Scattered

Ingrid Muhlig is the manager of DNA operations at the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR) in Canada. The National Missing Persons DNA Program was launched in 2018 and is delivered by two existing programs within the RCMP.  The National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR) and the National DNA Data Bank (NDDB) were created to help identify missing and unidentified persons through DNA profiling. 

In this episode we talk about:

• How DNA profiles are uploaded to national databases, and profile comparisons are done automatically at the national level to check for possible matches between missing persons and unidentified remains cases.



• New technologies, like YSTR and mitochondrial DNA, that allow for degraded remains to still be analyzed.



• Reporting missing loved ones to local police is key to create the links between missing person and unidentified remains cases.



• How historical missing persons cases presented a challenge due to needing updated consent forms for older samples and profiles.



• That over 700 unidentified remains cases currently need identification in Canada.
  The DNA program has provided 90 “putative identifications” through DNA matches since 2018.



• International searches can now be conducted through databases like Interpol’s I-Familia to search for missing Canadians abroad.



• Canada’s vast and variable geography, from cities to remote areas, presents diverse scenarios for how people can go missing.

Kudos to everyone involved in the background who make this program possible and successful. Ingrid would like to thank the police investigators, everyone at NCMPUR, and the NDDB Missing Person Unit (MPU). 

More information about some items mentioned in the interview can be found here:

• Canada’s Missing: https://www.canadasmissing.ca/index-eng.htm



• National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR): https://www.canadasmissing.ca/about-ausujet/index-eng.htm



• National DNA Data Bank (NDDB): https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/forensics/national-dna-data-bank



• Some introductory information on STR, YSTR, mitochrondrial profiling : https://innocencecommission-nc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/understanding-forensic-dna.pdf

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Notes from the start

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Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, Ingrid, I’m gonna get you to introduce yourself because you know you best. And then you can say your last name for me too, so I won’t mispronounce it.

Ingrid Muhlig: So, my name is Ingrid Muhlig and I’m the manager of DNA operations for the National Center of Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains, so NCMPUR. You know the RCMP, we like our acronyms so it’s that NCMPUR. I will try my hardest not to fall back into all the acronyms but, by all means, stop me asked me what it is. If I do say one.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And you do you what? That’s exactly what I thought when I was writing up the little sort of outline of what we could talk about — like, is what I’m talking about what I think I’m talking about because there’s a lot of acronyms going on.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yup, yup.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. Tell me a little bit about your role. You’re a manager of a big unit, it sounds like.

Ingrid Muhlig: It’s actually a very small unit. National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains is actually a unit of approximately 20 people. But those of us that are responsible for the National Missing Persons DNA Program — there’s two of us, that I’m the manager, I have and also a data, our DNA analyst who does the authorizing of DNA with, and she will speak with the investigators and go over the files make recommendations — so our side of the house, it’s National Missing Persons DNA program is actually, we’re partnered with the NDDB to steward this program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: NDDB. All right.

Ingrid Muhlig: National DNA Databank.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right.

Ingrid Muhlig:  Yeah, and so we take care of mostly the administrative items: logging the information about the case, making recommendations to the investigator, finding out what’s available in regards to DNA, and getting an idea about the case to make those recommendations. And then the NDDB accepts the submissions that we’ve authorized, and they’ll process them and they do the science stuff of processing the DNA and reviewing it, uploading it to CODIS, and then, if associations occur, writing those reports, those reports come back to NCMPUR, and we’ll release into the investigators. Also to the legislation, the legislation that governs how we operate is under DNA Identification Act. And the DNA Identification Act also states that there has to be periodic reviews. So we really, on the NCMPUR side, we manage the life cycle of that DNA profile.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so if you could take me back a step.

Ingrid Muhlig: Sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: In just my little preliminary, my own little investigation of websites —

because that’s called research these days — it sounds like the DNA program is very new. It just started in 2018.

Ingrid Muhlig: right

Yvonne Kjorlien: And it’s part of the overall missing persons and unidentified remains unit?

