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Emma Fillipoff: Vanished Without A Trace

A Mysterious Disappearance In Victoria, BC

By PanteraPublished about a year ago 14 min read
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Millions have watched on YouTube the CCTV footage of Emma Fillipoff exiting and entering a shop several times, which made us consider she was trying to evade someone.

There’s more in this case than the video displays, though, as Emma’s mental condition was deteriorating for weeks before her disappearance.

Emma was raised in Perth, Ontario, with her mother (Shelley), father, and three siblings. Her parents divorced when she was in her 20s.

Emma studied culinary arts at Campell River between 2008 and 2009.

She had also moved to China for a few months, where she was worked as an English tutor. She returned to Perth and moved to Vancouver Island again in 2011.

Emma Fillipoff (26 in 2012) has been missing since November 28th, 2012. She was last spotted in Victoria BC (Vancouver Island, Canada).

The Timeline Of Events

Emma exhibited signs of mental illness as young as 11 (source):

Entries in Emma’s journal suggest she had been privately suffering from mental health issues as early as 11. For years, her secretive and quiet nature enabled her to hide her inner turmoil from family and friends.

From “Help Find Emma Fillipoff

According to friends and coworkers in Victoria, she sometimes slept in the woods and changed several rooms before moving into a woman’s shelter (Sandy Merriman’s house), where she stayed until her disappearance.

Source

She switched several jobs until she got employed by a seafood restaurant in the harbor area, where she worked until October 31st, 2012.

Her job was seasonal, so she was expected to return on February 2013 (three or four months later).

All reports suggest Emma had a deposit of approximately $3000 at the bank and wasn’t in any debt. Nobody ever noticed her getting in trouble or involved in illegal activities.

Before she vanished, she was considering moving back to Perth with her mother.

November 20th — YMCA

On November 20th, Emma was spotted entering and leaving YMCA four times in fifteen minutes, while strangely stopping in front of the door to look outside.

She contacted her mother several times while considering returning between November 20th and November 28th. Still, she appeared to be shifting her mind constantly, calling her mother again and telling her she decided to stay.

November 28th

Her mother became aware that she was living in a woman’s shelter after dialing back a number from the shelter, where a staff member responded.

Concerned about her daughter, she decided to fly to Victoria and help her move back home to Perth, but she did not mention she would be there on the same day, not wanting to put pressure on Emma.

Emma’s condition was worsening, though, as the whole day several people spotted her drifting aimlessly around the town, acting as if she was lost.

She bought a prepaid card from a 7–11 store worth $200, and hours later (at 18:00), she visited the same store to buy a prepaid cell phone (which she never activated).

During her second visit, CCTV captured her looking outside the shop as if she wanted to avoid someone on the street and did not leave until several minutes later.

In the same afternoon, the first 911 call was made, by two concerned bypassers that realized she wasn’t behaving normally. There is no indication the police followed this phone call, though.

Emma went back to the shelter after leaving the 7-Eleven store. A staff member at the shelter was aware that her mother was flying to Victoria the same day and mentioned that to Emma.

Emma was shocked to hear this and rushed out of the front door. A friend and roommate named Patty run behind her and yelled at Emma to come back, but she did not listen and fled the shelter.

Out of the shelter, Penny entered a taxi and asked the driver to go to the airport.

During the ride, she changed her mind and told the taxi driver to take her back to the shelter, explaining she couldn’t afford the $60 for the ride. That was not true, though, since she had a bank card (with more than $2000) and the $200 prepaid card with her. The taxi driver mentioned to the police that Emma seemed confused regarding the taxi radio communication and asked: “Why is there noise coming out of that?”

An Incident At The Shelter Two Weeks Before Her Disappearance

Residents at the shelter had noticed Emma behaving strangely weeks ago.

Emma was moving furniture out of the shelter and leaving them on the street. When other residents asked her why she did that, she responded that the furniture was talking to her and making noise.

That is a clear sign of paranoid behavior, and the shelter staff contacted the police requesting mental health care.

This call was the first 911 phone call regarding Emma, but the police replied to call them back if the irrational behavior persisted. Perhaps an inexcusable mistake since the signs of a person struggling with mental illness were clear.

Including this phone call that happened two weeks before the day of Emma’s disappearance, the police were notified three times in total, yet failed to recognize the seriousness of her condition at all times.

