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In the weeks after Chief’s body was found, her family described their last moments together. Daughter Danielle Wolfe said Chief had come by for a visit with her three grandchildren. They laughed and joked for hours together.

In a 2007 interview, Wolfe described her mother as a caring woman who was always laughing and willing to help others in need. She was separated from her husband for several years but remained close with her family. While married, she drove a school bus in Onion Lake. She worked service, hotel and janitorial jobs in Lloydminster before taking a construction job in northern Saskatchewan. She had quit the job two weeks prior to her death to move back to Onion Lake to be with family and had gone to Lloydminster to visit friends on the weekend she died.

“We want to know why someone would want to hurt her,” Wolfe said in 2007.

The StarPhoenix reported in 2009 that Heathen was grieving the loss of one of her children — an adult son who died of his injuries after a vicious beating at a house party earlier in the year — when she disappeared. Decades earlier, she lost another son, a two-year-old boy, when he wandered onto a road and was fatally struck by a car. Family members said she never recovered from the loss.

We want to know why someone would want to hurt her

Her sister, Ruby Whitstone, said in 2009 that she both accepted and hated the possibility that her sister had unknowingly accepted a ride from someone with bad intentions.

Even if it was bad news, the family would rather know the truth than suffer through uncertainty, she said.