Ricky Dechaine Missing Person Case

Ricky Dechaine, a 42-year-old man, was last seen in connection with a flight departing Sioux Lookout, Ontario, on September 12, 1987, for the return trip to Thunder Bay. Dechaine was traveling with Guy Labreche, who was the pilot of a Cessna aircraft. An archived missing-person record based on Ontario Provincial Police information places Labreche at the Sioux Lookout airport at approximately 12:05 a.m. on September 12 as the aircraft departed for Thunder Bay. A later family memorial published through The Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal specifically names both Guy Labreche and Rick Dechaine and remembers them together as the two men who disappeared when their airplane vanished while traveling from Sioux Lookout toward Thunder Bay. The memorial gives September 11 as the day the aircraft disappeared, while the archived police-based missing-person information records the departure just after midnight on September 12; the available online material does not explain that one-day difference.

What began as a return flight across northwestern Ontario became a disappearance from which neither man was known to return. The police-based case information states that Labreche was an aircraft pilot and that his Cessna was presumed to have crashed. The publicly available account does not provide a detailed sequence of what occurred after takeoff: there is no description of a distress call, mechanical problem, weather emergency, forced landing, or final radio communication in the surviving online case summary. Instead, the known story ends abruptly after the aircraft left Sioux Lookout for Thunder Bay. The absence of those details is significant because it means that explanations beyond the presumed aircraft accident would be speculation rather than established fact. What can be said is that Dechaine and Labreche were associated with the same flight, that the airplane disappeared while returning toward Thunder Bay, and that the Cessna was subsequently regarded as having likely gone down somewhere along or near that journey.

The disappearance left remarkably few publicly accessible details despite the passage of decades. The archived case information identifies the Ontario Provincial Police Thunder Bay Detachment as the investigating police service in Labreche's missing-person case, reflecting the connection of the disappearance to the Thunder Bay area and the flight's intended destination. No description of recovered wreckage, a confirmed crash site, or the recovery of Dechaine and Labreche appears in the online records located for this case. That lack of resolution has left the circumstances surrounding the final portion of the flight uncertain. In a region characterized by vast forests, numerous lakes, remote terrain, and great distances between communities, the disappearance of a small aircraft could leave investigators facing an exceptionally difficult search area, but the surviving case information does not identify a specific location where authorities believe the Cessna went down. For Dechaine's family and those who knew him, that uncertainty has meant living without the certainty that a confirmed recovery could have provided.

Thirty years after the disappearance, the continuing emotional impact was evident in a memorial published in 2017 that remembered Guy Labreche and Rick Dechaine together. Their loved ones described the men as still deeply missed and made clear that the passage of three decades had not erased their memories. That remembrance also reinforces one of the central facts of the case: Dechaine's disappearance was inseparable from the loss of the aircraft and of Labreche during the flight from Sioux Lookout toward Thunder Bay. No reliable online source located for this synopsis establishes that Ricky Dechaine was later found or that the aircraft's disappearance was conclusively resolved. The case therefore remains a haunting aviation-related missing-person mystery in the public record: Ricky Dechaine left Sioux Lookout aboard a Cessna with pilot Guy Labreche on a return flight to Thunder Bay, the aircraft disappeared before completing the journey, authorities came to presume that the plane had crashed, and the publicly available record still provides no confirmed account of where the aircraft came down or what ultimately happened to the two men.
Last Seen: Sep 12, 1987

Canada's Missing - RCMP case 2006021199