Leader of probe finds ‘unfortunate parallels’
B.C., Ontario serial killers ‘fell through cracks’
The Ontario police deputy chief who critiqued the police investigation into Robert Pickton said serial killers like Pickton and Ontario’s Paul Bernardo can still escape detection by operating in multiple police jurisdictions.
Peel Regional Police Deputy Chief Jennifer Evans told the missing women commission of Inquiry on Monday that both Pickton and Bernardo “fell through the cracks” and kept killing due to poor police communication.
Evans, who reviewed Bernardo’s case for an Ontario public inquiry, said she found “many unfortunate parallels” with Pickton.
Even though police pledged that multijurisdictional problems would be fixed after Clifford Olson killed 11 children throughout the Lower Mainland in the 1980s, Pickton was able to pick up women in Vancouver for decades and kill them at his Port Coquitlam farm, just down from the Coquitlam RCMP.
“Systemically, there were similarities” between Bernardo, Pickton and Olson, Evans testified.
Evans noted that although junior Vancouver police officers and Coquitlam RCMP officers shared tips and suspicions about Pickton as early as 1998, no police leaders or chiefs “picked up the phone” to speak to each other.
Asked by commissioner Wally Oppal if regional policing would work better, Evans replied that it has in Peel, an amalgam of five city police bodies.
Along with strong tips about Pickton from informant Bill Hiscox in 1998, three more people came forward in 1999 to tell police that Lynn Ellingsen had described seeing Pickton butcher a woman in his barn.
But it wasn’t until 2001 that a joint VPDRCMP task force was set up and even then it was primarily a paper review.
Project Evenhanded Staff-sgt. Don Adam took the position that the missing women homicides were “historical” and that investigating possible ongoing murders would be a distraction.
Evans testified that police made mistakes, but she did not find any “neglect of duty, deceit or corruption” by individuals.
She emphasized that Pickton was able to keep killing women due to “systemic weaknesses and the inability of law-enforcement agencies to pool information.”
In fact, Evans noted that a student hired in 2001 to summarize “missing-women” police files astutely warned that homicides were likely still happening.
Meanwhile, VPD and RCMP managers could not agree on whether a serial killer existed or even whether to polygraph key eyewitness Ellingsen, a very convincing eyewitness who helped convict Pickton.
Hearings at the Oppal inquiry continue until April and Oppal has pledged to hand in his final report by June 2012.