LISSA Yellowbird-Chase stood on a marina and watched through binoculars as police towed a rusty pick-up truck from a vast lake in North Dakota, containing the body of a mother-of-five.

Olivia Lone Bear, who had disappeared nine months earlier, would have stayed in her watery grave had it not been for the determination of amateur detective Lissa, who refused to give up the search when police failed to find her.

13 Lissa Yellowbird Chase first started searching for people in 2012

This is just one of dozens of cases involving missing which Lissa has been trying to crack - most of which involve the disappearance of native American women.

A disproportionate number - potentially thousands - of native women go missing or are murdered each year in the US and Canada.

A staggering 84 per cent of Native American women experience violence in the lifetime, which was highlighted in the 2017 film Wind River, portraying the murder investigation of a local girl from a reservation - a legal designation for an area of land managed by a Native American tribe.

13 Jeremy Renner plays an expert tracker who stumbles across the frozen body of a local girl in Wind River (2017) Credit: Kobal Collection - Rex Features

Native American tribes have their own police forces to investigate and prosecute some crimes on their land, but murder has to be investigated by federal police.

Because in many cases it's not clear if the victim has been murdered or missing, many Native American disappearances slip through the cracks as it's not clear which jurisdiction they fall under.

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Lissa, 50, suggests homelessness, under-education and sex trafficking are to blame for so many indigenous people vanishing.

And the reason she's dedicated her life to finding the disappeared is because it so easily could have been her.

Sold for sex and addicted to drugs

At 15, Lissa ran away from home and fell for a man who trafficked her into the sex trade.

After months of abuse, she escaped to Minneapolis and enrolled in college but, after falling pregnant at 18, she found herself in and out of violent relationships and homelessness.

This eventually spiralled into an all-consuming drug addiction.

13 Olivia Lone Star disappeared in October 2017 Credit: Facebook

13 The pick-up truck Olivia borrowed from a friend was dragged from the lake Credit: Jessica Lussenhop/BBC

“I was addicted to drugs and drink and I started selling the product to feed my own habit,” Lissa tells Sun Online. “It was cocaine, crack cocaine, meth, pills, everything.

“I had two rounds with full blown addiction – my kids were 11, 9 and 7 for the first one."

When her children were taken into foster care, Lissa turned to sex work in order to fund the fight to have them returned.

“I did what I had to do,” she says.

13 Lissa - pictured with youngest kids Obie and Micah - spiralled into addiction when they were three and four

“While I was selling sex I got into situations where people were violent or may even have tried to kill me."

'My story matches every one of the missing women'

Lissa eventually trained as a legal advocate for Native Americans.

But she was still battling addiction and was arrested with a bag full of methamphetamine and cash in 2006 and she spent three years in a North Dakota jail.

She says these experiences have spurred her on in her quest to help indigenous women.

“My story matches every story of a missing or murdered indigenous person – the homelessness, the under-education, being sex-trafficked, doing sex work – all of that," she says.

“I come from an underprivileged and marginalised people and it’s a very common story.

“I could easily have been one of those that people are looking for – or not looking for.

“That created the passion within me to have some compassion for the people who are missing – they are my people, my relatives.”

13 Lissa's SUV with the number plate SEARCH Credit: Jessica Lussenhop/BBC

'Police don't do anything'

After her stint in prison, Lissa went on to be a welder, but eventually gave up that work to devote herself to searching for missing women.

She even splashed the last of her savings on a small boat and fishing sonar equipment to help in her hunt for Olivia.

Feeling “drawn” to the lake, Lissa went out on the water and, using the equipment, detected a rectangular shape on the muddy bed.

She took her find to the Mountrail County Sheriff’s office who took on the investigation.

They found Olivia's truck at the bottom of the lake nine months after she was reported missing by her family. Her killer has never been found.

“I think she was killed and the truck was dumped into a lake,” Lissa says. “Police say they are investigating but I don’t see them doing anything."

13 Then scan of the lake bed found Olivia's truck Credit: Courtesy of Lissa Yellow Bird-Chase

A snapshot survey of 71 US urban areas where the problem of indigenous people going missing is rife found 506 cases between 2010 and 2018, and it’s thought that women living on tribal lands are ten times more likely to be murdered.

