In our twenty-fifth episode of Unsolved Canadian Mysteries, Kenton de Jong and Dylan Fairman discuss Mekayla Bali's disappearance which occurred on April 12, 2016.
Bali was a 16-year-old girl from Yorkton, Saskatchewan. Considered a "homebody", "quiet", "shy" and a "good listener", she always dreamed of travelling to a city like Regina or Saskatoon. She was an introvert and spent much of her time on her phone, using anonymous texting apps to talk to different people online. One of these apps was Kik, an app known to be used by child groomers.
On April 11th, 2016, Bali told her friends she was going on a trip and asked one of them for a ride to the bank that evening. They could not help her, so she called the bank instead and deposited $25 into her account. She would tell her friends that she would have $5,000 in her account and wanted a ride to the bank the next morning, but her friends told her that the bank didn't open until 9am. Police records show she had nowhere near that amount of money in her account.
The next morning Bali would get dropped off at school, then walk right through the school and out the back door, five minutes later. Security cameras throughout Yorkton would track her movements, from pawn shops, gas stations, coffee shops, back to the highschool, and eventually to a restaurant where she would ultimately disappear.
Bali left behind little to help authorities find what happened to her. Their investigation was further delayed because of the 10-month delay the RCMP had while dealing with US social media privacy regulations. When they finally did gain access, they had more questions than answers.
What happened to Bali on that day in 2016? Was it drug-related? Did she commit suicide? Or was it a romance gone wrong? Listen to the podcast and find out!