Louisette St-arneault Missing Person Case

Louisette St-Arneault was a 33-year-old woman when she disappeared on June 6, 1982, in the area of the Pont Laviolette at St-Grégoire, Quebec. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Canada’s Missing database, a witness reported seeing Louisette fall from the Laviolette Bridge in Trois-Rivières that day. She was never recovered. The bridge spans the St. Lawrence River between Trois-Rivières and Bécancour, placing the disappearance over one of Quebec’s largest waterways; Quebec’s Commission de toponymie describes the bridge as a major steel structure approximately 2.7 kilometres long linking the two communities. From the beginning, the circumstances therefore presented investigators and Louisette’s loved ones with an especially difficult kind of missing-person case: there was an eyewitness account indicating that she had gone from the bridge into or toward the river below, yet there was no recovery that could conclusively establish what happened afterward. A later missing-person reference summarizing the case states that she has been presumed to have drowned, but the absence of her remains has meant that the most important physical confirmation has never been obtained.

Official records preserve a detailed physical description that may help distinguish Louisette from other missing persons. She was born in 1948 and was 33 years old at the time she vanished. She was described as a white female with a slender or thin build, standing approximately 165 centimetres, or 5 feet 5 inches tall, and weighing about 63 kilograms, or 139 pounds. Louisette had blue eyes and short brown hair, and the national missing-person record notes that she had braces on her teeth. The record also contains information concerning a previous shoulder fracture; the database lists the left shoulder while also retaining wording indicating uncertainty regarding which shoulder had been fractured. These characteristics became particularly important because there was no body recovered from the St. Lawrence River and therefore no opportunity to identify her through the ordinary procedures that follow the recovery of a deceased missing person. What she was wearing was also documented. Louisette was reported to have been wearing green denim pants, beach sandals, and a cotton sweater when she disappeared. Taken together, these details provide the surviving identifying information for a woman whose disappearance otherwise occurred in a matter of moments and left very little publicly documented evidence behind.

The central fact of the case has remained remarkably unchanged through the decades: on June 6, 1982, a witness saw Louisette St-Arneault fall from the Laviolette Bridge, but despite what was witnessed, her body was never found. The location itself helps explain why the lack of recovery does not necessarily resolve what happened after she fell. The Laviolette Bridge crosses the broad St. Lawrence River and is the road connection between Trois-Rivières on the north shore and Bécancour on the south shore; government transportation information identifies it as the only road crossing of the St. Lawrence between Montréal and Québec City. Publicly available records do not provide a detailed account of the immediate search of the river, the number of personnel involved, whether boats or aircraft were deployed, the water or weather conditions that day, or precisely where on the bridge the witness reported seeing Louisette fall. They likewise do not publicly describe evidence establishing how or why she came to fall. Those unanswered questions are important because the known facts establish the event that triggered her disappearance but do not explain the circumstances leading up to it.

More than four decades later, Louisette remains listed in the RCMP’s national Canada’s Missing database. The responsible investigating agency is the Sûreté du Québec, and the official record identifies the police reference number as 117-820606-003. The RCMP listing continues to request information from anyone who may know something about the case, demonstrating that Louisette has not simply disappeared from the historical record despite the passage of time. There is no publicly documented recovery of her remains, and the federal record continues to describe her as missing. The case is therefore remembered through a small but significant collection of facts: Louisette St-Arneault was 33 years old when she vanished on June 6, 1982; an eyewitness reported seeing her fall from the Laviolette Bridge over the St. Lawrence River near Trois-Rivières and St-Grégoire; she was never recovered; and authorities have retained her physical description, clothing information, and case record in the hope that information may still emerge. In overview, Louisette’s disappearance is a long-standing Quebec missing-person case in which the apparent event leading to her disappearance was witnessed, yet the absence of a recovery left her family and investigators without the final answers that might otherwise have brought certainty to what happened to her after she vanished from the bridge that day.
Last Seen: Jun 6, 1982

Canada's Missing - RCMP case 2014002978