Introducing: Someone Knows Something

School of Humans.

I'm at another river, this one flowing through a southwestern Ontario town on a clear but darkening springtime evening. I recorded these nature sounds well over a decade ago for a TV documentary using the same microphone I now use for the podcast. This thing always seems to be standing between me and the unknown, somehow oddly comforting, just.

Crouching at the riverside. Here a park and Hanover, Ontario. This is the Sage River, which the mouth of the Sagi actually empties.

Out into the Lake Huron.

It's about sixty kilometers downstream, I think, flowing clear, but there's lots of debris kind of pushed against the shoreline. There's obviously a pretty high floodplain here. There's an old gazebo, a swing set, there's an old gate.

I remember focusing on the sounds these things made. Here, chains on a swing, muddy logs at the high watermark, brushy grasses along the path, and that metal gate. I wonder if these objects or the sounds they made, ever held any actual comfort for anyone.

At one time, this park was Christine Harron's favorite place in the whole world. I have been told if i'd been here. Before May eighteenth, nineteen ninety three, I might have seen her down here catching frogs or fishing. Nobody here today, this path next to the river.

The sounds I recorded here don't reveal any secrets, but I feel pulled back to places like this again and again, pulled back into long term investigations, their grief and the hope. Even after some questions have been answered, there's always more and more difficult ones. Over thirty years ago, just one week after her fifteenth birthday, Christine Herron disappeared, and her full story has yet to be told. I'm David Ridgin, and this is someone Knows Something, Season nine, The Christine

We gathered here this morning for a celebration of life in the life a Christine.

Or I'd learned that a memorial service was being held at a church seventeen years after Christine disappeared. So I traveled west to Hanover in the springtime of twenty ten.

Let us bring loving to go out.

Look with mercy on those who mourned for Christine, who has died by the violence of our fallen world. Be with us as we struggled with the mysteries of life and death.

Framed photos of Christine in curly dark hair and glasses sit on a small table at the front of the church, next to the minister. There are others sad people whom I assume are her family standing close by, including the woman that I know is her mother, Mary Anne.

Described by her mom as a bit of a loader. Christie didn't have a lot of close friends.

In our culture.

Her loader mentality meant that she was viewed as being different.

She wasn't someone who has hung up on appearances or who is doing what with whom She had other things to do, other things.

This minister's words, his impressions of Christine filled me with a chill of sadness. Tears suddenly rolled down my face for this young person I'd never met, and right there I decide that I'm going to do this case.

This is the last slaves Christie had lived.

I would take several more months of information gathering before I contacted Chrissy's mother, Mary Anne.

That front window was the living room, and that's where her and I had spent the morning together watching television, with her laying her head on my lap.

I've got mary Anne framed up in my documentary camera on a cool, windy day, pale skinned in glasses, with meticulous makeup and shorter hair. Mary Anne stands in front of the small brick two story she'd been renting back in the spring of nineteen ninety three at the time Christy disappeared. Mary Anne gestures to where she says Chrissy walked away from home that.

Day and then she left to go to school. She walked down the other side of the street and around the corner, and that was the last I've seen of her.

Mary Anne says she watched from an upstairs window as Chrissy turned the corner on the way. Mary Anne thought to Grade nine classes at John Diefenbaker High School, not that far away. It was sometime between one thirty and two pm. Chrissy had not felt well that morning, so stayed home. She'd been known to skip classes and didn't want to go to school that afternoon either. She and her mom had argued about it, and mary Anne suggested

She was in a good mood that morning, but she was mad that she had to go to school. She even we were in the process of packing and moving to another place, and she says, well, even let me stay home and I'll pack all day. Times did it go on that day? But I said, you can't truant officers waiting.

There were other tensions in the household at the time as well. Chrissy had been deeply troubled by her parents' divorce years earlier. Her father, Lorne, lived in Western Canada at the time of Chrissy's disappearance and has since passed away. Chrissy got along with her younger brother named Sean, but did not always see eye to eye with her stepfather, who was also named Sean. Sean Russworm, who was then aged twenty six.

Well, she didn't like keeping a room clean. She's kind of a tomboy.

Yeah.

Russworm is a large man in a T shirt sporting a mustache and smudgy blue line tattoos on each shoulder. Back at their current home, he and Marianne are settled into a couch. Two chihuahuas named Chloe and Angel sit on their laps.

Wow, as well as they behaved, than maybe they can stay.

You.

The best thing to do is to hand her to you and let you hold her. Stare Angel?

See Mary Anne hands me Angel the extra small one so she can get used to me and stop barking. I walk around the room a bit with the dog in hand, looking at some photos of Chrissy spread out on a coffee table with a yellow lunch pail on her first day of kindergarten, blowing out birthday candles in red ribboned pigtails and Christmas tree moments.

