The Invisible Pattern

There is a truth we whisper in back rooms, after vigils, after funerals, after the last camera crew has left: serial killers have long preyed on Indigenous women in North America—not by accident, not by impulse, but because the system itself makes Native women the easiest victims to take.

That truth is hard to write, but it is even harder to ignore.

When you work in missing persons, true crime, or advocacy long enough, you begin to see patterns the rest of the world refuses to look at directly. You notice which cases get immediate resources and which are quietly dismissed. You notice whose faces appear on national news and whose families spend years begging a detective just to return a phone call.

And then comes the most devastating realization: predators have noticed all of this, too.

Serial killers aren’t mystical monsters. They’re observers. They pay attention to who is valued and who is not, who will be searched for and who will be forgotten once the paperwork gets lost in a drawer. They are students of vulnerability and opportunity. When a society repeatedly fails to protect a certain group of women—fails to search for them, fails to count them, fails even to record their disappearances correctly—predators don’t see tragedy. They see a hunting ground.

They see a margin.
A gap.
A blind spot.

They see Indigenous women.

The crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, including Two-Spirit and gender-diverse people, is not an unfortunate side effect of modern life. It is the product of a long history of colonization, racism, misogyny, and erasure. It is the consequence of laws written without Indigenous voices, of policing systems built on jurisdictional chaos, and of cultural narratives that repeatedly portray Native women as disposable.

When a system sends the message, again and again, that Native women don’t matter, that message doesn’t just lodge itself in government buildings or police departments. It settles into the minds of men who already wish to do harm.

This isn’t just a story about serial killers. It’s a story about why they choose the women they do—and why so many of them get away with it for so long. It’s about the cases we know by name, the ones that barely made a headline, and the thousands that exist only as memories in the hearts of families. It’s about a crisis that isn’t new, and a pattern that isn’t stopping.

Violence against Indigenous women did not begin with the names that appear in modern court records. The roots of this violence stretch back through centuries of forced removals, broken treaties, boarding schools, and policies designed to strip Indigenous peoples of land, language, culture, and autonomy. Early colonial reports documented the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Indigenous women with chilling casualness. Those stories aren’t ancient relics; they live in the collective memory of communities, passed down like a wound that never fully heals.

For many Indigenous families, each new disappearance doesn’t feel like an isolated crime. It feels like confirmation of something they have known for generations: the threat has always been there, evolving with time but never truly going away.

In our current era, the numbers should have sparked a national revolt. Instead, they’re often met with a shrug.

In Canada, Indigenous women are vastly more likely to be murdered or go missing than other women. In the United States, studies have shown that the overwhelming majority of American Indian and Alaska Native women will experience violence in their lifetimes. Some reservations report homicide rates many times higher than the rest of the country. When researchers looked at dozens of U.S. cities, they documented hundreds of cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and even then they stressed that the true scale was far larger because police departments often failed to respond or provided incomplete information.

Some analyses have concluded that this violence is not random but deeply tied to a long-standing pattern of colonialism and systemic bias. Indigenous women aren’t just more likely to be harmed; they’re more likely to be ignored once harm occurs.

To understand how serial predators intersect with this crisis, we have to look at specific cases that have forced the world to notice—even when the world didn’t want to.

In Winnipeg, a man named Jeremy Skibicki was eventually convicted for killing four Indigenous women: Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran, Rebecca Contois, and a fourth woman who is still known only by a spirit name often translated as Buffalo Woman. He targeted women who were navigating circumstances that made them more vulnerable: women using shelters, women struggling in poverty, women whose disappearances did not immediately trigger a robust law enforcement response.

Skibicki disposed of their remains in landfills. The choice of location was not random. Landfills are where society sends what it doesn’t want to look at anymore. For the families of the women he killed, fighting for searches of those landfills became a second battle layered on top of the first: a battle not just for justice, but for the basic recognition that their loved ones were worth recovering. Authorities hesitated, delayed, and in some cases refused outright to conduct full searches. It took public outrage just to push one search forward, and even then the process was painful and incomplete.

Even in death, Indigenous women were forced to prove that they were worthy of being found.

In Alaska, another case tore through Native communities and confirmed fears that many had tried to raise for years. A man named Brian Steven Smith, originally from South Africa and later a naturalized U.S. citizen, was charged with murdering two Indigenous women: Kathleen Henry and Veronica Abouchuk, both from Yup’ik villages.

