Accused serial killer Robert William Pickton allegedly confessed to killing 49 women and intended to kill one more to make it an even 50, prosecutors in his murder trial said during opening arguments on Monday.
Pickton, 56, has been charged with 26 counts of first-degree murder, accused of killing mostly prostitutes and drug addicts who vanished from a poor Vancouver neighborhood in the 1990s. He has pleaded not guilty to the first six counts for which he is being tried. It is expected to be the most macabre and lengthy murder trial in Canadian history.
Prosecutor Derrill Prevett stunned the courtroom when he said Pickton told investigators, including an undercover officer planted in his jail cell, that he had slain 49 women.
"I was going to do one more and make it an even 50," Prevett quoted Pickton as telling investigators. "I made my own grave by being sloppy."
Pickton went on to describe himself as a mass murderer who deserved to be on death row, according to Prevett.
But defense lawyer Peter Ritchie told jurors Pickton did not kill or participate in the murders of the six women.
He asked them to pay close attention to Pickton's demeanor in the videotapes of his interrogations, in particular his level of sophistication.
He did not address Pickton's alleged murder confessions.
Ritchie also asked the jury to listen closely to details regarding Pickton's relationship with his brother, David.
Both brothers raised pigs on the family's 7-hectare farm outside Vancouver, where investigators say that they threw drunken raves involving prostitutes and drugs.
After Robert Pickton's arrest in February 2002, health officials issued a tainted meat advisory to neighbors who may have bought pork from his farm, concerned that it may have contained human remains.
Jurors had been warned that details of the case, until now under a publication ban in Canada, would be horrific. As details began to emerge on Monday, some relatives of the victims began to cry and leave the courtroom.
After Pickton was arrested and the first traces of DNA from some missing women were allegedly found on the farm, the buildings were razed and the province spent an estimated US$61 million to sift through soil there.
Prevett said the government would prove that Pickton murdered the six women and butchered their remains. As a successful pig farmer, he said, Pickton had the expertise and equipment to dispose of them.
The trial covers the murders of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin and Marnie Frey.
When police first visited the farm in 2002 to investigate, they found two skulls in a bucket inside a freezer in Pickton's mobile home.
DNA testing identified the skulls as belonging to Abotsway and Joesbury, two missing sex workers from an impoverished Vancouver neighborhood.
"The heads of the individuals had been cut in two, vertically," Prevett said. "With the skulls were left and right hands and the front parts of the left and right feet."
He said both skulls had bullet wounds caused by 22-caliber bullets. Investigators found a Smith & Wesson rifle in Pickton's laundry room, sheathed in plastic with a sex toy attached. The toy had the combined DNA of Pickton and another victim, Wilson, Prevett said.
Prevett said one of Joesbury's earrings was found in the slaughterhouse. He said human bones were found mixed with manure and that part of Wolfe's jaw, with five teeth still attached, was found in a pig trough.
Pickton, clean-shaven with a bald crown and shoulder-length hair, sat emotionless in a specially built defendant's box surrounded by bulletproof glass.
During pretrial hearings, he occasionally chuckled to himself or scribbled in a notebook.
If found guilty of more than 14 charges, Pickton would become the worst convicted killer in Canadian history, after Marc Lepine, who gunned down 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnic in Montreal in 1989 before shooting himself.
Among the women Pickton is accused of killing is Sarah de Vries, a prostitute who disappeared in 1998 when she was 28. A 1995 entry in her diary revealed she feared for her life after women began disappearing in downtown Vancouver.
"Am I next?" she wrote. "Is he watching me now? Is he stalking me like a predator and his prey? Waiting, waiting for some perfect spot, time or my stupid mistake."
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Vancouver Police Department have faced intense criticism by community activists and advocates for sex-trade workers, who claim authorities were slow to search for dozens of women who have disappeared in the area over the years.
They counter that police resources were limited and that the magnitude of the case was overwhelming.
The task force says 102 women once believed to be missing have been found alive. More than 60 women remain on the list, as well as three unidentified DNA profiles from the Pickton farm.
Frey's mother, Lynn, was lined up with other relatives outside the courthouse early on Monday, hoping to get one of the 35 seats reserved for family members of the victims.
"It's been a long haul," she said. Her daughter was 25 when she disappeared in August 1997.
"I need answers, then hopefully I can carry on with my journey and my life, and let Marnie be at rest," she said.
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