Someone Knows Something - S1 Episode 1: The family

Episode Date: March 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. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sks/season1/someone-knows-something-season-1-adrien-mcnaughton-transcripts-listen-1.3846202

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In 1972, five-year-old Adrian McNaughton vanished while on a fishing trip in eastern Ontario. Documentarian David Ridgen goes back to the small town he grew up in, searching for answers. Hey, Ben. Hello, how are you? Not too bad. Hi, nice to meet you. Come in. Hello, how are you? Not too bad. Hi, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too, David. Oh, I know you guys. I've seen you. Yeah, and I worked with your mom for many years.

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's none so that any puzzle has a solution. We try to resolve chaos. What I have is another microphone that I would like to put on Murray. So before we start, can I do that?

I guess so, eh? 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. Well, I can't tell you very much because I just don't remember a whole lot of back then. I just wish, David, you had been around doing this a few years earlier when our memory was a bit better. Barb McNaughton lost her son, Adrian. I almost don't want to talk about it because I don't want to relive it.

I think I have it tucked 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 Adrian. And weak points are built on, and our vision is telescoped, so that we find not the truth, but what we want to find. And Adrian was a vocal boy. He could speak. He was not mute. He was able to talk and scream and yell.

He was quite normal as far as that goes. Quite normal little five-and-a-half-year-old, real busy old lad. He was a little guy, shy little guy. Ruth 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. And that's what we figured happened because there was just no sign of anything anywhere. There had to have been.

Lee McNaughton is Adrian's eldest brother. Being a nine-year-old, I wasn't very reflective. People would ask me, oh, your brother lost. How does that make you feel? My gut would sink when someone would ask me because my brother had disappeared in 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. Let me just record a bit of this sound here. We won't have to stick around here too long. And it's in moments of weakness that we're prone to point fingers. A lot of people said a lot of stories that wasn't true. Murray McNaughton, Adrian's father. People would imagine that I'd been in an institution, mental institution, just sitting

there, but that was not true. 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 was. It still bothers a person a bit. The stories that went about this were just wild.

That none of the children belonged to Murray. Well, a lot of people blamed Murray for it. Yeah, I remember one was Murray had just got out of jail and he'd murdered him. I couldn't believe that. I just could not believe it. Barb McNaughton used to nurse with my mom at the Arnprior 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 their mementos of Adrian's life. Barb's just 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 off and 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. Things have run through my mind. Could it have been, when you hear 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, Murray 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 knew, 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'll also find killers. We'll find them by comparing the geography of a case to the way a bumblebee visits flowers. We'll find them by using x-rays and thermal scans and DNA, 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 found, not a jacket, not a shoe, not a shoelace, nothing.

It really upset me. I would like to know what happened to that little guy. There's something not right about that case. I think somebody's involved in a foul play. The father was a likely suspect. He turned his back for 15 minutes, never saw the child after that. I think that's a bundle of crap. We'd been living there a number of years, and my parents are still there.

They're long-time iron prior people, and so people will know, oh, they lost a child. 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, a combination of Irish, Scottish, and something else, I think. And when I go back there, I always slip into and indulge in a bit of 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 than blonde, and just a year older than me. He was our child, and he was a handsome little boy. Big brown eyes and the blonde hair. He was just beautiful. Murray used to call him his little, his pal and he'd get up beside Murray and, you know. You back again? And his hair was white.

I remember how cuddly he was and how excited he'd be for mom to come home in the morning. And sometimes he'd 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 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 Armprior, that was my town, a place where people are concerned about getting their cat's license,

but not their guns. And it's always had this kind of frontier feel to me, isolated in 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. I collected clocks for 20 years and repaired them and got them running. He built that one.

