A nonprofit group that collects tips on missing persons cases plans to use cadaver dogs to search a large Etobicoke park Thursday for the remains of Nicole Morin.
Maureen was eight years old when she disappeared on July 30, 1985. She was last seen around 11 a.m. that day at her home at 627 The West Mall. She left her top floor apartment to go swimming with a friend and has not been seen since. Nicole would have turned 45 today.
Brett Robinson of Please Bring Me Home (PBMH) said about two years ago he began speaking to a woman who believed she saw Nicole with a man she knew in a West End park on the day she disappeared.
The alleged witness, who is now in her 50s but was about 12 at the time, declined to speak to the media at this time.
“This person she identified allegedly sexually assaulted her. There’s a lot of pain, a lot of trauma there,” said Robinson, who visited the undisclosed green space late last month.
Robinson said his organization decided to go ahead with a search of the park after being unable to “rule out” that person as being at that unnamed location at the time the witness indicated.
“Responsible investigation is about eliminating people, and we couldn’t do that in this case, so we decided to investigate this cadaver dog park,” he told CP24.
“It made sense that it could theoretically happen.”
Robinson said they expect it to take two to three hours to clean up the park on the west end, which is “several kilometers” from Nicole’s apartment building.
“If we get any hits, we will notify the police immediately,” he said, noting that PBMH has a policy of sharing any tips it receives with police unless specifically requested otherwise.
Toronto police said previous exhumations of Nicole’s remains had taken place “during the (Nicole Morin) investigation, but would not confirm the location or provide other details.”
Spokesman Kevin Masterman said investigators were looking into whether there were any connections in this case to the late Scarborough resident Calvin Hoover, who was identified through DNA as the person who abducted, sexually assaulted and killed nine-year-old Christine Jessup.
Like Nicole, Christine was just a child when she disappeared from her Queensville, Ontario home. home on October 3, 1984. She disappeared just 10 months before Nicole was last seen. Christine’s body was found dumped in woodland in County Durham three months later. However, Nicole’s remains have never been found.
Masterman said Toronto police will “follow up on any leads or evidence,” especially those that may implicate Hoover.
“At this point there is no evidence that (he) is involved in (Nicole’s) disappearance,” he told CP24.
Over the years, police have received dozens of reports of Nicole’s disappearance. They issued several news releases and made several appeals, but she is still missing.
At the time of her disappearance, Nicole was described as white, four feet tall and 55 pounds with straight shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes and a birthmark on the top of her forehead. Here you can find an updated artist’s rendering of what it might look like today.
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