A New Docuseries, ‘Murder in Big Horn,’ Spotlights the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Crisis

When Henny Scott—a 14-year-old girl from the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana—went missing in December 2008, it took the Bureau of Indian Affairs two weeks to put out a missing person’s report. “Her report just sat on a desk because the individual was out on vacation,” Scott’s mother, Paula Castro, told documentarians Razelle Benally and Matthew Galkin. “Nobody had been looking for her.” When the body of Kaysera Stops Pretty Places—an 18-year-old girl from the Crow reservation in Montana—was found on August 2019, her family wasn’t alerted by local law enforcement for almost two weeks.

Scott and Places’s remains were eventually found in Big Horn County—the sixth-largest county in Montana—yet the mysteries of both their deaths remain unsolved to this day. They point to a growing number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Big Horn, an alarming epidemic that’s now the focus of a new docuseries, Murder in Big Horn, which debuted at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival this past weekend. (It airs on Showtime February 3.)

The rash of murders explored across the docuseries’s three episodes—directed by Benally and Galkin—are not exclusive to the area (or the state), but Montana has one of the highest rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S. “Just because we focus on Big Horn County, doesn’t mean that other communities and places aren’t just as important,” Benally tells Vogue. “Big Horn County serves as a microcosm of a large-scale issue.”

There has been a pattern of Indigenous women and girls going missing under mysterious circumstances in Big Horn County, only for local law enforcement not to properly investigate their deaths after bodies were found. Although 14-year-old Henny Scott’s body showed signs of physical abuse, her death was determined to be caused by hypothermia; 16-year-old Selena Not Afraid’s death was also linked to hypothermia; and 18-year-old Keysera Stops Pretty Places’s death was ruled inconclusive. All of these cases have been in limbo while law authorities avoid taking ownership of the investigations. If a victim is found on reservation land, it’s a task for the FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs, whereas if it’s on county land, the local sheriff’s department handles the case. “It’s almost like a game of hot potato,” says Benally.