‘A monster off the streets’: How a dogged detective in an Indigenous woman’s slaying led to her killer’s sentencing

When the mutilated body of Mavis Kindness Nelson, a Seattle woman who worked at the front desk of a transitional housing center, was found a year ago in a wooded ravine near the University of Washington campus, her family was left with little confidence her killer would be caught.

They knew the statistics surrounding missing and murdered Native American women like Nelson were bleak, particularly in Washington state, where the rate of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women is about four times higher than that of white women.