Peter David Bighetty Missing Person Case

Peter David Bighetty was a 24-year-old man who disappeared on September 20, 1969, while traveling by canoe on Reindeer Lake in the Brochet area of northern Manitoba. He had left Jackpine Island with two other commercial fishermen, and the group was traveling across the lake toward Brochet Island. Peter was operating his own canoe and was moving ahead of the canoe carrying the other two men. Brochet lies on the northern shore of Reindeer Lake, in a remote part of northern Manitoba near the Saskatchewan border, where water travel has long been an important way of moving between communities and fishing areas. Peter's journey therefore began as the kind of practical trip associated with life and commercial fishing on the lake, with nothing in the publicly available accounts indicating that he expected it to become dangerous. At some point during the crossing, however, the men following behind him experienced mechanical trouble with their canoe and were forced to stop on an island. Peter continued ahead, and that separation became the last known point in his movements. He was never seen or heard from again.

When the other fishermen were delayed, Peter was apparently already far enough ahead that they lost contact with him on the lake. What happened after that remains unknown. Reindeer Lake is an immense body of water containing thousands of islands, rocky shorelines, bays and irregular underwater features, circumstances that help illustrate just how difficult a disappearance on the lake could be to reconstruct. Research describing the lake places its surface area at roughly 5,300 square kilometres and notes that it contains approximately 5,500 islands and thousands of kilometres of shoreline. The most important physical clue in Peter's disappearance came when his canoe was subsequently located in Reindeer Lake approximately 9.6 kilometres south of Brochet. The canoe was reportedly found in a vertical position in the water. Peter himself was not found with it, and there is no public indication that he was subsequently located along the shoreline or elsewhere in the surrounding region. The discovery strongly suggested that something had gone terribly wrong after he became separated from his companions, but without Peter or a witness to his final moments, investigators were left without a complete account of how he entered the water or what caused his canoe to end up in that position.

Peter was described as having black hair and brown eyes. Public case information does not provide his height or weight, and no publicly available photograph of him has been identified in the sources describing his disappearance. He was reportedly wearing clothing suited to working around cold northern water: tall rubber boots, a rubber jacket and rubber pants. Authorities have treated the circumstances as consistent with an accidental drowning, and published accounts state that foul play is not suspected. Even so, Peter's remains have never been recovered, leaving his family without the certainty that normally comes when a missing loved one is finally brought home. More than half a century later, the central facts remain painfully simple: Peter Bighetty was traveling ahead of two fellow commercial fishermen across Reindeer Lake, the other men's canoe developed mechanical problems and forced them to stop, Peter continued toward Brochet, and he vanished before reaching his destination. His canoe was later discovered south of Brochet, but Peter was nowhere to be found. The case remains the story of a young man who disappeared during an ordinary journey across a vast northern lake, with the evidence pointing toward a tragic water accident but with the absence of his remains leaving the final moments of his life unresolved.
Last Seen: Sep 20, 1969

Canada's Missing - RCMP case 2013000103