After dropping out of school, he left a butcher's apprenticeship to begin working full-time at his family's pig farm, and inherited it in the early 1990s.

Pickton would confess to 49 murders to an undercover RCMP officer disguised as a cellmate, going on to say he wanted to make it an even 50, but thought he was caught because he got "sloppy".

[6] Crown prosecutors reasoned that staying the additional charges made the most sense, since Pickton was already serving the maximum sentence allowable.

Pickton's older sister, Linda Louise Wright, was sent off to live with relatives in Vancouver as their parents thought that the family pig farm would be an inappropriate setting to raise a young girl.

[12] Louise often sent the brothers to school in unwashed dirty clothes, reeking of manure and earning them the nickname "stinky piggy" from their classmates.

Worker Bill Hiscox called the farm a "creepy-looking place" patrolled by a 612-pound boar and described Pickton as a "pretty quiet guy, hard to strike up a conversation with", whose occasional bizarre behaviour, despite no evidence of substance abuse, would draw attention.

[18] He often hosted parties at an ad hoc nightclub called Piggy's Palace, which attracted the political and economic elites of the Lower Mainland along with the Hells Angels.

[18] On March 23, 1997, Pickton was charged with the attempted murder of sex worker Wendy Lynn Eistetter, whom he had stabbed 4 times during an altercation at the farm.

Pickton was released on C$2,000 bond and the attempted-murder charge against him was stayed on January 27, 1998, because Eistetter had drug addiction issues and prosecutors believed her too unstable for her testimony to help secure a conviction.

[17] Its events included raves and wild parties featuring Vancouver sex workers and gatherings in a converted slaughterhouse on the farm at 953 Dominion Avenue in Port Coquitlam.

Both Pickton brothers were arrested and police obtained a second warrant using what they had seen on the property to search the farm as part of the BC Missing Women Investigation.

[21][22] Personal items belonging to missing women were found at the farm, which was sealed off by members of the joint RCMP–Vancouver Police Department task force.

[24] On May 26, 2005, 12 more came for Cara Ellis, Andrea Borhaven, Debra Lynne Jones, Marnie Frey, Tiffany Drew, Kerry Koski, Sarah de Vries, Cynthia Feliks, Angela Jardine, Wendy Crawford, Diana Melnick, and Jane Doe, bringing the total to 27.

During the early days of the excavations, forensic anthropologists brought in heavy equipment, including two 50-foot (15-metre) flat conveyor belts and soil sifters to find traces of human remains.

On March 10, 2004, the government revealed that Pickton may have ground up human flesh and mixed it with pork that he sold to the public; the province's health authority later issued a warning.

[32] In 2003, a preliminary hearing was held and the clothes and rubber boots that Pickton had been wearing during the Eistetter assault were seized by police from an RCMP storage locker.

[50] On December 11, 2007, after reading eighteen victim impact statements, British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Justice James Williams sentenced Pickton to life with no possibility of parole for 25 years—the maximum punishment for second-degree murder—and equal to the sentence which would have been imposed for a first-degree murder conviction, stating: "Mr. Pickton's conduct was murderous and repeatedly so.

"[108] Justice Louis LeBel, writing for the minority, found that the jury was not properly informed "of the legal principles which would have allowed them as triers of fact to consider evidence of Mr. Pickton's aid and encouragement to an unknown shooter, as an alternative means of imposing liability for the murders".

[109][108] British Columbia Crown spokesman Neil MacKenzie announced that prosecution of the 20 other murder charges would likely be discontinued: "In reaching this position, the branch has taken into account the fact that any additional convictions could not result in any increase to the sentence that Mr. Pickton has already received.

In addition, the Vancouver Police Department disclosed that for several years it has "communicated privately to the Provincial Government that it believed a Public Inquiry would be necessary for an impartial examination of why it took so long for Robert Pickton to be arrested".

The unwillingness of the police to pursue Pickton, despite overwhelming evidence, smacked hard of racism, sexism, and bias against drug addicts and sex workers.

[20] At a press conference, Deputy Chief Constable Doug LePard of the Vancouver Police Department apologized to the victims' families: "I wish from the bottom of my heart that we would have caught him sooner.

[116] During the inquiry, lawyers for some of the victims' families sought to have an unpublished 289-page manuscript authored by former police investigator Lorimer Shenher entered as evidence and made entirely public.

[118] During a court hearing on August 4, 2010, Judge Williams stated that Pickton should be committed to a federal penitentiary; up to that point he had been held at a provincial pretrial institution.

[124][10][125] A major plotline in the Canadian crime drama Da Vinci's Inquest deals with a spate of missing women thought to be victims of a prolific serial killer hunting in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Though names and locations were changed (Pickton's character was named Mason Turner, and acts take place in Ontario instead of British Columbia), many key details were used, including two brothers living on a run-down family pig farm who would abduct sex workers and homeless women and bringing them back to the farm before feeding the remains to the pigs.

[132] In 2011, Vancouver artist Pamela Masik planned to mount an art exhibition, The Forgotten, featuring portraits of some of Pickton's victims, at the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology, which declined to host it after some controversy.

[134] In 2011, a documentary was released, titled The Pig Farm, which outlined the flawed investigative work by the RCMP and the Vancouver Police Service.

[135][136] Pig Killer, a biopic written and directed by Chad Ferrin, starring Jake Busey as Pickton, was released in select theatres on November 17, 2023.

The British Columbia premier David Eby expressed his outrage: "All I can say is how deeply disappointed I am by the idea that the lives of vulnerable women could be trivialized like this."