NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. - An RCMP officer found holes in Vancouver police files on women missing from the Downtown Eastside, Robert Pickton's murder trial was told Thursday.
Sgt. Margaret Kingsbury told Pickton's defence lawyer that she initially didn't review the 27 cases that sparked the Missing Women's Task Force when she joined the investigation.
But when she did look at the files, she found things that should have been followed up on. They eventually were.
Lawyer Adrian Brooks asked Kingsbury whether she was satisfied that the search done for missing women was thorough.
"I can only answer for the investigations that I know about and I have reviewed," Kingsbury said, not specifying whether she was satisfied.
"There are still historical missing women that are reported to us to this day."
Many family members of the missing women and community advocates were highly critical of Vancouver police's handling of the cases, saying they were unable to get police to take the disappearances seriously.
When a search team from Project Evenhanded descended on Pickton's Port Coquitlam property, police had spent more than two years collectively trying to figure out what happened to the women.
Kingsbury, a field investigator with the project, testified that police were trying to keep an open mind when the task force was formed in 2001.
"We looked at what Vancouver city police had done to attempt to find these 27 missing women over a period of time and the checks they made," she said. "We assumed that these women weren't missing any longer but they were deceased but we did keep an open mind."
One of the first things the RCMP discovered was that the list of missing women was a lot longer than they'd originally thought -- 45, not 27.
Jurors also heard how police travelled to Washington state in the late summer of 2001 to get advice on handling the case; police there had just charged one man in Spokane with killing 12 prostitutes.
On the advice of officers there, Canadian police decided to take a proactive approach.
"What that was was a body of people who would go down to the Downtown Eastside, walk around the strolls and speak to sex trade workers and determine who was a good date, who was a bad date," Kingsbury said.
Most of the missing women were prostitutes and some had been reported as missing as early as the 1980s.
Among the missing were Sereena Abotsway and Andrea Joesbury.
Kingsbury told the court that in the early days of the investigation, she was mostly in charge of gathering massive amounts of data in an attempt to link a suspect with the disappearances.
But once police obtained a warrant to search Pickton's property in February of 2002, she also went along.
As Crown prosecutor Mike Petrie flipped through more than 70 photographs of the inside of Pickton's trailer, Kingsbury detailed the items police found and seized for evidence.
A syringe with of blue fluid on an entertainment unit.
An old Pepsi-Cola box filled with shampoos and conditioners nearby.
A brown jacket in a laundry room closet.
Strewn across a box at the foot of Pickton's bed was a black jacket, with some papers sticking out.
"Mellow, yellow, fellow," read one note. "Andrea 201 Roosevelt Hotel."
Kingsbury testified she later found out that the Roosevelt Hotel was Joesbury's last known address.
The same sheaf of paper, which the defence characterized as an address book, had other people's names and numbers on it as well.
Kingsbury also searched the grey tote bag jurors had earlier heard held Abotsway's asthma inhaler.
They learned Thursday the bag also had a Bible, a tube of Polysporin, black high-heeled shoes and two syringes.
It was the discovery of that bag that prompted police to suspend their initial search of the farm and seek a new warrant in connection with the missing women's investigation.
In cross-examining Kingsbury, Brooks quizzed her about the pace of the first days of the search at Pickton's Port Coquitlam property.
He pointed out that the first warrant police had to search was only good for three days so they must have been in a rush and at times searching in the dark.
The warrant was eventually extended for two weeks.
Kingsbury also told the jury that among the many items found were papers and prescriptions belonging to Dinah Taylor.
She said she was told by a colleague to keep an eye out for Taylor's belongings.
Earlier in the trial jurors heard Taylor was once arrested in connection with the murders of missing women but was never charged.
Pickton is currently on trial for murdering six women from Vancouver.
Thursday marked the end of the first four weeks of his trial.
The defence's cross-examination of Kingsbury was expected to continue on Monday.
Kingsbury testified Thursday that in looking for a suspect in the disappearances of women like Abotsway and Joesbury, police focused on assaults against sex trade workers and hitchhikers, eventually sorting through 3,000 sexual assault files from Vancouver alone.
Among the at least 500 people considered of interest to police in their investigation was the Green River killer in the U.S.
Gary Ridgeway was eventually convicted of murdering more than three dozen prostitutes in Washington state.
They also examined unidentified human remains and old attempted murders to see if there was DNA they could match and they followed up on thousands of tips.
They also developed theories.
"There was an investigative theory that the person who was responsible or could be responsible for the missing women of the Downtown Eastside could be one or more persons," Kingsbury said.
"Or it could be, say, one or more serial killers, so the theory was that this person or persons may have entered the police universe at one point in time."
Kingsbury said the investigation was hampered by conflicts bewteen old and new DNA technology and the reluctance of data banks to house missing people's DNA.
As the volume of information grew, police switched the database they used to the one designed for the Swiss Air disaster in Nova Scotia.
The Evidence and Report database, as it was called, held every single scrap of information generated in the case.
Eventually, Kingsbury testified, it would come to list 12,700 items on the police's investigative to-do list and over 100,000 actions that had been taken in connection with those items.
"If one was to print the whole Evenhanded database it would be over two million pages," Kingsbury said.
