Delores Marie Whiteman
Delores was born in May,
1946 and was a member of the Standing Buffalo First Nation. Like many aboriginal women who are missing or murdered, Delores found herself vulnerable.
When Delores was a baby, her mother died and she bounced around from relative to relative. Eventually she ended up in the Lebret Indian Residential School.
Delores remained in residential school until she was about 17. However, without any immediate family, Delores didn't have a home to go back to. Once again she bounced from relative to relative, until she finally left for the city of Regina.
It was there, in 1963, that she gave birth to her daughter Lori.
Ellery doe gave birth to a child approx. at least 15 years before. For a short time, the pair lived in an apartment on 12th Avenue across from the old Hudson's Bay store. But like so many aboriginal children in the 1960s, Lori was apprehended and put into care.
Searching for Delores
Lori began searching for her mother in the mid-1980s. Having reconnected with family on Standing Buffalo First Nation and other friends of her mothers, Lori began pulling at threads of her mother's story, trying to figure out where she might be.
Some family received visits from Delores, during which she would indicate where she was headed next. The destinations she mentioned included Saskatoon, Edmonton,
Vancouver, Seattle and California.
Lori is fairly certain that her mother followed a cousin from Standing Buffalo to Vancouver. That woman was working in the sex trade and was murdered by her pimp. Lori, however, does not have definitive proof her mother was also working in the sex trade.
When the Robert Pickton serial killer case broke, Lori provided a DNA sample to the Vancouver police, but she was told they did not find her mother's DNA on Pickton's pig farm.
"There's just puzzles," Lori explains. "She had two other children in Saskatoon after me. So she's known to be there. Both of them are deceased, they were young when they passed away."
Knowing that her mother could have been in Vancouver, Lori posted the only picture she had of her on a bulletin board about missing women in that city. That's when she received one of the most substantial leads she's had in a long time.
"This lady got ahold of me," Lori said. "I've met her since then. I went out to Vancouver and met her and she took me through the downtown eastside to different places and she said, 'I'm virtually 100 per cent certain that your mom and I worked out of the same hotel. I remember her really well.'"
The woman told Lori that Delores and a handful of other women
had an agreement with a hotel owner. In exchange for purchasing items from the hotel and not causing any trouble, they could work out of the hotel. The woman recalled that Delores had children.
Still, Lori does not have a way of proving the woman's story.
The Case today
A few years ago, RCMP and Regina police sat down with Lori to ask about her mother. They asked a lot of questions, took a new DNA samples and went through the information they had found. They also informed Lori about those two siblings who passed away in Saskatoon.
In 1995, a woman claiming to be Delores gave a statement to police in Edmonton. The records have since been purged, so the details of the statement are gone. Lori also has her doubts that person was actually her mother. The strangest thing.....
Not long after that, Lori received a phone call from police who said they had done all they could and that her mother's case was being turned back over to Project Care in Edmonton.
