The Misery Machine - Robert Pickton and The Horrors of His "Piggy Palace"

Episode Date: April 19, 2021

This week, Drewby and Yergy cover another listener suggestion (thank you Bec!) and travel 17 miles east of Vancouver to the Canadian city of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia for the horrific case of Robert "Willie" Pickton, a Canadian pig farmer and serial killer that terrorized the homeless for years. With the police denying the crimes were even happening, how did Pickton's reign ever come to an end? A very special thank you to Levi for supporting our show as our highest tier patron! Levi's Adoption Fundraising Page: https://gofund.me/d658a3a7 Support Our Patreon For More Unreleased Content: https://www.patreon.com/themiserymachine Join Our Facebook Group to Request a Topic: https://t.co/DeSZIIMgXs?amp=1 PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/themiserymachine Instagram: miserymachinepodcast Twitter: misery_podcast Discord: https://discord.gg/kCCzjZM #themiserymachine #podcast #truecrime Source Material: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pickton https://medium.com/the-true-crime-edition/remains-of-49-victims-found-on-robert-willie-pickton-s-pig-farm-a0368ac36ab8 https://youtu.be/_PKR_cMHhsU https://youtu.be/jrpTSKjjxCA Movie: The Pig Farm 

Hi, we're the Misery Machine. I'm Yergy. And I'm Drewby. And this week we're doing a Canadian serial killer. It knows Robert Picton, also known as the pig farmer killer. This is a listener's suggestion, so thank you so much, Beck, for suggesting this. Yes, thank you, Beck. If you two want to suggest an episode, please go ahead and do so in the comment section below. Yes. And by the way, check this out. We're at High of the Land, I believe it's called, outside of Rangely, Maine. I've never been here before, but it's, I don't think the camera's going to do this justice. It's so pretty here. Like looking at it, it doesn't look like it's real. It looks like it's a painting.

Yes, it really does. Also, if you're listening on YouTube, please hit like and subscribe. We're almost at 5,000 subscribers. So thank you so much for that. Yeah, thank you for all so much for the help. And if you haven't subscribed yet, help us get to that 5,000 mark. We really appreciate it. Without further ado. Robert Pickton. Robert William Willie Picton was born October 24th, 1949 in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. Not much is known about his childhood or family, but it is reported that his father, Leonard Picton, was allegedly absent in his childhood, and his mother, Louise Pickton, raised him. She was described as a workaholic who was tough and had eccentric tendencies in raising her children.

She would work her children for long hours on the pig farm, even on school days, but it was the 1950s, and this wasn't unusual. What is unusual is that Louise Picton was the first person to show young Willie picked in where and how to dispose of a body. Yes, she did. Because in his teenage years, and I'll just get this out of the way now because I don't really know where to drop it in. But in his teenage years, he was driving home on a farm road. And he ended up hitting a small boy who was walking on the side of the road.

He didn't see him. And he goes out and he sees the boy is critically wounded, but still alive. So he runs home and gets his mother. And his mother's like, no, you stay here. I'll take care of it. And allegedly, she drowned him in a lake. and the boy was never found again. That's a good role model to have as a mother of the year.

When you're the only parent in a, I think three children, he had one brother named David who you'll hear about. And he has a sister named Linda who I could not find a damn thing about. It's because the father sent her away. Ah, okay. Because a pig farm was no place for a lady. Yes, okay, I did remember hearing that. And she's never heard from again.

And thankfully, didn't have to deal with what happened in our story. Right. So Robert struggled at school. He had been put into special ed classes and realizing his dim prospects at graduating eventually chose to drop out. He was described as having personal hygiene issues as a child into adulthood. He had a visceral fear of water due to his mother hosing him down like a dog as a child. The classmates that were willing to be around, Robert begged him to bathe as he smelled of manure, body odor, and dead animals. While Robert didn't have many friends and had no close connections with the few friends he did have, he did, however, have a very special bond with a young calf that he had raised from birth. His parents told him that this calf could be his own pet, provided that he took care of it, and Robert took this very seriously. As he and the calf grew, not only did they develop a deep bond between them, but he felt like it was his only companion.

