A Rainy Night in Chilliwack
On February 19, 1983, ten-year-old Jo-Anne Pedersen spent the day at Chilliwack Mall with her older sister, Anna-Lise, and a 14-year-old cousin.
It should have been an ordinary Saturday.
But on the way home that evening, a small argument broke out between Jo-Anne and Anna-Lise. Upset with her younger sister, Anna-Lise and their cousin hurried ahead to the family townhouse.
When they reached the house, they decided to play a prank. They went inside and locked the door behind them.
Jo-Anne was left outside.
It was around 8:05 p.m., and a cold rain was falling heavily over Chilliwack. With nowhere to go, Jo-Anne walked roughly two blocks to the Penny Pinchers convenience store at Watson and Vedder Roads.
She was carrying a phone directory and a few coins.
Inside the store, Jo-Anne asked the clerk for help making a phone call. She was directed to the public telephone outside.
And that phone booth would become the last confirmed place where Jo-Anne was ever seen.
The Phone Call
Jo-Anne did not have enough money or the exact telephone number she needed, so she asked the operator to connect her manually to the Chilliwack Legion Hall, where her mother, Angela, was attending a birthday celebration.
When the call came through, Angela heard her daughter’s frightened voice.
Jo-Anne explained that she had been locked out of the house and needed someone to come and get her.
Then, while the child was still speaking to her mother, a tall man wearing a sports jacket approached the booth.
According to Angela’s later recollection, the man took the receiver from Jo-Anne and spoke directly to her.
He reportedly told her that she had half an hour to arrive or he would call the police.
Then the line went dead.
Angela immediately became alarmed.
She and her husband left the Legion Hall and drove toward Penny Pinchers as quickly as they could.
But they were already racing against the clock.
Twenty Minutes Too Late
Around 8:40 p.m., Jo-Anne’s parents arrived at the convenience store.
The phone booth was empty.
Jo-Anne was gone.
Witnesses later told investigators that they had seen a young girl inside the brightly lit booth with a tall man wearing a sports jacket.
Angela initially wondered whether her daughter might have gone inside the store to escape the rain. The clerk told her Jo-Anne was no longer there.
Her parents searched around the building, the parking lot, the surrounding area and nearby hiding places, calling her name through the rain.
They then returned to the townhouse, hoping Jo-Anne might somehow have made her way home.
She hadn’t.
Anna-Lise and her cousin were still inside, and they confirmed that Jo-Anne had never returned after being locked out.
The family immediately began searching the nearby streets, checking roads, ditches and dark areas for any sign of the missing girl.
Eventually, they contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Because Jo-Anne was only ten and a strange man had been seen with her immediately before she disappeared, investigators quickly treated the case as a possible abduction.
A Massive Search Begins
The search expanded rapidly.
Police established roadblocks around major routes leaving the Chilliwack area. Vehicles were stopped and searched as officers looked for any indication that Jo-Anne had been taken out of the area.
The Penny Pinchers store became an important part of the investigation. Officers interviewed the clerk and began trying to identify the unidentified man who had been seen at the payphone.
Military personnel from the nearby Camp Chilliwack were also brought in to assist with the search.
Police officers, military personnel and volunteers searched fields, wooded areas and rural terrain. Helicopters were used to scan the surrounding landscape, while tracking dogs were brought to the phone booth in an attempt to follow Jo-Anne’s scent.
The dogs reportedly followed a trail around the convenience store’s parking area before it ended at the pavement.
Investigators considered this significant because it suggested Jo-Anne may have entered a vehicle from the area.
But there was no vehicle description that could definitively identify where she had gone.
And there was no physical evidence showing what happened next.
The Call That Terrified the Family
About two weeks after Jo-Anne disappeared, her grandmother, Mary Riley, received a disturbing telephone call.
A man with a deep voice reportedly told her to listen.
Then Mary heard the sound of a child crying intensely.
She believed the voice belonged to Jo-Anne.
The call ended abruptly.
