THE PICKTON TRIAL
More than 60 women have disappeared from Vancouver's
Downtown Eastside in the last three decades. Many of those women
worked in the survival sex trade, often selling their bodies to support
their drug dependencies.
Robert William Pickton is accused of murdering 26 of those women.
Remains of the missing women were recovered on the Port Coquitlam
farm that Pickton co-owns with his brother and sister. His trial
is the biggest serial murder trial in Canadian history.
The B.C. Supreme Court judge presiding over the trial has split the 26 charges into two groups. Justice James Williams ruled that trying all at once would take too long and would place an unreasonable burden on the jury. Robert William Pickton faces the first six counts of first-degree murder in a trial set on January 22.
The six victims are Sereena Abotsway,
Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury,
Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin and Marnie
Frey. A date to try the remaining 20 charges has not yet been
set.
CBC Radio leads you through the Pickton trial and its implications. Who were the missing women? Why did they end up on the Downtown Eastside in the first place? And what should you do to monitor your information intake of a trial that Justice Williams described to potential jurors as "something that might be as bad as a horror movie"?
CBC Radio leads you through the Pickton trial and its implications. Who were the missing women? Why did they end up on the Downtown Eastside in the first place? And what should you do to monitor your information intake of a trial that Justice Williams described to potential jurors as "something that might be as bad as a horror movie"?
