Robert Pickton: The Case File of the Missing Women

Everything in this file follows one distinction. Pickton was convicted of six murders, all second-degree, by a jury in New Westminster. For 20 more women he was charged with first-degree murder, and those counts were stayed, which means the Crown halted them. A stay is not an acquittal and not a conviction; the charges were simply never put to a jury. One further count, for a woman who has never been identified, was quashed by the trial judge in 2006.¹¹³²³

That is why this file says “convicted of” only for Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Marnie Frey and Georgina Papin, and “charged with” for the 20 others. It is the language of the court record, and it does not diminish any of the women. The Crown said in 2010 that it was staying the 20 counts because a second trial could impose no further penalty, not because it doubted them.¹³⁰³²

The six women whose murders Pickton was convicted of are listed in the verdicts read in a New Westminster courtroom on Dec. 9, 2007. As CBC News reported the verdicts, each count gave a window of time and a place: “near Port Coquitlam,” between a date on which the woman was last known to be alive and Feb. 5, 2002, the day police first went onto the farm with a warrant.¹⁰

The public inquiry that followed set out to reverse what its commissioner called the “unforgiving shorthand” used about the women. It wrote a profile of each, drawn from families, friends and records. The profiles below draw on those pages and are credited to them. They are short because the record is short, and because the families, not this file, are the keepers of these lives.⁴⁵

The families waited a long time for the verdicts, and longer for an accounting. When the jury convicted Pickton of second-degree murder rather than first, Marnie Frey’s father, Rick Frey, told CBC News it was still, in a sense, a good day, “in that this guy’ll never see the light of day.” He added that his family had been at this “since 1997.”¹⁰

In May 2024, when Pickton died, Cynthia Cardinal, Georgina Papin’s sister, told the Associated Press that his death meant she could finally move on. “I’m like, wow, finally. I can actually move on and heal and I can put this behind me.”³⁵

Pickton was charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of 20 more women. In August 2006 the trial judge, Justice James Williams, split those counts from the six that went to trial first, and in August 2010 the Crown stayed them. The charges were never heard by a jury, so in law these 20 deaths remain charges against him, not convictions.²⁸¹³³²

The women in those counts, as CBC News listed them when the stay was announced and as the inquiry spelled their names, are: Cara Ellis, Andrea Borhaven, Kerry Koski, Wendy Crawford, Debra Jones, Tiffany Drew, Sarah de Vries, Cynthia Feliks, Angela Jardine, Diana Melnick, Jacquelene McDonell, Dianne Rock, Heather Bottomley, Jennifer Furminger, Helen Hallmark, Patricia Johnson, Heather Chinnock, Tanya Holyk, Sherry Irving and Inga Hall.¹³⁵

Some of them are well known through their families’ work. Sarah de Vries kept journals and wrote poetry, and her sister Maggie de Vries wrote about her in the book Missing Sarah. Heather Bottomley’s father, Barry Bottomley, told The Globe and Mail on the day of the stay, “There’s no justice.” Angela Jardine’s sister, Deborah Jardine, said she was “rather relieved” not to face another trial.¹³³⁰

The inquiry’s profiles identify six more women whose DNA was found on the farm but whose deaths never led to charges against Pickton: Sharon Abraham, Yvonne Boen, Nancy Clark, Dawn Crey, Stephanie Lane and Jacqueline Murdock. For several of them the DNA was identified after the trial. The inquiry records that in 2009 the RCMP recommended charges for Stephanie Lane and five other women, and that charges were not laid.⁵

This file does not describe Pickton as having killed these women. The record says only where their DNA was found and that no charge was laid. Stephanie Lane’s mother, Michele Pineault, has spoken publicly for years about her daughter, including before Pickton’s eligibility for day parole in 2024.⁵¹⁷

The honest answer is that no court has said. A jury found that he murdered six women. He was charged with murdering 26 named women and one woman who has never been identified. Investigators found the remains or DNA of 33 women on his farm. After his arrest he told an undercover officer posing as his cellmate that he had killed 49 women and wanted to make it “an even fifty.” The inquiry counted 67 missing and murdered women from the Downtown Eastside within its mandate, most of whom have never been connected to him by evidence.¹⁹¹⁵⁴

Every one of those figures appears in reporting about the case, and they are often used as if they were interchangeable. They are not. The table below sets out each number, what it measures and who gave it.

