The Jack family have been missing from Prince George for 29 years.
Ronald (Ronnie), Doreen and their children Russell, who was nine years old at the time, and Ryan, four years old, were last heard from in the early hours of August 2, 1989.
On August 1, 1989, Ronnie met a man at a pub in Prince George, where he was living with his wife and their two children. The man offered Ronnie and his wife jobs working at a logging camp.
According to the RCMP’s National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains website, Ronnie tried to make arrangements for Russell and Ryan to be watched by family while they were away, but was unsuccessful. When the couldn’t find anyone at such a late hour, he was told that there was a daycare at the camp for the children.
Ronnie called his mother late that night, in the early hours of Aug. 2, to tell her about the jobs at that they would be returning within the next 10 days. On August 25, 1989, all four members of the Jack family were reported missing.
Marlene Jack, Doreen’s sister, has been looking for them ever since.
About two weeks ago, the Prince George RCMP brought the case back into the public eye, putting out a press release asking for an anonymous tipster to come forward.
The tipster provided information about the case to a third party by telephone and then regular mail, before the third party passed it on to police. Investigators are asking the tipster now come to them.
In the press release, Cpl. Craig Douglass, a spokesperson for the Prince George RCMP, said: “The disappearance of the Jack family has greatly impacted many for nearly three decades, but none more than their family and friends. Having information about what may have happened to the Jack family must weigh heavy on anyone with it. Please come forward and help provide some much needed answers to this mystery.”
Marlene, who was in her early twenties when her sister’s family went missing, says it took a long time for the investigation to come back into the public eye. “I feel kind of positive in a way, that they have brought it back out and they are actually working on it … I was hoping they would do it a long time ago, but nothing came up.”
Marlene testified about her sister and her sister’s family at the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Smithers in 2017. She says it was after her testimony things seemed to start moving again on her sister’s case.
When stories about the Highway of Tears first began to come to light, Marlene says she approached an officer working on the case about the disappearance of her sister’s family, but the officer turned her away, saying they didn’t fit the profile.
“I’ve tried so hard for a lot of years [to get the case in the public eye],” says Marlene. She says she stayed quiet about the case for many years, because officers working the case with the RCMP told her they would stop telling her what was happening with the case if she spoke with the media.
It wasn’t until other activists for missing and murdered Indigenous women approached her and told her that nothing would happen unless she spoke up about it that Marlene began making her story public.
Now, finally, the case has “got the recognition I’ve been looking for for so many years.”
But Marlene’s search for answers isn’t over. She runs a Facebook group, Missing Jack family out of Prince George, where she hopes to spread the word about what happened to her sister’s family and gain some answers. She fields tips from people on Facebook and passes the information she gets to the investigators on the case.
Marlene also shares updates on other missing or murdered cases in B.C. in her group in the hopes that she can help others find out what happened to their loved ones.
She also recently started a GoFundMe campaign to raise reward money, to be used as an incentive for anyone with information about the missing Jack family to come forward with what they know.
Marlene says she used to speak with her sister every day on the phone.
“I miss her,” she says.
heather.norman@quesnelobserver.comLike us on Facebook
