In the summer of 2010, twenty-year-old Amber Tuccaro, a member of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, was living in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, along with her mother and her fourteen-month-old son Jacob.
On August 17th, Amber and her son, along with a female friend, flew to Edmonton for a vacation, staying in a hotel in the small hamlet of Nisku. At around eight p.m. on the following day, Amber was apparently spotted getting a ride to Edmonton with an unidentified man. While she was in the car, she received a phone call in which a male voice could be heard speaking in the background, reassuring Amber that they were taking a back road east toward Edmonton. Amber herself can also be heard to say, “You’d better not be taking me anywhere I don’t want to go.”
Sadly, however, this seems to have been exactly the man’s intention; police later speculated that the individual had actually been driving south into a rural area of Leduc County. Amber subsequently disappeared. In September of 2012, her remains were discovered by horseback riders in a field.
Amber’s family has been particularly critical of the RCMP regarding the crime, as police reportedly failed to raise any alarms at the time of her disappearance, and even allegedly told the family that she was probably out “partying.” Authorities didn’t even begin investigating the missing persons case until a month after Amber had vanished and didn’t start questioning potential witnesses until three months after that. According to most sources, they didn’t even bother to interview the friend who Amber had been vacationing with. Amber was even removed from the missing persons database for a time after a few unconfirmed sightings of her. Furthermore, Amber’s suitcase, which had been left behind at the Nisku hotel, was accidentally destroyed in the course of recovering it from the room.
Although several women evidently identified the man who Amber was last seen with, the RCMP claim the man they named is not a suspect.
Though the Deputy Commissioner later apologized to the family for the poor investigation of the crime, the family understandably did not accept his apology. The disappearance and murder of Amber Tuccaro remains another in the long line of unsolved slayings involving indigenous women in Canada.
Crime Immemorial 