EXTREMISTS from Canada

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Canadian Extremists of all time. This list of famous Canadian Extremists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Robert Pickton (1949 - )

With an HPI of 44.21, Robert Pickton is the most famous Canadian Extremist.  Her biography has been translated into 16 different languages on wikipedia.

Robert William Pickton (born October 24, 1949), also known as the Pig Farmer Killer or the Butcher, is a Canadian serial killer, serial rapist, former pig farmer and possible cannibal who is suspected of being one of the most prolific serial killers in Canadian history. After dropping out of school, Pickton left a butcher's apprenticeship to begin working full-time at his family's pig farm. He is believed to have begun his murders in the early 1990s after inheriting the farm. Arrested in 2002, he was convicted in 2007 of the second-degree murders of six women and was also the subject of a lengthy investigation that yielded evidence of numerous other murders. Pickton was charged with the deaths of an additional twenty women, many of them from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, but these charges were stayed by the Crown in 2010. Pickton was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole for 25 years—the longest possible sentence for second-degree murder under Canadian law at the time he was sentenced. During the trial's first day of jury evidence, the Crown stated that Pickton had confessed to forty-nine murders to an undercover agent from the Office of the Inspector General, who was posing as a cellmate. The Crown reported that Pickton told the officer that he wanted to kill another woman to make it an even fifty, and that he was caught because he was "sloppy".

2. Karla Homolka (1970 - )

With an HPI of 40.15, Karla Homolka is the 2nd most famous Canadian Extremist.  Her biography has been translated into 20 different languages.

Karla Leanne Homolka (born May 4, 1970), also known as Karla Leanne Teale, Leanne Teale, and Leanne Bordelais, is a Canadian serial killer who acted as an accomplice to her husband, Paul Bernardo, taking active part in the rapes and murders of at least three minors in Ontario – including her own sister, Tammy Homolka – between 1990 and 1992. Homolka attracted worldwide media attention when a controversial plea bargain with Ontario prosecutors meant she was only convicted of manslaughter, and served only twelve years for the torture, rapes and murders of two teenaged girls, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. Homolka testified against Bernardo, who was convicted of the Mahaffy–French murders and received life imprisonment and a dangerous offender designation. Homolka stated to investigators that she had been an unwilling accomplice in Bernardo's murders as a result of domestic violence, resulting in a deal made with prosecutors for a reduced prison sentence in exchange for a guilty plea to the charge of manslaughter. Homolka scored 5/40 on the Psychopathy Checklist, in contrast to Bernardo's 35/40. However, videotapes of the crimes surfaced after the plea bargain and before Bernardo's trial, proving that Homolka was a more active participant than she had originally claimed, including in the rape and death of her sister, Tammy Homolka. As a result, the deal that she had struck with prosecutors was dubbed in the Canadian press the "Deal with the Devil". Public outrage about the plea deal continued until Homolka's high-profile release from prison in 2005. Each of the three murders was committed the day before a family holiday spent with Homolka's family (Christmas, Father's Day, and Easter). Following her release from prison, Homolka settled in Quebec, where she married a brother of her lawyer. She briefly lived in the Antilles and Guadeloupe, but by 2014, had returned to Quebec.