Marie-Ève Larivière was an 11-year-old girl who disappeared in Laval, Quebec, on the evening of March 7, 1992. She was visiting relatives at a home on Beausoleil Street in the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul area when, shortly before 7 p.m., she offered to go out and buy bread for the family dinner. Because she was unfamiliar with the neighborhood, relatives gave her directions, but she became lost and ended up at a different convenience store on Desnoyers Street.
An employee there reportedly helped her by drawing a map showing how to get back. Marie-Ève was last known to have been seen alive at the store at about 7:45 p.m.
When she failed to return, her family became alarmed and a search began. The following morning, after hours of searching, her clothed body was discovered beside railway tracks in an industrial section of Chomedey. The location was roughly seven kilometers from the area where she had disappeared and was also relatively close to the Saint-Vincent-de-Paul penitentiary. Investigators determined that Marie-Ève had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
The investigation generated an extensive police effort. By 2005, authorities had interviewed approximately 400 people and examined about 140 pieces of information, but the person responsible had not been identified. That year, Laval police created a new investigative squad to reexamine the homicide after renewed publicity brought a large influx of tips. Following a television program about the case, police reportedly received about 100 new pieces of information, approximately half of which investigators considered serious and credible.
During that renewed investigation, police publicly identified what they believed could have been the area where Marie-Ève was attacked: near railway tracks behind a commercial building around Chénier and Belleville. Investigators theorized that the killer may have lived in that area at the time or may have had a connection to a nearby halfway or transitional residence. Those possibilities were investigative theories rather than proof identifying a particular person, and no publicly named suspect was charged as a result of the renewed inquiry.
Years later, investigators also examined Marie-Ève's murder alongside several other unsolved child abductions and killings from Montreal and Laval. In 2013, reports indicated that police agencies and specialists with the Sûreté du Québec were reviewing six murders and one disappearance because of similarities among the cases, including the young ages of the victims, abductions and sexual assaults. Authorities considered the possibility that some or all of the crimes could have been committed by the same serial offender, and behavioral analysts were involved in examining that hypothesis. The grouping did not establish that a single killer was responsible, however, and no individual was prosecuted in Marie-Ève's case on the basis of that theory.
The homicide remained unsolved decades later. Marie-Ève's sister publicly commemorated her in 2017 and described the killer as a man authorities were still seeking. Despite repeated reviews of the evidence, renewed appeals for information and advances that have allowed police to revisit older forensic material in cold cases, no arrest, criminal charge, trial or conviction has been publicly reported in connection with Marie-Ève Larivière's murder.
