An artist's sketch shows accused serial killer Robert Pickton taking notes during the second day of his trial in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster, B.C., on Jan. 31, 2006.JANE WOLSACK/The Canadian Press
Robert Pickton, a notorious and prolific serial killer whose crimes prompted public inquiries into police failures to seriously investigate the disappearances of Indigenous women and sex workers, has died.
Mr. Pickton, 74, was attacked by another inmate in a Quebec prison and sent to hospital in critical condition nearly two weeks ago. The province’s police force, Sûreté du Québec, and corrections officials confirmed his death on Friday.
The Pickton case was scrutinized by two public inquiries that examined the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and the systemic bias that caused their cases to long go unsolved. The investigative failures that allowed Mr. Pickton to continue killing for years prompted recommendations for widespread change to policing forces across the country, though advocates for Indigenous women say not enough has been done.
Who was Robert Pickton? A timeline of events leading to the serial killer’s conviction and death
Mr. Pickton had been in custody for more than two decades after his arrest in 2002. He was convicted in 2007 on six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Murder charges involving 20 other women were stayed.
Lorelei Williams says she went on a roller coaster of feelings upon hearing the news: happy, sad and then shock and nausea.
A pile of rubble including a pickup truck sits in the middle of the Pickton farm in Coquitlam, B.C. Dec. 20, 2004.CHUCK STOODY/CP
“Sad because I miss my cousin,” she told The Globe and Mail Friday afternoon at CRAB Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where she and the relatives of two of Mr. Pickton’s other victims came to lay flowers and keepsakes at a memorial to murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.
Her older cousin Tanya Holyk always protected her from harm, she said, but the 21-year-old was preyed upon and killed in 1996. An eventual murder charge was approved in her case but later stayed against Mr. Pickton.
Ms. Williams, who is a member of the Skatin and Sts’ailes First Nations, said she is sad that his death may now allow the RCMP to destroy evidence seized from his farm despite a long-running court battle to preserve these items.
The remains or DNA of 33 women, including Ms. Holyk, were found on Mr. Pickton’s property, a pig farm in Port Coquitlam, east of Vancouver, and he told an undercover police officer posing as a cellmate that he had killed 49 women.
Bill Fordy, one of three officers who questioned Mr. Pickton for 11 hours, said the man “certainly presented as a predator,” a psychopath and narcissist who was “quite cunning.”
“I do have a recollection of actually feeling his evilness,” Chief Fordy, who now leads the Niagara Regional Police Service, said in a recent interview.
Chief Fordy, who spent 28 years with the RCMP, including as assistant commissioner, said police forces across the country are better organized and more readily exchange information than they did in the 1990s, in part because of the Pickton case. A provincial review had found that among the many failures in the investigation was poor communication between police in Vancouver, where Mr. Pickton found his victims in the Downtown Eastside, and the RCMP in Port Coquitlam, where Mr. Pickton killed them.
Canada has also created a National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains.
But for some, not enough has changed.
Elaine Craig, a law professor at Dalhousie University, said Canadian police and prosecutors spent in excess of $100-million investigating and prosecuting Mr. Pickton – but “very little attention had been paid to the legal output of this process.”
“The social circumstances that failed to prevent the type of collective failure that permitted this man to murder so many women are being repeated today,” said Prof. Craig, who has studied Mr. Pickton’s protracted prosecution.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Pickton used promises of drugs and money to lure women from Vancouver’s impoverished Downtown Eastside to his farm, where he had sex with his victims before killing them. His arrest in 2002 set off a massive search that lasted two years as police enlisted the help of more than 150 forensic anthropology students to comb the seven-hectare property.
Mr. Pickton operated with seeming impunity for years. Investigators frequently failed to follow through on leads or compare notes about him.
Vancouver police also failed to act when friends and families of the women reported them missing, in some cases concluding that the women had gone on vacation or died of a drug overdose. Police officials publicly rejected the possibility that a serial killer was responsible.
After his trial, police promised to overhaul their missing persons departments.
But since then, courts have heard cases against other serial killers who targeted vulnerable victims whose disappearances were also overlooked or explained away because of stereotypes. One man killed eight men in Toronto’s gay village in the 2010s. A Winnipeg man has admitted to killing four Indigenous women before disposing of their bodies in landfills and his trial is now focusing on whether he should be considered criminally responsible.
Wally Oppal, a former B.C. attorney-general who oversaw the provincial public inquiry into the Pickton case, wrote in his final report in 2012 that Mr. Pickton’s victims were forsaken twice: “Once by society at large and again by the police.”
In a recent interview, Mr. Oppal said Mr. Pickton’s case should shock the conscience of all Canadians.
“Why did it take so long for the police to arrest and apprehend this person?” he said. “How does a semi-literate pig farmer outsmart the police for all those years?”
During his review, which heard testimony from dozens of police and prosecutors, Mr. Oppal established that police and public indifference aided Mr. Pickton’s crimes.
“These women were taken right out under the noses of the Vancouver Police and the RCMP,” he said. “Someone would say ‘My daughter is missing.’ They’d say ‘Ma’am, we don’t have time to look … Your daughter is a drug addict. What you expect us to do?’”
Officials with Vancouver police and the RCMP both apologized at the public inquiry, but they also blamed each other and said their officers did they best they could with the information they had at the time.
Mr. Oppal said the police’s handling of a 1997 incident remains a chilling example of police failure in the case.
That year, Mr. Pickton arrived in hospital with a slashed jugular, an injury sustained by a woman he had handcuffed but who had managed to escape. The woman herself entered hospital with critical injuries.
“She died twice on the operating table but she recovered,” Mr. Oppal said in the interview. “The next morning, she told the RCMP that ‘He told me he went to the Downtown Eastside once a week to bring the woman back to the farm.’”
But prosecutors did not pursue the attempted murder charge after concluding that the woman was addicted to drugs and her evidence could not be relied upon in court.
Mr. Oppal said the Mounties never conveyed that information to city police in Vancouver.
“If they had shared that information in March, 1997, the definitive evidence is that women’s lives, some lives would have been saved,” he said. “But the women kept going missing until February 2002,” he added.
Seven years after Mr. Oppal’s report, a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls recommended sweeping changes to police forces nationwide after finding the problems and prejudices laid bare by the Pickton case permeated police forces across the country.
Marion Buller, who led that national inquiry, said in a recent interview that the deaths and disappearances of hundreds of women remain officially unexplained – a source of grief and feelings of betrayal for their families.
“They just don’t have those answers, and they don’t know if they’ll ever get those answers and then they don’t have that closure.”
Ms. Buller said her inquiry built on Mr. Oppal’s work and the Pickton case was a symptom of a Canadian criminal justice system that is broken. Police officers “rely on stereotypes, like “Well, she’s just partying’ or ‘she’s just out with friends’ or ‘she’ll be back’ or just all those excuses for not starting an investigation right away,” Ms. Buller said.
Chief Fordy recalled an exchange with Mr. Pickton when he was investigating the case.
“We were talking about what would happen to him when he died.” Pickton’s answer was “that he would go to hell,” Chief Fordy recalled.
“I oftentimes think about that discussion … He was responding in an emotional way.”
With reports from Hannah Link and Xiao Xu