A mother from Mikisew Cree First Nation was never seen alive again after a car ride with a mysterious man. For 14 years, loved ones have not stopped asking how she died and what clues lie in a recording of that night. A Globe podcast investigates.
Globe and Mail: “Where are we by?”
The recording, as we hear it, begins with Amber speaking.
Then a man’s voice: “We’re just heading south of, uh, Beaumont – or north of Beaumont.”
In the recording, Amber Tuccaro is 20 years old, a young mother from Mikisew Cree First Nation who’d travelled from northern Alberta to Edmonton for a couple of days with her baby and a friend. The women had checked into a modest motel in Nisku, an industrial area outside the city, near the airport.
Early on the evening of Aug. 18, 2010, Amber left the motel alone, looking for a ride into Edmonton. She was never seen alive again.
“You better not take – You better not be taking me anywhere I don’t want to go. I want to go into the city.”
Since it was released to the public, this tape has haunted those who hear it.
It’s a rare and stunning piece of evidence in a homicide investigation: a recording of what appear to be the final moments of a young woman’s life, and the voice of the man who may be her killer.
More than a dozen years later, no one has ever been charged in Amber’s homicide – or in the slayings of the four other women whose remains were found near hers in a rural area outside Edmonton.
But Amber’s family won’t stop fighting for justice.
Missing
Vivian (Tootsie) Tuccaro knew right away something was wrong. She and her daughter had been texting each other all day, and suddenly, there was only silence. Tootsie kept calling and texting but got no response. Her daughter’s new friend, Evangeline MacLean, wasn’t any help. She just said Amber had taken off overnight, and told Amber’s mother to pick up the baby from the motel in Nisku. Before anyone could get there, she left Amber’s suitcase at the front desk, dropped the baby off with authorities, and left the city.
Tootsie reported her daughter missing to the RCMP two days later, on Aug. 20, 2010.But despite how unusual it was for Amber to leave her baby, and to stop texting her family and friends and posting on Facebook, investigators at the local RCMP detachment seemed unconcerned. Tootsie remembers officers telling her that Amber was “probably out partying,” and would come back on her own.
But Tootsie pushed the police.
“I just kept phoning, like 10 times a day. They never called. So I kept calling. Fill up the voicemail,” she said, in an interview at her home in Fort Chipewyan, Alta.“Because that’s my baby, right? And I wasn’t going to give up. It didn’t matter what or who I had to deal with.”
That September, Amber was removed from the missing person’s list, after a man who didn’t know her wrongly reported seeing her at a gas station. It took weeks for Tootsie to get her back on the list.
“When someone you love goes missing, it’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced before…,” Tootsie wrote on Facebook. “Your whole life becomes a ‘Nightmare.’ ‘Amber’ is the first and last thing on my mind… I’m not giving up ‘Hope’that my daughter will call or come home!! Please, dear God watch over my baby girl where ever she is and bring her back to her family!”
Amber’s family believed from the start that her disappearance was not being taken seriously by the RCMP, and their suspicions would eventually be confirmed by an investigation and report by theCivilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP years later.
The failures were significant enough that the RCMP would issue a rare public apology to Amber’s family in 2019, during which then-deputy commissioner Curtis Zablocki said the early missing person’s investigation was “not our best work” and out of line with the RCMP’s “established practices, procedures and guidelines.”
“I fully acknowledge that in the early days of our investigation into Amber’s disappearance, that it required a better sense of urgency and care …,” he said. “At the beginning of this investigation, the RCMP was not the police service we strive to be.”
Among the failings were that police didn’t immediately interview Evangeline MacLean, the last known person to see Amber alive, who, the report says, soon turned hostile and “even belligerent” with police.
(RCMP say she has since been interviewed and cleared of any involvement in Amber’s homicide. She repeatedly declined to speak with The Globe and Mail.)
RCMP also took months to pick up Amber’s suitcase from the motel, and when they did, they stored it improperly, and the bag and all its contents were mistakenly destroyed.
Amber’s family was not alone in questioning how police handled her case. In the years before Amber disappeared, police forces around the country had been grappling with an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, whose disappearances had, in many cases, been overlooked, ignored or not taken seriously by investigators, the public and media.
