VANCOUVER — The sister-in-law of one of Robert Pickton’s victims says a missing-person’s report she filed with Vancouver police sat in a filing drawer for years without officers taking any action on the document.
Lori-Ann Ellis told the public inquiry into the Robert Pickton case Tuesday that she filed the report about Cara Ellis by phone from Calgary, Alta. in 1998, about one month after she returned home from Vancouver where she had spent part of a holiday looking for her missing sister-in-law.
Cara was among the 20 women Pickton was charged with killing before those charges were stayed.
However, Ellis said she never heard back from police and only learned what happened to the report in the mid-summer of 2004, when members of the Missing Women Task Force visited her in Calgary — one day before a family memorial to Cara Ellis.
Ellis said an RCMP member who was also a member of the task force told her he had found the report in a filing drawer and it had never been “actioned.”
“I almost dropped the coffee pot,” she said. “All this time that we’d been sitting here waiting to hear, it had sat in a damn drawer in the police station and no one had even taken the time to do it.”
“They’re getting their paycheque to do it but they’re not doing it, and that really pissed me off.”
Ellis said she thinks the incident is shameful, and she said the people of Vancouver should be making the police accountable for taking paycheques while not doing their jobs.