Murder, Mystery & Makeup · Audioboom Studios

The Shocking Case of Robert Pickton | 49 Women, A Pig Farm, and A Horrifying Secret

·1 hr 4 min·4 clips

Lynn says she saw a body hanging from the barn ceiling and blood on the table.

Bailey opens on the Pickton case. She sets the story on the outskirts of Vancouver, where a pig farm, mud, and a much uglier stench surround the scene. Pickton is not framed as a shadowy stranger. He is shown as a man with wild parties, Hell's Angels connections, and shady charity work that kept him in plain sight. The title of the case still lands hard. He lured women to the farm and, as the story makes clear, many never left. Bailey keeps circling the same ugly question. Was this only one predator, or did something bigger and darker help the whole thing run for years? The episode reaches back to Pickton's birth in 1949. It also pulls him into Port Coquitlam, where he grew up in a small industrial suburb and later into the low track that forms part of the case's path. Earlier charges matter here. Bailey notes that after an attack on Wendy, police kept the clothes and rubber boots he had been wearing, even after the charges were dropped. That evidence becomes important later. A few months after the dropped case, Pickton goes back out and picks up Sarah, who is working out of the crack shack, a pickup spot for sex workers. Her friend gets picked up first. When that friend returns, Sarah is gone, even though her purse is still there. It is exactly the sort of thing that should have set off alarms, but the response is slow and dismissive. Family and friends report her missing. Police refuse to open an investigation because she is treated as only the latest in a string of missing sex workers. Bailey does not let that slide. The close lands on the same point: the victims were failed long before the case became impossible to ignore.

As heard by us

A brisk, unsparing Pickton story that centers systemic failure and the women police missed.

The episode treats Robert Pickton as more than one man’s horror story: a pig farmer on the quiet outskirts of Vancouver, missing women, and a system that kept brushing off the warning signs.

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Why you'd press play

You want Robert Pickton's story told fast, ugly, and with the stink of a true-crime nightmare.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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