What made it particularly disturbing was the fact that Mary’s telephone number was unlisted. Only a small number of people were believed to know it.
Investigators took the call seriously, although the technology available in 1983 made tracing a short, quickly terminated call extremely difficult.
There was no ransom demand.
No second call followed.
And no location was established.
For Jo-Anne’s family, however, the possibility that she might still have been alive somewhere was impossible to ignore.
The Man at the Phone Booth
For years, investigators concentrated heavily on the unidentified man seen with Jo-Anne.
A description was circulated, and eventually a composite image was produced.
Because the man was reportedly tall and appeared to have a military-style appearance, investigators examined whether he could have been connected to the nearby military base.
Personnel were investigated, but the effort produced no answer.
As the years passed without new physical evidence, the original investigation was eventually scaled back and the case entered the realm of unsolved disappearances.
But Jo-Anne’s family never stopped hoping for answers.
A Case That Returned to the Headlines
Two decades after Jo-Anne disappeared, the RCMP released age-progressed images showing what she might look like as an adult.
Then, as the 25th anniversary approached in 2008, investigators made another major public appeal.
A new composite drawing of the mysterious man was released, and a reenactment of the night Jo-Anne disappeared was produced with Crime Stoppers.
The renewed publicity generated dozens of new tips.
It also produced something much more unusual.
An anonymous letter arrived claiming to have been written by the man who had been seen with Jo-Anne at the phone booth.
The writer insisted that he had not abducted the child.
According to the letter, he had encountered a frightened girl in the rain and had tried to help her. He claimed that he eventually left the area, believing Jo-Anne would be collected by her family.
Investigators considered the letter significant because it contained information about the incident that appeared consistent with known details.
But the writer remained anonymous.
More Anonymous Letters
The mystery deepened again in 2011.
Another anonymous letter was sent to the RCMP. Investigators did not publicly disclose all of its contents, but they said it contained information they considered important.
Police appealed directly to the author, asking the person to come forward and speak with investigators.
A further communication reportedly followed in 2012.
The identity of the writer remained unknown, and investigators could not publicly confirm whether every letter had come from the same person.
For Jo-Anne’s mother, each new development brought a mixture of hope and pain.
Decades had passed, but she still wanted to know what had happened to her daughter.
The Breakthrough That Changed the Investigation
In February 2023, the RCMP announced a significant development.
Investigators had located the man who had been seen with Jo-Anne at the phone booth forty years earlier.
They interviewed him.
And after doing so, police ruled him out as a suspect.
According to investigators, the man had genuinely encountered Jo-Anne while she was frightened and stranded in the rain. His actions at the phone booth had apparently been an attempt to make sure her parents came to collect her.
His identity was not publicly released.
The development changed one of the central assumptions surrounding the case.
For decades, investigators and the public had focused on the man in the sports jacket as a possible connection to Jo-Anne’s disappearance. Now, police believed he had actually been a witness rather than the person responsible.
That meant the crucial moment likely occurred after he left.
Jo-Anne may have been alone at the illuminated phone booth shortly before her parents arrived.
Somewhere during that short window of time, someone else may have seen her.
Forty Years Without an Answer
Jo-Anne Pedersen’s disappearance remains an active RCMP investigation.
Her case number is 1983-2535, and authorities continue to seek information about what happened to her after she was left alone at the phone booth.
The years have transformed the area around Watson and Vedder Roads. The Penny Pinchers store is gone, and the phone booth that once stood outside it exists now only in photographs and memories.
But the central mystery has remained unchanged.
A ten-year-old girl was frightened, cold and alone on a rainy February night.
She made a telephone call to her mother.
A stranger briefly entered that story.
And within roughly twenty minutes, Jo-Anne was gone.
If she is still alive, Jo-Anne would be 54 years old in 2026.
Her family has spent more than four decades living with the same unanswered question:
What happened to Jo-Anne Pedersen after the phone call ended?
Anyone with information about Jo-Anne’s disappearance is asked to contact the Chilliwack RCMP Serious Crime Unit at 604-792-4611, or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.