A former senior police officer is rejecting allegations at the Robert Pickton inquiry that he wasted time and resources by clinging to a theory that Downtown Eastside sex workers weren't actually missing.
Current and former officers with the Vancouver police have said former inspector Fred Biddlecombe rejected the serial killer theory in the late 1990s and as a result, he didn't give the investigation the attention it needed.
Instead, Biddlecombe disbanded a working group that was considering ways to investigate the case, scrapped a news release warning that a serial killer may be on the loose, and tasked officers with locating the women.
Biddlecombe rejects the suggestion that he stuck to his pet theory, insisting that assigning officers to look for the women, including spending months poring through indigent burial records, was an avenue that needed to be explored
He says the force needed to determine whether the women had simply died of drug overdoses or diseases such as AIDS.
Biddlecombe says medical problems have caused him to suffer sporadic memory loss, leaving him unable to recall key details about the Vancouver police force's investigation into reports of missing sex workers.