I put that together out of some parts. I'm just going to record your clock. David? Yeah? Feel free to use the washroom before you leave. Oh, okay, great. I think I'm okay. But Adrian'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. We Built This City is a collection of stories from Mississauga, capturing the rich history, culture, sports, music, and incredible individuals who have shaped Mississauga into the vibrant city it is today. This brand new series

created by Visit Mississauga celebrates a city 50 years in the making, paying homage to Ontario's vibrant, diverse, and dynamic third largest city. Tune in to Visit Mississauga's brand new podcast, We Built This City, to learn more. Available now on CBZ Listen. Are you sure you parked over here? Do you see it anywhere? I think it's back this way. Come on. Hey, you're going the wrong way. Feeling distracted? You're not alone. Whether renting, considering buying a home, or renewing a mortgage, many Canadians are finding it hard to focus with housing costs on their minds. For free tools and resources to help you manage your home finances and clear your head, visit Canada.ca slash It Pays to Know. A message

from the Government of Canada. It's mysterious and it's perplexing and my hair is standing on end right now just thinking about where we're going. Just tell me what we're doing here. We're turning in the road to Holmes Lake. Adrian's father, Murray McNaughton, is driving this truck we're 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. Murray's a short man of few words,

now 83 years old and much slower. And he was with Adrian the day he disappeared, but has almost never spoken about it since. His daughter Chantal has come along too. Chantal McNaughton was only two 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, priding herself on a daily work-out 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. Sorry. 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 him but that's the only thing I know of him is a picture I do feel like I have a phantom sibling somewhere

I don't know like I say I don't have much memory of any of it, so I don't really have a whole lot of thoughts on it, to be honest. Not at the moment, anyway. It might be different once we get there. But Lee McNaughton was at Holmes Lake that day. Adrian's eldest brother, Lee, was nine years old at the time, and he's now an Anglican priest. Hi. Come on in.

All right, nice to see you. You look like your dad. People say it's my mother, but... 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 as perfectly as I've ever heard it. Before we begin our interview, we talk for a while about why I'm doing this podcast,

and it gives me a chance to go back over the reasons for it myself. 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 Calabogie Road, we've just passed a dirt smudge near some power lines. Murray slows down and seems disappointed. And there's the power line. Oh, and I've turned around because I missed a turn.

As you can see, it's a while since I've been here I wonder even if he tried like how far a five year old guy like Adrian could have gotten and ground like this you know it's a surprisingly small lake somehow I had imagined something much larger 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 Murray left his vehicle 43 years earlier. And from there, we make our way along a sublime pine-needled path with Red Squirrel and Canadian Shield accompaniment. A little farther than 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. That's where we were fishing right along there. And right at that tree, that was the last time I saw Adrian. He was that close? He said he didn't want to fish anymore, so I went over and got the rod from him and he walked up there. I see.

And I didn't see how far he went. 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 there? As I think so. I don't know. What makes you think he went north? As Murray tells his version of the story, I watch Chantal slip into a fugue state in the background.

It seems to suddenly have become hard for her to breathe. Chantal, what do you think being here? How does it make you feel at this site? It is weird now being out here. And 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 think.

No, but it's a big area. And there's a lot of bush. Just when I went back to get your camera and came back, I walked right past the path and I'm like, wait, is that where I'm supposed to go? Like two seconds. And I turned around and wow. That must give you a bit of a strange feeling in the pit of your stomach. When he disappeared, that stopped all the fishing. The kids, Daddy Ring, and I were fishing right here.

Fishing for speckled trout. When I walked way over to the end of the lake with the kids yelling, I came back and told them to stop yelling because the echoes around sounded like wild animals. Let me just try to say hello here and see if there's an echo. Hello! Substantial echo. Hello! Hello!

Hello! It 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 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 some one person

who knows exactly what happened and their conscience has weighed on them, unless they themselves say, I know and come 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 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? Oh, it didn't bother me. No, not 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. Murray said that there was a second adult there on the day Adrian disappeared, a fishing buddy named Donnie, 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 four. Instead, I should be wondering what the hell a 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, the ticking clocks, the sound the truck makes as we drive to the scene.

They're all connected, right? The townsfolk who weren't there but know, 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 gridwork with their dogs and 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 Holmes Lake in June 1972 and disappeared into thin air. And where did Adrian go?

I will never stop my love I will never sleep Some things here are precious 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. How are you? 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. Well, I guess the question's not important. Visit cbc.ca slash sks 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 Ridgen. The show is also produced by Ashley Walters, Sandra Bartlett, and Steph Kampf. The music is by Bob Wiseman. I will never stop my love. I will never sleep. Some things here are precious. A memory we keep. I will never stop my love I will never, never sleep

All I want is an answer For this mystery we keep Thank you.