North Bay Police are trying to solve a missing person’s case from the 1960’s.
Phillippe Guérin was 27-years-old when he disappeared on June 12th 1966.
Detective Constable Roger Drolet says this is the oldest case they have on record. They said the timeline makes it incredibly difficult to find anything new, even if they get help from the public.
He says people ask police to compare one case to another, but sometimes the public doesn’t know what the police have done. He says two years ago they had already followed up on a particular case comparison that did not produce any results. Drolet says he then received an email from an interested party asking him to do that exact comparison.
Drolet says they do encourage the public to keep coming forward with any information.
Guérin was 5’7” with a medium build, short brown hair, brown eyes and had no upper teeth. He had been paralyzed by polio at the age of 10 and walked with a limp. He was a psychiatric patient at the old Ontario Hospital in North Bay.
The only lead the Widdifield Police at the time could follow on was a North Bay clergyman who picked up a hitchhiker matching Guérin’s description in the Sudbury area.
The clergyman dropped off the hitchhiker at the Highway 17 and 11 junction south of North Bay. There have been no leads since then.
Drolet says they are trying to put the family’s conscience at ease. He says giving them a sense of peace and closure is the end goal. Even if the police can’t find out what happened, if they can find remains, Drolet says that is something that will give closure to Guérin’s loved ones.
He says the hardest part is that Guérin’s parents passed away never knowing what had happened to their son, and now it is his brother and sister that are left with the unknown.
Drolet says another difficulty with the case is the movement between police departments. He says it’s frustrating not knowing if they have some of the same information the Widdifield Police had at the time, and there’s no way of determining that.
Drolet says they have a couple of articles from the North Bay Nugget that talk about the clergyman’s story, but that did not uncover anything substantial.
Drolet adds Guérin would have been 77 today. He says that makes getting new information incredibly difficult as people who would’ve known or worked with Guérin have passed on themselves.
