Elisapee Sheutiapik, former mayor of Iqaluit, holds a photo of Mary Ann Birmingham, who was 15 when she was murdered in Iqaluit in 1986, at the National Roundtable on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Ottawa on Feb. 27, 2015.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
The Nunavut RCMP says a man recently charged in the killing of a 15-year-old girl about four decades ago had served time for two other murders when he was arrested this week at a halfway house in Ottawa.
RCMP spokesman Cpl. George Henrie says Jopey Atsiqtaq was out on parole and living at the halfway house after serving a sentence for killing two other people in Iqaluit in the 1980s.
“He did his 25-year life sentence, was released from the prison system, and he was residing at a halfway house with various conditions,” Henrie said in a phone interview Friday.
He was arrested Tuesday at the house and appeared in court in Iqaluit the next day on a charge of second-degree murder in the killing of Mary Ann Birmingham.
RCMP have said Birmingham was brutally murdered in her home in Frobisher Bay, in what was then the Northwest Territories, in May of 1986 while her family was out of town. Frobisher Bay later became Iqaluit and is now the capital of Nunavut.
Henrie said the two other murders Atsiqtaq has already been found guilty of would've taken place in the Frobisher Bay area in that same decade.
He added that in April 1990 a judge found in a preliminary hearing that there wasn’t enough evidence for Atsiqtaq to face trial in Birmingham’s murder.
“I can’t say whether he was known to the victim or not,” Henrie said about Birmingham.
“In 1986, Iqaluit was a smaller community back then. In Nunavut communities, it’s very common to know everybody.”
Investigators have said Birmingham was found by her sister, Barbara Sevigny, who had just returned from visiting her brother in Montreal. The front door to the house was locked, and she had to pry open a window with a makeup compact.
In 2018, Sevigny shared further details to panel members with the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
“When I turned to the living room, I saw her body on the couch,” she told commissioners at the time.
“And then I’m saying, ’Mary Ann?’ I’m calling her (name) out. I wanted her to wake up, but my mind’s telling me, ’But there’s a pool of blood, she cannot wake up.’”
RCMP said Atsiqtaq was remanded into custody and is scheduled to be back in court Oct. 29.