Serial killer Robert Pickton’s trial kicked off in 2006, when I was a wee 11-year-old. In the 90s, a bunch of women, mainly sex workers, started vanishing from Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Despite warnings and a failed murder charge in 1997 (that got dropped), the pig farmer wasn’t nabbed till about five years later when the cops were poking around his place for illegal guns. They even shrugged off a tip in 1999 that Pickton had human remains on his farm.
Pickton is thought to have offed at least 26 women between 1995 and 2001. He later spilled the beans to an undercover officer posing as his cellmate, claiming the real count was 49 women.
The grisly details of his crimes are gut-wrenching and tear-jerking. The case shed light on just how deep-rooted the police’s bias towards sex workers was. And how repugnant and ingrained its institutional racism towards Indigenous people was – a lot of the missing women were Indigenous.
