My name is Robert Pictou. I'm from Chapel Island First Nation. It's way down in Nova Scotia.
My daughter's picture is here. She's been missing for 20 years and eight months. She left behind seven children. Five of those seven children don't remember what their mother looks like.
She's missing up in Maine. The Bangor Daily News put out the news of what happened, and I saw a lot of contradictions in there. I don't have a lot of education, but then I have traditional ways, which to me are better. I know who did it, but I can't prove who did it. To prove who did it, you've got to have the body. The body is not there. The one who did it went around bragging, saying that she never will be found.
When we go on powwows, I go up to Caribou, Maine, and I see my granddaughters. I bring them information and some pictures of what their mom looked like. They sent me pictures the other day on the laptop, and one of them is the spitting image of her mom.
I believe—I'm not asking anybody else to believe, but I believe—it's my dead daughter being reincarnated, with all the physical aspects of her face, the way she was. My daughter had a mark on this tooth. When I looked at the picture of her daughter, which would be my granddaughter, I saw she had a mark on that tooth—just the opposite. Coincidence? Say what you may, but I see all of her actions, as she's growing up now, that my daughter had when she was younger.
Twenty years is a long time to suffer. You have hatred, but you ask the Creator every night, [Witness speaks in Mi'kmaq], Creator, take some of the hate away. You know, he took a lot of it away, but the anger is still there. Native people are very, very, very forgiving, but we don't forget. We don't forget. I know that my daughter is walking in the spirit world.
They say don't do this, don't do that, don't have hate, don't stir up anything. I have many beliefs. I was introduced to a friend who told me, here, take this and read it and do it. She gave it to me and I looked at it. I said, yes, I have to go and see them. She was a psychic.
What I felt in my heart for 20 years, I kept there. I didn't want to share it with anybody.
I made arrangements to see the psychic. My son came down from Vancouver, and we went there. Sometimes you watch TV and they have this Long Island Medium, all dressed up, her hair all curled up, and they have a big fancy house. She's got great big cars. Her son has a motorcycle, and her daughter is finished college. I didn't know what to expect when I went up to see that lady.
She lived in a rundown apartment. I knocked on her door and she let me and Robert in. I looked around. There was a trunk in the corner and on that trunk was where she had her television set.
She said, “I don't have much, but it's mine. I know what you came for.”
As she was talking she wasn't even looking at me or my son. She was just writing down. I don't even think she knew what she was writing down. She said the spirit of my daughter was guiding her hand.
Then she passed me the paper. I showed it to my son, and we paid her and thanked her. A lot of that hatred I had in my heart for 20 years, a whole lot of it went, but not all of it. She told me that all of the time I was there my daughter's spirit was circling her all the way around, back and forth, and kept on talking to her. As she was talking to her, she was telling her what to say. She in turn was telling us, me and my son.
You go there and you don't expect anything, and then something like this comes up. How did she know this? She's living in Truro; that's down in Nova Scotia. This psychic's in Truro and my daughter was murdered in Bangor, Maine, almost 600 miles away. She never knew her, still doesn't know her. The psychic didn't know her.
I carry the paper with me all the time, The Bangor Daily News. When the state police was called to a disturbance in a bar and grill in downtown Bangor, Judy's bar and grill, they found my daughter laying there bleeding. She had a cut over her eye, a cut in her lip, and a big bruise on top of her head. They asked her what happened.
She said, “My husband and my brother-in-law beat me up.” They asked, “What for?” She said, “They were drunk.”
About that time the men showed up. Her husband was put into the police car in the back seat and he tried to kick out the back window. He was taken to the Bangor lock-up. My daughter was taken to the hospital in Bangor, Maine. My daughter was one who wouldn't leave her children for more than two or three hours at a time. She wouldn't leave them overnight alone. While she was in the hospital for observation, it was not known to anybody that the beating had given her a bad concussion. This is what the psychic told me.
She wasn't one to stay in that hospital. She got out of the hospital and started hitchhiking home. That's about an hour-and-a-half drive in a car. At the same time, her husband was let out of jail. For me, I believe that her husband and her brother-in-law had the car, picked her up, put another beating on her—this is what I was told—and with that one concussion that she already had, they killed her. They didn't know. They didn't mean to kill her. There were three men involved: her brother-in-law, her husband, and another person.
They hid her in the building until nightfall. At nightfall, in the dark of the moon, they turned around and put her on a little boat. They took her way out in the ocean. It was at one of those times when the high tides come in. They stripped her and wrapped her up in a bedsheet that had a floral design.
When they were going out to the ocean or out to the bay, one of them was awful sick, sick all the time, just throwing up. When they got out there, they threw her in, just like a bag of potatoes. They came back and burned every stitch of her clothes. Years later, they bragged about it, saying, “They're not going to find her, they're not going to find her.”
But I went to the traditional teachings. I went to a man who understands a lot of these things. He told me to sit down on the bed, which was all eagle feathers. I was to sit down there, but he said, “Don't sit on the eagle feathers”. I sat down on that bed, and he said, “What's on your mind right now, if you ever start to carry it out, you'll spend the rest of your time in prison”. I just looked at him and said that my mind was all right, that there was nothing wrong with my mind. He said, “Yes, you can go outside and you can tell somebody that, but you can't tell me”. He said, “I know what's on your mind. You should leave it alone. The Creator will look after it.”
Well, I couldn't leave it alone, but I still didn't want to bother those two men, because in my teachings, if you turn around and harm those two people, it's going to come back on you, and it's going to come back on you twice as hard. I left them alone.
I found out later that the one who killed her was her brother-in-law. He suffered for a long while. He contracted AIDS and he died of AIDS. The other one, her husband, can't have a minute's peace because the spirit of my daughter is bothering him so bad. He gets drunk, and when he gets drunk and tries to sleep, he just keeps on hollering her name all the time. That's because she's bothering him all the time. That's what she told the psychic. She told the psychic that he'll never have a minute's peace. She said, “I'll haunt him till the day he dies”.
I want to thank everybody here, especially the women who invited me and my friend up here from Nova Scotia, and I thank everybody for sharing their stories.
[Witness speaks in Mi'kmaq]