The Secret of the Life of Alex Cooper — Mysterious Disappearance.
This story is about a man who seemed to have everything in life, a good job, a loving wife, caring children, and a big house. However, in his old age his life was ruined as his past caught up with him.
Alex and Margaret Cooper met in 1950. Two years after they met, they got married. Their relationship was smooth, there were no major scandals or fights. They simply did not have the energy to do so, as the couple was completely dedicated to raising their five children. Over time, their children grew up and soon Alex and Margaret were already grandparents.
Margaret has been a homemaker almost all her life. As for Alex, he worked most of his life as a sales agent. Traveling frequently throughout the country. He had quite the standard hobbies for a man: fishing, camping, and also playing the guitar. Everyone described him as a happy kind person, and absolutely no one ever noticed something strange in him.
April 3, 1987, Alex, as often happened, went on another business trip. The next morning, his youngest daughter, Laila, went shopping with her husband to a nearby town. During the trip, they noticed Alex’s car parked on the side of the road near the bridge. Liela decided to say hello to her father. Her husband slowed down, then turned around and they pulled up to Alex’s car.
The car was closed. Liela thought her father was fishing down under the bridge. However, there was absolutely no sign of Alex. This worried Liela a little, and she called her mother. Margaret told her daughter that Alex had not called her for more than a day after he left on a business trip. The woman thought that he just had a lot of things to do, so she did not raise a panic. Now that her husband’s abandoned car has been found, there is cause for panic.
Margaret called every hospital in the area. However, none of them enrolled her 65-year-old husband. So the woman went to the police and filed a missing person report. The police arrived at the place where Alex’s car was found. During the inspection, neither in the car nor near it were found signs of a struggle or anything else strange. Inside the car was a change of clothes and Alex’s fishing tackle, but no trace of Alex himself was found.
Dogs and a helicopter were involved in the search for the man. But still it did not give any result. One of the versions was that while fishing, Alex had a heart attack, he fell into the water and drowned. But the divers could not find confirmation of this, so this version faded into the background. The second version was born after the police found out that on the morning of the day of the disappearance, Alex had breakfast at a local cafe, just a few kilometers from where his car was found.
Margaret said that her husband had a strange habit of carrying around a lot of cash. Moreover, he did not wear them in his wallet, but simply twisted them and covered them with an elastic band, so when he needed to pay for something, Alex took all his money out of his pocket. It was assumed that when the man paid for breakfast in the morning, someone saw that he had a decent amount of cash with him. This someone asked Alex for a ride, and since Alex was a kind and helpful person, he could not refuse a stranger. During the trip, a stranger robbed and killed Alex, after which he hid his body.
This version seemed the most logical, but the version that Alex himself could just want to disappear and start a new life was also considered. However, it looked absolutely implausible. He had no financial problems, his children were already adults, he should have already started receiving a salary in order to communicate with him not to work and live for his own pleasure. After all, he was already 65 years old. Who, and most importantly for what, at that age, will start a new life?
Over the following months, the search for Alex continued in vain, and the version with the deceased quickly became the main one. His family occasionally received calls from people who claimed it was a man, likely Alex, voting on the track the day he went missing. And this gave hope that the man was still alive. However, time passed, and Alex’s family finally resigned himself to the fact that he was no longer alive.
In 1989, 2 years after the disappearance of her husband, Margaret went to court to officially declare him dead. However, for this, the discovery of the birth of the missing was expected. Margaret did not find him in her house, so she requested legal assistance from the state authorities. To my great surprise, I received the answer that on the day and year of her husband’s birth, not a single person with the name Alex Cooper was identified.
Then she finds other detentions or records about the missing husband by tension. But to even greater surprise that there were no records of her husband until 1950. The year they got married. Margaret was confused. From that moment on, she was taken out only to guess who the man really was, married to animals, she was already 35 years old.
On May 27, 1991, a man in Toronto, located 3,500 kilometers from the distribution site of Alex Cooper, applied for the distribution of his friend David Cooper. The police searched the room of the missing person and found a photograph of the detective holding a child. The man in the photo looked suspiciously like Alex Cooper. The police discovered this photo to Alex’s wife, and Margaret was shocked. It really was her husband who disappeared 4 years ago. The photo was taken in 1985 and shows Margaret’s husband holding their birth grandson in his arms. Now it has become obvious to everyone that David Cooper is Alex Cooper, who disappeared 4 years ago. But the problem was that no matter what name the man called, at the moment, no one had the slightest idea about where he was and from whom he was running.
Two days after police determined that David and Alex Cooper were the same person, the man returned to his Toronto apartment. He found signs of police work at his home and called his landlady. She told him that he was on the list of missing persons and the police really wanted to talk to him. He had no plans to disappear a second time, he was just on a long business trip. But his friend for some reason filed a missing persons report. The very next day, the police returned to Alex’s apartment, but the man disappeared again. It was very strange. What made him leave his family 4 years ago? What was he trying to hide?
The story of Alex seriously interested journalists. In September 1991, a program from the cycle of unsolved mysteries was shown on television about him. This show was very popular in the USA. It told about people who, for one reason or another, have been wanted by the police for a long time. And very often ordinary citizens were surprised to recognize in the heroes of this program their neighbors or just acquaintances. This makes it easier for the police to find criminals. That is what happened this time as well.
After the program went on the air, one man contacted reporters and said that he recognized Alex Cooper. According to the man, Alex lived in Hamilton, 70 kilometers from Toronto. This information was handed over to the police and on January 10, 1992, the police still managed to overtake Alex Cooper. Now both the police and Alex’s family were able to get answers to their many questions.
The man admitted that his real name is neither Alex nor David Cooper. He said that his real name was Albin Arsene Arsenault. He explained that in 1948 he worked for a Canadian bank. In the course of work, he was accused of robbing one of the bank’s offices. However, he didn’t. He wasn’t going to be punished for something he didn’t do, so he just disappeared then.
4 years after that, already under the name Alex Cooper, he married Margaret and kept his past a secret for all 35 years of his marriage. Nevertheless, his past still caught up with him when he was 65 years old. At this age, he should have started receiving a pension, but since he did not have a birth certificate, he could not get one. He understood that sooner or later, either his family or the authorities would be interested in why he did not draw up a pension. And then the truth will be revealed that he is not really Alex Cooper, but Albin Arsenault. He was afraid that he would be arrested for the crime imputed to him in 1948, but unfortunately Albin did not know that all the charges in that case had long been dropped from him, and he was completely clear before the law.
Two days after the police found Albin in Hamilton, he returned to his family after five years. It was very difficult for his family to understand his act, but they were glad that he was alive. Therefore, in the end, he was welcomed back with open arms. Albin and Margaret lived together for another five years, after which Margaret died in 1996. Albin himself lived to be 85 years old and died in 2007.
