Vanessa was four years old when her mother, 26-year-old Gloria Levina Moody, was murdered. Her brother, Dan, was three. Gloria, whom everyone called Levina or just Lee for short, was from the Bella Coola reserve of the Nuxalk Nation. She was the second oldest of eight children.
On October 23, 1969, Lee, her brother Dave and her parents left for Williams Lake. The family checked into a room at the Ranch Hotel. The following day, Lee and Dave hit the local bars before ending up back at the Ranch Hotel, where Lee was seen at 10 p.m. No one remembered what time she left or who she was with, and no one had seen her get into a car.
Lee’s body was found the next day on a cattle trail outside Williams Lake. She had been raped and beaten to death. Her parents, David and Daisy, took in Vanessa and Dan and raised them along with their own children.
“My grandfather really blamed himself,” says Vanessa. “He ended up becoming an alcoholic and died in 1972 in his forties.” Vanessa says elders tell the story of how he aged in a matter of days. “He locked himself in my mom’s room, and he just lay there. He didn’t eat or sleep, and when he came out, everybody in the whole town talked about how his hair went pure white.”
Vanessa says the first time the family heard from the RCMP was nearly three decades after her mother’s murder. Two RCMP officers brought along several boxes of files from the murder investigation and told the family that they believed three men from Williams Lake were responsible, and all three had died.
In 2007, the RCMP’s E-Pana unit added Lee’s case to their list of murdered and missing women along Highways 16, 97, and 5. Lee’s case is the oldest of the 18 files. The reinvestigation found that the original three suspects were behind the murder, but because they are dead, her murder is considered resolved, but unsolved.
Vanessa’s grandparents are gone. Her uncle Ron, Lee’s older brother, was also murdered, except his case was solved. His killer got 18 months. Sadly, it was too late for Dan. He was addicted to drugs and alcohol and died a few years ago. “My kid brother would always introduce himself as, ‘Hi, my name is Dan, and I’m damaged goods,'” Vanessa says. “Every one of our lives took a wrong turn after the murder. Even within the community, even today, people have a hard time talking about it.”
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Eve Lazarus is a reporter and author, and she hosts and produces the true crime podcast. This is an excerpt from Eve’s latest book .
