Publishing a memoir is hard, but publishing one from inside the walls of a maximum security prison? Piss-easy.
Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton, 66, successfully smuggled the pages of his memoir Pickton: In His Own Words out of Kent Institution in Canada’s British Columbia and it GENUINELY WENT UP FOR SALE ON AMAZON, hitting #1.
Pickton – previously a multi-millionaire pig farmer – is currently serving a life sentence with no chance of parole after being convicted of the second-degree murders of six women, though a further 20 murder charges were suspended because many of his victim’s bodies were never found (gross rumours abound that he ground up bodies and fed them to his pigs).
He’s suspected to have murdered dozens more women, once confessing to an undercover cop that he’d killed 49, so needless to say the families of his victims are outraged by the book’s publication.
During the short time it was on Amazon, victims’ distraught loved ones appealed to the public not to buy / read it and more than 50,000 people signed a Change.org petition asking Amazon to immediately pull it.
The book was selling for around US$20 on Amazon.ca, where it was ranked as a #1 bestseller and “hot new release” before being made unavailable; it was also spruiked on Amazon’s US site, but has since been withdrawn from sale.
Unsurprisingly, the 144-page book was filled with bullshit protestations of innocence, incl. claims he was framed for the killings by Canadian police.
So, how did this *even* happen? An investigation into how Pickton managed to smuggle the manuscript out of the max-security prison but Canadian news site CTV is reporting Pickton bypassed security checks on his own correspondence by passing the book to a fellow inmate, who sent photocopies of Pickton’s handwriting to a California-based friend named Michael Chilldres.
The cover of the book
Chilldres told the National Post he received the manuscript in the mail and originally had no idea who Pickton was.
“I got on Wikipedia and looked up his arrest record and stuff, and he was kind of creepy,” he said, which in no way explains / excuses why the fuck he submitted the manuscript to Outskirts Press, a Colorado-based self-publishing service, under his own name.
Outskirts Press maintain they had no idea Pickton was the book’s author, and immediately contacted Amazon.ca to ask for it to be taken down once it came to light.
“We have a long-standing policy of not working with, nor publishing work by, incarcerated individuals,” a statement read.
Chilldres is insisting Pickton won’t profit from the book, ‘cos he gave up publishing rights when he handed over the manuscript, but swears he’s donating 10% of profits to a charity… that’s still TBC.
Source: The Guardian.
Photo: AP / Toronto Sun.
