It's Wednesday, August 18th 2010 at approximately 8:00 pm, Amber Tuccaro is a 20 year old Mikisew Cree woman who is getting into an unknown man's car. Amber, her 14 month old son, and a woman known as Evangeline are staying at the Nisku Place Motel in Nisku, Alberta. It's a “budget friendly” motel that is essentially across from Edmonton International Airport with Alberta Highway 2 between them. There is no description of the man nor of his car that has ever been released to the public, but he is the last person who will ever see Amber alive.
Amber is from Fort McMurray, Alberta. At the time it is an oil town. Amber is unemployed and living with her mother. She had known Evangeline for only a few weeks. Very little is known about Evangeline. She's not from Fort McMurray, she's older than Amber and she will go on to be arrested across Canada multiple times though the nature of the charges are not publicly known. For reasons unknown, Evangeline suggested that she, Amber and Amber's son travel to Edmonton for a short vacation and to go shopping. Each ticket would have been at least $700 ($727.30 USD adjusted for inflation and converted). This is a conservative estimate. The tickets had been purchased on short notice, it was summer when airfares peak, and the price of crude oil had turned Fort McMurray into a boom town often compared to Gold Rush era towns like Deadwood. It is flooding with rig pigs and tradesmen. The airport was and still is small and can only service smaller aircraft. Companies often bought up tickets
en masse to transport their employees. It is unknown how Amber could afford her ticket.
The three arrived in Edmonton on the 17th of August, they checked into the Nisku Place Motel, and any further actions are unknown until Amber left her son with Evangeline and accepted a ride from the unknown man the following night. During the ride, Amber receives a 17-minute phone call from one of her brothers. He is incarcerated, so the call was recorded. Two years later, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would release a 59-second clip of the 17-minute recording.
In the clip, Amber asks “where are we by?” and the man tells her that they are just “south of Beaumont”. He then corrects himself and says “north of Beaumont.” Amber persists asking “yo, where are we going?” and the man seems to tell her that they are taking back roads to 50th Street. She responds “are you fucking kidding me?” He says he is not. She follows up with “you better not take, you better not be taking me anywhere I don’t wanna go. I wanna go into the city, okay?” The man insists that they are driving to 50th Street. During the call Amber often seems to be repeating what the man tells her to her brother, and clearly does not believe him. Towards the end of the clip, the audio becomes distorted and the word “gravel” is heard being said by Amber and repeated by the man. The call then ends. Amber’s brother was seemingly unconcerned as he made no attempt to report the call to authorities.
There has been substantial confusion concerning this phone call. Amber likely wanted to go to Whyte Ave as that's where the bars and clubs were and still are. She is not asking to go to 50th Street. As Anthony Henday Drive, which encircles all of Edmonton today, would not be completed until 2023, the most logical way to get there would be to take Highway 2 north until it becomes Gateway Boulevard and then continue north to Whyte Ave. An inferior alternative would be to drive east to 50th Street and then take it north into the city. The driver likely lied to Amber and told her that construction or traffic made this the faster route. Traffic on Gateway got pretty bad at the time and still does. There is a large stretch between Nisku and Beaumont, where you would turn onto 50th Street, that is entirely farms.
Amber does not return to the motel that night. When she fails to return in the morning and does not contact Evangeline, Evangeline calls Amber's mom, Vivian. As Nisku is not part of Edmonton, it does not receive services from the Edmonton Police Service, but rather the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP tell Vivian that Amber is out partying and will eventually return. She persists and the RCMP open a missing persons file. Then then promptly close the file without looking for Amber. Vivian only finds out about this when she tries to follow up. They re-open the file, but they do not interview Evangeline, they did not interview a single person for four months, they wait weeks before retrieving Amber's belongings from the motel, they then throw them in the trash without informing her family, they seemingly don't attempt to track her phone with GPS or cell tower pings. The Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (CRCC) would later conclude that the investigation was “"deficient in that various members were either not properly trained or did not adhere to their training and that various members did not comply with procedures and guidelines."
