On an October morning in 2014, police moved through a wooded area near Horseshoe Valley Road, north of Toronto, scanning the ground with radar. They were there because a tip had come in after the release of a short video reconstructing the last known movements of a girl who had been missing for twenty-nine years. A woman named Billie Jo Player would later say she had already told a detective about this place. What she remembered went back to when she was eleven years old, and it had nothing to do with seeing the missing girl.

On July 30th, 1985, an eight-year-old girl named Nicole Morin was getting ready to go swimming. She lived with her mother in an apartment at the top of 627 The West Mall, a high-rise in Etobicoke in the west end of Toronto. Her friend was supposed to meet her downstairs in the lobby, and from there they would go to the pool. Nicole didn’t need a ride or a trip across town.

The pool was part of the complex where she lived, and she already had friends in the building, so going downstairs to meet someone was a normal part of her day. One of those friends was a seven-year-old girl who walked to school with her. Nicole’s mother also babysat the younger girl’s little brother. They saw each other at school and at home, and when they wanted to go swimming, they could make their plans right there in the building.

But that friend was away on July 30th. Nicole had arranged to meet somebody else. The two girls had become best friends, and the building was where their families’ lives overlapped. Nicole’s mother wasn’t just someone the younger girl passed in the hallway.

She was the person who looked after her brother. And Nicole was the friend she could walk to school with every day. A swimming trip could begin with something as simple as coming down from the apartment. On that particular morning, her swimming friend was supposed to meet her in the lobby.

Nicole had somewhere to go, someone to meet, and the things she needed to take with her. She had brown hair and brown eyes, a gap between her front teeth, and a small birthmark on the right side of her forehead. She was about four feet tall. That morning, she put on a one-piece bathing suit and got her things together.

The description police would circulate included red canvas shoes, a green headband, a peach-colored blanket, and a purple beach towel. She was dressed for the swimming trip she had just arranged. At around 11:00 a. m.

, Nicole said goodbye to her mother and left the apartment to meet her friend. Her mother was upstairs. The meeting place was downstairs, but Nicole never arrived. There wasn’t a confirmed sighting that put her on the street or at the pool.

When police later described where she disappeared, they kept coming back to the same area between her apartment and the lobby. The building had twenty floors, and Nicole had left from the top. But knowing where she was supposed to go didn’t establish how far she actually got. It didn’t tell investigators whether she entered an elevator, who she might have met, or how she could have left the building without anyone providing an answer.

And there was no security camera footage of the disappearance for them to review. The police account would describe Nicole as having been abducted. But that didn’t mean they had a witness who could describe someone taking her. The last known departure was from her home, and her planned meeting in the lobby hadn’t happened.

Everything investigators could establish about that morning stopped before they could even explain the gap between those two places. Her clothing could help someone remember her. The photographs showed the gap in her teeth, and the description included the small mark on her forehead. But investigators still needed a person who could put Nicole somewhere after she said goodbye to her mother.

For the officers going into the building, that meant asking people about a child who should have been close by. For her family, it meant waiting for someone else to come back with her. One of the officers who volunteered to search for Nicole was Madelyn Freder. She had only been a police officer for about a year, and she joined the canvas of the building expecting that they would find out what happened.

There were residents to speak to and apartments to check. The starting point was known. The child had a description, and her family had photographs that could be shown to people who might have seen her. Police put together a task force with twenty members.

More than nine hundred people from the community joined the search. In a later account of the investigation, Toronto police would describe more than fifteen thousand hours of work. As investigators went back through the building, they interviewed residents again. And during those later conversations, they learned about a woman somebody had seen on the same floor as Nicole’s apartment.

On August 28th, the Toronto Star reported that police were asking for help finding her. According to the officer coordinating the investigation, a resident had seen her at the opposite end of the hall from the Morins’ apartment about forty-five minutes before Nicole disappeared. She had been holding a notepad. The description was fairly detailed.

The woman had appeared to be about thirty-five with a slender build and shoulder-length dark blonde hair parted on the left. The witness remembered a white skirt with a black pattern and a white-colored short-sleeved blouse with light-colored high heels. Police circulated a drawing hoping someone could give them a name. The newspaper printed the sketch beside the article along with numbers people could call if they recognized her.

