On her 40th birthday, Yvonne King went for a walk. She never came back (2024)

Michelle Healey will never forget what her friend was wearing the day she went missing.

The details are seared into her brain. How could they not, she says, after realizing she was one of the last people to ever see Yvonne King alive?

“She had a Henley round-neck shirt with no collar and buttons — white and blue, and black leather shoes, lace up,” said Healey in an interview.

“If you showed it to me today, I could tell you if it was hers.”

On Oct. 13, 2002, Healey and her childhood friend walked in a loop around the tiny fishing community of Fox Harbour, Placentia Bay, for hours. It was King’s 40th birthday and Thanksgiving. King was in her hometown from St. John’s to have dinner with her parents.

“I left her on the road. She was going home,” Healey said.

“And that’s the last anybody saw her.”

As the sun set over Fox Harbour that evening, the community was whipped into a frenzy as police searched on land, air and water, and residents mobilized to locate one of their own.

Now, more than two decades later, questions hang over the town about where Yvonne King is and whether her mental illness played a role in the direction of the police investigation.

At last official count, Fox Harbour had a population of just over 250. During its peak, the community nestled at the bottom of a long and steep road was home to fewer than 800 people.

There’s one road in and out, a church, library, town hall and fishing wharf.

“It was a sunny day, just like this,” Robert Buckmaster said, his finger pointing to the blue sky above Fox Harbour as seagulls swirl overhead.

Buckmaster and Carl Barnett were standing next to Buckmaster’s boat when Healey and King passed them during one of their many rounds around the harbour that day more than 21 years ago. The pair had gone to school with King.

“I know she was in good spirits that day because she was joking and laughing with us,” said Barnett.

The day she went missing is one they will never forget.

“She’s gone somewhere. Somebody knows where she’s to, but it will never be answered, not unless they find her somehow,” Buckmaster said.

During their hours-long walk, Healey said one thing was clear: King did not want to return home to St. John’s to see her doctor the next day.

“I just knew by the way she was talking that something wasn’t right,” said Healey.

“She wasn’t interested in anything that day, she wasn’t interested in conversation about her birthday.”

King was struggling with a mental illness, but Healey said she wasn’t depressed. Nuance and variance in the types of mental illnesses wasn’t as understood then, friends and family say.

After their time together, Healey walked one way. King, the other.

“That evening when I did leave her, she said, ‘Why don’t you drop up to our place, mom and dad’s,’ and I said I had to go home and I probably wouldn’t have a chance to head up this evening,” Healey said.

“I left her on the road and that was it.”

According to younger cousin Glenda Barnett, King did make it back the short distance to her parents’ home, where they were planning to have Jiggs dinner and birthday cake, but left again to walk up the street to her partner’s father’s home to grab a sweater.

Barnett drove by King around 4 p.m.

“She was walking by herself at that point, and I thought well, maybe I should stop, but I didn’t because she was walking that day so I kept driving down,” Barnett said.

“And that was the last time I saw her.”

Within about half an hour of returning home, Healey said her phone rang. It was King’s partner, asking if Healey was with King.

What happened next was organized chaos, said Healey. People in the town spread out on foot, while others methodically made their way through the phone book to call everyone they could.

The Mounties arrived a short while later with a helicopter and police dog.

Back at the family home, reality was hitting for King’s parents, who were distraught over what was transpiring.

Friends and family were confident King would be found quickly. After all, she was on foot, and in Fox Harbour, there’s only one way in and one way out.

But the police dog lost her scent. Divers found nothing in the ocean. Neither did fishermen who had their pots in the water.

Time moves on. Investigations do too.

Not a shred of evidence has been found to date.

“Small town like this, everybody sees everything here. But for some reason, it’s like she vanished without a trace,” said Barnett.

In the days and weeks that followed, there were reported sightings of King in Conception Bay South and St. John’s. It provided fresh hope, always followed by the same crushing disappointment.

Then came winter, and a few months later, the spring thaw. Police returned with sniffer dogs when the snow melted, to no avail.

Investigators ran out of places to search. Leads dwindled.

While the RCMP responded quickly and intensively in the hours and days after King went missing, there are fears the course of the investigation focused hastily on only one possible outcome: suicide.

