Face of Nation : Police in Ontario have made an appeal for new information in the suspected homicides of four seniors who mysteriously disappeared in cottage country more than two decades ago.
Ontario Provincial Police have long said foul play is suspected in the missing-persons cases of Joan Lawrence, Ralph Grant, John Semple and John Crofts, who all vanished from the Muskoka area, some 230 kilometres north of Toronto, between 1997 and 1998. On Thursday, police confirmed for the first time that all four cases are being investigated as homicides.
“We know the four people are not alive,” said OPP Det.-Sgt. Rob Matthews at a morning news conference in Vaughan.
Matthews said investigators decided to make their appeal now in hopes that anyone who may have avoided speaking to police 21 years ago may reconsider.
“Someone out there has information,” he said. “The time is right to come forward. Report what you may know to the police.” “Cat Lady” is a reference to Lawrence, who was given the moniker by locals in the community of Huntsville who would often see her walking through town with grocery bags of food for her 30 or so cats.
Her disappearance in the fall of 1998 sparked an OPP homicide investigation that took several strange twists before finally going cold years later. In the last years of Lawrence’s life, the 77-year-old lived in an 80-square-foot shack without running water, insulation or electricity on a rural 27.5-hectare farm outside Huntsville.
After she was reported missing, OPP searched the farm by land and air, and dragged the lake adjacent to the property, but never found any trace of her.
OPP documents, obtained in court by The Fifth Estate and the Walrus magazine in 2017 and 2018, revealed investigators believed Lawrence was murdered and her landlords may have played a role in her disappearance, though they never publicly named any suspects.
The landlords were all members of the local Laan family, which also owned several seniors’ homes throughout Muskoka at the time. Grant, 69, Semple, 89 and Crofts, 70, had all lived in properties owned by various members of the family before their own disappearances.
Matthews said no Laan family members who have connections to the cases — namely David, Walter, Paul and Krathrine Laan, as well as an uncle named Ron Allen — have been forthcoming with information.
“These individuals have not co-operated with police,” he said. While he would not say that any members of the Laan family were considered suspects in the homicides, Matthews would not say that investigators have ruled out that possibility.
