The family of Marilyn Bergeron searches for answers and reveals some startling theories in the mystery of a young Quebec woman who disappeared in 2008. She was last seen leaving the family’s home near Quebec City to take a walk. The investigation showed that the 24-year-old went to an ATM to take out money and then made a purchase at a Café Depot in Saint-Romuald, Que. Police have no trace of her since. Was she murdered or is she still alive?
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00:00This program is rated 14+, and contains scenes of violence and mature subject matter.
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00:12I stopped working for a while, so I could try to find Marianne.
00:17It seems really odd to just leave and disappear.
00:20It doesn't fit her personality.
00:22I always suspected that Marianne could have been a victim of human trafficking.
00:26She was a victim of threats.
00:30Maybe she tried to protect her parents.
00:33I brought her home and she broke down in tears.
00:37She was inconsolable.
00:39This was not the Marilyn I knew at all.
00:42She seemed scared of something.
00:44Somebody saw her, and somebody was with her the hours before the disappearance.
00:49Probably this person maybe killed her, maybe bring her somewhere else.
00:54We didn't find the body.
00:56No blood, no bones, no clothes.
01:00Nothing.
01:04Welcome to Crime Beat.
01:05I'm Anthony Robart.
01:06Tonight, a family is left baffled after their daughter vanishes without a trace.
01:12She was last seen at a bank machine and a cafe near their home.
01:16Now, as authorities searched for Marilynne, several haunting theories emerge about what happened to her.
01:22Here now is Dan Spector with the strange disappearance of Marilynne Bergeron.
01:3024-year-old Marilynne Bergeron goes to a Quebec City bank machine on February 17, 2008, after leaving her parents' house to take a walk.
01:45What was going through her mind at this moment?
01:47What was she looking at just moments before she vanished?
01:50When I see her in that location, I don't think she looks peaceful.
01:58You know, looking at her face and her eyes, I see that she seems worried about something.
02:03And she's looking over her shoulders, and I can't help but think, who's there?
02:17Marilynne Bergeron told her parents she'd stop by a mall and a park near their home in the suburbs of Quebec City and would be back in a few hours.
02:29But as the sun starts to set, she's still not home.
02:32The hour's packed.
02:34Marilynne isn't coming back.
02:36I started to become very worried because there was nothing normal about it.
02:40I was in New York for work.
02:44My mother called, and the first thing she said is, your sister is missing.
02:49Your heart stops when you hear these words.
02:53Her parents take a look around nearby Chauveau Park, but find no trace.
03:00After a sleepless night and no word from their daughter for 24 hours, the family calls the police.
03:05I picked up the phone, and I found it very difficult in that moment to call and say, my daughter is missing.
03:13This was a terrible burden.
03:16It's a system or it's a machine that starts, and you're not ready for it.
03:20Am I going to say, like, in the news, like, she's missing, we need to find her?
03:24And you're in shock.
03:25Like, it was chaos.
03:28There was a patroller or a police officer who came to take our statement in the next hour.
03:34That happened very quickly.
03:36That evening, an investigator from Quebec City Police Department came to take our statement.
03:42When I finally managed to get to Quebec, because there was a storm,
03:47I remember sitting down with my parents, and we're looking at each other, like,
03:51how do we even deal with this situation?
03:54How are we in this situation?
03:56We couldn't just stay still and wait for the phone.
03:59That wasn't going to be us.
04:01We basically decided to investigate where could we find a trace of her.
04:08We knew she had left home around 11, 15, on February 17, but we knew nothing after that.
04:16And what impressed us, I think, the most at the very beginning was just how involved they were.
04:24The investigators also felt, well, you know, she's 24 years old, she's an adult,
04:28she can come and go as she wanted, you know.
04:31They probably didn't fear that something terrible could have happened to their daughter, you know.
04:36But the parents could not lay low.
04:37Marilyn had left without her cell phone, her purse, her wallet,
04:41but she did have a credit card on her, associated with her father's account.
04:47I went to look at my account, and there was one transaction.
04:53This is where Marilyn tried to withdraw $60 from a bank machine in 2008.
04:58When she said she was going to take a walk, she went directly from here to the bank,
05:04because the security footage was captured seven or eight minutes later.
05:09She tried to get $60 out, but she didn't.
05:13She had either forgotten the code or something didn't work.
