More than three years after Canadian snowbird Malcom Madsen disappeared from the Mexican tourist town of Puerto Vallarta, local authorities have begun a ground search for the man’s remains.
The start of the search for an area in Puerto Vallarta was announced through a one-minute video posted online by the Jalisco State Prosecutor’s Office last Saturday in which an official provides a brief overview of the operation.
The search is a joint operation involving a number of agencies, including the Jalisco’s prosecutor’s office, the Special Prosecutor for Disappeared Persons, the Mexican Secretariat of National Defense and local police, the official in the video says. About a dozen investigators wearing white forensic bodysuits can be seen behind the officer.
Madsen’s daughter, Brooke Mullins, who has been pushing authorities in Puerto Vallarta to find out what happened to her father, said she was surprised by the announcement of the search and also suspicious of its timing given that a television documentary about the case is currently in production.
Mullins says she learned recently, however, that a new team that seems more committed to finding the truth had taken over the investigation.
“I was very impressed with the way they treated me,” she said. “I’ve been very vocal that I haven’t been very impressed with how the Mexican authorities have dealt with my dad’s case or my presence in the country trying to find answers. So I feel really hopeful with this new team that they actually do want to find him and solve this case.”
Madsen, a 68-year-old retired real estate agent and jeweler from Sutton, Ont., went missing on Oct. 28, 2018, after going out for drinks with his Mexican girlfriend, Marcela Acosta Ramos, 47, at Andale’s Restaurant and Bar in Puerto Vallarta.
Security video footage captured at Andale’s — footage found by Mullins, not the police, during one of her trips to Mexico to search for her father — shows Madsen and Ramos sitting at a table drinking cocktails. At one point, Madsen gets up to go to the washroom and Ramos pulls what appears to be a white pill or powder from her purse de ella and cradles it in her left hand beneath the table. Madsen returns and leans in close to speak into Ramos’s ear from him, momentarily cutting off his sightline from him to his drink from him. At the same time, Ramos brings her hand up from beneath the table and appears to sprinkle a powder into Madsen’s drink from her. The footage shows Madsen taking several more sips before the couple leaves the bar and gets into a cab.
It’s not clear what happened next, but Madsen hasn’t been heard since.
In the weeks and months following Madsen’s disappearance, investigators in Puerto Vallarta exhibited little interest in figuring out what happened. On her own de ella, in addition to recovering the security footage of her father de ella and Ramos and Andale’s Bar, Mullins found GPS data from a tracking device in Madsen’s van that showed where the van went that night. When Mullins gave Mexican investigators the password for the account where the data was logged, someone deleted the information.
Investigators also failed to take certain measures such as dusting Madsen’s van for fingerprints, searching Ramos’s house and conducting luminol tests for blood traces. Only after Mullins’s lawyer petitioned the courts were some of these measures taken.
During this time, Ramos sold the house Madsen purchased for her and moved away.
About two years later, Mullins and her lawyer put together a team of local sources and a private investigator and tracked Ramos to a municipality near Mexico City.
There, Ramos was arrested and charged with “disappearance committed by individuals,” used when the fate of a missing person is not known. Later, Ramos’s son de ella, Andres Javier Romero Acosta, and her brother de ella, Martin Alejandro Acosta Ramos, were also arrested and face the same charge. No trial date has been set and none of the allegations have been proven in court.
In her statements to investigators, Ramos has maintained her innocence and claimed that after she and Madsen left Andale’s, they returned home. She told police that Madsen packed up his things and headed for his beachside treehouse a few hours south of Puerto Vallarta the next day. Five days later, she reported him missing.
Last month, the Star revealed that a taxi driver’s statement to authorities contradicted Ramos’s account. The driver told investigators he did not take Madsen and Ramos home, but rather, dropped them off at another bar, Mandala, in downtown Puerto Vallarta.
The Star attempted to reach Ramos via email but the message bounced back. Calls to Puerto Vallarta-based lawyer Jose Antonio Torres Arteaga, who represents Martin Alejandro Acosta Ramos, were not returned Tuesday.
