KEY POINTS:
VANCOUVER, British Columbia - A pig farmer, Robert "Willie" Pickton, will stand in court on Monday, accused of being Canada's deadliest serial killer in a case the trial judge has warned will be like watching a horror film.
The start of the trial comes more than a decade after women started disappearing without a trace from a forsaken neighbourhood in Vancouver, one of the world's most liveable cities.
It is the first of two scheduled trials for Pickton, a 57-year-old Vancouver-area man charged with killing 26 women. The court opted to try him first on six of the first-degree murder charges to make it easier for a jury to handle.
The trial, expected to last at least a year, may also reopen painful questions about whether the police and public chose to ignore warnings of the women's plight because they were drug addicts and prostitutes.
"Is there more soul-searching? Yes, I think there is," said John Lowman, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University, who also said the Canadian government has failed to do enough to protect prostitutes from violence.
"Prostitutes are the most stigmatised women in Canadian society," he said.
The victims were among more than 60 women who disappeared from Vancouver's poor Downtown Eastside neighbourhood from the late 1980s until late 2001 - shortly before police raided Pickton's mobile home on a ramshackle farm in the suburban community of Port Coquitlam.
Pickton has pleaded not guilty to murder. He is the only person charged in the case.
If convicted he would receive a sentence of life in prison. Canada does not have a death penalty.
Vancouver, on the Pacific Coast, has been lauded as one the world's best cities to live in, but the city's Downtown Eastside with its rooming houses, seedy bars and open drug use is one of Canada's poorest neighbourhoods with high rates of HIV and other needle-spread diseases.
Activists raised alarms about women dying and disappearing in 1991. But the warnings generated little concern in the general public, and police contended many of the women lived transient lifestyles and had likely just moved away.
Vancouver police started intensifying the investigation in 1998 as the reports of missing women climbed, but many of the victims Pickton is charged with killing are believed to have died after that.
"There's been nothing to go on. We don't even know where (the prostitutes) came from," a police spokeswoman told Reuters in 1999, by which time they had offered a C$100,000 ($122,000) reward for information.
Police raided Pickton's farm on a rainy night in February 2002, looking for an illegal gun. It quickly became a homicide probe and investigators - including archaeologists - spent some 18 months digging up the 10-acre property.
The DNA of at least 31 of the missing women was found on the farm where Pickton, who also worked as a auto salvager, raised a small number of pigs and slaughtered them for a market of private customers.
The huge volume of material that had to be tested strained Canada's police laboratories, and that was a major reason it took the pretrial court process five years to complete.
A judge warned prospective jurors for the trial, being held in a court in New Westminster, British Columbia, that some of what they will see and hear would be like a horror movie.
Groups that look after abused women and sex trade workers in the Downtown Eastside are bracing for the emotional impact the trial's start and the media scrutiny will have on the community and the prostitutes who knew the victims.
"These workers are still living with the dangerous conditions that allowed this tragedy to happen and are most likely emotionally unprepared for questions about friends they may have lost," several activists wrote in a letter to the media.
Some victim's families have accused the media of marginalizing the missing women by focussing on their work as prostitutes and ignoring their lives before they got trapped in a world of drugs.
The second trial on the remaining 20 murder charges will begin once the first trial is completed.
- REUTERS
