What happened to Emma Fillipoff?
One year later, her mother is at a loss and a witness wonders if he could have done more, writes DEREK SPALDING.
Emma Fillipoff was disoriented, shoeless and incoherent when Dennis Quay found her on the streets of downtown Victoria. He called police for help, waited for them to arrive, then went home. The young man was one of the last people to see Fillipoff before her mysterious disappearance a year ago.
Two officers talked to the 26-year-old brunette in front of the Empress Hotel in downtown Victoria on that frigid night in late November, but they left Emma where she was. Because of that, Quay, 28, says he regrets leaving.
Maybe if he had stuck around, he could have helped her, he says. If he did that, maybe Emma would have met up with her mother just a few hours later when she arrived on a plane from Ottawa. Instead, the polite, extremely private young woman who grew up near Perth is missing and her family is struggling to keep things together.
“Part of me wishes I stayed there longer so I could see what happened,” Quay says. “I thought they would have taken her somewhere appropriate where she could be looked after.”
He initially spotted Emma by herself on Douglas Street in the historic downtown of the B.C. capital, where Emma had moved just a year before. Recognizing the young woman from a brief meeting a few weeks earlier, he went to say hello.
Unlike the bubbly, talkative person he had previously spoken to, Emma was motionless. She seemed lost, distracted — timid at times, Quay recalled. She was barefoot, carrying her shoes in her hands.
The two slowly made their way to the front of the Empress Hotel. Quay felt he was being too persistent by constantly offering help, so he eventually left and called 911 from a restaurant phone. He quickly doubled back and watched Emma from a distance until police arrived.
Two officers met up with Emma just after 7 p.m. on Nov. 28, police confirmed, and spent nearly 45 minutes with her. This would prove to be the last confirmed sighting of Fillipoff, who grew up in Lanark County about an hour southeast of Ottawa.
Police would not comment about their interaction with Emma that night, but the department has access to a network of crisis resource groups that can be called into action by officers when someone is deemed to be in distress. On this night, though, that call was never made.
“It’s really up to each individual officer to determine if someone is a risk to themselves or if we have grounds for apprehension, but clearly we didn’t at that time,” says Const. Mike Russell, spokesman for Victoria police. “These were two seasoned officers who deal with this stuff a lot. Just because someone’s acting strange or is not acting strange, doesn’t mean we can apprehend them or just all in someone to come assess them.”
A few hours later, Emma’s mother, Shelley, arrived in Victoria to help her daughter move home. Shelley had received several phone calls from Emma, who appeared stressed.
Some days she wanted her mother to come get her; other days she told her to stay away. Eventually, Shelley came anyway, but she was too late.
Emma had been staying at Sandy Merriman House, a women’s shelter in the days leading up to her disappearance. Emma was last seen there at 6 p.m. on Nov. 28.
It’s unclear how long it took before police made the connection between the woman they talked to and the missing person report filed on Nov. 29, but a news bulletin issued that day indicates she was last seen by friends in the early evening. This would be the same block Quay met Emma, well before police met with her in front of the Empress.
Shelley spent two months searching. Days passed, then weeks. The search eventually extended to the far corners of Vancouver Island in places such as Tofino, Campbell River and Nanaimo. There was no sign of Emma.
Shelley eventually returned home in February to the 100-acre property in Lanark where she and her ex-husband raised their four children. None of the siblings wants to talk about the disappearance of their sister.
But Shelley says she has to think about it, she has to talk about it. She is in constant contact with police and recently posted a $25,000 reward for information that leads to finding her daughter.
Much of Shelley’s life has stopped in the past year. Lights above her dining room table need rewiring. The back deck is falling apart with a few of the brittle floor boards broken away. Next year, she says.
The loss of her daughter is debilitating on so many levels. Some days, Shelley says she doesn’t want to get out of bed.
Then there was the answering machine. For nearly two weeks, people couldn’t leave messages because erasing the old ones meant she would hear Emma’s voice, likely recorded while Shelley was flying to Victoria.
“It’s funny, you know, you want to hear her voice, but you don’t want to hear her voice. I want to see her picture, but I don’t want to see her picture,” she says. “It’s all very complicated.”
Too often she imagines how the painful saga will conclude. In one scenario, she envisions police coming to her door, delivering the dreaded news.
“I’m not vouching for me, if that happens,” she said from her couch. “I’ve told everybody: the calm, trying-to-keep-it-together person is going to last forever until I find her, but if that happens, all bets are off.”
If her daughter were to call one day and say she is being held captive, Shelley has a list of questions that could help locate her and get police to respond as soon as possible.
Shelley says she’s trying to find a balance between the two exhausting scenarios.
“I have to stay on an even keel. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”