CANADA Canada - Diane Bélanger, 19, Montréal QC, 8 August 1982

[TheArtfulDetective]

Diane Bélanger



Case Classification: Endangered Missing
Missing Since: August 8, 1982
Location Last Seen: Montréal, Québec, Canada

Physical Description:
Date of Birth: N/A
Age: 19
Race: N/A
Gender: Female
Height: 157 cm / 5ft-2in
Weight: 59 kg
Hair Color: Auburn
Eye Color: Blue
Nickname/Alias:
Distinguishing Marks/Features: Unknown

Identifiers:
Dentals: Unknown
Fingerprints: Unknown
DNA: Unknown

Clothing & Personal Items:
Clothing: Brown dress
Jewelry: Unknown
Additional Personal Items: Glasses

Details of Disappearance:
Diane Bélanger, 19, disappeared on the morning of August 8, 1982 from where she was staying, with her boyfriend’s cousin at 2269 Dorion Street in Montréal. She looked after the cousin’s child with her partner the night she disappeared. The couple came back at 3:00 am and shared a pizza with Diane. When the couple woke up, Diane had disappeared never to be seen again. Her purse was in the living room, the contents strewn on the floor, the screen on the front door had been gutted, a bread knife was missing, and Diane’s nightgown was in the bath. No signs of violence or traces of blood were found in the home.

According to the investigator at the time, he interviewed a woman, a prostitute, in the hospital a few days after the disappearance. This lady had been badly beaten. She was also named Diane Bélanger, had the same date of birth and lived in the same sector as Diane. According to the woman, she believed those around her were targeting her and had a mistake. She believed Diane’s body was buried in Chertsey in Lanaudière, but searches revealed nothing. The circumstances of her disappearance and her whereabouts remain unknown.

Investigating Agency:
SPVM: Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal - (514) 393-1133
Info-Crime Montréal - (514) 393-1122
Case# 33-820808-005

| Montréal | Diane Bélanger Missing since August 7, 1982 - MDIQ
Diane Bélanger Service de police de la Ville de Montréal - SPVM
MISSING: The Disappearance of Diane Bélanger - 1982 - Montréal, QC — CANADA UNSOLVED

 

[TheArtfulDetective]

Same name, same date of birth; she is removed by mistake

October 2019

An uneventful Montrealer who has been missing for almost 40 years was kidnapped by kidnappers who mistook her for a prostitute with the same name and the same birthday, according to the investigator who led the case in the 1980s.

In June 1982, Diane Bélanger, newly adult, had left the family environment to settle temporarily with her boyfriend's cousin, in the east of Montreal, while waiting to find an apartment with her boyfriend.

Not having finished high school, she wanted to go back to school.

“She was a good girl, very reserved,” her young sister Sylvie told the Journal about the eldest of the family of four children. According to her, the shy Diane was not the type to get involved in shady stories.

“It was not only my big sister, but my confidante. We shared the same bedroom until he left home, ”recalls the 53-year-old woman, who lives in Saint-Jérôme.

Occasionally she kept the child of the couple with whom she lived. On the evening of August 7, she took care of the little one for the evening which promised to be quiet.

Fatal evening
When the couple returned to their small apartment on rue Dorion at around 3 a.m. with a pizza to satisfy a nighttime craving, they shared it with the 19-year-old.

They will be the last to have seen it before its disappearance.

When the couple woke up a few hours later, Diane Bélanger was no longer there, but strange clues suggested the worst.

Her purse was lying around the living room, the contents strewn on the floor, the front door screen had been gutted, a bread knife was missing, and her nightgown was lying around in the bath.

"There was no trace of violence in the house," recalls investigator Jean-Claude Rochon, from the youth section of the Montreal police, who took care of this file for years, referring to the so that nothing had been broken and no trace of blood had been found.

Mr. Rochon worked on this file from the start, in 1982, until the mid-1990s. Now 72 years old, the ex-investigator has been retired for 22 years.

He claims to have interviewed about sixty people during all these years when he had the file in his hands. One of them was even subjected to the lie detector, to no avail.

The sister of the missing woman is convinced that some people prefer to remain silent rather than inform the police.

"Sure, someone knows something," she said.

Dug holes
The former investigator told the Journal that, equipped with a shovel, he went so far as to dig himself a few holes near the house where Diane Bélanger was reported missing. A way of proceeding that is not usual for investigators in normal times, but a lead he wanted to follow had convinced him to give it a try.

"This is the biggest investigation I have carried out in matters of disappearance," he assures us. The police file spread over about thirty pages.

A few years later, an unexpected meeting made it possible to pose a first hypothesis to solve the mystery about what could have happened to the young woman.

A fatal namesake
Finding himself at an impasse, his boss sent him to the hospital to meet a woman who had been badly beaten and whose name was Diane Bélanger. Not only did she have the same name, but she was living in the same area as her namesake at the time of her disappearance, and had the same date of birth.

The woman admitted to the hospital was a prostitute who had been severely beaten by people around her.

The investigator and the latter discussed for a few minutes what had just happened to him when she made disturbing revelations to him.

"She told me that she knew Diane Bélanger who had disappeared and that the kidnappers had the wrong person," said the former lawyer. She also revealed to me that she was the one to pretend [that night]. "

The young woman appeared on December 27, 1982 in another text of the Journal entitled Have you seen them? which listed cases of disappearance.

It was difficult for him to see if the two women had any physical resemblances because the sex worker was disfigured by blows to the face.

She informed him that the body "was supposedly buried in Chertsey [in Lanaudière]". Research in this area has yielded nothing.

"The people who abducted her must not have known her well because they had the wrong person," assumed the former investigator.

One eye every month
Jean-Claude Rochon always kept an eye on Diane Bélanger's case even when new investigations began to follow one another after this one.

"He never found himself on a shelf collecting dust and I looked at him every month to find new leads," he said.

Moreover, he went a good ten times to the morgue when an unidentified corpse was found.

Retired for a little over two decades, he mentioned in the Journal that he kept a photo of Diane Bélanger in his wallet for a long time.

“I took this photo off four or five years ago,” he says, regretfully that he never solved this big investigation.

In early May, Quebec Murders and Unresolved Disappearances, an organization that tries to provide visibility into such unresolved cases, posted five new unresolved cases on trucks across the province. Among these, that of Diane Bélanger.

"It's a bit like bringing her out of the world of the dead," said her younger sister, whose sister would have been 57 on August 29.

Always open
On August 7, Sylvie Bélanger has been trying to get answers on the disappearance of her big sister for 37 years.

When asked by Le Journal if she still had any hope of finding her alive, she replied that "her hope was neutral".

The Montreal Police Department confirmed that the file was still open and still filed in the unresolved cases in Quebec.

Même nom, même date de naissance; elle est enlevée par erreur

 

[CastlesBurning]

Bumping for Diane - it's now been 41 years.