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The disturbing disappearance of Christina Calayca from Rainbow Falls Provincial Park

Christina Calayca, disappeared August 6, 2007, Rainbow Falls Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada.

Revised July 2024

On Monday, August 6, 2007, at around 6:30 a.m., Christina Calayca, 20, went for a jog with a friend in Rainbow Falls Provincial Park. The provincial park is located on Highway 17 (Trans-Canada Highway) between Schreiber and Rossport, Ontario, Canada, on the north shore of Lake Superior. The two decided to split up and run separate routes.

Christina was never seen again with huge official and unofficial private searches. After so many years, her whereabouts and the circumstances surrounding her disappearance remain unknown. What happened to Christina?

Who was Christina Calayca?

Christina Calayca was born on December 19, 1986, to parents Elizabeth Rutledge and Mario Calayca, who divorced when she was one year old. Elizabeth was a Filipino Canadian who had immigrated to Canada in 1980 from Mindanao in the Philippines, though Calayca had never been to the Philippines.

She had a younger brother, Michael Rutledge, who was 15 years old at the time of her disappearance. In the summer of 2007, Calayca lived in the Cabbagetown neighbourhood of Toronto and worked nine-hour days at a summer camp hosted by St. Bernadette’s Day Care, adjacent to D’Arcy McGee Catholic School. Before her disappearance, Calayca attended George Brown College and graduated with a certificate in Early Childhood Education in 2006. Investigators believe Calayca was not in a romantic relationship in August 2007.

Her family have described Christina as hard-working and a natural leader, with ambitions of performing missionary work in the Philippines and going on a family vacation to Panama before attending teachers' college at York University. Calayca held a leadership position in a church-affiliated youth group, Youth for Christ, and was responsible for organizing one of its largest conferences and also contributed a significant number of volunteer hours to an affiliated youth ministry.

Christina has also been noted as having very poor spatial awareness, sense of direction, and sense of balance. Before her disappearance, she had been part of a hiking group that had become lost on the Seaton Hiking Trail near Oshawa for several hours. She had several phobias, including a fear of spiders and rodents, she had experience fasting and was not a picky eater, traits that her mother believed would allow her to survive in the wilderness.

She had also suffered an inflamed callus years prior when she stepped on a needle by accident and did not have it removed immediately, allowing it to become embedded in her foot and leave a lasting injury, which made running or standing for long periods painful. As a result of her injury, Calayca generally kept in shape by playing volleyball and would only occasionally run.

At the time of her disappearance, Calayca weighed 125-130 lbs and was 5'2" (157 cm) tall. She had brown eyes and wavy, shoulder-length black hair with orange streaks in her bangs. Her skin tone has been described as dark East Asian, and investigators noted that she was in good health but in poor physical condition at the time she went missing.

Christina was last seen wearing a blue ‘hoodie’ sweatshirt, a maroon/purple striped shirt, black pants, and white running shoes. She was in the area with her female cousin and two male friends from a Christian youth group called "Youth for Christ", based in Toronto. All of them were inexperienced in the wilderness.

The trip to Rainbow Falls Provincial Park

Before the 2007 Civic Holiday, Christina Calayca had intended to participate in a youth conference in Montreal, but the trip cost was too expensive. Rather than attend the event, Christina and three friends - her cousin, Faith Castulo (20); and two friends from the Youth for Christ group, Edward "Eddy" Migue (20) and Joe "J.B." Benedict (19) ― made plans to camp at Rainbow Falls Provincial Park in Northwestern Ontario over the long weekend.

None of the group members heading to the park were experienced campers. Christina informed work colleagues where she was going but did not tell her mother their exact destination. The decision on where to spend their long weekend was made by typing the keyword “falls” into an online search engine and selecting the third result.

What is and where is Rainbow Falls Provincial Park?

Rainbow Falls Provincial Park is a 575-hectare (1,421-acre) recreation-class provincial park within the Ontario Parks system. It consists of two non-contiguous parts: Whitesand Lake campground in the main park and the historic Rossport Campground, east of the fishing community of Rossport, Ontario, which provides campsites along the rough and rocky shorelines of Lake Superior. Both campgrounds are just off Highway 17 between Rossport and Schreiber.

The Whitesand Lake campground is on the shores of Whitesand Lake and offers scenic trails to the park's namesake falls on the Hewitson River. The Rainbow Falls Trail has a waterside boardwalk trail. The Back-40 trail also goes through an abandoned campground to allow stunning views of the Lake Superior shoreline.

