From the year 1980, all the way through to 2001 many women were disappearing from the downtown eastside of Vancouver. Not just anyone in particular, but female prostitutes and female drug users were disappearing. The families of these women thought nothing about it, not even the cops, their behavior of disappearing and coming back was normal. But these girls weren't coming back, they were disappearing for good. Everyone who thought this was normal was woken up years later by a chilling and disturbing man known as “The Pig Farmer Killer”, Robert William Pickton and his actions in this case.
Not many details occurred in Pickton's childhood or before becoming a serial killer. Robert William Pickton was born on October 26, 1949, in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada. His family had been pig farmers for three generations (Fandom, 2013). Pickton has a sister and a brother: Linda Louise and David Francis Pickton in which they inherited the pig farm after their mother died. Later on, they ended up selling parts of their land and earning a total of $5.16 million. A ruling in Canada in the year 2002 lead to Pickton’s arrest, a warrant for firearm violations. On February 5, 2002, authorities were looking for illegal firearms on Pickton’s property but they found much more than just guns. They found a prescribed asthma inhaler belonging to a missing woman from the Downtown Eastside: Sereena Abotsway but it didn’t take the authorities long enough to execute a second court order to continue searching the farm for the “Missing Women Investigation”(Fandom, 2013). While being charged with “possession of a loaded firearm while not being the holder of a license and storing a firearm contrary to regulations”. He was released the next day and keep under surveillance.
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Exactly 23 days later, on February 22, 2002, Pickton was arrested again and charged with two counts of first-degree murder for Sereena Abotsway and the murder of Mona Wilson, another woman disappeared from the Downtown Eastside. Disturbingly enough the authorities found remains of victims like skulls, human hands, feet, bloody clothing, human teeth. The worst is that the skulls were cut in half and stuffed with these remains, and stored in freezers inside his barn. Also a couple of years later after searching the entire property, they found traces of DNA in the ground up meat Pickton would sell. He would put their remains in the meat and sell it to people. All the way from February 22, 2002, through May 26, 2005, Robert William Pickton was already charged to 27 counts of first-degree murder, for all the women disappearing from the Downtown Eastside. 1980-2001 were the years he was killing all these women. To normal people, this is disgustingly high but to him, this isn’t even the number of women that he killed. Pickton himself told an undercover officer posed as his cellmate, that he killed 49 women and wanted to kill 50. His exact words were “I was gonna do one more, make it an even fifty. That why I was sloppy, I wanted one more. Make the big five 0. Bigger than the ones in the states, his record was about 42”. Little did he know that all of their conversations were recorded and he was talking with an officer. In December 2007 he was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole for 25 years, the longest sentence available under Canadian law for murder.
Now the question is, how does any of these relate to the Rational Choice Theory also known was the Deterrence theory. The Rational Choice Theory “states that individuals use rational calculations to make rational choices and achieve outcomes that are aligned with their own personal objectives” (Ganti, 2019). In simple terms, this theory means that a person intentionally chooses to undertake any crimes they do, they are not compelled or forced to do a crime. And they commit these crimes because they think it will be more rewarding rather than having noncriminal behavior. Which brings it back to Robert William Pickton, Pickton committed these murders because it seemed that he wanted to top a record. He wanted to top the number of murders in Canada and in the United States(42 murders in the US), also stated in the video of him talking with the undercover officer. He wanted that reward of being known, he wanted everyone to know that he topped the number of murders. Some elements of the rational choice theory are; an available suitable target motivated offender and no sympathy. Pickton checked off all these elements, his targets were prostitutes and drug offenders from the Downtown Eastside. He was definitely a motivated offender because he keeps killing and killing within all those years. And finally sympathy, Pickton had no sympathy whatsoever, he grounded up female remains into the meat and also fed his pigs their remains, and slaughtered women like they were just pigs. That’s definitely a sign of no sympathy.
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