The pig farmer...

[fajrdrako]

So Robert Pickton has been ruled guilty. Is anyone in Canada surprised? He's been found guilty (so far) on six counts of second-degree murder.

Interestingly, according to an article in The Ottawa Citizen that quotes from a letter he wrote, Pickton said he did it because God told him to rid the world of evil.

The levels of irony in the comment amuse me.

Comments

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

I'm hardly surprised. I'm disappointed the conviction wasn't for first-degree-murder, although, as a friend pointed out, the jury may have felt constrained by very specific requirements to determine premeditation. But, jeez, how can killing that many women be unplanned?

Re the quote: I don't find it ironic. I just find it disgusting, and another example of how religion can be used by sick minds to do very evil acts.

[abrakadabrah.livejournal.com]

How is it possible that the conviction was not for 1st degree murder?
Why is the jury wimping out?

Under Canadian law, life imprisonment's the worst that can happen, right?

[tavella.livejournal.com]

What I found extraordinary was that apparently Pickton had a group of party pals who frequently walked in on him with a body, or were informed by him that he had killed someone, and shrugged and partied on. Or so was my impression from the bits of testimony mentioned in the wrapups.

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

To my mind, as I have followed this situation, the greater crime is (and continues to be) the fact that no one did anything even after the people in the neighborhoods where he found his victims began to see what was happening and asked for help from the authorities. Just because many of the women were sex workers, or lived in poverty, or otherwise were not the "right" kind of people? It broke my heart to read the comments of a shelter employee who had known one of the missing women (who later was identified among the dead); this humanized that woman for me, and made me realize how great an oversight there had been by the police and other authorities in the situation.

In Columbus, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the early part of the 20th century or else in the latter 19th, someone was killing people and putting them into trunks which were then found near railroad yards. None of the dead were ever identified, and no killer was ever caught -- even though he sent at least one letter to the police, saying that he was doing it to show that the police ignored a certain segment of society and that these people were basically invisible to higher society. As none of them ever had names on their gravestones... he was quite right.

(And actually some have conjectured who this killer was, a specific individual whose other behavior was known, and have also guessed that he quit killing people in the railyards here because he moved to Los Angeles, and killed the "Black Dahlia." Just a thought. People strive mightily to solve upsetting mysteries, no?)