1,200.

A number almost incomprehensible without names and faces or some way to register the suffering and loss.

There are partial lists online. Hundreds of names and some photos. But the information is ephemeral, scrolling into view and then gone. The next name and then the next.

There have been calls for an inquiry, hashtags, political slogans, but still nothing to really grasp and pull close.

The Star built its own database of murdered and missing aboriginal women in an attempt to attach as many details to the 1,200 cases as possible. This allowed us to plot points on a map, a bird’s-eye view of the destruction, but little else.

One Ontario family has offered a toehold, welcoming the Star into their homes and improbable past. Three Sisters is about a family ripped apart by violence and then brought together by a search for answers.

When first approached by the Star, the sisters’ surviving children and relatives did not know how Kathleen McGinnis died or where. Why Sarah Mason was stabbed. Or whether Edith Quagon’s killer was caught and punished.

The Star wanted to find the answers, and the family agreed that it was time to try.

“She was taken,” said Janice Henderson, one of Edith Quagon’s daughters and the chief of Mitaanjigamiing First Nation. “I don’t want her to be forgotten.”

Beneath the monotonous tolling of the 1,200, Three Sisters is just one of the stories tucked away in police and court files and in the memories of those left behind.

Edith Quagon: ‘A hard life’

On Nov. 13, 1978, close to midnight, the police officer pulled the hatch and pointed the flashlight down the basement staircase.

At the bottom, the decomposing body was dressed in a blue jacket and black shoes.

The half-nude woman lay face down on an old mattress surrounded by broken glass, an abandoned stove, a bloodstained kitchen countertop and a smoky-brown pair of eyeglasses.

The man from the medical examiner’s office rolled the woman over and found two stab wounds, each a half-inch wide.

Edith Lucille Quagon, her death certificate said, was 43 years old and from Manitou Reserve, Ontario.

Known then as Manitou Rapids, it is where Quagon — listed as “Pagan” in her Indian birth record — and her younger sisters Kathleen and Sarah were raised by fur trappers.

For the sisters’ children, and other surviving relatives, maybe the passage of time had muddied memories. Or their forced adoptions had broken family connections and the chains of reliable information.

They have only a handful of photos of the sisters, including one of Edith in a residential school, her chunky eyeglasses atop a mischievous grin.

Also, photocopies of her baptism and marriage certificates. At 21 years old, she wedded logger and trapper Allan Henderson.

“I miss my mom. I have for a long time,” said Edith’s son James Henderson, a drum keeper for his reserve, Mitaanjigamiing First Nation, which is north of Fort Frances, Ont.

“She grew up living a hard life, working in logging camps. Like one of the men, she was out there strip-cutting, throwing pulp wood around. She was outspoken. Didn’t take anything from anybody, and she backed up whatever she said. I worried about her because of that.”

In January 1978, Janice Henderson, then a student in Peterborough, was nervous but excited for her upcoming trip to Minneapolis. She was hoping to reconnect with her mother, Edith.

Henderson had not seen her for years, though she had snatches of childhood memories. “I remember she used to sing and hum. I remember being in her arms and she would brush my hair. I remember that really comforted me.”

During the ’60s Scoop, an 8-year-old Henderson was taken by children’s services and forced into a foster home. James and sister Donna Marie were also taken.

“My mom said that things were hard for her, but she was able to at least find goodness in people. That stayed with me,” said James, who, after years of drinking and raging at his mother’s death, decided to honour her life by working to heal others as an addictions counsellor.

Janice stayed with an uncle in Minneapolis that winter and planned to visit for a week.

Edith called Janice that first day and said she would see her soon. The next day Janice got the same call. And the day after that. “She would say, ‘I’m afraid that you’re not going to like me.’”

Separated from her husband, Quagon had moved to Minneapolis in the early 1970s. She lived with a man, was unemployed and drank. A tattoo on her shoulder read “Edith + Barnie.”

By week’s end, two hours before Janice had to leave, Quagon showed up.

“I was sitting in the living room. I was waiting for her to come and hug me,” recalled Janice, now the chief of Mitaanjigamiing, an Ojibwa reserve about 350 kilometres west of Thunder Bay. “Finally we did have a few words, but it was really nothing substantive. Then I had to leave. It wasn’t that moment that I wanted.”

Janice returned to Peterborough, Edith to her apartment on the second floor of 818 S. 10th St.

