On Labour Day weekend in 2020, Chelsea Poorman, a 24-year-old Cree woman from Kawacatoose First Nation, walked out of a friend’s apartment in downtown Vancouver. At 12:57 a.m. she told her sister on the phone that she’d met “a new bae.” It was the last time her family heard her voice.

Chelsea walked with a limp from a 2014 accident and couldn’t go far without her leg brace.

Yet in April 2022, her remains were found under a blanket behind a vacant mansion in Shaughnessy, about six kilometres away. Parts of her remains were missing, and the cause of death was undetermined. Police ruled her death not suspicious.

In this episode, we follow Chelsea’s family through a ten-day wait for a public alert and a nineteen-month search they largely carried themselves. We look at the questions the official story doesn’t answer and the investigations into how her case was handled, which are still unresolved. And we look at why her family, and Indigenous leaders across Canada, refuse to accept that no one knows what happened.

If you have information about Chelsea Poorman, contact the Vancouver Police Department’s Major Crime Section at 604-717-2500.

To see the sources we used to create this episode read more about this case, visit our website at vanishedvoicespodcast.com, or click here.

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We refuse to let these voices vanish.

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