What happened to Lois Hanna? Police renew call for answers in 1988 mystery

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Thursday will mark 36 years since the July 4, 1988, disappearance of Lois Hanna, prompting Ontario Provincial Police to renew their call for anyone with information to contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS. This story by reporter Kelly Pedro delved into the mystery and was first published in the July 17, 2004, editions of The London Free Press

Saying she was tired and had to work the next day, Lois Hanna pecked her brother Dave on the cheek just before midnight and waved goodbye to her friends at the Lucknow reunion dance.

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It was dark as she travelled the 20-minute trip along Highway 86 in her red 1987 Pontiac Grand Am to the Kincardine home she had moved into only months before.

She parked in the driveway at her brick bungalow, entered and locked the door.

Inside, she placed her purse and keys in the same spot as always – a china cupboard – and set about taking off the day, carefully hanging the pink dress she wore that night in her closet. She slipped into her peach-coloured nightgown and matching housecoat, flipped on the television and made a cup of tea – her nightly routine before going to bed.

She was halfway through her tea when it happened, some time after midnight on July 4, 1988.

Lois Hanna hasn’t been seen since.

***

The five-foot-four, 120-pound Hanna had spent the weekend at Lucknow’s 130th birthday celebration. Now 25, she and her brothers had attended elementary school there and were back to reminisce.

There were beer gardens, dances and happy reunions throughout the weekend that was topped off by a homecoming dance at the arena on July 3.

“Everything was just good. Everything was good right up until the time she walked out of the arena,” Dave Hanna now says.

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He remembers those last few precious moments with his sister.

The way she walked up to him at the dance to say goodnight.

The way her soft voice explained she was tired, that she had to work the next morning.

The way she leaned up to peck his cheek and the way she turned and walked out of the arena, never to be seen again.

“It’s like an image burned in your mind of what she looked like and how she moved,” he says.

“You’ll see her in dreams, too, and . . . you’re trying to scream at her to stop or yell ‘Wait.’ You’re trying to just warn her, ‘Don’t go out past that arena because once you’re out there it’s gone.

“‘Everything changes when you get outside that arena.’ ”

A RELIABLE SISTER GOES MISSING

The morning after the dance, Hanna was noticeably late for work at MacG’s, a women’s clothing store in Kincardine. That was unusual for the former Miss Mid-western Ontario beauty queen.

Hanna treated the store like it was her own. She loved her work and her co-workers.

Having studied fashion at Fanshawe College, she delighted in finding the perfect outfit for every woman who walked through the door.

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She always looked impeccable, her deep brown eyes often highlighted with eyeshadow and her curly brown hair styled to perfection.

But, this day, she had not arrived at work.

Worried about Hanna, co-workers called a friend, then Dave Hanna’s girlfriend.

The girlfriend called Dave Hanna.

“I’m thinking she just has to be in town,” he recalls. “I thought maybe they were overreacting.”

He became really concerned when his girlfriend called again that afternoon to say Lois still hadn’t turned up.

“As soon as she said that, I thought, ‘Something’s not right here.’”

Dave Hanna rushed to Kincardine.

A friend had already passed by the home where Hanna lived alone. Spotting her locked car in the driveway and the house secured, the friend broke in.

The clothes Hanna wore the night before were in the home.

So were her purse with keys, money and identification. The house lights and television were on.

Her peach nightgown and a matching housecoat were missing.

But it was one other absent item that caused Dave Hanna to know something was terribly wrong.

Hanna was meticulous about leaving notes behind.

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“She’d leave a note if she was running downtown to get a bag of milk.

“She’d leave a note if she stopped in your house and missed you.

“When there was no note and she was late for work, we knew instantly there was something wrong.”

EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH COMES UP EMPTY

Hanna’s family and friends used her house as a base during the first five days of an intensive search that included organizing their own dive team to check nearby Lake Huron.

They met with Kincardine police, but felt the case wasn’t taken seriously enough.

Dave Hanna has said he begged the local police to release news of his sister’s disappearance to the media.

Nothing happened, he has said, until he and his family organized their dive team.

It was five days after Hanna vanished that Kincardine police – now disbanded – asked the Ontario Provincial Police for help.

Forensic officers scoured her home for clues but turned up little.

A week after Hanna was last seen, police divers completed a search of Kincardine harbour.