I was gonna try something with that light.

Okay, the dogs seem calm and we start talking about Chrissy.

I'd like to take stuff apart.

And put her back together to see what made it work. She loved kids, love going for walks, into cricks, catching frogs.

And.

I see Chrissy seeming to watch me through her big glasses in the photos.

I love those.

Glasses, but she hated them.

There was times where other people would pick on her younger brother, Sean, and then Chrissy be right there sticking up for her brother. Chrissy was right there and punched out a couple of boys that were picking on Sean. This was in public school already, so she could hold her home and she was feisty and when she needed to be.

Sean admits that his relationship with Chrissy was sometimes strained, and he says that he's bipolar and sometimes can be aggressive. But he says that one of his last memories of Chrissy is her helping him replace the spark plugs in his car.

When we started to get closer, she'd come out to the garage and asked me if she could use my tools. Yeah, they're right there if I go to help. No, No, she wanted to do it herself.

But she wasn't one to go out to parties or anything like that. Like she'd come home a couple of times and said, well, they're drinking.

So I left.

She was against.

Smoking, she was against drinking.

I told her we were really proud of her for that.

She was close to her grandma, my mom, very close. Yeah, they spent a lot of time together.

We always had a good relationship for any reason. If she just wanted to talk, she'd call me. She used to spend a lot of time out there with.

Me, Grandma Phillis socks at her home.

And then when ninety three we moved to Gwelf. That's what upset me so bad, because I felt she if she's out there, she's going to try and reach me, because she always did if she wanted something other. And I thought, I move away, she won't have my phone number, and that's upset me. And once I moved away, I couldn't even look at her pictures anymore for a long time. It really upset me bad.

It says Grandma, It says Gramall wild as all.

Wild they saweya Oh God, says Grandma.

Christine sits around a Christmas tree with her family in nineteen ninety I watched the grainy archival video as she quietly makes sure that everyone has a gift to open before she does. Then the footage shifts to a Santa theme park and Christine's pretending to be a reindeer in front of a big red sleigh, a mischievous strength to her every move, just three years before she walks off into oblivion.

Whoh, I got sewing machine. I'm bringing her out and letting her use it. She made an apron the one time she was out and we'd baked and we'd just play games. We always used to go do worm hunting and picking with her too, and she'd go fishing. I just couldn't believe it when she disappeared and she didn't call me. It's something you can't never forget. I don't know, no matter what, you can't forget about it.

Mary Anne reported Christy missing to Hanover Police at nine to twenty one pm on the day she disappeared, May eighteenth, nineteen ninety three. Christy was known to have a poor sense of direction and would get lost easily, But despite this and her habit of skipping classes or sleeping over at friends' houses, mary Anne and others say that Chrissy would always call home and never go far.

When she didn't show home, I started phoning her friends and my family, just to see if maybe she went to one of her friend's house after school or something.

The story of Christine's case, at least in the beginning, is a familiar one. A teenager leaves home, supposed to be somewhere school, but never makes it. Local police investigatively inexperienced, finding nothing and flying in the face of what a mother knows.

And nobody had seen her or heard from her. So then the family and I we started going out and looking for her, looking in parks in the area, just to see, you know, if she was someplace else and just hadn't come home yet. We had formed the police and they said it was too soon yet to do anything. What we actually got from the Hanover police chief himself was that his daughter runs away a lot, takes off for days. So mine probably did the same thing. So she never showed home, and I sat up all night

Top police was very upset when we yes, when we set that up. They were not impressed that you set up a search.

Yes, yes, they didn't want the public to panic.

We were told that we went anywhere near the park that weekend, the very first weekend she disappeared, there would be consequences and repercussions.

Who told you that the police.

There had been an antique car show on at the park that coming Victoria Day weekend, and police were concerned about disrupting it. According to Mary Anne, Hanover police and fire department did eventually coordinate and conduct a single search using volunteers on May twenty third, nineteen ninety three, five days after she disappeared. The search encompassed the Hanover Park, the south shore of the Saggin River going east, and the town water tower. No trace of Christine was found.

I think everybody just wanted to believe she was a runaway. Nobody would actually think of her as something had happened, not in a small town, not to their town. So everybody who just told us, no, she's a runaway, She'll come back when she's ready, even when we were putting up posters. People would take them down. They just didn't want to believe it.

The town police took them.

Down, Yeah, but nobody would believe it. I actually got phone calls from people, you know, stop making such a fuss, she'll come back. Yeah.

Did you ever cast any suspicion or doubt suspicious of people in town.

Or anything home of it?

Nope, Mary Anne and Sean didn't have any suspects, but almost a year later they had to be ruled out as suspects themselves.