James Henderson recently drove to Minneapolis to visit friends. At the wheel of his pickup, he went through an underpass and felt his chest tighten and breath draw short. He realized he was near the intersection of S. 10th and E. 14th Sts.

Filed in county court and Minneapolis police archives are the details of how and why Edith’s life ended there nearly 40 years ago. Crime scene descriptions, witness statements, the transcript of an apparent confession — none of this known to James or his siblings.

Until the Star unearthed the documents, all Quagon’s children had heard was that a man had been arrested and a trial date set, that a strike by crime lab workers resulted in the case being dismissed and that no one went to prison.

Donna Marie Anderson had known nothing more, though she had seen her mother’s name on a website dedicated to murdered and missing aboriginal women, the list reminding her of a roster of war dead.

On a recent afternoon, Anderson, now 53 years old and living in Thunder Bay, began reading the newly obtained police file, then grabbed a blanket off her couch and wiped her eyes.

“It reads like a nightmare,” Anderson said. “Is this real?”

‘Unknown Indian Female’

Det. Pat Hartigan sat and faced the suspect in the interrogation room.

After some preliminaries — name, address, a brief discussion of the man’s decision to talk without his lawyer present — Hartigan asked Robert Timberlake, an unemployed 23-year-old, what happened to Edith Quagon.

“I stuck out my knife … ,” the suspect started, and Hartigan seemed about to solve the case.

It was the evening of Nov. 16, 1978, three days since Quagon’s decomposing body had been found at the foot of a basement staircase in a Minneapolis apartment building. Initially tagged “Unknown Indian Female.”

Hartigan was not the department’s top homicide detective. He was efficient, though, and well respected by colleagues and the down-and-outs he often comforted with a coffee or meal.

Burly and prone to quote from the Bible, he was also patient and trusted to run a methodical investigation.

Four years before he caught Quagon’s case, Hartigan was named co-winner, Minnesota Police Officer of the Year. Three armed robbery suspects had overrun the Country Club Supermarket and taken 55 hostages. While police snipers waited for their chance, Hartigan and a colleague had negotiated for six hours and talked the three gunmen into releasing all hostages and surrendering.

“He was a dedicated guy,” said Tony Bouza, former Minneapolis police chief. “Hartigan would have been really interested in seeing justice done. The guy was a solid citizen.”

In the early stages of the investigation, Timberlake, a resident of the building, told officers that two unnamed Indian males brought a woman into his apartment. The men did not say who they were or what they were doing. Timberlake said he grabbed a pipe and chased them off.

Another witness said a native American man named Michael Bearghost was last seen with the victim. Police noted, however, that Bearghost was legless and used a wheelchair, and that the only basement access was a wooden staircase accessible through a trap door.

An account from a 15-year-old resident named Lori put the victim in the grip of two threatening Indian males. One of the Indians, she said, was known to carry a switchblade.

Lori was nervous as she stood outside the apartment building and told her story. She could see Timberlake standing in a crowd of onlookers.

None of the witnesses claimed to know much about the murdered woman.

Two days into the investigation, though, police identified the body. The medical examiner found the blade had pierced her heart.

She had been dead about 24 to 40 hours before discovery, left to rot in the cluttered, filthy basement while outside and above ground the residents of Elliot Park walked the snowy sidewalk of S. 10th St.

Quagon had lived at 818 S. 10th St., two doors down from the crime scene at 822 S. 10th, though both addresses were part of the same complex of lowrise brownstone apartment buildings.

While officers did their door-to-doors, police got a tip that sounded credible. A woman running a group home called the homicide squad to say a former resident told her he had seen a body inside a building and a man at the top of the basement stairs wiping blood from a switchblade.

Hartigan learned the young man was the boyfriend of Lori, the 15-year-old who had implicated two native Americans.

The young man identified Timberlake, a black man with a goatee, and said he heard him say, “I cut her heart out.”

Hartigan brought Lori to the station to talk about “what had really happened.”

Lori flipped her story, saying that in the early hours of Nov. 12, Quagon was in Lori’s apartment with Timberlake and others, drinking wine. Edith — “Edie” as Lori called her — was drunk and got into a fight with Timberlake after she tried to steal a broken radio. The two left Lori’s apartment.

Timberlake returned 30 minutes later, Lori said, and picked up a sock off the floor to wipe his knife, saying, “I killed her. I stabbed her in the heart.”

Lori said she asked Timberlake why. He said, “Nobody steals my stuff.”

