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NATIVE WOMEN MISSING AND/OR MURDERED IN CANADA
CASES IN NOVA SCOTIA
MISSING
Terrilynne Poulette
TERRILYNNE POULETTE, aged 17, from the Eskasoni First Nation , NS,
disappeared in late February, 2005, after calling her family to say she was at a
friend's place.
She then set off for home and hasn't been seen since.
Terrilynne is described as shy and tomboyish, enjoys bike-riding,
hanging out with friends and visiting pals in neighbouring
native communities.
But she would always tell her brother or sisters where she
was heading, says Natalie Doucette, her aunt.
"She had a real close bond with her siblings."
Extensive searches by community members and police in the rocky
, wooded terrain around Eskasoni have turned up no traces.
Police are concerned Terrilynne, whose 18th birthday recently passed,
may be a victim of foul play.
She is five-foot-five and 129 pounds,
with short black hair. When last seen Terrilynne was wearing a navy
blue jacket with a narrow red-and-white stripe running across the chest
area, a grey hoodie, blue jeans, a dark-coloured ball cap with a knit
cap overtop, and white sneakers.
The teenager delighted in looking after her little niece.
Terrilynne's older sister gave birth to a second girl in July,
naming the child after her missing sibling.
Anyone with any information about Terrilynne can contact
the Eskasoni RCMP Detachment at (902) 379-2822 or
Nova Scotia Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.
Source: The Halifax Herald, Sunday, Sept. 18, 2005
MURDERED
Cheryl Ann Johnson
CHERYL ANN JOHNSON
Cheryl Ann's partially nude body was found by a passer-by in shallow water off
Sydney's popular boardwalk at about 8 a.m. Sunday, May3, 2001 just hours after
she and a male patron got into an argument and shoving match at Smooth Herman's
in Sydney, Nova Scotia. The victim's grandmother, told this newspaper earlier
this week that if it had been a young white university student found dead -
like Cheryl, with her bra pushed up over her breasts and wearing only her
panties - the investigation wouldn't have ended after one day. But it did!
"When you're an Indian, they don't care," she said. Cheryl was a University
College of Cape Breton arts student. will be buried this morning. Her remains
were buried on Saturday, May 12, 2001. "They're devastated," a family friend
said of her relatives Friday.
Earlier this week, the associate chief said Ms. Johnson's injuries were
consistent with drowning and no foul play was suspected. An autopsy determined
death by drowning. "You think if we didn't believe if there was one suspicion
of foul play we wouldn't be working on it?" he told this newspaper at the time.
"It doesn't matter who it is." Associate Chief Wilson said the woman may have
removed her own clothes or tidal action may have done it.
Kevin Saccary, chairman of the regional police commission, said it hasn't
received any formal complaints regarding the investigation. He said any
complaints should be directed to the commission or Police Chief Edgar MacLeod.
UNSOLVED
MURDERED
ANNA MAE PICTOU AQUASH
ANNA MAE AQUASH
aged 24. Anna, a native of Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, had become a
well-known Indian activist when she was killed execution-style in Feb. 1975.
Her family says the man who pulled the trigger is living in Whitehorse, but no
one has ever been charged. Aquash was shot in the back of the head in the
American Midwest
Her daughter Denise made a tearful plea for Canadian pressure to finally
resolve the case.
Aquash had helped AIM, the American Indian Movement, in the standoff at
Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973. Two years later, she was at the nearby
Pine Ridge Reservation when two FBI agents were killed in a fight with members
of AIM. Aquash was arrested on weapons charges, but later released by a judge.
Several months later her body was found in the Dakota Badlands.
