Lyette Gibb was an 18-year-old White/Caucasian woman from Laval, Quebec, whose disappearance in the spring of 1987 became a long-running unsolved homicide investigation. At approximately 1:50 a.m. on April 25, she left a friend’s residence on Notre-Dame Street in Laval intending to return home. She never arrived, and after she failed to return or make contact, she was reported missing on April 26.
Although April 25 is sometimes associated with her death, the official cold-case record identifies it as the date she was last seen and does not publicly establish an exact date of death.
For six months there was no publicly reported sign of what had happened to Gibb. The case changed dramatically on October 25, 1987, when a passerby discovered her remains in L’Assomption, northeast of Laval. The remains were located in a wooded area across from 950 chemin Presqu’île; contemporary reporting described them as skeletal remains found at the foot of a tree. The distance between Laval, where she vanished, and L’Assomption meant that her remains had been found well away from the place where she was last known to be alive.
The publicly available Sûreté du Québec cold-case record does not disclose how Gibb was killed, what injuries investigators identified, or what forensic evidence may have been recovered. Because her remains were not discovered until months after her disappearance, many details surrounding the circumstances of her death have never been made public. The case remains listed by the Sûreté du Québec as an unresolved crime under file number 171-871025-006, and investigators continue to seek information that could identify the person or people responsible.
Gibb’s killing later drew attention in connection with a broader group of unsolved murders involving girls and young women in the greater Montreal region. A 1999 La Presse report examined eight cases in which victims disappeared and were later found in isolated locations in and around communities north of Montreal. The article included Gibb among those cases and noted that, at that time, police had not apprehended a suspect in any of the eight investigations. The geographical and circumstantial similarities prompted examination of the cases together, but the available reporting did not establish that a single offender was responsible for all of them.
One of the cases discussed alongside Gibb’s was the 1987 murder of Sophie Landry. Guy Croteau was eventually prosecuted and convicted in Landry’s killing after DNA evidence linked him to that crime. However, the available public record does not establish that Croteau was charged with, convicted of, or formally identified as the killer of Lyette Gibb. His prosecution therefore should not be treated as a resolution of Gibb’s case.
No publicly available police record located for Gibb’s case identifies a named suspect, and no arrest, criminal charge, trial, or conviction has been announced in connection with her death. Decades after she disappeared while making what should have been an ordinary trip home from a friend’s house, her killing remains unresolved. The Sûreté du Québec continues to maintain the case in its cold-case files and asks anyone with information capable of advancing the investigation to contact its criminal information division.
