Nobody really took it seriously except for Kim Rossmo, one of his superior officers and a constable who is regarded as a legend in the downtown east side. Kim Rossmo earned a doctorate while working as a constable (basic uniformed police) and jumped the rank all the way up to Detective-Inspector (somewhere around a sergeant) with his creation of a new profiling system called geographical profiling. His jump in rank and "crazy new theories" didn't make him a popular person among the VPD's brass known as "The Old Boy's Club" and thus his unit was never properly staffed or funded. It didn't help that the number of disappearances slowly started to decrease after '97, which made the idiot bosses think the worst was over.
But despite all that, there was a lot of animosity in the case because of who the victims were. Prostitutes (many of them Native) are an easy target and most of society doesn't care about them so nobody gets in an uproar about them being missing, well except for their family and friends. Even the mayor of Vancouver at the time, Philip Owen, thought that if everyone just ignored the evidence that a serial killer was in their midst, he would just go away.
It's pretty disgraceful.
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