Doreen Jack would be 55 this year – a milestone her sister Marlene would have loved to celebrate with cake, song and feast.
The sweet, grinning nephews she remembers as young boys would be grown men, maybe with young families of their own by now.
But on Aug. 2, 1989, Ronnie Jack, 26, his wife Doreen, 26, and their sons Russell, 9, and Ryan, 4, vanished without a trace in Prince George, B.C. leaving their loved ones and police stymied by dead-end leads over the past three decades.
“The cops told me because the case is so old, there are 60 boxes they have to go through with each tip they receive,” said Marlene Jack, who started the Missing Jack Family Out of Prince George Facebook group in hopes of keeping the cold-case current and with any luck, drum-up new information.
She’s now hoping to bring national attention to the page, and closure that has haunted her for decades.
“I would like to find my family members and bring them home,” she said.
It’s believed the family is deceased.
“I don’t care about the guy or guys who did it. They’re probably old or dead. I just want to find my family,” she told APTN News by phone from her B.C. home.
According to an old Crimestoppers poster offering a $2,000 reward for tips in the family’s disappearance, Ronnie met a man at the First Litre Pub who offered him and Doreen jobs at a logging camp near Bednesti in the Cluclz Lake area, some 40 km west of Prince George along the Yellowhead Highway – now known as the Highway of Tears where nine women went missing or were found murdered between 1989 and 2006.
Ronnie had called his mother at 1:30 a.m. on Aug 2, 1989 and said his family would be gone for 10 days to two weeks and that that camp had daycare for their kids.
They left their home with an unknown man, possibly the one Ronnie met at the First Litre Pub and were never seen or heard from since.
Their Prince George home looked as though they planned to return after work at the camp.
Police did aerial and ground searches around Prince George but turned up nothing.
“They talked to the camps in the area and none said they were hiring and never heard of the family being hired,” Marlene said.
In 2002, there was some hope.
The Prince George Free Press reported the Vanderhoof RCMP received a phone call from an unidentified man. The call was patched through to the Prince George police.
“The Jack family are buried at the south end of Gordie’s ranch,” the man told police.
“Somebody had a guilty conscious,” Prince George RCMP spokesman Const. Gary Godwin told the newspaper.
“We think we went to the right Gordie’s Ranch, but we didn’t find anything. We haven’t had any tips since then. We’d really like that individual to call again.”
Marlene Jack hopes by talking about the disappearance, someone somewhere will come forward with information so she can finally give her loved ones a proper burial.