In Canada a stay of proceedings entered by the Crown halts a prosecution without a verdict. The Forsaken inquiry explained that a stay can be reversed within a year if there is significant new evidence or a significant change in circumstances. When the Crown stayed the 20 counts in 2010, it said the public interest did not require a second trial when no further penalty could be imposed, since Pickton was already serving the maximum sentence the law allowed.⁴³²³⁰

That is why the women in those counts are described here as women he was charged with killing. The Crown, the courts and the families did not describe the stay as a finding that he had not killed them; CBC News reported that the Crown had chosen to try first the six cases most likely to lead to convictions.¹³³⁰

The women in this case lived in or passed through the Downtown Eastside, a few blocks of Vancouver east of downtown that the Supreme Court of Canada placed about 30 kilometres from Pickton’s farm. The Court described the missing women as drug-dependent and working in the sex trade in that area. The inquiry asked readers to see past those words: it wrote that the women were too often referred to by “the unforgiving shorthand of ‘sex trade workers,’ ‘STWs’ or ‘prostitutes,’” and that strangers had told families their loved ones “deserved” what happened to them.¹⁴

The Canadian Encyclopedia describes the neighbourhood’s high rates of poverty, homelessness and open drug use, and reports a survey of sex workers there between 1999 and 2001 which found violence against them frequent and rarely reported. Many of the women had grown up elsewhere in Canada and some had lost touch with their families, which delayed reports that they were missing.³⁶⁴

Families and advocates had been raising the alarm for years before Pickton was arrested. The inquiry found that police accepted most missing persons reports immediately, but that some people faced substantial barriers to reporting, that investigations “were not treated as urgent,” and that the serial killer theory was not fully accepted by the institutions involved until a joint forces operation was set up in late 2000. In public, it found, the Vancouver Police Department continued to downplay the risk of a serial killer as late as 2000.⁴

Reporters helped keep the disappearances in view. The inquiry counted at least 56 newspaper articles about the missing women between 1997 and 2000 and singled out the work of Lindsay Kines of the Vancouver Sun for its impact on public awareness. When Pickton was charged in February 2002, CBC News described the case as that of “Vancouver’s 50 missing women,” and police told The Globe and Mail the case involved 50 missing women.⁴²²²⁷

Robert William Pickton, known as Willie, grew up on his family’s pig farm in Port Coquitlam, a suburb east of Vancouver. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives his birth year as 1949 and reports that he and his siblings sold most of the land for development, leaving a farm of about 6.5 hectares. The Crown’s summary at trial, quoted by the Supreme Court of Canada, described a 17-acre property on which Pickton had lived in a trailer at the north end since 1997.³⁶¹

Pickton ran a pig butchering business next to his home on the property, in the Supreme Court’s words, and the Crown described him as “a butcher by avocation” who slaughtered pigs there weekly. The Canadian Encyclopedia adds that he was a partner with his brother David in a salvage business and lived alone in his trailer. The inquiry records that he lived on the same property as his brother and a niece, in a different residence.¹³⁶⁶

Pickton regularly took barrels of offal from his slaughtering to a rendering plant near the Downtown Eastside, according to the Crown’s summary of its case. The inquiry identified it as the West Coast Reduction plant. The Canadian Encyclopedia reports that his trips to the plant are how he came to know the neighbourhood.¹⁴³⁶

That plant figures twice in the record. Andrew Bellwood, a Crown witness, testified that Pickton had told him he disposed of women’s remains there, and Pickton told the undercover officer the same. The inquiry found that police surveillance once followed him to the plant as he delivered drums, but that officers did not check what was in them.¹⁴

