YAKIMA — Mildred Quaempts was going through some personal items in early August when she found a rare treasure — a photo of her mother.
Quaempts was 4 years old when her mother, Mavis Josephine McKay, was discovered floating face-down in an irrigation canal just west of Toppenish on the morning of Aug. 13, 1957. The Umatilla tribal citizen died on the Yakama Reservation of a broken neck. There were multiple bruises and abrasions on her back and legs, and a severe bruise on the top of her head.
Her death was ruled a homicide. It was never solved.
In the time since Quaempts began asking about her mother’s death, she has seen few photos of her. Quaempts barely remembers her mother, who was 32 when she was murdered. Quaempts is 71 and has sought a photo of her mother for years, just to have one.
She also wanted a photo of her mother to share in hopes it would help jog someone’s memory. McKay had left her home in Pendleton, Ore. for Toppenish shortly before her death to see extended family and friends. She knew many people on the Yakama Reservation.
About the same time Quaempts found a photo of her mother, a private investigator in Massachusetts began making calls on the case. Lou Barry, a retired police chief who owns Harris Mountain Investigations LLC, is aware of the many challenges in getting answers for Quaempts, her family and friends.
Not the least of those is the passage of nearly seven decades. During that time those with important knowledge have likely died and related documents, such as the autopsy report, have been moved, lost or possibly destroyed.
Barry isn’t sure what he will find, he said, but he will do his best.
“Maybe nothing will come of it; maybe something will come of it;” Barry said. “But I can guarantee they’re going to get their money’s worth from me.”
‘My Yaya’
Quaempts and her son were going through some of her personal things when he found a container of old photos, she said. Among them was a photo of McKay with her first child.
The slightly creased black-and-white photo of McKay shows her holding a cradleboard with a chubby-cheeked infant. The baby is “my Yaya Tush aka Gabriel Selam,” Quaempts commented in sharing the photo on her Facebook page in mid-August. He looks to be a few months old.
Yaya means older brother in various dialects of the Sahaptin language family that includes languages spoken by Plateau tribes in the Columbia River basin and its drainages. Quaempts grew up speaking Imatillim, the Umatilla language, and often switches between Imatillim and English while talking and writing.
Tush was Selam’s Indian name. He was born in January 1940 and died in November 2009. Selam was a teenager when their mother was killed; McKay’s youngest child, Fred Hill Sr., was only a few months old.
Born in Pendleton on Oct. 3, 1924, McKay lived nearly all of her life on the Umatilla Reservation. For a time, she stayed at a home for unwed mothers 200 miles away in Gresham, Ore., according to 1940 census records on Ancestry.com.
The photo of McKay and Selam shows a small building in the background. “Not sure where that was taken,” Quaempts commented on Facebook. “Could be the old house.”
McKay is among dozens of Indigenous women and people who have disappeared, have been found murdered and have died mysteriously within and around the 1.3-million-acre Yakama Reservation. Others from the reservation have gone missing and have been found murdered in distant cities and states. Their deaths and disappearances date back to the formation of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation by treaty on June 9, 1855 — and before.
Few cases have been solved. However, some law enforcement agencies have dedicated more resources in recent years as the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous people as families and advocates have demanded that cases get the attention and media coverage they deserve.
The national and international crisis is rooted in colonization and complicated by nonexistent or unreliable data, a lack of urgency by and widespread distrust of law enforcement and a daunting jurisdictional maze in which cases can slip through cracks in layers of bureaucracy.
In McKay’s case, the jurisdictional maze has been further complicated by the passage of time, as Barry has learned.
Where are the records?
McKay was found in the Lateral 4 irrigation ditch near Cemetery Road, which leads into Elmwood Cemetery in Toppenish, according to newspaper reports. A cemetery employee riding to work in the back of a pickup saw her as the truck crossed a small bridge over the waterway.
She was discovered around 8 a.m. and had been dead for about four hours, according to the autopsy. McKay was nude, a single gold earring in one ear. Police on horseback rode along the dirt banks of the canal, looking for her clothing. They never found it.
“The autopsy showed no water in the woman’s lungs. There is a strong possibility she was murdered,” Louis B. Harwood, a criminal investigator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, initially told reporters. The FBI was also mentioned in initial newspaper reports.
The Bureau staffs and operates law enforcement programs on some reservations, along with supporting additional tribal-operated programs. The FBI has jurisdiction to investigate all serious crimes involving Native Americans on tribal lands.
Barry began working on McKay’s case after friends of and advocates for her family contacted him through Investigations for the Missing, a nonprofit that provides investigative services for loved ones of missing people. Barry volunteers for the nonprofit, which handles only missing person cases, so family advocates hired him for a flat fee.
“I felt that maybe I could help out on a consulting basis with the family,” said Barry, a retired police chief who also taught law enforcement courses for years. “I’ve got some good contacts that help me out a lot.
“One of the best researchers that volunteers for the nonprofit lives in Washington state, so that was a huge help right there, just having her. That’s where it comes in handy having contacts that are in the area.”
Investigating any case this old is going to be difficult, Barry said. “Even cases that go back 20 years, people are deceased, people’s minds are shot. Eyewitnesses are unreliable (even) right after the incident,” he said.
And confirming which agency actually investigated it and the location of case files has proven challenging, even with the BIA and FBI mentioned in early newspaper reports.
“The Bureau of Indian Affairs was the policing agency for the reservations back then. That changed and now there’s reservation police,” Barry said. “I was told that records from back then were with the federal government. I followed the trail and it brought me to an FBI (Freedom of Information Act) request. … I was told to make the FOIA through the FBI.”
He submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI for any and all records related to McKay’s homicide. “Their response was, there is nothing,” he added. Barry hopes to learn more from BIA officials.
Along with the missing autopsy report, which may or may not be stored in state archives in Ellensburg, “there are a number of files that are missing,” Barry said. “What’s the condition of the records? Do they even exist? Who had the records to start with and what happened to them?”
“And what was done? Who was questioned? … She was 32 … you figure (anyone involved) had to be in their 20s at least,” he said. “You would assume that, which would put them in their 80s now, if they were still alive,” he added.
Barry hopes to learn who McKay was staying with while at the Yakama Reservation. He wants to know why she was at the reservation, who she was spending time with while there and other details about her life then and lifestyle, if possible. He will talk to Quaempts, but is eager to hear from anyone with any information that could help.
“I’m not sure where this is going,” he said of his investigation. The primary goal was to locate a photo of McKay; now that Quaempts found one, family and friends want to locate the autopsy report. He’s working on it.
“You don’t know unless you look. Sometimes you get lucky,” he said. “But if you don’t try, you don’t get lucky.”
He’s not giving up, Barry said. “I’ve got more phone calls to make. … I’m going to keep at it.”