Unfortunately, he wasn't aware that the family never had any intentions of keeping the count any longer than necessary, and his parents had Robert's pet slaughtered one day when Robert wasn't home. He understandably never got over the grief of losing the most important connection in his life with the death of his pet. And what could be argued was his only real friends. If things couldn't be worse, his family ridiculed him for taking the death of an animal so hard and would remind him at the dinner table that he was eating his pet. Now, I also heard, it wasn't just a cow or something that was born on the farm. I heard that he had saved up money and bought the little cow at an auction. Oh, really? I didn't read that. That's even more sad.

Yeah. Robert never dated and he never had a girlfriend until arguably when he was much older. Because of the way he smelled, women were repulsed by him and in general found him to be creepy. He was socially awkward with a very strange and off-putting sense of humor. People in general found him to be unsettling to be around. Getting the hint, he would spend most of his life in isolation. I heard he did some really creepy things over in the pig farm. Yes, I heard he would chase around the other workers with pig's heads. And pig's penises. Yes, and pig's penises as well.

Like he would tie them like to his belt or make a belt with them or something just really bizarre. Yeah, and he would chase one guy around that really did not like that at all. So after both of his parents passed away, I believe his father was 77 and died of old age and his mother had died of cancer. Pichten and his siblings elected to sell off. most of the family pig farm to urban development. This reduced the farm to roughly 16 acres. He and his brother continued to operate a livestock operation, but it was on a much smaller scale than what they had done growing up with their parents.

Picton resided on the remaining farmland inside a small trailer. Eventually, the brothers began to neglect their farming duties. Instead, they registered a non-profit charity with the Canadian government in 1996, dubbed, and I'm not joking, it was dubbed, the Piggy Palace Good Times Society. The purpose of this charity was claimed to, and I quote, organize, coordinate, manage, and operate special events, functions, dances, shows, and exhibitions on behalf of service organizations, sport organizations, and other worthy groups, end quote.

The special events apparently included raves and wild parties in a converted slaughterhouse on the farm at 953 Dominion Avenue in Port Coquitlam. These events attracted as many as 2,000 people and drew in drug addicts like a magnet. Members of the Hells Angels were known to frequent the farm, and many sex workers from the Vancouver area were often in attendance. Despite the parties, the farm was a grim place. Now, what was really surprising about all of this

and all of the research that we did, we couldn't find a ton of information on these parties. No, I could not find much. There were small details here and there that I can get into about certain people that showed up there. But it's mostly rumors. There's nothing concrete I can find about this. And there's no pictures, no nothing. There's professional documentaries made about this case.

And not once were these parties mentioned. Yes. It was very interesting. We watched, I think, three professional documentaries. I think that's all the professional ones that are done on this case. And not once were the parties mentioned. I'm very surprised by this. And it's a bit concerning that from one documentary to the other,

they'll just leave out these big gaps where certain parts are that are mentioned in other documentaries. But this is just how this case is, I guess. So Picton allowed drug addicts to live with him on the farm, provided they did work around the farm. The extent of this work is speculated, but is known that Picton would give people who stayed their money if they needed it for drugs or otherwise. Many of these people living there were women.

Keep this in mind before we get into the next events of the story because it's easy to assume that Picton was living here alone with his brother. However, that's the furthest thing from the truth. There were so many people living there. Yeah, there was a lot. And a lot of them were helping out on the farm that was strange because they were doing less and less farm duties as time went on. Picton himself said in an interview that he was only doing the odd slaughtering job from time to time. people would bring him pigs to slaughter that he knew, so he'd do that. But other than that, it seemed like he was out of commercial slaughtering. Right. So at this point, you had to keep

in mind, his brother and sister, they sold off the farm. They got about $6 million for this. They got a lot from the city. So they didn't really need to work anymore. That is true. So a lot of these people here knew that Willie had the money, Willie being Robert. He preferred we called Willie, so we might go back and forth. Yeah. He had quite a bit of money. It was very generous with it. And it would just give it. it out. Not only that, and this is something we kind of left out of the notes because, you know, I can get into this a little bit, but to start on something that is well known about this, Picton liked to pick up sex workers. This is something that isn't hard to do in Vancouver.

