VANCOUVER - Thirteen women disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside after the city's police force first forwarded information about Robert Pickton to the RCMP, according to an internal police review that spreads the blame between both agencies.
The 450-page document prepared by the deputy chief of the Vancouver police blames both forces for errors that prevented either from arresting Pickton until 2002 -- years after officers first started looking at Pickton as they investigated reports of missing sex workers.
Deputy Chief Doug LePard made it clear Pickton could have been caught earlier.
"Certainly there was justification to aggressively pursue the information in the summer of 1999," LePard told a news conference in Vancouver as he released the full report.
"After that, at least 13 more women went missing and DNA links 11 of them to the Pickton farm."
LePard said the RCMP and Vancouver police failed to effectively share information, both lacked effective leadership, neither had resources such as crime analysts who could have provided crucial information and the Vancouver department had a bias against sex workers.
He said several officers who did come forward with information were ignored, and he specifically referred to Kim Rossmo, a geographic profiler who has complained he was ignored when he warned a serial killer could be at work.
LePard called Rossmo's work "uncannily accurate."
"No one wanted to let a killer escape," he said. "Everybody was doing their best, but when you don't have the right information, the right people aren't talking to each other, then mistakes happen, opportunities are lost."
LePard said his report makes a series of recommendations including improving information sharing between the RCMP and the Vancouver police, and he said those recommendations have already been implemented.
The report will likely increase calls for a public inquiry, which both the Vancouver police and the RCMP have said they support.
The provincial government hasn't said whether that will happen.
The RCMP descended on Pickton's farm in Port Coquitlam in 2002 and launched a massive search that uncovered the remains or DNA of 33 women. He was charged with 27 counts of murder and eventually convicted of six.
But there have long been questions about why police didn't catch Pickton sooner or take reports of women disappearing from the Downtown Eastside more seriously.
Families and friends of women who had vanished from the Downtown Eastside started sounding the alarm in the early 1990s, but some have said when they reported those disappearances to police, they were told the woman likely moved on somewhere else.
Earlier this month, a publication ban was lifted in Pickton's criminal case and Canadians learned Pickton had been accused of trying to kill a prostitute on his Port Coquitlam farm in 1997.
Those charges were stayed over concerns the victim would have made an unreliable witness, and Pickton continued killing. Critics have suggested the case should have prompted the RCMP to finger Pickton years before he was finally arrested.
The RCMP also has an internal report on the way, although it's not clear when that will be released. The Mounties had scheduled a news conference for Friday afternoon.
The B.C. government hasn't said whether it will call a public inquiry, insisting that decision will depend on the reports from the Vancouver police and the RCMP.