The Crown’s case at trial, as summarized for the Supreme Court of Canada, was that Pickton went to the Downtown Eastside, paid women there for sex, and “lured these women away from their usual working areas to his Port Coquitlam farm 30 kilometres away by offering additional money, drugs, or both.” Personal belongings and trace DNA of four of the six women in the convicted counts were found in his trailer, and the evidence, including the remains, was within 70 metres of it.¹

The woman the inquiry calls Ms. Anderson, who survived an attack on the farm in 1997, told police he had picked her up in the Downtown Eastside, offered her money to come back to his place, and promised to drive her back within a few hours. She also told police that he said he went to the Downtown Eastside about once a week to pick up women.⁴

The Crown’s summary and some trial reporting describe in detail what was done to the women’s bodies. This file does not reproduce those descriptions. They are in the cited court record for readers who need them, and nothing in the legal story depends on repeating them here.¹

One widely repeated version of Bellwood’s testimony, given by the Associated Press, says Pickton told him he fed remains to his pigs. The Crown’s summary quoted by the Supreme Court refers to disposal “including at a rendering plant.” Because the accounts differ, this file uses the court’s wording.³⁵¹

On the night of March 22 to 23, 1997, a woman Pickton had driven from the Downtown Eastside to his trailer fought him off when he put a handcuff on one of her wrists. Both were badly hurt with a knife, and both were taken to hospital. She escaped across the property and was helped by a passing couple, who called 911. A publication ban protects her identity; the inquiry called her Ms. Anderson, and this file uses that name only.⁴³

The inquiry wrote that she “courageously survived Pickton’s attack,” came to the justice system “numerous times” to tell her story, and that “ultimately, her story and her courage helped to stop Pickton.” As far as was known, it said, hers is “the only first-hand account from a target prey of Robert Pickton.”⁴

The inquiry was barred from second-guessing the prosecutor’s decision to stay the charges, and it accepted her evidence that she could not go ahead because Ms. Anderson’s testimony “was the case.” But it found serious limits in what happened around the decision: Ms. Anderson was interviewed only once by police, in hospital and in pain; no formal statement was taken; her vulnerability and addiction were not accommodated in preparing her for trial; and her remark that she believed there were other women on the property was not followed up.⁴

It concluded that from 1997 on, a reasonable person would have seen that Ms. Anderson might have important evidence about the missing women, and that further interviews “could have changed the investigation in 1997-1998 and, perhaps, the Stay Decision.” Pickton was never tried for the attack. At his murder trial the Crown asked to put the 1997 events before the jury as similar fact evidence, and the application was dismissed, so the jury did not hear her account.⁴³¹⁴

In July and August 1998, calls to a tip line that Sarah de Vries’s friend Wayne Leng had set up, and to Crime Stoppers, pointed police to a man called “Willie” and to women’s identification and clothing seen in his trailer. All the calls were later traced to one man, Bill Hiscox, whose information was largely second-hand and implicated Pickton in the deaths of more than one of the missing women. The inquiry found that his information started the Coquitlam RCMP’s investigation of Pickton, and that it was specific and detailed: a Vancouver detective was able to connect his report of a “Native girl’s ID” in Pickton’s trailer to the disappearance of Janet Henry. Almost a year later, a second source, Ross Caldwell, gave police information about a possible killing on the farm.⁴

The inquiry called these informants, together with Ms. Anderson, people with “compelling information that was not fully exploited by the police.” It found that the Vancouver police first heard Pickton’s name in connection with the missing women in July 1998, that he was first referred to as a serial killer that September, and that he was on the Vancouver force’s list of persons of interest from October 1999, staying in its top ten. Yet “at no time was Pickton pursued to the point of being confirmed or ruled out as the suspect.”⁴

