https://www.cbc.ca/missingandmurdered/mmiw/profiles/myrna-madeline-montgrand
Myrna Montgrand, 14, was going to school and spent a lot of time babysitting her young nieces. She disappeared from La Loche, Sask., on April 21, 1979. Her case is still open and the RCMP still consider her disappearance suspicious. Her niece Myrna Montgrand, who was named after her aunt, is still searching for answers. The family still does ground searches regularly.
The last time Dora LaPrise saw her 14-year-old sister was in 1979, and she encouraged Myrna to go home to her mom.
Myrna Montgrand had gone to her sister’s house in La Loche, Sask., with some friends, and LaPrise wanted her to go home to her mom’s house not far away.
Myrna didn’t want to.
“The next day, mom came over and she told me that [Myrna] never came home [and to] go look for her. So we told the cops, and they said she was out partying with her friends, but she said she would come back,” said LaPrise.
“Me and my mom would just walk in the bush, look all over for her. Mom just looked, looked, looked until the day she died.”
Myrna was Dene, but they did not have a home First Nation.
Saskatoon RCMP say Myrna was spending time with a group of people at a party that night and was last seen around 5 a.m. outside a home in La Loche.
“She used to come to my house, clean up the house for me and watch the kids with me. She helped out my mom a lot,” said LaPrise.
“She was fun to be around.... She’s loving.”
LaPrise is frustrated with the investigation.
She said she was told by a man in the community that he was walking home around the time Myrna disappeared and he heard a girl screaming near a construction site.
“He said that he heard a girl scream out for [her] mom,” she said.
“People were drunk coming ... out of that garage they were building. He said five, six people came out of there.”
LaPrise believes her sister’s remains could be hidden under a bar and garage that were built on the site, and she doesn’t know why police didn’t follow up the lead at the time.
She wants to see the site excavated.
“I'm pretty sure her body's there. People have told me to go investigate it, but how can I do that by myself?”
Myrna’s niece, Myrna Montgrand, who was named after her aunt, is still actively searching for answers.
The RCMP said the case is still open and they are investigating whenever new information comes in.
