The family of a North Vancouver couple whose disappearance has remained unsolved for more than two decades, spawning years of rumours and theorizing, is offering a $50,000 for any information that helps investigators figure out what happened.

Nick Masee and his wife, Lisa, disappeared in 1994.

Tuesday marked the 25th anniversary of the case, and Sgt. Peter DeVries said that while police haven’t re-classified the file from a missing person’s case to a homicide, RCMP investigators now presume that the couple is dead and that they fell victim to "a crime of some sort."

Nick's children, Nick Masee Jr. and Tanya Van Ravenzwaaij-Masee had previously offered $25,000 for relevant tips. They hope the passage of time will help rather than hurt the case.

"Perhaps the time that has gone by would allow somebody to come forward now that might otherwise have remained silent in the past," Nick Jr. told journalists at a press conference at the North Vancouver RCMP detachment.

For years the case has been the topic of heated discussion and conjecture in the Vancouver area because Masee was a financial adviser and stock broker to some of the city’s biggest movers and shakers of the 1990s. In fact, on Aug. 10, 1994 – the night before the couple was last seen – Nick and Lisa had arranged to meet a millionaire investor at the then-popular Trader Vic's restaurant in downtown Vancouver. The meeting never happened.

After the couple was reported missing, Mounties went to their North Vancouver home and found it unlocked and without any signs of struggle. Two cut zap straps were found on the floor.

Investigators later found the Masees had taken a secret trip to the Caymen Islands that April. Nick’s daughter, Tanya, says she had weekly phone calls with her father after she’d moved to the Netherlands in the summer of 1993, but that he began acting strangely after Christmas of that year.

“That's when the secrecy started, the out-of-character behaviour so unknown to my brother and I," said Van Ravenzwaaij-Masee, explaining that her father told her he couldn’t phone her on her birthday in April because he was going away, and wouldn’t tell her where he was going.

As the case grew cold, the theories and rumours continued, and in 2000, acquaintance and stock broker Bob Scott told CTV News he believed the couple had run afoul of someone with a lot of money.

“The most likely theory, and the most prevalent one, is he was being set up as an example,” said Scott, the publisher of Stockwatch at the time.

He explained, "If you owed me a large sum of money, it wouldn’t do me any good to kill you -- but it might help if I killed someone close to you."

Ozzie Kaban, a private investigator who was briefly retained by Nick Jr., continued to pursue the case long after his relationship with the family ended, and believes the couple orchestrated their own disappearance.

“I think they got a lot of money and they left the country,” he told CTV News in 2014. “He’s a banker, a very shrewd banker, who was highly respected by the people on the stock exchange.”

While Nick Jr. brushed off that idea, his sister acknowledged it’s possible.

“There's the logical part [of you] that tells you they can't be in hiding,” she said. “Then there's the part of you in your heart that wants for them to still be living – but then you'd be really pissed off and probably not want to have that to be the truth."

Nick Masee would be 80 and Lisa 64, and while Mounties believe they’re dead, without any evidence that’s now the case, the family will continue in their heartbroken limbo unless the right tip comes in to RCMP investigators.

"Everybody loses their parents at one time in their life, but then you have a funeral,” said Van Ravenzwaaij-Masee. “We don't have that and that part has been extremely difficult."

Anyone with information, no matter how insignificant they think it is, is being urged to contact North Vancouver RCMP investigators at 604-985-1311.