Ingrid Muhlig: It’s a program within the National Center, that it’s one of the services we provide to investigators, medical examiners or coroner’s office. So the National Center for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains is a national program and it provides services to investigators, medical examiners, Corners across Canada. So we’re really an assist and we assist with different services and one of those being the DNA program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Got it. Okay. Now, from that perspective, just because I don’t know who’s listening out there and what they know, and it’s something that I learned and in talking to when your colleagues from the Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains group, that things just don’t happen. Like investigators find some remains, efforts are made to identify them and they are, despite efforts, they are then classified as Unidentified. So that doesn’t just magically appear in your database. There is a process that the medical examiner or the coroner has to go through to then log that in the National Database, correct?

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. So typically when remains are located, they’re immediately put into CPIC and that – all police agencies across at Canada have access to it, they have the ability to search against it too, so if they have a missing person and want to search for potential remains, they have that capability within CPIC.  

What happens with our Center and our database — we call it MCMPUR, which is Missing Children, Persons and Unidentified Remains — I know you’ve spoken to Kevin about this database — what happens is when those investigators the remains into CPIC, it automatically feeds any body entries or any missing persons directly to our database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay!  

Ingrid Muhlig: Then our database has some algorithms, which it starts doing comparisons of whatever has been entered into what’s already in that database and it continues to do comparisons to anything new that’s added.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. But the search in CPIC does have to be done.

Ingrid Muhlig: The entry into CPIC does have to be done.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The entry does.

Ingrid Muhlig: And that is a requirement to participate in the DNA program. And that’s best practices that we preach to all police agencies, medical examiners, corner’s offices is that you need to enter your unidentified remains into this database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: There’s many little steps that many people have to perform to kind of log that entry in get it recognized on the national level.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. And it goes the same way for missing persons. We want the missing persons in right away. And our mandate is to improve these investigations. So we know, when someone goes missing, the investigator might go and quickly put in the pertinent information that he has at that time.

But, as the missing person, as the days go by and we realize this is more of a long term missing person, our recommendations is always to the investigator go back and make a fullsome entry into that database, give us as much information as we can. So that automated searching and taking place in the background and they don’t even see it. And it can provide some clues or some information, investigative leads.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right. So with that kind of in mind, since the DNA program, or the piece of it is fairly new – 2018 — what was going on before that kind of led to the development of the DNA program?

Ingrid Muhlig: So in 2000, you had the creation of the crime scene index in the convicted offenders index. And, I know at that time, we also had these humanitarian indices on the table that they wanted to bring forward along with those two indices, but there was a lot of privacy concerns and we had to do a lot of privacy impact assessments. So the best way to move forward was to drop the humanitarian indices and move forward with those criminal ones because that was very important to get moving on those ones. And then we brought in the humanitarian ones later, once they pass those privacy impact assessments.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what do you mean by humanitarian? Let’s set up a definition on that.

Ingrid Muhlig: So, right so what’s happened is that typically, our, whatever’s going into our indices — so you have the missing person index, you have the relative of a missing person index, and you have the human remains index. So we consider those three to be humanitarian. What’s being uploaded is cases that are non-criminal.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Got it.

Ingrid Muhlig: And then…although the missing persons, the human remains indices do get compared to the criminal ones, by law, we cannot compare the relative one against the criminal indices. So it stays on that humanitarian house and it is never compared to any criminal indices.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Fabulous, so how… Okay, so we’ve kind of touched on how the data are gathered — I mean for the criminal or for the missing and the unidentified — but there are other ways that data can be gathered, correct? Depending on which indices you’re looking at.

Ingrid Muhlig: So I’m not sure if I know what you’re asking.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Investigators, coroners, and medical examiners can put in an entry in CODIS for a missing person or unidentified remains. But then there’s also other humanitarian…

Ingrid Muhlig: So there’s one called a voluntary donor index.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah, yes.

Ingrid Muhlig: And it kind of sits on the fence between the two because it has to be in relation to a criminal file or it has to be in relation to a missing person file. When it’s in relation to a missing person file, that submission comes to us to handle. And typically it’s really what’s happened. It’s typically family that’s pulled the information from maybe the national DNA databank website. And what we tend to do is we tried to steer them to make an entry into the relative of missing person index. Because when you put a submission into that voluntary donor index you have criminal Jeopardy now. You’re telling the RCMP that they can go ahead and search against the criminal indices.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh! Okay.