Hartigan got a warrant to search Timberlake’s one-room apartment. He found nothing until Timberlake’s girlfriend, Beth, walked in.

The young woman was at first tight-lipped. Hartigan persisted, and she said Timberlake left their apartment around 4:30 a.m. on Nov. 12, likely carrying his pocket knife with a grey, glassy handle and a three-inch blade. “He usually does not go anyplace without it,” Beth said.

When Timberlake returned four hours later, Beth said, he was visibly shaken, the cuffs of his blue suit pants flecked with dust. “Robert asked me not to mention anything about the murder to nobody.”

Hartigan had his target and was about to make his next move when his phone rang.

Timberlake felt pinned — he had heard about Hartigan’s relentless march — and had called the detective to say he was being framed. He wanted to come in.

Timberlake was arrested and taken to the county jail. In the interview room, Timberlake informed Hartigan that his lawyer had just told him to say nothing.

As Hartigan was leaving, he mentioned that police were at that moment taking a statement from Beth. Timberlake looked surprised, then threw his lawyer’s card on the table. He was ready to talk.

What happened next was recorded in a two-page document typed by Hartigan. Thirteen questions and 13 terse answers.

Timberlake said he had gone to the basement after Quagon “made a proposition” but could not go through with it. She became angry, he said, and started swinging at him. He drew his knife, swung it and hit her neck. When she moved at Timberlake again, he held the knife out in front of him.

“I stuck out my knife and she fell back,” Timberlake said. “She hollered something, started coming towards me again and I stuck out my knife. She fell to the floor.”

He laid a board over the trap door, entombing Quagon.

When he left, the case file suggests, Quagon was still alive. Blood evidence indicated she crawled along the floor toward the stairs before losing her strength and her life.

Timberlake’s story was otherwise spare. The entire exchange with Hartigan lasted only a few minutes.

After a delay due to the crime lab workers strike, Timberlake went on trial in July 1979. The information in the decades-old file is incomplete, offering only clues at what may have happened next.

One document shows Timberlake’s lawyer asked the judge to toss out the statement given to Hartigan because of a violation of his client’s rights.

A supplemental report from Hartigan shows notes from an interview of a teenager who, in mid-January 1979, shortly after Timberlake was released on bail, overheard the suspect scheming to get witnesses to change their stories.

It is not known if the witnesses recanted. Nor is it clear what evidence the jurors saw and heard.

They deliberated three hours before finding Timberlake not guilty of second-degree murder.

Timberlake died in March of last year. He was 58. Timberlake’s daughter, who was not yet born at the time Quagon was killed, declined to comment for this article, saying, “My dad isn’t here anymore and we’d like to remember him as the man we knew.”

Hartigan retired in 1987 and died in 2006.

On the Manitou Rapids reserve, now known as Rainy River First Nations, Quagon is buried near a tree line, in a cluster of family graves.

Not far from her resting place is that of her sister, Kathleen McGinnis.

Kathleen McGinnis: The hitchhiker

The thin woman with black, shoulder-length hair staggered into the middle of the highway.

A car rounded the curve, the headlights illuminating her jeans and blouse, and swerved, narrowly missing her.

This stretch of Hwy. 1 was unlit. It was cloudy that night, April 3, 1978.

“She was waving her arms as if to stop us,” the driver later told the RCMP. “She seemed to be in a daze, and when I talked to her she did not seem to understand what I was saying.”

The woman did not smell of alcohol, the witness said.

A few motorists, including truckers, had pulled over and tried to talk her off the road. Something was agitating her, but no one could figure out what.

She went back on the highway and stood, waving her arms.

Relatives have circulated different stories about Kathleen McGinnis.

One said she was beaten to death in B.C. or maybe Alberta, her assailants never found.

Another said she died in a car accident, though it was not clear where.

Her son Robert Kalkman, 51, had heard his mother was a prostitute and had been dumped from a john’s vehicle before she was killed.

Her daughter Diane Geissler, 52, had heard the stories, too, and each left her feeling cold and empty.

They knew so little of their mother, in part because in 1965 children’s services scooped them from the Manitou Rapids reserve in northwestern Ontario.

Diane, then 2, and Robert, 1, were placed in foster care, separated and then put up for adoption — both to families in the Fort Frances area. Kalkman’s adoptive parents later moved to Vancouver.

Geissler had no photos. Through the years she had made a few attempts at finding official documents to shed light on her mother’s death and life.

