Ashley Simpson, who disappeared from the North Okanagan, has been missing for over two years, but her parents have never stopped searching.
They record tips that come in and are used to following up on the information they receive.
However, her father is not sure what to make of recent news that Simpson’s driver’s licence was discovered in a vacuum truck used for sewage at a northern B.C. lodge where she used to work.
In an interview from his home in Ontario, Simpson’s father, John, said: “You jump to a thousand different scenarios that it could be.”
“On this one we don’t know what to do, how to think. We know the place; that is where Ashley worked, and I thought she said at one time she had lost her ID, (but) I’m not 100 per cent sure on that,” John said.
Simpson was 32 and had been living on Yankee Flats Road in the north Okanagan when she disappeared in April 2016.
John described thinking of lots of different scenarios that could explain the licence’s discovery at the Sasquatch Crossing Lodge on Highway 97, a 13-hour drive north of where his daughter was last known to be living.
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One possibility John contemplated was the idea that “maybe someone put it there just to throw you off the scent.”
“We do so much. We just don’t know how to attack this one,” John said.
More than two years after his daughter disappeared, John is hoping for closure.
“What my wife and I would truly like is (for) somebody to come forward anonymously and say where she is and where the rest of the four ladies are that disappeared along the same route,” John said.
“That is all we really want. We want her home so she can be with us. Whether she is alive or she has passed on, one way or the other, we just got to get her home.”
Five women, including Simpson, have disappeared from the north Okanagan and Shuswap since 2016.
Only one has ever been found. Last year, police discovered the remains of Vernon teenager Traci Genereaux on a rural property in the same region.
John said his daughter’s ID was discovered by employees of the Sasquatch Crossing Lodge as they were doing a routine cleaning of a vacuum truck used by the lodge to remove sewage from its accommodations.
Both John and his daughter previously worked at the lodge.
John said the ID was mailed to him after police examined it and that he doesn’t believe police “think it is much.”
RCMP said the force is aware of the ID’s discovery and that it was mailed back to the family but had no further comment.
The Sasquatch Crossing Lodge declined to comment on the licence’s discovery.
—With files from the Canadian Press