Amber Alyssa Tuccaro

 

Amber Alyssa Tuccaro was born on January 3rd, 1990. Amber was a member of the Mikisew Cree First Nation and from Fort Chipewyan, Alberta. She was adopted into a family with four older brothers. Her mother, Vivian (also known as Tootsie), described Amber as a funny girl who loved to sing (even if Tootsie says she wasn’t the best), laugh, and make others laugh. One brother, Paul, said she had big dreams and was a vibrant human being.

Amber was also a dedicated mother to her son, Jacob, who Tootsie said was “Her number one priority in her life”. At the time of her 2010 disappearance, Jacob was 14 months old. Soon, he will enter adolescence. 

The Disappearance:

It was August 2010 in Alberta, Canada. At the time, Amber, 20, and Jacob were living in Fort McMurray, a smaller city in northern Alberta, with her mother, but had also spent a few short periods in a women’s shelter.

On Tuesday, August 17th, Amber and Jacob boarded a one-way West-Jet flight to Edmonton, with an acquaintance named R (I will be referring to people involved in rumors relating to the case only by a false initial for clarity’s sake). According to a timeline shared by Justice for Amber Tuccaro, a Facebook page run by her mother, the two met only a few weeks before her disappearance at Unity House, the aforementioned women’s shelter. Tootsie had some concerns about the trip, but Amber reassured her that she would only be gone two days.

After a short flight, the three of them check into the Nisku Place Motel, just across Highway 2 from the airport, as it will be cheaper than the hotels in the city itself. Despite being called Edmonton International Airport, it is actually located in the small community of Nisku, approximately 27km south of Edmonton. Bordering on Nisku’s south edge is another small municipality in the greater Edmonton area, Leduc.

Amber and R apparently had plans to go to Edmonton later on.

On August 18th, after their first night in the hotel, Amber decided to leave the apartment sometime around 8 pm, give or take half an hour, leaving Jacob in the care of R.  Leaving the motel was the last confirmed sighting of Amber Tuccaro.

Shortly after this, Amber hitched a ride with an unknown man. Some places say her last confirmed sighting was in the motel before leaving, while other sources report that she was seen getting into a vehicle (description unreleased).

According to Tootsie, she and Amber had been in regular contact throughout the day, but at some point, Amber stopped responding. This worried Tootsie, as she and Amber were close and she knew her habits. She eventually called R, but R reassured Tootsie that Amber was at the motel sleeping with Jacob.

The “Investigation”:

On August 19th, R contacted Amber’s mother to let her know she had not returned from Edmonton, and suggested that Amber had left in the middle of the night. This immediately set off red flags for Tootsie, given that Amber would never leave her son unattended so long with someone she had only known for a short time. Moreover, the continued lack of contact or social media postings scared her deeply. Knowing something was wrong, Tootsie quickly reported Amber missing to the RCMP.

Sadly, and unsurprisingly given Canada’s immense amount of anti-Indigenous racism, the RCMP told Amber’s mother that she was likely just out partying, and to call back in 24 hours. This is just the first of many, many screw-ups by the RCMP in this case, too numerous for me to mention in their entirety.

While it appears a missing persons case was opened after that 24-hour interval, it was then closed 8 days later on the 28th after unsubstantiated reports of a sighting. It is not believed the sighting was properly confirmed. On September 4th, the RCMP announced that they had no reason to believe that Amber was in danger, and that they “knew” she was still in the Edmonton area.

Amber’s missing persons case was not reopened until over a month after her disappearance, on September 23, 2010, and as such, the investigation that should have begun immediately was delayed more than four weeks. It took authorities four months to interview her mother.

The investigation, to me at least, seems to have very little evidence, beyond one major piece. Due to their initial lack of care, their delay in reporting, and other major bungles. One of these fuck ups was the RCMP accidentally destroying Amber’s belongings, which had never been properly investigated or processed. The other major fuck up you will also often see is because of the Tuccaro family’s statements that R, the last confirmed person to see Amber alive, was never interviewed.

The RCMP did not keep in good contact with the Tuccaro family regarding their investigation.

In 2019, they publicly apologized for their handling of the investigation.

The investigation quickly seemed to go cold.

The Evidence:

On August 28th, 2012, two years after her disappearance, the RCMP released a short clip of Amber Tuccaro’s final phone call, in a first for the RCMP in this sort of investigation. They also stated that they now believed Amber was a victim of homicide.

