An accused 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 is expected to last a year.
A judge warned jurors to expect testimony “as bad as a horror movie,” 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 pig farmer, Pickton had the expertise, the equipment and the means to dispose of them.
The judge presiding over the trial ruled that the other charges will be heard in a later trial so as not to overburden the jury.
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A CLOSER LOOK
If found guilty of more than 14 charges, Robert William Pickton would become the worst convicted killer in Canadian history. In 1989, Marc Lepine gunned down 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnic in Montreal before shooting himself.
