'I should have killed one more and made it 50'

Robert William Pickton, 56, has been charged with 26 counts of first-degree murder, accused of killing mostly prostitutes and drug addicts who vanished from a poor Vancouver neighbourhood in the 1990s.

He has pleaded not guilty to the first six counts for which he is being tried.

The murder trial is expected to be the most macabre and lengthy in Canadian history.

Prosecutor Derrill Prevett stunned the courtroom when he said Pickton told investigators, including an undercover officer planted in his jail cell, that he had slain 49 women.

"I was going to do one more and make it an even 50," Mr Prevett quoted Pickton as telling investigators. "I made my own grave by being sloppy."

Pickton went on to describe himself as a mass murderer who deserved to be on death row, according to Mr Prevett.

But defence lawyer Peter Ritchie told jurors Pickton did not kill or participate in the murders of the six women.

He asked them to pay close attention to Pickton's demeanour in the courtroom, in particular his level of sophistication. He did not address Pickton's alleged murder confessions.

Jurors had been warned that details of the case, until now under a publication ban in Canada, would be horrific. As details began to emerge yesterday, some relatives of the victims began to cry and leave the courtroom. Jurors were also told that the heads, hands and feet of two women were found in a freezer at Pickton's home. The heads had been cut in half vertically using a power saw, Mr Prevett said.

He added: "The Crown will say that over the course of several years he had these women to his farm. There he murdered them, butchered their remains and disposed of them.

"He had the expertise and the equipment for the task. He had the means of transportation available and the means for the disposal of the remains."

The heads, feet and hands found in a freezer at the farm in Port Coquitlam, outside Vancouver, were matched by DNA samples to two of the alleged victims, Mr Prevett told the court.

DNA evidence of all six women Pickton is alleged to have murdered was found on the farm, Mr Prevett told the jury. It included partial jaw bones, hand bones and teeth.

Mr Prevett told the court that during his police interview when shown a board covered in photographs of sex workers missing from the east side of Vancouver's city centre, he told them: "You make me more of a mass murderer than I am."

The prosecutor said that at one point the interviewer suggested the reason Pickton found himself in his situation was that "he didn't do a very good job in cleaning up a girl's blood".

"You'll hear him respond, 'That's right, I was sloppy'," Mr Prevett told the jury.

Pickton, who sat in a specially-built bullet-proof glass dock, is accused of murdering Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Marnie Frey and Georgina Faith Papin.

Mr Prevett told the jury they would hear from a female witness who would claim she had been at the farm and had seen Pickton in the slaughterhouse "engaged in butchering a woman". Another witness will testify about a conversation in which the farmer "admitted that he killed sex-trade workers, how he would kill them and that he would take their bodies to the slaughterhouse".

Mr Prevett said the undercover police officer told Pickton the best way to dispose of a body was to take it to the sea, and that the farmer responded that he "did one better than that" and used a rendering plant.

Hundreds of people began lining up before dawn outside the small courthouse in a suburb of Vancouver, vying for 35 seats to hear the opening arguments against Pickton.

Presiding British Columbia Supreme Court Justice James Williams ruled that 20 other charges would be heard in a later trial to avoid overburdening the jury. In instructing the seven male and five female jurors before opening arguments, Williams warned that the prosecution's evidence and witness testimony would be horrific.

"Some of the evidence to which you will be exposed to during the trial will be shocking and is likely to be upsetting. I must ask each of you to deal with that the best you can," he said.

The trial continues.

DERANGED PREDATORS ... THE WORST OF THE WORST

PEDRO ALONSO LOPEZ, Colombia. "Monster of the Andes", suspected of killing 300 people in Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. Convicted in 1980 on 57 charges.

HAROLD SHIPMAN, Britain. Manchester doctor sentenced to 15 life terms for murdering elderly and middle-aged patients between 1995 and 1998. A 2005 report said "Dr Death" probably killed 250, starting when he began practising medicine. Committed suicide in 2004.

HU WANLIN, China. Arrested in 1999 on suspicion of causing 146 deaths. A self-proclaimed healer and ex-convict, he called himself a doctor with magical powers.

LUIS ALFREDO GAVARITO, Colombia. Confessed in 1999 to the murders of 140 children.

DONALD HENRY GASKINS, United States. Executed 1991. Likely to have killed 100 people.

JAVED IQBAL, Pakistan. Sentenced to death in 2000 for murdering and mutilating 100 children.

DELFINA & MARIA DE JESUS GONZALES, Mexico. Owners of a brothel, the sisters were sentenced to 40 years in prison in 1964 for killing 80 women and at least 11 men.

ANDRE CHIKATILO, Russia. "Rostov Ripper" convicted of 52 murders in 1992, having confessed to at least 55.

ANATOLY ONOPRIENKO, Ukraine. Killed 52 people. Sentenced to death in 1999.

GARY LEON RIDGWAY, United States. Former truck painter dubbed the "Green River Killer" for place where he dumped bodies. Killed 48 prostitutes, runaways and drug addicts in spree that stunned Seattle. Sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2003.

THEODORE "TED" BUNDY, United States. Admitted killing 36 young women and was also linked to murders in the states of Washington, Oregon, Utah and Colorado. Once bragged he killed at least 100 women and was executed in 1989.

JOHN WAYNE GACY, United States. Successful Chicago businessman who killed 33 young men and boys, burying bodies beneath his house. Executed in May 1994.

JEFFREY DAHMER, United States. Sentenced to several life terms in 1992 for murders of 17 young men and boys in a 13-year rampage of dismemberment and cannibalism. Killed in prison in November 1994.