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Bester, Donna 1981 Canada; Ontario ( Toronto)
Topic Started: Mar 22 2009, 08:57 AM (1,526 Views)
Ell
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http://news.therecord.com/article/507128 [Close]

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HANDOUT PHOTO
RECORD STAFF
FAMILY PHOTO After 28 years, family still hopes sister will finally come home
TheRecord.com - CanadaWorld - After 28 years, family still hopes sister will finally come home

Melinda Dalton
RECORD STAFF



From the back, it could be her.

That long, strawberry blond hair, worn just the way Donna wore it. It could be her. But it never is.

More than 28 years after Donna Bester vanished, her family still sees her in those moments of optimism.

They still have to see the face of anyone they spot with those long strawberry blond locks, just to make sure it isn't her.

"I don't know what she'd look like now, she'd be in her 50s," Donna's brother, Jerry Bester said. "But still, when I see a girl with that hair, I think of her."

Bester's case still remains open with the Toronto Police Service, but little progress has been made over the years.

She was 27 years old when she vanished, old enough to make the decision to leave if she wanted to.

She had disappeared before -- she took off in a moment of desperation to Niagara Falls. It was several days before her family heard from her and a sister went to pick her up. She was struggling, her family says.

Police took the report her sisters filed when, after a couple of days, Donna didn't re-emerge. There wasn't much they could do.

She went on a missing persons list and the investigators would update the family if they had any news. There wasn't much.

Since the circumstances weren't suspicious, police had no reason to suspect she met with foul play.

Her family cleaned out her small basement apartment. They watched her bank accounts for withdrawals that never happened.

A year after she disappeared, her sister, Darlene Donovan placed an ad in a Toronto paper urging Donna to come home.

"We really thought she would just show up," she said.

Bester is only one of more than 1,400 Ontario residents listed as missing on the national police database.

Her case wouldn't have been a high priority.

Police assign ranks to missing persons cases. Children and those involving suspected violence get the highest ranking. Those who are adults -- and could very well want to be missing -- fall to the bottom.

In Waterloo Region, where police respond to more than 300 calls relating to missing persons every year, investigators have come across that exact scenario.

"We have got that request where we have found a person elsewhere and they are fine, but said 'I don't want to be in contact with the family, tell them I'm fine.' And that's all they get," said Regional Police Sgt. Mike Allard.

"Once we know that the person is safe and sound, that closes the investigation and we do respect their wishes. They're adults, most of them, those wishes are respected and we tell the family, 'They're fine and they want you guys to leave them alone.' "

For many families anguishing without answers, even that much would be a relief.

They just need to know.

When a person is reported missing, there are standard procedures that investigators follow.

They'll talk with friends and associates. They'll check local hospitals. They'll look at phone records and bank accounts -- anything they can to narrow down a time when the person was last seen, or to indicate they've taken off on purpose.

"You'll find a lot of time with a missing person, there's a window of a day, or hours and then it's up to investigators to try to decrease that window as much as possible," Allard said. "If we don't have the information, it's tough to do."

Most people turn up in a relatively short period of time.

Some teens that take off from group homes or after a fight with parents will return after a cold night outside or when the cash runs out. Others drain bank accounts to fund a getaway or show up after their image appears in the media.

But then there are those who seem to vanish without a trace. There's no withdrawal from bank accounts, no record of trying to board a plane or cross the border.

In Waterloo Region, four missing persons cases remain on the books. One, that of David MacDermott, was recently raised to a "missing person with suspicious circumstances," or a potential homicide.

That development reignited concern and hope for MacDermott's family that, more than six years after he vanished, closure may finally come.

For others with loved ones on the list, the attention given to that cold case provided a flicker of optimism that new information could turn up all these years later.

But even with that flicker, the heart-wrenching darkness of the unknown is still overwhelming.

"Everybody keeps telling me, 'You may never know anything. You may never hear anything.' I'm not OK with that," said Jacquie House, the sister of another man on the missing list, Alexander "Sandy" Abt.