“She was … a shy person with a quiet disposition,” she learned in a 1991 letter from children’s services. “Approximately 15 years old at the time of your birth … Unable to plan for your care. … No means of financial support.” No mention of a birth father.

A mother herself, Geissler had little time to navigate the layers of government agencies that may have held more answers.

Then she saw McGinnis’s name on websites listing murdered and missing aboriginal women in Canada and decided it was time to dig again.

A relative told Geissler that in early 1978, McGinnis heard one of her kids might have been living in Vancouver and headed west.

“She was hitchhiking from Thunder Bay to see if she could follow that lead. Only she never made it there,” said Geissler. “She didn’t find what she was looking for. I think I need to finish that journey for her.”

The first solid lead came in the spring, when the Star found a two-paragraph article in the April 4, 1978, edition of the Calgary Herald. “Woman killed” was the headline. The newspaper reported that the previous evening, Mounties were on Hwy. 1 just outside Calgary investigating a death. No name mentioned.

The RCMP told the Star this summer that it had no information on the death, only an index card with McGinnis’s name on it.

The Star and Geissler then filed freedom of information requests to the Alberta medical examiner’s office, asking for any documents relating to Kathleen McGinnis. The file in the provincial archives was more than 20 pages, some from an RCMP investigation.

Two months later, the documents, many of them censored, arrived.

A ‘routine’ death

The 29-year-old woman lay in two pieces on the highway, about 10 kilometres outside Calgary city limits.

Mounties from the Strathmore detachment found her right leg 130 metres from the rest of her.

The amputation left a gaping torso wound that exposed abdominal organs.

On the cool April evening near Chestermere Lake, officers looked at the dead woman, her brown eyes and broken teeth. She lay on her back in the right westbound lane, her nose and mouth bloody and personal belongings scattered.

Documents in her purse identified her and provided an address on S. Algoma St. in Thunder Bay. It was 9:25 p.m. on April 3, 1978.

Measurements and photographs of the scene were taken. An officer called Thunder Bay police looking for next of kin. The search was unsuccessful.

The Mounties found a friend who knew McGinnis by the alias Candida Mendaze.

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In the days that followed, police located relatives who confirmed that the corpse’s pierced left ear, appendectomy scar and mole under the left eye were those of Kathleen McGinnis.

It is not clear from the censored documents who from the family was notified or what they were told. There is a suggestion that the victim’s mother, Annie McGinnis, was contacted but details were blacked out.

At the time, Kathleen’s two children were teenagers, unaware of their mother’s identity and her death.

Two other witnesses gave statements that night.

One witness statement had been completely censored, another almost fully. The RCMP, citing privacy concerns, blacked out any information that could identify the witnesses.

The investigation concluded that at 9:20, a westbound driver rounded a curve, saw the vehicles parked roadside but did not see the woman in dark clothing standing in the middle of the road.

The post-mortem exam would find McGinnis was drunk when she died.

And because of her dark clothing and the unlit stretch of highway, the RCMP report concluded, “it is conceivable that the vehicle did not see McGinnis prior to the impact.”

The death was ruled an accident, the post-mortem exam classified “routine,” not urgent. No autopsy required. The provincial attorney general’s office said no charges should be laid.

While the newly obtained records provide Geissler and Kalkman with clarity about their mother’s final moments, they leave crucial questions unanswered.

“She’s listed as intoxicated but it’s a stretch of highway that’s bare. It’s not like she walked out of a bar and got hit. There’s nothing around there,” Geissler said. “How did she get there?”

And why was she agitated and trying to flag down cars and trucks?

Weather records show the temperature was around the freezing point that evening. The medical examiner’s inventory of her clothing does not include a coat or shoes. Why was she apparently underdressed in a rural area 10 kilometres outside city limits?

“I close my eyes and I think about it: It’s April. It’s cold. To not have shoes on her feet, to be on the highway (in that location), she either had jumped from a vehicle or got thrown out,” said her son Robert, 51, a scaffolder in Chetwynd, B.C. “Something’s gone down and she’s trying to regroup. She’s waving her arms frantically, saying help me, man.”

Also censored are any details of the car that struck McGinnis, the driver and what he or she told police, if anything. It is not clear if the driver stayed at the scene.

“She was coming to B.C. to find me, and she got killed doing that,” Kalkman said. “And that makes me feel like s--t.”