Most of the hiking trails in the area are short, generally measuring around 2 miles (3 km), except the 32-mile (53 km) Casque Isles Trail, which passes through the park and allows you to hike from Rossport to Terrace Bay. The park is one of the most rugged areas in the province, and outside of its established hiking trails, the area is covered in thick brush and cliffs up to 240 metres high.

Timeline of events

Sunday, August 5

At noon on Sunday, August 5, 2007, Christina, Faith, Eddy and J.B. arrived at Rainbow Falls Provincial Park after leaving Toronto at 10 a.m. the day before and driving about 14 to 15 hours in a green Honda CR-V belonging to Christina’s mother. They had stopped in Sault Ste. Marie, Neys Provincial Park. They were delayed along the way because they ran out of fuel outside Wawa. Although they had reserved campsite lot 72 in the Whitesand Lake campground near the main road, the group moved to lot 88 as it was in a more private area along the lake. The park was busy, with about three-quarters of its 97 campsites occupied by visitors, mostly locals.

Christina and her friends spent the rest of the afternoon setting up and relaxing at the campsite before having a short nap for half an hour at 6.30 p.m. They had set an alarm, but it didn’t go off, and they slept until 10.30 p.m. After they finally woke, they lit a campfire and sat around it, grilling food on the flames. The group finished almost all of their food and drank alcohol, though according to Eddy Migue, none of them drank enough to become drunk. The last known photograph of Christina was taken just after midnight, at 12.08 a.m. on Monday, August 6; the photo features her, Eddy, and J.B. tending to a frying pan over the fire. The group put out the fire at 3:30 a.m. and went to bed half an hour earlier, at which time Christina joked they should go for a swim.

Monday, August 6

At around 6.30 a.m., eight minutes before dawn, Christina asked Eddy to come with her to the comfort station, and according to Migue, they decided to go jogging on their return to the camp. Accounts differ as to whether the pair decided to take different paths immediately or if they had tried to run together until Christina, who could not keep up with Eddy, instead decided to take an alternative route.

The two split up at an intersection near the park entrance and just south of the comfort station. Eddy followed the road towards Highway 17, and Calayca chose a different road leading to Rainbow Falls; this was Christina's last confirmed sighting. Migue later remembered that her mood at the time appeared upbeat, as she tended to be most of the time.

After splitting up with Christina, Eddy Migue followed the road toward Highway 17 to reach the Rossport campground. He only got as far as a roadside picnic area, where he carved "FCJE", the first initials of all four members of their group, into a rock before turning back.

About an hour after he and Christina started their run, Eddy returned to the campsite and searched for an axe to whittle down some oversized logs but could not find one. Joe Benedict and Faith Castulo woke around 9.30 a.m. At first, the group was not worried that Christina had not returned from her jog, and Faith thought she had likely begun to walk through the forest to clear her mind. As they waited for her to return, J.B. showered at the comfort station and checked the beach while Castulo and Migue prepared breakfast.

Rainbow falls provincial park Ontario — Rainbow Falls Provincial Park

The search for Christina Calayca

When Christina had not returned by 11 a.m., her friends began looking for her. J.B. and Eddy drove along the road to the falls and then searched the Lake Superior Trail and Rainbow Falls Trail, two forest trails she may have run down. Although several other people were present on the trails, the two men did not ask them for help. Around 1.45 p.m., the group left a note for Christina at the campground in case she returned while they were out searching and intended to drive to Rossport, where one of the hiking trails ends. While asking about trail maps at the park gatehouse, they told park staff that Calayca was missing. After telling the group to report the situation to the Ontario Provincial Police, park staff began calling and searching local trails and beaches.

Christina was officially reported missing around 2 p.m., seven and a half hours after she was last seen, and her mother, Elizabeth Rutledge, was told at 4 p.m. that her daughter was missing.

Schreiber resident Paul Gauthier later told police that he may have seen Calayca the morning she disappeared. He had been camping at the Rossport section of the campgrounds, roughly two miles from the lot where she and her friends had stayed the night. He was drinking coffee outside his RV at around 9 a.m. when he spotted an unidentified Asian woman run off the highway and through the campground. Police questioned Gauthier multiple times about the sighting, but they could not confirm whether Christina was the person he saw.

The OPP Northwest Region Emergency Response Team, under the command of OPP Sgt. Eric Luoto took responsibility for the first search, establishing a command post in the park near Whitesand Lake.