Abt was last seen in Kitchener in October 2008. His van was found not far from the Chapters store on Gateway Park Drive, but it was the only trace of him. House still holds out a sliver of hope he could be hiding out somewhere -- not wanting to be found.

But, most of the family has accepted that he is likely gone forever.

"I still cry every day," House said. " I don't know how to deal with it. I just need to know something.

"Every day, it haunts me."

The large Bester family was well known in their downtown Kitchener neighbourhood. Donna was number 15 of the 18 Bester kids -- the youngest girl.

When their numbers started mounting, the family became celebrities of sorts, posing for photos in the local and Toronto papers.

Donna was only 11 when she lost her mother and the life she knew. Not long after, her father was injured in a car accident and the brothers and sisters were left with little choice but to sell the family's Whitney Place home and put him into care.

Donna went to live with older brother Jerry and his wife Sandra.

"When she was a teenager, I was raising a family," Jerry recalled. "Our kids were small and I wasn't ready for a teenager then."

The quiet redhead with a face full of freckles never did get close to her older brothers and sisters. She lived her own life and kept her emotions to herself.

"When there's a large family, there are groups that are close and then there is another group," said another sister, Peggy Fach. "It's impossible to be close to everybody. She was kind of in-between boys (brothers) and didn't have a girl (sister) close to her."

When she was old enough, Donna moved to Toronto to take early childhood education classes at Centennial College. Though they were busy with families of their own, two of the Bester sisters already in Toronto -- Darlene and Theresa -- tried to keep an eye on her.

Donna was a member of the sailing club and, after she graduated, took a job at a Toronto child care centre.

She wrote poetry and letters to potential love interests she met through a personal service. Her family found them when they collected the small number of personal possessions from her Huron Street apartment a month after she disappeared.

Her siblings remember her struggling with depression and problems in her relationships. The day she went missing, Jan. 16, 1981, she was living with Theresa because she was having difficulty coping.

Her boyfriend, Gary, was the last person to see her that day.

"He was taking her home to Theresa's and he was stopped at a stop light and she jumped out of the car and said, 'I'm going to get there myself,' " Fach said.

"Their relationship was, I guess, not going so good because she was depressed. He had to go to work and she wasn't going to work so we knew she needed help. We never saw her again."

None of the siblings can remember Gary's last name, but police did clear him of any involvement in her disappearance.

Time passed and only the vision of Donna -- her lovely eyes, her long strawberry blond hair, the long sleeves she always wore to hide her freckles -- remained.

Then, there was a phone call.

"It was almost a year to the day that she disappeared," Fach recalled. "My husband said it was her. I got on the phone and there was just breathing and breathing, she wouldn't say anything."

Fach's husband said the caller asked for Peggy by name and he recognized Donna's voice.

"I said 'Donna, we love you. We miss you. Where are you? Can I come and get you?' And she didn't say anything for a long time. Finally she said, 'The Galt arena.' "

Fach, who lives in Cambridge, reassured her she wouldn't contact the police and told her to stay put.

She raced to the arena and scoured the area. Donna was nowhere to be found. She started knocking on doors, asking neighbours if they had seen anyone using the pay phone. No one saw anything.

"That was the last time anybody heard from her," Fach said.

The more time passes, the more difficult a missing person case becomes for investigators.

"People forget," said Waterloo Regional Police Sgt. Mike Allard.

"That's why it's important to bring it back to the public's attention, to kind of tweak people's memories . . . Sometimes, now that it's a little bit older, people will come forward."

There's also the problem of communication. When a missing person is listed on CPIC, the national police database, a notification will come up if their name is run through by any police agency. If someone tries to cross the border or is pulled over for speeding, a notification will come up on the database.

But, CPIC doesn't include pictures and is only effective if the missing person comes in contact with police.

Project Resolve, an initiative led by the Ontario Provincial Police, was developed to provide solutions to some of those problems.

There are currently over 700 missing person on Project Resolve's website, www.missing-u.ca.

