May 10, 1949 - Robert Pickton

Robert William Pickton (October 24, 1949 – May 31, 2024), also known as the Pig Farmer Killer or the Butcher, was a Canadian pig farmer and serial killer. He is believed to have murdered at least 26 women, many of them sex workers from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

In 2010, the Crown attorney officially stayed the remaining 20 murder charges, allowing previously unrevealed information to be made available to the public, including that Pickton previously had a 1997 attempted murder charge dropped. Crown prosecutors reasoned that staying the additional charges made the most sense, since Pickton was already serving the maximum sentence allowable.

The discovery of Pickton's crimes sparked widespread outrage and forced the Canadian government to acknowledge the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, with the British Columbia provincial government forming the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry to examine the role of the police in the matter. Pickton died in 2024 after being attacked in prison by another inmate.

Content sourced from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert Pickton under CC BY-SA 4.0.