In the summer of 1976, a young, 24-year-old First Nations woman named Belinda Gurtrude Williams disappeared from the landscape of British Columbia, leaving behind a family and a story marked by ambiguity. Officially, she was last seen in Mission, British Columbia, on July 1, 1976. However, accounts from her own family differ, with her father and sister remembering their last encounter with her sometime in July of 1976 or possibly even 1977 in Vancouver.
Belinda was a petite woman, standing between 5'1" and 5'2" and weighing around 117 pounds. She had black hair and brown eyes. Several distinct features marked her appearance: a scar below one of her eyes, another on her right arm, a crooked right little finger, and a tattoo of the letter "B" on the webbing of her right hand.
The profound mystery of Belinda's disappearance was compounded by a devastatingly long delay in the official investigation. For decades, her absence was a source of private pain for her family, as law enforcement reportedly did not initially take a missing person's report. It wasn't until February 2004, nearly 28 years after she was last seen, that Belinda was officially reported missing to the Stl'Atl'lmx Tribal Police in Mount Currie. The case was subsequently handed over to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. This delay has left generations of her family grappling with the uncertainty. Her niece, Loralei Williams, who was born three years after Belinda vanished, has become a powerful advocate, starting a dance group called Butterflies in Spirit to raise awareness for Canada's missing and murdered Indigenous women. The family's grief was tragically deepened when another relative, Loralei's cousin Tanya Holyk, was identified as a victim of serial killer Robert Pickton.
Very little information about the official investigation into Belinda's disappearance has ever been made public. Her case remains classified as a missing persons investigation. The conflicting reports of where and when she was last seen—Vancouver according to her family, Mission according to witnesses found by Tribal Police—create a confusing timeline that has been difficult to resolve after so many years. The overview of this case is one of profound and lasting tragedy; a young Indigenous mother vanished without a trace in the 1970s, her case languishing without official recognition for decades. The systemic failures that delayed the investigation and the conflicting accounts of her last known movements have left a family in a prolonged state of uncertainty, a painful story that highlights the broader crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada.Last Seen: Jul 1, 1976
