The Long Vigil of Celine Ethier
Tragic mystery of missing teen

HighGrader Magazine September/October 1999
by Brit Griffin

One of three towns that cluster along scenic Highway 11B in Temiskaming, New Liskeard is as prim and buttoned down as you can get clean cars with "Baby on Board" stickers, children clustered outside the afternoon matinee, middle-aged men with white shoes, white shorts and big smiles. It's a Block Parents dreamland.
She met me at the beach on a perfect summer's day. Big Lake Temiskaming, usually muddy and brooding, was actually pretty in the sunshine. Celine Ethier was a bit distracted: besides meeting with me, she was planning on following up a tip from a psychic.
Juliette Mageau, clairvoyant, had hung up her shingle at the local Temiskaming Mall. She had approached Celine Ethier and offered her services. Mageau says she's been instrumental in finding lost children before, the first being her own sister, when Mageau was only seven. She says she found her sister under a milk truck. The child had been raped and her ear cut off. Since then, locating missing children has been something of a vocation for the Gatineau-based psychic.
Mageau spent some time with Celine Ethier; went to her home, held some of Melanie's things to `read' the situation. She decided Melanie's remains could be found on a nearby island. A trip to the island with the police turned up nothing.
"Is it, well, stressful to follow up these kind of tips? Is it like...." I asked. Already awkward. How do you ask these questions?
Celine Ethier had the grace to interrupt me.
"Like a roller coaster? Oh yes, very much, but I'll try anything. Most psychics offer their services for free in these cases. I've contacted other psychics. Some would say she's near a dump, or she's beside a cemetery. If they give me a tip, I have to go there. I was never really into psychics before but I think, what if this is the tip that helps me find Mel?"
Trying to find Melanie has preoccupied Celine Ethier for three years now. A single mother, with another child to raise, she is a tall woman, bright blue eyes and auburn hair. She seems brimming with life.
Beside her I feel small, cramped up with all these fears for my own children. How does she do it? Maybe there is a difference between fearing the worst and facing it down.
Celine Ethier says no, she has been through some very hard times. The first few weeks after Melanie went missing were chaotic and consuming, her house full of people, the phone constantly ringing.
"When I would go to pick up my little girl in the evening I would tell everyone to leave. That was my time with her. But she would cry because the phone wouldn't stop ringing."
Since the disappearance, Celine Ethier has been indefatigable in her efforts to keep Melanie's story alive. With the assistance of Child Find, Melanie's picture has appeared on visa bills, special posters and on the Camellia Scott show. It has been on placemats in restaurants and in post offices throughout the area. Cars and trucks carry her picture and the Crime-Stoppers hotline phone number. A large billboard on Highway 11 carries her photo with the blunt statement "You know what happened to me why won't you say something?"
A tree outside the CIBC bank in New Liskeard is covered with gold ribbons and pictures of Melanie. The photos change with each season.
Celine admits that after so much effort, she recently felt the need to get away from it all. A trip to her cousin's in Burlington seemed to be the ticket. But on her way there, she passed a transport truck with Melanie's picture. On her arrival, she found that TVO's Studio 2 was repeating its documentary on the disappearance. There are, it seems, few places one can go in Ontario without seeing the face of Melanie Ethier.
Her picture is so utterly familiar that I would know her anywhere. I watch for her too, down in the city, driving along the highway. I'm always looking for Melanie. There must be literally hundreds of us doing that, but still nothing has turned up.

