One tip lost, opportunities wasted say people familiar with the matter
An inquiry appointed in 2010 to assess police handling of Robert Pickton’s case found that the RCMP lost the first tip it received about the serial killer. The call came in to Vancouver Crime Stoppers on July 27, 1998, the Globe and Mail reports, when a caller said a woman visiting a man living in a trailer on a farm in Port Coquitlam had noticed at least 10 purses, along with female identification and women’s clothing. Though Crime Stoppers passed on the information to an RCMP corporal, it did not reach the detective investigating the disappearances of a number of downtown women in Vancouver until nine days later, when the tipper called again. Pickton was eventually arrested 3 1/2 years later, in February 2002. Separately, Cpl. Catherine Galliford, who recently said publicly she suffered years of sexual harassment from male colleagues as a female RCMP officer in B.C., said she reviewed a 1999 RCMP file on Pickton that she said contained enough information to obtain a search warrant for the killer back then.