New Westminster, British Columbia – A man accused of being a serial killer allegedly confessed to killing 49 women and intended to murder one more to make it an even 50, a prosecutor told jurors Monday during opening arguments of his trial.
Robert William Pickton has been charged with 26 counts of first-degree murder. He has pleaded not guilty to the first six counts in what is expected to be the most macabre and lengthy murder trial in Canadian history.
The 56-year-old pig farmer is charged with murdering the women, most of whom vanished from Vancouver’s impoverished Downtown Eastside neighborhood in the 1990s.
The first trial covers the murders of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin and Marnie Frey, and it is expected to last a year.
Hundreds of people began lining up before dawn outside the small courthouse in the Vancouver suburb of New Westminster, vying for the 50 seats in the courtroom.
A judge warned jurors to expect testimony “as bad as a horror movie” during the trial, and some of those shocking details came immediately.
Prosecutor Derrill Prevett said the government would prove that Pickton murdered the six, cut up their remains and disposed of them. He told the jury that as a successful pig farmer, Pickton had the expertise, the equipment and the means to dispose of them.
When police first went to the farm to investigate in 2002, they found two skulls in a bucket in a freezer in Pickton’s mobile home.
DNA tests would later identify them as those of Abotsway and Joesbury.