News travels very fast in a small town. We were at our friend's house the first time I heard the name Melanie Ethier. It was Sunday, September 30, 1996. We were drinking wine and sitting down to supper when our friend's teenage daughter came in to tell us that her friend Melanie was missing.
She hadn't made it home from the party. It wasn't like Melanie. Teenagers were already searching the area. And this, less than 24 hours after the disappearance.
Melanie's mother was searching too. When Celine realized her daughter hadn't come home she immediately phoned the police. The Ethier's didn't have a phone so Celine had to walk a kilometre to the nearest pay phone.
"I called the police and said, `I know I'm supposed to wait 24 hours to report my daughter missing, but this is really not like her,' I said, `she's black and there are very few black people in town so if you see her, please tell her to come home.' He told me we didn't have to wait 24 hours and asked for a description and he took it all down right off the bat. He took me seriously right from the minute I phoned."
By the time she got back to her house, the police were already out searching the street. Celine says that from the beginning she had a bad feeling but the sight of the police scouring the Armstrong street bridge was jarring. Her world would never be the same again.
From all accounts, Melanie was a happy and confident young woman. She had a great relationship with her little sister and was close with her mom. If she was going out, she left notes. If something was bothering her, she didn't hold back.
"We're both Capricorn, " smiles Celine, "we both spoke our minds." There was no way, in Celine Ethier's mind, that her daughter had run away.
An official description was issued: 5'5", 120 lbs. long black braided hair, brown eyes. Last seen wearing a Nike jacket, blue jeans, black shoes and a white T-shirt with a blue, heart logo.
On the Monday, the Ontario Provincial police joined the search. A tracking dog and the helicopter were brought in. On Tuesday, the Emergency Response Team joined in an intensive neighbourhood search. Nothing.
A week later, the cops figured it was time to check the Wabi River near the Armstrong street bridge. OPP divers groped through the turgid water, unable to see anything. Three days of searching turned up zilch.
"This is a very frustrating case," OPP Detective Inspector Bill Deverell explains, "We're talking about a possible 11 minute walk; it could have been one minute depending on how far she got. But we have no physical evidence at all and no crime scene."
When it became clear that Melanie wasn't likely to turn up in the neighbourhood the search had to be expanded. But in Northern Ontario the possibilities were endless; miles and miles of trees, mine roads, bush trails, concession roads to nowhere, countless lakes and marshes, an area cut through by the Trans Canada Highway going north-south and a twenty minute highway drive west to Quebec. Like a needle in the haystack.
By the time the first prayer service was held later in the week the whole area was watching and waiting. Snow flakes fell outside the packed Anglican Church as the town opened their hymnals for Melanie. It was beginning to get cold.
Over time the search was scaled back. But Celine Ethier continued going out every day. She was a familiar sight, standing in the Tim Horton's getting a coffee to go, wearing the orange vest and cap to alert hunters as she trudged through the bush.
"When I first started doing the searches I thought, `Okay, I'm going to find her body and its going to be decomposing.' I went through many stages, but in the beginning when I'd go on the searches, I'd look with my nose. I wanted to make sure I would find her, but I didn't want to see her like that. I wanted to remember her the way I knew her, with her big smile. But then one day I was walking along and I happened to see a dead animal right in front of me, decomposing. But it didn't smell. I got really sick that day, thinking I could find her without smelling her first."
Time kept marching forward and there was still no sign of Melanie. Two OPP officers from the Major Crime Unit in Orillia became involved. They tracked down all the leads and all the rumours. All led to dead ends.
Celine too, had to live with the rumours; that Melanie had run off to find her father in Botswana; that her body had been found in the river; someone phoned one morning saying she'd heard on the news that Melanie had been found in the back seat of a car shot in the head. No report of the kind had ever been made. All the while, Ethier and the police just kept plugging away.
In November 1996 another teen, Robert Goulet, went missing from the same high school (Ecole Secondaire Ste. Marie). Around that time a tip came forward that a black girl and a blonde boy were seen hitch-hiking near the Earlton Zoo on Highway 11 north of town. After lots of leg work, the police found out the girl was from Timmins.
Goulet's body was found in a gravel pit in the spring. The murder is apparently unrelated, connected to another murder over drugs in Earlton. Still, the crime added to the nagging unease in the community. Maybe this wasn't the innocent community everyone wanted to believe.
And Melanie Ethier wasn't the first girl to go missing in the area. Just as mysterious and disturbing is the disappearance of Julie Fortier of Elk Lake. On September 19, 1980, Fortier caught the bus to go to school in New Liskeard. She was never seen again. Fortier was roughly the same age as Melanie when she went missing. Both attended the same school. Both went missing in late September.
Five years to the day, Fortier's school bag, running shoes and coat were found near the Haileybury dump. In 1990 her remains were also finally found near the dump. Police were unable to establish a cause of death and the case remains open.

