ENDERBY, B.C.—A bat flits around Denis Aubertin’s head in the darkness, its wings casting shadows on the underground tunnel’s soot-blackened walls. On hands and knees and wheezing with the effort, Aubertin presses forward, desperate for some sign of his missing daughter.After crawling through 45 metres of tunnel beneath what appears to be a former grow-op on a farm in British Columbia’s Interior, he comes to a windowless room and a locked steel door. Rising to his full height, Aubertin throws his body against it. Over and over again he tries to break it down, but despite his tradesman’s strength the door refuses to yield.“This tunnel has a lot to hide,” Aubertin says, pausing to catch his breath. But with little new evidence to go on, “we’re between a rock and a hard place.”It’s late August — almost a year since Denis and Jane Aubertin’s daughter, 31-year-old Nicole Bell, disappeared. Aubertin thinks this farm, less than an hour’s drive south of where Bell lived, might hold some clue to what happened to her.Subscribe today: To access more of the Star’s award-winning journalism, please consider subscribing at just 99¢ + tax for your first month.The Aubertins are not alone in their search. Waiting above ground with Jane, beside the tunnel’s concealed entrance in a dark corner of a dilapidated outbuilding, is Cindy Simpson. Her daughter Ashley disappeared from the same area in April 2016.Both families have kept up their desperate searches because they say police have not. Their daughters are among roughly 2,500 people who have gone missing in B.C. and never been found, most of the cases going back 10 years or more.Canada-wide, there are approximately 7,000 open cases in which a person has been missing at least three months, a StarMetro-Toronto Star investigation has found. The RCMP says missing persons are an operational priority, especially in B.C. where there are ...
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