A hybrid receiver, and an associated method, for receiving a radio signal carrying transmitted data that is subject to distortion in the transmission channel. The receiver includes a plurality of stages that perform parallel interference cancellation (PIC) to establish successively more accurate estimates of the transmitted data, including a receiver first stage being either a RAKE receiver or a linear minimum mean-square error (LMMSE) receiver, a second stage including an LMMSE, and preferably a third stage also including an LMMSE. Each stage processes the estimates of the transmitted signal provided by the stage preceding it to mitigate or eliminate as much transmission-channel interference as possible and prove a refined estimate for processing by subsequent stages. Improved channel estimation may be achieved by processing the pilot signal in similar fashion as well.