05:17Afterwards, she used her credit card in a Café Dépôt in St. Romuald,
05:24which is on the South Shore of Quebec.
05:25It's about 20 kilometers from her house.
05:28How did she get to the Café Dépôt?
05:32There are cafes everywhere.
05:34I don't understand why she had to come here.
05:36That's why we keep saying that someone came to get her here,
05:39or she came here with someone.
05:42She didn't have a car.
05:44So somebody drove her to South Shore, to Lévi.
05:48She didn't have money.
05:49She paid with a car for a coffee in the coffee shop.
05:54She was with somebody.
05:56And when she's in the bank, she always takes a look in her back,
06:02like looking to somebody who would wait for her.
06:06The distance between the bank and Café Dépôt is huge.
06:11It's about 18, 20 kilometers.
06:13Even on a beautiful winter day, which it was, it's quite a walk.
06:19And you don't follow a path.
06:21Like you have to cross the bridge.
06:24You have to cross freeways.
06:25It's complicated.
06:26We didn't understand why she would have gone to this place.
06:30The only explanation is that it looks like a place where you might meet someone
06:35because it's near freeways.
06:38The Café Dépôt, I went there with my dad.
06:40I remember the young woman, she looked like me, and she asked,
06:43does your sister look alike?
06:45And I said, yeah, we have the same type of eyes.
06:48And she says, I recognize her through you.
06:52That is like the last really legitimate, documented place where we know
06:58without a shadow of a doubt that Maddie Lynn stopped early that afternoon,
07:04bought a coffee, paid with a credit card, and left.
07:08Why didn't she go to a coffee shop at this outdoor shopping mall
07:12in an area that's difficult to access across a bridge several kilometers from her home?
07:17And where did she go from here?
07:21Something in her life was terribly wrong at the time of her disappearance.
07:27Maddie Lynn had been living in Montreal for three years.
07:31Out of the blue, one day, calls her mom and dad in tears, very distraught,
07:35and says, mom, you know, please, I have to come back home.
07:40She says she's in with the wrong crowd and that she's afraid to live in Montreal.
07:46What's this story all about?
07:49She said to me, mom, I wasn't hanging around with a good crowd.
07:52Welcome back.
08:09Marilyn Bergeron left her parents' home in Quebec City,
08:12and where she went remains a mystery.
08:15As the weeks wear on, dark theories begin to form.
08:19We now return to Dan Spector with the strange disappearance of Marilyn Bergeron.
08:30The fact that she moved to Montreal was very natural.
08:34It felt like the right move.
08:35It was something that we had talked about for the longest time.
08:39She was attracted to the city for many reasons.
08:42Work was one of them, but also the music scene, the friends.
08:48So it was an important milestone.
08:50She played guitar and she sang really well.
08:56Marilyn was a hyperactive child.
09:01When she was young, she did sports, she played basketball,
09:06she was the captain of her high school team, she was an excellent musician.
09:12She was born around the holidays, so she was kind of a Christmas present.
09:18We were reading books, encyclopedia together.
09:21I played teacher with her a lot.
09:23So she was always very, very curious, wanting to know more.
09:28She was shining in pretty much anything she tried.
09:32She was working as a freelancer and also working at Steve Music.
09:38I wasn't surprised that in Montreal she also gravitated around artists
09:43because this was a world that she loved.
09:46It was definitely the heart of her life.
09:50Music was really, really important to her.
09:53She had many different friend groups.
09:58She had some very good friends in Montreal.
10:01She has no problem making new friends.
10:04In split seconds, she becomes best friend with many, many people.
10:09Things started to change towards the time of her disappearance.
10:13I had seen her in October, so a couple of months before,
10:18and I felt that I was looking at somebody new.
10:23We had seen her at Christmas, and I found it a bit sad.
10:27I asked her if everything was all right, and she said yes,
10:30because she wasn't someone who really opened up,
10:32not necessarily to her parents either.
10:36She didn't have the same energy and the same smile as she normally does.
10:40She was more quiet, more reserved.
10:45No one understood what was wrong with her.
10:47She was sad, withdrawn, with no joy at all.
10:50We didn't recognize her anymore.
10:55She was suffering in silence.
10:57It was like she had completely shut down.
11:01I called her after work at night.