The search would last 17 days, one of the longest in Ontario’s history, and see the 100 police officers, firefighters, divers, and specialists unaffiliated with the police involved. However, only about 30 of these personnel were involved for the first four days. Searchers used GPS, underwater side-scanning radar, infrared cameras, four canine units in the search, two fixed-wing airplanes, a floatplane, three helicopters, and marine vehicles. Pilots from the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association (CASARA) also took part in the first two weeks of the search, sending at least one aircraft daily to help. For this search, most statements to the media were delivered by OPP regional spokesperson Sgt. Deb Tully.

The weather at Rainbow Falls on August 6 was good, with a low of 59°F (15 °C) and a high of 73.4°F (23° C), and the fog that usually covers Lake Superior had cleared. Conditions briefly got a little worse on Tuesday, August 7, when a hard rainstorm hit the area, but temperatures rose again, and the area experienced an unseasonably warm few weeks while the search was ongoing. For safety reasons, no searches were made at night.

The rain caused many leaves to fall from the canopy and cover the ground, and the difficult terrain made life difficult for the searchers. This caused three injuries: a dog handler who experienced a sprained ankle, another handler with a twisted knee, and a rescue worker who suffered facial lacerations while attempting to rappel down a cliff. A search dog was also lost in the forest during the search.

Canine units were deployed early in the search, but by the time they arrived on the scene, nearly a full day had passed since Christina was last seen, and they could not pick up a scent. The OPP sent investigators to check the Rainbow Falls Trail and Casque Isles Trail, splitting officers into teams of three to search the main path of each trail and the area just off the path on either side. Acting on the assumption that she was alive but lost, they covered the entire Casque Isles Trail over several days, frequently calling out her name.

The OPP also deployed "hasty teams" to search the area around where Christina was last spotted, concentrating their efforts on rivers or electrical lines, which a person may follow when lost. Investigators determined their search area based on a standard lost hiker behavioural profile, using a statistical method to determine that she would likely be found inside a 5-mile (8-kilometer) radius from the place where she was last seen, as is the case in about 90% of situations where people go missing in woodlands. The rugged terrain in the area undermined this tactic, the possible sighting by Paul Gauthier in Rossport, and an incorrect understanding of her behavioural profile.

While some items of interest were recovered during these searches, none have been officially linked to Christina Calayca. One team which searched around Rainbow Falls recovered a pair of socks from a deep pool of water in the Hewitson River (sometimes called "Whitesand River") at the base of the falls and a footprint in a mossy area nearby. According to investigators, the socks were likely too large to fit her and attempts to test them for DNA were inconclusive. While the footprint matched Christina’s shoe size, without a preserved tread pattern, it was not possible to determine if it was created by one of her running shoes. However, a Thunder Bay identification officer was brought in on the investigation to make a plaster cast of the print for further forensic study. Another unit located a site where a broken branch and candy wrapper suggested a person had rested. However, DNA recovered from the wrapper was tested at the Molecular World laboratory in Thunder Bay and did not match Calayca's genetic profile.

Air units began using thermal imagery to look for Christina on the fourth day of the search, and aircraft without infrared equipment undertook hour-long flights outside the area being searched by the ground teams. From the air, searchers noted some areas with heightened activity in scavenging birds, including turkey vultures and crows, and one site with a lean-to. Ground searches of these locations turned up no signs,

Some police resources involved in the search were diverted after the body of a Sault Ste. Marie man was found in a tent south of Wawa on Friday, August 10, but by Monday, August 12, the number of officers involved in the search had increased to about 70. Then, Police were diverted once again to another missing person investigation near Nipigon on Wednesday, August 15, but this was soon determined to be a false alarm.

Although asked not to participate in the search themselves, the family camped out around nearby Thunder Bay for the entire search effort, with Elizabeth Rutledge arriving the day after Christina was reported missing. OPP Constable Keith Jones met the family when they arrived in the area and put them in touch with Raul Escarpe, a Catholic priest and fellow Filipino Canadian who performed special masses for the family several times during the search. As media interest in the situation grew, OPP spokespeople denied that public scrutiny played any role in keeping the search active.