Yes, we all were. At one point they asked us to take polygraphs, and I agreed just to rule out being a suspect so that they would get on with the case and find the person that did it. Or I did it willingly knowing that it would clear me and would help the case. I would would have done anything at that time. And you went through two of them.

I went through too. The first one was fairly basic. It didn't bother me too much. The second one was at a very tense time in my life. My employer at the time was on strike. In nineteen ninety nine. I had the interview over at milfors Pp Eastation and I believe it was October of nineteen ninety nine and I was interviewed by one of their forensic people from Kingston,

Paul Bernardo was a serial rapist and murderer in Ontario. In the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. He and his partner Karla Homolka horribly murdered two young women. Bernardo had been arrested and jailed months before Christy disappeared, So using his name here was a tactic to get Sean talking, and.

With myself already being bipolar things that were going on in my life at that time, I completely lost it. I jumped out of my seat. I seemed to remember throwing a couple of things around. I just said, let me add the son of a bitch, because only one of us is going to walk out of the room alive. I completely lost control. They tried to calm me down. I shut them off. All I had in my mind was looking for Paul Bernardo and wanted at him, and I wanted him dead. And that's the last I could remember.

Russworm had been at work until three pm in Durham, Ontario, at the time Christy disappeared, about a fifteen minute drive away from Hanover. After work, he drove to Marianne's, where he heard that Christine had left for school shortly before he arrived.

And what did they tell you about the results of either of those polygraphs that you took.

On that I was clear, as far as they're coriscerned, I had nothing to do with it. What they said they had to do what they had to do to prove that I was not guilty.

Sean and Marianne did pass their first polygraph tests, according to documents, and neither was ever arrested or charged in Christine's case.

Do I wish anyone to ever go through a process like that? No, it's hell, it's not a very nice process. What they did everything that they needed to do, and I commend them for doing it. I just still wish that we had something more could bring justice and bring Christine home.

I did know before the night was over she was dead, though, call it mother's intuition or whatever, I knew she was going.

There weren't many Christine heron news reports to look at. Early on in my investigation items I could find. Talked about the local Hanover police making no headway in Christine's case, claiming even a year later that there was no evidence of foul play. Even though Chrissy had left her house without her id, any extra clothing, or the eighty dollars in birthday money she had just received. Police continued to suggest that she was a runaway, that there were sightings

Three, mary Anne and I spent a lot of time the first six months to a year we went to Kitchener, London, Toronto.

Where else did we go here? I can't even remember.

Even if police weren't looking for Christine, Marianne and Sean were trying their best.

Every chance we had, going to places that we probably we checked, shelters we went into. I'm not sure if it's a halfway house or a drug house or what it was.

The media would report on these supposed sightings of Christy and help to generate more rumors and to make matters worse. According to Mary Anne, the few articles that were written were often filled with inaccuracy.

I found that whenever you tried to tell them something, they twisted into something else. It was never what you were trying to explain. They always just took bits and pieces and made their own sentences.

It wasn't always the truth that we had said. So it became frustrating and upsetting, to the point where we just had to refuse to speak from We were so scared of jeopardizing Christine's case that.

We shut out all reporters for quite a while until now.

I've kept most of the clippings the newspapers all these years, got those and somewhere the posters, Yeah, typical girl.

Yes, So do you think there's a chance in this case still or what's your want?

It solved justice and solved. I think you're still a chance. I hope, I hope this will bring her home. We'll do our best marking, sure you will, but Canver does not feel like home anymore. She went missing us. It's not our home.

We had the same home room in grade nine, so the only desk was right beside her, So that's how I met her and Finn there we pretty much were like fat sons.

Like Christine was very shy.

Cindy Galen McPherson, one of Christine Herron's school friends.

I mean, if you didn't know it, it took a long time to kind of.

Get to know it. And a lot of people like to pick on her.

Because she was really easy to pick on.

How So, if somebody said, well, why don't you go do this, she'd go and do it because she wanted to be accepted.

People would like froll in a locker. She'd just stay there until like, we we're gone.

And I'd come and be like, okay, you can get out now.

She really wasn't.

Once for conflict, even if people were fighting or if there was a chance that there could be fighting, she.

Was out of there.

We'd hang out pretty much every weekend.

The day she disappeared and I found the house, then her mom answered and I'm.

Like, it's Christy.

Know.

She's like no, if she hasn't gotten home from school yet, I thought it was kind of weird.

And I'm like, well she didn't, she wasn't at school, and her.

Mom's like, oh, okay, And then I think it was about two hours later. I got another phone call and she's like, are you sure Christy isn't there, And I'm like no.

Cindy and her father drove the roads that Chrissy might have traveled to get to their farm.

And we didn't see her. So my dad's like, well, we can't stay out, you know. So I went home and I phoned their moment. I said, well, we didn't find her on any other roads coming from Hanover.