When serial killer Robert Pickton was arrested in 2002, he boasted he’d killed 49 women before he was caught. Many of them were Indigenous.
Part of the reckoning with the Pickton case was that if a serial killer had gone unnoticed in B.C. for so long, it could be happening in other places, too. Like Edmonton.
In 2003, the RCMP formed a task force called Project KARE to look into unsolved homicides around Alberta’s capital, and began by examining more than 70 cases of missing and murdered women, some of whom were found in clusters in rural areas outside the city.
“We weren’t oblivious that there were some missteps or investigative areas that weren’t addressed in the Pickton investigation, and even prior to that, the sheer amount of unsolved cases was a concern,” says Superintendent John Respet, a former RCMP officer who led Project KARE, and now works with the Grande Prairie Police Service.
He says an analysis of the cases around Edmonton in the 1990s and early 2000s led RCMP to believe there was a serial killer – or, more likely, multiple serial killers – preying on women in the area. Most of the victims were Indigenous, and many were vulnerable, or what was at that time described as “high risk.”
Though Amber was not initially deemed to be “high risk,” Project KARE eventually did take over her case from the local RCMP detachment. But by that time, she’d been gone for a year, and with the early failings in the police response to her case, a valuable period of investigation had been lost. Any surveillance or CCTV footage had long been taped over, memories faded, potential witnesses – or suspects – gone or harder to locate.
Then investigators found the recording.
It was a call between Amber and her biological brother, Darren Bulldog, who she’d been reconnecting with at the time. It had been recorded automatically because he phoned her from jail. The whole call was 14 minutes, 52 seconds long.
During the call, Amber was in a vehicle with an unknown man, and he appeared to be taking her somewhere she didn’t want to go. It was recorded the night she disappeared and ended with the call being disconnected.
“You know, I’ve got that voice ingrained in my memory,” Supt. Respet says. “When I think back to hearing it initially, and hearing it multiple times afterwards … That’ll be something that’ll never leave me.”
Police played the entire phone call for Amber’s family. And then months later, in the summer of 2012, around the second anniversary of Amber’s disappearance, they released excerpts of it to the public.
Releasing the recording was breaking new ground for a police agency that typically shares very little about criminal cases before they go to court. In this case, it seemed to be worth an exception: If investigators could find the man behind the voice, they would have a suspect in Amber’s homicide – or at least crucial new information about the night she disappeared.
“We are doing this with careful thought and with purpose,” RCMP spokesman Shawn Lemay said, at the time the recording was released. “Clearly our collective goal is to find Amber, and we will stop at nothing to locate her.”
It was a bold move that seemed like it could have a profound impact on the case, perhaps even make up for the flaws in the early investigation. All police needed was someone who recognized the voice.
“It’s important that as many people listen to this audio as possible, and if they recognize the voice of this individual, that they call investigators with that information,” said Constable Ray Shelton, a Project KARE officer who was the lead investigator in Amber’s case at the time.
He said Amber left the motel in the early evening to find a ride, and had gotten into the vehicle of an unknown man between 7:30 and 8 p.m.She got the call when she was already in the vehicle, passing along what the driver told her about where they were to her brother on the phone.
The RCMP had put together one minute of clipsfrom the longer call. In these excerpts, Amber’s voice slides from curious to irritated, to tough, defiant. Afraid.
Tootsie was at the press conference, and left the room sobbing as the recording was played aloud for reporters.
Amber: Where are we by?
Unknown man: We’re just heading south of, uh, Beaumont – or north of Beaumont.
Amber: We’re heading north of Beaumont. Yo, where are we going?
Unknown man: Just –
Amber: No, this is a –
Unknown man: Backroad –
Amber: Are you fucking kidding me?
Unknown man: No, I’m not kidding you.
Amber: You better not take – You better not be taking me anywhere I don’t want to go. I want to go into the city. Yo, we’re not going into the city are we?
Unknown man: We are! We’re going –
Amber: No, we’re not.
Unknown man: Yes, we –
Amber: Then where the fuck are these roads going to?
