A woman who spent the last 26 years searching for answers about how and why her son disappeared from Kelowna without a trace is turning to this community once again for support.
Denise Allan travelled to Kelowna from her home in the UK Tuesday, in preparation for a candlelight vigil she intends to hold for her son, Charles Horvath, who was last seen May 26, 1989.
Allan along with a Vancouver based missing persons advocate, will hold the vigil Saturday, May 16 at 8:30 p.m. to remember her long missing son and to get answers by breathing new life into her son’s old file.
“(Allan) is hoping to have a meeting with BC RCMP Deputy Commissioner, Craig Callens, to discuss her request for a Cold Case Team to be assigned,” read the announcement about her arrival.
“Anyone with information on the disappearance and presumed death of Charles, is strongly urged to come forward. Denise needs peace – after nearly 26 years of uncertainty and grief.”
Allan last heard from her son May 11, 1989. Charles arrived in Kelowna a week earlier, and during their conversation they discussed plans to meet up for a joint birthday celebration—his 21st, her 40th— in Asia.
It was a celebration they never got to share.
“He had maintained contact with his family throughout his travels and so, when he failed to finalize arrangements to meet them in Hong Kong as had been planned, he was reported missing by his mother Denise Allan,” said Const. Kris Clark, in a statement prepared for the 25th anniversary, last year.
Allan has never let the search die, draining her financial resources as she kept up the search.
She’s returned to Kelowna repeatedly, made countless appeals for information through media outlets, vigilantly kept his name alive through Facebook, as well as a number of missing person sites. In 2010, she even paid to have a missing person billboard erected in Kelowna, at a cost of $1,000 a month.
The billboard was put up in the “hope that the people who know where Charles’ body lays will find the courage to come forward and to tell somebody so that he will be taken home to England and laid to rest with his beloved Nana,” Allan told the Capital News in 2010.
“We still don’t have him home and the answer is here, in Kelowna. I’m still searching and I will do so until the end of my life.”
If you have any information please contact the Kelowna RCMP at 250-762-3300. Remain anonymous by calling Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477, leaving an online tip at www.crimestoppers.net or texting CRIMES (274637), subject line ktown.
