If they'd had PowerCase – an early warning system that took seven years and $31.7 million to develop – Ontario investigators say they might have nailed the notorious Paul Bernardo well enough before he could have killed three young women.
PowerCase now links every Ontario police force by computer network, sending e-mail alerts to each force, according to the Toronto Star. "No other policing body in the world has anything like it," said Detective Superintendent Bill Van Allen of the Ontario Provincial Police, who heads the project, to the newspaper. "Had this system been in place in 1987, Paul Bernardo would have been apprehended at an earlier stage and three young women would still be alive today."
Police in Hamilton and Halton Region are putting Van Allen's words to a pretty severe test: hunting a man they think has been stalking sex-trade workers in Hamilton and Burlington over two years, the Star said. They turned to PowerCase, and they have at least one similarity between this man and the Bernardo case, according to the newspaper: this man smokes the same brand of cigarettes (du Maurier) as Bernardo.
At least one woman has been killed, two others have disappeared, and five others have been attacked in the two years, the Star said. PowerCase is designed among other things for spotting those who have been stopped and questioned previously for stalking, the paper said.