Disappearances are not always kept on record so data is scarce on the actual figure of Missing or Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWGs), but in 2016 there were 5,712 reported cases worldwide.

13 Credit: Jessica Lussenhop/BBC

Lissa says her own story had spurred her on to be a champion of Native American women

'I found the body of my own niece'

But it's not just tribal women who Lissa helps find.

She first started searching for the disappeared in 2012, when oil field worker KC Clarke went missing on the Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota.

His abandoned truck was found and, although two people were eventually convicted of his death in a murder-for-hire scheme, the body of the 29-year-old was never located.

“I was like ‘Holy cow! This kid’s missing on the rez [reservation] and he’s not a tribal member, he’s not even from North Dakota, he’s a non-Indian,” she previously told Aljazeera.

The main issue was about jurisdiction - who should investigate KC's disappearance?

He vanished on the reservation so a report needed to be filed with tribal police, but they do not look into cases involving non-Native Americans.

13 KC Clarke's disappearance was the first Lissa looked in to, and it helped raise her profile as someone who looked for missing people

Although still working as a welder, Lissa wanted to help the family so she passed out flyers on the reserve, interviewed suspects and spent days camping out in the fields, looking for freshly turned earth and other clues.

As her interest grew, she began to devote herself to more cases – some very close to home.

“I got sucked into the vortex and it became a spiritual quest,” she says. “I’m a mother and I know how it would feel if my child was missing and nobody was helping.

“One of the cases was my own niece and I found her body. I was very close to her father and he died two years before she did so I was supposed to be looking out for her so that was a really difficult case for me personally.”

13 Lake Sakakawea in North Dakota where Olivia's body was found Credit: Alamy

The details surrounding her niece's case are too painful for Lissa to talk about, but her work investigating KC's disappearance cemented her as the go-to for families desperately seeking vanished relatives.



'They said he'd been fed to the pigs'

As her case load grew, Lissa founded a group of helpers called the Sahnish Scouts and, while looking for Olivia Lone Bear, she quit her job to search full-time.

Living off savings, she was soon forced to give up her apartment and is now planning to buy a camper van to use as her home, office and transport.

“I’m travelling so much now I’ll just go from one case to the next,” she says. “It has become my life.”

Lissa now has numerous case files full of evidence and clues that might one day allow her to reunite a family with the body of their missing loved one.

She has cases in South and North Dakota, Montana, Iowa and Minnesota and not all are Native Americans.

13 Olivia was missing for nine months before Lissa tracked her down Credit: Facebook

Current quests include searching for Ron Johnson, a 74-year-old grandfather who disappeared on the way home from a casino in New Town, and 38-year-old father-of-five Joe Bruce, who went missing last June after telling his partner he was rushing to the bedside of his severely disabled son, who was in hospital.

A couple of days after his disappearance, police found the family’s van at the end of a remote dirt road. The keys were still in the ignition, but there’s been no further news on the case.

13 Joe Bruce vanished after saying he was going to visit his son in hospital and his family are desperate for answers Credit: Facebook

After Joe’s mum was told he’d been “fed to the pigs”, Lissa hunted down pig farms in the hope of a lead but at the moment there has been no news about him since.



Kids are proud of me 'doing my thing'

As well as tip-offs that come from her numerous pleas on Facebook, Lissa and her volunteers talk to family and witnesses, scour acres of reservation for disturbed patches of earth and scan vast bodies of water for clues.

“We had a lot of resistance in the beginning,” she says. “As late as last summer I was threatened with jail, for interference with an investigation but now that we are getting a name and a following some jurisdictions are inviting me, saying come train our officers.

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“We want to learn how to do what you do and they’re more open to it. They see what we do as more of a resource than a threat so that’s good.”

She is now close to her children - Sharna, 32, Lindsay, 30, CJ, 28 Obie, 21 Micah 20 – and has eight grandchildren and they support her valuable work

“The children just say ‘mum’s doing her thing.’ I’m a recovering addict and I used to be out ‘doing my thing’ 15 years ago and it was a very negative thing.

“So now I’m doing something positive they’re just happy I’m not drinking and drugging.”