During the late 1980s and 90s Vancouver, Canada experienced a significant spike in missing women. Most of the missing women were either sex-workers, runaways or suffered from drug addiction and mental health issues.
While some thought these women went missing due to their high-risk “lifestyles” or by choice, the sex worker community knew that most of the missing women were, in fact, victims of a serial killer. The community did its best to protect residents and fellow sex workers by walking in groups or writing down their clients’ license plates. Yet, nothing worked and the list of missing women only grew.
Families and friends did what they could to convince the police to take action for the missing women, eventually the Canadian RCMP created a special team to investigate the disappearances. Unfortunately, the team was disbanded due to lack of progress in the investigation, its main issue was garnering trust from the women it was trying to protect.
The investigation went ice cold and the posters of the missing Canadian women collected dust in the local police department’s filing cabinets. With no leads and no evidence, the RCMP figured that most of the missing women had just relocated.
A Break in the Case
The investigation into the missing women was at a stand still until 1997 when a man named Robert Pickton was arrested for kidnapping and stabbing a sex worker.
The sex worker in question stated that she had been picked up by Pickton while she was working, the victim was taken back to his farm where he attempted to handcuff her. When she resisted, Pickton stabbed her in the abdomen. Even with life-threatening injuries, she managed to wrestle the knife away from him and stabbed him before running to the nearest road to hail an oncoming vehicle for help. Luckily, the woman was able to arrive at a hospital to receive treatment.
As for Pickton, he called an ambulance shortly after the woman got away. He was taken to the same hospital where he was later arrested. Pickton was charges with attempted murder, forcible confinement, and assault with a weapon.
If only the story ended there.
Pickton’s charges were dropped because the woman he attacked was a drug addict and was considered an incompetent witness. Pickton’s defense argued that the woman was a hitchhiker who had attacked him, so he was promptly released from prison.
After the trial, there was another instance in which police had the opportunity to arrest Pickton in 1999. An employee on Pickton’s farm told law enforcement that a sex worker and drug addict he knew, Lynn Ellingsen, had seen a body hanging in Pickton’s slaughterhouse. When questioned, Ellungsen denied the story. It wasn’t until much later that she admitted to seeing it but didn’t report it. Ellingsen said she was afraid of Pickton since she also depended on him to fund her drug habit at the time. Although Pickton consented to a search of his property, police did not investigate the accusation further. If they had searched the property, they likely would have found the evidence they needed.
Another employee of the farm, Bill Hiscox, informed the RCMP that there were multiple items of women’s clothing on the property and that he believed belonged to the missing Vancouver women. Yet again, police did not investigate further and said that they either needed an eyewitness or physical evidence to search the property.
In 2002 another former employee of the farm, Scott Chubb, came forward as an eyewitness who had personally seen illegal guns on Pickton’s farm. At last, this was enough for police to receive a warrant to search the property where the RCMP found unregistered weapons, several pieces of women’s clothing as well as personal items that belonged to some of the missing women.
This would mark the beginning of one of Canada’s largest investigations.
Finding the Truth
On the farm, RCMP found fragments of human remains, including: teeth, hair and small bones. Since the police never found a complete body of any of the victims, this discovery led investigators to hypothesize that Pickton would murder his victims, dismember them then shove their severed limbs through his meat grinder before discarding the remains into his pig pens. Police struggled to identify all the remains due to the shear amount of DNA left all over the property. In the end, police were only able to identify twenty-seven victims although there were many, many more.
While the investigation continued to be underway, Pickton was sitting in jail with his cellmate, who unbeknownst to him, was actually an undercover police officer.
Pickton was all too eager to brag about his crimes to his cell mate and was quoted saying, “I got a murder charge on me, and forty-eight more, forty-eight more to come. Whoopee!” Pickton told the undercover officer that he wanted to make it an “even fifty” but was caught because he was “sloppy.”
The nightmare was finally over, the monster behind it was caught.
In December 2007, Pickton was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years.
