In the early morning hours of April 18, 2007, 24-year-old Crystal Shannon Saunders climbed into a red vehicle on the streets of Winnipeg. A police officer saw her and in fact, officers attempted to follow the vehicle for a time before eventually losing sight of it. This would become the last known sighting of Crystal alive.
By the following morning, the young Métis woman was dead, her body abandoned in a water-filled ditch near St. Ambroise, Manitoba. For almost seventeen years, no one would be held responsible. But Crystal’s story did not end beside that lonely rural road.
Crystal Saunders was only 24 years old when she was killed. At the time of her death, her life had become difficult. She was struggling with substance abuse disorder and houselessness and was involved in the survival sex work. Those circumstances made her particularly vulnerable, but they were circumstances in her life and definitely not the sum of who she was.
Crystal was also a daughter, granddaughter and mother. Her family remembered a young woman who was caring, intelligent and full of life. Most importantly, Crystal still had plans for her future. She wanted to address her addiction and hoped to regain custody of her daughter. Years later, her mother, Sandra, would ask people to remember her daughter for the person she was rather than define her by the struggles she was experiencing when she died. Crystal was trying to change her life, but she would never get the chance.
The Last Sighting
Late on April 17 and into the early morning hours of April 18, 2007, Crystal was in Winnipeg. An on-duty Winnipeg police officer saw her getting into a red vehicle. Police attempted to follow it but eventually lost track of the vehicle. Crystal disappeared with whoever was inside. What happened after that remained a mystery for years. The following morning, an off-duty RCMP officer was checking his trapline near St. Ambroise, northwest of Winnipeg. There, in a water-filled ditch, he discovered the body of a young woman.
It was Crystal. She had been strangled and the person responsible had left her body far from the Winnipeg streets where she had last been seen alive. Investigators now had a homicide on their hands.
A DNA Clue With No Name
Police investigated Crystal’s killing extensively, but they were unable to determine who she had been with during the final hours of her life. There was, however, something important among the evidence collected from Crystal’s body: DNA. At the time, investigators could not connect it to the person responsible for her death. Years began to pass. Crystal’s homicide eventually became one of the cases examined by Project Devote, the Manitoba task force established to investigate cases involving missing and murdered vulnerable people.
In 2019—twelve years after Crystal’s death—investigators again appealed publicly for information. Someone, they believed, might still know something. Behind the scenes, however, forensic technology was changing. And eventually, the DNA left behind in 2007 would lead investigators to a name. Kevin Charles Queau.
Advancements in DNA technology eventually connected evidence recovered in Crystal’s case to Kevin Charles Queau, a former Winnipeg resident who later lived in British Columbia. Queau’s DNA was already contained in Canada’s national DNA database because of previous criminal convictions and investigators had finally found the person whose DNA had been recovered in connection with Crystal’s death.
But a DNA match was not the end of the investigation. Police still needed to establish what had happened. And they would eventually undertake an extraordinary undercover operation to find out.
In 2023, RCMP investigators launched what is commonly known as a “Mr. Big” operation. Undercover officers entered Queau’s life while pretending to be members of a criminal organization. It was extremely intricate. Over the course of months, officers built relationships with him. They socialized with Queau, attended hockey games and even went skydiving with him. Slowly, they introduced him to what appeared to be increasingly serious criminal activities. At least 18 undercover officers were involved in the operation.
Investigators staged dozens of scenarios designed to earn Queau’s trust and create the impression that he had become part of a powerful criminal organization. Eventually, conversations turned toward the past and specifically toward 2007. During the undercover operation, Queau admitted that he had “dropped a body” that year. The investigation that had begun beside a Manitoba ditch nearly seventeen years earlier was finally approaching an arrest. On January 27, 2024, RCMP arrested Kevin Charles Queau in British Columbia. He was 42 years old. Queau was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Crystal Saunders and returned to Manitoba to face prosecution.
For Crystal’s family, the arrest was something many had wondered if they would ever live to see. Days later, relatives and community members gathered around a sacred fire at Winnipeg’s Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre. Prayers were offered. Tobacco was placed into the flames.
Crystal’s grandmother, Cynthia, spoke about having received the devastating telephone call telling her Crystal had been found dead seventeen years earlier and now, for the first time in almost two decades, the family had the possibility of seeing someone held accountable.
But the legal story would take another unexpected turn. Queau was originally expected to stand trial for second-degree murder. Instead, in March 2026, he pleaded guilty to the lesser offence of manslaughter. Understandably for Crystal’s family, this decision was unimaginably difficult.
The Crown later explained that prosecutors had developed concerns involving the credibility of one of the principal undercover officers from the Mr. Big investigation. Disciplinary proceedings involving the officer created potential problems if the case proceeded to trial. Rather than risk any further delays and uncertainty, prosecutors accepted Queau’s guilty plea to manslaughter.
It meant there would finally be a conviction. But it wasn’t the murder conviction Crystal’s family had waited nearly nineteen years to see.
On March 27, 2026, Kevin Queau stood before Manitoba Court of King’s Bench Justice Sadie Bond.
Crown and defense jointly recommended a sentence of 12 years in prison. The judge accepted the recommendation. Queau received credit for 791 days he had already spent in custody while awaiting the resolution of the case. He was also given a lifetime firearms prohibition.
Crystal’s mother provided a victim impact statement. Her message made something unmistakably clear. She wanted people to remember Crystal as a person not simply as a woman struggling with substance abuse disorder, houselessness or exploitation when she was killed.
Crystal had dreams. She had a daughter. She had been trying to change her life and she had people who loved her.
Remembering Crystal
For almost seventeen years, Crystal Saunders’ murder existed as another unresolved Manitoba cold case. Her photograph appeared in police appeals. Her name became associated with Project Devote and the broader tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada. But behind every cold case photograph is a life interrupted.
Crystal was 24. She was a young Métis woman navigating an extraordinarily difficult period in her life, but she still imagined something better ahead. She wanted to overcome her addiction. She wanted her daughter back. She wanted another chance.
Instead, sometime after getting into a red vehicle in Winnipeg in April 2007, Crystal encountered the man who would take that future away from her.
Her body was left in a ditch outside St. Ambroise.
For nearly two decades, her family lived without knowing whether anyone would ever answer for what happened.
Then a tiny piece of evidence collected in 2007 was examined through the lens of technology that had advanced with time. The DNA finally produced a name. That name led investigators across Western Canada. It led to an elaborate undercover operation and it led to an arrest.
And ultimately, it led to a courtroom where Kevin Queau finally admitted responsibility for causing Crystal’s death. Nineteen years after Crystal Saunders was killed, her case was no longer unsolved.
But perhaps the most important part of telling her story comes from the family who spent those years refusing to allow Crystal to be forgotten. She was more than the circumstances she was living in when she died. She was more than a cold case, and she was more than another name on a list of murdered Indigenous women.
She was Crystal.
Sources: Manitoba Courts, Global News, Toronto City News, Winnipeg Free Press, ILRToday, Yahoo News, Winnipeg Homicide dot org, StarFM
*Note: I really don’t think this is justice. He’s had the last 17 years to do whatever he wanted and only gets sentenced to 12 years – 791 credited (that’s just over 2 years) so he’s getting barely a slap on the wrist for violently taking Crystal’s life. I can’t express how disappointed and angry this makes me – someone who never knew Crystal or her family. I can’t even imagine how her family feels. 🧡
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