However, Patty, the roommate, and friend of Emma, explains (in an interview with Jordan Bonaparte) that the shelter might have lied about Emma putting things on the street. (source)

Outside The Empress Hotel

Wikimedia: By Dllu — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59148828

Half an hour later, Ema was spotted in front of the Empress hotel at the inner harbor, where police were notified (for the second time during the day and the third time in the last two weeks), and spent 45 minutes assessing her.

Apparently, a person named Dennis Quay, who knew Emma, spotted her standing in distress and asked her if she wanted help, but she declined. He stayed with her for some time and then entered a restaurant where he called the police as he figured Emma needed immediate healthcare.

When police arrived (19:17) outside the Empress hotel, she was barefooted, holding her shoes in her hands.

In all CCTV footage, she appears to be acting paranoid, looking outside the glass doors and hesitating to move, as if she was concerned about someone following her and wanted to elude their presence.

Police did not consider Emma in threat to herself or others, so they allowed her to leave (at approximately 20:00).

This was the last official sighting of Emma.

This is the last confirmed sighting of Emma. The identities of the two officers are protected by privacy laws and details of the conversation have not been released.

Shelley sent in a Freedom of Information (FOI) request on May 19, 2015, which was denied by the VicPD without reason.)

(source)

To clarify, Shelley Fillipoff requested information from Victoria police regarding the discussion that occurred between two officers during the last sighting of Emma, but they denied this request without reason.

How can a service deny this request? And was there no appeal to this decision? This request can go higher in the command chain, and a jury can order the release of any documents to her mother.

Dennis Quay, in an interview, explained how he watched police arrive and felt relieved, assuming they were going to make sure she would receive treatment in a hospital.

It is logical to assume the police would recognize a disoriented person. However, there had been another two calls before, this one regarding Emma Fillipoff. Still, they were both ignored.

Maybe, though, Emma’s survival was hanging by a threat at these crucial moments.

The officers probably were not aware of the previous incidents. If they knew about any of the incidents, they would take her for an examination at the clinic instantly.

One phone call did not identify Emma Fillipoff but was made by people that didn’t know her name.

The other one, though, was just two weeks ago, from the shelter staff. Wasn’t that phone call recorded? Wasn’t there a database entry pointing to a second similar issue?

This wasn’t a decent job by the police in this case.

I’m not sure how the system works, but databases existed in 2012. You get a phone call; you record everything under the person of interest.

I also believe this is the case since there is a systemic malfunction in the approach of the Victoria police department that surfaces with this case.

23:00 — Shelley Fillipoff Arrives At The Shelter

Shelley (Emma’s mother) arrived at the shelter at 23:00, but sadly Emma had already vanished. The staff notified the police for the fourth time, and the police declared her a missing person by midnight.

Emma, during the last few days before her disappearance, had also bought a van, which she told people was going to use to move back to Ontario. Police searched the van and found most of his belongings, including her passport.

A Rare Coincidence

A few years before leaving Perth, Emma met Julien Huard, a French guy from Quebec, who accompanied her on her long walks and other activities.

He was interested in her, and some stories point to him as a stalker who created problems for Emma with his behavior.

Early documentaries presented Julien Huard as obsessed and suggested her father confronted him, and he had to back down.

However, Julien was cleared by the police as a suspect and even passed a polygraph test with questions lasting three hours.

Emma seemed to enjoy his company in Perth, but in the end, their short relationship ended as friends. It was Emma that broke that relationship in a friendly manner.

There was no relationship either, but a friendship that Emma wasn’t in the emotional state of handling it as was slowly evolving into a romantic one.

So the issue is that somehow, that man, Julien Huard, moved 2500 miles from Perth to Victoria while seeking a job, knowing Emma was also there.

Julien met with Emma one day in Victoria and had a chat with her. She was excited to see him again, according to Julien, and promised she would visit him one day after work and spend some time together.

Yet the next time Julien found Emma again, she was in a different state of mind.

He claims it was a coincidence since Victoria was the best place he could find a job, although he also indicated he was hoping to meet Emma again.

Until this point, though, there was nothing that Julien did wrong.

He did not stalk Emma. He was not coercive or aggressive against her.

There’s a misunderstanding though, as we discover while examining the case further.

Coming from Quebec and not fluent in English, Julien mistakenly used the word “stalking” in a message he sent to Emma’s father on Facebook.