Ingrid Muhlig: So we’ll steer them to the relative of missing person index, if that’s the proper index for them to be in, and that way they’ll never be compared against those criminal indices.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. That’s important to know.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah. We’ve had a few submissions and we’re like, no that’s not where you want to be. You want to be over here.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah. All right. I’m glad I asked that then. Okay. The public can make a submission. I mean to the right place. You guide them there.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right.

Yvonne Kjorlien:  If they have a missing persons that they’re worried about.

Ingrid Muhlig: The reality is we don’t deal with the public…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay.

Ingrid Muhlig: Because there has to be a missing persons investigation. The public should always go to the investigator of the file and then, if they’re not sure about it, they can contact us, and we’ll guide them through making that submission.

Some of these small detachments, they may handle a missing person case once in a blue moon, right? And then, typically, larger detachments, like I’m thinking of Toronto Police Service or Niagara Regional, they have actual missing person units, right? Where, that their investigators, that’s all they do. We’re very well versed with them and they’re very well versed with our procedures. So that’s the difference. It’s just, you know, the population areas and the smaller population areas might not know about this. And, although we deal with investigators, it’s something the public should be aware of that this is a service available, right?

The DNA program, also too the NCMPUR that manages Canada is missing website and you can get more information about different services from that Canada’s missing website. And we also published the missing persons or unidentified remains in hopes of receiving tips from the public on the different cases.  That’s the public component to our unit and the public can… there’s different addresses: you can go to Crime Stoppers, you can go right to the police and jurisdiction, or you can come to us and report information, that’s that Canada’s missing web email address.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, it’s nice to be aware of these Service because there’s nothing like starting a service with all these good intentions and then nobody knowing about it.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that’s yeah, you don’t want that. No.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right No. Doesn’t look good.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Exactly, right. Have you seen, on that note, do you know who’s using it? Has there been in an increase over the years? I’m guessing during COVID, there was probably a bit of a slump in who used it. I mean, I don’t know.

Ingrid Muhlig: You know what? During COVID, investigators were working back at the office and had seemed, it appeared like they had more time. So they start pulling out these historical missing persons and started going through them. So actually during COVID we had a bit of an uptick of historical ones because the investigators had the time to start pulling out these different investigations.

And it’s funny. Investigators, police investigators, are fickle bunch. They want to see value for the effort they’re putting into and, by all means, I agree with them. If there’s no value. Why are we doing this? Question why we’re doing this, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Exactly.

Ingrid Muhlig: I knew when I started, if we start showing them the success and the associations, that they’ll start being more active within the program and definitely we’ve seen that. For our business model, we were expecting one to two cold hits a year and to be now five years in and we’re at 90 putative identifications that have been released. I think we’ve been very successful.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s pretty awesome.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, for such a junior program, we are pleased with our success so far.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So I’m wondering if you can talk maybe, I’m guessing there’s a bit of a backlog because there’s this database or all this information, entries for missing persons and unidentified remains — so there is already that in place when this new unit came in 2018….

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. I think where you’re going is these historical ones, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, were you able to tackle some of that?

Ingrid Muhlig: We try and we thought it was going to be a lot easier than it was. And it ended up being actually quite difficult. But what happened was we knew there were already missing person files that had already profiles existing for them because they had done them at the provincial level for them. And we’re kind of like, okay, let’s, we gathered all that information before the, the database came into operation and then when we became operational, we started calling for them. But the issue we ran into is there is a specific consent form for the NMPDP, the National Missing Persons DNA Program. So the investigators had to go back, find the family that would been sampled, get them the complete these forms so they could be submitted to National. And that’s what I always say to the public also, is, I’m like, you may have given your DNA at one point, but if you don’t remember signing this consent form, it’s probably not at National. So another reason to go back to the investigator of the file and say, I would like my DNA put up at the national level.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that consent. That’s a key piece.

