Pig Farmer Is Focus of Murder Case

VANCOUVER, Canada —  Police filed first-degree murder charges Friday against the owner of a dilapidated pig farm that has become the focus of a search for 50 Vancouver women who have disappeared since the early 1980s and are feared dead.

Robert Pickton, 52, was charged in connection with the deaths of two of the women, but the inquiry was continuing, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police told a news conference at the farm in Port Coquitlam, a suburb of Vancouver.

Police, who raided Pickton’s farm Feb. 5, refused to say what evidence prompted the arrest.

Nearly all of the missing women were drug addicts who worked in the sex trade in Vancouver’s downtown east side, one of Canada’s poorest neighborhoods. The first disappearance took place in 1983.