On August 5, 1987, 24-year-old Dale Andrew Sinclair left his home in Edmonton, Alberta, driving his wife’s vehicle. His plans for the day sounded ordinary. He intended to stop at a bank to cash a cheque and then travel north to Gibbons, Alberta, where he planned to visit family. Somewhere between those ordinary plans and the days that followed, something went very wrong. Dale disappeared, and one week later the vehicle he had been driving would surface hundreds of kilometers away in another province with no sign of Dale.
Dale was born in 1962 and was 24 years old when he vanished. He stood approximately 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighed around 190 pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes. When he left home that August day, he was reportedly wearing grey denim pants, a maroon pullover sweater and grey running shoes. The RCMP’s Canada’s Missing database confirms that Dale left his Edmonton residence in his wife’s vehicle intending to cash a cheque at a bank before visiting family in Gibbons.
Gibbons is a relatively short drive north of Edmonton, less than an hours drive. This would make Dale’s planed journey a fairly regular occurrence. What isn’t clear, however, is whether he ever arrived there. Edmonton Police information refers to Dale meeting family in Gibbons later that afternoon, while the RCMP record more specifically says he intended to visit family there. I have not found a source clearly confirming that relatives actually saw Dale in Gibbons that day. Until that can be established, the safest interpretation is that Gibbons was his intended destination rather than his confirmed final location.
The planned bank visit creates another potentially important piece of the mystery. Did Dale actually cash the cheque? If so, where and at what time? Did a bank employee remember serving him? Did the transaction establish that Dale was still in Edmonton at a particular hour? None of those details appear in the publicly available case information. Something as ordinary as a bank transaction could potentially narrow Dale’s timeline considerably, yet nearly four decades later that information hasn’t been publicly released.
Then, on August 12, 1987, just one week after Dale disappeared, police recovered the vehicle he had been driving. It wasn’t found in Edmonton. It wasn’t found in Gibbons. In fact, it wasn’t even found in Alberta. The vehicle was recovered in Regina, Saskatchewan.
That discovery drastically changes the mystery surrounding Dale’s disappearance. Regina is hundreds of kilometers southeast of Edmonton. Someone had apparently taken Dale’s wife’s vehicle on a substantial journey across the Prairies, yet the publicly available records do not establish that Dale was the person who drove it there. There is no publicly confirmed sighting of Dale travelling toward Saskatchewan and no publicly released evidence placing him in Regina.
That distinction is crucial. We know the vehicle reached Regina, but we have no idea that Dale did.
Sadly, very little information about the recovered vehicle has been made public. The available case summaries don’t tell us its make, model or color and do they do not identify exactly where in Regina it was discovered. We don’t know whether it was found on a residential street, in a parking lot, near a motel or bus terminal, airport, or somewhere on the outskirts of the city. We don’t know whether it was locked or if the keys were recovered or if Dale’s belongings were inside, or whether investigators found evidence suggesting someone other than Dale had been using it.
Those details could dramatically change how the case is interpreted. If Dale’s personal possessions were still inside, that could mean one thing. If they were gone, it could mean something entirely different. If a witness remembered seeing someone park the vehicle, that person might have provided investigators with Dale’s last known movements or evidence that Dale wasn’t the person driving it at all. None of that information appears to have been publicly released.
It’s also important to remember that this happened in 1987. There were no smartphones recording people’s locations, no Google location histories, and nothing approaching today’s network of security cameras. Cash transactions were common, and someone could travel hundreds of kilometers without creating the kind of electronic trail investigators would expect today. If Dale or someone driving his wife’s vehicle travelled from Alberta into Saskatchewan using cash, reconstructing that journey afterward would have been extraordinarily difficult.