Ingrid Muhlig: It’s huge. It’s Canada. We’re very protective of our personal information and nothing was going to be uploaded unless that specific consent form had been completed. So, you run into hiccups too or some of these cases are fairly old. So the people may have passed on, so then we have to go back to legal and what steps can we take can, we still accept it based on what they previously signed and so, yeah, there’s been a lot of learning curves for the program.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah, sometimes, I can imagine it could be really tough and frustrating but at the same time, the spirit of why that is in place and how important it is.

Ingrid Muhlig: And it has to be respected, right? It did cause a lot of work. And even in the creation of the database, we looked at, hey, do we only accept profiles, or do we take samples? And then at one point it was just profiles, and then it got changed and we’re like, no, we’ll accept both actually, profiles or samples, knowing that not every province had the money to create profiles out of these DNA samples, right? So let’s make it accessible to all provinces and territories. And now we’re kinda realizing that existing profiles? Not great because our technology is better now and we’re able to do better profiles. And now we’re going, not only do we do those STR profiles. We’re doing YSTR profiles. We’re doing mitochondrial. So we actually need that sample to be able to do that further processing if necessary, right? So, yeah, the message has changed over the years. We’re kind of like, okay, samples. Give a samples.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m glad it only took you five years to figure that one out. Yeah, that’s just it. Technology is improved vastly in 20 years and in five years, it’s changed. And yeah, are we gonna keep up with that?

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah. That’s it. That’s keeping up with it and keeping in our lane too. So.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah that – mmm.

I know that you gave a presentation for the Canadian Association of Biological Anthropologists in October and I missed your presentation. You know, there’s only one flight…

Ingrid Muhlig: They put me very last or second last.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It was on the Saturday. That’s all I know. There’s only one flight per day from Winnipeg to Calgary and it was during your presentation. So that was it. I had to be on it, so. Are there any tidbits in that presentation that you can share here? Take home messages?

Ingrid Muhlig: You know what? My goal there was to kind of intrigue those who were coming into this field because that’s who we work with, forensic anthropologists throughout Canada, right? With the unidentified remains. And talking to the coroners or talking to different people, it’s interesting how, on the surface they kind of know about us, but they don’t really know us in depth, right? So it was kind of capturing their interest and getting out there again: what the program does and how it can be used, right? Even like, for forensic anthropologists, a lot of times when remains are found they’re incomplete. With the database what’s nice is we can retain that profile. We know it’s been identified. But now we’re just retaining and comparing it to all other human remains that come in so we can potentially identify further remains for that incomplete’s unidentified — well, now they’re identified — remains. So that’s one of the nice things about it because when you get into arms, if you get an arm bone, yeah, at least if you have a skull or a mandible, you have some teeth, you might be able to get a dental from it. But yeah when you’re dealing with a single bone, it’s pretty hard to make that connection between the cases.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Or even a fragment of. You can tell it’s human. It’s definitely not animal. But, from there, where do you go?

Ingrid Muhlig: Right, right. And we’re seeing more cases of burned bones too. And that’s where mitochondrial does come into play. Although it’s not as descriptor, not as discriminative as nuclear, at least gives us the capability of dealing with degraded remains, so..

Yvonne Kjorlien: I’m guessing then, at least with mitochondrial, you can exclude.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. YSTR and mitochondrial is great for excluding.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right.

Ingrid Muhlig: when you cannot exclude, it tells you it’s that family, right? But it can’t tell you within the family tree exactly where they are. So you now need that additional metadata to come in and help support that identification.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. But, at least then, you’ve got somewhat of a direction then, which is always helpful.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yes. For sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You did mention cost. And, again, I don’t know who might be listening to this and everybody who has watched CSI, they think that DNA can just be… you know, it’s five dollars, you can get it on-demand, and you know, easy peasy, carry on. Let’s dispel some of that myth, shall we?

