VANCOUVER - A longtime sex worker believes serial killer Robert Pickton violently raped her in the early 1990s, but she told the inquiry into Vancouver's missing women that police never showed up to investigate.
Susan Davis, a self-admitted sex worker who is an outspoken advocate for the city's prostitutes, testified she can't be certain it was Pickton who picked her up several blocks from the Downtown Eastside in 1990 or 1991 and raped her at knifepoint.
But Davis said she believes that's what happened.
"When he was arrested, I saw his picture and I thought, 'That's the guy,' and I thought to myself, 'Your mind is playing tricks on you, that's not possible,"' Davis said during her testimony at the public inquiry into the Pickton investigation.
"So I asked a veteran sex worker in the Downtown Eastside -- she asked me to describe the vehicle, which I did, and she told me that she thought it was indeed him. That's the truth that I live with, even though I can't prove it."
Davis was attacked more than a decade before Pickton was arrested and charged with killing women from the Downtown Eastside.
She told the inquiry on Monday she made three attempts to report the assault to police.
Davis testified that she was standing with another sex worker on a street just south of the Downtown Eastside on a snowy winter day when a blue Chevrolet drove up. The other women declined to get in, but Davis said she needed the money and took the client.
She said the man drove her to a nearby parking lot, but after a dispute over money, she was attacked. The man punched Davis in the face and then held her down at knifepoint and raped her, she said.
After it was over, she said she jumped out of the car.
Davis said she called the Vancouver Police Department's non-emergency line and was told to call 911, which she did. She waited for an hour, but no one from the force showed up. She said it was cold and she still needed money to pay for a room for the night, so she took another client and left the area.
During the next three weeks, Davis said she tried two more times to contact police, first by phone and then in person. She never connected with an investigator, despite having the licence plate number of the man she alleged attacked her, she said.
The hearings are examining why Vancouver police and the RCMP failed to catch Pickton as he killed sex workers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The inquiry has already heard about what appears to be several missed opportunities to connect him to attacks and murders against sex workers the Downtown Eastside.
The most striking example is an alleged attack on a sex worker in 1997, in which Pickton was charged with attempted murder but never prosecuted. More than a dozen women disappeared from the Downtown Eastside in the years that followed.
Davis's allegations, if true, would mean Pickton could have come to investigators' attention even sooner if police had taken her report more seriously.
The inquiry has already heard complaints that Vancouver police were quick to dismiss or even mock sex workers who came forward to report assaults or rapes.
"It haunted me because he had used a knife, he was violent and it was my first really serious assault," said Davis.
"And I guess being the middle-upper-class daughter, I believed I would get equal treatment. And it haunted me that I couldn't."
Under cross-examination from a Vancouver police lawyer, Davis readily acknowledged she did not have any evidence about the assault or her interactions with the force.
"I have no proof of that, and I also realized myself that my eyes could be playing tricks on me, and you hear this all the time that people see a picture and they want it to be the guy that raped them because they want the rape to be over," said Davis.
"So I am totally aware that I might be making this up in my mind, but it is the reality that I live with."
Vancouver police lawyer Tim Dickson asked Davis to contact him if she can recall any other details, suggesting the force would try to dig up any records of its own.
Davis first entered sex work in Nova Scotia in the mid-1980s, when she answered a wanted ad at an escort agency. She moved to Vancouver in 1990, and soon found herself working as a street prostitute in the Downtown Eastside, taking on risky clients for small amounts of money to feed her drug addictions.
Davis is still a sex worker, though she no longer works on the streets. She has spent years as an advocate for prostitutes.
Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no parole for at least 25 years. The remains or DNA of 33 women were found on his farm, though Pickton claimed he killed 49.
The public inquiry began in early October and is expected to continue for months as it hears from dozens of witnesses, including academic experts, families of Pickton's victims, sex workers, police officers and prosecutors.
Commissioner Wally Oppal had asked for an extension that would have seen his final report due at the end of next year, but the British Columbia government wants his report complete by June 30.
Oppal is also conducting a less-formal set of hearings known as a study commission to examine broader issues surrounding missing women, including the so-called Highway of Tears in northern B.C.