Mike King, the Mayor of Terrace Bay, and Pat Halonen, a town councillor in Schreiber, organized a volunteer search team which scoured the area the weekend after Christina went missing. About 100 to 200 residents from the local area, including Schreiber's former mayor Don McArthur, participated in a grid search organized by Tracy Anderson, the fire chief in Terrace Bay. According to Halonen, the volunteer force included experienced searchers. The first search on Saturday, August 11, lasted for eight hours and covered the area between the provincial park's East Beach and Highway 17, starting at the Hewitson River and heading east towards Schreiber. Another day of searching they were followed the next day, involving 50 to 80 volunteers: members of Calayca's family, who had been previously barred from participating in the investigation, and Calayca's friends, Joe Benedict and Edward Miguel. Volunteers returned to the park on Monday, August 13, to continue looking, though in reduced numbers as many had to return to work.

The OPP's underwater search unit used sonar to investigate local bodies of water, including a deep pool of water at the base of the Rainbow Falls, where evidence that had never been conclusively linked to the disappearance was recovered. As part of their search, marine searchers engaged in sledding, a process where divers in a sled-like device are pulled across the water by an OPP boat, allowing them to look directly down into clear sections of Whitesand Lake.

Christina’s father, Mario Calayca, first addressed the media on August 13 and announced he would bring seven other relatives to the search area to support the investigation. However, he and four relatives left the area to return to Toronto after seeing the area from a police helicopter on August 16. On August 17, eleven days into the search, OPP Regional Commander Mike Armstrong continued to reassure the family and the media that her chances of survival were high as favourable conditions in the park made dehydration and hypothermia unlikely. On Wednesday, August 22, Christina’s uncle, Ken West, told journalists that, “They’ve used K-9 units. They’ve used planes. They’ve used submarines. They’ve used all sorts of different ways to find Christina. And nothing, absolutely nothing works. There’s no clue at all.”

Police initiated a final concentrated grid search on Tuesday, August 21, now telling media they believed Christina was a "non-responsive person" and would be unable to reply if she heard searchers calling her name. By this point, most other police resources, including aircraft and canine units, had been called off the search, leaving only 20 to 25 officers to perform the grid search and divers to continue investigating nearby bodies of water. On the advice of OPP Sgt. Don Webster, the Provincial Search & Rescue Coordinator, the search was called off on Thursday, August 23. The day after, Rutledge told journalists she would continue searching for her daughter. At the time, the family believed she had been abducted and was no longer in Rainbow Falls Provincial Park.

After the initial police search was called off, the investigation into Christina Calayca's disappearance reached an impasse. Investigators questioned Joe Benedict, Faith Castulo, and Edward Migue three times after the initial search, but these failed to produce new leads. None of Christina’s friends who accompanied her to Rainbow Falls Provincial Park were ever considered suspects in her disappearance. In the months after she went missing, police told the family that they were following up on 60 leads related to her case, including interviews with other campers who left the park the weekend of the disappearance.

When the official search was over, Elizabeth Rutledge financed multiple private searches of the area around the Park by fundraising through the Find Christina Calayca Group, several fundraisings and withdrawing money from her daughter's trust fund.

The first privately funded search, made together with the OPP, cost Elizabeth $44,000 of the $48,000 the family had fundraised to that point and involved 22 volunteer searchers working over five days. OPP Sgt. Eric Luoto again led the police search effort, hoping to take advantage of areas too thick with vegetation to properly search in the summer of 2007 but had been thinned out over the winter.

A team of five rescue workers trained in rappelling was also used to look for evidence around the area's cliffs; they had originally been scheduled to search the area on November 19, 2007, but could not work in poor weather conditions. After the police finished their search, the family and volunteer forces were allowed to conduct their search led by Halifax-based canine handler Doug Teeft, who provided his cadaver dogs. The Ottawa-based canine group, the Ottawa Valley Search and Rescue Dog Association (OVSARDA), and eight US-based search dog teams also participated in the search. This phase was organized with help from the Minnesota-based John Francis Foundation and began on 13 June 2008. The volunteer force called the police to report strange behaviour from the search dogs in a particular area. While this behaviour did not mean that human remains had necessarily been found, it was only observed near a large hole. Forensic technicians with the OPP investigated the hole and the area around it on Wednesday, June 18, but found no evidence to explain the dogs' behaviour.

A second privately funded search was conducted in November 2008, and a team of six cadaver dogs was brought to investigate the area where Christina was last spotted. According to search manager Jeff Hasse, all six dogs detected the scent of human remains at the bottom of the Hewitson River, but the river's flow and depth made any further investigation into this lead difficult.

