A first investigation into what happened during a bloody hammer attack on a sex worker in Maple Ridge five years ago was concluded after police investigated the victim’s record as a prostitute, documents show.

But this year, officers investigating a string of attacks against women – many of them sex workers – found new evidence in the case that resulted in a 12th criminal charge against Curtis Sagmoen, of assault causing bodily harm.

It’s a great step for police to get a charge in the case now, but there are questions about what would have happened to other alleged victims had officers made a charge stick back then, said Angela Marie MacDougall of Battered Women Support Services.

“They bore judgement on the victim and opted not to pursue criminal charges,” MacDougall told CTV News. “If the police had taken the 2013 incident seriously it could have made a difference for all of the other women."

The chilling incident happened before several women went missing in B.C.’s Interior, and before the body of a missing teenage girl was found after a lengthy search by RCMP of Sagmoen’s family farm near Salmon Arm.

CTV News reported last year that neighbours heard a woman yelling and calling for help. Mounties wrote in a report at the time that “there was a male chasing a female southbound on Gilker Hill Road and she was yelling for help. The female yelled. The male hit her with a hammer.”

Mounties tracked down the woman, who didn’t want to give a formal statement, but told them she had “fallen asleep on the couch when she woke to the male beating her with a hammer.”

“Consent search found two hammers in the house, neither in the vicinity or the room they were in and no blood on either,” the officer wrote in the report.

The woman “is a known Surrey prostitute…she has extensive…criminal record…it appears he was ripped off by a known Surrey prostitute,” the report says.

Her occupation is irrelevant to the assault, said MacDougall.

“This is someone who had experienced an assault and they should have pursued that in a way they pursued any assault,” MacDougall said.

In January, Sagmoen was charged with assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm for an incident that allegedly occurred on Aug. 10, 2017; and assault for an incident that allegedly occurred July 1, 2017 in the North Okanagan.

Police at the time said those incidents involved two different victims who were advertising their services online. Sagmoen has not been convicted of any of these crimes and has not been charged with any offence related to the human remains. Sagmoen’s lawyer didn’t return calls.

The charges give hope to family members of missing women in the area police are investigating as part of the case, said John Simpson, the father of Ashley Simpson, who went missing in the area while hitchhiking in 2016. She is one of at least five women who have gone missing in the area since early 2016.

“At least they’re charging,” said Simpson. “They’re going the distance now and maybe there are other offences he can be charged with also.”