It’s Saturday, September 1st 2012, a group of horseback riders are in a field in a rural part of Leduc County near Range Road 241 and Highway 623. This is east of Nisku and south of Beaumont. It takes approximately 17 minutes to drive there from the Nisku Place Motel. They find skeletal human remains. The remains are identified as those of Amber Tuccaro based on dental records. Three years later, Delores Browers’ skeletal remains are also found near Range Road 241. She had vanished 15 years earlier. The remains of Edna Bernard had been found in a wooded area on Range Road 245 in 2002 and the remains of Katie Ballentyne had been found in 2003 in a field near Range Road 235. That’s all four bodies within an 8 kilometre (5 mile) radius. All four women were indigenous and all four cases remain unsolved.
I read up on her case and I agree with you. There are three questions I have about her:
1. Why did she leave her child and her friend at their hotel to go to Edmonton? Some heavily downvoted posts on Reddit suggest she was getting drugs and/or turning tricks as Amber was known to do. The official Reddit-approved narrative is that she wanted to save money by hitchhiking ahead of her friend and her child, which makes no sense. Again this hitchhiking happened in the middle of the night, not during the day. I tried searching more about Amber’s proclivities and got a thoroughly scrubbed search tsk tsking me about stereotypes of indigenous women.
2. There was a call that was recorded where she was in a vehicle with an unidentified voice which may have been from the killer. The reason why this call was recorded is because she was talking to her brother who was in prison. Prison calls in Canada are recorded. Only one minute has been released out of 17. The RCMP hasn’t released the remaining 16 minutes and nobody seems to be keen to release those other minutes. So why was she talking to her brother in prison at night while she was in some random guy’s truck? Once again, none of the Reddit sleuths and troo crime advocates want to know more about this.
3. There’s a sex offender, Pat Carson, who keeps getting in trouble and owns a ranch near the area. The RCMP claims he has been repeatedly cleared. Nobody wants to provide a description of Carson which makes me wonder if he’s a First Nations guy. We are supposed to be scared of him but nobody can tell us anything about him.
I look forward to your post!
Just posted it.
1. She wanted to get fucked up on Whyte Ave for sure. Everyone from 18 to like late 20s who goes to Edmonton from any small town hits Whyte Ave. If you’re every in Edmonton, check out Whyte when the bars close at 2 am on a Friday or Saturday. It’s like seeing
Cops or
To Serve and Protect live.
Going to Edmonton from Fort McMurray to hook makes absolutely no sense. She was a fat native chick who had a kid 14 months earlier. Girls like her work street corners in Edmonton and make like $30 a blowjob. And, those corners are taken. The girls are pretty fucking territorial. It’s better now but they used to be out fighting for their spots and flashing cars in broad daylight. So, not worth the airfare especially when there are dozens of drunk rig pigs in Fort Mac on any given night with oil money burning holes in their pockets. Those guys might be out working the oil patch for two months without even seeing a woman. They’ll pay to stick it in anything.
They were 100% in Edmonton to buy coke or meth and sell it in Fort Mac for like double what they paid for it.
2. Canadian jails and prisons have phone restrictions. Whenever my brother was locked up, he could only make calls between like 6 and 8 or 9 pm. And, the calls are always recorded. I was unable to confirm, but I have heard that her brother was in the remand centre in Edmonton, so he was probably getting out. You’re usually not in remand for very long. He might have called to make arrangements to see her, or to ask her for bail money. I think she repeats what the unknown man says to her because her brother was telling her that the guy was lying which he clearly was. Not sure why her brother didn’t alert anyone.
3. The dude on the recording has a white accent. Natives tend to sound native in rural Canada. My understanding is that Carson is a white dude who lures women to his ranch with promises of work and then forces himself on them. More coercion than forcible rape but its sexual assault none the less.
Missing in rural British Columbia
Not First Nations
Tim Horton’s may or may not be involved
was the most important thing.