Monday, April 12, 2004
Byline: Jim Gibson Dateline: NANAIMO, B.C.
Source: CanWest News Service; Victoria Times Colonist
NANAIMO, B.C. - On a recent spring
afternoon, Joanne Young stands on the dam in Nanaimo's Collier
park. It's the same place where volunteer divers plumbed the murky
waters last fall, looking for anything to help explain the
whereabouts of her daughter, Lisa Marie Young.
They found nothing _ just as searches by police, volunteers,
family and friends have found nothing in Nanaimo or beyond
connected to her disappearance.
Lisa Young, 21, was last seen early morning June 30, 2002. She
had been at a downtown nightclub.
Yet the rumour mills still sputter, but no longer with the
force that once spewed out live sightings one day and unearthed
remains seemingly the next. And thrown into this heartbreaking mix
of expectations were tawdry _ and maligning _ speculations of
cokeheads, date-rape drugs, porn video-makers, biker gangs and
foul-smelling storage lockers.
``Aliens are the only ones we haven't heard (about),'' observes
Nanaimo RCMP Const. Jack Eubank.
Almost two years later, it's hard to miss the reality Young has
still not been found. There are constant reminders: the posters in
store and car windows, the puckering billboard with her face on
the outdoor wall of the Foundry pub and Allison
Crowe's benefit CD, Lisa's Song.
Nanaimo is not allowed to forget.
``They still talk about it,'' says Mayor Gary Korpan, who has
yet to meet Young's distraught parents. ``A lot assume they know
who did it,'' he says, inadvertently lubricating the rumour mill.
Among those who believe they know are Joanne and her husband
Don Young, their grieving faces known to many in the city. Teary
strangers hug them in stores.
``We can't enjoy life the way it was,'' says the missing
woman's mother. Too many places have too many good memories for
the once-happy family of five.
Joanne Young is 41, but feels much older.
``Right now, I'm 110,'' she quips, in a flash of humour that
surely once bubbled much closer to the surface. Her husband, a
balding almost academic-looking man, is 47.
Several people seem to recognize Joanne Young during her visit
to Collier Dam Park. There was no link between her daughter and
the dam other than a psychic's musings. The psychic ``sensed'' her
being near flowing water and a blue-roofed building.
Collier loosely fits the description, says Young, a petite
woman with flowing black hair, dressed in black tights and bulky
sweater. Her sweater is burgundy, the same colour as the older
Jaguar in which her daughter was last seen alive.
The driver of the burgundy Jaguar, a 20-something man, is still
considered ``a person of interest,'' according to Eubank. He may
be the case's only person of interest. And it's on this man the
parents now focus all their attention.
The psychic is one of about 10 clairvoyants who have so far
offered to help _ at times unsolicited. Most expect to be paid.
Some bring comfort such as one who says Lisa Young comes to her
mother in her sleep and brushes her hair.
If nothing else, the psychics give the parents a sense of
something happening in an investigation which, in their eyes,
petered out with the police questioning and release of the Jaguar
driver within weeks of her disappearance. The burgundy car had
been searched.
Eubank insists the case is still alive.
Next, Joanne Young points out other spots in the Nanaimo and
Parksville-Qualicum areas with tenuous links to her daughter's
disappearance.
She suspects her husband couldn't bring himself to tag along.
It's been particularly hard on him. Some days he'd need her to
accompany him in his van to make it through his courier
deliveries.
After several tries last year, she has just returned to her old
phone solicitation job.
The Youngs are poor sleepers now, particularly those nights
their daughter slips into their dreams. Don Young once woke his
wife after a particularly telling one. Their daughter and some
boys are playing basketball, a game she loved. They tease her
about her knobby knees. She comforts her father saying, ``Leave it
alone, Dad.''
But the Youngs can't.
Theirs is not the Hollywood hope that ends with a laughing
daughter waltzing back into their lives. It's much bleaker.
They now simply want to find her body.
The possibility of her death wasn't an assumption that slowly
seeped into their consciousness. They ``knew'' the first day,
Joanne Young said in an earlier interview.
