Let Me Tell You A Story

Fact II

The Pig Farmer Killer

By the late 1990s, Robert Pickton had been well-known by a certain segment of Vancouver society for years. He and his brother owned a farm just a few minutes outside of the city. Pickton was popular due to the massive parties that he would host on his pig farm. The farm was a bit run down, but the bashes he would host often attracted thousands of visitors. The typical guests of these parties were drug addicts, sex workers, and gang members. A few women began to go missing after these parties, but little official attention was given to the disappearance. The women who were unable to be accounted for were Vancouver's Low Track, an incredibly improvised area of town.

Police paid little attention to the disappearances, assuming that the transients who lived in the area had simply packed up and left without warning.

Robert Pickton was well known by the women who sold sex in the Low Track. In addition to hosting the parties that were popular among local sex workers, he was generally regarded as being a kind john who treated and paid prostitutes well. He would often come to the neighbourhood to pick up girls and bring them to his farm for sex. But sometimes, he had much more in store for them.

Pickton first gained the attention of the police in 1997, after he solicited a sex worker named Wendy Lynn Eistetter. After the usual, he began to stab her. She escaped to a hospital with handcuffs on and pressed charges. The police felt that the drug-addicted prostitute was too unreliable and unstable to be taken seriously.

It was not known at that time, but even prior this event several other women had met similar fates but had not been so lucky. Before the investigation against Pickton relating Eistetter, he is estimated to have murdered as many as ten victims though the number may be much higher. Some of these women were so down and out that nobody even noticed that they had disappeared until several years later. And the identities of others are still unknown.

Each time things began exactly as they did with Eistetter. Pickton would head downtown, drive around the Low Track, and choose a victim. Often a Native Canadian, often a prostitute, and always somebody that he knew wouldn't raise any serious police investigation.

He would solicit them with money and drugs, then drive them back to his farm. When there, he would rape them, murder them, and then commit one of the most heinous acts that any person could ever commit, stuffing their bodies through a wood-chipper and feeding their remains to his pigs, and sometimes even grinding them up and mixing them in with the ground pork that his farm provided to the public. Perhaps the most disgusting part of this whole ordeal was realized during Pickton's trial, years later. It was discovered that the family of Marnie Lee Fray, one of the victims, had purchased meat from Pickton's farm shortly after her death. While unproven, it is possible that they unknowingly consumed parts of their loved one.

Robert Pickton left trails of evidence, and it's likely that several other people knew what he was doing. By only killing those people whom he knew the authorities would neglect, he ensured that no serious effort would be made to investigate their disappearances.

In years before Pickton was caught, the Vancouver police knew that at least sixty women went missing from that area. Since Pickton disposed of this victim's bodies, it took a long time for the police to grow suspicious of him.

Pickton was caught when the police came to investigate his house after a tip about unregistered guns on his property. This was serious enough for the police to obtain a warrant and conduct a search. They didn't only find the guns, but also a lot of evidence suggesting that Pickton committed several murders.