When Police Wouldn’t Help Me, I Searched For My Dad’s Murderer Myself

In October 2018, Canadian artist and snowbird Malcom Madsen, 68, disappeared in Mexico. A few days later, his daughter flew to Puerto Vallarta from her home in Port Hope, Ont., to find him. Brooke Mullins has spent more than four years accumulating evidence and pushing local police to make arrests. Finally, after presenting the cops with video footage of her father being drugged in a bar the night before he went missing, police arrested her father’s live-in girlfriend, Marcela Acosta Ramos, now 48, in July 2020, despite never having found the body. (Two months later, Marcela's brother Martin Alejandro Acosta Ramos was also arrested; her son Andres Javier Romero Acosta was arrested in 2021. All three were charged with “disappearance committed by individuals,” used in Mexico when the fate of a missing person is unknown.) Brooke’s story is told in the 2022 documentary Malcom Is Missing; the case went to trial in April 2023, and Marcela, Martin and Andres were all found guilty. Here, Mullins shares her experience seeking justice for her father with Chatelaine.

My dad and I had some up and downs over the years, especially over his girlfriend, Marcela. We’d been trying to mend some of that friction. It was hard because he wasn’t always around [when]. I was raised by my mom. When she passed away at the end of 2007, my dad stepped up a lot. He really tried.

He started casually dating Marcela in 2013. I didn’t like that there was a language barrier—she didn’t speak much English and he didn’t speak a lot of Spanish. There was a massive age gap between them. Also, for a long time on her Facebook page, she said that she was his daughter, so you can imagine what that felt like for me. I didn’t think she was in love with him. I felt she was in the relationship for money. But I tried. I was always trying to be nice.

There was a full house of Marcela’s family living at my dad’s place in Mexico all the time. One of them was a really good person. When my father went missing in October 2018, that person got me on a plane and helped me put the pieces together. They felt something sinister had happened within the family to cause my father’s disappearance.

I honestly thought I was going to go down to Mexico and find my dad alive. I thought I would rescue him. In retrospect, I don’t know why I thought this, but I did.

Before I even got there, I told Marcela she needed to go to the police station and file a missing person report. When I arrived, I went to the police to give a statement, and then went to the Canadian embassy to chose a lawyer off their list. (That lawyer ended up not being very good.) Then I went over to Andale’s, the bar that Marcela said she and my father had been to the night before he went missing, to ask if they had any camera footage. The file was large so the manager downloaded it for us.

I didn’t see the entire footage until the second time I went to Mexico, in late November 2018. I had handed the footage over to a private investigator and when I met up with him, he started talking about the scene where Marcela drugs my father. I was like, “What do you mean?!” That’s when he showed me the footage of her dropping a powder into my father’s glass. Sitting with the investigator in the Hard Rock Hotel in Guadalajara, my emotions were so mixed. It was like horror and elation at the same time. I’ve been riding that high—and that low—for the past four years.

Marcela’s case finally went to trial in April 2023. There’s a new district attorney in Guadalajara now, and I think these guys are the people I’ve been looking for—someone to take this over for me. They seem like good guys. I hold the first DA in Guadalajara responsible for why it’s taken this long [to]. I do not think they wanted to help me at all.

What I really didn’t realize—and this is probably the most important life lesson I learned from this—is that the police don’t help. I don’t feel the Mexican government or the Canadian government help in these situations either. I’m always surprised even now if I hear from them. I’m like, Oh, I forgot about these guys. But there is one thing we have in Canada, and most people don’t know about it: a financial assistance fund that’s administered by the federal government and helps families of victims of serious violent crime who have to travel overseas with flights and hotels. It doesn’t cover lawyers and big-ticket items, but it is a little bit of a reprieve. I know so many people who didn’t go on with the search for their missing loved one because they didn’t have enough money and resources to do it. The amount I have spent [trying] is sickening. But I don’t regret it.

For a while I was mad at my dad for being manipulated by Marcela. And I couldn’t understand how he’d fallen for her. But now, having stepped into that world myself, I see how easy it is to trust that people are good. I think I have a little more compassion for where he ended up now because I can see how it could happen to someone. I just feel really sad for him. I don’t know what happens after death, but I think that a traumatic death at the hands of someone you love must be brutal. I hope wherever he is, he’s able to have peace and move forward. Mind you, I joke that my father loved the idea of life after death and living multiple lives, and I’m sure that if this was another lifetime, he would think it was super cool that this villainess girlfriend murdered him. My humour keeps me going, as well as all the amazing kindness that I’ve experienced. I still think I’ve seen more good than evil in all this.

At publication time, Marcela, Andrews and Martin had not yet been sentenced.