But the officer also made a distinction about why police wanted to speak with her. She was being sought as a possible witness, and he specifically said she wasn’t a suspect. The report placed her on the floor before Nicole left. It didn’t put Nicole beside her.

And it didn’t say that anyone had watched the woman approach the Morins’ door. A resident had remembered someone in the hallway, and investigators were trying to find that person so they could ask what she knew. The notepad was part of the description. The report didn’t establish why she had it, whether she was writing in it, or whether she had anything to do with Nicole at all.

By October, Nicole’s parents were still making public appeals. A photograph shows her mother, Janette, standing beside Nicole’s father, Art, at a bus shelter near Burnhamthorpe Road and The West Mall. Next to them is a large Crime Stoppers sign with Nicole’s face on it. The poster offered up to $100,000 for her safe return.

It was an appeal people could see while waiting for the bus, close to the neighborhood where she had disappeared. In the photograph, Janette is wiping tears from her face while the picture on the sign shows Nicole smiling. The reward and phone number were printed large enough for passing strangers to read. Her parents were asking people outside the building to look at their daughter, too, because the search inside it still hadn’t brought her home.

The woman from the hallway remained on Art’s mind. Years later, he would bring her up when he spoke about his daughter. He wanted to know who she was and why she had been there. But there was no established evidence that she had taken Nicole.

For Art, that left a person he couldn’t ask about the day his daughter disappeared. In a 2015 interview, he was still asking about her. Police would also make their position on Nicole’s family clear. By the time of their 2014 appeal, they said they had cleared her family and her friends of involvement.

Nobody had been arrested in the case. In December of 1987, a Toronto Star photographer took a picture of Art sitting on a bed with a doll behind him. More than two years had passed since Nicole had left for the pool. In the newspaper’s caption, Art said Christmas didn’t mean very much to him anymore.

Nicole would have been ten by then. The search had already lasted through more than two years of ordinary occasions. And Art was talking about another Christmas without knowing where she was. The photographer could take a picture of Nicole’s father, and newspapers could print another appeal with her face, but nobody had a new photograph that showed where Nicole had gone after leaving the apartment.

Nicole’s photograph was still being circulated, but as the years passed, the face in that photograph belonged to an age she could no longer be. By July of 2014, Nicole had been missing for twenty-nine years. Freder was now a detective sergeant, and she was still involved in trying to find her. The young officer who had volunteered to canvas the building was now standing at a public appeal for the same child.

Police said tips had continued to come in over the years, including that year. They were reviewing the case and following up on information. Together with Crime Stoppers, they released a reconstruction of Nicole getting ready to go swimming and leaving home. Police asked people to share it, and they created social media accounts under “Find Nicole.

” The police could reach someone who had lived in the area in 1985 and since moved away, or someone who had information they never passed on. The reconstruction ran for less than a minute. A child got ready for the pool, and the sequence followed the departure that police were still trying to explain. They weren’t releasing recovered footage of Nicole.

They were using an actor to put the known part of that morning in front of people again. The plan went beyond people who happened to see the news report. The video was also going to be shown in Max convenience stores across Ontario. A person could come across the appeal online through somebody sharing it or while going into a store.

Freder said information had continued to come in over the years. Investigators had new leads that summer, but they weren’t releasing the details of those leads to the public. For Freder, the anniversary also meant returning to an investigation she had joined near the beginning of her career. She had volunteered when Nicole first went missing because she wanted to help find her.

Now the child in the video was playing a girl who had been missing for most of her time as a police officer. One of the people who spoke publicly that year was Billie Jo Player, a woman living in Hamilton. She said she had been eleven when Nicole disappeared, and two days later she was coming out of her family’s barn with her mother and sister in Springwater Township. According to Billie Jo, they heard a little girl screaming in the wooded area nearby.

Billie Jo said her mother immediately thought of the girl who had gone missing in Toronto. They went back to their house, contacted neighbors who also said they heard something, and her mother called 911. Provincial police investigated, but nobody was found. Billie Jo couldn’t identify the person they heard, and her belief that it was Nicole would remain her belief.

