text: First published on Friday Aug. 16, 2013. 
   
   Liliane Cyr retraces the steps she took in 1978, the last time she ever saw her 18-month-old daughter,Yohanna. 
   
   Walking down Rochon St. in St-Laurent, where she lived with the baby in a small apartment, she heads onto Décarie Blvd., to the parking lot of a strip mall. She stops where a taxi stand used to be and recounts how she gave the driver the destination before turning to her then-boyfriend and thanking him for looking after little Yohanna while she worked out of town that week. Then, the 20-year-old mother kissed her baby goodbye. 
   
   Cyr never saw Yohanna again. 
   
   Thirty-five years on, a small congregation of supporters gathered for the sombre anniversary on Aug. 15. Cyr’s daughter, Vera Sarah, sang a song for the sister she had never met but who had always represented hope in their home. New missing posters adorn telephone poles in the neighbourhood, as the RCMP unveiled yet another age-processed photograph that shows how Yohanna might look today, if she is alive. 
   
   “That is my daughter,” Cyr said, looking tearfully at the photograph. “That’s her. It looks so much like her biological father, and like me. It’s special. You can’t see something like this and stop looking. How can I?” Holding a little teddy bear, Cyr said she questions everything. 
   
   When she got to her job that day, she called her boyfriend to check in, but he said Yohanna was in the bathtub. When she called back the next day, he told her Yohanna was with his mother, who offered to babysit so he could come visit Cyr in Les Escoumins, in Quebec’s North Shore region. When they came back to Montreal together, he told her his mother lived in Boston. When Cyr flew to Boston to get her baby, he told her Yohanna had drowned and that he had buried her. 
   
   “I didn’t understand nothing,” she said. “And I got very, very scared.” 
   
   Cyr rushed back to Montreal, alone. She asked her neighbours, phoned hospitals, called the morgue and contacted police. No one had heard or seen anything, no one had information. The taxi driver, the only witness, died a month after he picked her up. Cyr brought baby photos and clothing to the police to open a file, but they went missing a decade later. Police reopened the file in 1994. 
   
   When Aaron Lewis Guay, now her ex-boyfriend, was charged with kidnapping in 1978, he denied everything. In a preliminary hearing, a judge ruled there was not enough evidence to proceed. There was no body, no evidence that he had been watching the child, no crime scene. 
   
   He was also deported because, as a U.S. citizen, he didn’t have the proper papers to stay in Quebec. No charges were laid, but he was told not to return. 
   
   The case went cold. He disappeared too. Did he sell her daughter? Kill her? Smuggle her into the U.S.? What did he do with her? Where is she? These questions haunt Cyr, and she knows he is the only one with answers. She has tried, and failed, to contact him, but hopes the new photo of Yohanna might create new leads. 
   
   In 2005, a U.S. woman, whose husband happened to see a photo of Yohanna and thought she might be a match, contacted Missing Children’s Network. The woman eventually came to Canada, but the DNA proved she wasn’t Liliane’s daughter. 
   
   Cyr still hopes. 
   
   “Maybe she’s alive, maybe she’s dead,” she said. “If she is alive, it would be the most beautiful gift a mother could have, If she’s dead, and someone can show me her bones, I will have to accept it, and I will finally be able to think about something else. 
   
   “But while I wait …” Anyone with information concerning Yohanna Cyr’s whereabouts is asked to please contact the Missing Children’s Network at 514-843-4333 or toll-free at 1-888-692-4673. All calls are confidential. ||||| Update, Oct. 5, 2016: DNA tests have revealed that the U.S. woman is not the daughter of Liliane Cyr. Click here for the full story. 
   
   Liliane Cyr has spent close to four decades hoping someone would contact her with news of her daughter Yohanna, who disappeared from her St-Laurent apartment when she was only 18 months old. 
   
   But she has also watched as promising leads turned to bitter disappointments through the years and, in the hardest moments, wondered if it was best to give up and stop thinking about what happened. 
   
   So when she received a private message two weeks ago through a Facebook page set up to keep Yohanna’s case alive, Cyr, 59, took a deep breath and reminded herself not to get her hopes too high, regardless of what it said. 
   
   The message, received Aug. 5, came from a woman living in the United States. She said she didn’t want to bother Cyr or cause her any pain, but asked how she could get in touch with the investigators in charge of Yohanna’s case. 
   
   Cyr, curious but trying to keep calm, asked what she knew about her daughter. The woman answered with a question of her own: Did Yohanna have a Y-shaped birthmark on her index finger? 
   
   Cyr confirmed that she did, and froze at what came next. 
   
   “I’m not 100 per cent sure,” the woman told her. “But I think I might be your daughter.” 
   
   Yohanna Cyr disappeared from her mother’s St-Laurent apartment exactly 38 years ago on Monday. 
   
   Cyr had left her daughter in the care of her then-boyfriend, a man named Aaron Lewis, while she went to work outside of the city. 
   
   When Lewis went to join Cyr a few days later, he told her Yohanna was being babysat by his parents in Boston. But after Cyr headed to Boston to pick her up, Lewis’s story changed: Yohanna had drowned in the bathtub, Cyr says he told her, and he had no choice but to bury her. 
   
   Lewis was arrested and charged with child abduction, but was acquitted and released because of a lack of evidence. 
   
   Cyr has since spent a lifetime trying to keep her daughter’s case alive in hopes that if Yohanna is out there somewhere, she might start looking for her mother one day. 
   
   Then came the Facebook message two weeks ago. 
   
   According to Cyr, the woman told her she started wondering about her past when she turned 18 and, while trying to get her driver’s licence, found out that her birth certificate was a fake. She pushed her parents for details, but they never provided clear answers. 
   
   She told Cyr she knows of no existing photos from when she was a little girl, and that she occasionally has flashbacks: blurry memories that come to mind of her being loaded onto an airplane as a small child. 
   
   She has sent Cyr photos, and she not only looks like Yohanna, Cyr said, but her daughters do as well. 
   
   “In my heart, I hope it’s her,” Cyr said on Monday. “There can’t be 50,000 people with that mark on their finger, can there?” 
   
   Cyr said local police are communicating with American authorities so the woman can have DNA tests performed to know if she really is Yohanna. Results could take weeks, if not months, and Cyr says she knows not to be too optimistic until then.
target: – A Canadian woman looking for her missing daughter since she went missing as a toddler almost 40 years ago received a Facebook message in early August that may change her life, the Ottawa Citizen reports. The private message sent to Liliane Cyr, who maintains a Facebook page dedicated to finding her daughter Yohanna, who disappeared from their Montreal apartment in 1978, was from a US woman who started off asking a very specific question about a birthmark on Yohanna's finger, followed by this: "I'm not 100% sure, but I think I might be your daughter." The woman told Cyr that the discovery that her birth certificate was a fake, an odd lack of early childhood photos, and fuzzy memories of a plane ride led her to suspect something was amiss in her past. The Montreal Gazette tells the story of what happened the week Yohanna disappeared, with 20-year-old Cyr leaving 18-month-old Yohanna in the care of Aaron Lewis Guay, her US boyfriend at the time, while she was out of town for work. Guay met up with Cyr a few days later without the baby, first telling Cyr his mom was watching Yohanna, then saying the toddler had drowned in the tub and he'd buried her. Guay was charged with kidnapping, but he denied his original story and a judge ruled there wasn't enough evidence to go on with the case; he was released and disappeared. Cyr says she's trying not to get her hopes up, but she notes that photos of the woman resemble Yohanna. DNA tests are in the works. (Two teens missing for two years were found on a Minnesota farm.)