11:03I said to her, Marie, are things all right?
11:06And she said, no, things are not good, Mom.
11:08I asked, what's going on?
11:13Are you afraid?
11:14She said, yes, I'm afraid to live in my apartment in Montreal.
11:18So I told her to pack her backpack and get on a bus home that night.
11:23She said, I'm going to do that right away.
11:26We finished the conversation at 6.40 p.m.
11:30By 7.15, she was on the bus on her way to Quebec City.
11:34It happened very quickly.
11:36She said to me, Mom, I will tell you everything when I get home.
11:41Marilyn settles into her old bedroom and it's quickly decided the 24-year-old is going to move back to Quebec City.
11:48Why does she want to go back to live with my parents when she's been on her own for three years and she's enjoying it?
11:55So that was really an important point for me and I think something derailed her pet very dramatically.
12:04Are you heartbroken or something?
12:07Does this have to do with love?
12:09She said, no.
12:09Do you owe money?
12:11She said, no.
12:12Is it drugs?
12:13She said, no.
12:14Then I said, Marilyn, were you assaulted?
12:18And she closed her eyes, she pinched her lips together and tears started to stream down her face.
12:25I took her in my arms and we cried together.
12:28It's like she was saying, I don't know, how can I tell my mother this?
12:32I remember her asking me the question, like, is there a light now at the end of the tunnel?
12:37And I paused and I picked my word very carefully because I knew something was wrong.
12:45And I said, yes, there's always hope, Marilyn, you know that, and you know I will say that to you.
12:50And I said, what's going on?
12:52Tell me about it.
12:53And she wouldn't talk.
12:54She was like, no, I needed to hear that from you.
12:56I'm very happy you said that.
12:58And it was the last conversation we had together.
13:01Marilyn Bergeron was working in a music shop in Montreal when she called her mother to tell her she wasn't feeling well and wanted to come home to Quebec City.
13:14She wasn't the same, her mother says.
13:16She looked sad and depressed, like something was bothering her, but she didn't want to talk about it.
13:22Two Sundays ago, Marilyn left her parents' house to go for a walk.
13:26She used her credit card to buy something at a Saint-Romuald coffee shop.
13:31The Quebec City police believed that Marilyn committed suicide.
13:36That was their primary hypothesis.
13:39They were convinced that our daughter had taken her own life.
13:42They said she had probably thrown herself in the St. Lawrence River.
13:49During this time, I had looked under the bridge.
13:52It was ice.
13:53If she had done it, she would have stayed on the ice.
13:56The Quebec City police said probably it's a suicide, but we didn't find the body on the ice in the St. Lawrence River.
14:05And the theory of the Quebec Municipal Police, it was not well received by the family because the way to say, okay, it's all set.
14:16I don't think you walk 20 miles almost and you go get a coffee to then commit suicide.
14:24Personally, I find that hard to believe.
14:27They never really did any searches or anything to find our daughter's body.
14:33We asked several times, but it was never done.
14:36If she wanted to kill herself, she would have done it in Montreal.
14:42Meanwhile, the Bergerons have started a search of their own.
14:46They're printing posters and creating a website with pictures of Marilyn.
14:50It's extremely difficult.
14:53I was getting married in May and she was writing a song, coming, excited.
14:58I was sharing pictures with her and I know that she didn't miss that event because she wanted to.
15:05I know that something bad happened.
15:08She had this group of people there that we didn't really know, but we felt like they may have had a certain influence over her.
15:15She loved to talk to people.
15:17Maybe I wasn't careful enough with that because she talked with a lot of people.
15:24Well, I mean, she had romantic relationships with men much older than her, about 10 years older.
15:31She told me she was scared.
15:33When she said that, I was not surprised because we had met some of these people
15:38and her father had already had a talk with her in Montreal.
15:41I always suspected that Marilyn could have been a victim of human trafficking.
15:47Michelle Bergeron and André Berchard's daughter disappeared six months ago.
16:02It's still fresh in their minds and hurts them to talk about it.
16:06But it's not just the emotional torment they're dealing with.
16:09They're frustrated with the Quebec City police.
16:12They came to plead with police today.
16:14They've had no news about their daughter's case for three months.
16:18Working with the police was difficult at the beginning because we were not used to it.
16:23We didn't know how this works.
