British Columbia's solicitor general said the government is taking steps to ensure convicted serial killer Robert Pickton doesn't profit from a book in which he claims his innocence.
"It is deeply disturbing to hear that a book about Robert Pickton's story is being sold," Mike Morris said in a statement.
Morris said the government is also asking online book retailer Amazon to stop selling the 144-page book.
"Pickton: In his Own Words" is available for sale on Amazon.com for about CAD$20, and gives a glimpse into the mind of Canada's most notorious serial killer.
As of approximately 1 p.m. ET on Monday, the book was unavailable on Amazon.ca.
CTVNews.ca has reached out to Amazon, but has yet to hear back.
"It is not right that a person who has caused so much harm and hurt so many people could profit from his behaviour," Morris said.
In 2007, Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and is serving a life sentence in Kent Institution in Agassiz, B.C.
The remains or DNA of 33 women were found on his Port Coquitlam farm. He also confessed to an undercover police officer that he had murdered 49 women -- many of them sex workers from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside -- but had fallen short of an even 50 because he got "sloppy."
Questions are being raised about how a manuscript penned by Pickton was smuggled outside the maximum security prison.
Author Stevie Cameron extensively followed the Pickton case and wrote the book "On the Farm: Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver's Missing Women." She said she found it "very weird" that a hand-written manuscript of the book managed to make its way outside of the prison.
Pickton appears to have passed the manuscript to a former cellmate.
That inmate then sent the manuscript to a friend -- a retired construction worker from California named Michael Chilldres -- who typed it up and is credited as the author of the book.
Cameron, who is currently working on a book about the former maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary, said inmates' correspondences are closely monitored by prison guards.
“Any letter I wrote (to) a prisoner was read (by the guards), any letter they wrote me was read," Cameron told CTV's Canada AM on Monday. "I just wonder, how did that manuscript get out of that prison?"
Cameron said the guards likely knew about Pickton's friendship with his former cellmate.
"Didn’t they search the man's bags before he left?" she asked. "They must have seen Pickton scribbling away."
Rick Frey, whose daughter Marnie was one of the six women Pickton was convicted of murdering, said he's not surprised by the book's release.
"It's his kind of shenanigans," Frey told CTV News Channel on Monday. "The guy never goes away."
Frey said Pickton is "capable of anything" and added that he should have been more closely monitored by the prison guards.
"I thought this guy was supposed to be in a secure place."
A petition asking Amazon to stop selling the book is circulating online. The Change.org petition had more than 11,000 supporters as of Monday afternoon.