So Port Coquitlam is not that far of a drive, at least what it looked like on a map. I have not been there myself. I have, however, been to Vancouver, specifically. specifically Vancouver's downtown east side. And what's there is some people call it Vancouver skid row. I don't know if I'd go that far, but there's a lot of homeless encampments there. There's a lot of people struggling with drug addiction, especially homeless. They say it's the poorest zip code in all of Canada. And, you know, I would tend to believe that. I only spent a couple of days there. But I was living in Seattle at the time and I was a about to move back to Maine and for a long time I was told that Vancouver really is the place to be I was specifically told to go to Gastown it's a hop in place it's full of hipsters there's a lot of fun things to do that I'd like it so I go up there I was shocked to see a lot of homeless a lot of I don't want to say like riff-rath but there was a lot of rough people there just walking around in

Gastown, which I've now read constitutes part of the downtown east side, and I drove through the downtown east side. But walking around Gastown, I saw some interesting things. And I wasn't there on a weekend night, some things that I saw, okay? I saw people shaking down someone else. I wasn't sure what it was for. And this was in, this was like 4 p.m. in front of a bunch of people. The streets were packed. I saw a woman bent over, puking into a Sue were great with her young child holding her hair for her. And the most confusing of them all, I saw a man chasing a woman with, I guess you would call it a cattle prod. It's, you know, you press the button. It creates like a big electric crackle. And he was just shouting and I heard

snap, snap, like you would hear from a cattle prod. I'm like, what the hell is that? And I look over and this woman is just sprinting, this guy's behind her. And while I'm processing, what's happening and they disappear from view and into the crowd rather quickly, nobody acted like anything was happening. And that was the most puzzling part to me. And I'm sure there's going to be some Vancouver natives that are just going to either not believe this or maybe they'll say stuff like this happens all the time. I don't know. But I've lived in and been to many rough places in the United States. And this was one of the more weirder places I had ever been. been to. It was strange. There was very beautiful parts in the Vancouver area, but Gastown, the east side,

it wasn't really anything that I couldn't have gotten and more in Seattle. So that was my experience with it. But it was filled with drug addicts. It was filled with homeless that I saw many, many homeless encampments. And I didn't see these personally, but as we stated, it was filled with sex workers, especially drug-addicted sex workers. And because of that, it is stated that if they were looking for a fix or they were withdrawing, they were known to get into vehicles of even the most sketchiest people, which exposed them to a lot of danger. Furthermore, this is probably how it was easy for someone like Picton to pick up so many women. And this was something that he did often, though

unfortunately, he wasn't just picking them up for sex. So on one night, Picton picked up Wendy Lynn Eystetter, also known as Stitch, who was an addicted mother of two working as a prostitute. She initially refused to go with Picton saying that Port Coquickland was too far,

but he assured her that he'd have her back in an hour and a half. She agreed, but knew something was wrong when she found a woman's bra in his truck, that he merely explained was a date that he had the prior week. She looked for an opportunity to leave, but none came. They arrived at the front gate of Picton's farm, which she thought was actually a junkyard

at first sight. After he unlocked it, they drove further in and arrived at Picton's trailer where he led Stitch to the basement. So when she was making it to the basement, she was a nerve to immediately see a giant butcher's knife sitting on the kitchen table as they made their way in. When she reached the basement, she was even more horrified to see an empty room without a bed, but with clear plastic lining the floor along with a sleeping bag. Picton didn't try anything out of the ordinary, and the two had sex without any incident of mention from Stitch, until after. It was when Stitch went upstairs and asked to use the phone to call her boyfriend

to let him know that she was on her way back to the hotel she was staying in. When she was searching the phone book, she felt Picton lock a single handcuff around her left hands. Stitch immediately broke free of Picton's grasp and ran for the butcher knife and tried to kill him. She escaped from the trailer, feeling blood run down her body. In the scuffle, she had been stabbed twice in the abdomen, once in the ribs, and another to puncture her lungs. She stumbled out of Picton's trailer, assuming she was going to die. A wounded Picton initially tried to chase her, but abandoned the pursuit, having been stabbed multiple times himself. Stitch flagged down a passing driver, Maria Mills, who called an ambulance for her and brought her to the Eagle Ridge Hospital.

