‘The families deserve answers’: inside the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women
The sobering docuseries Murder in Big Horn examines the struggle for justice for Montana’s missing Native women
Henny Scott was 14 years old, a high school freshman on the Northern Cheyenne Indian reservation in Lame Deer, Montana, when she went missing after a house party in late December 2018. Her family promptly reported her disappearance to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. But the office took two weeks to issue a missing persons report, which “sat on a desk because the individual was out on vacation”, Scott’s mother, Paula Castro, told documentarians Razelle Benally and Matthew Galkin in their new Showtime series Murder in Big Horn.
There was no official search, no amber alert, no communication. “We had to do our own investigation and form our own search crew,” recalled her stepfather, Nathan Stops. Eventually, the FBI stepped in, without notifying Scott’s family, and found her body less than 200 yards from the house where she was last seen.
