The B.C. government will review how police investigated cases of missing women on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside before serial killer Robert Pickton was finally apprehended, the province's acting Solicitor-General Rich Coleman has said.
On Sept. 8, the provincial cabinet will outline what the review will look like, such as a public inquiry or a judicial review, Coleman told The Globe and Mail Friday evening.
News of the review came hours after Vancouver police released a candid 400-page report chronicling mistakes that were made during the course of investigations by its own officers and by the RCMP.
The report noted that 13 women went missing from the Vancouver area after police first received credible information that Robert Pickton was murdering women on his pig farm, but mistakes kept police from catching him sooner.
It concludes, among other things, that enough was known about Pickton's activities by 1999 "to justify a sustained and intensive investigation."
"The information suggested that Downtown Eastside sex trade workers were willingly visiting the Pickton property in Coquitlam and some were being murdered there," the report says.
At that time the RCMP, which had jurisdiction over Coquitlam, launched a criminal investigation on Pickton. But they "essentially abandoned" it without uncovering his grisly crimes, the report says.
Pickton was eventually taken into custody in 2002. In the meantime another 13 women disappeared from the Vancouver area, and investigators later found DNA from 11 of those women on Pickton's infamous farm.
"No one wanted to let a killer escape," Vancouver Police Department Deputy Chief Doug LePard said at a press conference. "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."
"This report sheds a harsh cold light into every corner of the process, outlining every failure, regardless of where it occurred," he said.
While the report levels some of the blame on the RCMP, it also says that if Vancouver police had better managed its own investigation into the disappearance of women on the city's Downtown Eastside, it "could have brought more pressure to bear on the RCMP to pursue the Pickton investigation more vigorously."
LePard said that Vancouver police and the RCMP did not adequately share information relating to the case, neither force had the leadership or the resources that were needed, and Vancouver police were biased against sex workers.
Vancouver police "should have recognized earlier that there was a serial killer at work and responded appropriately," the report says, but the investigation was hobbled by the "failure" of management "to recognize what it was faced with."
Some police officers who came forward with information were ignored by their superiors, LePard said. For example, geographic profiler Kim Rossmo's "uncannily accurate" warnings that a serial killer could be at work went unheeded, he said.
The Mounties reacted quickly to the report's release, suggesting their own review had reached different findings.
"I can say that there are certain views expressed which I do not share," Chief Supt. Janice Armstrong said in statement on behalf of Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass. "However, in fairness, I know that the same can be said with respect to the RCMP report created in 2002."
One of Pickton's victims was Cindy Dawn Folks. Her stepmother, Marilyn Kraft, blames both organizations.
She said police delayed adding Folks to a missing persons list until four years after family members reported her disappearance.
"We were told when we reported Cindy missing in 1997 that she was probably somewhere else plying her trade," Folks said, adding that police treated Pickton's victims "as disposable people."
"There was a big failure both with (Vancouver police) and the RCMP," she told CTV News Channel. "There has to be an inquiry."
With files from The Canadian Press
