Mother hopes letter helps find missing daughter
Montreal woman writes letter to daughter who went missing at 18 months
A Montreal mother whose infant child disappeared 40 years ago this week has penned a letter to her daughter, asking her where she may be and hoping for her return.
“It is so hard to live with this wait year after year. I am trying to never lose hope, but this has marked our daily lives and left open wounds that do not heal,” Liliane Cyr writes in the letter to her daughter, Yohanna.
“I am still without any news from you, always in the unknown, always asking myself questions for nearly 40 years,” Cyr adds. “That represents 14,595 days. Where are you? Why have we not found you?”
Yohanna Cyr was only 18 months old when she vanished from her mother’s St-Laurent apartment exactly 40 years ago this Wednesday. On Aug. 15, 1978, Cyr left her daughter in the care of her thenboyfriend while she went to work outside of the city.
When the man went to join Cyr a few days later, he told her Yohanna was being babysat by his parents in Boston. But after Cyr headed to Boston to pick her up, his story changed: Yohanna had drowned in the bathtub, Cyr says he told her, and he had no choice but to bury her. The man was arrested and charged with child abduction, but was acquitted and released due to a lack of evidence.
Three years ago, Montreal police dug up a parking lot that had been a wooded area behind Cyr’s apartment in 1978. A woman had once told police she saw Cyr’s boyfriend leaving the apartment building with a large metal breadbox in the days surrounding the disappearance.
Radar searches appeared to show large metal objects below the surface, but police found nothing in the dig.
Then, in 2016, Cyr was contacted by an American woman who believed she could be Yohanna.
The woman had found out her birth certificate was fake while applying for her driver’s licence and couldn’t get clear answers from her parents. She had no photos of herself as a child and had vague memories of being loaded onto a plane as an infant.
There were other promising signs: the woman looked like age-progressed photos of Yohanna and had a Y-shaped birthmark on her index finger that matched the toddler’s. But two months later, DNA tests showed the woman was not Cyr’s daughter.
In her letter this week, released by the Missing Children’s Network to mark the 40 years since the disappearance, Cyr lists some of her memories of Yohanna.
They include her curly hair at birth, her first tooth, first steps, first Christmas and first trip to La Ronde.
“You were a baby that was always in a good mood, who always smiled. As much in the rain as in the snow, we went outdoors in strollers, in sleighs or by foot, in the park or just on the street,” Cyr wrote.
“I only had you for 18 months and I have now spent 40 years asking myself where you are,” the letter ends. “I love you Yohanna and wish from the bottom of my heart that you hear my calls and return to us.”
Anyone who has any information about Yohanna Cyr’s whereabouts is asked to contact the Missing Children’s Network at 514-8434333 or toll-free at 1-888-6924673. All calls are confidential.