HUNTER: Pig Farm Killer Robert Pickton got death penalty in the end

Article content

The most hardcore death penalty abolitionist would grudgingly admit that pig farm serial killer Robert Pickton should have been swinging from the end of a rope.

Article content

Instead, Pickton, 74, got the big adios courtesy of a fellow jailbird in a Quebec prison.

He pegged out Friday and got his one-way ticket to hell.

Pickton was the infamous Port Coquitlam pig farmer who cops believed murdered dozens of women, lured from Vancouver’s hardscrabble east side with the promise of drugs, dough and fun at the farm.

Lurking on the farm of evil was instead death, torture and deprivation. After Pickton had finished with them, the women — most of them prostitutes and junkies — they were fed to his pigs.

Pickton went down in 2007 for six murders, although homicide detectives suspect the number is more than 50. Last fall, it emerged that the odious monster was eligible to apply for day parole.

While it was a near certainty that he would never get it, the very idea was an affront to the dead, their families and a civilized society at large. Happily, Pickton would never get the opportunity.

Article content

Article content

At the Quebec maximum prison on May 19, Pickton was stabbed with a toothbrush in the neck, the suspected killer con then broke a broom handle and shoved it up the pig farm killer’s nose and into his skull.

Recommended video

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Play Video

But Pickton’s death leaves a slew of questions for the victim’s families. The killer himself boasted he had murdered 49 women (he was charged with 26) — one short of his goal of 50 — and that he had an accomplice.

These questions and countless others will never be answered, but after two decades in the slammer, if Pickton wasn’t talking by now, he’d take his sickening secrets to the grave.

“There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t think about her,” Lynn Frey, stepmother of victim Marnie Frey told CTV News. “And you know, I have a few of her remains. Hopefully they’re her. I’m not 100% guaranteed.”

Article content

She added: “At least we got a little bit of accountability from Marnie, but all the other families got nothing. You know, there are a lot of families that never had their day in court and never will. And how can they? I can’t imagine how they feel over this.”

Elsewhere, on Saturday, wannabe cult leader Chad Daybell was sentenced to death in Idaho for murdering his wife’s two children. A satisfying ending for the heinous murders.

But more typical is Craig Munro. No jagged broom handle in the head. No state-sanctioned execution.

Munro, now 72, has served 44 years in prison for the cold-blooded murder of Toronto cop Michael Sweet in 1980 during a botched heist at a city watering hole. He has now been given six months of day parole.

The Parole Board of Canada cheerily announced that Munro had “made significant gains over the course of your sentence, have seen a reduction in your assessed areas of needs, and are committed to living a pro-social and law-abiding lifestyle.”

Sweet was the father of three young daughters and slowly bled to death. Munro taunted the fallen cop as he took his final breaths.

Munro’s release is depressing, but as Meatloaf sang, two out of three ain’t bad.

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun

Article content