Naomi Leigh Desjarlais, a 21-year-old Indigenous woman, was last seen alive in Regina, Saskatchewan, on March 25, 1987. The available online records place the events surrounding her killing in March 1987 rather than October. Two days after she was last seen, on March 27, her nude body was discovered in a ditch near Regina’s city dump. Investigators determined that she had been shot.
Publicly available accounts do not establish the precise time between her disappearance and death or describe the number or location of the gunshot wounds.
The condition in which Desjarlais was found immediately raised questions about what had happened to her clothing and whether those items might provide evidence leading back to the person responsible. Investigators were reportedly trying to locate the clothes she had been wearing before her death: a brown coat, black fashion boots, a black miniskirt, a purple sweater and black fancy pantyhose. None of those items were reported as being with her when her remains were discovered, and recovering them was considered potentially important to the investigation.
The circumstances suggested that whoever killed Desjarlais had either removed her clothing or that it had been separated from her before her body was left in the ditch. Public sources located for the case do not identify the place where she was actually shot, meaning it has never been publicly established whether the ditch was the murder scene or whether her body was transported there afterward. The publicly released information is also limited regarding her activities on March 25, the people she may have been with, transportation she may have used, or witnesses who saw her shortly before she disappeared.
Her killing became one of Saskatchewan’s long-unsolved cases involving Indigenous victims. Later reporting on missing and murdered Indigenous women in Saskatchewan included Desjarlais among the women whose cases remained unresolved. Government archival records also contain an estate file for Naomi Leigh Desjarlais associated with the Piapot Band, providing an additional historical record connected to her identity after her death.
The case continued to receive attention years later. The Regina Leader-Post revisited the 1987 murder in February 2009, more than two decades after Desjarlais was killed, and CBC subsequently maintained a profile identifying her case as unresolved. Despite the passage of time and renewed public attention, the available sources do not report that police publicly identified a suspect responsible for the shooting.
No arrest, criminal charge, trial or conviction in connection with Desjarlais’s murder was found in the available online reporting. Her killing continues to be listed as unsolved, with no publicly named perpetrator. Anyone with information about the case has been directed to contact the Regina Police Service, as investigators have continued to depend on information that could explain what happened after she was last seen on March 25 and who was responsible for leaving her body near the city dump two days later.
