Family offers $50k reward 25 years after North Van couple goes missing, now presumed dead

NORTH VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — Twenty-five years after a North Vancouver couple vanished without a trace, their family is once again hoping someone comes forward with information about what happened.

Mounties say there was never enough evidence to conclude Nick and Lisa Masée had been kidnapped or killed, and the circumstances in which they disappeared were mysterious. But now police say they believe they are dead and were likely victims of a crime.

“But we don’t know why or what that crime might be, we just know that they’re missing,” North Vancouver RCMP Sgt. Peter DeVries said at a press conference. ” And we also believe that somebody out there has information.”

RELATED: UNSOLVED MYSTERIES: Nick and Lisa Masee’s disappearance

The family is now offering a reward of $50,000 in hopes someone will come forward to with some answers.

Nick’s daughter Tanya Masée Van Ravenzwaaij says she now believes her father is gone, even if she doesn’t want to accept it. She says it would have been out of character for him to vanish without speaking to his children.

“So there’s the logical part that tells you that they can’t be in hiding, and then there’s a part of you in your heart that wants them to still be living, but then you would be really pissed off,” she said at a press conference hosted with RCMP pleading for information on what happened to her father.

Nick Masée Sr. and Lisa Masée. (Source: RCMP Handout)

She says she still misses her weekly phone calls with her father, hoping that he isn’t truly gone, and now all she wants is closure.

“Everybody loses their parents at one time in their life, but then you have a funeral, and we don’t have that, and that part has been extremely difficult,” she says. “Hoping that somebody is going to provide the peace of closure for us so that we know — I think that would be the greatest gift we could ever receive: closure.”

Nick’s Masée would have turned 80 this year, and Lisa would have been 64.

Investigation uncovers more questions than answers

DeVries, reading from a statement, said in the weeks and months after the couple disappeared numerous tips came into RCMP but led to nowhere: “In fact, the evidence they uncovered led to more questions than answers.”

Investigators learned that in April 1994, the Masées took a secret trip to the Cayman Islands and, on the last day they were seen in August 1994, they were meant to meet a millionaire investor at downtown Vancouver restaurant, but never showed up.

While @nvanrcmp can’t say if the couple were victims of homicide, due to the passage of time and the events, police do presume the couple are now deceased. Police presume they have fallen victim to some sort of crime.
“There is nothing new that we have to bring forward” pic.twitter.com/zyV952oB8A

— Lasia Kretzel (@rhymeswpretzel) July 30, 2019

DeVries says police and the family know the case will be a difficult one to solve, and will likely involve an element of luck if they do.

“It could be a seemingly not so obvious clue that could actually result in something here, that a dot that the police don’t have, or that the family is unaware of, that might not seem relevant to the police or to us, because we don’t know it, or don’t have a context,” he says. “So it could be that somebody knows something that was could have been going on at the time, but doesn’t connect it to the disappearance, per se, it could be an unconnected thing.”

DeVries says he hopes the reward can help overcome obstacles someone may be facing to coming forward with information on what happened.

“So we’re hoping that the family is hoping that with the passage of time that this reward might be enough to push people to say, I can speak now, if they were afraid before, maybe they’re less afraid now, maybe some of the people that they were afraid of have passed away, maybe the situation is much different for them now.