May 10, 1949 - Robert Pickton
Pickton operated largely unchecked for years, his victims drawn from one of Vancouver's most vulnerable and marginalized communities — a population whose disappearances attracted little urgent attention from authorities. The eventual investigation exposed systemic failures in how law enforcement responded to reports of missing women, particularly those who were Indigenous, and led directly to a formal government inquiry into police conduct. The scale of what occurred on his farm, and the institutional neglect that allowed it to continue, made this case a landmark in Canada's reckoning with violence against Indigenous and marginalized women.
From Wikipedia
Robert William Pickton (October 24, 1949 – May 31, 2024), also known as the Pig Farmer Killer or the Butcher, was a Canadian pig farmer and serial killer. He is believed to have murdered at least 26 women, many of them sex workers from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. He confessed to forty-nine murders to an undercover RCMP officer. 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 staying the additional charges made the most sense, since Pickton was already serving the maximum sentence allowable.
The discovery of Pickton's crimes sparked widespread outrage and forced the Canadian government to acknowledge the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, with the British Columbia provincial government forming the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry to examine the role of the police in the matter. Pickton died in 2024 after being attacked in prison by another inmate.
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