\With Canadian police forces in general and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in particular having been justifiably criticized in the past and the present for they way they handle cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, it is encouraging to see the efforts that are being made to find out what happened to Bobbie Lynn Moose, a 29-year-old member of Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation whose body was found in an empty lot on Nelson Road in Thompson Oct. 17, about two-and-a-half weeks after her sister dropped her off at Walmart on Mystery Lake Road on the first day of last month.
As a woman with no fixed address, with friends and acquaintances who also count themselves as members of Thompson’s homeless population, Bobbie Lynn Moose’s is not the sort of case that police always approach in such a high-profile way, having made up posters and pamphlets with her picture and pictures of the clothes she was last seen wearing and distributed them to every household in Thompson. RCMP have twice brought up extra officers to Thompson to assist in canvassing the city’s residents, with officers going door-to-door over the weekend trying to find someone who knows something and setting up in the Canadian Tire parking lot with free coffee Nov. 8 in an effort to encourage some people who may have hung around with Bobbie Lynn Moose to come by and provide RCMP with more information about how she spent the last few weeks of her short life in Thompson. Manitoba RCMP commanding officer Asst. Commissioner Jane MacLatchy held a press conference in Winnipeg last week with members of Moose’s family, and sat down for an interview with the Thompson Citizen Nov. 7 in an effort to encourage more community members who might know something about what happened to Bobbie Lynn to come forward. RCMP have also erected a billboard on Mystery Lake Road with the photos of her and her clothing in an attempt to get the word out that they are looking for information to as wide an audience as possibly. As MacLatchy told the Citizen, these are unusual tactics for police, but they believe they are the right ones for this case.
Unfortunately, not having a permanent home, as well as being Indigenous, made Bobbie Lynn Moose more vulnerable to dying as result of violence and more difficult to gather information about. The fact that RCMP are taking extraordinary efforts to gather information about Bobbie Lynn Moose’s last days alive makes it seem possible that the little they admit that they know about her location and activities from Oct. 1 to Oct. 17 may be very little indeed. The circumstances in which she was found, in a public place not far from where a number of violent incidents occurred over the past few months, combined with her transience, probably make tracking down her killer more difficult than in many other homicide cases. Hopefully, the extra steps being taken by the RCMP to find Bobbie Lynn Moose’s killer will be successful and all of Thompson, as well as Bobbie Lynn Moose’s friends and family, will be able to rest easy knowing that that violent individual will no longer roaming the streets.
