In February 2002, police entered Robert William Pickton’s Port Coquitlam property under a firearms warrant. A missing-women investigation was also involved, and the search soon shifted toward evidence connected to women reported missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. In 2007, Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin, and Marnie Frey. The Supreme Court of Canada affirmed those convictions in 2010.

This episode follows the case chronologically: the disappearances families and advocates struggled to have taken seriously, the 1997 assault case involving an anonymized survivor known as Ms. Anderson, the 1998 stay of those charges, the divided investigations across Vancouver and Coquitlam, the formation of Project Evenhanded, and the farm search that changed the case. It also explains the legal limits of the record: Pickton was charged in twenty-six murder cases, convicted in six, and the remaining twenty charges were stayed. Reports that remains or DNA from thirty-three women were found on the farm do not equal thirty-three murder convictions, and Pickton’s undercover claim of forty-nine victims was not a verified count.

The central unresolved issue is what the courts could not answer for families whose loved ones’ cases never went to trial, and what the public inquiry later found about the policing failures that delayed accountability.

This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication.

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