Eerie Encounters : Robert Pickton's Piggy Palace Killings

 Robert Pickton was born in 1949 in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia and along with his brother and sister, he was raised by his parents on a pig farm they owned. In the 1970s, his parents passed away and the property was passed on to him and his siblings. Robert and his brother took over the farm while their sister moved away. Initially, Robert and his brother tried to run the pig farm the way their parents did but, quickly they stopped taking care of it and the business fell into a decline.

 Neighbours reported seeing their pigs free-roam the property and the brothers seemed to have stopped taking baths. After spending hours together in mud and pig faeces, they were seen walking into their house with the boots on. According to Bill who was one of the farm workers who stuck with the Picktons on the farm’s decline, the farm was an extremely creepy place and Robert was a creepy guy despite not smoking or drinking.

Dawn of The Piggy Palace

 After two long decades, the Pickton brothers finally figured out they were not good enough to run the pig farm and decided to sell portions of their land. They sold almost all of their property to an urban developer for a whopping 5 million dollars. The brothers were not sure about what to do with the cash they had and ended up having it locked up for over a year after which they decided to use it for charity. As a result, they found an official charity called “The Piggy Palace Good Times Society” in 1996. This charity’s purpose was to raise funds for needy organisations by running events like dance shows.

 Although the initiative was noble, it ended up becoming a cover-up for the wild, drug-fuelled parties Robert was throwing inside his slaughterhouse. This slaughterhouse although not in use, still had huge hanging hooks and blood stains all over its floor.

 These Piggy Palace parties were pulling huge crowds of drug addicts and prostitutes from the poverty raided downtown on the east of Vancouver. Robert was familiar with this place as he visited it often to dispose of the animal waste at the rendering plant located there. When his so-called charity was at the peak of its prowess, Robert started going to this locality and hiring strippers for his party. Most of the women he chose were extremely poor and they accepted it only for the food, drugs and money he offered.

Women go missing

 While Robert was hiring women for his parties, women in downtown coincidentally started disappearing. As the number of missing women exponentially increased, rumours of a serial killer commenced. The residents only went out in a big groups and they all lived in fear of death. But despite all their cautious efforts, the disappearance of women never stopped. The locals resisted lodging a complaint to the police due to their distrust of them but, eventually, they gave up and reached out to the police for help. But since their bodies were never found, the police blamed the lifestyle of the women and concluded that they must have run off or should have overdosed.

 As the disappearance continued, the locals constantly told the police that something else was going on but, they never listened. When the newspapers got to know about this, they criticised the police for intentionally not investigating the disappearance of those women as they were drug addicts and prostitutes but the police immediately rejected these claims.

A bleeding woman

 On the evening of March 22, 1997, which was one year after Robert’s charity was established, Robert’s neighbour heard a knock on their door. When they opened the door, they saw a bleeding human. She was hunched over with a hand on her bleeding stomach and she had a handcuff on her wrist. Although panicked, they pulled in the woman and called the ambulance. She was rushed to a hospital where emergency surgery was performed on her.

 Once she was stable, she told the nurse that she had been to The Piggy Palace parties where she was handcuffed by Robert and stabbed by him with a knife. She managed to pull out the knife and stabbed him in the face before escaping. After she told this story, Robert Pickton entered the exact hospital with a bleeding big cut on his face. Since this added weightage to the girl’s story, the medical staff immediately called the police.

 When the police after arriving inspected Robert, they found the key to the handcuff the girl had on her wrist. The police grew suspicious and took him into custody. During the investigation, Robert told the police that the girl was a drug addict who attended the party. He claimed that the girl tried to steal and was caught red-handed by him. When he confronted her, she took out a knife and a struggle led to both of them getting stabbed. The police believed him and let him go.

Suspicions on Robert

 As soon as he returned to the farm, Bill a person who still worked at the place, grew extremely suspicious of Robert as he had read about women going missing from a locality that Robert often visited to pick up women for his parties. With his instinct constantly telling him Robert was somehow related to the missing women, he finally decided to inform the police that he believed Robert attacked the girl who was admitted at the hospital and it was not the other way round.

 He also told them that a woman named Lisa who once attended the party complained about seeing the clothes of a woman in Robert’s trailer. She had also seen wallets and id cards of at least 10 women. The police followed up with Lisa, who, because of her fear of Robert, did not cooperate with them. As they couldn’t proceed without an official complaint from her, they ditched the case. However, Bill never stopped his persuasions and constantly told the police that Robert was behind the missing women.

Robert is arrested 

 After almost a dozen more women went missing, in 2002, a former employee of the Pickton farm came forward and told the police that he had seen illegal weapons in Robert’s trailer. The police got a search warrant and raided Robert’s pig farm. During their raid, along with illegal weapons, they found several items directly linked to the missing women. Robert was arrested but let out on bail. He was put under surveillance and told not to go back to the farm as they were conducting a thorough search. In that thorough search, they found the blood of one of the missing women in Robert’s trailer. Robert was charged with murder and arrested again.

Creepy Revelations

 In jail, he shared his cell with an undercover police officer who was disguised as a detainee. In their conversation, Robert unintentionally admitted to having killed 49 people most of whom were missing women from the downtown east side. After a long investigation, it was found that Robert’s killing spree began in 1991 but it reached greater heights when he started Piggy Palace. He lured his victims into his trailer, handcuffed them and injected them with antifreeze or strangled them to death. Once they died, he would move their body to the slaughterhouse where he butchered them like a pig.

 A portion of their remains was fed to his pigs, and the unfed parts were bough to a rendering plant in the downtown east side where they were crushed and turned to gelatine. This was later used in a variety of products ranging from candy to cosmetics. He would also set aside the best meat, grind them up with pork and turn them into sausages which were served at his parties. He also gave these human-pork sausages to his neighbours, food banks and orphanages.

 After conducting a thorough search of the property, police were able to find little remains of only 26 women and Robert was charged with the murder of all 26 of them. However, he was only convicted for six of them and was sentenced to life in prison where he is still alive.