Very little about Dale’s personal life has entered the public record either. We know he was married because police identify the vehicle as belonging to his wife, and we know he had family connected with Gibbons. Beyond that, publicly available police information tells us almost nothing about his occupation, friendships, interests or what was happening in his life during the summer of 1987. We don’t know whether Dale had friends in Saskatchewan, whether he had ever travelled to Regina before, or whether there was any reason he might suddenly have changed his plans and headed east.
Police have also not publicly announced a definitive theory about what happened to him. There is no publicly released evidence establishing that Dale was murdered, died accidentally, deliberately disappeared or died by suicide. Nearly every possible explanation eventually encounters the same problem: the vehicle made it to Regina, but we don’t know whether Dale did.
That uncertainty has naturally generated speculation among people who have encountered Dale’s case online. One possibility is that Dale voluntarily changed his plans after leaving Edmonton and decided to travel to Saskatchewan. If he drove to Regina himself, then whatever happened to him may have occurred after he arrived. But that raises the obvious question of why he would go there. No publicly known connection between Dale and Regina has emerged.
Another theory is considerably darker. If something happened to Dale somewhere in Alberta, another person could theoretically have taken his wife’s vehicle and driven it to Saskatchewan. Abandoning the vehicle hundreds of kilometers away would have created an enormous problem for investigators trying to determine where Dale’s trail actually ended. There is, however, no publicly available evidence establishing that another person drove the car, so this remains a possibility rather than a fact.
It’s equally possible that Dale reached Regina and continued travelling by another means. He could theoretically have boarded a bus, caught a ride with someone, hitchhiked or travelled elsewhere. Once again, though, there is no confirmed public evidence supporting any of those scenarios.
I specifically looked for substantial Reddit discussions about Dale’s disappearance, but I could not find a credible thread devoted to his case containing developed theories. There are discussions elsewhere in the online missing-person community, including Websleuths, where the Regina vehicle naturally becomes the focus of speculation. Rather than attribute theories to Reddit that don’t appear to exist, it is more accurate to say that the known evidence itself produces several possibilities—none of which has been proven.
And so the years continued to pass. August 1987 became August 1988. Five years became ten, then twenty, then thirty. As of 2026, almost 39 years have passed since Dale disappeared, yet he remains listed as missing by both Edmonton Police and Canada’s Missing.
If Dale were alive today, he would be approximately 64 years old. Instead, the photograph associated with his missing-person case continues to show the 24-year-old man who walked out of his Edmonton home in the summer of 1987.
Somewhere in the events of that week is the missing piece of Dale’s story. Perhaps someone remembers seeing him at the bank. Maybe someone saw his vehicle travelling east. Someone in Regina may have noticed when the vehicle appeared or remembers who parked it. Perhaps Dale mentioned plans to travel somewhere other than Gibbons to a friend or acquaintance. After almost four decades, someone possessing that information might not even realize it could still matter.
Ultimately, Dale’s disappearance revolves around two very different journeys. The first is the journey Dale said he intended to make: from Edmonton to Gibbons to visit family. The second is the journey we know his wife’s vehicle somehow made: from Alberta to Regina, Saskatchewan.
What happened between those two journeys remains unknown.
On August 5, 1987, a 24-year-old man left home intending to cash a cheque and visit his family. Seven days later, his wife’s vehicle was sitting hundreds of kilometers away in another province. The vehicle was recovered, but Dale was nowhere to be found.
Nearly four decades later, we still don’t know whether Dale Andrew Sinclair ever reached Regina or whether the vehicle arrived there without him.
If you have information on Dale’s case, please contact any of the following:
Edmonton Police Service: 780-423-4567
Reference Case#: PR87119634
Canada’s Missing Case Reference: 2014005346
Crime Stoppers: 1-800-222-TIPS(8477)
Online at: https://www.canadiancrimestoppers.org/submit-a-tip/submit-a-tip
Crime Stoppers provides anonymous tipping
Send email to the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains at: canadasmissing-disparuscanada@rcmp-grc.gc.ca
Sources: Canada’s Missing, Edmonton Police Service
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