When the Missing Become the Dead

Six months after he was beaten in a Trois-Rivières bar, Eduardo Malpica is still missing and presumed dead

“From one day to the next, I became a single mom. I’m solely dedicated to finding Eduardo, finding answers,” says Chloé Dugas. PHOTO: Peter McCabe

Stéphane Luce got out of bed at dawn, put his boots on and prepared himself for the grim task of finding a body.

Luce’s team met at a diner in Trois-Rivières that April morning, filling their bellies with eggs and coffee ahead of a long trek through the marshes. Armed with a dozen volunteers and four cadavre-sniffing dogs, they would scour the banks of the St-Lawrence River in silence. Maybe somewhere out there, amid the cold mud and driftwood, they might come upon Eduardo Malpica.

“There’s a nervous energy that lingers in the air,” said Luce, who’s worked with families of missing people and homicide victims for the past 14 years. “It’s hard to describe how fragile everyone feels. And it’s a bit of a race against time because the hotter it gets, the harder it is for the dogs to do their work. 

“They’re able to detect decomposing flesh on a tiny piece of fabric so if there’s a 150-pound body out there, they’re going to find it. But when it gets hot, as it did that afternoon, they’re less and less effective. That day, we came up empty.”

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Luce has no connection to Malpica and his volunteer organization, Meurtres et disparitions irrésolus du Québec, doesn’t usually get involved until a few years after a case goes cold.

But something about Malpica’s case didn’t sit right with him. Malpica, a 44-year-old college professor and father, went missing six months ago after he was beaten in a bar in the port city of Trois-Rivières.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve never seen a police investigation handled this way,” said Luce. “There is so much evidence (pointing to foul play) and yet the Trois-Rivières police seem fixated on a theory that just doesn’t make sense.”

Until recently, the police theory into Malpica’s disappearance went like this: on the night of Nov. 26, while celebrating with colleagues, the professor got drunk and disruptive at Café Bar Zénob, got into a fight, stumbled out of the building without his coat or wallet, then decided to run away, abandoning his 4-year-old son and his partner, Chloé Dugas. 

This theory, based on little more than gossip, has been questioned by experts in missing person’s cases and the people who knew Malpica best. And whereas detectives in Trois-Rivières described the events at the bar as a “fight”, investigators with the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) have said it was a “violent” and possibly “racist attack” against Malpica, who is Peruvian.

Two of the last people who saw Malpica that night told The Rover they were drugged at Café Bar Zénob and believe he may have been as well. One of them informed police of her suspected drugging less than 24 hours after Malpica disappeared but only heard back from detectives two months later. Security footage from Café Bar Zénob corroborates the SQ’s description: it showed Malpica being attacked by a half-dozen white patrons who then dragged him onto the pavement outside.

But no matter what the evidence said, police insisted Malpica left Trois-Rivières of his own accord and was hiding out somewhere in Montreal or Ottawa. 

Until now. 

A police source told The Rover that despite not committing to one theory in their public statements, detectives now say Malpica is likely dead and may have taken his own life. 

“We’re not favouring any one hypothesis, whether it’s a voluntary departure or whether he took his own life. We’re investigating all avenues,” said Luc Mongrain, a spokesperson for the Trois-Rivières police. “The case is still very much active.”

Of course, this is all speculation. Until a body is found, the case is at an impasse. 

Which is where Luce comes in.

“I’m not here to bash the police, I want to help them. But one day these detectives will get to move on. Mr. Malpica’s family never will,” Luce said. “I know this because my mother was murdered 42 years ago and it still haunts me. She was beaten to death in her bed, bludgeoned 70 times and they never caught her killer. 

“I was a kid, 13 years old. I still think about it every day, I still imagine the horror of my mother’s final moments. Still wonder if there’s some tiny thing that could have gone differently. 

“Sometimes investigators get so stuck on one theory that leads nowhere. I believe that’s what happened in my mother’s case and I think that’s what’s happening here.”

***

From the moment Malpica didn’t come home that night in November, Dugas says it felt like she was trapped in a time loop.

“My body is here, in the present, but my mind is constantly thinking about what happened, and mostly asking myself why,” said Dugas. “It’s like I’m a ghost in a room, looking at everyone around me, but I’m not really there. I’m in some parallel world where I have no notion of time, where life doesn’t feel real because it can’t be real.

“I try to make sense of what happened, of how I continue living life, taking care of our child. From one day to the next, I became a single mom. I’m solely dedicated to finding Eduardo, finding answers, and being there to give all the love and attention Santiago needs. I need to help his little heart navigate through this, and I hope it won’t be damaged forever, haunted by the disappearance of his dad.”

Dugas says Malpica’s therapist agreed to breach patient confidentiality in order to help investigators find her patient. The therapist said Malpica didn’t fit the profile of someone who would take their own life.

Dugas also shared Malpica’s diary with detectives

“Eduardo had full confidence in me, he left (his diary) on the desk knowing I would never read it,” she said. “Even when the police gave it back to me, I didn’t read it in order to respect his privacy. It’s only when I really felt that Eduardo was gone that I read it. Nothing in there leads me to believe he was contemplating suicide.”

