Jury to Deliberate in Canadian Pig Farmer Serial Killings Case

NEW WESTMINSTER, British Columbia – A judge delivered final instructions to jurors Friday, shortly before they were to begin deliberating a verdict in the gruesome case of a pig farmer accused of being Canada's worst serial killer.

Robert "Willie" Pickton went on trial in January on the first six of 26 first-degree murder charges filed against him in the deaths of women, most of them prostitutes and drug addicts from a seedy Vancouver neighborhood.

Pickton, 58, is accused of murdering Mona Wilson, Sereena Abotsway, Marnie Frey, Brenda Wolfe, Andrea Joesbury and Georgina Papin.

The jury was to begin deliberations Friday evening.

Judge James Williams reviewed the transcript of a videotape in which Pickton is heard telling an undercover police officer that he had planned to kill one more woman before stopping at 50, taking a break and then killing another 25 women.

"I was going to do one more; make it an even 50," Pickton told the officer, who had been planted in the accused killer's cell, and gained his trust.

A day earlier, Georgina Papin's three sisters cried and clutched each other's hands in court while the judge reviewed the testimony of a witness who said she walked in on a blood-covered Pickton as Papin's body dangled from a chain in the farm's slaughterhouse.

Earlier, the judge reviewed the testimony of another prosecution witness, who said Pickton told him how he strangled his alleged victims, bled them and gutted them before disposing of them by feeding their remains to pigs.

Health officials once issued a tainted meat advisory to neighbors who might have bought pork from Pickton's farm, concerned the meat might have contained human remains.

The defense has acknowledged that the remains of the six women Pickton is accused of killing were found on his farm outside Vancouver, but denies he was responsible for their deaths.

Pickton has been charged in the slayings of 26 women, but almost 40 names remain on an official police list of women who have been declared missing. The investigation into their disappearances is still active.

Prosecutors said Pickton will be tried for the 20 other murder charges later, but no date has been set.