The Canadian serial killer who lured over two dozen female victims to his pig farm is clinging to life after he was viciously attacked in prison, officials said.
Robert Pickton, 74, was in a segregated intervention unit at the maximum-security Port-Cartier Institution when he was speared in the head with a broken broom handle on Sunday evening, the Vancouver Sun reported.
As of Tuesday, Pickton was in critical condition and was not expected to survive.
Pickton’s 51-year-old attacker — whose name has not been released — had done a stint in solitary confinement for previous assaults on other inmates, a source told the outlet.
“The safety and security of institutions is paramount and an investigation into what occurred is currently underway,” the Correctional Service of Canada told The Post in a statement.
The organization was not able to provide an update on Pickton’s condition.
Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with the maximum parole ineligibility period of 25 years in 2007.
He was also charged with the murders of 21 other women, but those counts were stayed, the Vancouver Sun explained.
In total, investigators found DNA from 33 women — many of them sex workers who vanished from Vancouver’s downtown eastside in the 1990s and early 2000s — at Pickton’s Port Coquitlam pig farm.
Pickton also once allegedly bragged to an undercover police officer that he had killed as many as 49 women.
Grisly rumors about Pickton’s pig farm had swirled around the Vancouver area for years before he was finally arrested in 2002 — and authorities were criticized for initially failing to take the spate of missing women seriously.
“This news actually gives me a little bit of closure for myself,” Cynthia Cardinal, whose sister Georgina Papin was one of PIckton’s official victims, told Postmedia of the killer’s injuries.
“I’ve had all these feelings today. I know it’s Georgina. And I know she’s happy,” she added, calling Pickton’s injuries “karma.”
“It’s been hard for me not knowing. I would hope that eventually, we get news on Janet because so many people said that she ended up there,” Gagnon told the Vancouver Sun.
Gagnon said she was not surprised to hear of the attack on Pickton.
“Because a lot of serial killers — people want to get (them) because of what they’ve done to the women, especially Robert Pickton, when I think about how he murdered the women. It was so brutal,” she explained.
With Post wires
David Turner is a globe-trotting journalist who brings a global perspective to our readers. With a commitment to shedding light on international events, he explores complex geopolitical issues, offering a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
