eistetter and took her home. While they were having sex, he tried to handcuff her, but she broke free. She ran to the kitchen and grabbed a knife. Willie was enraged, and he, with his own knife, stabbed her. Unexpectedly, she fought back, stabbing him at least as many times as he stabbed her. She ran away, and was picked up on the side of the road by an elderly couple driving by. They took her to the hospital where she was able to relate her story to the police.
Willie was questioned and claimed that she had been a hitchhiker who had attacked him. He had the key to the handcuffs used on Wendy, and was arrested and charged with attempted murder, assault with a weapon, and forcible confinement. The charges were ultimately dropped, when police said Wendy was a drug addict, and therefore could not be considered a competent witness.
In August, Willie picked up Marnie Frey, and offered her drugs in exchange for sex. She was never seen again. By 1998, 30 women had gone missing.
David and WIllie owned P&B Salvage, near Vancouver. In 1999, police received a tip indicating that Willie was keeping human flesh in freezers on the property. Although police obtained a warrant, they never carried out a search.
Lynn Ellingson, a crackhead and friend of Willie’s was staying with him for a few months. One night, she fell asleep after getting high, and awoke to see a light on in the slaughterhouse. She got up to investigate, and when she peeked inside, she found the body of Georgina Papin, hanging there, as parts of her were being cut up. Lynn fled, running away from the farm, and Willie let her. Maybe he knew she would never go to the police. And she never did.
Brenda Wolfe also went to Willie’s farm, looking for drugs. She too, never left.
Since no bodies were ever located, the police said they couldn’t investigate. Perhaps Willie knew what he was doing when he disposed of his victims in barrels, that he took to West Coast Reduction.
So many women were disappearing, that Willie started having trouble getting women to go home with him. This lack of victims led him to seek help from other female friends. One such friend would visit women’s shelters and encourage them to “go party with uncle Willie.”
By January 2001, the number of missing women had risen to 62. In April, the police had no choice but to start taking the case seriously. They formed a Missing Women’s Task Force, and offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. Tip lines were flooded, several tips coming in mentioning a “pig farmer.” Soon, Willie’s name was added to a list of suspects, yet somehow he was still overlooked.
In June, Willie picked up Andrea Jonesbury, and in August, Sereena Abostway. He killed both women, but instead of disposing of them right away, he kept their hands, feet, and heads, and stored them in plastic buckets in his meat freezer. In November, he picked up Mona Lee Wilson and took her to a camper van behind the barn. After the two had sex, Willie brutally beat her, then shot her with a .22 calibre revolver. Her blood spattered the walls and ceiling, and soaked into the mattress.
Finally, in February 2002, police received a tip from a truck driver who occasionally worked on the farm. He claimed he had seen some illegal firearms inside of Willie’s trailer. Police obtained a search warrant, and on February 5, 2002, the farm was finally searched. While they did find some guns, what really caught their attention was the personal item they found, an inhaler that had been prescribed to Sereena Abotsway.
Investigators halted the firearms search, and obtained a new warrant, this time to search for the missing women. Willie was taken into custody on the weapons charge, and was released on bond, but was told he could not return to the farm until the search had concluded.
Investigators found Mona Lee Wilson’s blood all over the camper van, and what remained of her body in a trash can just outside the van; brains, hair, and a skull that had been sawed in half. They found the buckets containing the hands, feet, and heads of Andrea Jonesbury, and Sereena Abotsway. They found bloody clothing, jawbones, teeth, and even DNA from 33 different women. THey found .357 Magnum rounds, two pairs of faux fur-lined handcuffs, a pair of night-vision goggles, and photos of a garbage can, containing human remains. They found Willie’s .22 revolver, with a dildo attached to the barrel. When questioned about it, Willie claimed the dildo was meant to function as a makeshift suppressor.
On February 22, Willie was arrested again, this time charged with two counts of murder. Police interrogated him, but he maintained his innocence. Trying a different tactic, they put him back in a cell, this time with an undercover RCMP officer. The officer was able to get Willie talking, “I was gonna do one more, make it an even 50. That’s why I was sloppy, I wanted one more. Make… make the big five-O.”
As forensics teams were able to match DNA found on the farm, to the DNA of the missing women, more charges were added. Robert received a total of 27 first-degree murder charges. Despite having confessed to 49 to the undercover officer, they did not find evidence to support it. Why? Because Willie had fed them to the pigs on the farm. In 2004 it was revealed that he had also ground up the womens’ bodies and mixed it in with the pork which he sold to the public. The province’s health authority issued a warning to all consumers.
On January 30, 2006, Robert “Willie” Pickton pled not guilty to 27 charges of first-degree murder. 1 charge was dismissed quickly, on the basis of insufficient evidence. On August 9, Justice James Williams split the charges into two groups – one containing 6 counts, the other containing 20. (It was later explained that trying 26 charges at once would be too burdensome for the jury.)
Evidence presented to the court included testimonials from lab staff regarding the 80 unidentified DNA profiles that had been found on evidence. Items found in Willie’s trailer, including the .22 revolver with the dildo over the barrel, .357 Magnum ammunition, night vision goggles, faux-fur handcuffs, a syringe with blue liquid inside, and photos of the contents of Willie’s garbage cans. There were also two video tapes presented. One of Willie’s friend Scott Chubb, claiming that Willie had told him a good way to kill a female heroin addict, and a video of an associate named Andrew Bellwood who claimed Willie and mentioned killing prostitutes by handcuffing and strangling them, then feeding them to his pigs.
On December 9, the jury returned a verdict stating that Willie was not guilty on six counts of first-degree murder, but rather guilty of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life with no possibility of parole for 25 years. As for the other 20 charges, on August 4, 2010, Crown prosecutors stayed the charges, eliminating all chances of further trials.
How about another story, this one about a hunter in Alaska.
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