UNSOLVED CASES WITH TIES TO FORT ST. JOHN
PAMELA NAPOLEON
Sherry Dominic wishes she could have had the strength to go take a closer look at her family cabin, destroyed by fire, when the police were there with a dog that summer day two years ago.
“To this day, I think: What if I would have went closer to the cabin? I keep that in my mind, you know, what if?” Dominic said in the kitchen of her home on Blueberry River First Nation, a reserve about an hour north along the Alaska Highway from Fort St. John.
She was too emotional about the fire that day — too many memories of her late brother associated with that cabin she had been so sorry to lose in an unexpected fire earlier that month — so she stood some distance away, smoking a cigarette, while the dog sniffed around.
The dog did not find the human remains found on the bed a few weeks later.
They belonged to Pamela Napoleon, 42, a childhood friend who had once lived a hard life, hitchhiking from one couch to another around B.C. and Alberta, before finally getting her own home back on the Blueberry reserve.
“Sometimes we don’t know where you are and it would be nice if you could keep in contact with us, because one of these days we are going to be going around looking for you,” Dominic recalled a mutual friend telling Napoleon during those wandering years.
That was then, though, before Napoleon got her house in the community, where she would put her culinary school talents to use cooking up meals for her friends and her adult sons, who lived nearby.
“She just came home and stayed home. She stayed here because she had a place to call home. It was her own little cabin. She would go to Fort St. John to do her shopping or whatever, but she would always come home,” says Dominic, a band councillor.
That is why Dominic knew something was wrong when she had not heard from her friend in a while after receiving a final text message from her on July 8, 2014, when she was planning to head up to a ranch the band owns in Pink Mountain, about 180 kilometres away, to visit her boyfriend at the time.
“She never made it up there,” said Dominic.
Her family reported her missing to the Fort St. John RCMP, but then Dominic was thrust into the role of amateur detective, organizing volunteer search parties and feeling like she had to pressure the RCMP into taking a look at potential pieces of evidence.
There was the camouflage cap Napoleon had been known to wear that an elder from the community found lying in the ditch on the passenger side of a vehicle that had been abandoned on the side of the road.
There was the surveillance video from a gas station along the highway where she was sure Napoleon would have had to stop, but the owner was away and the RCMP said they could not access the footage — until it was too late.
There were the trips into Fort St. John, to put up missing person posters and to ask the street people with whom Napoleon had been friendly whether they had seen her around.
There was the trip up to the burnt cabin, where the police found nothing, but then a close relative of Napoleon found the bones on Aug. 4, which police were able to identify. But they were unable to determine the cause of death from her bones.
Throughout it all, there was Dominic, other friends and family having to insist to the police that yes, while Napoleon used to travel around a lot, she did not do so anymore.
The RCMP news release issued at the time of her disappearance noted this fact.
“They also advised that this is very out of character for Pamela not to be in contact with them for this long,” said the release, but then added another detail: “She is known to travel to Vancouver, Abbotsford, Prince George, Grande Prairie and Pink Mountain to visit with family and friends.”