One of the world’s most notorious serial killers expressed disappointment that he had been unable to murder more victims to an undercover police officer posing as his cellmate.
Robert Pickton said he butchered 49 women at his farm near Vancouver, Canada.
Unaware that he was being filmed, the 69-year-old told his police officer cellmate that he had “wanted an even 50” of victims but fell short of the macabre target after “being sloppy”.
Most of Pickton’s victims were sex workers, who he lured from Vancouver's red light district to his farm with drugs and alcohol.
There, he would have sex with them before murdering them. He then dismembered them before feeding the remains to his pigs or grinding them up into mince which he is believed to have mixed with animal meat and sold to the public.
He killed some of the women by injecting them with anti-freeze from a syringe which he told them contained drugs. Others he stabbed to death.
Police found the DNA of 26 women at Pickton’s farm, after they raided it in 2002 to search for weapons.
The footage captured by the undercover officer shortly after his arrest will be broadcast in a new documentary, Voice of a Serial Killer. It show Pickton boasting about the murders.
“I can making things disappear,” he said. “Only I was kinda sloppy at the end, too, getting too sloppy.”
He added: “They got me on this one... they’ve got DNA. I was gonna do another one, make it an even 50. That’s why I was sloppy. I wanted to do one more, make the big 5-0.”
In 2007 Pickton was convicted of six counts of first-degree murder and jailed for life with a minimum term of 25 years. Prosecutors stayed the remaining 20 charges as he was already serving the maximum sentence possible under Canadian law.
As the extent of his crimes emerged, police faced anger from victims' relatives, who accused detectives of ignoring signs that a serial killer was on the loose, which they claimed had allowed more murders to take place.
It was also alleged that police had not taken the disappearances seriously because the women were sex workers and, mostly, from Canada's indigenous community.
