Robert Pickton, Notorious Canadian Serial Killer, Dies at 74

Robert Pickton, one of Canada’s most notorious serial killers, whose crimes called attention to police and societal disregard for the violent deaths of Indigenous women, died on Friday after a fellow inmate attacked him in prison in Quebec, where he was serving a life sentence. He was 74.

His death, in a hospital, was announced by Correctional Service Canada, which said he had been assaulted on May 19 at Port-Cartier Institution and had died of unspecified injuries. The announcement did not give a motive for the attack.

In 2007, Mr. Pickton was convicted in the murders of six women, though he boasted to an undercover police officer that he had killed 49 in all.

The remains of his victims were found at a ramshackle pig farm he owned outside Vancouver, where authorities conducted what at the time was the largest crime-scene investigation in Canadian history. After 18 months, they found the remains of 33 women.

The victims were mainly members of Indigenous groups, and most were sex workers and drug addicts whom Mr. Pickton encountered in the Downtown Eastside, an underbelly of the scenic, affluent Vancouver.

Mr. Pickton was able to continue killing for so long, according to an investigation by the provincial government of British Columbia, because of police bias toward the race and marginalized status of his victims.