Despite his wounds, Picton was able to drive himself to the same hospital as Stitch. An orderly there found a small key in Picton's pocket, which matched the handcuff that was still on Stitch's rest. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were notified, and on March 23, 1997, Picton was charged with attempted murder. He was later released on a $2,000 bond. The prosecutor was concerned that getting a conviction would be difficult as the victim was a drug addict and a sex worker, and that therefore she wouldn't be seen as credible. The charge was dismissed in January 1998, and Picton remained a free man. Months later, Picton and his brother David were sued by the city of Port Coquitlam for violating zoning ordinances,

as they were neglecting the farming for which it had been zoned, and having, quote, altered a large farm building on the land for the purpose of holding dances, concerts, and other recreations, end quote. Despite legal pressures, the two brothers ignored this request and held in 1998 New Year's Eve party, after which they were faced with an injunction that banned any further parties and that the police were, quote, authorized to arrest and remove any person present at any future events, end quote. Their society lost this nonprofit status after they were unable to produce financial statements to the city, and the society was disbanded shortly thereafter. I don't think Willie knows how to do accounting. Probably not.

I bet he did not have a single financial statement. In 1998, Vancouver Police Detective Constable, Lorimer Schenner, learned. of a call made to a police-tip phone line stating that Picton should be investigated in the case of the women's disappearances. Shenner has stated that he tried in vain to get more police resources and attention to the case until finally the 2002 search of Picton's farm took place. Which we'll get into. Yes. In fact, Schenner wasn't the only person who was trying to urge police to do more about this. Dr. Kim Rosmo, who is a Canadian criminologist, then working as detective inspector of the Vancouver Police Department, noted that the rate of missing women

had risen dramatically year by year starting in 1995 and thought that this could be the work of a serial killer. Dr. Rosimo urged the Vancouver Police Department in the very least to look into this further, but animosity towards him from his superiors caused his data to be ultimately rejected, and he was later dismissed from the police force. It is thought that this decision from Vancouver Police was a major contributor in allowing Picton to operate freely for several more years. In 1999, the RCMP received a tip that Picton's farm had a freezer filled with human flesh. My goodness. Yes.

Although they interviewed Picton who denied killing the missing women and obtained his consent to search the farm, the police chose not to conduct one. This is going to be a reoccurring theme where there's a lot of balls being dropped. Yeah, it's kind of. crazy to think that with what they had, they never did a proper search. Right. So, yeah, this would not be the only time they received consent to search Picton's farm with Picton himself showing up to an RCMP office in Vancouver with friend Gina Houston to confront the police about surveilling him, which indeed they were. This was supposed to obviously be done without Picton's knowledge, but they ended up pulling him

over thinking he had a prostitute with him. But in reality, he had Houston's 13-year-old niece. and thus the surveillance operation was blown. Picton and Houston were interviewed for six and a half hours. Pickedon urged them to search his whole farm and take as many DNA samples as they wanted. He actually said this, but to do it and get it over with, so he could move on with his life

without feeling watched all the time. But at this time, other suspects were starting to take precedence over Piquton in the police's eyes. Barry Thomas Niedermeyer was arrested for assaulting several prostitutes. Then there was Robert Yates, who had just been arrested for me. murdering sex workers in Washington State. Even the Green River killer, Gary Ridgeway, who some people claim they saw him attend

Picton's farm parties, was considered a person of interest being investigated as responsible for the disappearances. That'd be really interesting if he really was at the parties. There's endless theories about other people that are involved in this case. And we can mention that at the end, but do I think Gary Ridgeway was involved? Probably not. I mean, he was an American serial killer. Could he have crossed the border then?