16:26And we had expectations that a new missing person case would be top of the list.
16:34I think at the beginning they were considering this as someone who decided to leave
16:39while we were begging them to understand that we were worried and that she was in a vulnerable place.
16:48We feel abandoned by the system because we had high hopes.
16:53I thought a missing person was something important.
16:55And you had to see she might have been in danger.
16:59Anything could have happened, especially when you take into account absolutely everything surrounding Marilyn,
17:05the state she was in.
17:08We organized our blitzes.
17:11We did it all.
17:12We always believe that time is of the essence, especially in Marilyn's case where, yes, she was 24 years old,
17:21but we have to also listen to what the family was saying.
17:24And they told us that their daughter was in distress, asked to be moved, left Montreal quickly after three years.
17:31Something was off.
17:33You know, you have to take that like really seriously.
17:35There were some cameras that had filmed the bridge and maybe some shops around Café Dépôt,
17:45but we lost that footage because by the time the demand was made, it had been destroyed.
17:53In this case, I think we lost something important in the investigation because the body who was in charge of the investigation was not the best.
18:02Lawyer Marc Belmar is a former Quebec justice minister and has been an advocate for victims of crime for nearly five decades.
18:11He helps the Bergeron family pro bono.
18:13It should be the Montreal police who was made the investigation, not the Quebec police.
18:22A spokesperson for the Quebec City police said that they put countless hours into the case and have done all that they can.
18:29We've asked a few times for a transfer and they were always denied.
18:34She had moved back to my parents' house the day before.
18:39The three years before that, she was in Montreal.
18:43Really, there was not even 24 hours of I'm leaving in Quebec City and I disappear.
18:49And the entire story around Montreal, that felt like this was something that maybe the police of Montreal could have helped with.
18:57We wanted the investigation transferred to Montreal.
19:03We were not able to because there is a rule that says the investigation belongs to the police service from the moment the person was last seen.
19:13At that moment, it was, no, we're not transferring the case, it's ours.
19:18Hey, there's a person who could die here.
19:21We could lose our daughter because of all these rules.
19:26And I don't blame the police for that.
19:28They have to travel back to Montreal.
19:30It's not easy to get resources and allocations to do that.
19:34But it felt like this was a remote investigation instead of being, like, in the location where it happened.
19:44We're talking about threats.
19:46We're talking about a young lady who saw something very sad, very bad kind of crime.
19:52And Montreal police has more experience in this kind of case.
19:56This is how Nathalie Bergeron spent the last 48 hours, wandering downtown Montreal, talking to strangers.
20:10She's told thousands of Quebecers about her missing little sister.
20:1425-year-old Madeleine Bergeron has not been seen for close to a year now.
20:18So we put together a 1-800-number because people were calling, but there was no way to call from a different city at the time.
20:27We had, like, she's at that location now, and we would call and share that.
20:32And it would take a while for us to get a call back.
20:35And we felt like we're missing opportunities of finding her.
20:40We were all over the place.
20:43I stopped working for a while so I could try to find Madeleine.
20:47It seems really odd to just leave and disappear, although we never know, but it doesn't fit her personality.
20:55Yesterday, the Bergeron family launched a Canada-wide publicity campaign.
20:59Friends and family passed out thousands of information pamphlets in 40 different cities, from Vancouver to New Brunswick.
21:06We had the Marie-Lynne disappearance email, we had a website so people could contact us, and we would pass that information along to police.
21:19At one point it became clear that this was going to take a while, and I had to go back to work.
21:24My work required travel, so I saw that as an opportunity also for me to spread the word about my sister.
21:34I remember one of my first business trips to Vancouver after she went missing.
21:38I would get up at 6, 7, have meetings all day, dinner with the clients, smile, go to the hotel, put my jacket back, and head out.
21:50I would go in bad neighborhoods looking for her, Toronto, Vancouver, New York.
21:57I thought at one point I might have gotten shot.
22:00I remember I went to the FBI.
22:04I always suspected that Marie-Lynne could have been a victim of human trafficking, and I just was very determined to talk to them.
22:12They let me go upstairs, and I met with some agents that were specialists of human trafficking for a good hour.
22:22What happened really, she was a victim of threats.
22:26Maybe she tried to protect her parents.
22:29Jonathan Gauthier was a longtime friend of Marilyn.