A year later, in early June 2008, search and rescue teams went back in for a week-long search with a high-angle team scaling cliff sides for Christina's body. The family put together a team of American and Canadian volunteers and dogs trained to detect human remains. It went into the park on June 13, 2008. The Minnesota-based Jon Francis Foundation, a non-profit group that supports searches for lost hikers, helped the family plan what was supposed to be a 10-day, 30-man effort. The foundation thought the search master should be Canadian, so the family was connected with Doug Teeft, who trains dogs in Nova Scotia. But again, nothing was located.

A third and final search funded by the family began on September 19, 2009. It was again led by Jeff Hasse and intended to focus on the area along the Hewitson River, where search dogs had detected the possible presence of remains in November 2008. In addition to family members, 21 volunteers with the Search, Rescue, and Recovery Resources of Minnesota (SRRRMN) participated in the search. Searchers were split into eight units and sent to investigate places of interest, including some areas surveyed the day before the main search began. Although searchers claimed to have found more possible evidence, an OPP search on 14 October 2009 could not find any new leads. By this time, Elizabeth had sold her house and moved into a two-bedroom apartment with her son to finance the investigation. However, when the third privately funded search failed to turn up any new evidence, she told the media she was faced with the choice of using what money she had left to either continue funding the investigation or pay for her son's university education.

Aftermath

Christina Calayca disappearance — Christina Calayca

Human remains discovered in the Thunder Bay area in October 2010 were investigated as possibly belonging to Christina Calayca but were later determined to be unrelated.

In a 2021 interview, retired OPP officer Sgt. Don Webster told the Elliot Lake Today online publication that throughout the investigation, he had assembled a large binder detailing all the available information about the case and had met with the family to discuss it. Webster revealed that some information about the case has not been made public as it is part of an active investigation.

The disappearance is still under investigation by the Nipigon division of the Ontario Provincial Police and is still being treated as a missing person case.

Explanations

Animal attack

At the time Christina was reported missing, the official stance of the Ontario Provincial Police was that they suspected a bear had attacked her. A consultant from the Ministry of Northern Development, Mines, Natural Resources and Forestry was brought in to help investigate this theory. Stephen Herrero of the University of Calgary later cast doubt on this theory. Herrero, who wrote an authoritative book on bear attacks, suggested that it was "not impossible, but highly unlikely" that a bear had attacked since no ripped clothing, blood, or drag marks were found during the initial search. A bear would not have travelled beyond 600 ft with a kill. It is not believed that the area's wild wolves would have attacked, as these are extremely rare.

Misadventure

OPP investigators alleged that the lack of experience hiking in the wilderness likely led Christina to become lost and disoriented in the dense undergrowth of the forest. However, her mother, Elizabeth, has questioned why her daughter would have wandered off the forest's well-marked trails given her inexperience and how she could have managed to remain undetected for the two and a half weeks police spent searching the area for her. Investigators also allege that they found no signs of the disturbance usually found after a person creates a path through dense vegetation.

Before the disappearance, only one other person had gone missing while hiking the park's trails and had been located within nine hours. While investigating OPP Sgt. Eric Luoto claimed search and rescue teams in Northwestern Ontario were called in to locate 30 to 40 lost people each year and, in more than 95% of cases, can find the person within 24 hours.

On May 16, 2006, over a year before the Calayca disappearance, Hamilton-based tree planter Aju Iroaga went missing in an area about 43.5 miles (70 km) north of White River, Ontario; his case also remains unsolved, but early speculation suggested an animal may have attacked him. Before this, the July 4, 2005, disappearance of Jeffrey Turtle on the Pikangikum First Nation had also triggered a 17-day search by the OPP, which failed to locate Turtle or determine why he had disappeared.

In justifying the OPP's involvement in the June 2008 Rainbow Falls National Park survey, OPP Sgt. Eric Luoto stated that in spite of the aerial surveillance done during the initial search, there were several large crevices in the area which could only be surveyed on the ground and should only be entered by trained professionals. Volunteer firefighter and search team member Matt Borutski has defended the misadventure hypothesis, noting that some sections of the forest are so dense that if a person were to become immobilized, the mass of surrounding vegetation would be enough to keep their body upright, obscuring them from view. This view was reinforced by OPP Constable Greg Beazley, who also participated in the search and told journalists that the vegetation was "so thick that if you trip, you don't fall down". Borutski also questioned the effectiveness of aircraft in the search, noting that at times a police helicopter would be directly above him but tree cover prevented the helicopter from seeing any of the searchers on the ground and vice versa. Pat Halonen, who helped to organize the first volunteer search for Calayca, later told journalists that the amount of leaves in the canopies had blocked air searchers' line of sight with the ground and that the significant amount of leaves on the forest floor even created challenges for volunteers searching the area on foot.