Unknown man: To 50th Street.
Amber: 50th Street. Are you sure?
Unknown man: Absolutely.
Amber: Yo, where are we going?
Unknown man: 50th Street.
Amber: 50th Street?
Unknown man: 50th Street.
Amber: East, right?
Unknown man: East.
Amber: Dirt road or gravel?
Unknown man: Gravel. [Garbled, phone disconnects]
Three days after RCMP released the tape, some young people riding horses discovered a skull in a wooded area along a farmer’s field outside the city. Amber’s remains had been found.
Fort Chipewyan is a hamlet of about 800 people, mostly First Nations and Métis, in Treaty 8 territory. Amber’s relatives here have waited 14 years for progress in the murder investigation.
The voice
The recording changed everything. Before then, Amber’s case had received almost no media coverage or attention from the public, and there had been little support to find her outside the efforts of her family. But the tape put Amber’s story out there in an unforgettable way. It also offered the prospect that, despite the early problems with the investigation and the time that had passed, Amber’s homicide could be solved.
“As hard as it is to listen to, I am asking that you ‘PLEASE SHARE THIS TO YOUR FRIENDS’ so that they can also ‘SHARE’ it,” Tootsie pleaded on social media. “There ‘HAS TO BE SOMEONE OUT THERE THAT RECOGNIZES THE VOICE!!!’”
From only a handful of tips, police soon had hundreds, and more coming in every week. There was something distinctive about the way the man said “50th Street,” “Beaumont.” “Absolutely.” It reminded people of men they knew, of a relative, a man who had hurt them, a stranger they’d encountered who sounded just like the voice on the recording.
“For me, it’s an absolutely haunting recording. It’s a very emotional recording,” says Staff Sergeant Travis McKenzie, who heads the RCMP’s Historical Homicide and Missing Person’sunits in Alberta, and is one of the only people to have ever heard the full 15-minute call.
The flood of interest and attention brought countless dead ends and false tips, some malicious, others from people who truly believed they recognized the voice but were wrong. One person called into a radio show claiming he was the man in the vehicle with Amber. In one of the highest-profile instances, a man in the United States made videos on social media accusing his father of being the killer.
Each tip had to be considered and investigated. From having little attention at the beginning, Amber’s case would receive 50,000 hours of police work, one of the largest efforts focused on one victim that Staff Sgt. McKenzie says he’s ever seen.
He says investigators spoke to “dozens and dozens and dozens” of people in person. If they hit key criteria to be a viable suspect – like having been in Alberta at the time – investigators would interview them and take a sample of their voice for analysis.
Hundreds of samples were taken, and more than 30 were sent to forensic audio specialists in Britain.
It was a tantalizing scenario for investigators. As Staff Sgt. McKenzie puts it: “They get that one phone call who says, ‘I know this voice. Here’s who it is.’ They go talk to that person. They send his voice for analysis, and they have that company say, ‘That is a direct match.’”
Catching Amber’s killer was important enough. But Amber’s remains were in close proximity to the places where four other women’s remains were discovered. Edna Bernard, Katie Ballantyne, Corrie Ottenbreit and Delores Brower disappeared from Edmonton between 2002 and 2004. Two of the women, Edna and Katie, were found before Amber. The others, Corrie and Delores, were found after. Police have long wondered whether the cases are connected, and whether the women are victims of the same killer.
All but one of the women were Indigenous, and with the exception of Amber, they all went missing from the same area of Edmonton. The women were found within eight kilometres of each other in the same rural area south of the city. No one has been charged in any of their deaths.
Identifying the voice on the tape could mean finding a serial killer. Solving five homicides, maybe more.
To persevere
For Amber’s family, the voice has been a source of both pain and hope. For years, they clung to the idea that if the right person heard and recognized the voice and contacted the police, Amber’s killer would be identified.
Instead, Amber’s family was called into another meeting with investigators.
“Here, 10 years later, we had a meeting and they said it’s useless,” says Amber’s eldest brother, Paul Tuccaro. “They can’t do a comparison because they said it all depends on the way they’re feeling, the way their blood pressure is … well why would you even try to go down that road then?”
