Introduction
In the middle of a quiet night in a picturesque resort village in Central Saskatchewan, a fifteen-year-old boy and his 68-year-old grandmother inexplicably vanished, never to be seen again. This website has been set up in the hope of recovering their bodies and encouraging someone to come forward to name their killer.
Chitek Lake
The village of Chitek Lake consists of a few streets of cottages nestled around the end of lake, with a village store, a small motel and bar, a small restaurant, and a village office and police station. It is located about half an hour north of Spiritwood, Saskatchewan.
Kevin Charles and his adoptive grandmother, Mary Goodfellow, lived together in a small bungalow two houses down from the store, across the narrow street from the restaurant and about a hundred yards from the motel and boat-launch. They were among the few aboriginal people living in the village.
Kevin’s parents, Stan and Marlene lived about an hour and a half away at Little Red Reserve. They had sent Kevin, who was the oldest of their five children, to live with Mary because she wanted company and because they wanted Kevin to grow up in a quieter community than their home village, and to finish his schooling. Kevin was a treaty Indian and so attended the new high school at nearby Pelican Lake Reserve.
Kevin
Kevin was a polite, rather quite and well-behaved boy, who nonetheless made friends easily and had recently acquired a girlfriend. He generally stayed out of trouble but was said to have been part of a group of high-spirited boys who broke into some fishermen’s cabins at one time.
Mary
Mary was a deeply religious, caring, and shy woman who rarely left her home, even to go to the corner store. Traumatized in her youth, Mary always kept her Bible with her when she was at home, and took a broom with her when she went out. She augmented her income by running an informal pawnshop from her house, mostly to help people who needed money to go for medical appointments. She wouldn’t deal with people who were looking for money for liquor. Her clients were mostly Cree people from Pelican Lake. Some people said that before their disappearance one of the pawned items in her house was a hunting rifle but it may have been redeemed before the night of April 3-4, 1993, when she and Kevin vanished. Mary was a member of the Lewis family of nearby Pelican Lake First Nation. The last positive sighting of her was on April 2, when she was seen cleaning her windows.
The Night of April 3-4, 1993
The story of what happened that night is unclear but it is certain that Kevin ran over to the house across the street and banged on the door and windows, shouting for help. This house was occupied by an elderly woman and a younger live-in companion who were afraid to open the door at that hour. Rather than telephoning the police, they went back to bed.
According to an article published at the time in the Prince Albert Daily Herald, Spiritwood police reported that two people, at least one of whom was intoxicated, had come to the Goodfellow home in the night in a truck and broke into the house, threatening Kevin and accusing him of stealing. The other intruder tried to dissuade the aggressive drunk.
Beyond that, the story becomes murky. A trapper, returning home to Chitek Lake at 5 a.m. the day of the disappearance claimed to have seen two people fitting the description of Kevin and Mary at a distance walking down the railway tracks out of town. For a time there was a hypothesis that Kevin and Mary had fled into the woods along the railway tracks and died of exposure.
Later that day Kevin’s mother Marlene was alerted by a social worker that Kevin was absent from school and asked if she had picked up him early for the Easter holidays. Marlene was not immediately able to get in touch with her husband Stanley since he was returning that day from a two-week hunting trip near Brochet, northern Manitoba, with his brother Adam (now an Anglican priest) and Henry Bird. Marlene succeeded in contacting Stanley when the hunters stopped at Adam’s home.
Stan returned to Little Red, picked up his second son Elvis, and drove to the Goodfellow house. They found that the lock on the back door of the house had been kicked in and the house was is some disorder, with a mirror broken in Kevin’s bedroom -- there were shards lying on the floor -- and the living room couch pulled away from the wall. There was a Players cigarette box on the floor, though neither Kevin nor Mary smoked. The lights were out. Mary's purse was still in the house and contained a small amount of cash. Mary's bible and broom were still there.
Normally when Mary went out she would leave a note under a rock on the front step for her relatives indicating where she had gone but on this occasion no note was to be found. Thinking that perhaps Mary and Kevin would return home, Stan and Elvis stayed at the house for some hours, returning in some anxiety to Little Red at 1 a.m.
April 5, 1993
The following morning, Stan and Marlene returned to Chitek Lake where they found police had begun an investigation. It seems that members of Mrs. Goodfellow’s family who lived at Pelican Lake Reserve had also become worried and had contacted police.
The police interviewed Stan closely and repeatedly, plainly suspicious of him and later following him around as he searched for Kevin and Mary in the woods. This was a regrettable turn of events as Stan, a professional trapper, in turn became suspicious that the police were trying to frame him and so was less eager to work with them than he would have been otherwise.
At the end of one day of searching, at dusk, the police were suspicious that there was a coven of ravens gathering in the woods. It was decided to return the next morning to search the spot but nothing was found. At least one police officer maintained the unlikely hypothesis that the bodies had been buried there but the murderer, observing the police interest, has removed them that night.
The Aftermath
Despite all the searching by Stan and his volunteer helpers, by the police with tracking dogs and helicopter, no remains have ever been found.
After the police stopped searching, Kevin’s father Stan continued to organize searches of whomever he could enlist, and with his family began to post homemade posters. Finding Kevin and Mary became the object of his life and he searched ceaselessly, often alone. Though he was a young man without a history of heart-trouble, he had a heart attack later that year, from which he has since made a full recovery.
Before long Child Find Canada took up the case, and Kevin’s face began to appear on milk cartons. The local newspapers took some interest but with so many aboriginal people, particularly women, having vanished over the years, the case has faded from public consciousness.
While the case appears to have gone cold and no longer appears to be under active investigation, it was not always so. A number of years ago a police investigator is said to have become so obsessed with the matter that his marriage fell apart under the strain.
Today
Stan and Marlene Halkett, with their three surviving sons and daughter, continue to grieve daily for the loss of Kevin and Mary who were remembered this Christmas at prayers at the Anglican Church at Little Red Reserve where Stan has served for many years as churchwarden.
Stan’s brother Adam is the Archdeacon of Saskatchewan and his sister Josephine is a member of the Order of Saskatchewan.
The case is now filed with the North Battleford detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