In August 1999 the lead Coquitlam RCMP investigator, Cpl. Connor, was transferred, a move the inquiry called “incomprehensible” and said “effectively marked the end of a concerted investigation into Pickton.” Coquitlam RCMP interviewed Pickton in January 2000. The inquiry found that the interview “did not meet even the most basic police standards” and that afterwards the investigation “entered a period of hibernation.”⁴

Surveillance was used only sporadically. On one occasion officers followed Pickton to the rendering plant where he delivered 45-gallon drums, but did not get out to look at what was in them. The inquiry wrote that a dedicated surveillance strategy over six to nine months “would likely have brought the Pickton investigation to a conclusion.”⁴

The joint Vancouver police and RCMP task force, Project Evenhanded, began in January 2001, with a formal agreement between the forces signed in May or June. The inquiry found it started on the mistaken belief that the killings had stopped. Women continued to disappear through 1999, 2000 and 2001. Five of the six murders he was convicted of have count windows that open in 1999 or later: those of Georgina Papin and Brenda Wolfe in March 1999, and those of Andrea Joesbury, Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson in 2001.⁴¹⁰⁵

According to CBC News, on Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2002, RCMP officers searched the Pickton farm with a warrant to look for illegal firearms. Members of the missing women task force went along. The next day they applied for their own warrant, and on Thursday, Feb. 7, the task force’s 30 members and a dozen other RCMP officers moved onto the property. Pickton was charged with firearms offences.²¹

Police said little in public. An RCMP spokesperson told reporters only that the task force had shown a judge enough to obtain a search warrant, and CBC News reported that police said at the time that Pickton was not a suspect in the missing women investigation. Feb. 5, 2002, is the date on which each of the six murder counts ends, and the date on which the inquiry’s terms of reference close.²¹¹⁰⁴

The charges grew as the forensic search went on. CBC News reported 15 first-degree murder counts by March 2004. By the time of the pre-trial hearings in 2006 there were 27, one of them for the unidentified woman known as Jane Doe, and Pickton pleaded not guilty to the 26 counts naming women.²⁴²³¹

The task force grew too: The Globe and Mail reported that it doubled to 85 officers soon after the search began, and that a police tip line drew more than 600 calls in two weeks. Families told the paper they had given police information about the farm in 1999 and felt it had not been followed up.²⁷

After his arrest Pickton was interrogated by police; his defence later put the length at 12 hours. CBC News, which published the transcript after the publication bans were lifted in 2010, reported that he denied any involvement for most of the interview, then said “there’s other people involved.” Asked how many women investigators might find on the property, he said, “I’d say two,” and then, “probably two, maybe three.” At one point he told the officers, “You’re making me more of a mass killer than I am.”¹¹⁵

The Crown’s summary of his formal statement, quoted by the Supreme Court, was that he admitted being the “head honcho” responsible for the deaths of missing women while saying that others were involved too. The Supreme Court noted that his references to others did not exclude his own participation.¹

The defence told the jury that none of this amounted to a reliable admission. Its summary for the Supreme Court said Pickton “scored low on verbal intelligence tests” and was “simply parroting back to the police accusations that were put to him,” in an attempt to get police off his property and to protect people close to him, and that what he told the cellmate “reflected his unsophisticated efforts to impress” him.¹

The jury heard both the statement and the cell recordings. It convicted him of six murders, and the trial judge’s instructions and the Supreme Court’s ruling turned on how he had taken part in them, not on whether the admissions were true in every detail. Some TDSH roundup posts describe him as having a low IQ; this file reports only the defence’s argument about test results.¹

After the arrest, the farm became what The Canadian Encyclopedia calls the largest crime scene in Canadian history. It reports that investigators took 200,000 DNA samples, seized 600,000 exhibits and sifted 383,000 cubic yards of soil, at an estimated cost of nearly $70 million. Those figures are not given in the court rulings or the inquiry report this file relies on, so they are credited to the encyclopedia.³⁶