Each one includes a picture, if available, and details of the case. It also includes a database of unidentified remains. Both MacDermott and Abt have been added to the database, a step that has to involve the investigating police agency if it's not an OPP case. Bester isn't yet on the list.

There are unique challenges for investigators tackling some of these so-called historical cases, said Don Reid, a civilian who works on Project Resolve.

Often, family members don't have photographs or can't remember certain details. People scatter and forget. Leads go cold.

"Once they're older than six months, they tend to take a long time to solve," he said.

Since the project began in 2006, investigators have solved 32 missing persons cases and identified eight sets of remains. They've also passed on nearly 700 tips to investigators.

Their most recent success came in early March when the OPP announced they'd put a name to decades-old remains after family members saw the case on a television news show.

"It's those ones, the 40-year-old cases, that end up surprising even us," said Reid. "It is because of that public exposure and that is what the website is doing. It's taking the cases strictly out of our hands and asking the public for help."

In many cases, simply having investigators take another look at the case has helped bring resolution.

"Memory fades, files get stuffed away, so just accessing that information is often a big barrier," Reid said.

"But these cases don't go away. We don't treat them as closed. They remain on our books and we try to solve them, no matter how long it takes."

Donna Bester's family know they've now spent more years without her then they had with her.

Realistically, they acknowledge she probably wouldn't have gone this long without contacting anyone if she could.

But, they still have theories.

Maybe she simply wanted out of her life and relocated under a new name. Maybe she was lured in by a cult that preyed on vulnerable young women.

There are also the bleaker hypotheses. A psychic once told one of the sisters Donna was murdered by a psychopath who is serving time in the Kingston Penitentiary. There's also the possibility she may have taken her own life. But each theory has its own set of holes. And, with no clues and no base to start from, the family found all they had were theories.

"We didn't know what we were looking for," Donovan said. " It's not like when they go into ravines looking for a body. She was an adult. She was depressed. But you think, if she committed suicide, there would have been a body . . . We think we would have heard something by now, unless she was murdered.

"Unless she was buried somewhere and they never found her."

Toronto Police have never investigated the case as a homicide.

The family has stayed in contact with investigators, but they, too, have told them there's little chance Donna will turn up, given the time that's passed. She didn't have dental records, so even if remains were discovered, an initial comparison would be difficult.

Often the hardest part for families of the missing is making the decision to move on while so many questions are still unanswered, said Const. Richard Dorling of the Waterloo Regional Police homicide unit.

"The family just want closure," he said. "At least with a homicide, there's a funeral and the grieving process and things kind of make sense. But with missing persons, there are just so many questions that are left unanswered. "

After 28 years, Bester's family is now facing a difficult decision: should they accept that Donna is gone and have her legally declared dead or keep hoping and risk never having closure?

"The oldest ones are all getting up now," said Sandra Bester. "There's not even a spot on a stone or anything to mark that she was even here. We want to do it soon before maybe the younger ones won't think to do it. Something needs to be done. "

They are making one last appeal to the public for information, hoping desperately that something went unnoticed or unreported.

It's the same hope the Abts and MacDermotts share -- that if their loved one is truly gone, someone knows something that can bring them some peace.

At least then, they'd be able to acknowledge and remember their loved one instead of being consumed by the unknown and the future that never was, Bester's family said.

"Going through her poems, I had so much in common with her," said Donovan. "The poems she wrote out were the same ones I love. Even the stuff that's she's written, you just think, 'What a loss that we never had her in our life.'

"It would be a dream, a wonderful dream if she showed up. If she just walked through the door."

Anyone with information on Donna Bester's disappearance is asked to contact the family at sandara.bester@sympatico.ca or Toronto Police Service's 33 division at 416-808-3300.

Anyone with information about local missing persons cases can call Kitchener detectives at 519-650-8500 ext. 4431. To report an anonymous tip about any of the cases, contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS.

newsroom@therecord.com

http://news.therecord.com/article/507128

http://news.therecord.com/printArticle/507128
Ell

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Only after the last fish has been
caught;
Only after the last river has been
poisoned;
Only then will you realize
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