Michael Mahonen, one of the primary cast stars from the film, later released it for free to his own channel on YouTube, which is the only public copy available not privately stored in CBC's archives.

[5] Like the book, the film approached the story from a relatively novel angle for its time, exploring the underlying xenophobia and racial prejudice that fuelled the attitude surrounding the case.

Nineteen-year-old Helen Betty Osborne was a Canadian Cree student raped and murdered by a group of boys in The Pas, Manitoba, in 1971 while boarding at a local home to study at an English public school.

On a cold November night in 1971, local ice hockey jocks Dwayne Archie Johnston, James Robert Paul Houghton, Lee Scott Colgan and Norman Bernard Manger get drunk, swear loudly and drive around looking for women to pick up.

While driving, they spot local Cree student Helen Betty Osborne bundled in a winter coat as she walks home along the road.

The next morning, a young boy and his father, ice-fishing near a pump house, find the woman's fully-nude body abandoned in the snow, covered in multiple stab wounds and bruises.

To the disgust of Angie, a local waitress at the town's most popular diner, a department store owner openly tells the joke, "did you hear about the new Indian wine (play on the homophone "whine"))?

He listens to the last vinyl record she had purchased, a single of "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo", and finds only innocent, harmless artifacts in the room, not any sexual paraphernalia.

It is revealed that Helen Betty was gang-raped, beaten, internally-injured and stabbed over fifty times with a screwdriver tool, cracking her skull, ripping one of her kidneys apart and damaging her lungs severely before she died, after which she was dumped at the pump house.