Crown Prosecutor Michael Petrie (right) leads his legal team across the street to the courthouse in New Westminster, British Columbia yesterday. Arguments began yesterday in the first of two scheduled trials for accused Canadian serial killer Robert "Willie" Pickton. The trial will involve six of the 26 counts of first degree murder facing the Port Coquitlam, British Columbian man. - Reuters

NEW WESTMINSTER, British Columbia, (Reuters):

Accused serial killer Robert 'Willie' Pickton butchered his victims after death, and evidence will include heads that have been cut in half and other severed bones, prosecutors told a Canadian court yesterday.

"He murdered them, butchered their remains and disposed of them," prosecutor Derrill Prevett told the court in New West- minster, British Columbia, in his first glimpse of horror-film like evidence that prosecutors say will prove Pickton to be Canada's deadliest serial killer.

Pickton, a pig farmer, showed no apparent emotion in the prisoners' box at the start of the trial, which is being held in a courtroom packed with the relatives of the victims.

Pickton is charged with killing 26 women, although this trial will deal with just six of the murder charges. The judge divided the case into two trials to make it easier for jurors to handle.

Prevett said there is no dispute that the six women had been killed and their remains found on Pickton's farm in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia.

Evidence

Prosecutors said the evidence will include at least two heads found in buckets packed with the feet of the victims and a gun with a dildo attached to it on which the DNA of at least one of the victims was found. All of the victims appear to have been killed by gun shot.

The judge presiding over the trial warned jurors they must brace themselves for "shocking" testimony. "I must ask each of you to deal with it as best you can," Judge James Williams told the 12 men and women who will listen to evidence in a trial expected to last at least a year.

Williams also warned the media about breaking any publication bans, which restrict, for example, the release of evidence previously produced in pre-trial hearings.

Family members of the missing women, local and international media and members of the public began gathering outside the courthouse several hours before the high-profile trial began.

Some family members, like Lynn Frey, the stepmother of Marnie Frey, one of the six women Pickton is accused of killing, were not allowed into the courtroom because they have been subpoenaed as potential witnesses.

"I am angry," Frey said. "I've got a lot of emotions going through me right now... I want someone to be held accountable for what happened," she said, shivering in the rain outside the court.

The women Pickton is accused of killing were among more than 60 prostitutes who disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside — one of Canada's poorest neighborhoods — from the late 1980s until late 2001.

Pickton, 57, has pleaded not guilty to murder. He is the only person charged in the case.

Police initially raided Pickton's ramshackle farm looking for an illegal gun. But the case quickly became a homicide investigation and murder counts were added over the next three years.

The trial will likely raise questions over how police handled the investigation. Activists first raised alarms about missing women in 1991, but a formal task force was not launched until 1999 and it had to be reorganised after stalling.

Police say the case was more difficult than other serial killing investigations because the women disappeared without a trace. Some victims were not reported missing until months or years after they disappeared.

The DNA of at least 31 of Vancouver's missing women was found on Pickton's farm, according to police.