By Lori Culbert, From Vancouver Sun

North Vancouver banker and his wife have been missing for 20 years

NORTH VANCOUVER — The disappearance of the wealthy banker and his beautiful wife has all the hallmarks of a classic whodunit: the mysterious investor with $10 million, an association with shady stock promoters, a secret Cayman Islands bank account, and an abandoned home with unlocked doors and a lonely cat.

This is not, though, a plot spilling out of a summer beach novel. Instead, it is a real, 20-year-old unsolved case in North Vancouver.

Nick and Lisa Masee vanished Aug. 11, 1994 and police hope the anniversary will prompt someone with information to provide a clue to their whereabouts.

“We hope someone will come forward after the passage of time,” said North Vancouver RCMP Cpl. Gord Reid. “We don’t know what happened to the Masees. Is the essence of the mystery that they deliberately disappeared or that they met foul play? We just don’t know.”

Even after 20 years of investigation, police are still torn between those two theories.

Nick Masee was a personal banker for many of Howe Street’s most notorious stock promoters before his retirement in February 1994. He went on to become a director in the Vancouver Stock Exchange company Turbodyne Technologies, which falsely inflated its stock value and went broke after Masee vanished.

There is no evidence Masee ever acted improperly as a banker or knew about the problems at Turbodyne, but police looked for any possible connections between his career and his disappearance.

“The nature of the work he was doing — stock promotion, especially in Vancouver 20 years ago — there were a lot of weird things that were happening,” Reid said.

Police found no solid leads.

“It’s a very murky world. We wanted to know if there was money salted away or a particular bad person was owed money,” Reid said. “Is it possible that he was going to expose the fraud (at Turbodyne) and someone said ‘no’? I guess it is. But we’ve talked to people about all of that and had inconclusive conversations.”

Masee, then 55, and his 39-year-old wife Lisa, a hairdresser, went to downtown Vancouver on Aug. 10 to meet a man who had $10 million to invest in Turbodyne. They may have had a drink at the Westin Bayshore that evening, but never made it to the Trader Vic’s restaurant for the mysterious meeting.

The next day, Lisa Masee called both their employers to say they were taking a few days off. That was the last contact anyone reports having had with the couple.

They were reported missing about a week later. Their empty house was found unlocked and the alarm system was not turned on, both oddities for the security-conscious Nick Masee. Their pet cat had been left alone. Bank accounts and credit cards remained untouched.

These details pointed to the couple being abducted and murdered. Furthermore, Nick Masee’s adult son passed a lie-detector test in which he denied having any contact with his father.

If the motive, though, was retaliation for some type of white-collar crime, Reid questioned why the criminals would also target Masee’s wife.

In support of the theory that the couple planned to disappear, police discovered the Masees made an earlier trip to the Cayman Islands where they opened a bank account. They had also created a new will shortly before they vanished. They were both born outside Canada, so had passports to live in other places, Reid added.

Nick Masee left behind two adult children from a previous marriage, a son in Japan and a daughter in his native Holland. In an affidavit filed in B.C. Supreme Court in 2001, the daughter, Tanya Van Ravenzwaaij-Masee, said her father’s personality changed before he vanished.

“My father was always a very open man who enjoyed sharing details of what was happening in his life and work,” Van Ravenzwaaij-Masee’s affidavit said. “However, in the six months before his disappearance, he became very guarded about his life and, in particular, the details of his work. Furthermore, he seemed concerned for his safety.”

RCMP have received few tips in recent years about the Masees, despite a $25,000 reward offered by the family.

Investigators have used newer technology, though, to try to generate leads. For example, they are comparing unidentified human remains to familial DNA donated by the Masees’ relatives, but they have yet to find a match.

“We keep files like this open for 70 years and we review this on an annual basis,” Reid said. “There’s nothing we’d like more than to solve a historical file.”

Anyone with information can call Reid at 604-985-1311 or CrimeStoppers at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS).

IMAGE: Police hope someone will come forward with a clue to the disappearance of Nick Masee and his wife Lisa 20 years ago. Photograph by: Jeff Vinnick , Vancouver Sun

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