VANCOUVER – Serial killer Robert Pickton began his murder spree in 1991, a police team commander told the Missing Women inquiry today.
“The first time he killed was 1991,” Don Adam testified.
“He was a fully functioning serial killer since 1995.”
Adam, who joined the RCMP and recently retired after serving 34 years, was appointed in November 2000 as the team commander of Project Evenhanded.
It was a joint forces operation using Mounties and Vancouver police officers.
He said the joint investigation didn’t really get going until February 2001.
Adam recalled the team’s focus was quite broad – to look at the murders of prostitutes in Vancouver, the Fraser Valley, on Vancouver Island and up north, and solve them.
The investigation was also to look at the 27 women, at the time, reported missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
“Did you believe the missing women were murdered?” asked lawyer Janet Winterinham, Adam’s lawyer.
“Yes I did,” Adam told inquiry Commissioner Wally Oppal.
He also said he found it “astounding” to learn there were 52 unsolved prostitute murders and the solve rate was only 50 per cent – well below the solve rate of most homicides.
“It didn’t seem possible to me to be the work of one person,” Adam said of the unsolved murders.
He felt there were clusters of murders, including three bodies of Vancouver prostitutes found in the Fraser Valley in 1995 and a series of murders on Vancouver Island, that indicated more than one serial killer was operating in B.C.
“My mandate was to catch them all,” Adam recalled.
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He said he assigned investigators to look at the Valley Murders and try to link to Pickton, who was eventually eliminated when Pickton’s DNA didn’t match those crimes.
Early on, Adam recalled, police believed the women had stopped going missing but there were murders of sex trade workers on Vancouver Island, so it was believed the killer may have moved there.
The problem with the missing women, he said, was the absence of a body and a crime scene.
“There wasn’t an event – somebody being dragged screaming into a car,” he explained.
“You lack the certainty of a crime.”
At the begiinning, he said the investigation team spent time making sure there was a crime and how to solve it.
“We were doing this investigation to find the killer and bring him to court,” he said, admitting the investigation did suffer from “tunnel vision” at times.
“We could not assume there was one killer,” Adam said.
He said at one time, police had 63 “priority one” suspects that were considered capable of being serial killers.
“This file was full of hideous human beings and they needed to be looked at,” Adams told the inquiry, sounding upset.
He also pointed out that a B.C. Mountie named Bob Paulson, now head of the RCMP in Canada, sent Adam an e-mail in 2001, drawing Adam’s attention to a half skull found in 1995 in a Mission river bed.
He said the skull’s DNA was later matched to bones found on Pickton’s farm.
Pickton had been charged with the murder of “Jane Doe” but the charge was dropped by the trial judge because it was never determined when the unidentified victim was killed.
Adam said the investigation was also hampered by lack of DNA samples and a computer data base that could integrate the previous years of the Vancouver police investigation and RCMP files.
A rookie RCMP officer, Const. Nathan Wells, who was not involved in Project Evenhanded, executed a search warrant on Pickton’s home on Feb. 5, 2002, looking for illegal firearms.
The guns were found but also found was identification and personal items of missing women.
Pickton was initially arrested and released 10 hours later.
Adam recalled police found drops of blood and an inhaler belonging to one of the missing women, Sereena Abotsway, which were tested for DNA.
Twelve days later, Adam recalled, police were able to match two DNA samples to missing women and the Crown agreed to charge Pickton with the first two counts of first-degree murders.
He said the DNA lab testing evolved greatly during the investigation, eventually being tested by robotic machines.
Adam pointed out that there has been some criticism of the RCMP for not finding the DNA of two missing women that was on Pickton’s clothing seized by Coquitlam RCMP in 1997 after Pickton’s knife attack on a prostitute.
Adam said police in 1997 had no DNA samples to match to any of the missing women.
He pointed out that sample couldn’t be tested unless there was a homicide suspect.
Vancouver police had been “crippled” in getting bodily fluid samples tested in Canada because it classified the women as missing instead of homicide victims, Adam said.
He said the VPD had to send its samples to a U.S. lab for testing.
Adam credited a number of Vancouver police officers for outstanding work, including Const. Lori Shenher, the first officer assigned to the missing women case, and Jim McKnight, a homicide detective who became the primary investigator on Project Evenhanded.
He also disputed criticism that Project Evenhanded was “file review” involving officers “blindly stumbling” along.
He said it was a complex, systematic investigation.
Adam’s testmony will continue this afternoon at the inquiry.
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