Robert William Pickton (October 24, 1949 – May 31, 2024) , also known as the Pig Farmer Killer or the Butcher, was a Canadian serial killer and pig farmer. After dropping out of school, he left a butcher's apprenticeship to begin working full-time at his family's pig farm, and inherited it in the early 1990s.
Between 1995 and 2001, Pickton is believed to have murdered at least 26 women, many of them sex workers from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Pickton would confess to 49 murders to an undercover RCMP officer disguised as a cellmate, going on to say he wanted to make it an even 50, but thought he was caught because he got "sloppy". In 2007, he was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years—the longest possible sentence for second-degree murder under Canadian law at the time.
In 2010, the Crown attorney officially stayed the remaining 20 murder charges, allowing previously unrevealed information to be made available to the public, including that Pickton previously had a 1997 attempted murder charge dropped. Crown prosecutors reasoned that...