Don Webster, a former police sergeant and the OPP Provincial Search & Rescue Coordinator for nine years, stated in a 2021 interview that the lack of evidence turned up by the initial search for Christina suggests she may have defied expectations and covered more ground than the search teams believed a hiker could cover, explaining why their search efforts were unable to locate her remains. He also proposed that the absence of clues could indicate that she was abducted, as this would also not produce the kind of evidence typically left by a lost hiker.

Intentional disappearance

Christina’s family has suggested it is unlikely that she intentionally disappeared to sever ties with her community and family. Ca She had a strong relationship with her family and had been responsible for organizing her mother's 50th birthday party on July 28 2007, just nine days before her disappearance. The podcast “The True Crime Files” has noted that in such a scenario, a plot would have involved at least one other person who would have to not come forward in the years since the disappearance for the case to remain unsolved. Rumours have circulated that Christina was as due to enter into an arranged marriage and was unhappy as a result of this, and limited career options are not backed by any testimony offered by investigators, the family, or others close to her.

Foul play

Foul play has been suggested as a possible cause of the disappearance, and family members believe she was abducted or murdered, noting that the Trans-Canada Highway would give an attacker easy access to the area and her trusting nature may have left her vulnerable to an opportunistic killer. Karen Caguicla, Chrisitna’s aunt and the head of the Find Christina Calayca Group, defended the family's stance that her niece had been the victim of violence by telling journalists, "Christina is just too smart to get lost" Traffic through the area was higher than usual but standard for a long weekend, owing to campers celebrating the Civic Holiday and travelling to attend local events, including the annual Dragfest which generally attracts a crowd of 10,000 attendees.

Despite suggestions that they had something to do with her going missing, the three friends who accompanied Christina to Rainbow Falls are not considered suspects, according to investigators. Eddy Migue, the last confirmed person to have seen her, has since regretted allowing her to walk alone on the morning she disappeared.

Don McArthur, a former Mayor of Schreiber, has stated he does not believe a resident of the local communities would have assaulted Calayca. He thinks the only murder he knew to have occurred in Schreiber happened in 2005 and was likely related to the illegal drug trade.

On the CBC true crime podcast The Next Call, host David Ridgen speculated that Denis Léveillé, a suspect in the unsolved 1996 disappearance of Melanie Ethier with a history of sexually abusing teenage girls, may have been responsible for other missing person cases in Ontario. Ridgen included Christina in a list of girls and young women who disappeared in Ontario at the time Léveillé was active.

A theory proposed by the hosts of the podcast Cold Case Detective suggests Christina may have been washing her feet at the cascades and was attacked by a stranger, alleging that the socks found near the Hewitson River only appeared to be too large because they had been saturated with water and that the footprint found near the site may have belonged to her attacker. However, no signs of a struggle were found at the scene. The podcast also believed that Calayca was the victim of a crime of opportunity as her ethnicity could have led a stranger to think she was an Indigenous woman, leading a passerby to target her as has happened along remote sections of road elsewhere in Canada like the Highway of Tears; or that police may have invited her into a vehicle and then left her in a remote location similar to the treatment faced by Indigenous people victimized by "starlight tours" in Saskatoon. The OPP does not suspect she was the victim of foul play.

RCMP involvement

It has been alleged that since Christina had indigenous-like looks, she may have been a victim of a run-in with the authorities. For example, the RCMP Saskatoon freezing death cases involved Indigenous Canadians in and immediately outside Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in the 1990s and early 2000s and are suspected of being linked to actions by the members of the Saskatoon Police Service. The police officers would arrest Indigenous people, who were usually male, for alleged drunkenness and/or disorderly behaviour, sometimes without cause and would then drive them to the outskirts of the city at night in the winter and abandon them, leaving them stranded in sub-zero temperatures. The practice is known as taking Indigenous people on "starlight tours” and dates back to at least 1976.

"Highway of Tears," a documentary film by Matthew Smiley, was released in 2015 to critical acclaim. The film focused on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) 's ill-treatment of indigenous First Nations people, the impact of high unemployment, and the numerous unsolved murders along Highway 16 in Canada's British Columbia. The road is 720km long and runs from Prince George to Prince Rupert. Since 1969, an estimated 40 women have gone missing or have been found murdered somewhere along Highway 16 and its huge surrounding forests. See more of this story at The Terrible Story of Canada’s Highway of Tears