Someone Knows Something - S1 Update

Episode Date: December 7, 2016

The investigation into the Adrien McNaughton case continues. Since the season finale, there have been meetings with police, two search dives and some discoveries.

This is a CBC Original Podcast. You are listening to an update from Someone Knows Something from CBC Radio. In Season 1, David Ridgen investigated the disappearance of 5-year-old Adrian McNaughton, who vanished while on a fishing trip in eastern Ontario. The season finale was released in May, but a lot has happened since then. This episode contains spoilers, so if you haven't already listened to Season 1, keep that in mind. You can listen from the beginning at cbc.ca.sks or download episodes on iTunes or your favorite podcast app.

This is Season 1. Update. These guys are now looking, and they're looking hard. I'm up at Holmes Lake. It's a really beautiful November day. Got the divers here again for dive number three. I can't see anything anyway so you know what, let's just blow the silt out of the way. SKS season one ended after we finished a dive and tried to talk to police. After SKS season one ended, the police came to the McNaughton's house and talked to them. During dive two, which happened after season one ended,

we're here again in Holmes Lake, and we're going to start sifting silt. This is detritus from the bottom of Holmes Lake, dredged up by the divers here. We're searching for pieces of bone or rubber. This is where the dogs responded to something in the air. You reach down into it, Like are you feeling bottom solid? I was trying that.

Even here, I mean we're only what, three feet from the shore, easily going down a foot into the mud to hit solid bottom. And that mud is a mixture of mud and tree branches. Sifting through the silt to look for remains of any kind, like bone or... What's this? Divers found a piece of shoe, a piece of shoe rubber. We found some rubber amid the sludge. It looks like there's some... The kind of rubber that goes around the end of a shoe like one of those old kids back from the 70s, you know, when the kids had them.

A little piece of rubber that went around the front of the toe. That's what I think it was. I don't know what that signifies. We'll find out. I think it's likely the first piece of evidence I bagged. This is what one of the things, the items that we were looking for. So what are you gonna do with it now? I'm gonna I'm gonna bag it as evidence I'll put it in a bag and then Scotty's gonna mark exactly where he he found that we're

gonna start a bit more focused there. Great. So 1225 that was found. We gave it to police and they said they would take it in and analyze it. We give you that little piece of rubber. The divers were ecstatic over finding this and I'm, you know, always skeptical. But it is, it looks like an old piece of bumper off the front of a shoe, you know, the old Keds. The front, you can take it. And that was labeled by one of the divers. Yeah, we'll take it and we'll have a look at it. Maybe if we look at this piece that you found, and maybe somebody could date it or say how old it is or something like that.

I don't know what they can do with a piece of a shoe, but we can inquire about it. Police also told us, the OPP, that they had never heard the tip that we heard from John Jervis about the black and white car, the 1956 Dodge. So they took that with interest. There might be some areas that we can expand on. The black car was something that I wasn't familiar with. I don't think Lori was. No.

Do you think that any OPP canine unit would want to go even just do a practice run up there or something, or just to sort of verify the findings of all these dogs. I spoke to our one canine officer here in the area. After we asked them at the McNaughton's if they would search the same area that we've been searching with their own cadaver dog, they agreed to. So they sent one handler with a dog up. The handler reported that they weren't able to see any actions happening from their

dog. So after that, Kim Cooper came back up with another dog handler and three dogs. And she noticed even more pronounced actions on behalf of her dogs. With the wind, the direction the wind was going, she triangulated that the place where the dogs were making their actions was pretty much exactly where we were doing our dive before. So we decided we'd do a third dive. We've all gone through the planter, read parts of it. We're pumping sediment from the bottom. We're going to do that ashore. And to get to the third dive...

You can go around the tree kind of like this. Yeah. And up. Why don't I do either one? Since there were so many logs on the bottom of the lake near the shoreline, we decided to come up with the approval of the Ministry of Natural Resources and took several of the logs out of the way, moved them, shifted them. Little barren one there.

And cleared the way, so... In fact, the log that the dogs crawled out on, we moved out of the way. So, in fact, the log that the dogs crawled out on, we moved out of the way. And right now, as I'm looking at the lake, the divers are standing right there, right where we removed the logs. And they've got a pump and a boat, and they've got lots of tubes

and basically pumping the bottom of the lake. And we're pumping the water into a series of screens. It's muddy water, lots of stuff coming out. And we're sifting in. The things we can't sift, we're throwing into piles so that the dogs can come and sniff them and we've had some luck that looks like it does it looks like a tooth and it's a it's a small size one it looks like a tooth but who knows? It's got the same kind of light at the bottom, darker at the top root, a small baby tooth type thing that would have been maybe not erupted yet. We don't know if it is, but it's got the consistency

of one that we've found something that looks like a tooth. It could be a baby tooth, like an un-erupted baby tooth that was below the gum line perhaps. This is a human tooth in 8 feet of water. All right, about 20 feet from shore in the location where he disappeared. We don't know. It might not be a tooth. It may not be a human tooth. But we've got it in a bag, and we're going to look at it. And we're going to keep looking at things here.

We've got some other things in bags that look like they could be bone fragments. They're not just organic matter or wood. Could be quartz, could be some kind of mineral. But we're going to keep looking for Adrian here. You have been listening to Season 1, Update. The items that were discovered in Holmes Lake are currently being analyzed. We'll let you know the results as soon as we have them. Visit cbc.ca slash sks to see a 360 video of Holmes Lake along with more information on the Adrian McNaughton case. Someone Knows Something is

hosted, written and produced by David Ridgen and mixed by Cecil Fernandez. The series is also produced by Chris Oak, Steph Kemp, and executive producer Arif Noorani. Our theme song is by Bob Wiseman, with vocals by Mary Margaret O'Hara and Jess Reimer. I will never stop my love. I will never sleep. Something here is precious. A memory I keep. I will never, never stop my love. I will never sleep