VANCOUVER—A senior Vancouver police investigator who pioneered geographic criminal profiling tried to warn residents in the Downtown Eastside that a serial killer was on the loose and preying on vulnerable women, a commission looking into missing women heard Wednesday.

Kim Rossmo, who completed his doctorate in criminology while on the force and headed the Vancouver police department’s geographic profiling section, wrote a public warning in May 1998, said his lawyer Mark Skwarok.

The inquiry was ordered by the provincial government after Robert Pickton was convicted in 2007 of six counts of second degree murder. Another 20 counts of murder were stayed when Pickton was sentenced to life in prison.

The commission is looking at a time frame between January 1997 and February 2002 when Pickton was finally arrested. During that period, the commission has heard, the Vancouver police department and Port Coquitlam RCMP, where Pickton had a pig farm, were aware of his connections to the Downtown Eastside.

But despite early suspicions that the disappearance of dozens of women may be linked to a killer, the Vancouver police ignored mounting evidence, according to Rossmo’s lawyer.

“There is clear and unambiguous evidence that had senior police officers listened to him (Rossmo), Pickton would have been caught sooner,” said Skwarok.

Rossmo, who has since left the force and now teaches criminology at a university in Texas, wrote a draft press release in 1998 that warned residents in the Downtown Eastside that a serial killer was preying on people in the neighbourhood.

Pickton’s victims were sex trade workers and drug addicts who had come to the impoverished neighbourhood to live and work.

Drawing on evidence from analysis done on the number of women who went missing and those who were later found murdered Rossmo concluded that the most likely explanation for the majority of cases was a single murderer preying on skid row prostitutes.

“The probability that the extraordinary increase in the number of missing women could be attributed to chance was less than one per cent,” Skwarok told the commission.

But despite Rossmo’s belief that a serial killer found his victims in the Downtown Eastside, his bosses in the Vancouver police department refused to publish his report.

Nearly a dozen organizations representing sex trade workers, residents in the Downtown Eastside and aboriginal groups have pulled their participation from the commission because their request for funding from the provincial government was rejected.

Ann Livingston, of the group Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, said the women who went missing were often lured to their deaths with illegal drugs and while they were living, they were criminalized and marginalized because of their drug addictions and poverty.

Many of them had children and some of those children live in the Downtown Eastside.

“We want to be assured the orphaned children are looked after so they don’t kill themselves or drug or drink themselves to death,” said Livingston. “We want an apology from the police for disregarding us.”

Lawyer Sean Hearn, who is representing the Vancouver police department and police board, made an apology to the families of the missing women, saying the force should have caught Pickton sooner.

But he reminded the commissioner that investigators did not know all the facts.

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“There was a frighteningly large number of suspects capable of committing these crimes who live among us,” said Hearn. “Today we see a clear path between the Downtown Eastside and the pig farm.”

But in the late 1990s, police didn’t have all the information and the benefit of hindsight bias must always be kept in mind, he said.

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