Some people said the FBI wanted her dead, but her family says she was actually kidnapped, raped and killed by members of the Indian movement because she knew too much about who killed the FBI agents. Her cousin, Robert Pictou-Branscombe, has conducted his own investigation and he has publicly named three people as the killers -- a man and woman in the United States and the man who pulled the trigger, now in Whitehorse. Now Pictou-Branscombe wants the Canadian government to use its influence to finally wrap the case up. "We want it resolved. We want prosecution," he said. br>
The RCMP say the man in Whitehorse is not under investigation. Meanwhile, the
American detective who took over the case this year says he, too, is close to
laying charges"
On the afternoon of February 24, 1976 Rodger Amiotte, a mixed blood rancher
whose land was in the northeast corner of the Pine Ridge Indian
Reservation...found the body of a woman in a snow-covered ditch one hundred
feet from the country road. She was wrapped in a blanket. The woman wore a
maroon windbreaker, jeans, and blue canvas shoes. She had long fingernails. Her
hands were adorned with fancy turquoise jewelry, including rings and a large
bracelet.
The body was taken to the Pine Ridge hospital, where Dr. W.O. Brown performed
an autopsy in the presence of FBI agents. The doctor said the unidentified
woman died of exposure. She had frozen to death. There was no sign of violence.
"
During the autopsy, an FBI agent asked Doctor Brown, "I need her hands. Sever
them at the wrist, would ya, Doc?" Over the next days, the government agents
approached mortuary after mortuary, asking to have the handless body buried.
According to one undertaker, the FBI agents wanted the woman buried under a
fictitious name. 'Can't do it,' he said. 'You guys ought to know. That's
illegal.'
On March 3, the body was buried, nameless in the Holy Rosary Mission on the
[Pine Ridge] reservation. That same day, the FBI notified its Rapid City office
that the dead woman was Anna Mae Aquash." The Wounded Knee Legal
Defense/Offense Committee (WKLDOC) demanded a an exhumation and a second
autopsy. However, before this could take place, "The FBI filed its own request
for exhumation and reautopsy. The reasons its affidavit gave were that Anna Mae
might have been killed in a hit-an-run accident or that she might have been
murdered by AIM as a suspected informer...there was no explanation as to how a
person who might have been a victim of a hit-and-run accident could have been
thrown one hundred feet from the highway, display no sign of contact with a
vehicle, and end up in a ditch, neatly wrapped in a blanket." The autopsy was
scheduled for March 11, 1976.
Anna Mae's family, through WKLDOC attorney Ellison hired Garry Peterson, an
independent pathologist from St. Paul Hospital in Minnesota to observe. When he
arrived, Dr. Peterson was the only Doctor there. The FBI had not bothered to
have a pathologist at the autopsy it had requested. Peterson, who brought only
the minimal equipment needed to observe, had to perform the procedure. It was
not terribly complicated.
An obvious bullet wound, surrounded by an even more obvious 5 cm x 5 cm
discoloration, adorned the rear of Anna Mae's head, exactly where the hospital
staff had seen the thawing body leak the week before. She died of exposure to a
small-caliber bullet fired from a gun placed near the back of her head. She had
been executed.
Loud Hawk - The United States versus
the American Indian Movement
UPDATE
U.S. jury has convicted a former member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the death of an aboriginal Canadian shot 27 years ago in South Dakota.
The federal jury found Arlo Looking Cloud guilty of first-degree murder committed during the kidnapping of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash. Looking Cloud, 50, will be sentenced April 23 and faces a mandatory life prison term.
ANNA MAE'S QUOTES
"You are continuing to control my life with your violent, materialistic needs.
I do realize your need to survive and be a part of this Creation - but you do
not understand mine...I have traveled through this country and I have observed
your undisciplined military servants provoke those whose rights are the same as
yours...
I am not a citizen of the United States or a ward of the Federal Government,
neither am I a ward of the Canadian government. I have a right to continue my
cycle in this Universe undisturbed."
~Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Micmac
UPDATE
Man Held in Decades-old Slaying
of American Indian Activist
[Last Updated 7:24 a.m. By DEBORAH MENDEZ Associated Press, April 3, 2003]
>br?
DENVER (AP) - The slaying of American Indian Movement activist Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash has gone unsolved for nearly 30 years, frustrating local and federal investigators.
But now, with a suspect in custody, they say the pieces may be coming together.
