Canadian Bacon

Robert Pickton the 57-year-old pig farmer was found guilty by a Vancouver court of murdering six women he is charged with the killing of a further 20.

He was found guilty of killing Mona Wilson, Sereena Abotsway, Marnie Frey, Brenda Wolfe, Andrea Joesbury and Georgina Papin.

The women are just some of dozens who disappeared in the 1980s and 1990s from Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, a district famed as "Canada's poorest postcode".
For years, police refused to open murder cases, labelling the women simply as missing.

Many were drug addicts, working in the sex trade to fund their habits - part of a transient and disenfranchised community. The low social status of these women, many of whom were of aboriginal origin, contributed to the police's lack of concern.

He was known as an ordinary farmer, "just a pig man".

In February 2002, the police stumbled across some of the women's possessions while searching his property for firearms.
But when they began examining outhouses and sifting deep through the soil on the 10-acre farm, they found blood-stained clothes and pieces of human bone and teeth, amassing enough evidence to charge him with 26 murders. Some of the bodies had been fed to the pigs.

The 10-month trial heard from almost 130 witnesses, including Lynn Ellingson, who said she once walked in on the pig farmer, who was covered with blood, as Ms Papin's body hung from a chain in the farm's slaughterhouse.

In a videotape played to the jury, Pickton is heard telling an undercover police officer that he had planned to kill one more woman before stopping at 50, taking a break and then killing another 25 women.
"I was going to do one more; make it an even 50," Pickton told the officer, who had been planted in his cell to gain his trust.

Pickton was already regarded as a dodgy character, and had quite a reputation, women were afraid of him and prostitute's and warned each other about him referring to him as a "bad date."

1983: First woman disappears from Downtown Eastside
1995: Spike in number of women vanishing 27 in total.
1999: Vancouver police offer $100,000 reward for information
Feb 2002: Police search Pickton's farm, find remains, first murder charge
May 2005: Pickton now faces 27 murder charges
Aug 2006: Judge splits charges into two cases
Jan 2007: trial begins
Dec 2007: Pickton found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder.

Pickton was a serious suspect by 1997, she said. In that year alone, 13 women disappeared.

Described at the trial as not showing any emotion, he occasionally smiled. Normally, unless he nods or smiles at a defence witness he knows, his face doesn't change. He listens intensely. His hair is very greasy. He is a creepy-looking guy. He talks using little aphorisms, little clichés.

Under Canadian law a murder conviction leads to an automatic life sentence. Pickton must wait 10 years for possible parole.

Health officials issued a tainted meat warning to neighbours who bought pork from Pickton's farm, concerned it might have contained human remains.