Smith might have remained anonymous if not for a terrible stroke of luck. A digital memory card labeled in a way that referred to a homicide at a hotel was discovered by someone who turned it in. On that card was video evidence of Kathleen’s murder. Without that accident—a small piece of plastic lost and found—Smith might still be free.

For the Alaska Native community, his arrest didn’t calm fears; it confirmed them. Women had been disappearing, dying, and turning up in ravines, wooded areas, or city outskirts for years. Families had whispered about a predator. Now they had a name. But the deeper question lingered: how many women had gone unnoticed, their cases never fully investigated, their deaths written off as accidents or overdoses or “lifestyle issues”?

Further south, in British Columbia, the name of a pig farmer outside Vancouver became synonymous with horror. Robert Pickton lured women from the Downtown Eastside, many of whom were Indigenous and many of whom were surviving through sex work. Families reported their daughters, sisters, and mothers missing again and again. For years, they were met with indifference.

These women were seen as transient, as troubled, as unreliable narrators of their own lives even when they were still alive. That perception clung to their cases after they vanished, and it bought their killer time.

When the truth finally came out, it was worse than anyone had imagined. Pickton had killed an extraordinary number of women over many years, and an official inquiry found layer upon layer of bias and failure in the way authorities handled the disappearances. If Indigenous women had been treated as worthy victims from the beginning, he could have been stopped much earlier.

For many advocates, the story of Pickton isn’t just about one man’s cruelty. It is about a system that effectively told a serial killer, over and over, that the women he was targeting did not matter enough to provoke urgent action.

The pattern is not limited to one region. Across the Pacific Northwest, in Washington State, the case of Warren Forrest reveals how predators can span decades. His crimes date back to the early 1970s. He has been convicted of multiple killings and is suspected in several more, some involving women who may have been Indigenous. To this day, investigators are still trying to understand the full scope of his violence. The passage of time has eroded evidence, memories, and records—exactly the conditions that favor men like him.

In Minnesota, the name Billy Glaze surfaces whenever advocates talk about Native women and serial homicide. He was linked to the killings of Native American women in the 1980s and is suspected of many additional murders across multiple states. His known victims were Indigenous women in Minneapolis, a city where Native communities were already grappling with poverty, displacement, and police neglect. Glaze targeted women he assumed would not be missed in the halls of power, women whose deaths could be minimized or written off.

Even beyond individual killers, one of the most chilling patterns involves long-haul truck routes. For years, investigators noticed clusters of murdered women whose bodies were discovered along highways, often near truck stops, rest areas, or remote roadways. Many of these areas run through or near Indigenous lands.

Long-haul trucking, as a profession, provides mobility, anonymity, and plausible explanations for frequent travel. It is an entirely legitimate profession for most drivers—but for a small number of predators, it has become cover. Law enforcement agencies have identified hundreds of truck drivers as potential serial offenders in cases spanning multiple states.

Truck stops and rest areas are also known hotspots for trafficking and prostitution. Women who are already vulnerable—those fleeing violence, those without stable housing, those trapped in trafficking networks, those hitchhiking for lack of transportation—may cross paths with men who see them not as human beings, but as disposable targets.

For Indigenous women in rural and remote communities, hitchhiking has often been a necessary risk. With limited access to public transportation and few options for safe travel, many women rely on rides from strangers to reach jobs, schools, medical appointments, or family. This reality is not a moral failing on the part of Indigenous women; it is the predictable outcome of infrastructure and policy choices that have left entire communities without reliable transportation. But predators twist that necessity into opportunity.

To understand why Indigenous women are so often chosen as victims, we have to look at vulnerability not as personal weakness, but as an architecture built over generations.

Poverty in many Indigenous communities is not accidental. It is the direct result of a long history of land theft, broken promises, and imposed economic limitations. When communities are boxed in by these realities, women are more likely to experience unstable housing, dangerous jobs, survival sex work, or abusive relationships. They may have fewer options for escape, fewer resources when they try to leave, and fewer places to go when everything falls apart.

Jurisdictional chaos makes this worse. A crime involving an Indigenous woman might fall under tribal authorities, local police, state police, federal agencies, or some confusing combination of all of them. Sometimes no agency steps up decisively; sometimes they argue over whose case it is; sometimes jurisdictional questions are used, consciously or not, as excuses for inaction.

Meanwhile, most tribal police departments are expected to protect huge territories with limited budgets, understaffed agencies, aging equipment, and little access to advanced forensic tools. Some lack dedicated homicide units. Some cannot afford large-scale searches or DNA testing. All of this combines to send a loud, deadly signal to predators: if you target women in these communities, your odds of being caught are lower.

