A newly released police video from 2000 shows notorious serial killer Robert Pickton telling officers about a prostitute he almost stabbed to death, two years before he was caught for the suspected murders of dozens of women.

The video, never seen by the jury in the Pickton trial, was shown at the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry in Vancouver this week.

The provincial inquiry is probing why investigators did not arrest Pickton before February 2002, after dozens of women had gone missing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and has heard that police received tips about him as early as 1998.

Pickton was convicted of killing six women, but was charged in the deaths of another 20 and once boasted he had murdered 49.

In the video, police question Pickton, accompanied by a female friend, about a prostitute he fought with in 1997 after bringing her back to his home for sex. The fight was so violent that both Pickton and the woman ended up in hospital.

Pickton is shown claiming the woman attacked him with a knife first, before he was forced to defend himself.

"She attacked me," Pickton says. "She should have been charged."

He says the woman had injected heroin into her arm in his bathroom before lunging at him with a six-inch knife, stabbing him through his jaw and knocking out some teeth.

"It was a terrifying event for me. I was down for almost two months in hospital," Pickton says. "I couldn't work, I couldn't do anything. My back still bothers me."

But the woman, known only as Witness 97 or Anderson during the Pickton trial, gave a very different account.

The inquiry heard that Pickton attacked Anderson after she had been handcuffed on one hand. She managed to fight him off before seizing a chance to escape his farm, running naked to a nearby road where she flagged down a passing car.

Anderson nearly died from the fight -- her heart stopped but emergency workers managed to revive her.

Jurors in the Pickton trial never heard the woman's story because it was under a ban. Pickton was charged with attempted murder after the fight, but the charges were dropped because Anderson was viewed as a drug addict and unreliable.

In the 2000 police interview, Pickton tells police that, after the fight with Anderson, he never brought another prostitute back to his home.

Police eventually found the remains of 33 women on his property, during one of the largest investigations in Canadian history.

With files from The Canadian Press