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 in 1971 and served 40 years before retiring last year, became team commander of Project Evenhanded in November 2000.

The VPD-RCMP joint forces operation didn't really get going until February 2001, he said.

Adam recalled the team's focus was broad - to look at and solve all the murders of prostitutes in Vancouver, the Fraser Valley, on Vancouver Island and up north.

The investigation was also to probe the 27 women reported missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

"Did you believe the missing women were murdered?" asked lawyer Janet Winteringham, 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.

He said he assigned investigators to look at the Valley Murders and try to find a link to Pickton, who was eventually eliminated as a suspect when his 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 beginning, 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," Adam told the inquiry.

He spent much of the day explaining how several roadblocks hindered the investigation, including the absence of a national DNA missing persons data bank, which he suggested the inquiry could remedy by recommending that such a data bank be established.

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.