Murder at Piggy's Palace: The Bizarre Serial Murder Case of Robert "Willie" Pickton

March 20, 2008

The phenomenon of serial murder has existed among mankind throughout history, though the documentation of this type of killing humans has not been substantial prior to the last 75 years or so. Despite the long history of serial murder, however, it should be noted that the number of incidents or commissions of such murders has never been as great as they are today. Even the numbers of victims in such cases has increased. The bizarre case of Robert Pickton, the Canadian pig farmer turned serial murderer, serves as a perfect example of the latter statement—best estimates are that he may have claimed as many as 49 victims and, in his own words, he was going for "an even fifty" at the time of his arrest. If serial murder had reached "an almost epidemic proportion," according to Robert Ressler, formerly of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, by that criminal profiler’s estimate that was published in the mid-1980s, now, more than two decades later, such so-called "motiveless" crimes have come even closer to reaching Ressler’s assessment and belief.

The Pickton case began quietly, as most such cases do, when women from Vancouver’s downtown eastside, long known as being among the poorest neighborhoods in the city, began disappearing. Since many of the women were prostitutes and/or drug addicts, few people outside their immediate families likely noticed their disappearances and even fewer people likely cared that they were missing. Although some people believe the Pickton case may have actually begun in September 1978 with the disappearance of Lillian Jean O’Dare, it would be several years before an official investigation would be launched by the police. At first, the police were the first to admit that they were baffled by the disappearances, and many doubted that they were being murdered—opting instead to believing that the women had simply moved on to other locales.

"In the case of these missing women, we don’t have a suspect," said one Vancouver police officer. "In fact, we don’t have a crime."

Nonetheless, police kept up the search for clues as to why the women were disappearing without a trace. Initially, they didn’t have any crime scenes with which to work, nor did they have any suspects to investigate. If they had, they presumably would have been able to uncover more facts sooner to help them solve the case—a case that many didn’t want to believe existed. Early in the case, the police were accused by a number of people of ignoring the concerns of loved ones of the missing women, some of whom had been missing for more than a decade, because of their particular lifestyles. But the fact that the missing women were someone’s mother, daughter, sister, or granddaughter kept many people pushing the investigators actively working the case to try and solve the puzzle that became even more mysterious with each passing month and each new disappearance. It took some time before they finally began to see an erratic pattern emerging. By the time the massive case finally broke in February 2002, homicide investigators suddenly realized that they were dealing with one of the worst serial murder cases in history and formed a task force when it became almost certain that a serial killer was at work. By then, however, 31 women had vanished, and police suspected that there were others that hadn’t been accounted for yet...

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