The nightclub cameras weren’t working.

Aaron Derischer was twenty-two years old, a recent civil engineering graduate from Okanagan College. He had a girlfriend he planned to marry. On September 29, 2006, he went to Level Nightclub in Kelowna, British Columbia, with friends.

At 1:40 AM, his buddies left to watch a fight outside.

Aaron stayed inside.

No one has seen him since.

His cousin Nicole texted him that night. No reply. He missed a planned rafting trip the next day. His bank account sat untouched. Police interviewed nearly three hundred people. Nothing.

Aaron is 5’10”, 160 pounds, curly brown hair, blue eyes. He was wearing a dark blue button-up and dark jeans.

The RCMP still takes tips. A cash reward of $2,000 CAD is available through Crimestoppers.

But after eighteen years, the only thing they know for certain is that the cameras were off the night Aaron walked out of that club and into absolutely nothing.

 

Michael Dunahee was four years old.

March 24, 1991. Blanshard Park Elementary School, Victoria, BC. His mother Crystal was playing flag football. His father Bruce was watching from the bleachers.

Michael asked permission to walk to the playground.

Crystal had a gut feeling something was off. But she let him go.

“Wait there until your father comes,” she said.

When Bruce arrived, the playground was empty.

Fifty people started searching within minutes. The RCMP launched one of the largest investigations in Canadian history. Over 11,000 tips have poured in. A $100,000 CAD reward still stands.

One witness reported a man in his late forties or early fifties with a brown van near the playground. Police tried to recreate the incident a month later. No new leads.

In 2006, a young man living in interior British Columbia resembled Michael. DNA said no.

In 2009, Milwaukee police found a missing person poster of Michael in the home of 62-year-old Vernon Sites, who had confessed to harming a child in 1959. Sites died of natural causes before anyone could question him.

In 2020, a TikTok user claimed to have found the exact Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt Michael was wearing. Underwater. The family reached out.

It wasn’t the shirt.

In 2021, Victoria Police released an age-progressed sketch. Michael would be thirty-seven now.

His mother Crystal became president of Child Find BC and pushed for the Amber Alert system—implemented across most of Canada because of her son.

“I honestly believed we would find him,” she said.

Michael’s case remains open. Over 10,000 tips. No physical evidence.

In 2023, someone online pretended to be Michael, asking for money.

“He is not Michael,” his family wrote. “Please do not send him anything.”

 

Emma Fillipoff was twenty-six.

November 2012. Victoria, BC. She’d come from Perth, Ontario, worked a seasonal job at Red Fish Blue Fish seafood restaurant, and had been staying on and off at the Sandy Merriman House women’s shelter.

Her mother didn’t know about the shelter until Emma started calling home, begging to come back. Her tone shifted dramatically during each conversation.

On their last call, Emma said: “I don’t know how I can face you.”

Her mother flew out immediately.

That same day, November 28, security footage showed Emma at a 7-Eleven on Government Street. She bought a prepaid cell phone and a $200 prepaid credit card. She seemed hesitant, checking the street outside before leaving.

Around 6:00 PM, she left the shelter, hailed a taxi to Victoria International Airport, couldn’t pay the fare, and got out. She was spotted walking barefoot in front of the Empress Hotel.

A man named Dennis Quay called 911. A woman in severe distress.

Victoria Police arrived. They spoke to Emma for forty-five minutes. Took her name. Decided she wasn’t a threat to herself or anyone else.

They released her.

No one reported seeing her after 8:00 PM that night.

Her red 1993 Mazda MPV was found in the Chateau Victoria parking lot. Inside: her passport, library card, digital camera, clothes, laptop, and recently borrowed library books. Almost everything she owned.

The prepaid phone was never activated.

In 2014, a Vancouver business owner reported a man in a green shirt throwing out a $25,000 missing person reward poster for Emma. “She’s not missing,” the man said. “She’s my girlfriend. She ran away because she hates her parents.”

The owner called police. The man was never identified.

