On July 30, 1985, Nicole Morin, 8, left her mother’s penthouse apartment in The West Mall, in Toronto’s Etobicoke area, and vanished.
At 10:30am Nicole had gone to the lobby of the twenty story apartment building to pick up the mail. She returned to the apartment and got ready to go swimming with a playmate.
Before leaving the apartment Nicole had spoken to a friend through the building’s intercom and promised to be right down. The playmate waited about 15 minutes before buzzing the apartment again to find out why Nicole hadn’t arrived. The two girls had arranged to meet in the lobby and go to a supervised swimming pool at the rear of the building.
About 11:00am Nicole said goodbye to her mother and left the apartment. There has been no trace of the girl, who was likely abducted moments after leaving the apartment in the Highway 427 and Rathburn Road area.
A massive search effort was launched by police for the missing eight-year-old girl, and though officials have received thousands of tips over the years, what happened to Morin remains a mystery.
Her disappearance would spark an extensive search of Etobicoke and the launch of a 20-member taskforce, with approximately 900 community members helping to look for the little girl. Unfortunately, No one has seen the girl since she closed the apartment door and walked into the penthouse hallway.
In 2004, researchers for a Belgian organization known as Fondation Princesses de Croÿ et Massimo Lancellotti announced that they had tentatively matched photographs of Morin seen on a Canadian police website with pictures on a Dutch website that advocates for sexually-abused children. Using biometrical analysis, the researchers claimed a strong resemblance between Morin and a child in a pedophile network in Zandvoort.
Despite the years of investigations and thousands of leads, no physical evidence has ever been uncovered to solve the disappearance.
In 2019, on the 34th anniversary of her disappearance, an age-enhanced, artist rendition of Morin was released. The sketch shows what Morin might look like in her 40s.
The case remains open to this day.
Nicole was wearing a peach, one pieced bathing suit with colored stripes on the front, a green headband, red canvas shoes, and was carrying a peach colored blanket and a purple beach towel. If you have any information on Morin’s whereabouts, please contact Toronto Police at 416-808-2200.