Life Goes On
Celine Ethier is very matter of fact about being the most famous (or infamous) Mom in Temiskaming. "At the mall, everyone would stare at us at first. But I'd say to myself, just put one foot in front of the other, I have to live here, I'm going into that mall."
I told her I was one of those people. I always watched her. She has a long stride, as if she has things to do. No messing around. At times I considered approaching her, wanting to say something, to tell her that our children prayed for Melanie every night, but I never did. Perhaps I was afraid that I wanted to approach her more for myself than to offer her anything. I'm not sure why, but there is something about Celine Ethier that is comforting.
"Yes, a lot of my friends, even strangers, will come up and thank me for comforting them. But I guess it's because I'm getting the strength from the whole community, from all of them. Do people avoid me? Just the opposite. I have people coming up to me at yard sales, people I don't even know, saying `Oh, Mrs. Ethier, can I give you a hug'."
Melanie would have graduated from high school this past spring. The Francophone community in New Liskeard is tightly-knit and the high school, a centre of community life. Celine Ethier attended the graduation of Melanie's friends.
"I know there isn't going to be any wedding, or births or anything like that. I said to myself `This would have been her graduation so I'm going.'"
Celine Ethier says she managed to keep her composure until the grads threw their hats in the air. Then she figured it was time to go home. On her way out she was stopped by a parent, who said her daughter would like to see her for a minute. The grads had a big bouquet waiting for Celine Ethier.
Recently, Celine was finishing off gifts of hand-made dish towels for Melanie's friends. The towels are symbolic of the fact that each of them are now leaving home and starting their own lives. "I saw many of these kids grow up, and they have really been there for me through all of this," she says.

In my top drawer, I keep some precious things; my grandmother's old prayer book with its velvet cover, some old black and white photos of my mother as a drop-dead gorgeous teenager. And in a Glad sandwich bag, a few locks of hair and a couple of tiny teeth. The locks of hair are tied with wool. There is one from each of my daughters. The little teeth were left behind by a neglectful tooth fairy. I keep them, I guess, as some sort of positive voodoo charm. Tucked away safely, they are parts of my daughters that are always close by, I always know where they are.
In the real world I watch my girls, worry and sometimes fear the worst.
But as Celine Ethier points out, you can worry, you can follow all the safety rules. You can store bits and pieces of your children in a special drawer. You can live in places that are safe and tidy. But sometimes bad things just happen.
"When I think about Melanie, and what a fighter she was, and how much she knew and this still happened to her. If you worry and worry, it just eats you up inside, it doesn't protect you."
A police officer puts it even more simply, "Three hundred children will go to a dance and three hundred children will come home, unless someone decides otherwise."
They are right, I suppose. Faced with such unimaginable tragedy, it is hard to know how one would survive the turmoil. But Celine Ethier has struggled to do more than simply survive. Throughout my time with her I find her radiant smile almost overwhelming. Despite her long, terrible vigil, Celine Ethier has emerged as a big, bold woman full of spirit. She says that this spirit has been a newfound occurrence, a rebirth after three deadening years.
"This is the first time I have felt like smiling. After this past winter I finally feel alive. When she went missing I felt as if I was dead. I felt like I was somebody else, searching for someone else's missing child. But I know now that I might have to live with the fact that I might never know what happened. She might never be found. I can't live like I'm dead."

The police say that after three years, tips still continue to flow in. Bill Deverell says that the case has been kept very much alive in the local community. He says the high-profile would be hard to maintain in a larger center. "Tips continue to come in, " says Deverell, "If not on a daily basis, easily on a weekly basis. But it's hard. You kind of have a hollow feeling, like, what can I tell Mrs. Ethier today. It has all the elements of a tragedy."
Anyone with information regarding the disappearance of Melanie Ethier are asked to call local police or 1-800-222 TIPS.

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