22:32They'd met in school in their teens.
22:34They lost touch when she moved to Montreal, but had reconnected just a few months before she disappeared.
22:39She seemed extremely sad.
22:42At a party they both attended, he says, he found her in shambles in the hallway.
22:47I brought her home, and she broke down in tears.
22:50She was inconsolable.
22:53This was not the Marilyn I knew at all.
22:55She seemed scared of something.
22:57I said, you can tell me everything.
23:00Then every example I brought, she said, no, it's worse.
23:05I said, Marilyn, did you witness a murder?
23:09No, it's worse.
23:10Were you a victim of rape?
23:11No, it's worse.
23:13She said, Joe, you can't even imagine what I experienced.
23:18I had the impression she didn't want to put me in danger.
23:22She had lived through something horrible, two to three weeks, maybe a month, before we had this conversation on December 10, 2007.
23:31To bring the person into that, at a certain point, someone the person trusts.
23:38She said to Jonathan Gauthier, who got in touch with her in December, a few weeks before her disappearance,
23:48that she saw something worse than a rape, and she was listening to music in the dark, and she was very apart in the party, and she was very upset by this.
24:00It kind of goes back to the theory of human trafficking.
24:07This is a situation where the people that are involved in it will witness things that are horrible, will suffer acts that are terrible also.
24:18I had some people contacting me that would say, the same type of story happened to my daughter.
24:25Let me tell you about it, because it sounds like what you're going through is very similar.
24:31And in one particular case, it was human trafficking, and this person had a daughter who was almost stuck for two years.
24:41She was in Montreal, in Toronto, in Halifax.
24:45She was being moved from one location to another and forced into prostitution.
24:51She tried to escape, and she was severely beaten.
24:54And the father told me that he finally got her out, but he felt alone.
25:02He didn't have any support.
25:04The people that were part of that world were still making threats to him and his daughter.
25:10The family's belief that Marilyn could have been lured into human trafficking has been fueled by a mysterious encounter in a small Ontario town a year after she went missing,
25:20when a married couple said a young woman knocked on their door on a cold, rainy night.
25:27I mean, basically, she was cold.
25:28She was frail, wet because it was raining outside.
25:32They have indications that Vergeland, who they last saw at their home near Quebec City in February 2008,
25:38could be in Ontario because of what one resident of Hawkesbury, near the Quebec border, says happened in 2009.
25:44I think she was at Guy Salico's house at this night.
25:50For the past year, Andrée Béchard says she has glanced into passing cars,
26:04hoping she would see something or someone that leads her to her missing daughter.
26:08In 2009, Marilyn's family had already spent months running their own investigation into her disappearance,
26:26gathering their own tips on a 1-800 number they'd set up and butting heads with Quebec City police.
26:32Madeleine's parents are not impressed with how police are handling their daughter's case.
26:37They say they've been ignored for months.
26:43The first year was difficult because sometimes we struggled to get them to change their minds about their theories.
26:51It was deeply ingrained in them that our daughter had taken her own life,
26:56and no matter what new information came in, it felt like it wasn't being taken seriously.
27:01We said we were not pleased, and we took action, such as hiring a private investigator,
27:08because we felt that some leads needed to be looked into straight away.
27:12So it was a costly endeavour with mixed results, but it was something that we had to try.
27:20But their attention and their hope is about to turn to this small town near the Quebec-Ontario border.
27:26There was some information that came in.
27:29There are really a lot of sighting in the region of Oxbury in Ontario.
27:36The phone started ringing, and I remember that we had significant sighting at different locations.
27:43A hospital.
27:46Somebody that resembled Mary Lede was seen at the Oxbury hospital.
27:51We pushed that investigation because the Quebec police wouldn't have gone.
27:56They said there was nothing significant in Hawkesbury.
28:01Somebody even made an affidavit saying, I think I've seen Marilyn in my house.
28:06She knocked in the middle of the night, and this person is convinced it was my sister.
28:11On the month of December, Marilyn, that we believe it was, came to our house, and it was around 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning.
28:20He says at the time he didn't know who it was, but that the young woman who rang the doorbell was crying and asking for help.
28:26When she came in, basically, she was cold.
28:29She was a little frail, wet because it was raining outside.