He contacted her father, thinking he could gain his trust by being sincere.

There was a concert soon which he was waiting for, and he wanted to ask Emma to join him too, but he did not know where she was staying or working. Since Emma had no mobile phone or social media, he thought he could ask her father if he could convey that message to her.

But being French and not fully aware of the meaning of the word “stalking”, he also wrote this part:

“The last thing I want to do is be stalking her like I did the last time,”

Nobody is writing that unless they do not realize the meaning of the word stalking. He probably thought it meant a romantic gesture or something similar.

Her father did not read that message, but only after Emma’s disappearance. Still, this message was enough for police and the media to consider Julien a villain and a suspect. This is still how the media and content creators portray Julien.

The next time Julien came across Emma was on the morning of the same day she disappeared.

He was traveling by bus to visit a government agency regarding a health card, and he noticed Emma sitting on a pavement, in downtown Victoria.

He exited the bus to talk to her. Emma, though, was cold with him and did not want to respond.

We can find clear traces of persecution complex and paranoid delusion in Emma’s behavior. She was in direct need of treatment, yet apparently, the police that encountered and questioned her weren’t aware of all the facts.

We cannot ignore all the incidents and the deterioration of her condition.

She mentioned to people that knew her that furniture was talking to her, and everyone that met her felt she was not acting normally.

Julien Huard wasn’t a culprit and wasn’t stalking her, either. The issue here might be that just his appearance might have caused Emma’s condition to deteriorate, but he met her again in Victoria before she stopped working at the restaurant.

Nighttime Podcast has published a full interview where Julien explains everything:

Some researchers are not convinced. Still, the odds that Julien Huard committed a gruesome murder are not there.

2014: A Mysterious Figure Appears

In May 2014, a man barged into a clothing shop in Gastown BC (Vancouver) and thrown out an Emma missing person poster while claiming Emma Fillipoff was his girlfriend.

He told the shop staff:

“It’s one of those missing persons posters, except she’s not missing, she’s my girlfriend and she ran away because she hates her parents.”

(source)

While security cameras captured the man, the quality and angle didn’t help the police, and they still have no clue who this man was.

Emma’s Prepaid Card Was Used Eight Days After Her Disappearance

One final clue appeared a few days after Fillipoff’s disappearance.

On December 5th, just eight days after Emma’s disappearance, someone activated her prepaid card. The police rushed to the Pedro Canada Station where a man had tried to use it to buy a carton of cigarettes.

He was detained for questioning and passed a polygraph test, but the police found no foul play.

That man claimed to have found the prepaid card on the side of a road but mentioned to the police several times he was always drunk at the time and wasn’t sure where he picked it up.

He explained he had found the card a week ago, a clue that did not help the investigation.

Still, he gave his best guess a “road near the Juan de Fuca Recreation Centre and Galloping Goose Trail in Colwood”.

It’s a long shot from there to guess where Emma might have gone. The police initially believed she had not left Vancouver island. Upon examining the island further, we observe it is covered with uninhabited forests, mountains, lakes, and even a rainforest.

She could have walked several miles for many hours and days with short breaks to sleep and find something to drink. The issue is if Emma had the skills to survive the winter in the wilderness, particularly in her vulnerable state. She would have better chances if she traveled to another city or region.

Closing Thoughts

According to the Victoria police, this is an age progression sketch released in 2022.

Although, this illustration was based on a photograph that doesn’t represent Emma’s characteristics.

Probably, this is not how Emma Fillipoff aged, although we have to consider this possibility as well.

According to the story from Ottawa CTV News:

“While Shelley doesn’t think the rendering truly looks like Emma, she says it’s good to draw attention to Emma’s story.”

Emma probably fled and moved to a different location. She could be constantly on the move, living on the streets in places rarely anybody looks.

Moving undetected requires holding no papers, no cell phone, and perhaps no devices that connect to the internet.

Note:

Anyone with information on Emma is asked to phone the Victoria Police Department at 250–995–7654, or to go to helpfindemmafillipoff.com.

References:

Images: (public domain & fair use, research), cover image: source

External content published in this article is used for research purposes and falls within the guidelines of fair use. No copyright infringement intended. If you are, or represent, the copyright owner of images used in this article, and have an issue with the use of said material, please notify me.

Originally Published on Medium (on my Ex Cathedra Profile)

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About the Creator

Pantera

In Crypto Since March 2017.

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