Years later, seeing a picture of Nicole brought those memories back. Billie Jo said she had been having nightmares, and she wanted to speak to Toronto police about what she remembered. By her account, the detective interviewed her in Hamilton about a year before the October 2014 search. They were in contact again during the summer when police released the reconstruction.

This wasn’t a memory she reported after watching that video. Billie Jo placed the moment when the memories came back at about four years before the search. She had seen Nicole’s photograph and recognized the case her family had heard about in 1985. The nightmares followed, and eventually she sat down with the detective to go through what she remembered.

Her account included an attempt to get help at the time. She said her mother had called the police after hearing the screams, and officers had looked into it. She wasn’t describing a family who had heard something and simply decided to keep it to themselves for twenty-nine years. But she was still describing something she had heard as a child.

She hadn’t seen Nicole in those woods, and the earlier police response hadn’t located the girl whose voice she remembered. Billie Jo would tell CHCH that she didn’t know the police were going out to search until she heard they were there. Police confirmed that a tip received after the video led them to the Springwater area, although CHCH said it had not obtained information that Billie Jo’s tip was the specific reason for the search. When the search began, a police inspector told Global News that investigators had been told about something that happened in Springwater shortly after Nicole disappeared.

He didn’t publicly identify the event. Police had known about it in 1985 and investigated then without finding anything. Now information received earlier in 2014 had brought them back. Officers from Toronto and the Ontario Provincial Police were both involved.

Dozens of police officers were searching a rural area well outside the apartment complex where the investigation started. The description police gave was limited, and Billie Jo’s specific account offered one possible explanation for interest in that area, but the connection wasn’t confirmed. Officers spent two days searching near Horseshoe Valley Road. They scanned the ground with radar.

At one point, two officers went into the woods carrying shovels. But when the search ended on October 9th, police said they had found no conclusive evidence that Nicole had ever been there. Billie Jo still believed the screams belonged to Nicole. Investigators hadn’t found anything that could establish that they did.

The search had ended with the same distinction it began with. Police had enough information to go out and look, but nothing they found established that Nicole had been taken there. Billie Jo said she was grateful the search had happened, and that it gave her some peace. For her, officers had returned to an area connected to a memory she had carried since childhood.

For Nicole’s family, it still hadn’t produced an answer about their daughter. The following summer, Global News visited Art. He was still living in the Etobicoke neighborhood where Nicole had disappeared. He had a photograph of her hanging beside his bed.

It was the first thing he looked at every morning. He remembered the call telling him his daughter was missing. And he remembered being unable to believe that she wouldn’t turn up. Now he had been waiting for an answer for thirty years.

Art said he still held out hope that he would find out what had happened to her. In another interview that day, Art took a photograph of Nicole out of his wallet. He said he had never expected the search to last this long. Art described trying to get through the wait a year at a time.

When Nicole first went missing, he had expected somebody to find her. Even after so many years, he still wanted the information that would tell him where she was and what had happened. At home, there was the portrait beside his bed. When he spoke to City News, he reached into his wallet and took out another picture.

The reporters were talking to a father thirty years into his search, and he could still show them the child he was looking for. Police kept asking the public to look at her face, too. In 2019, they released an age-progressed image showing how she might look as an adult. It was an artist’s estimate made to help someone recognize her if she was still alive.

The new image estimated her appearance at forty-two. The childhood photograph was still useful for asking about 1985, but anyone who encountered Nicole decades later would be looking for an adult. Police were continuing to appeal for information without knowing whether they were searching for someone who could still come home. Art had held on to that possibility.

The age progression gave the public an adult face to consider, while the original photograph remained beside it in coverage of the case. By 2022, investigators were working through the old case material again and putting the files into a digital form. They found multiple tips pointing them toward a location north of Toronto, and a team went to excavate an area where they thought evidence might be present. But the excavation didn’t produce what they were looking for.

Police said they would continue following up on the information. The renewed work was being discussed publicly by an investigator named Stephen Smith. He described a case with investigators working on it full-time and other officers helping. As the old information was put into a digital form, they had noticed a number of tips referring to the same area.