Arlo Looking Cloud, a 49-year-old homeless man, was arrested March 27 in Denver on a warrant issued by federal authorities in South Dakota. Looking Cloud and another man are accused of shooting Pictou-Aquash during a kidnapping in December 1975 near Wanblee, S.D.
Looking Cloud pleaded innocent to first-degree murder on Monday, U.S. Attorney James McMahon said Wednesday in Sioux Falls, S.D. A judge was expected to decide Thursday whether he should be sent to South Dakota to be prosecuted.
Pictou-Aquash's frozen body was found on South Dakota's Pine Ridge reservation in February 1976. The 30-year-old woman, who had been shot in the head, had disappeared from a Denver home several months earlier.
Looking Cloud worked as a security guard at AIM events during the 1970s, said Paul DeMain, editor of the bimonthly newspaper News From Indian Country in Wisconsin who has researched the case extensively.
Police in Denver were familiar with Looking Cloud because he has been cited for several misdemeanors, including trespassing and public drinking, during the years he has lived on the city's streets.
Denver detective Abe Alonzo, who was first assigned to the Pictou-Aquash case nearly 10 years ago, said Looking Cloud was known to loiter on Colfax Avenue, one of the city's main streets.
"It was almost like it was too easy," said Alonzo, who walked up to the suspect on the street before calling uniformed officers to make the arrest.
Looking Cloud, a Lakota Indian, was arrested on a trespassing charge and later seemed surprised to learn that he was wanted in the Pictou-Aquash slaying.
"I don't think he actually thought this was happening," said Alonzo, who last had contact with Looking Cloud in January. He would not elaborate.
According to a rap sheet released by police, Looking Cloud used as many as 23 aliases over the past nine years.
The man named along with Looking Cloud in a March 20 indictment has not been taken into custody. Authorities gave no detail.
Pictou-Aquash was a member of Canada's Mi'kmaq Tribe. She was among Indian militants who occupied the village of Wounded Knee in a 71-day standoff with federal authorities in 1973. There was some speculation she was killed by AIM members because she knew some of them were government spies. Others said Pictou-Aquash was killed because she herself was an informant.
Federal authorities repeatedly have denied any involvement.
Man indicted for 1975 Wounded Knee killing
Last Updated Wed, 03 Dec 2003 7:32:05
VANCOUVER - John Graham, charged with the 1975 murder of an aboriginal activist, was behind bars Tuesday in a Vancouver jail.
John Graham
Earlier this year, Graham was indicted in the U.S. for the murder but he had been at large until his arrest Monday.
The victim, Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, a Mi'kmaq born in Pictou Landing, N.S., was shot in the head and her frozen body was found months later near Wanblee, S. Dakota.
The FBI believe Graham and Arlo Looking Cloud took Pictou-Aquash in a car from Denver, Colorado, to a ravine on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota where they killed her.
It's believed Pictou-Aquash was killed for being a suspected FBI informant inside the American Indian Movement. She was among the Indian militants who occupied the village of Wounded Knee for 71 days in 1973.
Graham, a Yukon aboriginal, admits he was with Pictou-Aquash the last time she was alive, but in a 2000 interview with the CBC's The Fifth Estate, Graham denied any involvement in her murder.
"I wasn't there and I didn't witness it. And that's all I can say about that," he said.
Graham's bail hearing is set for Dec. 17.
The U.S. has 60 days to file an extradition request but in the meantime, Cloud, a Lakota Indian, will go on trial next February charged with first-degree murder.
Written by CBC News Online staff
IMPORTANT INFORMATION!!!!!
American Indian Movement (AIM) Of Colorado
Position On The Arrest Of Arlo Looking Cloud
In The Murder Of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash
!!! WITH SOME VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING THE ARRESTS
Please click on this link to read some important information regarding the FBI' s COINTELPRO.
MURDERED
LAURA LEE CROSS
'A sweet kid with a big heart,' Laura Lee Cross left home at 13 and got sucked
into a violent life of prostitution and drugs. But in the months before her
death a5 33, she tried to turn her life around.