When families report loved ones missing, they are too often met with stereotypes and assumptions. Instead of urgency, they get speculation about whether the woman might have been partying, whether she left on her own, whether she is unreliable. Past struggles with addiction or mental health become reason to delay searching, rather than reason to sound the alarm immediately.

Many families report that they feel interrogated rather than supported. Their missing loved one is subtly or overtly blamed for her own disappearance. When that happens, predators gain something priceless to them: time. Time to flee. Time to dispose of evidence. Time to offend again.

On top of all of this sits the weight of historical trauma. Generations of Indigenous people lived through boarding schools, forced removals, cultural suppression, and the systematic dismantling of community structures. The effects didn’t vanish when those policies changed on paper. They live on in rates of addiction, domestic violence, mental health struggles, and cycles of poverty. Predators often target women already navigating that trauma, knowing they may lack robust safety nets or may be dismissed as unreliable witnesses of their own experiences.

The result is a perfect storm: women made more vulnerable by conditions they did not choose, living in areas where jurisdiction is murky, served by police departments that may be underfunded or biased, in countries where data collection systems are riddled with gaps.

The gaps matter.

In theory, modern policing has tools to identify serial killers. Databases like the FBI’s violent criminal tracking systems exist to recognize patterns across jurisdictions. But many agencies do not consistently participate in these systems. Some send partial data; others send nothing at all. Cases are coded incorrectly. Race is misclassified. Indigenous victims may be recorded as white, Hispanic, mixed-race, or unnamed.

When data is incomplete or wrong, patterns disappear. What should look like a series of connected murders becomes a scattered set of individual tragedies on paper. No one sees the larger story.

Advocates and independent researchers have tried to fill that void. Projects that compile and analyze unsolved homicides have discovered clusters—geographic concentrations of killings that look very much like the work of serial predators. Some of these clusters overlap with Indigenous communities or corridors used by long-haul truckers. Others appear in or near cities with documented histories of violence against Indigenous women.

We may never know how many Indigenous women have been killed by serial predators in North America. We do know that in many official tallies, the number of Indigenous victims is vastly undercounted when compared to the actual population percentage. That imbalance is impossible to explain away as coincidence.

The human stories behind those numbers are what haunt you.

One of those stories belongs to a young mother named Amber Alyssa Tuccaro.

Amber was twenty years old, from the Mikisew Cree First Nation, and the mother of a little boy named Jacob. She traveled to the area outside Edmonton with a friend and her son, planning to head into the city the next day. She was young and excited, eager to get into Edmonton sooner rather than later. So she made a decision countless people have made at one time or another: she accepted a ride from a stranger.

That ride was the last time she was seen alive.

In the following days, her family knew something was terribly wrong. Amber was not the kind of mother who would vanish willingly and abandon her child. Her loved ones reached out to police, expecting urgency. What they encountered instead felt, to them, like indifference.

Amber was removed from official missing-persons lists prematurely, despite the fact that no one had actually seen her. Some of her personal property that might have become important evidence was handled in ways that raised serious concerns. Her family had to fight just to have her case recognized as ongoing.

Nearly two years after she disappeared, horseback riders discovered her remains on rural land. The uneasy, fearful speculation that had followed her disappearance hardened into undeniable reality: Amber had been murdered.

Her family has spent years pressing for accountability, not only for the person who killed her, but for the way authorities responded from the very beginning. Reviews of the investigation found serious deficiencies, validating what her loved ones had been saying for years.

Amber’s case remains unsolved. Her son is growing up without his mother. Her family continues to push for answers, carrying both grief and determination.

What makes her story so profoundly heartbreaking is not only the horror of what happened, but the familiarity of the pattern. Indigenous families across North America can recognize their own experiences in Amber’s story: the lack of urgency, the assumptions about the victim’s character, the procedural errors, the lost time, the lingering sense that if their loved one had not been Indigenous, the response might have looked very different.

That is the quiet, suffocating terror underlying the entire MMIWG crisis: the knowledge that predators are watching how the system behaves and adjusting their targets accordingly.

We know that families have been told, in so many ways, that their missing daughters or sisters probably just took off, that they are probably partying, that they will likely return. We know that past struggles with addiction or prostitution or unstable housing are too often used as reasons to investigate less thoroughly. We know that Indigenous victims are frequently described in ways that shift focus from what was done to them to what kind of person someone has decided they were.

This culture of blame and dismissal does not stay confined to conference rooms and case files. It ripples outward, all the way to the men who decide who lives and who dies.

