Still no sign of tamra

By Veronica Rhodes
The Leader-Post

Darryl Naytowhow knows there will always be a void in his life after weeks of searching failed to turn up the precious treasure that was lost -- Tamra Jewel Keepness.

"We may never see this girl again. There are days I try and go back, I have gone through our search plans. What could we have done better? Are there places we could have missed?" said the leader of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation Search and Rescue team.

The team from the northern Saskatchewan reserve spent roughly five weeks in Regina following Keepness's disappearance, assisting with searches in and around Regina and on two First Nations in the Qu'Appelle Valley -- searches that failed to turn up the little girl.

Keepness was last seen heading to bed in her family's Core area home on July 5, 2004, and was reported missing to police the following day. Since then, family and community members have waited for answers, but to date, there have been none. Foul play is suspected but no one has been charged in connection to the case.

"It is still a question mark," said Hanya Peigan, Keepness's great aunt.

In the weeks after her disappearance, Naytowhow said his 15-member team helped co-ordinate and execute searches with Regina police and other volunteers. The team was used to conducting searches in northern Saskatchewan and had to adjust to combing city streets, which made determining what found items may be important, difficult.

"You have children's clothing all over the place, you have items that could be considered evidence: broken glass, blood on broken glass, a torn shirt, a kid's shoe with blood on it. But it could be a young child that got hurt and left their shoe behind when they fell off their bike, that kind of thing," Naytowhow explained in a recent interview.

While he admitted to being concerned about what his team may find, Naytowhow said finding nothing is always a good thing.

"If we don't find a body, if we don't find evidence of foul play, then that is always a good thing, meaning she's alive somewhere. That's something I always like to say when we're doing our searches and that just motivates our team to continue harder," Naytowhow said, admitting the team did the best they could on the search.

While the intensity of the initial search may have died down, it is still an active investigation for Regina police. Elizabeth Popowich, spokesperson for the police service, said two primary investigators are still pursuing avenues in the open case -- a noticeable change from early on in the investigation when the police service poured all available resources into looking for the young girl and the cause of her disappearance.

Popowich explained a six-person task force dedicated to the investigation was assigned to review the case in March 2005. As of June 2006, two senior investigators have remained on the case, but are also working on other major crimes investigations.

"This is still an open case. We will continue to pursue avenues and are pursuing avenues of investigation and new leads. It's an investigation, though, that is awaiting information," Popowich said, adding there is still a $25,000 reward for information leading directly to Keepness's whereabouts.

In the two years since Keepness disappeared, other cases of missing persons in the province have captured the public's attention. It also raised questions within the provincial government, which led to the creation of the missing persons task force in November 2005.

"The Tamra Keepness case, certainly Melanie Dawn Geddes, in Saskatoon Daleen Kay Bosse -- those cases all were brought to public attention around the same time," said Justice Minister Frank Quennell.

"They all, I think, had an effect on me and on the government in saying, 'is there more that we could be doing than we are already doing', recognizing that the police services seemed to be doing a fairly good job of these cases," Quennell said.

With the creation of the task force, the province will provide almost $2 million over three years to fund eight new police positions. Also part of the task force is the development of a provincewide policy for reporting and investigating missing person cases, as well as the creation of a network of police, aboriginal and community groups to provide support for families and communities of missing people.

The increased public awareness also led to the launch of the Saskatchewan Association of Chiefs of Police Web site (www.sacp.ca) that includes information on every missing persons case in the province, as well as every unsolved case of found human remains.

"We're confident that in Saskatchewan, it is now an even higher priority than it was before and that we're doing a great deal to make sure that the kind of effort that went into the Tamra Keepness case isn't unique. That those kinds of efforts can be put into these cases and hopefully some of them will have a better result than unfortunately we had in that case," Quennell said.

Naytowhow has developed his own plan, which he is hoping will become a reality this summer. He and his team are planning to become certified to train others in basic level one of search and rescue. Once certified, team members would hold training sessions in Prince Albert, Saskatoon and Regina.

"My personal goal is to have six people within all our First Nations in Saskatchewan trained in search and rescue basic level one," he said.