Family portraits and small Roy Henry Vickers prints line the
walls. Stuffed animals that mother and daughter once collected sit
on the furniture.
``We were really tight, so we knew,'' says her mother.
Lisa Young lived with a roommate in the neighbouring apartment.
Her mother still must touch its door in memory whenever she
passes. Her father was to help her move to a new apartment the day
she went missing. She was poised to start a new job at a call
centre after a three-month break from bartending and five years
before at a fast-food restaurant. She had planned to return to
school.
And she had always been good about keeping in touch with her
cellphone when she stayed over anywhere. Lisa Young never called
that Sunday morning. Nor did she answer her cell.
The Youngs last saw her daughter about 11 p.m. the night before
when she left their apartment, saying she was having a bath and
then going out.
``Isn't it a little late?'' her father remembers asking her.
After all, she was to have a busy morning moving.
Like every father, Don Young worried about his attractive
daughter. His concerns ranged from the ``dangerous'' height of her
high heels to the sobriety of her friends behind the wheel. Weeks
earlier at the family's regular Sunday brunch, he sought her
assurance that she was always with friends when out at night.
``I've always got someone,'' she told him in the exasperated
manner of sons and daughters wishing their parents would finally
realize they are no longer children.
But it would appear his daughter was not always with friends
the night she went missing. She had gone to the Jungle Cabaret,
one of several downtown clubs on Skinner Street. She had once been
a well-liked employee there. It's not a club police readily
associate with trouble.
It was a long weekend and downtown, says Eubank, was ``a
happenin' place.'' It was about 2 a.m. outside the club she had
visited that police have their last sighting of her.
But the Youngs have pieced together a sketchy version of her
travels after that.
Their version goes: She left the club with two male friends.
Needing a ride, they asked a stranger if he wanted to go to a
party. He did, taking them to one party and then another. Lisa
Young left her friends there, telling them she was hungry. The
driver offered to take her to a fast-food outlet.
Instead, he stopped at a residence, leaving her in the Jaguar
from which she phoned her friends back at the last party site. She
was worried about the driver.
But RCMP refuse to confirm any of this. The Youngs don't even
know where the driver claims he dropped off their daughter. It is
not unusual for police to be vague about possible future evidence,
particularly in what Eubank calls ``a complex investigation.''
Apparently the Youngs were a little too free with information
RCMP had once shared with them. They were even basically cut off
from receiving further details from the RCMP.
They parents even have photos of the parked Jaguar which Joanne
Young snapped from the street outside the house where the car
owner, the driver's grandparent, lives.
At one time her husband began e-mailing the grandparent, until
he was warned off by the RCMP.
Eubank won't confirm this or even that Joanne Young late in
July 2002 was taken by RCMP to confront the Jaguar driver, in a
small room with a large photo of her daughter and a white board on
which the troubling words, ``Rape,'' ``murder'' and ``accident''
were written.
It was a brief meeting, she reports, in which she asked the
driver to tell her where her daughter was. She remembers him
saying something like ``I can't,'' before pausing and then
trailing off with ``I'm sorry, I don't mean to disrespect your
family ...''
What struck her about the driver was how unlike she imagined
him to be.
``He doesn't look like a monster,'' she recalls telling the
RCMP officer. Monsters, he replied, come in all shapes and sizes.
While the RCMP won't confirm any of this, those familiar with
RCMP investigation techniques say Young's account is plausible.
Don Young's last encounter with the RCMP was chilly. He had
warned them he was planning to update the posters. The new batch
would be more than just photos and a description. The new ones
would name the driver, Chris Adair.
The RCMP asked the Youngs to reconsider.
Last January, the Youngs went ahead anyway. No one refused to
display their posters. One downtown Qualicum Beach store owner
burst into tears when asked to replace the old poster with the
revised one.
Three months later in Qualicum, Joanne Young sees only one
poster missing from the Memorial Avenue storefronts. She is
pleased, believing awareness is the only way she'll ever find out
what happened to her daughter.
Young refuses to accept the possibility the driver is telling
everything he knows. Her husband is not quite so adamant.
``It is possible,'' he says, letting this thought trail away
into that infinity which is a missing daughter.
