VANCOUVER — The Missing Women inquiry heard again Tuesday from Sarah de Vries, one of the victims of serial killer Robert Pickton.

"Am I next?" de Vries wrote in 1995, three years before she disappeared.

"Is he watching me now? Stalking me like a predator and its prey. Waiting, waiting for some perfect spot, time or my stupid mistake. How does one choose a victim? Good question. If I knew that, I would never get snuffed."

The passage from de Vries's journal was read out from the book Missing Sarah, written by her older sister, Maggie de Vries, who teaches creative writing at the University of B.C.

She read another passage written the year before Sarah vanished in April 1998 while working as a street prostitute at the corner of Princess and East Hastings in Vancouver.

"Somebody's going to leave us tonight," Sarah wrote, months before she was killed.

"I don't know who and I don't know why. I feel it, I fear it, it's in the air. It's so just ... well, just there. It makes my flesh tingle from goose bumps and sends my heart through a flash of panic."

Sarah wrote that she felt "cold, emotionless, empty, yet too tough to show that you're cracking inside and starting to cry.

"Deep, deeper and deeper still, way down in the abyss o my heart a spark shows through all the empty, cold darkness."

Maggie de Vries told the inquiry that her sister's writing shows that even though Sarah presented a hard exterior to the world, "inside that shell there is a person in pain."

Sarah took precautions to stay alive, de Vries said, but despite her fears she was killed — likely because she "may have encountered a rapid use of force."

She recalled that police — when Sarah was first reported missing — didn't make Maggie feel that her sister's disappearance was important.

She said she wasn't contacted by police for a week to 10 days after she reported Sarah missing. She would have appreciated more police contact and more updates.

One Vancouver police detective, Lori Shenher, showed warmth, but she was overworked as she investigated the mounting number of missing women cases, de Vries said.

She recalled attending a Vancouver police meeting with families of the missing women in June 1999.

"We were patted on the head and told to go away," she recalled feeling after that meeting.

Maggie de Vries is part of a panel at the inquiry, along with Wayne Leng and sex trade activist Jamie Lee Hamilton. The inquiry, after hearing four months of testimony from experts and many police witnesses, has decided to move to panel discussions to try to find practical recommendations to make to government.

Leng established a website, missingpeople.net, in January 1999. Initially it was a tribute to his friend Sarah, but eventually it was expanded to include all the missing women, he said.

Leng said he also brought the problem to the attention of the TV program America's Most Wanted, which did a show about the women who were then disappearing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.