VANCOUVER - A senior Vancouver police officer had a temper tantrum when another officer suggested they issue a public warning that a serial killer may be on the loose, the Missing Women inquiry was told Tuesday.

Kim Rossmo, the former Vancouver police detective-inspector who wanted to issue the warning, said he believed the police force had a duty to inform the community a possible serial killer was preying on women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

But his press release was nixed by then-Insp. Fred Biddlecombe, who was in charge of the homicide section and missing persons unit.

“He had a small temper tantrum,” he told the inquiry, recalling the September 1998 meeting between Vancouver police and the RCMP in which the news release was discussed. “He didn’t like what we were doing.”

Rossmo testified Biddlecombe said there was no evidence of a serial killer and felt the women would be eventually found.

“I found him arrogant and somewhat egotistical. He wasn’t interested in a discussion. He was angry and unreasonable. He didn’t want to work with us.”

Biddlecombe’s negative attitude effectively killed the working group that had been assembled to look into the missing women problem in August 1998, Rossmo said. Instead, Biddlecombe asked Det-Const. Lori Shenher to continue trying to locate the 27 women who had been reported missing between 1978 and 1998.

At the time, Rossmo was a serial murder expert and the first officer in Canada to obtain a PhD in criminology. He is now is a professor at Texas State University, where he is the director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation. He served 20 years with Vancouver police, including two tours of duty in the Downtown Eastside. His last five years were spent as a detective-inspector in charge of the geographic profiling unit, which assisted in serial crime investigations of rape, robbery and murders. He recalled he had been asked to analyze the data on the missing women.

Despite Biddlecombe’s negativity, Rossmo said he continued working on the case but had difficulty getting any data from major crime. “I was somewhat frustrated in my efforts to obtain more data or information.”

He didn’t receive the data until months later, in February 1999, when he prepared a report concluding the number of missing women took a dramatic jump in 1995. Three women were reported missing that year and the numbers subsequently grew — five women went missing in 1997 and 11 disappeared in 1998. “Something is going on,” Rossmo explained as he showed a bar graph. “We have an outbreak. This is a warning to us.”

Rossmo also studied the data of when missing people tend to show up.

“Most people are found within two days,” he said. “After three weeks, 93 per cent are found.”

Rossmo’s research showed no other city in Western Canada had a similar problem. “I thought the data could only be explained by the possibility of a serial killer,” Rossmo said.

He passed on his conclusion to his superiors but it seemed to fall on deaf ears, he said. This was one of the “classic mistakes” made by police investigating Pickton, Rossmo added.

nhall@vancouversun.com