The Piggy Palace

Robert “Willy” Pickton and his brother ran a pig farm in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, east of Vancouver. In the 1990s they also threw large parties in a converted building on the land through a registered society called the Piggy Palace Good Times Society. During those years, women vanished from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Many were living with poverty and addiction, and their families said police did not take the reports seriously.

On February 6, 2002, officers searched the farm on a warrant for illegal firearms and found belongings of missing women. Pickton was arrested on February 22, and investigators began one of the largest forensic searches in Canadian history. He was eventually charged with murder in the deaths of 26 women. In December 2007 a jury convicted him of second-degree murder in the deaths of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin, and Marnie Frey.

He was sentenced to life with no parole for 25 years. After the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the convictions in 2010, prosecutors stayed the other 20 charges. He had told an undercover officer that he killed 49 women. His eligibility to apply for day parole in February 2024 caused new pain for families. On May 19, 2024, inmate Martin Charest attacked him at Port-Cartier Institution in Quebec, and Pickton died on May 31, aged 74.