Taxi driver testimony yields new details on case of missing Canadian in Mexico

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This article was published 20/03/2022 (1646 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A taxi driver’s statement to Mexican authorities investigating the disappearance of Canadian snowbird Malcom Madsen is raising questions about claims made by Madsen’s girlfriend about what happened the night he went missing.

Madsen, a 68-year-old retired real estate agent and jeweler from Sutton, Ont., disappeared from the west-coast town of Puerto Vallarta on Oct. 28, 2018, after going out for drinks with his Mexican girlfriend, Marcela Acosta Ramos.

In statements to investigators, Ramos, 47, claimed that she and Madsen had a few drinks shortly after midnight at Andale’s Restaurant and Bar, a popular tourist hangout, before returning immediately by taxi to the home Madsen had bought in town. The next day, Ramos said, Madsen packed up his things and headed for his beachside treehouse a few hours south of Puerto Vallarta. Five days later, she reported him missing.

But now, a statement made to the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office by the taxi driver who picked the couple up at Andale’s provides a different story. According to an official prosecutor’s office document obtained by the Star, taxi driver Jose Guadalupe Ochoa Garcia told investigators he did not take Madsen and Ramos home, but rather, dropped them off at another bar, Mandala, in downtown Puerto Vallarta.

The document states that, during this time, Ramos would communicate with her son Andres Javier Romero Acosta, who would immediately communicate with his uncle and Ramos’s brother Martin Alejandro Acosta Ramos.

Ramos never mentioned this in any of her four police interviews.

“Why would she even forget something like that? What was the importance of going to that location?” said Brooke Mullins, Madsen’s daughter, who has spent the past three-and-a-half years seeking justice for her father. “It’s incredibly disappointing. It’s been a really hard three years and I wish the police had picked up on this at the beginning.”

The document goes on to allege that Madsen was then taken to the town of Valle Dorado, about 40 minutes north of downtown Puerto Vallarta. His fate remains unknown.

Ramos was arrested in July 2020 and two months later her brother, Martin, was also arrested. Her son, Andres, was arrested in September 2021. All three have been charged with “disappearance committed by individuals,” used when the fate of a missing person is not known. They remain in detention. No trial data has been set and all have maintained their innocence in interviews with police.

The Star attempted to reach Ramos via email but the message bounced back. Puerto Vallarta-based lawyer, Jose Antonio Torres Arteaga, who represents Martin Alejandro Acosta Ramos, did not respond to multiple calls and messages.

The Star also sent multiple emails seeking comment from several Mexican officials involved in the case but did not hear back.

A 2019 Star investigation revealed security camera footage recorded at Andale’s (recovered by Mullins without the help of local police) shows Madsen and Ramos sitting at a table next to a dance floor. Shortly after midnight, Madsen gets up to go to the washroom, leaving Ramos at the table. Ramos then takes what appears to be a white pill or powder from her handbag and cradles it in her left hand and looks around. Madsen returns, sits down and leans in close to Ramos to speak into her ear. As Madsen’s sightline to his drink is momentarily cut off, Ramos appears to sprinkle the substance she is holding into Madsen’s glass. Over the course of the next 25 minutes, Madsen can be seen taking several sips of his drink. The couple then gets up and leaves.

Madsen hasn’t been heard from since.

From the moment her father was reported missing, Mullins says it became clear that local authorities were not interested in finding out what happened.

“The first time I saw the police, they said they figured my dad was just taking a trip in the jungle, drunk somewhere or decided to go on a walkabout. I don’t think at all that they wanted to deal with it,” said Mullins, who has spent more than $100,000 traveling from her home in Port Hope, Ont., to Mexico, hiring lawyers and enlisting the help of a private investigator in an attempt to learn the truth.

In addition to discovering the security footage of Madsen and Ramos at Andale’s, Mullins also recovered GPS data from a tracking device Madsen had installed on his Toyota van to monitor its use when he was away. While Ramos told investigators that the van had sat unused in her garage on the night Madsen went missing, the GPS data shows someone drove it on a meandering journey through the night: a shopping mall early in the evening, a neighbourhood about half an hour north of Puerto Vallarta close to a jungle-like area, a marina, and then back to the vicinity of her home.

Mullins gave investigators the password to the GPS account in an effort to aid their investigation. But when she later logged in, the data had been deleted. She was unable to figure out who was responsible.

Then, in 2020, Mullins’ lawyer and a private investigator, along with local sources — again, not the police — tracked Ramos, who had since left Puerto Vallarta, to a municipality north of Mexico City where she was living in a house with a “local businessman” with whom she had a romantic relationship, according to Mexican media. That man, Julio Alejandro Marquez Camacho, was shot dead in July 2020. No suspects have been named.

A documentary chronicling Mullins’ search for justice is currently in production and will air on CBC’s documentary channel in the fall.

“It’s hard. There are so many times I wish I could turn to one of my parents for support,” said Mullins, whose mother died in 2007. “That’s usually what you do, right?

With files from Manuela Vega

Kenyon Wallace is a Toronto-based investigative reporter for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @KenyonWallace or reach him via email: kwallace@thestar.ca.