THE LONG AND often gruesome legal battle that has gripped Canada for over three years came to a quiet end in a British Columbia courtroom yesterday, as the Crown ruled that 20 of the 26 charges against convicted killer Robert Pickton should be dropped.

Pickton is already serving a life sentence for the murders of six women, whose bodies he butchered, froze and fed to his pigs. His appeal against the verdict of the 2007 trial was rejected last week by the Canadian Supreme Court.

But yesterday, the court ruled that he will never face trial on the murders of twenty more, many of them prostitutes and drug abusers.

“I can’t imagine that’s ever happened in the history of Canada, where 20 first-degree murder charges were stayed [dropped] on one day,” lawyer Rob Anderson told reporters gathered outside the courtroom.

The court arrived at the decision because of the difficulties of finding reliable witnesses, and the fact that Pickton – now 60 – is already serving a full life sentence of 25 years, with no chance of parole.

Now that the case is officially over, the judge was able to order the release of a wealth of material that had been under a judicial embargo.

The new evidence reveals how one woman escaped becoming Pickton’s next victim in 1997 after he had handcuffed her and stabbed her in the stomach, by managing to stab him him in the jugular. She ran away, naked and bleeding profusely.

Later, she was treated at the same hospital as him, where staff were able to unlock her wrist after finding the key for the handcuffs in Pickton’s pocket. But the case never made it to trail because prosecutors believed the woman was ‘too unstable’ to testify.

The new evidence also uncovers significant police failures, including the fact that the clothes and rubber boots Pickton had been wearing that evening were seized by police and left in an RCMP storage locker for more than seven years. It wasn’t until 2004 that lab testing show that the DNA of two missing women were on these items.

Reports from the 2007 trial reveal how Robert and his brother David threw wild parties regularly, using a converted building near their pig farm that they dubbed ‘The Piggy Palace’. The venue was also used to host events in the name of a registered charity, ‘The Piggy Palace Good Times Society’.

The parties were attended by friends, and prostitutes from downtown’s Eastside, which was a haven for drug addicts and sex workers – and it’s believed many of the partygoers ended up his victims.

Pickton’s younger brother was also under investigation as a prime suspect in the murders, but no evidence ever emerged to link him to any of the crimes and he wasn’t charged.  He still lives close to the farm.

Robert Pickton’s 2007 trial heard how he confessed to forty-nine murders to an undercover police officer posing as a cellmate. The Crown reported that Pickton told the officer that he wanted to kill another woman to make it an even 50, but he was caught because he was “sloppy”.