Sure, he could have. But there's no evidence to suggest that he operated in British Columbia. So over the course of three years, it was noticed that women who visited the farm eventually went missing. On February 6, 2002, police executed a search warrant for illegal firearms at the property after receiving a tip. Now, it should be noted that this tip was not from a concerned Samaritan, as there were many things witnessed by people there, that they should. have come forward about. However, this tip was merely a lie from a drug addict in order to get backed at Picton and in hopes that he would receive money from the police for the tip. So I just want to stress that what ends up getting Picton into hot water here is purely, purely,

because there were, we can talk about this at the end. There was many people that have witnessed things that should have done Picton in. none of them cared. But what got police to actually search the place? And this wasn't their first time searching it. They searched it one other time, like when he showed up at the RCMP being like, just search my farm. They did send somebody out there later in the week.

And they did a half-hearted search and they did not find anything. That according to them anyways. Now, was he prepared for it? Probably. But if the right people had come forward, he wouldn't have operated for this long. If people were listened to in the Vancouver Police Department that had proper data on him, he wouldn't have operated for this long. And what ends up sinking him is an act of malice from someone else, not because he actually had illegal firearms.

So Robert and David Picton were arrested and the police obtained a second warrant using what they had seen on the property to search the farm as part of the British Columbia Missing Women's Investigation. Personal items belonging to the missing women, including a prescription inhaler made out to Serena Abbott's Way, were found at the farm, which had been sealed off by members of the joint RCMP Vancouver Police Department Task Force. No illegal firearms were found, so let's get this completely straight. This lie, there was nothing. Yeah, there wasn't. I mean, they did find a gun with a dildo as a silencer attachment, a makeshift silencer attachment. Apparently it was hollowed out to stick the barrel in, but that's all they found, really, I believe. We have the data at the end of the notes.

Yeah, we definitely do. Picton was charged with storing a firearm contrary to regulations, and possession of a firearm will not be in a holder of a license. Both of the Pictons were later released. However, Robert Picton was kept under police surveillance. We'll see if they'd do a better job this time. And remember, this is Canada, so their gun laws differ from ours in the state. So on February 22nd, Robert Picton was arrested in charge with two counts of first degree murder. However, by May 26 of 2005, the total number of first degree murder charges topped 27.

Searches continued at the farm through November 2003. The cost of the investigation is estimated to be around $70 million by the end of the year. So within two months, it costs $70 million. Let me be clear about that. $70 million to search 16 acres of land in two months. Continue. Yeah, it's pretty wild. But forensic analysis proved difficult because the bodies had been left to decompose or be

eaten by insects or the pigs on the farm. So they're doing a lot of soil sampling. So I think that's why the money went up. So on March 10, 2004, the government revealed that Picton may have ground up human flesh and mixed it with pork that he had sold to the public, kind of like our friends. Joe Methany, yeah. Well, allegedly Joe Methany. While I don't believe that Joe Methany necessarily did it, I think Robert Picton might have actually done this. He was known to give pork to people, meat to people freely. And he had access to not only be able to slaughter and cut up a carcass, but he had access to a processing facility. And it was thought that he was bringing what was left over of bodies there to dispose of. of. And since he had access, and these things are disposed of as biohazard waste, all evidence basically vanishes at that point. Can we talk about how Mr. Picton looks a lot like a family

member from Texas Shansaw Massacre, as does his property? He does. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, and also forgot to mention. He's a weird little voice like that, too. Yeah, he does have a strange voice like that. That's true. It also kind of reminds me of James Gum from Silence of the Lambs in some ways, just his whole demeanor. The other thing is, is that, as you may have heard, if you know anything about this case, so not only did he bring it to processing facilities, but the pigs that he did have on the farm may have been fed human remains. And this is...

This is a very common disposal tactic. Yeah, this is a common... I wouldn't call an urban legend, but it's kind of a trope. You know, you hear it mentioned in Snatch. You see it in the movie Hannibal. if pigs are starving, they will allegedly eat through anything. I don't know this for a fact. Maybe there's some myth in there.