That was what led to the excavation. The information had to be checked against the ground itself, and the team went to the location north of Toronto to do that. The search didn’t recover any evidence, so those tips hadn’t established where Nicole was. Now, another proposed search was being organized closer to her home.

This one would be carried out by volunteers, and it began with a different woman’s memory of July 30th. A group called “Please Bring Me Home” had been speaking with a woman who believed she had seen Nicole in a West End park on the day she disappeared. According to the group’s Brett Robinson, the woman said Nicole had been with a man she knew. The woman had been about twelve years old in 1985, and by the time Robinson spoke to CP24, she was in her early fifties.

She declined to speak to the media herself, so the public account of what she remembered came through him. Robinson had been talking with her for about two years. He said his group had been able to rule out the man’s presence at the place and time she described, and they decided to search the park. That didn’t establish that her identification was correct or that the man had taken Nicole.

The park was a few kilometers from Nicole’s building, but its name was kept out of the reporting. Toronto police said they followed up on possible leads, but they weren’t involved in organizing the group search. Robinson said volunteers would notify police immediately if the dogs found something. On July 14th, the group searched the park with two dogs trained to detect the scent of human remains.

Robinson told City News that one dog had alerted at a spot, and the second dog had responded there, too. The group marked the location and passed the information to Toronto police. Robinson described dense undergrowth away from the trails and said they intended to return to check the spot again and search more of the park. He estimated that the team had covered around 40 to 45 percent of the park during several hours of searching.

After the dogs responded to that location, the volunteers kept checking other ground, but he reported no further responses that day. The place they had marked was away from the pathways where the vegetation was thick. Robinson wanted to return in a couple of weeks to check it again and cover the parts of the park they hadn’t reached. And so the public heard that two dogs had responded in a search connected to Nicole’s case.

But the volunteers had reported a location to investigate. They hadn’t recovered remains there, and they couldn’t identify Nicole from a dog’s response. In July of 2025, police would state that no physical evidence had ever been recovered in Nicole’s case. That statement came from the police appeal marking forty years since her disappearance.

The later searches had generated reports about places to look, but none had supplied the physical evidence investigators were still missing. The investigation was now being handled through a police service that had established a dedicated missing persons unit in 2020. More than three decades had passed before that unit was introduced. Nicole’s case had continued through all those changes, and police were still asking for help locating the same child who left her apartment in 1985.

When police discussed the renewed work in 2022, they had also returned to something missing from the original investigation. Nicole had disappeared inside a building, but they didn’t have camera footage showing her movements. The investigator speaking to City News explained that the cameras had been scheduled for installation. The cameras were supposed to go in the day after Nicole disappeared.

The investigator raised the possibility that somebody knew about the installation, but he did not establish that anyone had planned the disappearance around it. At the fortieth anniversary appeal in 2025, Owen and Melissa Maschek spoke about Nicole. By then, Melissa had served as a police officer for twenty-one years, and she was a mother herself. She was also the seven-year-old friend who had been away the day Nicole went missing.

Melissa remembered walking to school with her and having Nicole’s mother look after her little brother. When Nicole disappeared, she hadn’t fully understood what had happened. She just knew that she couldn’t see her friend anymore, and that her parents were afraid. Melissa said the swim Nicole had planned was something they would normally have done together.

She had been away that day, and looking back as an adult, she said it could have easily been her. At seven, her understanding had been much simpler. A friend she saw all the time was suddenly gone, and the adults around her were frightened. The case that police were still investigating forty years later had first reached her as the disappearance of the girl she had spent her days with.

She was able to speak about the investigation from a very different point in her life, but she still wanted someone to come forward with information about her friend. Now she was standing at an appeal for the girl she used to walk to school with. Police announced a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to Nicole’s location, with a term of one year. They again asked anyone with information to come forward.

Nicole remains listed as missing. Her date of birth is April 1st, 1977, which means she would be forty-nine now. Her photograph is still on the missing kids website beside the date her family last saw her.

July 30th, 1985.