The Department of Indian Affairs and Manitou Band Office were notified and arrangements made to have the body sent to Ontario for burial.

A funeral service was held for McGinnis on the Manitou Rapids reserve. The casket was closed.

Seven months after her death on Hwy. 1, her sister Edith Quagon was stabbed and left to decompose in the filthy basement of an apartment building.

Fifteen years later, a third sister, Sarah Mason, was also stabbed to death.

All three from Manitou Rapids reserve. All forced into residential schools. Two of them later stripped of their children in the ’60s Scoop. Not surprisingly, Kalkman says, the sisters, toward the end of their short lives, were in pain and drank.

Pushed to the margins and died there.

“Good God … the trauma a person goes through … it’s quite phenomenal. How your life can be taken from you,” Kalkman said.

“Three mothers. Three sisters. I’m sorry these women had to die the way they did.”

Sarah Mason: ‘She was going to come home’

As the constable found Sarah Mason’s fading pulse, his partner walked the hall toward the neighbouring apartment.

The officer saw the front door open. A man was sitting on the couch watching TV, the sound all the way up.

The officer called out: “What happened?”

There was blood on the man’s jeans and cotton plaid shirt. He stared ahead, said nothing.

The handle of a knife was visible beside the man’s right thigh, the blade hidden beneath the fabric of a pierced cushion.

On the floor were five empty bottles of Molson Canadian.

On a table sat an unopened bottle of rum, a half-empty bottle of London Sherry and a partly eaten chocolate heart.

It was Valentine’s Day 1993.

A trail of blood led to the front door of the apartment where 42-year-old Mason, bleeding from her chest, had staggered down the hall to pound on her neighbour’s door and gasp for a 911 call.

The Thunder Bay police officer, almost yelling this time, asked the man again:

“What happened?!”

Sarah Mason walked out of the house on Halloween night 1980 with her purse and a promise to take her kids trick-or-treating after she returned from the corner store.

Her eldest child, Thomas, recalls his parents fighting earlier in the day. He was 11 years old and had no sense of the depth of his mother’s despondence.

“She was a strong woman. She had a good sense of humour. She was always laughing. We always thought she was happy,” said Thomas, now 46 years old and a teacher in White Earth Nation in Minnesota.

Sarah, a residential school survivor, was the homemaker; her husband, Hank, a former logger who was taking a course to become an addictions counsellor. He taught the kids how to hunt, fish and trap. The kids also learned how to harvest wild rice from the shallows.

They lived in International Falls, Minn.

Sarah beaded. Meticulous and artful with floral patterns, she spent hours at a time making ceremonial garments for Hank and their kids.

She was also a talented traditional dancer, often placing in competitions at powwows, her metal-draped jingle dress shimmering and clanging as she stepped and shuffled.

“She seemed happy when she danced. Like she was flying,” another relative remembered.

She drank. Lately Sarah had felt overwhelmed by the demands of caring for six little ones and had been unable to quit the booze. Hank had, and he wanted her to be sober for the kids.

As the children pulled on their costumes, Sarah bypassed the corner store and headed for Fort Frances, Ont., and then, two days later, east to Thunder Bay.

“We didn’t hear from her until about a year later,” Thomas recalled. “When she called she was drunk. She said, ‘I love my babies’ and all that stuff. And I said, ‘If you love us, you’d be here with us.’”

Through the years, Thomas visited off and on, back when he was a wayward young man and needed to flee a bad relationship or a disorderly conduct charge.

Thomas Mason talks about his mother.

She called him Tommy. She told him she left because she felt like she was suffocating, that she needed some space.

There were times, Thomas recalls, when his parents discussed her return, but she stayed in Thunder Bay, and she drank.

That may have been about to change on the evening of Valentine’s Day 1993.

Mason’s neighbour Jacques Michaud, the man who called 911, told an officer that earlier that day Mason told him she was leaving on a trip west.

She had asked Michaud to relay news of her departure to her common-law spouse, Jean-Claude Gagne, who lived with Mason in the rear apartment on the first floor of 218 Manitou St.

The Star learned this from court and police records, some of which had not been public and were obtained under freedom of information laws.

When Thomas Mason heard this detail, during an interview with the Star near his hometown of Callaway, Minn., he grew pale, his voice a whisper.

“Just days before her death, maybe four, five days, Dad got a call from her and she asked him if she could come home. I remember distinctly … Dad said, ‘You can come home. But you gotta sober up.’ … She was going to come home.”

