The jurors who will decide the fate of Robert William Pickton were beginning their second full day of deliberations on Sunday.

The 58-year-old pig farmer, from Port Coquitlam, B.C., who is charged with murdering six women from a poverty-stricken area of downtown Vancouver, will face another 20 charges at a second trial.

The question of whether Pickton matches the standard profile of a serial killer was never raised during his lengthy trial of almost 10 months, though at one point in an often-contradictory taped conversation with an undercover officer, he seems to relish the prospect of becoming known as Canada's worst serial killer.

"I had them going, boy did I have them going," he says in the jailhouse chat, sounding cocky as he describes how he played police.

But at another point, he attributes the crimes to unidentified others, saying he would "take the fall" in the end.

"They all think they're something pretty special and they glory in taunting the authorities, taunting their victims, and taunting the public," says Elliot Leyton, Canada's best-known expert in serial killers. "They love it."

Killers often 'dull, normal' people

Leyton won't speak about Pickton specifically until he's heard the jury's verdict. However, he says the typical serial killer is "a dull, normal person of average intelligence, who has ideas about himself and who thinks he or she should be something better in society.

"They have the feeling, the illusion they're not where they ought to be and people have stood in their way and they're going to get even in one way or another."

Some of those themes are played out in a tape police obtained that Pickton made for a woman known only as Victoria in 1991.

The tape, which investigators dubbed "Willie's Memoirs," is a long, rambling monologue about his hard life growing up on the family pig farm.

"I never ever did wear new clothes, always second-hand clothes," he tells her at one point.
At another, he boasts of his talents as a mechanic, saying, "I can just look at a truck and I can pretty well tell you what's wrong with it."

His frustration with still being stuck on the family farm after so many years comes out. "I was hoping that we'd be out of here long before this… but it's holding me all back," he says.

Intelligence question at centre of defence

IQ tests place Pickton on the low end of average intelligence, a point his lawyers stressed when arguing before the jury that their client could not have successfully committed so many murders. They say he was duped into confessing during the police interrogation.

However, Leyton says that's where the vast majority of serial killers fall – despite pop culture's depiction of them as conniving geniuses who outwit police.

"To try to mount a defence based on how stupid their client is, is one of the most pathetic, last-gasp efforts I've ever heard," he says of the Pickton team.

"If in fact we accept such a defence, then we'd have to empty the prisons, because there's not a lot of exceptionally bright people in there."

On the other hand, the kind of anger Leyton describes as typical of a serial killer was rarely attributed to Pickton during this trial. Acquaintances testified that he is kind, polite, shy and subservient to his younger brother Dave.