Still, no clues.

Police continued an exhaustive land and water search for months, using dive teams, helicopters, infrared cameras and hundreds of witness statements.

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They released composite sketches of two men seen leaving MacG’s the same morning Hanna didn’t show for work.

Nothing.

For 10 years, police had nothing and then, in the summer of 1998, in an attempt to identify the 500 people who went to the dance in 1988, they set up an office in the town.

Finally, fresh leads. And, for police and the Hanna family, renewed hope.

Police began to open up. They revealed they believe Hanna was followed home from the dance, abducted and killed.

OPP began calling her disappearance a homicide, revealing they had recovered enough blood from her home to get a DNA sample. That DNA, they said, belonged to a male.

The following year, 1999, investigators told the Hannas they had a suspect and a DNA sample recovered from her home – the kind of evidence that would normally bust a case wide open.

But, five years later – 16 years since Lois Hanna went missing – an arrest still hasn’t been made.

VICTIM’S FAMILY IS GETTING FRUSTRATED

There are signs the case will be broken, sooner rather than later, perhaps.

Police say they’re trying to get their ducks in a row. They say they want to make sure they haven’t missed anything.

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They won’t confirm they have a suspect, but say there are “persons of interest” who have yet to be cleared.

“In this case as with other cases, we do have persons of interest . . . and they remain persons of interest until we can eliminate them through evidence or whatever,” says South Bruce OPP Const. Darryl Campbell.

He won’t divulge how many people have yet to be eliminated.

But the Hanna family is getting frustrated.

Dave Hanna says his own investigation has uncovered clues he has turned over to police.

“We’d start putting our pieces together with their pieces and all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Oh my God, this is not what happened here,’” he says.

Hanna says he talked to people who gave him information they never told police, either because they forgot or didn’t think it was important.

He says he can’t divulge what information he’s uncovered because of the sensitivity of it.

But he hints he has a good idea who killed his sister. He says he thinks there will be an arrest soon.

Cobden is a sleepy retirement community of 1,000 about one hour north of Ottawa.

It is here that, in March this year, Dave Hanna travelled, putting up posters on hydro poles with his sister’s photo, pleading for information on her whereabouts.

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It is here that he believes his sister’s killer lives, or has lived.

“The police (OPP) did have this individual in the first few weeks. They definitely did have the right one, but they were just bombarded with so many people telling them what to do and all the rest of the stuff they had to decipher facts and fiction,” he says.

CRUDE COMMENTS FROM MAN AT DANCE

Dave Hanna can’t say who he believes is responsible for his sister’s disappearance, but early in the investigation, police interviewed a man who made crude comments to Hanna at the Lucknow dance.

Police at the time said she knew the man “from before” but added he wasn’t a suspect.

Connie White, editor at the Cobden Sun newspaper, says interest in the Hanna case has fizzled since Dave Hanna’s spring visit.

“It’s been very quiet about it,” she says. “I think putting the posters up at first made people a little nervous. But once people found out it wasn’t something that just happened . . . it sort of died down.”

The posters – White has counted eight – are still up, but have become part of the scenery in Cobden.

Dave Hanna says he has had some response from Cobden residents since his visit.

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People, he says, are concerned about why he was in their village.

“They’re genuinely sorry to hear about our sister,” he says. “They phone up and it’s like, ‘OK you’re here for a reason. Is there something we can do to help?’”

Asked whether he received any information in Cobden that might help police with the case, Hanna hesitates.

“There’s reasons I can’t tell you some stuff,” he says. “Hopefully someday I can blurt out what’s happened here and you’ll just shake your head at what’s gone on.”

THE CASE

Lois Hanna, a single, 25-year-old former beauty queen from Kincardine, leaves a reunion dance in nearby Lucknow just before midnight on July 3, 1988.

She arrives at her home, changes into her nightclothes and makes a cup of tea.

She hasn’t been seen since.

SUSPECTS

• Early in the case, police release composite sketches of two men seen leaving MacG’s, a clothing store where Hanna worked in Kincardine. They were seen leaving the store the same morning Hanna first didn’t show for work after the reunion dance.
• In 1999, investigators say they have a suspect and a DNA sample recovered from her home, but no arrest has been made.
• More recently, police won’t confirm they have a suspect, saying instead there are “persons of interest.”

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