Waiting ... and Hoping

"We're only five days in. We have done a lot of work but there's still a lot of work to be done. ... We have well over 200 tips that we're going through and that takes time because we have to follow up on each tip."
Staff Sgt. Doug Andrus, Calgary Police

Grandson Nathan O'Brien, Grandparents Alvin and Kathryn Liknes

The mysterious disappearance of a pair of grandparents and their five-year-old grandson continues to bedevil logic. On the other hand, perhaps not? The grandparents, Alvin and Kathryn Liknes, after all had held a week-end 'estate sale', basically putting everything in their middle-class home up for sale. Hundreds of people, perfect strangers for the most part, wandered through their home, assessing their belongings to determine whether they might make an offer and carry the object away with them.

The couple planned to pull up roots and leave Canada, to retire to Mexico. The sale of their worldly goods was a way of disposing of things they felt they would no longer need. A secondary purpose was to gather in some additional funding for the purchase of a new home in Mexico, presumably. Police are attempting, through a laborious process of vetting what was sold and for how much, how much money the couple had taken in and might have had in their possession in their house that evening.

The very evening when their daughter had left with them her son Nathan O'Brien for a sleep-over with his doting grandparents. Police, according to news reports are "keeping an open mind" with respect to whether the abducted couple knew their abductor/s. Some details are being kept close to the investigators' vest, as it were, as for example, whether a weapon that might have been used on the couple to subdue them when they put up a struggle against the invader to their home, had been found.

It appears to be assumed on the basis of some evidence uncovered that one of them might have suffered an injury during the struggle. Adding to the mystery is the finding that no evidence exists the abductors had to force their way into the house. They might have been invited in, known to the residents, they might simply have walked in because the doors may have been unlocked. Police remain hopeful that the three missing people, grandparents and grandson are still alive.

Evidence has been taken from the home and is being analyzed. But analytical processes take time, and it may well be that a week will lapse before all the evidence has been sufficiently examined and drained of their meaning. The search is on for the driver of a green Ford F150, a pickup truck dating between the 1980s or early 1990s. Someone driving a clunker because they cannot afford anything more recent, or someone having a love of old vehicles and restoring them ... ?

Sgt. Andrus advised there are "no suspects I can name", a rather ambiguous statement that could mean he is unable to name the suspects that appear to have been involved without further evidence, or alternately no suspects appear to have been isolated as potential abductors in the case, and therefore there are no names to be revealed. In any event, how could the names of any who could be suspected in this case be revealed before they are apprehended?

So far, investigators have interrogated roughly 75 people who had been present at the estate sale. People were invited to appear at a local community centre where police took their fingerprints to match them against prints discovered within the home, ruling out possible suspects. Police are attempting to discover what items were purchased in the hopes that clues will present themselves and the murky aspects of the case will be clarified to reveal something of value.

And the family of the three missing people, wait in an agony of hope.