The phone call is chilling. Though only about a minute of it has been released to date, the call itself was 17 minutes long. In it, a scared-sounding Amber speaks with another man who repeatedly asks her where he is taking her, though clearly not believing him, and tells him, “You better not be taking me anywhere I don’t want to go.”

At one point near the end of the call, she seems to ask the man driving to pull over, and he replies with something about “gravel” before the call seems to abruptly end.

You can easily find the call online if you want. But I do find it pretty upsetting, hearing a scared young mother in what was almost certainly the last moments of her life, in what is the most effective anti-hitchhiking audio ever.

In fact, Tootsie had cautioned Amber about hitchhiking before. Not only was it dangerous in general, but especially for an Indigenous woman like Amber, who was at statistically MUCH higher risk of violence and homicide. As a cautionary measure, she would tell Amber to call someone and have someone on the line if she was going to hitchhike. Sadly, that measure was not enough to deter the sick bastard who killed Amber.

Though it is not known if it was a message she left or something he was on the line for, the call was made to one of Amber’s brothers, who was incarcerated at the Edmonton Remand Center at the time. Because of this, the call was recorded. It is widely believed that Amber had smartly done this on purpose.

Though this was the first time the RCMP had released a call like this, many were upset at the length of time it took them to release the video.

Finding Amber:

Coincidentally, four days after the call was released, partial skeletal remains were discovered by horseback riders on a rural property near Leduc, including a skull. These remains were quickly identified as Amber’s.

Eerily, the remains were found about a 17-minute drive away from Amber’s last known location —the same length as Amber’s call.

Despite the driver repeatedly telling Amber they were heading to 50th street, a main street that went North/South through Leduc and would eventually turn into a road that led up to Edmonton.

Because it appears Tuccaro’s remains were found near Range Road 241 and Highway 623/Rolley View Road, it seems her killer may have driven her down the road leading from the Airport motel, Township Road 502, turned right on Highway 814, and then left onto Rolley View. There are a couple of other potential routes, but this seems most straightforward and likely to me. These are all rural roads.

Due to this, it seems that Amber was likely killed shortly after the call ended. The killer likely either killed her in his vehicle and dumped her body in the field or killed her once she left the vehicle.

At one point, Amber’s family asked for her remains to be exhumed and retested, as they had some doubts as to whether the remains found were actually Amber’s, citing the unusual speed at which the remains were identified and potential differences in dental records. I have not found any follow-up as to whether this has happened, or if the family still has some questions as to whether or not the remains were of their loved one.

It has been over 11 years since Amber Tuccaro’s disappearance, and to my knowledge, there have been no suspects or persons of interest named in the case.

The Theories:

Due to the lack of formal suspects or POIs, there is much speculation and rumours surrounding her disappearance. This final section will list some of the theories as to who killed Amber Tuccaro. 

R: Amber’s family has said online that they believe R knows something more about Amber’s appearance than she is letting on and may be involved. This is due to the inconsistent stories they said R had given them relating to Amber’s whereabouts. While I absolutely think this is a possibility, R was involved, or knows more than she says, especially given their newer friendship, it is also quite possible R lied about Amber being back at the motel in hopes to stall Tootsie’s panic, assuming that Amber would be back later. However, assuming it is true that R was never properly interviewed or located, the lack of investigation into her case seems like a massive oversight.

Y: In January 2020, a man made several posts on social media stating that he believed his father, Y, had murdered Amber Tuccaro, as well as several other women in Canada and the US dating back to the 1970s, and had submitted this info to various authorities. The man claimed that he and several other family members all identified the man on the Tuccaro call as Y. They also stated that he lived rurally in the greater Edmonton area, and had a history of violence. He also claims he shared recordings of his father with Amber’s relatives, and they did say they sounded similar. As promising as this sounds, it seems to have gone a fat nowhere. It appears that a month earlier, he had presented a similar list of disappearances he believed his father had potentially been involved in to Banff RCMP, but that they had investigated the claims and that many of the cases he believed his father to be tied to were already solved. It does not know if Y has been fully ruled out or not, but the RCMP did refer to the posts as “erroneous” information, and the man has taken his original posts off social media.