At the time of his disappearance, Malpica was riding a wave of accomplishments in his professional and personal life. His family had moved from renting a small apartment in southwest Montreal to owning a beautiful home in downtown Trois-Rivières. 

The 44-year-old had just started his dream job teaching at a local CEGEP, where students had grown so fond of him that some joined the initial search party after he went missing.

He was also involved in local activism, advocating for the rights of workers and migrants. On the night of his disappearance, Malpica and his fellow activists were out celebrating a lecture series they’d just hosted at a nearby art museum. Friends who saw him that night spoke of a man who was elated and looking forward to some time off during the Christmas break.

And then there was his son Santiago, who still clung to Malpica the way a toddler would. The last time they saw each other, Malpica dropped his boy off at school as he did every day.

“You know how some of us are mother hens with our children?” Dugas said. “Eduardo was a mother hen with Santi. He would still check on him when he slept at night, just standing over his bed and watching him breathe. The way you do when they’re first born”

What confounds Dugas and those closest to Malpica is the police’s reticence to investigate what happened at the bar that night. Despite witnesses and security footage appearing to show an act of aggravated assault against her partner, no arrests have been made. Bar employees and witnesses contacted by The Rover have mostly been unresponsive or simply said it’s too difficult a subject to broach.

Police claim that Malpica made unwanted advances on a woman that night, provoking a brutal response from her male friends. When the men were done beating him, the bartender told Malpica to leave but asked someone to accompany him on the short walk home. By that point, Malpica was so disoriented that he could only speak Spanish and started heading in the wrong way to get back to his place.

After Malpica became aggressive towards the man walking him, his guide backed off and allowed the 44-year-old to wander off without a coat on a night where the temperature dropped below zero. That was the last confirmed sighting of Eduardo Malpica.

Two sources close to the man who tried to help Malpica get home say he suffers from a profound sense of guilt over how the night ended.

“It’s been very, very heavy,” said one bar employee, who was among the last to see Malpica.

Another bar employee told The Rover that it’s possible Malpica was drugged given that the series of druggings reported in downtown Trois-Rivières these past few years. But when a follow up interview was scheduled, the employee never picked up the phone. 

While visiting the Zénob in February, an elderly man working there approached me and said the bar had nothing to be ashamed of. But Malpica, he said, should be ashamed of how he behaved that night. In social media posts, Malpica’s character has been maligned and it’s been implied that he deserved whatever happened to him.

If he was in fact dosed with GHB — commonly known as the “date rape” drug — one of the most common symptoms is increased sensuality and enhanced sexual feelings.

There is also a possible racial component to the attack that night. One witness who sat with Malpica at the bar told The Rover, shortly before the assault, a white man walked over to him and asked “how do you say f*ggot in Spanish”, clearly making Malpica feel unwelcome.

Privately, one of the bar’s owners has expressed empathy towards Malpica’s family and they’ve put a missing person poster of Malpica outside the bar and , at every turn, its owners have cooperated with police. But at least two of the people who were there that night told The Rover they can’t bring themselves to go back.

“How could I after what happened?” said one woman, who was once a regular at le Zénob. “It’s way too painful.”

With police unwilling to crack down on Malpica’s assailants, that bar — the last place we know for sure Malpica was seen — is a dead end.

***

Eduardo Malpica (second from right) and his partner Chloé Dugas (right). PHOTO: Courtesy Martín Ignacio.

After their search along the riverbank last month, Luce’s team went out once more last week and they’ll keep looking for Malpica. It may be that the only hope for answers relies on those cadavre-sniffing dogs.

“These dogs are relentless, they go all out, they’re so intense we have to bring them in every 15 minutes,” Luce said. “They’re relentless. The only way to get them to stop is to hide a vial with the synthetic smell of a corpse and when they find it, we give a treat. If he’s out there, I know they’ll find him.”

Dugas has walked alongside Luce every time he’s led the search party and she’ll be out there when they go back.

“Out there, when we look for Eduardo, it’s a mix of wanting to find him while anticipating a breakdown if we do,” she said. “At this point, finding his body is the best possible outcome. It’s either that or living without knowing forever. … When he first went missing, there was this ringing in my ears that cut everything out, I couldn’t hear anything but the ringing.

“I still have it to this day, anytime I’m trying to recharge that ringing sound comes back, overwhelming everything. My legs go numb and my heart beats so hard it hurts.”

In a way, Luce wishes he could tell Dugas that things will get easier, that she’ll find closure and live a full life again. But Luce knows that’s not how these things work.

“She’s an incredibly resilient person, I’ll say that about her,” Luce said. “Sometimes when we go out on a search, we’re very careful about the language we use and the way we speak of the victim. (Dugas) wanted us to be as direct as possible. She’s on a mission and I admire her determination.

“I hope we can find him and I hope we can solve this. Because, with my mom, it never stopped. Imagining every terrible scenario, replaying it again and again. I was just a kid but it stays with you. I hope we can all come together and do right by Eduardo’s family.”