Canadian police make missing women case arrest

VANCOUVER, Canada (CNN) -- Canadian police Friday arrested a pig farm owner in connection with a string of missing women, some of whom have been missing for nearly two decades.

Robert William Pickton, 52, was charged Friday with two counts of first degree murder, a spokeswoman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced. Pickton owns a pig farm in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam, where the joint police task force began searching two weeks ago in connection with the missing women.

"We believe we now have the answers regarding the disappearance of two of the missing women," said RCMP Constable Catherine Galliford. "But this is a case involving 50 missing women. There are a lot of questions still unanswered and we will not rest until those answers are found."

Galliford said there were still "hundreds of potential suspects," and refused to disclose the evidence that led to Pickton's arrest.

"This is one small piece of a very large puzzle," she said.

The families of the missing women had rallied for years, asking the police take the investigation more seriously. They believe police were not interested in the case because most of the women were drug addicts and prostitutes.

"'Tanya was just out having fun, don't bother us,'" is what Dixi Purcell said police told her, when she reported her daughter's disappearance five years ago. "I just stood there with the phone in my hand for 10 minutes just looking at it."

However, police said they did the best they could with the information they had.

"When you look at the fact that we've got some people, of course, who are involved in various activities that put them in a high risk category to begin with, those reports are taken as seriously as possible by the police department," said Vancouver Police Det. Scott Driemel.

A grassroots movement by the missing women's families helped encourage Vancouver police to form a joint task force with the RCMP last spring.

With the help of new information from the public and reports by the media, the RCMP said the joint task force began searching Pickton's pig farm earlier this month.

Pickton will appear in court Monday in Port Coquitlam, Galliford said. Out of respect for the families, the names of the two women Pickton is charged with murdering will not be released until Monday, she said.