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Piggy Palace Murders Case Study

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Case Study: Robert William Pickton and the Piggy Palace Murders Canada’s most notorious killer, Robert William Pickton, is responsible for the murders of 49 different women, mostly consisting of prostitutes and drug addicts. Over the course of twenty years, Pickton murdered women one by one after luring them onto his 17-acre pig farm, a pig farm he called, “The Piggy Palace” (Fox News 2007). At the Piggy Palace, Pickton would throw large out-of-control “drug-fuelled parties for prostitutes and bikers” (Leonard 2007). Pickton was arrested in 2002 after police found an unlicensed shotgun, numerous women’s belongings that went missing in the ‘80s and ‘90s, as well as the skulls and bones of multiple victims. After his arrest Pickton told investigators …show more content…

Living on a 17-acre farm, Pickton didn’t have to worry about neighbors witnessing his horrific crimes. Pickton was able to get rid of the smell of the fifty carcasses, by disposing of the bodies through a wood chipper and then feeding the chipped remains to his pigs. After his arrest, health officials issued out a tainted meat warning to the surrounding area, due to the risk of possible human remains in the meat coming from the Piggy Palace farms. From a criminal justice perspective, the case is an interesting one. Due to the overwhelming horror of the case, the trial only covered the murders of six women as a means of not overwhelming the jury. The state also withdrew countless evidence from the jury as a means of reducing prejudice against Pickton, and only focusing on the murders. The Vancouver Sun wrote in 2010, eight years after Pickton’s arrest on the “tremendous amount of damning evidence… that the jurors deciding his fate did not hear during his year long trial” (Culbert 2010). Pickton is in prison for life, but due to the states significant withdrawal of evidence, to protect Pickton’s character, the jury “found Pickton not guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of [the] six women, but guilty of the lesser charge of second-degree murder” (Culbert

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