Serial killer Robert Pickton dies 22 years after a gruesome discovery

There was women’s clothing and jewelry. An asthma inhaler prescribed to a missing woman. The blood of another. That was just the start. The pig farm soon became the largest crime scene in Canadian history. That initial search led to the arrest of the serial killer who was charged with murdering 26 women and bragged in jail that he had really killed 49. On Friday, Pickton died after another inmate assaulted him on May 19, Canadian authorities said. We are mindful that this offender’s case has had a devastating impact on communities in British Columbia and across the country, including Indigenous peoples, victims and their families,” Correctional Service Canada said in a news release. “Our thoughts are with them.”

Pickton, who pleaded not guilty to the murders, was serving a life sentence. The search began in early 2002, the start of a nearly two-year operation that included 102 anthropologists sifting through 370,000 cubic yards of mud and pig manure, trying to find missing women, The Washington Post reported at the time.

For more than two decades, Pickton worked the slaughterhouse on the property, which a local called “the dredges of the earth.” Many of the women who disappeared were sex workers who had attended parties he hosted there. Many of the victims were also Indigenous women, whose relatives accused police of not taking their cases seriously. Pickton was arrested Feb. 22, 2002, as investigators combed through junked cars, a barn, a motor home and a slaughterhouse.

They set up tents and trailers, backhoes and conveyor belts in a scene that looked like a construction site. Photos from the Vancouver Sun show rows of people walking through soggy fields, bending over to pluck evidence from rock-filled grass, digging in the dirt with the help of what appear to be skiing or hiking poles.After the Feb. 5, 2002, tip that Pickton had unregistered guns, police raided the farm about 20 miles east of Vancouver. They saw enough to obtain another warrant, specifically to search for the missing women.