Maybe there's some truth in there. But this is just one of those things you hear over and over again in murder media, so to speak. There's a lot of cases actually like that. So a preliminary hearing was held in 2003. At the hearing, it was revealed that Picton had been charged with an attempt in murder in connection with the stabbing of sex worker Wendy Lynn Eistetter in 1997. This is the young woman we reviewed earlier. Yeah, known as Stitch.

So Pigtin's clothes and his rubber boots from that evening were seized by police, but after the charges for eyesetters, the tempered murder were dropped, they were left in an RCMP storage locker for more than seven years. Not until 2004 did lab testing show that those items contained the DNA of two missing women. Pickton's trial began on January 30, 2006, in New Westminster. Picton pleaded not guilty to 27 charges of first-degree murder. reporters were not allowed to disclose any of the material presented in the arguments. On March 2nd, one of the 27 counts was rejected for lack of evidence.

On August 9th, the judge severed the charges, splitting them into one group of six counts and another group into 20 counts. He explained that trying all 26 charges at once would put an unreasonable burden on the jury as the trial could last up to two years. It would also have had an increased chance for a mistrial. And I guess I should probably say this, probably thinking, whoa, 27 charges, where this come from in the story. That's the problem. We don't have many accounts of these. We have a list of names of victims attributed to him,

and then we have names of alleged victims. And then there's just many more people that could or could not have been picked in. Yeah, the list is not all-inclusive. During this time, you know, a lot of people who were friends or family of some of these workers, some of these homeless, because all the missing, sex workers and homeless, almost 100%. And many were indigenous. And many were indigenous as well. And so people would come here. They would put up wanted posters. They would try to appeal to the police.

And nothing would happen. There was even when rising pressure came from the media, the police made some sort of public statement and roughly said something like there was no evidence of any murders. We've not found any bodies. it is more than likely that these disappeared women have just moved on to other cities. That was their thing. There's nobody. They probably just went somewhere else. And that's what they hung their hat on for many years until Pigtin's Farm was raided that second time. So the trial for the first six counts was initially set for January 22nd, 2007. The media ban on the trial was lifted.

And finally, for the first time, the public heard the grisly details of what was found during the search of Pigton's farm. Skulls cut in half with hands and feet stuffed inside. A victim's remains found stuffed in a garbage bag. Blood-stained clothes found in Picton's trailer. Part of another victim's jawbone and teeth found beside Picton's slaughterhouse. A 22-caliber revolver with an attached dildo containing both his and a victim's DNA. In a videotaped recording played for the jury, Picton claimed to have attached the delto to the weapon as a makeshift silencer,

Drew B spoke of earlier. The following information has also been presented to the court. During Picton's trial, lab staff testified that about 80 unidentified DNA profiles roughly half male and half female have been detected on evidence. The items police found inside Picton's trailer were the loaded 22 revolver with a dildo over the barrel with one round fired, boxes of 357 magnum handgun ammunition, night vision goggles, two pairs of faux fur-lined handcuffs, a syringe with three, milliliters of blue liquid inside and Spanish fly aphrodisiac.

To follow up with that, there's a videotape of Picton's friend Scott Chubb saying that Picton had told him a good way to kill a female heroin addict was to inject her with windshield washer fluid. Windshield washer fluid is blue, so that could have been what it was. A second tape was played for Picton in which an associate name Andrew Bellwood said that Picton mentioned killing sex workers by handcuffing and strangling them and then bleeding and gutting them before feeding them to his pigs. Yeah, I remember the interview with Bellwood where he said that where he's just like,

come on, Andrew, let's go get a hooker. Let's go get a hooker. He's like, no, and he's like, you want to know what I do with them? And then you just basically said that in length. The mention of injecting heroin addicts with windshield washer fluid, that makes you wonder if any other people were found and ruled an overdose, if he killed anyone outside the farm, let's say, or killed them in prison. put them somewhere. It just makes you wonder if anyone's death was ruled an overdose in

reality they were killed by Picton. Especially, let's just say they are poor sex workers or addicts in this more impoverished district of Vancouver. Are they even doing their due diligence and doing a toxicology test? Probably not. Probably not because it's resources they don't want to spend. They don't even want to look into clear data that sex workers, especially first nation, sex workers, are going missing. And it wasn't even just like a few. That information the doctor had, it was like one or two people missing, one or two people missing, some years nothing. And then it was a humongous spike that just kept going up and up and up.

