A companion piece to this week’s Vanished Voices episode.
On the evening of August 18, 2010, a 20-year-old mother named Amber Tuccaro got into a car with a man she’d never met, on a gravel road just outside Edmonton, Alberta. She was never seen alive again.
What sets her case apart from so many other unsolved disappearances is a single, haunting piece of evidence: a recording of her voice, captured almost by accident, from the last documented minutes of her life. More than sixteen years later, that recording is still public — and the man on it has never been identified.
An ordinary trip
Amber was a member of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, living in Fort McMurray with her 14-month-old son, Jacob. On August 17, 2010, the two of them flew to Edmonton with a friend for what was, by every account, an unremarkable trip. They checked into a motel in Nisku, just outside the city, and settled in for the night.
The next evening, Amber left her son with her friend and set out to find a ride into Edmonton. Sometime between 7:30 and 8 p.m., she got into a vehicle with an unknown man.
While she was in that car, a phone call connected — and because of how it happened to route, through a monitored line, the conversation was recorded. Nobody set out to capture it. It was simply an accident of circumstance.
What RCMP did next
Here’s where Amber’s case takes its first, and arguably most consequential, wrong turn.
Just ten days after she was reported missing, RCMP issued a public statement saying they didn’t believe Amber was in danger. They said they had a sighting of her in Edmonton, and closed her file on that basis.
That sighting was never confirmed. No name, no location, nothing that held up. Amber’s mother, Vivian — known to nearly everyone who’s followed this case as “Tootsie” — kept calling every single day, refusing to accept that her daughter had simply resurfaced somewhere without a word. It was her persistence that eventually got the case reopened. But by then, roughly a month had passed with no real investigation happening at all, and it would take four months total before anyone properly interviewed the people closest to Amber.
Family members say that when they pushed for updates during this period, they were told Amber was probably just out partying.
The recording
For two years, the case sat cold. Then, on August 28, 2012, RCMP’s Project KARE unit released that phone recording to the public — and according to what the family was later told, investigators had actually had it in hand for roughly a year before anyone outside the department heard it.
The recording itself is short — reports describe it as around a minute long, made up of several disjointed segments. On it, Amber can be heard questioning the driver about where they’re headed, growing more insistent as the drive continues. At one point she tells him directly: “You’d better not be taking me anywhere I don’t want to go. I want to go into the city, okay?” He assures her he’s taking her to “50th Street.” She asks if he’s sure. “Absolutely,” he says. The call ends shortly after, cutting off mid-conversation.
RCMP has said the man on the recording is a person of interest, and that identifying his voice remains one of the most promising paths toward solving the case. They’ve never fully explained how the recording was obtained beyond confirming it came through the monitored line, or why it took as long as it did to release.
Remains found
Less than a week after the recording went public — before a single tip could lead anywhere — a group of horseback riders came across a human skull on a rural property in Leduc County, not far, as it turned out, from the “50th Street” the man on the tape had promised. Dental records confirmed, on September 6, 2012, that the remains belonged to Amber.
The case became a homicide investigation, handled by Project KARE, the RCMP unit responsible for unsolved homicides and cases involving vulnerable or high-risk missing persons in Alberta. Two years after Amber disappeared, her family finally had an answer to one question — and an entirely new set of questions that, to this day, remain unresolved.
A pattern of failure
What followed was more than a decade of the Tuccaro family fighting to hold the RCMP accountable for how Amber’s case had been handled.
In 2014, Vivian filed a formal complaint, laying out the false sighting, the month of inaction, and a new detail: that evidence from the Nisku motel room — Amber’s belongings — had been destroyed. In 2017, Amber’s brother Paul testified for two hours at the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, describing an investigation that felt dismissive from the outset, and revealing that Amber’s belongings had sat in a hotel room for months before ultimately being thrown away — despite the fact that no one had ever been charged in her death.
A 2018 federal review, the result of a four-year process, confirmed nearly everything the family had been saying. It found the investigation “deficient,” the officers involved either poorly trained or non-compliant with proper procedure, and the decision to remove Amber from the missing persons list “erroneous.” It made seventeen recommendations, including a formal apology.
That apology came in July 2019, delivered by RCMP Deputy Commissioner Curtis Zablocki, who acknowledged the investigation “was not our best work.” According to reporting from that day, he left the press conference shortly after, citing another commitment. Vivian didn’t accept the apology as sincere. “They did it because they were told to,” she said.
A wider pattern
Amber’s case doesn’t exist in isolation. Between 2002 and 2012, the remains of four other women — Edna Bernard, Katie Sylvia Ballantyne, Delores Dawn Brower, and Corrie Ottenbreit — were found within an eight-kilometre radius of where Amber’s remains were discovered, in that same stretch of rural Leduc County.
It’s worth being careful here: Amber’s case has never been formally connected to convictions secured in some of those other deaths, and unlike the other women, she wasn’t known to be involved in sex work — a distinction investigators have pointed to directly. Whether her case connects to the others remains genuinely unknown. What is clear is that this small corner of Alberta has, for over a decade, been treated by advocates and RCMP alike as a place where women disappear and cases go cold.
Where things stand
As of the most recent public reporting, the case remains open and unsolved. No arrests. No named suspect. The voice on the recording has never been identified.
At a March 2023 press conference marking the thirteenth anniversary of Amber’s disappearance, another detail surfaced: the friend who had traveled with Amber to Edmonton, and who was the last person to see her at the motel, was never formally interviewed by police — not once, in over a decade.
Vivian continues to advocate publicly, as she has since 2010. Jacob, fourteen months old when his mother disappeared, is a teenager now, growing up largely through other people’s memories of her.
If you know something
The recording central to this case is still publicly available. If you recognize the man’s voice — a way of speaking, a turn of phrase, anything — please contact RCMP’s Major Crimes Unit or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 (1-800-222-TIPS), or online at p3tips.com.
You don’t need to be certain. You just need to say something.
For the full story, listen to this week’s episode of Vanished Voices: “Have You Heard This Voice? — The Murder of Amber Tuccaro,” available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Vanished Voices is a true crime podcast dedicated to the cases that don’t get the attention they deserve — unsolved cases of people of color, LGBTQ+ victims, MMIW cases, and stories that still need tips to be solved. New episodes drop every Thursday. Subscribe and follow us anywhere you listen to podcasts.
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