S1 Episode 1: The family

Mar 1, 2016

What happened the day five-year-old Adrien McNaughton wandered into the woods and was never seen again? How does a family grieve for someone who may still be alive? And where might he be today? SKS host David Ridgen returns to his hometown to investigate.

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in 1972 five year old Adrian McNaughton vanished while on a fishing trip in eastern Ontario documentarian David region goes back to the small town he grew up in searching for answers

hello how are you up to that hi nice to meet you nice to meet you too I know you guys have seen you yeah and I and I were solving cold cases or as I call them so called cold cases is something we're good at and something we're not good at

and when I say we I mean we because I think that we all think that we can solve them it's natural we tend to impose order where there is none so that any puzzle has a solution we try to resolve chaos another microphone but I would like to put on Marie so before we start can I do that I guess soy investigators are compelled by time and budget pressures to follow the strongest impulse

because it's less risky and cheaper but sometimes the strongest force in any investigation can be its weakest point

I can't tell you very much because I just don't remember a whole lot of knock then I just wish David you haven't been around doing this a few years earlier when our memory was a bit better Barb McNaughton lost her son Adrian but I almost don't want to talk about it because I don't want to relive it

I think I have talked to the back of my mind and I don't think of it every day but every so often I'll go to say something and I'll say Adrienne and weak points are built on and our vision is telescoped so that we find not the truth but what we want to find an Adrian was a vocal boy like he could speak he was not mutti was able to I'm screaming yelling

Norm hoofers that go over quite normal little five and a half year old we will visit go lad who's a little guy shine a little guy Bruce McHugh is a McNaughton family friend he couldn't tie his shoes he was only five so he would have lost his shoes in that bush it was very thick

bad things happen to little boys sometimes that's what we figured happen because there was just no sign of anything anywhere and there had to have been Lee McNaughton is Adrienne's eldest brother being a nine-year-old who I wasn't very reflective people would ask me oh your brother lost how does that make you feel

why God would sink when someone would ask me because my brother disappeared and utter mystery no idea what happened

it's because we're fallible or I am anyway sometimes I imagine that I'm in a screenplay because it makes things easier to take and we just record a bit of this sound here we will not to stick around here too long

and it's in moments of weakness that were prone to point fingers

a lot of people said a lot of stories that wasn't true Marie McNaughton Adrian's father people imagine that I've been in an institution mental institution just sit there but that was not true with so what you're saying is people might have thought you were responsible

oh yes that's got to be pretty hard to take

yeah sure water still it still bothers person a bit it's a stories that went about us were just wild that none of the children belong to Murray well a lot of people blamed Marie for it yeah I remember one was Marie had just got out of jail and he'd murdered him I couldn't believe that I just

not believe it Barb McNaughton used to nurse with my mom at the aren't prior hospital I'm sitting at her place with her husband Murray it's open concept with a big kitchen and a newer construction because their previous house burnt down and with it virtually all the mementos of Adrian's life Barb's does come through some severe health challenges and is resting in a large mechanical chair that sounds like a garage door opening when it moves and she adjusts it often to find a comfortable position for the memory she's confronting

she smiles when she talks even when describing the worst and it's an optimism that must have carried her through many storms

thanks have run through my mind could it have been when you're here today of the sexual predators could someone have taken him for that reason he was a handsome little boy and I've thought of that you know Marie doesn't think that but I don't know I would pray that he wasn't abused or tortured or anything like that you know but if we just

snoo even if it was something like that if we just knew I have prayed that before I go to be with my Father in Heaven that I will know

but saying all that we will also find Killers will find them by comparing the geography of a case to the way a bumblebee visits flowers will find them by using X-rays and thermal scans and DNA and and we'll find them frankly by simply looking back at the case and going through it

so putting chaos in order has its place and often everyone knows something

and for sure someone knows something there was nothing ever filed not a jacket not a shoe not a shoelace nothing it really upset me or I would like to know what happened to that little guy

there's something not right about that case I think somebody's involvement will play the father was a likely suspect then turned his back for 15 minutes never saw the child after that

and that's the modeler crap

we'd been living there a number of years and and my parents are still there their longtime iron prior people and so people will know that though they lost a child that that will be just part of the mythology of a town

