Lakota Rae Renville was so shy as a teen that when she graduated high school she was reluctant to walk across the stage.
She was a straight-laced girl who didn't smoke cigarettes, drink or take drugs, says her sister, Waynette. But her life took a dramatic turn after she met a man online in 2003 and moved from South Dakota to the Kansas City area.
Lakota, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribe, told her sister that she had a boyfriend who had two jobs, so she didn't need to work. She kept secret most everything else about her life.
Two years later, just 22 years old, Lakota was murdered. Her badly bruised, naked body was wrapped in a carpet pad, rolled in a blanket and dumped in a gravel lot in Independence, Missouri. No one has been arrested.
Police say Lakota was a prostitute who worked in Kansas City, but Waynette believes her sister was a victim of sex trafficking — a growing concern among law enforcement and activists in Indian Country. "She had to be forced into that line of work," she says. "She would never, ever do that."
For five years, Waynette called the police every week, hoping a new tip or DNA would lead to Lakota's killer. She did not want her sister forgotten. "She was loved," Waynette says. "She had lots of friends and family."
In January 2017, she says, her sister's boyfriend contacted her and denied having anything to do with Lakota's death. Waynette has little hope now that the case will ever be solved.
Lakota was buried on the South Dakota reservation. Her headstone is engraved with an angel.
"We're just not the same anymore," Waynette says. "It's agonizing to not know who did that, why they did that."
At first, Waynette says she was angry with the world because of Lakota's murder. Now, she says, breaking into tears, she feels differently, believing that whoever killed her sister "will deal with this — either in this lifetime or the next."
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