After dropping out of school, he left a butcher's apprenticeship to begin working full-time at his family's pig farm, and inherited it in the early s. Between and , Pickton is believed to have murdered at least 26 women, many of them prostitutes from Vancouver 's Downtown Eastside.
Pickton would confess to 49 murders to an undercover RCMP officer disguised as a cellmate, going on to say he wanted to make it an even 50, but thought he was caught because he got "sloppy". In , the Crown attorney officially stayed the remaining 20 murder charges, allowing previously unrevealed information to be made available to the public, including that Pickton previously had a attempted murder charge dropped.
The discovery of Pickton's crimes sparked widespread outrage and forced the Canadian government to acknowledge the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women , [ 7 ] with the British Columbia provincial government forming the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry to examine the role of the police in the matter.
Pickton's older sister, Linda Louise Wright, was sent off to live with relatives in Vancouver as their parents thought that the family pig farm would be an inappropriate setting to raise a young girl. Robert and his younger brother, David Francis Pickton, began working at the farm at an early age, and their mother was very demanding, prioritizing the pigs over the brothers' personal hygiene, and forcing them to work long hours raising the farm's livestock.
Louise often sent the brothers to school in unwashed dirty clothes, reeking of manure and earning them the nickname "stinky piggy" from their classmates. Robert was strongly attached to her and rarely interacted with his abusive father. Two weeks later, after not finding it after school, he was told to check the barn, and was distraught to find it slaughtered. Pickton dropped out of school in and began working as a meat cutter. He continued to do so for nearly seven years before leaving to work full-time at the farm.