K: This one isn’t mentioned on the news, only on Facebook comments by a man who feels he is a potential witness. He says he saw Amber leaving the airport around 7:30/8 pm with a man named K driving a vehicle. He said he saw K return to the airport without Amber at around 9:30 pm, looking “tired out with a red face”. He claims that K's voice also matches the call. This one seems particularly interesting to me, but given that the man says he reported it to the police, it is not known whether this man was thoroughly investigated and ruled out, and given that he has never been publicly named, is likely not a suspect. The person with him may not have been Amber.

A serial killer: Beginning in 2015, police admitted that they were considering the possibility that there may be a serial killer operating in the Leduc area. First, there are at least 15 unsolved cases of MMIWG in the greater Edmonton area. More potentially damningly, is that between 2002 and 2015, four different Indigenous women’s bodies were all found within one small rural area near Leduc, including Amber Tuccaro. Apparently, all but Amber were involved in sex work, which sadly placed them as some of the most vulnerable adults out there.

In 2015, the skull of Delores Brower was found near Rolley View. She was reported missing in 2005 and was last seen hitchhiking on May 12, 2004. She was 33.

Found the day after her murder on September 22, 2002, Edna Bernard was also found in a field in Leduc after being last seen in a vehicle with unknown people. She had apparently been beaten, strangled, and set on fire. She was a 28-year-old mother of six. Her remains were found in a wooded area along Range Road 245, just north of Rolley View Road. This is just around 7 kilometers west of where Amber’s remains were found, slightly closer to Leduc itself. At one point, someone had been taken into custody, but the family did not believe it was the real killer, and no charges have been laid.

Finally, on July 7, 2003, the badly decomposing remains of Katie Ballantyne, 40, were found in a farm field near Road 235 and north of Township Road 500. Township Road 500 is the road immediately north of Rolley View. She had been reported missing on May 5th of the same year by a friend who had said she had last seen her eight days earlier in Edmonton. Ballentyne was also a mother.

To help you visualize, all of these women’s remains were found in a short rectangle of space just east of Leduc, spanning across a very small area. There are mostly farm fields in the vicinity, but there are also small wooded patches, a couple of small bodies of water, and a landfill.

All women were Indigenous and vulnerable, and all had been hitchhiking. At one point earlier, Bernard and Ballantyne’s murders had also been suspected of being done by the same killer. Thomas Svekla, convicted of killing one Edmonton sex worker, is a suspect in their killings as well as several other homicides. He has been serving a life sentence since 2007. In 2015, the RCMP said they would conduct more searches for bodies in the area, but one still has to wonder if others have not been found, given that Delores Brower’s were not discovered for a decade.

Finally, there is one other body found in that area over the years, that of Corrie Ottenbreit. Though Corrie was not Indigenous, she was also involved in street sex work. She had last been seen on May 9th, 2004, in Edmonton. Shockingly, her remains were found at the same time as Delores Brower. Given that they disappeared within a few days of each other, there is a chance that they both may have been killed at the same time, or had been killed within days of each other and dumped so close to each other that their remains easily intermingled.

While most “potential serial killer” theories are a bit sensationalist and perhaps do not hold much water, this is the theory I think I lean the most towards. There are just too many similarities in circumstances, victims, and locations of bodies for them not to be connected somehow.

??: This one doesn’t seem to hold much water, but I will mention it anyway as it leads to the final theory I wish to mention. Basically, in one of the main YouTube uploads playing the Tuccaro call, the uploader, MT, claims in their post that they believe there are actually two killers, and that they have seen them twice in Edmonton. They give no other info, but imply they believe these men are the killers based on the audio. They say this because they say these two people look nothing like “O”, one of the main names in this case… Which brings me to Pat… the only person involved I will fully name…

O is a man from an area of Alberta, around an hour northwest of Leduc. While he is not a POI or suspect, his name is often brought up when Amber’s case is, so it would not be proper to ignore this. Of course, have changed his name to a random initial. O is a registered sex offender. At some point after his release from prison in the early 2000’s for a sex charge relating to an underage person, the RCMP released a public safety warning about him. He has a previous criminal record and would lure victims with newspaper ads regarding volunteering at a ranch. His charges also involved sex workers and choking.

This appears to be a pattern for O, as watchdogs frequently report similar, suspicious ads on Kijiji by various aliases, looking for people to work on a ranch in exchange for room, board, and various experiences, ranging from practical to seemingly appropriately spiritual, all within the same area O’s ranch is known to be. The most recent of these ads was posted in January 2022.

At least three separate women have come forward and claimed that the voice on the Tuccaro case is also O’s.