An Ontario woman whose brother went missing from Thompson nearly seven years ago says she believes his disappearance may be the result of a crime that has managed to go undetected.
Melinda Guignard, who recently made a trip to Thompson and Churchill in order to speak with people who knew her brother during the brief time he was in the city, says she believes that there are some who know more about her brother’s disappearance than they’ve admitted to.
Yvon Shawn Guignard last spoke to family members in late November 2015, within a few days of arriving in Thompson and no more than a few days before he was reported missing. It was reported at the time that Shawn Guignard had last been seen on Nov. 28 at the Thompson General Hospital, but his sister says that information was incorrect and that he was actually last seen near the Thompson Homeless Shelter, where he had been staying, around 6:45 a.m. that day. His truck was found in the possession of someone he knew in Thompson and his wallet was at the homeless shelter, as he had given it to staff there to keep safe, Melinda Guignard says.
Around the time of his disappearance, Shawn Guignard had phoned his father to say that he was urgently in need of $40. He had been in Manitoba since June 2015, having stayed and worked in Lynn Lake for several months before coming to Thompson.
His mother told CBC in 2015 that he had schizophrenia and had checked himself into a hospital in Ontario for treatment prior to departing for Manitoba and that he had stopped taking his medication.
Within about a month of Shawn Guiginard’s disappearance, Manitoba RCMP issued a second plea for information, saying that they had exhausted all investigative avenues into his activities and possible whereabouts.
His sister says she has spoken to people Shawn was hanging around with just before he went missing and that she believes they either have information about or may have been involved in an altercation with her brother, who had been in another fight a few days prior to that with another man staying at the homeless shelter.
“Since the get-go, there’s been an outstanding amount of evidence that strongly suggests a crime,” Melinda Guignard told the Thompson Citizen in a late August phone call, shortly after having returned from Thompson, where she wore a shirt with her brother’s photo on it while talking to homeless people about Shawn.
The RCMP’s last public release of information regarding Shawn Guignard came about a year after he went missing. There is also information about his missing status on the Manitoba Crime Stoppers web page.
Melinda said her brother was not violent or dangerous when he had not been taking his medication, though he was sometimes paranoid, and that he could be “naive” and “gullible.”
“He might have befriended the wrong person,” she said, noting that she also found it strange that he would have given away his truck, which he used for work. “Why would he give his truck away? He was using that to make a living.”
A Red Seal welder who first showed signs of schizophrenia in his late teens, Shawn Guignard was 34 years old at the time he went missing and Melinda says her brother came to Manitoba because he wanted to work in a mine.
The amount of time that has passed since Shawn Guignard’s disappearance is an issue when it comes to figuring out exactly what happened, as it is in all so-called “cold cases,” said professor and author Michael Arntfield, a former London, Ont. police officer whose most recent book is called How to Solve a Cold Case.
“Cold cases are very difficult, when you’re talking years later, to develop new leads on unless you have new forensic technology,” Arntfield said.
Though the vast majority of people who are reported to police as missing show up or are found very quickly, Arntfield says, it is important to use the right tactics if there is evidence of possible foul play.
“When it becomes suspicious, it needs to start being investigated as a probable homicide until proven otherwise,”he said.
Unfortunately, while many municipal or regional police forces in Ontario have dedicated missing persons units, that is not the case with all police departments everywhere.
“Often in contract policing scenarios, it’s a general crime detective who’s also investigating burglaries and such,” said Arntfield, adding that what family or friends consider suspicious and what police consider evidence of a possible crime are not always the same.
“That’s the plight of a lot of families that feel as though they know the individual best and they see characteristics or circumstances surrounding the disappearance that don’t make sense to them and are worried,” he says. “These are tricky cases.”
Manitoba Crime Stoppers, which covers all of the province outside of Winnipeg and Brandon, has a number of missing persons on their website who come from or went missing in Northern Manitoba, dating back to as long ago as 1974. In at least two of these cases, RCMP believe that the missing person has been the victim of a homicide. Police announced Sept. 6 that they now consider Rico Linklater, who was reported missing from Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation last October, to have been the victim of a homicide and officers from their Major Crimes Services, Search and Rescue unit and Underwater Recovery Team are currently investigating in the area around Nelson House. Tammy Nattaway, who went missing from Garden Hill First Nation in July 2020, is also believed to have been killed, police say.
Melinda Guignard believes her brother falls into that same category and hopes that police are following up on information she has obtained and provided to them.
“It just seems like nobody’s really acknowledging the fact that a crime has taken place and somebody’s getting away with that crime,” she said. “And I don’t like that.”
Following her recent trip to Thompson, during which she spoke with someone who she believes knows exactly what happened to Shawn, Melinda says she’s done as much for her brother as she can, apart from just keeping his missing status in the public eye.
“As of right now, there’s nothing I can do,” she said.