“I think if it was someone who didn’t have a mental health issue, maybe it wouldn’t be considered a cold case now,” said Barnett.

Michelle Healey provided a written statement to police about her day with King. Others, like Robert Buckmaster and Carl Barnett, say they were never asked.

“I think things did go wrong there. I’m not saying they didn’t do a search — they did. They had divers and dogs out, they did,” Barnett said.

”They did do their due diligence, but then after the fact to me, it was like … nothing.”

The RCMP attempted to revive the investigation five years later and put out another plea for the public’s help.

Loved ones describe King as intelligent, dry-witted and compassionate. She moved home to Newfoundland years before her disappearance, from Ontario, where she lived for a while after leaving high school.

Barnett said she reconnected with a man from Fox Harbour and they quickly became a couple.

They lived in St. John’s with King’s daughter from a previous marriage.

Initially, Healey suspected her outdoor-loving friend kept walking that day. Maybe she stumbled during a walk in the woods. Got her foot stuck under some tree roots or fell over an embankment.

But after 21 years without finding a shoe, a piece of clothing or shred of anything related to King, Healey is not so sure.

“As time goes on, the community talks. The community has lots of ideas about what they think might have happened,” she says.

Juanita Gafer, King’s younger sister, speaks more straightforwardly in her assumptions.

She doesn’t buy the suicide theory, and says King wouldn’t leave her daughter.

Gafer said the RCMP ought to have been more cautious, knowing that women are more often killed by an intimate partner than a stranger.

“As far as I’m concerned, [the police] botched it up. They let [her partner] go up in the helicopter,” Gafer said.

In the hours after King was reported missing, the RCMP took her partner in a search and rescue chopper over the community to look for her.

Gafer said she believes that decision allowed a potential person of interest to guide where the helicopter should and should not look.

“The last [officer] I spoke to was supposed to get her boyfriend out for a polygraph, and I don’t know if they ever did,” Gafer said.

“This was years ago. I just got so frustrated with the whole thing.”

King’s partner declined to comment on this story when reached by CBC News last fall.

Police haven’t yet closed the case of King’s disappearance.

But as theories swirl, the Mounties have little new to add.

In answers to questions from CBC News last fall, RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Jolene Garland said she couldn’t not speak to the specific investigative techniques used as the case is open, but said “the use of a polygraph examination in an investigation can certainly be a useful tool.”

A full review of King’s case was completed in August 2023, Garland said, which includes revisiting witness statements and reports of investigating police officers.

“All missing person cases remain open until they are solved and are considered suspicious until proven otherwise,” Garland wrote.

“Oftentimes, these file reviews are conducted using an officer who is new to the investigation, offering a fresh investigative lens. These reviews can be prompted by the receipt of new information or done at random as part of quality assurance.”

Garland said the RCMP remains open to all possibilities when examining what happened to King — including foul play.

While she didn’t put a figure on it, Garland said family members, friends, neighbours, and those who may have had contact with King in the days leading up to her disappearance were interviewed along with anyone else who provided information to police.

“At this time, no outcomes have been ruled out and the investigation to determine what happened to Ms. King is continuing,” she said.

As of Oct. 25, 2023, the RCMP had a total of 40 missing persons cases in Newfoundland and Labrador. The oldest case dates back to 1951.

WATCH | Feature story on a two-decades-long mystery in the community of Fox Harbour:

Yvonne King disappeared on Oct. 13, 2002, on the day of her 40th birthday.

The disappearance of Yvonne King sent shockwaves through the lives of those who love her and the community she came from.

For Gafer, it meant uprooting her son and husband and moving home to Newfoundland to be closer to the ongoing search for her sister.

For her parents, it was a series of endless and agonizing questions that never properly ended. Both her mother and father have since died.

As family and friends speak publicly for the first time in more than two decades, they hope someone hears their plea and comes forward if they know anything about what might have happened to King.

They’re still haunted by the mystery.

“I can go back to that day many times. I can revisit what she wore and everything,” Michelle Healey said.

“I don’t want to see in my lifetime that they won’t find her.”

Videographer and drone operator: Dan Arsenault

Text editor: Malone Mullin

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