Cindy had spoken to Chrissy on the phone the night before she disappeared. They were planning the May Long weekend where Chrissy was supposed to come to Cindy's farm.

So like I was the last person to talk to her and everything seemed fine.

She was excited. She loved being at.

My house because of all the animals and everything like that, saying May we had baby goats.

And sheep and calves and plaids, and she was excited.

To come and see them.

And I didn't really.

Think anything was up. Okay, So the police then did they talk to you?

Oh?

Wait, a couple of years they come.

And May returned.

Cindy says she spoke to police several times over the years and that sometimes they would insist that Cindy knew more, that she knew where Chrissy was, but she didn't. The best Cindy could do was tell police about what Chrissy was like, her routines and habits, certain places she liked to go.

Christy used to go and put on the swings at the park and just think she said, that's what she liked to do, and she wanted to think was go and put on the swings like Cristy was a very good friend to me, and it kind of hurts me.

To know that she's miss out on a lot of stuff that I've gotten to do.

And what's your theory? Everyone's got one. I think somebody.

Picked her up, Chrissie. What would have gotten into a car with somebody.

Do you think that she would have run into a stranger's car if they were nice to her?

Probably she was like.

Just driving for some sort of Oh I doubt to prove it.

Well, if you were and you were a nice time, she would move having.

A night to keep that.

Like that.

I don't even know the word. I'm looking for that, Yeah, to keep that attention on her. So do you think she got into a car and you think that there was the wrong car?

I honestly do.

It should be noted here that some feel Chrissy would be shy of strangers or even run away from them if she were alone.

Just for sure, she.

Would have phoned me if she was still alive, Like push first, she would have phoned me.

And I kind of knew deep down.

I had to say, I'm like, she's not around anymore, she's dead.

I'm sitting in the passenger seat as Sean and Mary Anne give me a short tour of Hanover, Main Street, the river, the school, the park. Population about seventy seven hundred. Hanover rose and then fell as a furniture making capital of Canada, with much of that business gone now overseas a town at the time of her disappearance down on

They were very rude with us.

Yeah, I actually had phone calls. You get a lot of calls in the middle of the night, were hanging up, so we had the hand of her. Police put a trace on her phone so they could try and find out who was doing the phone calls, but they never did.

A brief flurry of police activities surrounded a call that a boy going into grade ten named mar Koons received in July nineteen ninety three, a couple of months after Chrissie disappeared. The call Coont's told his parents and police came from someone who said they were Chrissy. The girl on the other end said she was calling from a payphone and that she was near one of the abandoned factories in town. The person on the phone said she had run out of money and asked Coontz to meet

We had asked for the OPP to be able to step in. We pleaded with the hand Or police to bring the OPPN. They said no, it was their jurisdiction. They don't have to bring an outside source in and it turned out to be six years later before we were able to have the OPP come in.

In nineteen ninety nine, Hanover Police requested the assistance of the Ontario Provincial Police on Chrissy's case. At that time, a cataloging of the case was undertaken by the OPP and new interviews were conducted along with reinterviews. DNA samples were taken from Mary Anne and a profile obtained for Chrissy from a tube of her lipstick. A reward fund for thirty thousand dollars was renewed on the ten year

Moves back now, this talks will be nice quiet.

Did you ever receive any documents from the OPP.

By the case?

No, the opp wouldn't let us know anything.

And since that time, we're now in twenty eleven here, what has the OPP done or to your knowledge, how they communicate it to you?

Or they followed up on some other leads, but we've never been told any results from those. We haven't heard from them. So as far as I know, the case is closed, I'll.

Get into telling you what I know to myself.

I'm going to leave you with some today that.

You guys can read.

Did you ever back at Marianne and Sean's place, I share some documents with them that the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General has sent me The basic story that they tell is known to Mary, Anna and Sean, but the crucial details have remained hidden and out of reach until now. Details about a local man named Anthony who had a frustrating night at an August two thousand and four party. He'd had a few drinks and then confessed

The Crown Attorney told us was a slam dump. At one point he was ninety percent sure he was going to be convicted. Listen to me very carefully.

Right now, you're under arrest of the murder of Christine Herron because you told that police officer that you killed her.

This story, hearing move me to a didy fuckin doesn't weave these webs.

Did you know Christine?

Did you kill Christine?

Why did you confess to their murder? Someone Knows Something is hosted, written and produced by me David Ridgin. The series is also produced by Katie Swires. Sound design by Evan Kelly. Natalia Ferguson is our transcriber. Emily Knell as our digital producer. Chris Oak is our story editor. Our executive producer is Cecil Fernandez Tanya Springer is the senior manager and Rafnurani is the director of CBC Podcasts. If you want to help new listeners discover the show, please

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