28:33He says the blonde woman, who appeared to be in her early 20s and fluent in English, wanted directions to Chamberlain Street in Hawkesbury and refused his offer to drive her there.
28:43According to Salico, after about 15 minutes, she left.
28:46She had a little jacket, blue jeans, a light white t-shirt with a V-neck, and she had high-heeled shoes also.
28:57He talked about how in the middle of the night, this young girl, what she was wearing, you know, a little jean jacket, I believe, you know, she was blonde, and she was blonde at a certain point as well.
29:10Described the woman, like her personality, the fact that she was very soft-spoken, she spoke really good English but with a French accent, like there were a lot of similarities with Marilyn.
29:23I think she was at the Salico's house at this night.
29:27She tried to make the call.
29:30Nobody seemed to have answered.
29:31The gentleman and his wife wanted to drive her to the street, and she insisted no, you know, but they allowed her, like, to come in, gave her a towel because she was soaking wet at that time.
29:42And he didn't realize who she was.
29:46It's only later when he saw photographs of Marilyn that he's like, this is the young girl that came to our house and came forward with this information.
29:54It made me so sad to know that my daughter could be struggling like that in the middle of the night.
30:01I have tears in my eyes because that's not what we wanted for our daughter.
30:06It completely shattered me to think that this could be my daughter.
30:10Guy Salico, when we went to see him with his wife, Carole, I'm sorry, I have tears in my eyes.
30:17When we brought the photo album, he said, that's her.
30:21That's the girl we saw.
30:22We said to ourselves, wow, you know, like, this sounds like really, really credible.
30:29We received clues, calls from people who saw her also in the train station, in this area, in Toronto trail.
30:39She was seen by many people.
30:40It's well known by investigators that there's a sex trail from Montreal to Toronto.
30:49The girls got in Toronto to dance and to make prostitutions.
30:54Many policemen told me that it exists and it's the way it is.
30:57Maybe she was in this trail and she got to Toronto by Huxbury.
31:02The Quebec police came to my place.
31:04Belmore says the family is frustrated because of what they claim is lack of information from police.
31:09They say that the inquiry is going on, but we don't know more than that, but we need more than that.
31:20Quebec City police went up a while afterwards and unfortunately we were told that it was not Marie-Lyne,
31:26which was very disappointing to the family.
31:28I don't feel that it was taken seriously at the time, but to us it was very important.
31:33And it was him and his wife, like it wasn't just him in the house.
31:37There were two people looking at this woman that walked in the middle of the night, barely dressed and she was cold and she spoke French and English.
31:46There are really a lot of sighting in the region of Huxbury.
31:51The 30 tips we received were from Ontario saying that they saw Marilyn in the train station on the road, which I came.
32:04There were other people that worked in the restaurants and talked about this woman sitting with an older person.
32:10We also had leads in that region like Ottawa and even Toronto.
32:16I remember talking to some charity organizations.
32:20There was a woman that was described to me as Maria and she was with someone who was violent and the description fit my sister.
32:29I remember talking to one of the specialists in Montreal.
32:33I asked Point Blanc, can you actually live more than five years if you're in human trafficking?
32:40And he told me, yes, you can go 20 years old easily.
32:45And I was shocked by that.
32:46He explained to me that unfortunately there's a point where the person who's the victim could then become the abuser to survive in that type of circle.
32:56I'm not saying this is what happened to Marilyn, but it is how some people will survive.
33:01And some people will forget their previous life entirely because of the mistreatments and the drugs and the abuse.
33:08Hawkesbury was the place we thought.
33:11We really thought she had been there and that was a year later.
33:15We didn't find her in Hawkesbury.
33:17We went a few times.
33:19We continued to pursue these leads.
33:21But unfortunately it didn't bring us the result we were hoping for.
33:25Guy Salico did not want to speak on camera for this episode, but he told us he remains 99.9% sure Marilyn Bergeron was in his house that night.
33:35He said Quebec City police came to the area to investigate, but he didn't feel they treated the sighting as seriously as he expected they would.
33:42The family says they received dozens of tips about Marilyn from the Hawkesbury area that they shared with authorities.
33:48What happened really, she was a victim of threats.
33:53Maybe she tried to protect her parents.
33:56Maybe the threats would go to the family also.
34:00I said, was she a witness to something?
34:03Did she participate in something against her will?
34:06Did she herself commit a horrible act against her will?