When Gagne returned to Manitou St. that Valentine’s Day evening, Mason was still in the house.

‘It was just one blow’

Justice Platana: “Mr. Gagne, do you have anything to say before I give my ruling?”

Jean-Claude Gagne: “I would really like to, Your Honour, but I don’t remember anything.”

Gagne had pleaded guilty four months earlier, and on this day, Sept. 13, 1993, he awaited sentencing.

He said he had blacked out. He said nothing more. No explanation. No remorse.

The transcript of the sentencing hearing characterizes the killing of Sarah Mason as little more than a regrettable, unremarkable accident.

While Gagne had initially been charged with first-degree murder, the plea, accepted by the judge, was manslaughter.

The lawyers noted that while Gagne reportedly told an officer at the scene that he was responsible, he had been drunk, had no known history of violence and was “a bit up there in age.”

Gagne was 56, a former woodcutter who lost a leg in 1987. He lived off his workplace injury compensation and a pension. Originally from Quebec, he had four kids from a previous marriage.

There was little mention in court of Sarah Mason, except that she had also been drinking on Valentine’s Day.

“It was really an alcohol-related event,” Gagne’s lawyer told the judge. “I also ask that you understand this was not a situation where there was a fight … It was just one blow. It’s unfortunate for, um, for Mr. Gagne that that blow killed the victim, but that’s what happened.”

Gagne was sentenced to five years in prison, eligible for parole in half that time.

The hearing lasted about 30 minutes.

“We were never really told the reason why Gagne did it,” said Thomas Mason, Sarah’s son. “I was real angry the day that we heard about the sentence. I didn’t agree with it. I thought it was unjust for my mom.”

The police file reveals details that for Thomas provided some long-awaited clarity on what happened to his mother.

The “one blow” was a 10-inch Skyline-brand knife plunged with enough force to pierce her heart.

Although the court heard that there was no fight, the officer who approached Gagne heard something else.

The officer twice asked Gagne, “What happened?”

Gagne finally said: “She wanted to fight me. I protect myself.”

The officer reached for the knife’s wooden handle, pulled the blade from the couch and, with the assistance of his partner, arrested Gagne. They took him to the Balmoral St. police station.

Neighbour Jacques Michaud told officers that he was making dinner when he heard Gagne come home and the TV volume next door go way up. It is not known if Mason was telling Gagne she was leaving.

When police found her — face down, surrounded by a pool of blood and vomit and cold to touch — Mason was wearing a pink T-shirt, grey sweatpants, white runners, three gold rings on her left hand and “a good watch.” She was 42 years old.

Taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital and pronounced dead at 7:33 p.m., Mason’s body was moved to the morgue, cooler No. 1.

The year she died, Mason was one of 16 aboriginal women killed in Canada, Star research shows.

“I want to put a story with the number,” Thomas Mason said. “I’m not trying to glorify her life. I’m not trying to put her on a pedestal. But I don’t want my mom to be remembered (as) another alcoholic aboriginal lady who was really worth nothing, you know? Because my mom was worth a lot.

“She was a person. We’re people. We’re human beings just like everybody else. We deserve that respect, too.”

There was also this detail in the police file: as it had been for her sister Edith in 1978, the official cause of Sarah’s death was a stab wound of the right ventricle.

Not far from where her sisters Edith and Kathleen were buried on the Manitou Rapids reserve, Sarah lay in an open casket.

There was some fuss about removing crucifixes from the coffin. Sarah’s mother, Annie McGinnis, had raised her kids in the Ojibwa traditions. She wanted the crosses removed. Funeral home staff fumbled to fulfil her request.

The ceremony began. Hank stayed in his seat. So did Thomas.

McGinnis, then 75 and doddering with grief, approached, saying, “Wake up, Sarah, wake up. It’s time to get up,” Thomas recalled.

Annie McGinnis, born in 1917 in Onegaming First Nation, Ont., had buried three daughters before her own funeral in 1998, her obituary in the Fort Frances Times listing her predeceased in chronological order of their violent deaths.

There is a fourth sister, born after Edith but before Kathleen and Sarah.

Mary Natawance, 70, lives in Thunder Bay, a few bus stops from the house on Manitou St. “It’s still standing. I don’t like going by there,” she said.

Mary sometimes feels alone but finds her sisters’ spirits give her strength. She recently stitched a blanket. It shows three bears. Three sisters. Three protectors.