“All this time, it wasn’t worth nothing,” Tootsie says. “It has no value, they say. I think that’s the biggest part of Amber’s case is the recording, the voice. But according to the police, it’s not, now. It’s so hard to understand, on top of everything else that our family feels and has to go through.”
Staff Sgt. McKenzie says instead of being the “forensics slam dunk” police were hoping for, investigators now know the quality of the recording and the duration of the man’s voice samples aren’t enough to identify a suspect.
“They put a lot of work time and effort in going after all these voice tip leads, hoping that they’d be able to take that like a sample of that person’s voice and have an expert say ‘Yes, that’s him. You’ve got your guy,’” he says. “It turns out that they’ve just never been able to do that.”
But Staff Sgt. McKenzie disagrees that the recording is of no value. He said he still believes the voice is “a phenomenal piece of evidence,” that could still play a role in the case one day, whether because of new information or advancements in technology. He says police haven’t released any more of the recording, and have restricted it to the smallest number of investigators, in the hope it could still be part of identifying and charging Amber’s killer.
“With that recording, we’ve all had Amber in our house, right? We all know her words, we all know who she is. It’s out there,” he says. “And so is he. He knows what happened. He knows what was said and what wasn’t said. And he knows that we’re looking for him.”
Fourteen years after Amber disappeared, her case remains an open investigation with the RCMP, one of 86 active cases in the Historical Homicide Unit in Alberta. Project KARE has been shut down, and most of the homicides of women around Edmonton that sparked its creation have still never been solved. Some of the RCMP’s protocols around missing people have changed because of Amber’s case.
“When you lose somebody that you love, it seems like it didn’t happen 14 years or 20 years. It just seems like yesterday. It still hurts,” says Amber’s sister-in-law, Judy-Ann Cardinal. “When you’re that close to someone, it doesn’t go away. It’s always there with you. You just try to do the best you can.”
Amber’s son Jacob, who was a baby when she disappeared, is a teenager now. And Tootsie is still hanging on to the hope that, one day, there will be justice.
“I just hope he’s caught. That’s my thing, that he’s caught, because for all we know, he is still out there murdering young girls or women,” Tootsie says. “The biggest thing is him being caught and taken off the streets.”
Last winter, Tootsie’s sons started to notice she wasn’t herself, and she was rushed out of Fort Chipewyan for emergency medical care. Doctors found cancer in her brain and lungs, and started her on an intensive course of treatment in Edmonton.
“I always said I hope I don’t die before Amber’s killer’s caught,” she says. “Then I go and get cancer. But I’m going to beat that, too. Because I’m not a quitter.”
In Her Defence: 50th Street is available Sept. 30 wherever you get your podcasts.
Jana G. Pruden
Photography and video by Amber Bracken The Globe and Mail Fort Chipewyan, Alta.
Behind the investigation
Amber Tuccaro’s homicide is one of a long list of cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Edmonton and across the country. And another in which police failures significantly hindered their ability to find her killer. Her murder remains unsolved, despite the release of a bombshell piece of evidence 12 years ago: an audio recording believed to include the voice of the person who killed her.
The Globe and Mail spent seven months investigating Ms. Tuccaro’s murder for a six-part narrative podcast series, In Her Defence: 50th Street. To tell this story, reporter Jana Pruden, audio producer Kasia Mychajlowycz and photojournalist Amber Bracken travelled to the isolated Alberta community of Fort Chipewyan, 600 kilometres northeast of Edmonton and only accessible in the winter by air or ice road.
In the ensuing months, they followed Amber’s journey from her home community in Fort Chipewyan to the rural area outside Edmonton where her remains were found. They interviewed dozens of people as they explored the early failures of the police investigation, the men who originally emerged as possible suspects and the large number of unsolved murders of women around Edmonton. They received exclusive interviews with police investigators and, through Amber’s family, viewed documents never released publicly about Amber’s case.
The Globe’s reporting on this story was guided by elements of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action, the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and Indigenous journalists and scholars, including Duncan McCue’s book Decolonizing Journalism.