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This week’s featured member is Angela Ellis. Angela, known to most us as
“Ang” is our member coordinator, and AD for Ontario, Quebec, and British
Columbia. She was one of the original 10 members taken from the
“Coldcases” group in 2001.
As member coordinator she receives all the
applications for membership, and is responsible for approving them. She is
always on the lookout for people in the field of Law Enforcement that
could help us in our pursuit. She was part of the original administration,
and started taking on other responsibilities like rewriting or creating
form letters for the Ad's to use and creating group procedures. She answer
any questions the doe network members may have and does a great job at
keeping the Ad's and the group as a whole motivated. Some of us call Ang
the list mom, though she's one of our younger members.
She then went
on to became case submission coordinator. She is responsible for taking
all case submissions and making sure we have all the information we need.
If you look, you can find message board postings about the network by Ang
all over the internet. She also has her own email group called Find Missing Loved Ones that helps people looking for
their missing loved ones. The group sets them up with organizations that
can help them like Doe, NMCO, MPCCN, Outpost for Hope etc. That group also
has some skip tracers and PI's that run searches for them, and have found
many loved ones, some that had been out of touch or "missing" for over 20
years. She also does a daily search of all online media for any stories
related to missing and unidentified persons, and sends them to the Ad's to
keep track of or to try and get the case if we don't have it already.
She is also Canada Media Director and has made 8 TV appearances, one
radio appearance and has been in 4 newspaper articles on behalf of the Doe
Network.
She also volunteers for the missing children organization, Child
CyberSearch
When asked “why” she is so dedicated, she tells us,
“When I was growing up several young girls were abducted and some later
found murdered. Sharin Morningstar Keenan's disappearance was probably the
one that touched me the most. CBC Radio was always on in our house and
Peter Gzowski who was on in the morning lived in the same neighbourhood as
her and detailed how he police were out searching for Sharin who went
missing from a park near her home. He spoke of the police going door to
door, using loudspeakers as they were driving through the streets calling
for her and asking anyone that may have seen her to come out and talk to
them. Those images are forever stuck in my head. Sharin was murdered and
stuffed in a fridge in a rooming house close to where she lived by Dennis
Melvin Howe who escaped before her body was found in the winter of 1983
and is still on the lose. She was 9 and I was 11 and the reality that
things like this could happen to girls like me became very real. I had
been followed home by cars and invited in for a ride home numerous time.
Then another girl went missing, Christine Jessop was abducted and murdered
in October 1984 after getting off the school bus in the small town she
lived in, very much like the one I lived in too. Her murderer is unknown
and still on the loose. Nicole Morin went missing in July 1985 while
riding the elevator down to the pool in her apartment building to go
swimming with a friend and has never been found, now I was haunted and
hooked. How could a girl just disappear into thin air? From then on I read
everything I could about missing persons but I felt very much alone
thinking I was weird and the only person that I felt a passion for doing
something about this. Thankfully I eventually found coldcases and the
people here at the Doe Network. I am driven, by my need to find Nicole and
by my need to id all those other girls and boys murdered and left without
a name”
In addition to being such a dedicated member of these
organizations, Angela is also a wife and mother to two adorable little
girls. When asked why she stays with the group, she goes on to say, “ This
is the most rewarding thing I have ever done (outside of having children)
and I couldn't imagine ever doing anything else. Missing and unidentified
persons are of course rather dark and depressing subject matters but I
have the privilege of working with the most caring and selfless people I
have ever met and they really make it an uplifting experience. Sure cold
cases can be hard, frustrating work but whenever I get down I think about
all those families members depending on us to help them find their missing
loved one and about all the Does who deserve to have their name back and
to be given back to their families and I know I have to keep going because
they need me.”
Thank you, Ang, from all of us. Thanks for being a
motivator, mentor, and friend. We wouldn’t be where we are without you
Author: Dana Gonzalez
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