Yeah, it was like double digits in a year. And this is just for the surrounding Vancouver area. We're not talking greater British Columbia or all of Canada, just the Vancouver area. It just everything about this goes to show you that they do not care. In Canada, and we've mentioned this before, Canada has. a long-standing history of not really caring about the homeless, not really caring about sex workers, and very much not caring about their First Nation people, their native people. The Highway of Tears, I've mentioned this before, this is something to look into. If memory serves as started around 1970 and is still going on to this day, and there's almost 100 victims from this, I think the vast majority are not solved. Basically, you'll find, Native peoples, but especially native women dead along the highway, and they'll be dumped on

native land. And I could go into a lot of details about it, but that's it in a nutshell, really. This is just the culture of how it's been in Canada for a long time. So am I to believe that the Vancouver Police Department doesn't really care about these kinds of people? Yeah, I think they don't at all. So on top of that, there were also photos of the contents of a garbage can found in Picton's Slaughterhouse, which helped. some of the remains of Mona Wilson. She was one of the victims. Yes, she was one of the victims.

On December 9, 2007, the jury found Picked in not guilty, not guilty on six counts of first-degree murder, citing lack of evidence that these murders were premeditated. So do you just pick somebody up for sex and just in the heat of things like, you know, I think I'm going to kill him. Many times. Many times. So not guilty. Many crimes of passion. Yeah, are they claiming this is a crime of passion? Okay, so not guilty of first-degree murder.

However, he was instead found guilty of second-degree murder on all six counts. A second-degree murder conviction carries a punishment of a life sentence with no possibility of parole for a period between 10 and 25 years. On December 11, 2007, after reading 18 victim impact statements, British Columbia Supreme Court judge Justice James Williams, picked into life with no possibility of parole for 25 years, which is the maximum punishment for second degree murder, and equal to the sentence, which would have been imposed for a first degree murder conviction. I'm confused by this. Maybe it works differently there than in the States, but in the States, if you have multiple

murder convictions, you're just going to get life at that point. It sounds like they're charging him as if it was just one murder. I don't know. I would think if you kill six people, you'd get life without the possibility of parole. I don't know. I'm not familiar with Canadian law. Before passing his sentence, Justice Williams said, and I quote, Mr. Picton's conduct was murderous and repeatedly so. I cannot know the details, but I know this.

What happened to them was senseless and despicable, end quote. So you may be wondering, well, what about the 20 other charges? Well, on February 26, 2008, a family member of one of the 20 women named his alleged victims told the media that the Crown had told her a trial on the further 20 counts might not proceed. And on August 4th, 2010, the prosecutor stayed the pending murder charges against Picton, officially ending the prospect of any further trials. You might think, well, he might do life anyways, right?

Well, I'd still would think that if I was a family member of those victims in question, I'd be feeling like justice wasn't served. And it wasn't. They basically just didn't want to spend the resources. Yeah, again, we're spending too much money. So on December 9, 2007, Picton was convicted of second-degree murder in the deaths of six women. Serena Abbotsway, Mona Lee Wilson, Andrea Joseberry, Brenda Ann Wolf, Marnie Lee Frey, Georgina Faith Papin. Picton also stood accused of the first-degree murder in the deaths of 20 other women until these charges were stayed on. August 4th, 2010. Their names are Jacqueline Michel McDonald, Diane Rosemary Rock, Heather Kathleen

Bottomley, Jennifer Lynn Furminger. Some of these could have the French pronunciation, but I'm just going to pronounce them in English just for consistency sake. Helen May Hallmark, Patricia Rose Johnson, Heather Chinook, Tanya Hulk, Sherry Irving, Inga Monique Hall, Tiffany Drew, Sarah DeFries Cynthia Felix Angela Rebecca Jardine Diana Melnick Deborah Lynn Jones