the first time I ever heard about someone being missing I was four years old and living in the Ottawa Valley in eastern Ontario it's a place where everyone talks with a bit of an accent combination Irish Scottish and something else I think and when I go back there I always slip into and indulge in a bit of the twang

there was logging in the valley back in those days White Pine mostly and I used to run on the booms with my friends in the Ottawa River but there's none of that there now boom and then bust but it's a beautiful spot surrounded by a great rugged Wilderness and it was into that that Adrian McNaughton disappeared when he was five years old he was small for his age hair more white and blond and just a year older than me he wished our child and he

handsome little boy big brown eyes and the blond hair he was just beautiful Marie used to call him his little his power and he get up beside Marie and you know and if you back again Jesus and his hair was white

I remember how cuddly was and how excited he'd be for Mom to come home in the morning and sometimes they crawl in with me waiting for Mom I remember that I always felt like he was my shadow I don't dwell all the time on it I never wanted my friends to think I was looking for sympathy so I didn't bring it up a lot

we haven't talked about that much at all so why do you think that is I mean other than the obvious reasons well there's the pain of it but it's also in many ways it's it's done

I never knew Adrian but I moved into the area with my family shortly after he disappeared on June 12 1972 while he was on a fishing trip and he was from our prior that was my town a place where people are concerned about getting their cats license but not their guns and it's always had this kind of Frontier feel to me isolated and its geography and its own particular sense of Destiny

Adrian's is a case that's hung over the area like a dark Mass ever since I must have absorbed the case as if by osmosis because I can't remember people talking about it at the time but I remember the fear and the basic detail a little boy out there somewhere like me oh I collect a clock for 20 years and we paired them ago

run and he built that work I put that together out of some parts it's going to record your clock

yeah feel free to use the washroom before you leave okay great I think I'm okay

but Adrienne's disappearance is one that the locals have talked about and wondered about even people who weren't alive at the time have been raised with an awareness of this case organizing themselves unconsciously around it like an unchanging Contour that you can't help but go around because going over it's too damn hard and very few people in this town of now close to 8,000 were unaffected my friends my family

so I'm starting here

it's mysterious and it's perplexing and my hair is standing on end right now just thinking about where we're going Tommy what we're doing here we're turning in the road to Holmes ache Adrian's father Murray McNaughton is driving this truck were in it's packed with tools and the odds and ends of someone mechanically minded someone who instinctively collects things saving them for unknown future projects Marie's a short man of few words now 83 years old and much slower and he was with

Adrian the day he disappeared but it's almost never spoken about it since

his daughter Chantel is come along to Chantal McNaughton was only 2 on the day her brother disappeared and stayed home with her mother Barbara today she's decided to come along for the first time to see the scene with her dad she's calm and thoughtful shorter in stature prided herself on a daily workout regimen and like the rest of the family seems suddenly stricken when confronted with the moment of discussing Adrian's case

I don't remember him at all I feel like I was robbed I don't have any memories of him

I just I don't remember I hear the stories and it makes me think I have a memory but I don't there's nothing at all that even I see the picture of them but that's the only thing I know of him as a pitcher

I do feel like I've I have a phantom sibling somewhere

what do you think about Chantal coming back here

I don't know it's like I said I don't have much memory of any of it so

don't really have a whole lot of thoughts on it to be honest not at the moment anyway might be different once we get there

but Lee McNaughton was at homes like that day Adrian's eldest brother Lee was nine years old at the time and he's now an Anglican priest

all right I see you look like your dad he looks like his father Murray except four times the size his hallway is lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and later he quotes dostoevsky's as perfectly as I've ever heard it before we begin our interview we talked for a while about why I'm doing this podcast and and it gives me a chance to go back over the reasons for it myself

the truth I try to explain that I'm not a media weasel looking to dig a hole in his family and I think he believes me some would say from a Catholic perspective natural law says that if someone has done something horrible like that we need to be found out and that's why we like murder mysteries we want something solved because there is truth in the world and so someone did it or someone didn't do it we want the truth to come out

back on the winding beautiful calibogue road we've just passed the dirt smudge near some power lines Marie slows down and seems disappointed power my afternoon railroad I missed the turn

as you can see it's a while since I've been here wonder even if he tried like how far a 5 year old guy like Adrian could have gotten and ground like this you know like it's a surprisingly small Lake somehow I had imagined something much larger and you can see most of it from any place on the shoreline but the area around it I suspect

holds both the key and the lock to the case

we've apparently parked in the place where Marie left his vehicle for a three years earlier on from there we make our way along a Sublime pine needle path with red squirrel and Canadian Shield accompaniment that'll fire there and I thought