CBC News reported in March 2004 that the excavation of the farm had ended the previous November. Some DNA identifications came later: the inquiry records that DNA of some of the women was identified on the farm only after the trial ended in 2007.²⁴⁵

By 2006 Pickton faced 26 counts of first-degree murder naming women. Justice James Williams of the B.C. Supreme Court, the trial judge, decided that trying them all together would place “an unreasonable burden” on a jury, with a trial expected to last two years. On Aug. 9, 2006, he divided the counts into a group of six and a group of 20. A publication ban kept his full reasons out of the news until 2010.²⁸³¹

When the reasons could be reported, The Globe and Mail explained them. The defence accepted that the six women in the first group were dead, based on what had been found on the farm, but said it would require the Crown to prove that the other 20 were not still alive. The prosecution said it might have to call as many as 535 witnesses just to establish that those 20 women were missing. “The ability of 12 men and women of the community, doing their best to fulfill an important civic function, is not without limit,” Justice Williams wrote.³¹

Several other pre-trial rulings shaped the trial. The count for the unidentified woman was quashed in March 2006 (§02). The jury would not hear the evidence of the woman attacked in 1997, because the judge accepted a defence argument that it was not directly relevant to the six counts (§08). And most of what was argued in court before and during the trial was covered by publication bans until August 2010 (§19).²³¹⁴³²

The trial before a jury opened in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster on Jan. 22, 2007. Justice LeBel of the Supreme Court of Canada later wrote that it “took almost a year to complete” and that 129 witnesses were called by the two sides; CBC News and The Globe and Mail reported 128. Pickton did not testify. The defence called 31 witnesses.^361311029

The Crown’s position from start to finish was that Pickton alone had killed all six women. Both sides accepted that three of the women had died of a gunshot wound to the head; The Globe and Mail identified them as Sereena Abotsway, Andrea Joesbury and Mona Wilson. For the other three, the Crown relied on the similarity of the evidence to argue that he had killed them too.¹²⁹

The jury of seven men and five women began deliberating on Nov. 30, 2007, and was sequestered in a motel. On the sixth day it sent the judge a question about whether it could find that Pickton had killed a woman “if we infer that the accused acted indirectly.” The judge revised his instructions on the three gunshot counts in response (§15). Three days later, on Sunday, Dec. 9, the jury returned its verdicts.¹⁰²⁹¹

As the foreman said “not guilty” to first-degree murder on the first count, there was a scream in the courtroom. He then said “guilty” of second-degree murder, six times. Families held a ceremony outside the courthouse in the snow, lighting a candle for each of the six women and remembering the 20 others.¹⁰¹²²⁹

Under Canada’s Criminal Code, as CBC News explained on the day of the verdict, murder is first degree when it is planned and deliberate, or when death is caused during certain other offences such as forcible confinement. Second-degree murder carries the same mandatory life sentence but allows parole eligibility to be set between 10 and 25 years.¹⁰¹¹

Jury deliberations are secret, so the reasons for the verdict are not known. Pickton’s lawyer, Peter Ritchie, said afterwards that the jury had evidently not been satisfied the murders were planned and deliberate. The Globe and Mail’s reporters wrote that the verdict meant the jury did not believe Pickton planned the killings on his own but was involved in them, perhaps with someone else; that is their reading, not the jury’s.¹⁰²⁹

The Supreme Court of Canada held that the original “actual shooter” instruction was itself wrong in law, because it invited the jury to acquit on a factual doubt that did not necessarily clear Pickton. Writing for the majority, Justice Charron said the case “was never about whether Mr. Pickton had a minor role,” but about whether he had actually killed the women, and that limiting liability to active participation made the instructions “unduly favourable to the defence.”¹

Three judges, writing through Justice LeBel, found errors in the instructions but held that there was “compelling, overwhelming evidence” of Pickton’s participation. They added: “Indeed, this properly instructed jury would likely have convicted Mr. Pickton of first degree rather than second degree murder.”¹