A prostitute and drug addict since her teens, Laura Lee Cross didn't stand a
chance.
But that doesn't explain why the Dartmouth woman's skeletal remains were found
in October in a wooded area off Old Guysborough Road, about 17 kilometres from
Halifax International Airport.
Lower Sackville RCMP used DNA evidence to identify Ms. Cross, last seen in
Halifax on July 13, 2001, when she was 33.
The five-foot-five, 140-pound woman with short reddish-blond hair was a repeat
offender for assault, theft and prostitution-related crimes.
The eldest of two children born out of wedlock, Ms. Cross was raised by her
grandparents from the age of nine months.
"Laura Lee was a sweet kid with a big heart," her aunt, Barbara Doucette, said
Tuesday.
"She would give you the shirt off her back. Maybe that was her problem."
Ms. Doucette and her husband sometimes took care of the young girl.
"Laura Lee always called me Mom," she said.
At age 13, Ms. Cross left her grandparents' home and lived in group homes
before falling into a lifestyle of prostitution and severe drug abuse.
Ms. Cross had a lot of family support while growing up, Ms. Doucette said.
"But she went on a different path and wore out her welcome everywhere she
went." Court documents revealed Ms. Cross worked as a streetwalker in Boston
before returning to the Halifax area about 17 years ago to continue plying her
trade.
She bore four children over the years but was unable to support them and court
documents show three were believed to have been put up for adoption. The
fourth, Nathan, is in his mid-teens and lives with his father in the Preston
area.
Ms. Cross had only a Grade 7 education but completed a hairdressing course and
a food service program at Eastern Shore District High School in Musquodoboit
Harbour. Before that, she attended Gaetz Brook Junior High.
"She wasn't into sports or anything like that," her brother, Douglas Cross, 22,
said from the family home in Ostrea Lake. "I guess you could say she was an
average student. She wasn't overly smart or anything."
In her early teens, she embarked on a destructive lifestyle for 20 years,
starting with marijuana and moving on to crack cocaine and other drugs.
During the last eight years of Ms. Cross's life, she was spending $300 to $350
a day on drugs like Dilaudid and Valium, crack cocaine and alcohol.
In a presentence report prepared for one of her court cases, Ms. Cross told a
probation officer that she had been shot, stabbed and beaten by clients while
she was working as a prostitute. She claimed one of her worst beatings was by
an ex-boyfriend in September 2000.
But in the months before her death, she tried to turn her life around. While
living on social assistance benefits of $670 a month, she tried to upgrade her
education and participated in a number of drug rehabilitation programs.
Ms. Cross had hopes of one day supporting herself as a hairdresser.
Her brother said the family is heartbroken.
Mr. Cross said he'll remember the excursions they shared around the family home
whenever she came to visit.
"Mostly when she came down here, we'd just take off on the four-wheelers or
something like that," he said. "She was an outdoorsy kind of person. She liked
to go clam-digging and whatnot."
Despite her problems, Ms. Cross was a decent, jovial person "who always put a
smile on your face," he said.
"It was just the way she was, just happy-go-lucky sort of thing. Even if you
were in a bad mood, she would put you in a good one."
got into a shouting match in central Halifax on July 12, 2001, with a man she
used drugs with.
The friend, who saw the dispute, told The Herald on Tuesday that he heard the
man use expletives and threaten to kill Ms. Cross.
"You (expletive), I'm going to kill you," the friend heard the man say to Ms.
Cross.
The friend said the dispute was over a drug deal gone bad.
"He told me it was for $200 or $250 for an eight ball. I think about $250," the
friend said.
An eight ball is a large rock of crack cocaine.
Ms. Cross laughed at the man before going into the friend's apartment, where
they spent about 45 minutes chatting.
She had been planning a trip to the Bathurst, N.B., area to meet a male friend.
"She was excited like a little child about the trip," the friend said.
On the night of July 12, the friend said, Ms. Cross left her Dartmouth home and
was at his Charles Street apartment before heading out onto the street to earn
a little money for her trip.
