Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIV) as a Theme in The Girl from Devil’s Lake
Thematic Claim: Institutional Erasure and the Long Road to Justice
In The Girl from Devil’s Lake, J. A. Jance weaves the real-world crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIV) into a serial-killer narrative to argue that decades of systemic racism, bureaucratic indifference, and deliberate erasure of Indigenous identity allowed Stephen Roper to murder with impunity—and that only modern, cross-jurisdictional task forces can begin to repair that harm. The MMIV theme is not a subplot; it is the engine that transforms a cold case into a hot investigation and forces characters—and readers—to confront how “the only good Indian is a dead one” thinking persists in law enforcement and public memory.
Tracing the Theme Across the Plot
1. The 1962 Murder of Amanda Hudson: An Invisible Victim
The novel’s earliest Indigenous victim is Amanda Marie Hudson, a twenty-one-year-old Lakota woman from Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. In 1962, hitchhiking home to her grandmother’s birthday, she accepts a ride from sixteen-year-old Stephen Roper. He strangles her and dumps her body in the Turtle River. The crime scene yields a partial palm print on her glasses, but the case quickly goes cold. The outline reveals a crucial detail: Amanda’s birth certificate listed her as Caucasian because her father, Elmer Hudson, “failed to mention” his children were half Lakota. As Amanda’s brother Luke later explains, “When our father filled in the information on our birth certificates, he checked the Caucasian box.” This act of erasure means that when the MMIV task force later requests unsolved murders of Indigenous people, Amanda’s case is missed entirely. Jance uses this bureaucratic oversight to show how a victim’s identity can be silenced at the most fundamental level—on paper—allowing a killer to escape notice for sixty years.
2. The 1972 Murder of an Unnamed Navajo Woman: A Pattern of Neglect
Twelve years after Amanda, Roper—now a teacher—travels to Arizona and picks up a dark-haired woman wearing a “sky-blue squaw dress” with a silver-and-turquoise horseshoe necklace. She is walking west of Bylas, on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. The narrative withholds her name, underscoring how easily Indigenous women were—and are—rendered anonymous. Roper kills her by strangulation, then dumps her body in a dry wash feeding the Gila River. The evidence notes that “stories about missing or murdered Sioux women didn’t get much traction—not with the press and not with law enforcement, either.” This line directly echoes the novel’s earlier observation about Turtle River Girl: in a region where “the only good Indian is a dead one,” Indigenous victims are not newsworthy. Jance’s repeated use of the phrase “Turtle River Girl” instead of a name for the 1962 victim enacts the very dehumanization the theme critiques.
3. The MMIV Task Force as the Agent of Justice
The turning point comes when the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women task force enters the story. Anna Rae Green, an MMIV investigator, contacts Sheriff Joanna Brady after a palm print from Amanda Hudson’s glasses—uploaded to AFIS thirty years earlier by a forward-thinking medical examiner—matches a print from the Roper investigation. Anna Rae explains that her field agent, Nadia Grayson, was led to the old case after Luke Running Deer, Amanda’s brother, saw a television interview about two other murdered Native girls. Luke had kept the victim’s effects—glasses, bracelet, whetstone—in an envelope for decades. The task force does the work that local authorities never did: they check the victim’s tribal identity, locate the cold file, and discover the fingerprint dust on the glasses. Without the MMIV, Roper would almost certainly have continued killing. Jance makes the task force a symbol of institutional repentance and hope.
4. The Broader Context: Non-Indigenous Victims and the Serial Killer’s Signature
The novel complicates the MMIV theme by showing that Roper does not exclusively target Indigenous women. His first victim, his step-grandmother Lucille (1956), is white. He later kills Brian Olson (1961, the “Cotton Candy Boy,” also white) and the Mexican child Xavier Delgado (2023). The signature—manual strangulation, no sexual assault, disposal in water—remains consistent. Yet the Indigenous victims suffer an extra layer of erasure: their cases are less likely to be investigated or publicized. Detective Deb Howell notes that Xavier’s body had been treated with bleach and his fingernails removed to destroy DNA, showing Roper’s evolving sophistication. But the MMIV link reveals that his earliest victims, like Amanda, might have been caught if her Indigenous identity had been recorded. The novel thus argues that while the killer’s pathology is universal, the social response to his victims has been tragically unequal.