Two days after the verdict, CBC News reported, Justice Williams heard 18 victim impact statements and argument on parole. The Crown asked for the maximum 25 years before parole eligibility; the defence asked for 15 to 20. The judge said parole eligibility in most second-degree cases does not exceed 20 years, but that this case warranted the maximum. He sentenced Pickton to life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole for 25 years, on each count, the six sentences to be served concurrently.¹¹

“Mr. Pickton’s conduct was murderous and repeatedly so. I cannot know the details but I know this: What happened to them was senseless and despicable,” Justice Williams said, reading out the names of the six women. “Mr. Pickton, there is really nothing I can say to express the revulsion the community feels about these killings.” He called it a “rare case that properly warrants the maximum period of parole ineligibility available to the court.”¹¹³⁵

Both sides appealed. The Crown challenged the severance order and the six acquittals on first-degree murder. Pickton appealed his six convictions for second-degree murder, arguing that the judge’s answer to the jury’s question had changed the “goal posts” late in the trial and made it unfair.¹

On June 25, 2009, the B.C. Court of Appeal dismissed Pickton’s appeal by a majority of two to one. Justice Low, with Chief Justice Finch, held that the defence had known throughout that other routes to liability were in play; Justice Donald, dissenting, would have ordered a new trial because the jury had not been instructed on aiding and abetting. In the Crown’s appeal, a unanimous Court of Appeal ordered a new trial on all 26 counts, an order that was put on hold until Pickton’s own appeal was finally decided.²¹

Five days after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Crown prosecutor Melissa Gillespie stayed the 20 outstanding counts of first-degree murder in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster. She told the court that the public interest, and in particular the safety of the public, did not require a second trial “when no more penalty at law could be imposed.” Justice Williams ordered Pickton moved from a provincial pretrial centre to a federal penitentiary.³²³⁰

The stay also ended the Crown’s own successful appeal: with no second trial, the order for a new trial on all 26 counts was never acted on. A Crown spokesperson told the Vancouver Sun the decision had been difficult, and that a main consideration was that Pickton was already serving the maximum sentence.¹³²

For most of the case, much of what was said in court could not be reported. Under the Criminal Code, anything argued while the jury was out of the room could not be published during the trial, and pre-trial rulings, including the reasons for the severance and for quashing the Jane Doe count, were also covered by bans. When the Crown stayed the 20 counts on Aug. 4, 2010, Justice Williams lifted most of the bans, and outlets began to publish the 1997 case, the reasons for the severance and the transcripts of Pickton’s statements.^323313215

This file does not name Person X or give any detail that could identify her or her family. It uses only the pseudonym, Ms. Anderson, that the public inquiry used. It does not link to any page that names her, which is why some widely used reference pages are not among the sources here. It also does not name the undercover officers or any witness whose identity remains protected, and it limits the names of other people to those that appear in the court rulings, the inquiry report or mainstream reporting after the bans were lifted.³⁴

British Columbia set up the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry in September 2010, with former attorney general Wally Oppal as commissioner. Its mandate was to make findings about the police investigations into women reported missing from the Downtown Eastside between Jan. 23, 1997, and Feb. 5, 2002, about the 1998 decision to stay the charges arising from the 1997 assault, and to recommend changes. According to CBC News, it held 93 days of hearings and heard 85 witnesses, and its report, Forsaken, ran to 1,448 pages; it was released on Dec. 17, 2012.⁴¹⁶

The inquiry identified 67 women within its terms of reference, and it began with them: a volume of profiles, written with families, intended to “acknowledge the terrible loss of these women, as individuals.”⁴⁵

Forsaken made 63 recommendations under four themes: equality, community engagement, collaboration and accountability. CBC News listed some of them on the day of release: round-the-clock funding for emergency centres serving women in the sex trade; better public transit along Highway 16, the so-called Highway of Tears; a compensation fund for the children of the missing women; a healing fund for families; a regional police force for Greater Vancouver; and better police training on vulnerable people and on the history of Aboriginal people.⁴¹⁶

