A B.C. family of 4 vanished 35 years ago. Police are still hoping to find them

Thirty-five years after a family of four vanished from Prince George, B.C., police are renewing an appeal for information that could help close the decades-old cold case.

Doreen, Ronald, Ryan and Russell Jack were last seen on Aug. 2, 1989. They were reported weeks later after the family failed to return from an alleged job opportunity for Ronald somewhere west of the city.

“We have ideas about where the Jack family may have gone, but we don’t have anything to concretely pinpoint what direction they left Prince George in, if their travel plans changed after the last time they spoke with their family,” Prince George RCMP Cpl. Jennifer Cooper said.

1:34 What happens when a person goes missing in B.C.?

In the decades since the family vanished, police have run down leads exhaustively, to no avail.

To this day, the detachment retains a dedicated investigator tasked with following up on new tips on the file.

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Cooper said cracking the case is all the more difficult given that in 1989 police did not have many of the tools they currently use to try and trace a missing person.

“No banking records, we were still using cheques back then, no debit cards, no cellphones, no GPS in our cars,” she said.

“A lot of the tools we rely on in our current missing persons investigations just weren’t there for us to access.”

That fact makes collecting tips or hearing from witnesses or anyone who might have information on where the Jack family went all the more important, Cooper said.

Cooper added that police intend to keep the file open until they can answer what happened to the Jacks, or they can “bring the family home.”

Anyone with information on the family is asked to contact Prince George RCMP at (250)561-3300 or anonymously contact Crime Stoppers at 1(800)222-8477 or online at northernbccrimestoppers.ca.