Finding Eduardo

A 44-year-old father of one goes missing in Trois-Rivières after he was beaten and threatened outside a local bar.

Chloé Dugas keeps a candle lit for her partner Eduardo, who went missing 51 days ago. PHOTO: Chris Curtis

TROIS-RIVIÈRES, QC — Eduardo Malpica used to watch over his son's crib at night to make sure he was still breathing.

It was the kind of anxiety that can take hold of any new parent but Malpica’s partner, Chloe Dugas, says he listened for the boy’s breathing every night for years. Each runny nose, cough and scraped knee was cause for great concern. And as their son grew older, Malpica remained just as doting.

"Sometimes I would wake up at night and his side of the bed would be empty," said Dugas. "Then I’d walk through the house and find him in Santiago's room, cuddling our baby."

Perhaps it’s fitting that the last time she saw Malpica, he was taking Santiago to school. 

That was their daily routine. He would pluck the boy from bed, make him breakfast, get his boots on and they’d be out the door. Like every other morning, Dugas waved goodbye as she worked from her home office on Nov. 25. Santiago made it to school that day but Malpica never came home.

That was 51 days ago.

Malpica’s disappearance has confounded investigators from his adopted city of Trois-Rivières and the Sûreté du Québec’s missing persons taskforce. Their theory — that he voluntarily abandoned his partner and their 4-year-old son — is unconscionable to Dugas and those who knew Malpica best.

The 44-year-old had just been hired for his “dream job” teaching at a college in Trois-Rivières, a port city halfway between Montreal and Quebec City. Last year, the couple moved from a dimly lit apartment in southwest Montreal to a two-storey farmhouse within walking distance of the waterfront in Trois-Rivières. After years of living in the uncertainty of Montreal’s rental market, it seemed the family was finally able to settle down and start a new life together.

On the night he disappeared, Malpica was out with colleagues after attending a lecture at a museum downtown. About a half dozen of them sauntered to the Café-Bar Zénob. That’s where everything spiralled out of control.

The last confirmed sighting of Malpica was outside the Zénob, where a half dozen men surrounded him and rained down blows on his limp body. By then, all of his colleagues had left the bar, and Malpica was alone. When they were done beating him, the assailants dragged Malpica onto the cold pavement and across the street.

That’s when someone reached into the trunk of his vehicle and allegedly pulled out an axe to threaten Malpica. Local newspaper Le Nouvelliste, which has done a fantastic job fighting for answers in the missing person’s case, described a man brandishing an axe as people pulled Malpica by the shirt collar. The man then drove off in a white van.

By then, Malpica could barely walk and he was so agitated he only spoke Spanish, despite being fluent in French. Throughout this brutal, minutes-long assault, no one at the bar thought to call police or an ambulance. Instead, one of the patrons tried to walk him home but headed back to the bar when Malpica became aggressive.

Lacking the know-how to deal with someone in such distress, the man let Malpica walk away into the sub zero night with no winter coat or wallet.

***

You might think the attack — much of which was captured by security cameras at the bar — would be at the heart of the investigation into Malpica's disappearance. 

But police believe that sometime after 2 a.m., Malpica decided to leave his partner, abandon his child and head east towards Montreal. Whether it was guilt, shame, post traumatic stress or a psychotic episode that caused it, police say he voluntarily left his family sometime after sustaining countless strikes to the body and head.

"I have a hard time believing that," said Charles Fontaine, who was with Malpica that night. "When I left the bar, just before midnight, he was lucid and happy. Speaking as clearly as you and I were. And, from what I could tell, things in his life were great. Why would he just run off like that?

“The way it’s been described to me, he was limp and incoherent. It isn’t impossible to think he’d been drugged. This sort of thing happens in bars across Quebec. But no one seems to be interested in that. It feels like the detectives have a theory and they’re sticking to it no matter what.”

Dugas says she also can't wrap her mind around the voluntary disappearance theory.

"I'm not saying it isn't plausible but it's just unlike anything he's ever done," Dugas said. "The police are tracking activity on his bank account and he hasn't used it since that night. He hasn't logged into his email or any of his social media accounts. No one seems to have seen him at the bus station leaving town. So where did he go?

"He's not McGyver, he's not the kind of person who can vanish and start a new life. He can barely nail a nail into the wall. Every time we assemble furniture together, it's a disaster. I just can’t imagine him having the survival skills to make it on the streets for months without being noticed.”

Chloé Dugas. PHOTO: Chris Curtis

When I visited the Café-Bar Zénob on Wednesday, a man who called himself the owner was surprisingly uncooperative. After refusing to comment, he offered this: “The bar has nothing to be ashamed of. He might have something to be ashamed of but we don’t.”