Wendy Crawford Carrie Koskey Andrea Faye Borhaven Kara Louise Ellis also known as Nikki Trimble and one more Jane Doe and these are the ones we know So as of March 2nd 2006

the murder charge involving the unidentified victim had been lifted. Picton refused to enter a plea on the charge involving this victim, known in the proceedings as Jane Doe, so the court registered a not guilty plea on his behalf. Picton is implicated in the murders of the following women, but the charges have not yet been made, and this is not an inclusive list. So we have Mary Ann Clark, also known as Nancy Greek,

Yvonne Marie Bowen, Don Teresa Cray, and two unidentified women. women. After Picton was arrested, many people started coming forward and talking to the police about what had taken place at the farm. One of the witnesses that came forward was Lynn Ellingson. Ellingson claimed to have seen Picton skinning a woman hanging from a meat hook years earlier and that she did not tell anyone about it out of fear of losing her life. Additionally, Ellison admitted that she blackmailed Picton about the incident on more than one

occasion. And about Ellingson, when I heard her story on the documentary that we watched most recently, it's called the Pick Farm, the woman that she saw being butchered, she was partially the reason why she got in the car. So she was staying with Robert and said, I'm going to pick up a hooker. Do you want to come with? And she's like, yeah, sure. And she's talking to this woman. And she was kind of hesitant to go with Picton. And she said, are you coming to? And she's like, oh, I live there. He's like, okay, well, if you live there, I think it'll be okay for me to do this. And they, all three, went back to Pichton's place. She claimed she didn't join in on anything. She just went to her room, but she noticed to get real quiet and she noticed the light go on in the slaughterhouse. By her claims, she walked out

there, opened the barn door, and saw her already hanging from the hook. It should be noted that there are many people, most whom are women, who have lived with Picton or were close with Pekton during that time that deny having seen anything at all. But they speak in such a way. that in my opinion, a person would do this to basically signal that they know but aren't saying anything to protect themselves. And the only good examples I could give this, watch the pig farm and you'll see what I mean, they go and interview many of his associates. There's this one women who basically just kind of would shut down any further conversation when it got deep like this. Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple of them who shut it down in different ways. Some of them further

deny that Picton was capable of doing anything like this period. Others insist that Picton was capable of this, but swear that it couldn't have been him alone and he must certainly have had help, citing that he's a very dim-witted and simple person. However, whether he had help or not, nobody else has come forward with other names. So the victim's children filed a civil lawsuit in May of 2013 against the Vancouver Police Department, the RCMP, and the crown for failing to protect the victims. They reached a settlement in March of 2014, where each of the children were to be compensated $50,000 Canadian without any admission of liability.

Robert Picton was convicted of six murders, formerly accused of 21 other murders, and is thought to have potentially killed almost double that amount of people in the very least. Picton maintains his innocence and is still incarcerated at the time of this episode. And he's also since written an autobiography and was on sale on Amazon for a period of time. But I believe it has since been taken down. There was definitely petitions to get it taken down. Yes.

Which I'm not sure of the law about you being able to publish a book while you're behind bars. I'm pretty sure that's still legal. I don't know if there's anything illegal about in Canada. But I think it was just people trying to make sure that he didn't receive any money for this, given who he is and what he did. Right, you can't profit from your crimes, but that's like a U.S. thing. I don't know if that's a Canadian thing. Yeah, if somebody here from Canada wants to fill us in, you know, leave us a comment or Misery Machine Podcast at gmail.com.

This is a very, very messy case. And it's one where I would have liked to lead with who the victims were, what kind of people they were. We hear their victim's stories from the family, but we just don't know what happened. And if Stitch didn't come forward after she survived, we wouldn't have had her story either. And her story is the closest thing we have to basically assuming what Picton did with his victims, combined with some things he allegedly told his acquaintances and associates. It's a very tragic case.

And unfortunately, I am quite confident after reading this and going through this thoroughly, that there are many more women who are still missing that probably will never be found, and it's because of him. No, I totally agree. I totally agree. So if you made this far, I really appreciate you. And if you appreciated this episode, if you could hit like and subscribe if you're listening on YouTube, or if you're listening on any of the other platforms, hitting the subscribe button

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