"That was how she made money," he said. "She was a street prostitute."
The last time he saw her was at 8:45 p.m. as she headed out the door. She was
wearing a sweater, denim shorts and sandals.
"I said goodbye to her," he said. "She said she may be back. I said the door is
always open."
It wasn't until weeks later that two Halifax Regional Police officers told him
Ms. Cross was missing. That made him think about the dispute he had seen that
night. He said he hadn't taken the threat seriously but now wondered if he'd
been naive.
"I took it as just hot air," he said.
On Aug. 22, 2001, Halifax Regional Police issued an appeal in the missing
person case.
Police said Ms. Cross contacted her family from her apartment and said she
would be catching the train on the 12th. She didn't make that train and was
planning to catch one the next morning.
A search of her Penhorn Lake apartment revealed her suitcases were packed and
her purse was still there, which the friend said wasn't unusual.
Halifax RCMP aren't calling her death a murder.
"I don't believe that we've determined the cause of death yet," said Sgt. Wayne
Noonan, the RCMP's provincial spokesman.
Ms. Cross's skeletal remains were found off a logging road 17 kilometres up Old
Guysborough Road on Oct. 14.
RCMP broke the news to Ms. Cross's family on Monday morning that the body was
hers but didn't tell them if she'd been murdered.
"We are treating it as suspicious, obviously, just (because of) where the body
was found in a wooded area out in the Dollar Lake area," Sgt. Noonan said. But
family members say they're convinced Ms. Cross was murdered.
"It just doesn't make sense," said her aunt, Barbara Doucette. "People know . .
. and are keeping their mouths shut. Hopefully one of these days they will slip
up and we will find out what happened and who did what.
"Certainly, Laura Lee's death was foul play. I mean, she is not going to go up
into the woods."
Ms. Cross's brother, Douglas Cross, 22, said Tuesday he wants the person who
did it strung up.
"To tell you the truth, I would do it myself," he said. "If you were in my
shoes, wouldn't you?"
Ms. Cross's father said he's heard all sorts of stories and worries that a male
friend of hers was involved in her death.
"If he didn't do it, he knows something about it because he's well-known around
here for stuff like that," Wilfrid Cross said of the man. "He's in and out of
trouble, and trouble follows trouble."
Police say Ms. Cross had stormy relationships with several men, including some
clients. She told a probation officer that she was badly beaten by an
ex-boyfriend in September 2000 and spent two months at Adsum House, a Halifax
women's shelter, and the local YWCA.
"I heard that (he) beat her up and put her in the hospital," her father said.
"I didn't hear it from her, but she was scared to tell me anything like that
because I would have went right after him, and I might be going after him yet."
In a presentence report from April 2001, Ms. Cross told a probation officer
that some of her clients had shot, stabbed and beaten her while she was working
the streets.
"To me, closure will not be until after the person who is responsible for her
death is found," Ms. Doucette said. "I am still just so upset and angry. To me,
the book won't be closed until all the pages are filled.
"She was just a person like everybody else and we have a right to know what
happened to her."
UNSOLVED
MURDERED
Jean Hilda Myra
JEAN HILDA MYRA, of Halifax, NS, a known prostitute, who worked primarily in the south end of the city. Jean was last seen on April 4. 1990 leaving an area tavern shortly before midnight. . She was also a heavy drinker and used drugs. Her body was discovered by the grain elevators in the area of Ports Canada.
UNSOLVED
If you have any information please contact Halifax Police.
MURDERED
Kimber Leanne Lucas
KIMBER LEANNE LUCAS, was last seen in the area of North and Maitland Streets between 1:30 - 3:30 on Noember 23, 1994. Kimber was a known Crack user in the downtown area of Halifax. At the time of her death she was seven months pregnant. Kimber was of Mic Mac heritage.
Her body was discovered behind a building on North Street near Agricola Street on November 23, 1994.
Please notify Halifax Police if you have any information
UNSOLVED
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