‘I’m a legend,’ serial killer Pickton told cellmate

VANCOUVER – A newly released transcript of a jail-cell conversation between Robert Pickton and an undercover police officer show the serial murderer presenting himself as a hapless hayseed, confused and out of his depth, after the arrest that would lead to his conviction for killing six women.

"I’m just a pig farmer," Pickton says in the transcript, released by authorities Friday. "This is, this is way over my head."

It’s just the latest release of previously confidential information about the Crown’s case against Pickton, who last month saw his appeal for a new trial rejected by the Supreme Court of Canada.

One transcript released by authorities Friday recounts a recorded jail-cell conversation between Pickton and an undercover police agent in 2002, following Pickton’s arrest. In it, Pickton exults over his new celebrity – "I’m a legend already" – while lamenting the fact the police probe has "ruined" his life.

"I hear I’m dead," he tells the informant. "Well, they killed you already, they’ve ruined your life… take everything away from you, everything you worked for."

Pickton also complains about the fact he’d intended to leave his farm by the age of 40. "Now I’m 53 and now it’s buried me," he says, referring to the police investigation.

"The whole f-king world knows me. All the way to Hong Kong and everywheres."

"F-k if the next think (sic) you’ll be like King Tut or Saddam Hussein and those guys," says the informant.

"Kinda nice to be similar to Saddam, what did you call him," Pickton replies.

While Pickton denies throughout the transcript having killed anyone, he refers at one point to a "f-king bitch" who left her identification at his farm.

"She had no place to stay or anything," he says. "She brought all of her ID over to my place, and everything else, and all her clothes. The only problem is now I’m charged with murder and I got her ID at my place."

At another point in the transcript, Pickton tells his cellmate about his lack of vices: "I don’t drink, I don’t even smoke, I don’t do drugs or nothing."

"Come on, nobody’s that straight," the informant replies.

"You got to be doing little kids or something if you don’t . . . smoke or drink."

"No," Pickton says. "I’m a workin’ boy."

On Wednesday, a B.C. judge lifted all but three publication bans in the Pickton case, after lawyers for the media appeared in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster to argue against the bans. Lifting the bans made public for the first time the fact that Pickton – convicted in 2007 of six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of six missing Vancouver women – was implicated in a knife attack on a sex-trade worker at his Port Coquitlam, B.C., farm 13 years ago.

Pickton’s victims disappeared from the Downtown Eastside from 1978 to 2001 and their butchered remains were found on his farm.