Yellow police tape marked the murder-suicide scene at Hawkins' home in Missoula when Cindy Umphrey arrived to identify her 36-year-old sister.
Two years later, in 1995, her 17-year-old niece, Tambi Weinberger, also died at the hands of a boyfriend.
If a person kills an intimate partner in a fit of rage, it's called murder.
But for too long, such deaths were attributed to a “crime of passion,” said Vickie Amundson, president of Montana's Silent Witness Initiative.
“They're getting over that one.”
Amundson belongs to a larger network, the Silent Witness National Initiative, organized 15 years ago to create awareness of domestic violence homicides.
On average, more than three women in the United States are murdered each day by intimate partners, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics.
And even though the Bureau of Justice reports a 36 percent decline in domestic violence homicides over the past two decades, the incidence of domestic violence deaths among Native women remains twice that of non-Native women.
The Silent Witness Initiative assists women with referrals to domestic violence programs. The group's trademark, though, lies in its red, life-size memorials of women killed in domestic violence.
The National Silent Witness Initiative was born in Minnesota when, in 1991, more than 500 women met at a church across the street from the State Capitol. They formed a procession and carried silhouettes of murdered women into the Capitol Rotunda, launching what would become a national campaign to end domestic homicide.
Umphrey's sister and niece are among the female body silhouettes, each of which bear a shield with their names and details of their deaths.
Amundson said one-third of the 53 Montana women killed in domestic violence homicide since 1990 were Native women. It's a detail she rarely reveals.
“I've made a deliberate effort to avoid that sort of identification,” she said. “I didn't want people to look at the exhibit and say, ‘Oh, it's an Indian problem.' ”
Domestic violence advocates are pointing to a more disturbing trend in violence against Native women. Umphrey's sister and niece, Salish-Kootenai women from the Flathead Reservation, were killed by white men - Russell Lindhahl and Ronald Niederklopfer.
Their deaths reflect Bureau of Justice statistics showing that 60 percent of violent crimes against Natives are committed by whites, a trend that counters typical same-race violence.
Amundson is critical of law enforcement, legal protection and health services offered to Native women in domestic violence cases. Many of the women die off reservation lands.
Often, it's a Native woman involved with a white man, she said.
“Sometimes I think they pick out Indian women because they're less protected,” she said. “They're more vulnerable.”
Hawkins and Weinberger died in Missoula, about a 20-minute drive from the Flathead Reservation border.
Some dead Native women, though, will never be memorialized with a red Silent Witness silhouette: The cutouts are made only in cases of murder-suicides or when a case results in a court conviction.
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