VANCOUVER - The team leader of a joint forces VPD-RCMP investigation that was looking into serial killer Robert Pickton explained Wednesday why he went on a two-month vacation while the murders continued.

Don Adam recalled he went on vacation because he had been told that women had stopped disappearing in 1999 from the streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

"Being told and reading documents that it had stopped obviously influenced me," he told the Missing Women inquiry.

He said he wasn't made aware of new reports of missing women until August 2001.

Adam agreed that before that, there had not been a sense of urgency to the joint forces investigation, which began Feb. 26, 2001, he said.

The purpose of the investigation was to review all the unsolved murders of women across B.C.

Adam said his mandate was to determine whether one or more serial killers were responsible for the past murders and the disappearances of dozens of women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

"It wasn't proceeding on the basis that there was an active serial killer out there," he recalled.

Once the joint investigation known as Project Evenhanded realized there was an active serial killer, he said, the police investigation became pro-active in early 2002.

Adam recalled that Pickton was a top "priority one" suspect, but added there were many.

"Pickton was a great suspect. So were others," Adam told inquiry commissioner Wally Oppal.

He pointed out that investigators had met with their counterparts in Seattle, who investigated the Green River killer.

"We had a discussion about what to do to get in front of the killing," Adam said.

"Obviously he was killing but he was under our radar," he said of Pickton, noting that there were no sightings of Pickton in the Downtown Eastside being reported to police at the time.

He said police eventually got a "break" and solved the case in February 2002.

A rookie Mountie, unrelated to Project Evenhanded, got a search warrant to check Pickton's farm for illegal guns. He found the guns but also discovered identification and personal items in Pickton's home belonging to missing women.

Police then got another search warrant to search for evidence of murders.

The forensic search - the largest in Canadian history - went on for almost two years and found the remains and DNA of 33 missing women.

Cross-examined by commission counsel Art Vertlieb, Adam said he knew about the previous VPD and Coquitlam RCMP investigations had considered Pickton as the prime suspect.

The retired Mountie said investigators did not interview Coquitlam RCMP Cpl. Mike Connor, who had investigated a 1997 knife attack by Pickton on a prostitute from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

The woman slashed Pickton with a knife while at Pickton's farm in Port Coquitlam; she survived after running to the street and flagging down a passing car.

Pickton was charged with attempted murder and unlawful confinement but those charges were dropped in 1998 by the Crown, who felt the victim was unreliable because she was a drug addict.