Predators pay attention to whose stories make the front page and whose stories are buried. They see whose faces appear on national television and whose faces only show up on homemade flyers and Facebook posts shared among relatives. They notice when a missing Indigenous woman is treated as a runaway, when police don’t issue alerts, when local departments fail to enter her into national systems.

What they see is not just opportunity—it is permission.

And yet, in the midst of all of this, Indigenous communities have refused to disappear. The MMIWG movement has risen from grief and rage and love, insisting that these lives are not expendable, not forgettable, not collateral damage. Families have stood on the steps of government buildings, at roadways, in church basements, and on social media, naming their loved ones and demanding change.

Organizations led by Indigenous women have been at the forefront of documenting cases, pressuring lawmakers, pushing for inquiries, and supporting families. They have tracked down missing records, compiled lists of names, and organized searches when no one else would. They have held up photographs at rallies so that the rest of the country has to look at the faces of the women it failed.

These efforts have forced governments to acknowledge the crisis, to commission inquiries, to issue reports. Some policies have been revised. Some procedures have been improved. Some training has been implemented. But the families who live this reality every day know that change is still far too slow.

What truly needs to change goes deeper than any single program or press release.

Every law enforcement agency must take missing Indigenous women seriously from the moment a report is made. There should be no delay because of assumptions about partying or voluntary disappearance. Public warnings should not be reserved only for victims who fit a certain racial or socioeconomic profile.

Police departments and federal agencies must fully participate in data systems designed to track violent crime. Victims must be correctly identified, including their Indigenous identity, so that patterns can be recognized and responded to.

Tribal police departments must be funded at levels that match the reality of the violence they are expected to investigate. That includes training, equipment, forensic support, and staffing.

Jurisdictional disputes need to be resolved in ways that prioritize victims rather than bureaucratic boundaries. Cases should not languish just because agencies cannot agree on who is responsible.

When remains are suspected to be in landfills, the decision to search should not depend on public popularity or the perceived value of the victims involved. Indigenous women deserve the same level of effort, the same investment of time and resources, as anyone else.

Investigations must be trauma-informed and culturally respectful. Families should not have to battle the very institutions that are supposed to be helping them.

Public awareness campaigns should be ongoing, not confined to a single day or month of remembrance. Serial violence thrives in silence. The more we talk about these cases, the less cover predators have.

Perhaps most importantly, non-Indigenous people must understand that this is not simply an Indigenous problem. It is a societal problem. Serial killers exploiting gaps in the system do not just threaten one community; they expose weaknesses that endanger everyone. The difference is that Indigenous women are often the first—and most frequent—targets.

When I sit with the stories of women like Morgan, Marcedes, Rebecca, Buffalo Woman, Kathleen, Veronica, and Amber, I feel an ache that goes beyond statistics. These were women with favorite songs, private jokes, complicated relationships, dreams for their children, fears for their futures, and plans that will never be fulfilled.

Their lives were not defined by the way they died or by the failures of the systems around them. They were defined by their humanity.

And if we truly believe that every human life has value, then we cannot keep accepting a world in which some women are effectively marked as open season for predators.

Serial killers have learned to read our indifference. They have learned to navigate our bureaucratic blind spots. They have learned that violence against Indigenous women rarely causes the kind of political and media firestorm that forces swift action.

We cannot undo the past. We cannot return the thousands of women and girls who have already been taken. But we can refuse to keep teaching predators that Indigenous women are fair game.

That work starts with telling the truth, even when it is uncomfortable. It continues with listening to Indigenous families, following their lead, and supporting the organizations already on the front lines. It requires changing laws, rewriting policies, and retraining the people who hold power over investigations.

And it demands that we say, clearly and without hesitation, that Indigenous women deserve what every woman deserves: to be safe, to be searched for, to be believed, and to be brought home.

Until that becomes reality, the pattern will persist. Serial killers will keep testing the boundaries of our apathy. And Indigenous families will continue to carry grief that could have been prevented.

I don’t want to write another piece like this ten years from now. I don’t want to learn another name whose story follows the same script of disappearance, dismissal, discovery, and delayed outrage. I don’t want another mother to stand in front of cameras and beg for what should already be guaranteed: a thorough, respectful, urgent investigation into what happened to her child.

We owe Indigenous women more than memorials. We owe them action.

Until then, we will keep speaking their names. We will keep connecting the dots that others try not to see. We will keep exposing the overlap between serial predators and systemic neglect.

And I will not be quiet.