Ingrid Muhlig: I don’t know our costs unfortunately because I’m not on that side of the house. I do know we did go through another lab, a private lab, for some profiling. I think the STR was 450 or 500 dollars.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so that’s much cheaper than it was several years ago. It was in the thousands and it could take months, if not years.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, so thousands you’re looking at now or for the genetic genealogy SNP [single nucleotide polymorphism] profiles. So YSTR, I think it was about 400 or 450, so to get it like a STR/YSTR profile. I think it cost us $950 from a private lab.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what’s turnaround time because that would probably be non-priority, correct?

Ingrid Muhlig: No, that was a quick turnaround and I think ours, probably is for us to do is a bit cheaper because we do it on batches. Where they’re doing just that one case, right? So I would assume that our cost is a bit lower than that. Yeah, and that’s the problem too. It’s humanitarian. We don’t do priority but I can bump things up the queue, when necessary, but our turnaround time, like we say 30 to 60 days. 30 days, we aim for 30. Sixty days, usually it happens if the bones are degraded and we need to process it more than once.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah. Yeah, that’s just because it is a destructive technique. Yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig: I had one case where mom had provided us the baby teeth for her missing son. And, you know, I’m a mom. I know how heart-wrenching it is to have to give up something that you’ve saved like that, right? So we were so happy because the lab was actually able to get a profile from the dried blood that was on the tooth. So we didn’t have to destroy the tooth. So you have these little cheer moments here like yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: The technology has just come so far.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah. It’s crazy.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so you mentioned that you’ve 90 people identified in the five years.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. So we provided 90, we tell we call them putative identification reports because in the end it’s the coroner and the medical examiner that it looks at everything, between the information on the file and the DNA and the breakdown of the DNA and they’re the ones who sign off on the identification. So yeah, we’ve provided 90. We’ve had a few international ones.

You might have read recently Toronto Police Service had a lady who had been pulled out of Lake Ontario in 2017 and they tried every avenue to identify her: media releases and everything. And they resorted to genetic genealogy. And it led them back to Switzerland. So then Toronto came to us and we’re like, we think she might be from Switzerland. So we were able to take the profile that we had in our databank and go through Interpol and have it searched against the Switzerland database and sure enough. It identified someone who went missing from Switzerland.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s amazing.

Ingrid Muhlig: And you think of it like I know I deal with the Yukon a lot and that’s majority of their people they have up there. There is a lot of tourists coming through, right? Niagara, too. So yeah, so we have these areas where they’re just… and we share a border with the US. So there’s a lot of times we want to do that search on the US side too. So we have that capability, which is nice.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I just love that, you know what? sometimes globalization works.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right. Yeah. Uh-huh.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You can actually call somebody up and say, “So, hey, I’ve got this missing, this person, unidentified person and we’ve got the profile. Can I ship you the profile and you guys take a look over there?”

Ingrid Muhlig: Can you check it out? Let us know?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Sometimes it works. All right, where do you see this going forward? You’ve already mentioned how far you’ve already come in five years and the technology has changed quantumly in with 20, 30 years. Where do you see this going in the next five?

Ingrid Muhlig: The next five? You know what’s hot right now and what’s really picking up, is these international searches.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah!

Ingrid Muhlig: I’m getting a lot more requests for people who went missing internationally. So it’s finding the best way to move forward with those I would say.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, Canadian that have gone missing while they’re traveling?

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, the traveling or maybe it is a family member the family, may be like let’s say in England, but their son has come to school here, right? And now they can’t locate their son and he’s gone missing. Interpol has started an international database called I-Familia. And so it kind of works at the same concept as ours nationally but at the international level. It’s huge in Europe. Because those countries, people can pass through multiple countries within one day and there’s not really a tracking system for that, right? So the European countries will submit to I-Familia and then that way they know that’s being searched against all other cases within their area, right? So that’s something we need to look at and see what’s the best way of utilizing that database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Huh.

Ingrid Muhlig: So you never know when something’s missing, you use whatever is at your fingertips to try to locate the missing items. So I don’t think missing persons is any different.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Ah, yeah, that’s just it like we’ve got the technology and we just got to use it and make it work for us. Yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yes, for sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, and I think that’s just it: that you don’t know what you don’t know. So it’s difficult, to, I guess, ask for specific help if you don’t know what that specific help is and that’s part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you about this is because I didn’t even know that there was this DNA data bank program going on, I knew about the missing and unidentified remains, but I didn’t know about this other part of it. And, like I said, sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know.

