On February 6, 2002, acting on search warrants for alleged firearms offenses, investigators converged on Pickton’s pig farm in a raid that netted more than they had been looking for in the suburban Port Coquitlam location—the remains of several women whose dismembered body parts had been fed to Pickton’s pigs. Two weeks after the initial raid, Pickton was charged with the murders of Sereena Abotsway and Mona Wilson—and the number of suspected victims would only grow as time went on.
As the police investigated Pickton over the course of the next few years while he languished in jail, they learned that he and a relative had been running a registered charity that they called the Piggy Palace Good Times Society. Although several of the local politicians, business people and others attended fundraising events there, Pickton also used the "Piggy Palace" for other purposes. Located in a separate building adjacent to the pig farming operation, the palace was also used for depraved acts of hellish entertainment of the most sordid kind on a somewhat regular basis in which the performers were "on stage" for a one-act show that didn’t allow for encores. When Pickton was finished with a victim, always a female, he would kill them in a variety of ways after which he would cut up their bodies and feed them to his pigs. There are, of course, many more details about the crimes than are being described here due to obvious space limitations, details that can best be described as horrific. Suffice it to say that by the time Pickton was stopped, it is believed that he was responsible for the disappearances and slayings of many additional women. Pickton unknowingly told an undercover cop posing as his cellmate that he was only caught because he had become "sloppy."
The voir dire phase of Pickton’s trial began on January 30, 2006. Voir dire proceedings, of course, consist of a hearing to determine admissibility of evidence and/or the competency of witnesses and jurors. By that time he had been charged with 27 counts of first-degree murder, and that portion of the trial had taken much of the year to complete. He pled not guilty to all of the counts. On March 2, 2006, the judge in the case rejected one of the counts for lack of evidence, and by August 9, 2006, the same judge reduced the indictment to six counts without dismissing the other 20 in case it was decided that they would be tried later. Jury selection was completed in December 2006, and the actual trial before the jury began on January 22, 2007, following several delays.
Among the harrowing details presented during the trial was the fact that the police had found a loaded .22 revolver with a dildo fitted onto the barrel (with one round fired), as well as handgun ammunition, night-vision goggles, two pairs of fur-lined handcuffs, "Spanish Fly" aphrodisiac, and a syringe that contained three milliliters of a blue liquid substance. At one point a videotape of one of Pickton’s friends was played, in which the friend described how Pickton had told him that an excellent way to murder a female addict was to inject her with windshield washer fluid. Another tape depicted an associate of Pickton’s describing how Pickton had talked about slaying prostitutes by bleeding and gutting them and afterwards feeding them to his pigs.
On December 9, 2007, the jury found Pickton guilty of six counts of second-degree murder after rejecting the first-degree murder charges. Pickton was subsequently sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years—the maximum sentence available under the law for convictions of second-degree murder. As of this writing, it does not appear that Pickton will be tried on any of the remaining 20 counts.
