Seventeen-year-old Mariella Lennie had a four-month-old baby, and lived with her parents in Tulita, in the Northwest Territories, Canada. But somewhere around the autumn of 1991, she moved to the larger city of Yellowknife to live with her aunt Bert and attend high school. Not long afterward, she left her aunt’s home and moved in with her cousin.
At approximately six p.m. on October 6th, 1991, Mariella was seen leaving the Discovery Inn on foot. This was evidently the last confirmed sighting of her alive.
It took twelve days before she was reported missing, and her aunt only heard about her niece’s disappearance a few months later, through the grapevine. At first, family members believed she had simply taken off, and initially, their instincts seemed to be correct, for there were unconfirmed sightings of her in various cities. Her aunt described Mariella as “outgoing,” but also “naïve” and “too trusting,” and worried that someone may have taken advantage of this in order to do her harm.
The investigation stalled for months, while the family searched diligently, but the case took a tragic turn on May 8th, 1992, when Mariella’s body was found floating in Great Slave Lake. Cryptically, police told relatives that a suspicious death or murder had not been ruled out, but reportedly would not release the cause of death to the public. They also stated that several suspects had been questioned about the crime, but none had been detained.
Significantly, Mariella was only one of several indigenous women who had gone missing or been murdered in the same general area in the same period. In 1990, for instance, both fifteen-year-old Charlene Catholique and twenty-four-year-old Mary Rose Keadjuk vanished in separate incidents, and in 1996, a woman named Dorothy Abel was assaulted so badly in Yellowknife that she fell into a coma from which she never recovered. It has been reported that Indigenous women account for sixteen percent of all female homicide victims in Canada, despite only representing four percent of the total population.
The probable murder of Mariella Lennie remains an open case, and the RCMP is still requesting anyone with information that may help them solve the crime to come forward and bring justice and closure to the Lennie family.
Crime Immemorial 