34:09Did she go through some sort of initiation?
34:15The reality is Marilyn didn't have a record.
34:18She was young.
34:19She was starting her life.
34:20If she did commit a crime, she wasn't caught.
34:24And we didn't know about it.
34:26I asked, is she caught up in some kind of organization?
34:29She said she was hanging around with the wrong crowd.
34:32That's when I really started wondering, what had she gotten herself into?
34:37She had gotten involved in something.
34:39Because Marilyn was the kind of girl who trusted people easily.
34:43And I started thinking that somewhere along the way, she had been deceived.
34:53Somebody saw her and somebody was with her hours before the disappearance.
34:58Probably this person maybe killed her, maybe bring her somewhere else.
35:03We don't know no more.
35:05This person is probably from Montreal because she got many links with the Montrealers.
35:12People weren't talking.
35:14They don't talk.
35:15There are some people who refuse to even speak with the police.
35:19Some people just don't want to talk.
35:20And you can't force them to talk either.
35:24It's a big puzzle trying to find a missing person.
35:27And a lot of people have cases and they don't know.
35:33We didn't find a body.
35:35So if she's dead, she's dead.
35:37But we didn't find nothing.
35:39No blood, no bones, no clothes, nothing.
35:44If Marilyn is watching, I just want her to know that we love her, we miss her,
35:49and we just want to hear that she's doing well.
35:51The Bergenon family is convinced their daughter was kidnapped or the victim of a crime.
35:55But Quebec City police are not treating it as such.
35:59They believe Marilyn is a runaway, a claim that has upset the family.
36:04And maybe she decided to leave also because she didn't want to talk to the family no more.
36:09Could it be that Maddie Lynn has decided to just live a new life somewhere else?
36:17Welcome back.
36:30Within days of moving back in with her parents in Quebec City, 24-year-old Marilyn Bergeron went missing.
36:37Now, her parents always believed that her disappearance was linked to her reasons for coming home from Montreal.
36:43We now return to Dan Spector with a conclusion of the strange disappearance of Marilyn Bergeron.
36:54In Marilyn's old bedroom, her parents keep a bin full of Christmas presents they've bought for their daughter every year since she went missing.
37:02There are now 17.
37:03When she comes back, we'll give them to her, all the Christmases we missed.
37:09We can live a little moment for each time.
37:14One day, maybe we can offer her everything we wanted to offer.
37:21Her bedroom is still intact, her guitars sit ready to be played.
37:25They've also kept some of her clothes, including one of her favorite sweaters.
37:31My mom, it's our full-time job to look for my sister.
37:37André Bouchard can cover her entire kitchen table with the extensive notes she's taken,
37:42documenting the entirety of the family's investigation into their daughter's disappearance.
37:47They made more than 60 trips at their own expense, following leads, visiting places she may have been seen.
37:55It's been over 15 years that Marilyn has gone missing.
37:58This mom could almost become a detective.
38:00I think she learned so much about the law.
38:02She learned so much about investigation.
38:05Today, they met with liberal MNA Patrick Huot at the National Assembly.
38:10They handed him a petition with 5,000 signatures.
38:13The goal is to improve the disappearance of the disappearance.
38:15The goal is to improve the way missing person cases are treated, she says.
38:21In 2016, I started talking about the missing persons law.
38:25I met with the minister of social services.
38:29For nearly a decade, she pushed Quebec to give police more power to look into missing persons cases,
38:35to soften privacy rules, to help find people.
38:38There were some moments where I felt that because she was an adult,
38:43that the effort and the urgency in particular didn't match the situation.
38:49I think now that's better, and also I see some efforts for collaboration
38:55between the different cities, and that is really critical.
38:59I was invited to the Parliamentary Commission to give my opinion on the law regarding missing persons,
39:07why it was important, etc.
39:09At that point, 8 out of 10 provinces in Canada had already adopted it,
39:13but here in Quebec, we still hadn't.
39:16When we can have an additional training, we never say no to that.
39:23So it's a law of the police that was changed to include the ability for police, for example,
39:30to seek information about a missing person on medical records.
39:34For example, they can look for a social security number with a name
39:38and ask, like, was there any activity over the last years.
39:42They can request the medical situation, any access to a file,
39:47or any information in the files that can be shared.
