Toronto Sun
September 2002
By Michele Mandel

No clues. No sightings. No body. No goodbye. One minute they are there. And the next, they are gone.

They are the missing, the vanished, the disappeared. Angela Ellis knows them all. As member co-ordinator of the Doe Network, she mans a database that profiles all cold missing person cases that are at least nine years old.

Created in 1999 by Ellis and others who had come together on a cold case Internet chat group, the volunteer, non-profit Doe Network centralizes cases on their database to help law enforcement agencies and the public in locating missing persons and identifying unidentified human remains throughout North America, Europe and Australia.

47 IN ONTARIO
From Ontario alone, Ellis has 47 cases -- 47 adults and children who have disappeared without a trace, some dating back to the 1950s. Also listed are artist depictions of four unidentified bodies found in Ontario in hopes that somebody will recognize them and put a name to the dead.

The Doe Network has already managed to identify three with the help of amateur "detectives" who scanned the unidentified person database and matched them to three missing persons. In Ontario, one case is still pending confirmation from DNA tests. Caroll Viau went missing from Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital in 1985. Someone scanning the Doe Network suggested that she looked very much like a woman found in a Michigan lake in 1999.

"The likeness is striking," Ellis says as she alternates between the two pictures on her kitchen computer.

And indeed it is.

The Web site lists dozens upon dozens of smiling faces, people who have simply vanished into thin air. How many murderers have gone unpunished? How many more victims will they claim?

A library technician by training, Ellis is a stay-at-home mom of two little girls. Her fascination with missing persons cases began when eight-year-old Nicole Morin disappeared from her Etobicoke apartment in 1985. Now they are in her blood.

"Who remembers them?" she asks. "Who is still looking for them? Does anyone other than their family and friends remember who they are? We can't let these people be forgotten and we can't give up looking until they are found."

Just back home from her family's cottage in Thornbury, 14-year-old Ingrid Bauer wanted to surprise her boyfriend.

"I'll be back by 10:30," she told her dad.

It was Aug. 16, 1972, shortly after 9:30 p.m. Bauer left her home in Kleinburg and headed east toward Islington Ave. to catch a ride to her boyfriend in Pine Grove, 8 km away.

She had never hitchhiked at night before.

Ingrid was last seen at about 9:45 p.m. walking south on the west side of Islington Ave. And then she disappeared.

Within an hour, her family knew she had not arrived and a search was launched. But it was already too late. "She is a good girl," her father Oscar told reporters then. "There was absolutely no trouble at home or anything of that nature."

Ingrid was beautiful -- 5-foot-6, with blonde hair and brown eyes. When she went missing, she was wearing tan bell-bottom pants and an off-white sweater with red apples on it.

That winter, her father launched a nationwide billboard campaign in 13 Canadian cities, asking for help: "'Please ... tell me where Ingrid is,' Oscar Bauer, her father."

No one did.

Her mother travelled across the country, searching as far as Vancouver in her quest to locate her daughter. "We must believe she is alive or we could not continue searching for her," she said in 1973.

There were hundreds of interviews, countless searches using tracking dogs, scuba divers and helicopters.

Nothing.

Too much time has passed and her family now believes their daughter is dead. They suspect a man later found guilty of raping an eight-year-old girl and attacking an 18-year-old woman was also responsible for Ingrid's disappearance.

They no longer speak with reporters.

"It's just like it happened yesterday," says Patricia Hanson. "But we don't know any more now than we did then and it's going on 28 years now."

It was May 31, 1974, a Friday evening, when her daughter Cheryl Ann left home to walk down Bloomington Side Rd. to her cousin's home 10 minutes away. They had always gone back and forth on the quiet country road.

The pretty blonde, blue-eyed seven-year-old was wearing dark brown pants and matching sweater, a red nylon jacket and white leather shoes. She was heading to her cousin's for a sleepover and was carrying her white pyjamas with red flowers in a brown paper bag.

"I was clearing off the kitchen table," her mom said at the time, "when I looked out the window and Cheryl was walking down the road. And that was the last I saw of her."

She simply vanished.

Thousands of volunteers, including police, CB radio operators, aircraft and Queen's York militia units, scoured the region for weeks in an unprecedented search of York Region.

But there was nothing.

NARROW ESCAPES

A few months later, in July, an 18-year-old Etobicoke high school student was riding her bike at 11:15 p.m. when a man jumped out and knocked her down. He threatened to slit her throat if she didn't follow him to his car. Instead, she managed to punch him in the face and escape. The next month, on Aug. 26, 1974, an eight-year-old girl was abducted while riding her bike near her Craigleith cottage. The child was raped and then thrown naked and bleeding from a car, a stocking knotted tightly around her neck. Police believed she survived only because a heavy rainstorm loosened the knot.

Donald Everingham was eventually convicted of both crimes and sentenced indefinitely to what was then known as the Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Penetanguishene.

The following year, a special Crown prosecutor said Everingham had confessed to several murders, including that of Cheryl Hanson. He said the man described Cheryl's clothes and drew a crude map of where he'd thrown her body.

But the newspapers had been full of Cheryl's description and extensive police searches in the area he indicated never uncovered her body.

"I'm investigating if in fact there was a confession," says Acting Det. Tim Gore, to York Regional Police's cold squad. "We haven't been able to verify it."

Could this case be linked to Ingrid Bauer's disappearance? "I don't know," he says. "Possibly."

Cheryl's parents still cling to hope, even after all these years because the pain never goes away. "You always hope for a miracle," her mother says from their home now in Nova Scotia. "You often think someone's going to be at your door ..."

Shortly before midnight on July 3, 1988, Lois Hanna said goodbye to her friends and her brother and headed back to her Kincardine home from a reunion dance in Lucknow.

No one would ever see her again.

When a co-worker went to check why the always-dependable Hanna had not shown up for work at a Kincardine clothes store, she discovered a spine-tingling scene.

The former beauty queen was nowhere to be found. Her burgundy Grand Am was parked in the driveway. The television set was still on and a half-finished cup of tea was on her kitchen counter. The pink outfit she'd worn to the dance was hung neatly in her mirrored closet. Her purse and keys were in the china cupboard where she always kept them. There was no sign of a struggle.

The only items missing were her peach nightgown and matching robe.

Police speculated that Hanna, 25, had been stalked at the dance, followed home and abducted. The only clue was two drops of blood found later on a wall near the side door.

DNA EVIDENCE

For more than a decade, there appeared to be no progress in the case. Search after search turned up nothing. But, in 1999, the OPP revealed that they had a DNA sample from the blood and they had now identified a prime suspect.

An arrest seemed imminent. And then, nothing.

For Hanna's four older brothers and her widowed mother, these years have been tortuous. "It doesn't get any easier," sighs Jim Hanna, 46. "The police have to have all their ducks in a row -- they're not going to move on this guy until there's no way that it can be overthrown.

"But it's very trying on the family. We've had a lot of Christmases and Lois's birthdays go by. If we could at least have a body for mom to bury, that's what's so hard. There's no closure to it."

No closure for them all.