After 20 years, police officers and his family are still haunted by the disappearance of Michael Dunahee.
The four-year old vanished on March 24, 1991, from a Victoria playground while his mother was playing a flag football game and his father was watching from the sidelines.
The search for the boy remains one of the largest police investigations in Canadian history, involving thousands of officers over the years.
It has remained one of the city’s darkest unsolved cases, but isn’t the only instance in Canada where a child has vanished without a trace.
Tania Murrell
For most long-time Edmontonians, Tania Marie Murrell will be permanently ingrained in their memory as a grinning little girl with braided pigtails and strands of flyaway hair, whose picture was featured in newspapers and on TV for weeks in 1983.
She vanished without a trace on Jan. 20 of that year, shortly after 11:10 a.m., when she walked out the school doors for the quick trip home for lunch.
A teacher watched as the three-foot-two, blond-haired youngster with hazel eyes walked out of sight. She was never seen again.
Tania’s disappearance made national headlines, and was the subject of several television programs in the U.S.
One of the chief investigators at the time, Det. John McLeod, said it was the uniqueness of the case that had caught people’s attention. "She went missing without a trace — no clothing, no school books, nothing."
Courtney Struble
On July 9, 2004, 13-year-old Courtney Struble left a friend’s house in Estevan, Sask., between midnight and 1 a.m. but never made it to her father’s home where she was visiting.
Carol Deagnon, a case worker with Child Find Saskatchewan, said the organization received a tip at the beginning of 2008 from someone who believed they spotted Struble outside the province.
While the tip was forwarded to the Estevan Police Service, Deagnon said nothing came of it.
To this day, Deagnon said the circumstances that led to Struble’s disappearance are still unknown.
Mariam Makhniashvili
Makhniashvili disappeared on Sept. 14, 2009, after walking with her 14-year-old brother to their high school, Forest Hill Collegiate Institute in Toronto, a short distance from her parents’ home.
She had no money and no passport at the time.
Police canvassed 6,000 homes in the Toronto neighbourhood where she lived but turned up little, and also garnered few clues from several searches of nearby parks and ravines.
The 18-year-old was believed to have been seen in Okotoks, Alta., a small town about 50 kilometres south of Calgary, on Oct. 27 of that year, going door to door selling dream catchers.
RCMP investigated and determined it was not the teen. Her backpack was recovered in early October, but that, too, has led investigators nowhere.
With files from Postmedia News
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