In 2023, Victoria Police released a sketch of the green shirt man. They want to talk to him.

Emma’s mother is still waiting.

 

Nicole Morin was eight years old.

July 30, 1985. Etobicoke, Toronto. She lived with her mother Janette in a penthouse apartment on the twentieth floor.

At 10:30 AM, Nicole went to the lobby to get the mail. She came back upstairs, prepared for a swim date with a friend, spoke to the friend on the intercom—”I’ll meet you in the lobby shortly”—and left around 11:00 AM wearing a peach one-piece bathing suit, a green headband, and red canvas shoes.

Fifteen minutes later, her friend buzzed the apartment. Where was Nicole?

Janette was busy watching other children in their daycare group. She assumed Nicole went to the pool alone. She didn’t call police until 3:00 PM.

The search became the largest for a missing person in Toronto police history. Twenty-member task force. Twenty-five thousand hours. Six thousand people questioned. Cost: $1.8 million CAD in the first year.

A neighbor remembered seeing an unidentified blonde woman with a notebook in the building lobby forty-five minutes before Nicole disappeared. Police never found her.

A few months before she vanished, Nicole had written a note in pencil: “I’m going to disappear.”

Police said kids that age write all sorts of things.

Nicole’s father Art defied police advice, hired a private investigator, left his job to set up an office. Her mother Janette consulted a psychic in Calgary.

In 2015, Toronto police organized a 5K run called Nicole’s Run. Raised $3,000 for the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.

In 2020, a woman came forward saying she’d seen Nicole at a nearby park on the day she disappeared. The witness was twelve at the time. The man she saw with Nicole had also harmed her. She was too afraid to speak until now.

Police brought cadaver dogs. Excavated an area where the dogs hit.

No physical evidence.

Nicole’s mother Janette passed away in 2007.

“I cannot help but keep my hope,” Art told the Toronto Star in 2010. “That she will surface again one day.”

 

Lisa Marie Young was twenty-one.

June 29, 2002. Nanaimo, BC. She was a fitness enthusiast, a vegetarian, a hardworking independent woman with a strong personality and a tattoo of a flower band on her right arm. She was moving into a new apartment, about to start a job at a call center, and planning to become a television sports broadcaster.

That night, she went to a nightclub with friends. A man in a red older-model Jaguar offered her and a friend named Dallas a ride to a house party. They went to one party, then another in the Cathers Lake area.

Around 4:30 AM, Lisa got hungry. The driver offered to take her for food.

Lisa called Dallas’s cell phone.

“Dallas, I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “This guy won’t bring me back. We’re sitting in a driveway on Bowen Road, and he won’t bring me back. I’m bored. I’m getting mad.”

That was the last anyone heard from her.

Her cell phone’s final signal traced to the Departure Bay area of Nanaimo.

Her parents didn’t initially tell police Lisa was Indigenous. They were afraid the report wouldn’t be taken seriously.

Police later questioned the Jaguar driver. Lisa’s mother met him briefly. “Tell me where my daughter is,” she asked.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to disrespect your family.”

No charges were filed. The Jaguar was seized, inspected, and released. The driver’s grandmother owned the car. She threatened to sue over any talk that implicated her grandson.

In 2022, an anonymous American donor offered a $50,000 USD reward for information.

Police have received 15,000 documents and interviewed hundreds of witnesses.

No arrests.

Lisa is 5’4″, 115 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes. She was last seen wearing a black shirt, skirt, boots, and a silver hooped necklace.

 

Five Canadians. Five families. Decades of questions.

Aaron walked out of a nightclub and disappeared into a city with working cameras that somehow captured nothing.

Michael vanished from a school playground while his parents watched from fifty yards away.

Emma was detained by police, deemed safe, released, and never seen again.

Nicole wrote about disappearing before she did it—a child’s note that became a prophecy.

Lisa made a final phone call from a driveway and then stopped existing.

The RCMP has interviewed thousands. Offered hundreds of thousands in rewards. Deployed helicopters, dogs, divers, ground-penetrating radar.

