In April 2002, Mildred Sexton’s late father visited her apartment, but she was nowhere to be found.

He visited several times that day and eventually located someone to let him inside.
 

Mildred Sexton’s sister-in-law, Sandra Dawe, says everything inside the apartment seemed normal.

“Everything was there belonging to her; there were leftovers from her last meal,” said Dawe. “There was no indication that she wasn’t coming back.”

But, the 47-year-old never returned.

What happened 15 years ago remains unclear.


























“People have different stories,” said Dawe. “Some people said they saw her walking up the road; some people said they saw her walking out of town. Somebody else said they saw her getting into a car in the parking lot of the (apartment) building. A lot of different stories, some of them were a few days later.
 

“The way I look at it is if you see somebody, you don’t pay much attention to them walking down the road unless there’s a reason to.”

Her 5 foot 9 inch and 150 pound frame was known to most in the small town.

The RCMP did initial searches around St. Anthony, and soon volunteer search teams and local fire departments such as Raleigh’s got involved. Rumours began to abound that she had walked off onto the harbour ice and fallen through, but Dawe says Sexton had a fear of the harbour ice and would not walk across it.

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“I use to tell her that when she goes to check her mail she could walk across the harbour, you don’t have to go all the way around to the other side,” said Dawe. “She would say, ‘No way, I’m not going out on that harbour.’”

Known to family and friends to be soft spoken, Sexton rarely strayed far from home. Dawe says she would occasionally go to dart night to sit and watch the games, but was not known to party or be involved with drugs. She had a history of mental illness relating to schizophrenia and while Dawe says she had her relapses, for the most part she was doing well and there was no indication Sexton was dealing with issues brought on by schizophrenia at the time she went missing.

Sexton was also a smoker, and Dawe says it was strange that her cigarettes were found in her apartment.

“If she was going somewhere, we would have expected the cigarettes to be gone,” said Dawe.

The details of Sexton’s disappearance have faded with the passing of the years.

“There was a fishing boat in at that time, there were different people here,” said Dawe. “Some family and people said maybe she went with one of the fishermen, but that’s speculation. I don’t think she would go on a foreign boat, but she was a very trusting person.”

Mayor Ernest Simms served his first term as mayor during the time Sexton went missing. As a school teacher, he taught one of her brothers. He says being so close to Labrador with many unknown people coming and going, rumours are common.

















































 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now that there are three additional missing person cases, all unsolved, Dawe says painful memories are brought back to the family with each revelation. Sexton’s mother, says Dawe, still talks about her missing daughter and hopes she may one day reappear.

“It’s been difficult,” said Dawe. “People wonder if we are missing something, maybe there’s not enough being done in the searches and follow-up. Initially people are out looking but as time goes on, it kind of goes away. Then years go by and you kind of wonder if more could have been done earlier, or continued on.

“Whenever we spoke to RCMP, the file is still open, but visibly that’s not there,” she said about progress in the case.

Like the family, Dawe says locals in town still keep their eyes peeled for Sexton, and sometimes they will even hear word that someone thought they had seen her. But it’s always to no avail.
 

In June 2005, a mock search and rescue was done by RCMP and ground search and rescue teams from Roddickton and Port Saunders. The demonstration was done in an area near where Sexton was last seen on the chance they may find some evidence regarding what happened to her.
 

Unfortunately for the town of St. Anthony, Mildred Sexton was to be only the first of four unsolved missing person cases that have unfolded there within the past 15 years. With a fourth missing person reported in December of 2016, Dawe says the people of St. Anthony are as restless as ever.
 

“There is an uneasy feeling among people, you get that feeling in the night time and going out by yourself.”