Lost girl: How could someone be gone for decades before anyone realizes they are really missing?

By Jana G. Pruden, Edmonton Journal June 22, 2015, Source

EDMONTON - The last time Rick Kasprick saw Lori, it was spring. May, maybe June. Rick was at a track meet when she showed up. She asked him how everything was, and they chatted. Then she said, “I have to go.” And she left.

The other details of that moment — what his sister was wearing, who she was with, what kind of car they were in — are all lost to time and memory.

It was 1976. Rick was a teenager. He didn’t know then that it was the last time he would see his sister, or that it would take decades for anyone to fully realize she was missing.

“When you’re young, you don’t really think of things like that. You think it’s a phase they are going through, and they’ll come back, right?” says Rick, now 54. “Then days go by, weeks go by, years go by. And here we are, almost 40 years later, and it seems like yesterday.”

Lori Lee Kasprick was born in Manitoba, and moved with her family to Hilliard, 59 kilometres east of Edmonton, in the early 1970s. There were seven kids. Rick was the oldest, about a year older than Lori.

Their home life wasn’t always easy. Rick and Lori’s mother wasn’t around, and their father struggled to raise the children by himself. Lori started running away not long after they moved to Hilliard, disappearing for a few days at a time, until her dad or the RCMP found her and brought her home.

“Everything would be good and then she’d get up and take off again,” Rick says. “She had a mind of her own. I don’t know if you’d call her a free spirit. I just couldn’t tell you.”

Their aunt, Mavis Neil, remembers Lori as a “happy-go-lucky kid” who started to rebel as a teen.

“She was the only girl at that time. She was just a hard kid to manage,” Neil says. “She wanted to do what she wanted to do, and she was going to do it,”

Photo: RCMP Sgt. Doug Coleman of the Tofield detachment turned up a few new facts in the 40-year-old disappearance of Lori Kasprick but the mystery is still not solved.

Neil remembers Lori sometimes came to see her on weekends, and during one visit Neil gave her a ring. Beyond that, many of the details are hazy.

“Everyone expects me to remember. It’s just the weirdest thing how quickly things happen and how quickly time passes,” Neil says.

After running away several times, Lori left sometime in the spring of 1976, and never came back.

Rick remembers RCMP officers coming to speak to his father at one point and telling him there was nothing they could do. He remembers them saying, “She’s 16 now. Legally she’s of age and she’s doing what she wants.”

The officers said if they found her, they would bring her home. But they never did.

“She just left and that was that. It was just like she disappeared into thin air,” he says. “I don’t recall anyone doing a big search. There was always the thought that she was going to show up or phone, there was no sense it was going to be a permanent thing. Somehow, we always thought she would show up.”

She called the first Christmas after she left. Rick remembers her saying she was working as a model in Lake Tahoe, Nev., but they didn’t know if she was telling the truth. There was no caller ID then, no way to trace the call.

“She could have been calling from next door, as far as you know,” he says now.

He remembers hearing his father ask, “When are you coming home?”

After so many years Rick knows Lori’s face primarily from the two pictures he has of her: One is a school photo. In it, she has a shy, gap-toothed grin and her hair is long and flowing, parted down the centre in the way that was popular at the time. The second photo is her 1975-1976 identification from Mundare School. In that picture, she is serious, unsmiling. Rick notices how her birthdate has been changed from 1961 to 1958, making her three years older than she really was. He remembers Donny Osmond posters on the wall of her bedroom. There is not much else.

For years, Rick has watched for his sister. Often, when he passed a police station, he went inside to ask about her. He talked to the Red Cross, to social workers he knew. After the Internet arrived, he searched for her there.

There were moments they thought they found her: A woman who called in the middle of the night saying she was Rick’s sister turned out to be a half-sister who had been put up for adoption. They found a Lori Kasprick in Ontario, but it was another family. One aunt thought she saw Lori on television, another relative thought they saw her at the bus depot, but it was never anything that could be confirmed.

At one point Rick considered hiring a private detective, but it was too expensive. The detective told him it was especially hard to find women because they marry and change their names.