The woods don’t care about any of that.

Neither, apparently, does whatever is taking people from parking lots and playgrounds and city streets in broad daylight.

 

I want to go deeper on Nicole Morin, because her case has a detail that stops me cold every time.

Eight years old. A penthouse apartment on the twentieth floor. She went down the elevator to the lobby. She had plans to meet a friend at the pool. Her mother was upstairs watching other children.

Between the lobby and the pool, Nicole Morin vanished.

The building had 429 units. Police knocked on every door. They entered apartments even when no one answered. They searched underground garages, utility rooms, storage units, pump rooms. They brought in mounted equestrians, marine units, helicopters, tracking dogs.

Nothing.

A neighbor saw an unidentified blonde woman with a notebook in the lobby forty-five minutes before Nicole disappeared. Police couldn’t find her. No one came forward.

A few months before she vanished, Nicole wrote: “I’m going to disappear.”

Her parents thought nothing of it. Kids write things.

But she did. She absolutely did.

 

Emma Fillipoff’s case has a different kind of detail that haunts me.

The police spoke to her for forty-five minutes. They determined she wasn’t a threat to herself or anyone else. They let her go.

Forty-five minutes. That’s enough time to notice if someone is lying. Enough time to see if someone is scared. Enough time to ask the right questions.

They didn’t.

And now Emma is gone, and a man in a green shirt is out there somewhere, throwing away missing person posters and telling strangers that she’s his girlfriend and she ran away because she hates her parents.

The police want to talk to him.

They’ve been wanting to talk to him since 2014.

 

Lisa Marie Young’s mother didn’t tell police her daughter was Indigenous at first.

She was afraid the report wouldn’t be taken seriously.

That’s not paranoia. That’s experience.

Indigenous women in Canada go missing at disproportionate rates. Their cases don’t get the same attention. Their families don’t get the same resources. Their faces don’t end up on milk cartons or billboards as often.

Lisa’s family fought anyway. They put up their own reward—$1,500. Her grandfather organized tribal search efforts. Her father’s employer printed thousands of posters. Volunteers searched reservoirs and remote areas for months.

The Jaguar driver said he was sorry. He didn’t mean to disrespect the family.

But he didn’t tell them where Lisa was either.

 

Michael Dunahee’s mother Crystal became an advocate.

She pushed for the Amber Alert system. She believed that if it had existed in 1991, her son might have been found.

Now Amber Alerts flash across highway signs and phone screens across Canada. They’ve saved lives. They’ve brought children home.

They didn’t bring Michael home.

But Crystal kept going anyway. She became president of Child Find BC. She spoke at conferences. She comforted other parents who were going through what she went through.

That’s the thing about these families. They don’t give up.

They can’t.

 

Aaron Derischer’s case is the one with the least information.

No cameras. No witnesses. No phone pings after 6:48 AM. Just a young man who walked into a nightclub and never walked out.

His family still posts about him on social media. Still shares his photo. Still hopes.

The RCMP still takes tips. There’s a reward of up to $2,000 through Crimestoppers.

Two thousand dollars.

That’s not nothing. But it’s not enough to make someone remember something they’ve forgotten. It’s not enough to unlock a memory that’s been buried for eighteen years.

It’s a token. A gesture. A way of saying we haven’t forgotten, even if we don’t have the resources to do more.

 

Five cases. Five families. Five holes in the fabric of Canadian life that no one has been able to patch.

The RCMP does what it can. They investigate. They follow leads. They bring in experts and technology and dogs and divers.

But the wilderness is vast. The cities are crowded. The spaces between what we know and what we don’t know are infinite.

And sometimes, people just vanish.

Not because they want to. Not because someone took them. Not because they made a mistake.

Just because.

 

If you know anything about any of these cases, call the numbers you’ve heard.

Aaron Derischer. Michael Dunahee. Emma Fillipoff. Nicole Morin. Lisa Marie Young.

Someone is waiting for answers.

Someone has been waiting for a long time.