Speaking at the release, Oppal said: “The women didn’t go missing. They aren’t just absent, they didn’t just go away. They were taken, taken from their families, taken from their friends, taken from their communities.”¹⁶

In March 2014, CBC News reported, 11 of 13 families in a civil lawsuit brought by children of women whose remains or DNA were found on the farm agreed to settle with the City of Vancouver and the provincial and federal governments for $50,000 each. The suit claimed police and the Crown had failed to warn women in the Downtown Eastside that a serial killer might be at large. Troy Boen, whose mother Yvonne Boen’s DNA was found on the farm, said: “How can you put a price on someone who fed you, clothed you, took you to school, drove you here, there, everywhere?”²⁵

The next day, CBC News reported, the three governments announced a $4.9-million fund to pay the same amount to as many as 98 children of the women identified by the inquiry, whether or not they were connected to Pickton. Establishing such a fund had been one of the inquiry’s key recommendations.²⁶

Pickton became eligible to apply for day parole on Feb. 22, 2024, according to the Parole Board of Canada as quoted by CBC News, 22 years to the day after his arrest on the first murder charges. The Parole Board of Canada said that did not mean a hearing would be held; offenders have to apply. On the evening before, CBC News reported, families held a vigil at the site of the farm, now held by the B.C. government. “Pickton should not walk on this Earth,” said Michele Pineault, Stephanie Lane’s mother.¹⁷

The vigil also came amid RCMP applications, begun in 2020 according to CBC News, for court permission to dispose of exhibits from the 2007 trial. The RCMP said it could not hold evidence indefinitely. The niece of Sherry Irving, one of the women in the stayed counts, said her family wanted her aunt’s evidence examined further.¹⁷

On May 19, 2024, Pickton was attacked by another inmate at Port-Cartier Institution, a maximum-security federal prison that CBC News placed about 480 kilometres northeast of Quebec City. He was taken to hospital, then flown to Quebec City and admitted to intensive care, and was kept in a medically induced coma on life support. He died in hospital on May 31, 2024, at the age of 74.⁸⁹¹⁸³⁷

Correctional Service Canada said he had been serving an indeterminate sentence that began on Dec. 11, 2007, for six counts of second-degree murder, that his next of kin and registered victims had been notified, and that it was launching a Board of Investigation into the assault.⁸

Martin Charest, a fellow inmate, was charged with first-degree murder on July 3, 2025. On Sept. 25, 2025, in a hearing in Sept-Îles, Quebec, he pleaded guilty, telling the court, “I killed Robert Pickton for the victims.” The statement of facts read in court gave the cause of death as “blunt polytrauma.” The prosecutor said there would be no victim impact statements on Pickton’s behalf; his brother did not want to speak.¹⁹²⁰

Superior Court Justice Carl Thibault sentenced Charest to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. He noted that Pickton had been guilty of “the worst atrocities a person can commit towards others,” but that he still had the right to serve his sentence “in safety.”²⁰

“In pre-trial rulings, the trial judge quashed one count and severed 20 others and the trial proceeded on the remaining six counts of first degree murder. At the conclusion of what was a lengthy trial, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty of first degree murder, but guilty of second degree murder on each of the six counts.”¹

The jury’s question: “When considering Element 3 on one or more of the counts, are we able to say ‘Yes’, if we infer that the accused acted indirectly?”¹

The amended instruction: “If you find that Mr. Pickton shot [the victim] or was otherwise an active participant in her killing, you should find that the Crown has proven this element.”¹

“Pursuant to the inherent jurisdiction of the Court, there shall be no publication or broadcast by any means, including the internet, of the given name of Person X or use of that persons initials, or any information identifying the family members of Person X from the date of this publication ban. This ban remains in effect until further order of the Court.”³

“I conclude that the initiation and conduct of the missing and murdered women investigations were a blatant failure. I hasten to add these systemic police failures were not all encompassing.”⁴