“We never got nowhere. It was just a dead end, like she dropped off the face of the Earth. There was nothing at all,” he says.

“After that, I just put her on the back burner. What else are you going to do?”

Around 2006, after Lori had been missing for 30 years, a B.C. police officer contacted her family to see whether they had any items that may contain samples of her DNA. The request was part of the investigation into the remains of murdered women found on the farm of serial killer Robert Pickton.

“I don’t even know what to think about it,” Rick Kasprick says. “Just watching the news was horrible enough.”

Rick and his wife, Bonnie, had always assumed that if something happened to Lori, they would have been contacted. They imagined that, if she had died, someone would have found them and told them.

Rick says he still doesn’t know if there was any indication Lori may have been connected to Pickton, or if they were going through the same procedure for all missing persons cases. (RCMP in B.C. did not respond to requests for information for this story.) Either way, there were no DNA matches to the items Rick provided, and, in the fall of 2013, Lori Kasprick’s file was shipped back to the small RCMP detachment in Tofield where she was first reported missing by her father in 1976.

The woman who had been missing for nearly 40 years officially became a missing person.

Photo: This is age progressed police sketch of Lori Kasprick, who vanished in the late 1970s. She would be 53 now.

RCMP Sgt. Doug Coleman says he was surprised by the case, but started investigating it the same way he would a current missing person: Talking to friends and associates, looking for a trail to follow.

But investigating a four-decade-old case is difficult, especially since there was so little investigation done at the time. After talking to about 80 people over the course of a year, Coleman says he knew only a little more than he did at the beginning. He now knows she was in Edmonton for a while, maybe hanging around a park on Jasper Avenue. He says he can put her on a bus to Winnipeg in 1977, where she used to hang out in the East Kildonan neighbourhood, and the area around Portage and Main. Her nickname was Lovey.

“And that’s unfortunately where the investigation comes to a stop,” he says.

Coleman says many of the people he talked to didn’t even know Lori was missing. There is no paper or Internet trail.

She is just, simply, gone.

Coleman retired this month. He started with the RCMP in 1978, his career spanning less time than Lori has been missing.

He hoped to find her as one of his final cases. Now, other officers will continue the investigation if tips or information come in.

“You try to do the best job you can, and maybe you have,” he says. ”But you always sort of have an empty feeling that if you don’t have an answer for the family, you just haven’t done enough. My hopes are, still, that we will hopefully hear something that we can give some answers to her relatives.”

The way police investigate cases has changed. When Lori went missing, police didn’t even have Fax machines. Now, there’s the potential to share a picture around the world on the Internet. An RCMP sketch artist did an aged drawing of Lori, and Coleman says he hopes it could trigger something.

“There has to be somebody else still out there, in Winnipeg or Edmonton that can recall her,” he says. “And hopefully getting that information and finding some answers for the family would be very positive for everybody.”

Lori would be 53 years old now.

There’s a chance that she wants to stay missing. Coleman says even if that’s the case, RCMP would like to let her family know she’s OK.

“Especially now that she’s an adult, she’s certainly entitled to have a life and if she doesn’t want to be in touch with anybody that’s a choice she can make,” he said. “Just to let them know she’s OK would really be a positive.”

Rick Kasprick says that would be fine with him.

“At this point in my life, why she left or what she did doesn’t matter,” he says. “I got a family of my own, I got two grown-up kids. She missed a lot, they missed an aunt. At this stage in my life I wouldn’t even ask her why she left or what she was up to, I’d just like to know she was OK.

“Really, it wouldn’t even bother me if I didn’t even see her, as long as I knew she’s OK.”

When their father died in 2006, he was still carrying Lori’s school ID card in his wallet.

“I couldn’t even tell you today what she would look like. I probably could walk right by on the street and I wouldn’t even know it was her,” Rick says, sitting in the kitchen with his wife, Lori’s photograph and school ID card on the table in front of him.

“You’d get an eerie feeling, I think,” Bonnie says.

“But how would you know?” he asks.