“I know our crime unit people look there regularly if something like this goes missing,” County of Wellington OPP media and communications officer Mark Cloes said of Six Nations. “As long as I’ve been a cop it’s one of the first places you check.”

A recent convert to this police crime theory is Mount Forest’s Wray Hauser. On June 11, he had his four-by-four Chevy pickup truck stolen from the parking lot of the Guelph’s Holiday Inn Express in plain view of his wife, Kelly. She was just pulling into the lot, in another of the family’s vehicles, when she saw the thief driving out with the truck and briefly and unsuccessfully gave chase.

The family dog was inside the cab and the truck was towing a trailer full of tools. Hauser had been in Guelph doing some renovations at a business he owns.

“The (city of Guelph) police officer told me, ‘just wait a few a days and it’ll likely show up at Six Nations,’” Hauser said.

After receiving that counsel, he took it upon himself to plaster the reserve with flyers. Sure enough, less than a week after the truck was stolen, it was found — at Six Nations.

The truck’s tires were stripped. The trailer and tools were missing. And Daisy was nowhere to be found.

Later in the summer, Ben Millard had his truck stolen from his west-side Guelph home. It was loaded with softball equipment belonging to the mite girls’ softball team he coached.

Within a week, the vehicle turned up — with the softball gear — on Six Nations territory. Millard said a Cambridge sibling of his experienced the same thing after a recent vehicle theft. And, since his truck-theft ordeal, he said he’s been told of four other local vehicle theft cases that resulted in the pilfered property turning up at Six Nations.

Sergeant David Rektor, the OPP Western Region Media Relations and Community Services Coordinator, said Six Nations is not always the first place police look.

“We only follow the evidence to where it leads us,” he said. “That’s all we do; follow the evidence.”

But the evidence seemingly leads to Six Nations with some frequency. Between 2004 and March 2008, more than 1,850 stolen vehicles with an estimated value of $33-million were hauled away from the reserve, according to a 2008 Globe and Mail report.

“Some cars stay buried in the woods for years,” Detective Constable Wesley Barnes of an OPP-led joint forces auto-theft team told the Globe last year. “If you gave me a helicopter and the time, I could find you a hundred stolen cars.”

The Six Nations band office referred the paper to its police service for comment.

Barnes also declined comment for this story as he has since left the auto theft team. However, on behalf of the Mercury, he said he notified a Six Nations Police Service investigator working with the auto-theft team and invited the officer to provide an interview. Six Nations joined the unit last year.

The Six Nations officer never contacted the paper despite several requests for an interview placed over the course of several weeks.