Ingrid Muhlig: Right or have to experience it to kind of get away with kind of cultural thinking. And we did have some provinces where the police officers were like, if the person went missing here, we’re going to find them here. And, I’m like, challenge taken!

So I’m gonna when I get that inter provincial link happened then, yeah for sure, that said that’s a win for me in the sense that I could say this is why you need to come National. Don’t stop at the provincial level. You need to move on, to bring it up to National.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s just it. Yeah, you never know. The unexpected can happen.

Ingrid Muhlig: I see it as a safety net. It’s just an additional safety net that’s in place and can catch these things, right?

Yvonne Kjorlien: Alright, so is there anything that we haven’t covered that you want to touch on?

Ingrid Muhlig: I think our messaging to the public, when I’m speaking the public, is we really need the two sides of the stories to make that link. We need the missing persons and we need the unidentified remains story and we get the unidentified remains from investigators and medical examiners, coroners throughout Canada. But we see that we’re not always getting that missing person report and we’re really seeing that now with IGG in the sense that — are investigative genetic genealogy in the sense that — the ones that I know of that I have been following and they’ve been identified they were never reported missing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh, wow.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, so that really needs to be the take-home is that, if you have a loved one who you haven’t seen, who you can’t get a hold of, please make a report to the police of jurisdiction and get them up into the database.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay. Good to know.

Ingrid Muhlig:  Because I know to-date, we’ve always run with about 700 unidentified remains. 700 we need to identify. There’s got to be some people who missing …

Yvonne Kjorlien: There’s got to be some people missing. Yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig:  …that need to be reported so we can make those links to these unidentified.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. Yeah, it’s too bad that those unidentified remains, you don’t have any data on whether there’s scavenged or not because I would really like that information. That’s the information I want to know.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yeah, I don’t and unfortunately it’s not something we go into ‘cause that’s more, investigator side of the house.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I know. I’m gonna keep asking for it though because it’s my wish.

Ingrid Muhlig: If it’s items that we see that the investigators need to know, it’s definitely something we’ll look into but, yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It is what it is Ingrid. I understand. We can’t all have everything.

Ingrid Muhlig: No, no. And It’s funny because, until I talk to you I really haven’t talked to anyone who’s looked at the scavenging point of it. Other than, I know, because I’ve had a few cases where dogs are bringing home bones from the woods and bring them home to their dog parents and then they’re calling police about it, which is to me it totally different. I’m here in Ottawa. We’d never even think of that right but my brother-in-law who lives out in BC. he’s got three dogs who just go into the woods disappear for half a day and then come back with these bones and I’m looking at them and I’m like are you sure none of these are human? That’s where my mind goes which is terrible looking at me going. No, they’re animals.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, just so we’re sure. Hey, I hear ya. That would be my first question. You’ve got to check them out.

Ingrid Muhlig: Yes. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, it’s… Canada’s so vast and there’s so many different things that can happen. It’s incredible. Even the waterways, I know, I’ve heard a lot of Red River or Niagara and just doing that check of the waterways to see if any remains have come to surface. So we’ve got a lot of water here in Canada, and that’s where a lot of people can go missing for sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And people can go missing in those remote contexts. It doesn’t have to be criminal. People can get snowed in, and they’ll leave their vehicle and they’ll just get caught out and die of exhaustion. Or exposure, yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig: Exposure. Yeah, a lot of scenarios.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, a lot of scenarios in this very big country with a lot of remote areas.

All right, thank you very much for this wonderful conversation. I’m just so tickled that we finally had a chance to connect and talk about this. Yeah.

Ingrid Muhlig: It was great. Thank you for coming forward, and I’m glad we were able to chat about it. Like I say, it’s a service for the people of Canada. And if this is your situation, by all means, speak to the investigator of your files and get that story in so we can start working on making some possible connections.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yes, right. Everybody should know about this service.

Transcribed by Google.