Christy Lee

This crime takes place in April of 1997 in the province of Alberta, Canada.

It's a freezing cold morning and it's not quite 7.30 in the morning and there's two motorists driving through a rural rolling farmland.

Now suddenly their eyes are drawn to something by the side of the road and they stop the car to investigate.

lying in an icy snow-filled ditch is what looks like a body lying face down and it appears to be a woman and according to her id connie grandinetti has blonde hair and is 38 years old or she was an autopsy would determine that she'd been shot twice in the back of the head execution style

The news that Connie's body had been found in the ditch by the side of the road on a freezing cold morning was really shocking to everyone who knew her and loved her.

She was a 38 year old mother of three and she worked as a teacher's aide at a school in Edmonton.

She was known as a dedicated family woman and a kind hearted friend.

Her maiden name was Connie Pruden, and she grew up in Beaver Lake Cree Nation.

So she's indigenous.

It's located about 220 kilometers northeast of Edmonton.

It's a reserve or a reservation.

And she did want all three of her kids to grow up with the same knowledge of their Cree culture, history and traditions that her own mother had passed down.

But the problem was that her husband, Jeff Grandinetti, was racist.

And according to a court document, one of their sons together would later say that his father held blatant racist beliefs that Indigenous people were inferior, and I quote, and he didn't allow his children to reveal their Cree identities to anyone.

Now obviously Connie's marriage to Jeff Grandinetti wasn't an overly happy one.

After 16 years of marriage they separated and this is in 1994 and a nasty divorce and custody battle was brewing.

She was eventually awarded custody of their boys and Jeff was ordered to pay her about a thousand dollars a month in child support and at first he was making his payments but then he stopped.

Connie had actually hired a lawyer to enforce payment of child support from her ex-husband, Jeff Grandinetti.

And her lawyer applied to the court for Jeff to have to pay his arrears, which by this point was $12,000 plus his ongoing child support of $1,000 per month that he was missing.

Police learned some very interesting information from another relative from Connie's ex-husband Jeff's side of the family.