39:49It is a way for us to cope with this situation
39:53and to feel that we're doing something useful.
39:57Some critical puzzle pieces are still out of reach.
40:00The family has never been able to access Marilyn's Facebook messages, for example.
40:04Well, we're still looking into this,
40:06so hopefully I'll have a different answer for you in a couple of months.
40:09But at the moment, the answer is no.
40:13They've followed up on countless calls that came into their toll-free family line.
40:17Some are more painful than others.
40:20It was a man, and he would systematically call at 3 or 4 a.m. in the morning for me,
40:26because I live in Los Angeles.
40:28He would say that she was being trafficked.
40:32He knew where she was.
40:33He was part of this organization.
40:35You know, I could never tell anybody about it, not the police, not anyone.
40:39And I could see that, slowly but surely,
40:43it was going to be a money question that was coming.
40:47You have a part of you that you can't help it.
40:51You just say, what if?
40:53What if this is it?
40:54What if this is true?
40:57Natalie even managed to get Marilyn's name added to NamUs,
41:01the United States National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
41:05I think she's the only one who's a missing Canadian in NamUs.
41:09I still feel that she wants to be found.
41:14But what if Marilyn has started fresh and does not want to be found?
41:19No idea. No idea at all.
41:21Could it be that?
41:23We brought it up, but you know, you can propose anything,
41:27and we'll say, yes, it's possible.
41:29Oui, c'est possible.
41:30Leaving Quebec, going somewhere else,
41:33it's easy to leave today, yeah?
41:35It's not very difficult.
41:38I would love that theory to be true, actually,
41:41because that's my best-case scenario,
41:43like her being happy somewhere.
41:45But I don't believe it,
41:47because Marilyn, since she's super young,
41:50she's been extremely attached to people,
41:53and she never cuts ties with anyone.
41:57So the fact that none of us,
42:00friends, family, teachers,
42:03anybody has heard from her in 17 years
42:06is not mine anymore.
42:09All the family would want to know
42:11is if she is alive and living a new life.
42:14If she wants to get in touch with them,
42:16so be it.
42:17And if she decides that for whatever reason
42:19she's not ready, so be it as well.
42:21As long as they know that their daughter's alive
42:24and okay, then they can stop searching.
42:31I will find myself sometimes looking,
42:34you know, if I'm in a car or if I cross a city.
42:38There are stories with somebody running up a mountain
42:41and crossing path with a missing brother.
42:44These things do happen.
42:46They're very rare.
42:47Maybe she's dead, too.
42:49You know, we have been very highly publicized.
42:53We don't know if maybe that was harmful.
42:55We played that card.
42:57But did we bring harm to our child?
42:59We don't know.
43:04This is Marilyn, and I've always left it here.
43:08That's because Marilyn, in the last week she was here at the house,
43:11went to run some errands at the shopping center here behind us,
43:14and she had found this little cat here.
43:17I don't know if she is alive,
43:19but she will see that I still have her cat.
43:22I know that Marilyn is waiting to be found,
43:25and I know that every family deserves
43:28to know what has happened to their children.
43:32I think she would be very present in my kid's life
43:36if she was around.
43:37I love that they love music, both of them,
43:40because I feel there's a part of her in them that way.
43:44I think that she would really enjoy to get to know them.
43:49There's a physical resemblance to a certain point also
43:52because we're family.
43:53So it's interesting to me to see that
43:54the way my kids react sometimes remind me of Marilyn.
43:58We're reaching a point where I almost spent
44:04as much time knowing her than looking for her.
44:08And it's a long quest.
44:10I think in the meantime, I can honor her memory
44:13through music and through good laughs
44:16that we would have together on many different topics.
44:19I miss this conversation.
44:20Hopefully I will have them again one day.
44:22The Bergeron family says their relationship
44:27with Quebec City Police has improved in recent years.
44:31A new team has taken over Marilyn's case
44:34and has regular meetings with the family.
44:37In spite of multiple requests,
44:39Quebec City Police declined to speak with us
44:41for this episode.
44:43The Bergerons hope their advocacy prevents other families
44:46from suffering the same way they have for 17 years.
44:51And though their optimism has faded,
44:54they still pray Marilyn will come home.
45:00Thank you for joining us tonight on Crime Beat.
45:03I'm Anthony Robart.
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