Her body was found in a Whitehorse dump 55 years ago. The family still wants answers
CBC
The last time Tootsie Jimmy-Charlie was seen alive, as far as anybody knows, was on March 17, 1967, when she was released from the Whitehorse jail.
Nine weeks later, her body was found by a trio of people who had gone to the Porter Creek dump for some rifle practice. According to a coroner's report, Jimmy-Charlie's body was found lying face up under some deadfall near the back of the dump. There were broken branches nearby. The body was partially decomposed.
It's not known how long Jimmy-Charlie had been dead.
A coroner's inquest a few weeks later ruled that the 26-year-old woman had died by "misadventure," with alcohol and exposure playing a prominent role.
"There was no sign of a struggle at the scene and two broken branches indicated that the body could have rolled into the spot in which it was found," reads the inquest report, recounting testimony from one of the RCMP's investigating officers.
The coroner's report was filed and for police, the case was essentially closed.
But for Jimmy-Charlie's family, nothing's been closed. They believe there's more to learn about what happened 55 years ago to their mother, sister and aunt. They feel the inquest conclusions just don't add up, and the report is deeply flawed — incomplete, and racist.
The report, "makes it sound like she just walked there herself and died on a pile of garbage. No one does that. No one," wrote Jimmy-Charlie's sister Ann Maje Raider, in a statement last week.
"Several statements [in the report] ... demonstrate negligence in the investigation, as well as abject prejudice towards Indigenous people."
Questions and suspicions have haunted the family for decades, Maje Raider says.
"We knew definitely, you know, there was something more than what they had put in the autopsy report," she told CBC News.
"We felt that there was more than that. We still feel that she was murdered."
Jimmy-Charlie's family does not have any definitive new information to back up their suspicions. But they have something else, as of last week — an admission by the RCMP that police had dropped the ball in the original investigation.
"It was our job to complete a thorough investigation. And that was not done," Yukon RCMP Chief Supt. Scott Sheppard admitted to a gathering of family members in Whitehorse last week.
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