MISSING: Terry Zubko - 07/21/82 - North Bay, ON

February 1, 2020 SM

By: S.M.

Last Updated: 07/20/20
04/24/20

The Disappearance of Terry Anthony Zubko

Terry Zubko was born June 4, 1964 in Blind River, Ontario - a small town located on the North Channel of Lake Huron in northern part of the province.

In 1982, Terry was 18 years old and lived with his parents in Sault Ste. Marie - 142 km west of Blind River, and about 308 km west of Sudbury.

According to Terry’s sister, he loved animals and sports, and enjoyed hobbies like collecting stamps, biking, fishing, water skiing and building forts. The family still kept a cottage in Blind River, and Terry enjoyed helping his parents with landscaping the property.

In May of that year, Terry was admitted as a patient at the North Bay Psychiatric Hospital on Highway 11 North - which later became the Northeast Mental Health Centre, before it was torn down in 2013.⁣

See this map in the original post

Highway 11 in North Bay

It is unknown what Terry’s diagnosis was at the time, though several sources indicate he suffered from amnesia and required medication.⁣

"Terry was terrified of hospitals,” his sister said at a 2016 press conference. “The North Bay Psychiatric Hospital was forewarned my brother would try to leave the premises, because he was terrified to be there."

The warnings had proven to be futile.

July 21, 1982

On July 21, 1982, at 10 a.m., Terry was granted a rare unsupervised walk around the hospital for one hour. When he left, he was wearing blue jeans, a brown and beige V-neck striped sweater, a blue t-shirt, and blue & white running shoes.

Terry never returned from his walk. He vanished from the North Bay Psychiatric Hospital 46 days after he’d been admitted.

When Terry failed to return to the ward, hospital staff conducted an unsuccessful search of the grounds and along the highway. By afternoon, without any indication of Terry’s whereabouts, the staff reported him missing to police. Police conducted a search of the grounds, the building, and the bush surrounding the hospital, but found nothing. At the time, his family was at their cottage in Blind River, and it took several days for the hospital and family to establish contact.

In the days and weeks following his disappearance, police followed up on reports from the public of possible sightings of Terry in the North Bay and surroundings areas, but no definitive trace of Terry Zubko was ever found.

Decades of searching

In 2016, the North Bay police held a media conference at its headquarters to mark the 34th anniversary of Terry Zubko’s disappearance. His mother, Audrey Zubko, his sister Alana Cawston and niece Sarah Foreman traveled from Fort Frances to the event in Sault Ste. Marie. Their emotions raw after decades of unknowing, they plead to the public for answers.

“I want my brother found and brought home,” Cawston said.

In the nearly four decades since he disappeared, Terry’s family say they’ve travelled thousands of miles looking for him. They’ve “scoured highways, in ditches and culverts,” and have placed advertisements across Canada. His family has provided DNA, but without a national registry in place to match missing persons with John and Jane Does, the best chance the Zubko family and many others have for closure is through renewed public interest - and any new leads.

Information sometimes hides in plain sight.

It’s been 38 years since Terry Zubko vanished from the hospital.

But nobody simply vanishes — he went somewhere. Hopefully, the time has come for someone to come forward so his family can finally find out where.

The clue to solving Terry Zubko’s fate could come from any new piece of information from the public.

Contact information:

Anyone who thinks they know something, no matter how small the information might seem, is urged to call North Bay Police Service at 705-497-5555 (select option 9 to speak to a police officer) or visit in person at 135 Princess Street West, North Bay.⁣

For those wishing to remain anonymous, contact Near North Crime Stoppers by telephone toll-free at 1-800-222-8477, or submit a tip online at nearnorthcrimestoppers.com.

A note on Northern Ontario psychiatric hospitals:

Historically, Ontario psychiatric facilities were built as “large, imposing edifices of civic progress and prosperity,” often surrounded by outbuildings and “considerable acreage” of land, according to the Archives of Ontario. The North Bay Psychiatric Hospital was built in 1956 and opened in 1957. It was an imposing complex, with over 1,100 beds by the 1960s. There were no bars on the patients’ windows - instead, they were made with a type of reinforced screen. All of the buildings were connected by a series of tunnels. At the 2016 press conference, Terry’s family blamed the hospital for his disappearance. Police said they were working with what they had at the time.

Terry’s mysterious disappearance in 1982 is one of several historical cases where young men disappeared from Northern Ontario psychiatric hospitals.

Philippe Guérin went missing, on June 12, 1966, while he was a 27-year old patient of the Ontario Hospital, a psychiatric hospital that was located in the North end of North Bay, which has since been demolished. On April 7, 2000, nearly 18 years after Terry Zubko’s disappearance, another patient named Russell Hoffart walked out of the North Bay Psychiatric Hospital and disappeared.

There are currently 13 unsolved missing persons cases in North Bay, and the disappearance of Terry Zubko is one of the region’s oldest.

North Bay Psychiatric Hospital. Source: North Bay History

Terry Zubko - Physical Characteristics & Details:

Missing since: July 21, 1982
Year of birth: 1964
Age at disappearance: 18
Gender: Male
Bio group: Caucasian
Eye colour: Hazel
Hair: Long straight brown
Height: 172 cm / 5 ft 8 in
Weight: 56 kg / 123 lb
Build: Slender / thin
Teeth: Good condition; tooth 16 treated, tooth 37 absent
Scars: Slight scar on the lower forehead; scar on the left upper nostril; 12"-14" scar unknown which forearm
Last seen wearing: Blue jeans, blue size 9 running shoes, v-neck sweater with beige and brown stripes, blue t-shirt