5. The Symbolic Role of the Cigar Box and the Bracelet
Roper’s trophy box—a cigar box containing objects from his kills—includes the switchblade taken from Amanda (later identified by her brother) and the turquoise necklace from the 1972 victim. The bracelet made by Amanda’s grandmother, Madeline Running Deer, is returned to the family in evidence bags but never claimed as a trophy. The contrast is deliberate: Roper values the knife (a weapon) and the necklace (an object of beauty wrenched from its owner), but the bracelet, a gift of love, remains outside his collection. When Joanna learns that the bracelet was part of Amanda’s personal effects, she understands that the killer’s attention was on the weapon, not the person. The cigar box thus becomes a material record of how Roper objectifies his victims—and how Indigenous women are reduced to “trophies” in a system that overlooks their humanity.
Complexity and Contradiction
One might argue that by making the serial killer a product of childhood abuse and “voices,” the novel risks diminishing the agency of his crimes. However, Jance never excuses Roper; the voices are a symptom, not a justification. The more complex contradiction lies in the role of the MMIV task force itself. While the task force represents progress, it also highlights how much damage has already been done. Anna Rae Green cannot bring back Amanda Hudson, and the surviving family members—Luke, now elderly—must live with decades of unanswered grief. Moreover, the novel shows that the task force was created only after widespread public outcry; before that, Indigenous women were dying in silence. The MMIV theme thus carries a dual message: celebrate the collaboration that finally solves the case, but mourn the years of neglect that allowed a monster to roam free.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does the novel use the erasure of Amanda Hudson’s tribal identity to critique systemic racism?
Answer: Amanda’s father listed her as Caucasian on her birth certificate, so when MMIV later requested unsolved Indigenous homicides, her case was not included. This bureaucratic denial of identity allowed her killer to evade detection for sixty years. Jance shows that racism is not always overt violence—it can be a line on a form that makes a victim invisible to the very system meant to protect her.
2. What role does the MMIV task force play in the investigation, and why is it necessary?
Answer: The task force provides the resources and focus to connect cold cases across state lines. Anna Rae Green, Nadia Grayson, and Philip Dark Moon actively search for Indigenous victims whose cases were mishandled or forgotten. In the novel, they identify the palm print from Amanda’s glasses and link it to Stephen Roper, something local agencies had failed to do for decades.
3. In what ways does Stephen Roper’s choice of victims reflect both his personal pathology and broader social indifference?
Answer: Roper kills whoever is available and vulnerable—hitchhikers, runaways, a young boy. But his Indigenous victims (Amanda Hudson, the unnamed Navajo woman) are especially easy targets because their disappearances generate little police or media attention. The novel implies that Roper learns early on that “Indian” victims are low-risk, a calculation that exploits societal bias.
4. How does the symbol of the bracelet complicate the trophy-collecting motif?
Answer: Roper keeps the switchblade and the turquoise necklace as trophies, but the bracelet—a gift from Amanda’s grandmother—is returned to the family with her other effects. The killer does not value the personal, handmade object; he values only the instrument of violence and the visible marker of cultural identity (the necklace). The bracelet stands for the familial love that the killer cannot steal.
5. Does the novel offer any hope that the MMIV crisis can be resolved, or does it end on a note of despair?
Answer: The novel ends with mixed emotions. Joanna scatters Marliss Shackleford’s ashes and attends Jenny’s wedding, affirming family and community. But Roper’s case is not yet closed; a Nebraska sheriff calls about a green barrette from another possible victim, and Joanna offers Ernie Carpenter the massive cold-case file. The collaborative work of MMIV and Cochise County suggests that systemic change is possible, but the sheer number of unresolved cases— “nearly ninety unidentified victims”—underscores how much remains undone.