Murray moves slowly and with effort

I think he's anxious to get this over with it's been tough on he and his family especially so because as any victim's family member will tell you the first order of business in any investigation is to rule out those very family members as the perpetrators for refreshing right along there and right at that tree I was the last time I saw you doing

he was that close he said you didn't want to fish anymore so I went off and got the rod prom when he walked up there and I didn't I couldn't see how far it worked and I think he went that way

you think he went that way I think so I don't know what makes you think he went North well this Marie tells his version of the story I watched Chantal slip into a Fugue state in the background it seems to suddenly have become hard for her to breathe

Chantel what do you think the in here does it make you feel at this site I mean it is weird now being out here after you asked me earlier just driving in looking around thinking he could still be out here somewhere

that is possible anything's possible not in the immediate vicinity I don't know but it's a big area and it's a yes a lot of us yeah just when I went back to get your camera and came back I walked right past the path and the queen is that where I'm supposed to go like two seconds and I turned around and wow

does give you a bit of a strange feeling in the pit of your stomach he disappeared that stopped all the fishing the kids that hearing and I were fishing right here fishes for Specter speckled trout but I walked away over there the lake what the kids yell I cannot control him to stop yelling because it accurate surround sound like wild animals let me just try to say hello here and see if there's an echo hello

substantial like oh yeah hello

hello sounds over to the West like it did before hello

hello way over to the West could you tell in any way where I was there your documentary I hope it works I really do but if it doesn't turn out that's not going to surprise me it you know I would have assumed if Adrian was going to show up he would have showed up by now but because it's been so long unless someone

our sin who knows exactly what happened and their conscience has weighed on them unless they themselves say I know and come forward and say I suspect we're not going to know and if there is that person look into your heart and know that there's a family that has for countless years and over a generation now

now wants to know where their son and brother is gone and if anyone knows please say something

so how'd that make you feel going back there I didn't bother me up for this case anyway

just another day you might as well turn that off now I'm done okay

it was a long day for Murray then and now and I know I've hit he and his family hard with my presence and my questions and predictably I feel like shit for it

but there's new information Marie said that there was a second adult there on the day Adrian disappeared a fishing buddy named Donny and he's never been reported about before I'm certain

I wonder why

I do like trying to figure it all out

the process of it it's a kind of intoxication to find out who did it who might have done it what happened and I think it's also a kind of arrogance that I bring to these cases where I actually believe that I can put two and two together and get 4

instead I should be wondering what the hell are two is anyway a symbol for a number

the symbols we follow that create the narrative because we make the links between them the fishing trip ticking clocks the sound the truck makes as we drive to the scene they're all connected right the town's folk who weren't there but no and the family who doesn't talk and the boy who was small for his age and the people searching in the woods in a careful grid work with their dogs in the Army and their hope and nobody

frustratingly few details such a simple chain of events leading up to a blooming catastrophe Murray's five-year-old son walked away from him that day on a fishing trip at homes Lake in June 1972 and disappeared Into Thin Air

and where did he dream go

memory on the next episode of someone knows something

so tell me about who else was there with you well I don't know whether he wants me to mention his name or not Danny ring my fishing buddy all right I've read a lot of news articles about the story of Adrian and I've never heard anything about another guy being there yeah

follow my guest for some not important

visit cbc.ca / SK s to see a photo of Adrian McNaughton and news clippings from after his disappearance

subscribe in iTunes or your favorite podcast app if you like the show tell your friends someone knows something is hosted written and produced by David region the show was also produced by Ashley Walters Sandra Bartlett and Steph Kampf the music is by Bob Wiseman

never stop my love I memory we keep I will never stop my love I will never know all this

mystery weekend

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