Sources interviewed by the Trois-Rivières detectives say that downplaying the attack has been a consistent thread in their investigation. One man, who met with investigators from Trois-Rivières and the SQ’s missing person’s task force, says local cops and provincial police have divergent views on this.

“The Trois Rivières cops describe what happened to Eduardo as ‘just a scuffle, something that happens all the time.’ But everyone who’s seen the security footage will tell you it was an extremely violent attack,” said the source, who wished to remain anonymous. “The SQ says that what they saw on the security footage and what was described to them by witnesses was a vicious assault. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this discrepancy.”

Then there is the issue of race.

Malpica and a half dozen colleagues were at the bar that night to celebrate a lecture series they’d just organized on international labour rights. After the lecture, they walked to the Zénob, a basement bar frequented by students and profs from the local university. Fontaine said that while he was ordering a drink, he saw a man walk up to Malpica and ask, “how do you say f*ggot in Spanish?” 

Malpica has dark skin and his family came to Canada from Peru over 30 years ago.

“He said he’d experienced that sort of thing before but you could tell it bothered him,” Fontaine said. “I’m not saying he was the victim of a racist attack but that’s a detail from that night I can’t forget.”

I asked Fontaine what the bar’s owner meant when he said Malpica might have something to be ashamed of.

“I wasn’t there when it happened, but my understanding is he was giving unwanted attention to a young woman at the bar,” Fontaine said. “I’m not saying he didn’t do that and I’m not saying that sort of thing is okay, but if that’s the case, you deal with it like adults. You don’t beat someone mercilessly and send them onto the street.”

Dugas is aware of these allegations and while she says that would be out of character for Malpica, she isn’t discounting it.

“The detectives told me he had ‘wandering hands’ that night,” Dugas said. “I don’t know if that means he touched someone’s arm or their bum or their breasts. And I’m not saying it didn’t happen. People can do awful things when they’re intoxicated. I’ve been in toxic relationships with men but Eduardo was never like that. He’s not a drinker and the only time he ever smoked pot, he called 911 because he was having a panic attack.

“But if he did harass a woman, I don’t think it was handled well at all.”

Outside the Zénob, in downtown Trois-Rivières. PHOTO: Chris Curtis

Malpica’s colleague Steven Roy Cullen says that if his friend was out of line, it was the bar’s responsibility to act on it.

“If he groped a woman, they really should have called the police or figured out a better way to handle it,” said Roy Cullen, who was at the museum with Malpica that night. “What you don’t do is allow people who’ve been drinking to handle it themselves. What you don’t do is allow people to beat someone and drag him into the street. 

“They sent someone to walk him home but clearly the situation had already gotten out of hand by then. I’m not blaming the person who walked with him but it was just a huge error in judgement on the bar’s part.”

***

Eduardo Malpica. PHOTO: Handout.

The crux of the police’s argument — that Malpica voluntarily left Trois-Rivières  — rests on the testimony of one witness who says she saw him at a park downtown the morning after the attack.

A source close to the investigation says the woman, who volunteers with Trois-Rivière’s homeless population on Saturday mornings, told investigators she was approached by a man matching Malpica’s description. He immediately confided in her.

“He apparently told the woman he was ashamed of himself, that he’d ruined his life and that he was going east to start over,” the source said. “It’s an incredibly rare thing, in this sort of investigation, to have such a detailed sighting so close to the disappearance.”

There was another sighting of someone matching Malpica’s description.

In an incident on Dec. 20, someone who looks like Malpica was seen on a bus headed to Ottawa, according to a report by Le Nouvelliste. The witness said he was mumbling to himself in Spanish and giving the middle finger to someone who wasn’t really there. As the ride went on and his behaviour became more erratic, the man was kicked off the bus in Casselman, Ont. — a farming village by Highway 417.

The Nouvelliste article doesn’t say whether this tip was thoroughly investigated by police in Quebec or Ontario.

Another theory is that Malpica has been living on the streets of Montreal. Four outreach workers contacted by The Rover said they’ve never seen him. One shelter, run by the Welcome Hall Mission, has had Malpica’s photo posted at their door for weeks but there have been no sightings so far.

If there’s a silver lining in this, it’s the solidarity Dugas’ new neighbours have shown her family. From the outset, volunteers helped search every back alley, grain pier and vacant lot in the port city. His photo is posted all over downtown. And outside le Zénob, there’s a candle lit just for Malpica.

But for Dugas, the days are getting harder and harder.

“Yesterday, my son asked if they put papa in the garbage,” she said, visibly shaken. “How do you tell a 4-year-old his dad is missing? Nothing feels real right now. I can do all of the chores I need to do around the home, I can shop for groceries and cook and watch our son, but there are these moments where I feel so lost. Because none of this makes sense. I want to be wrong, I want him to be okay somewhere and come to his senses and come back to us.

“But each day, it gets harder and harder to imagine that.”