S1 Episode 1: The family

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In 1972, five-year-old Adrian McNaughton vanished while on a fishing trip in eastern Ontario. Documentarian David Ridgeon goes back to the small town he grew up in, searching for answers. Come in. Hello, how are you? After that. Hi, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you today. I've seen you. Yeah and For maybe. It's something we're good at and something we're not good at. And when I say we I mean we're not going to be able to do I think that we all think that 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. Um what I have is another microphone that I would like to put on Murray. So before we start, can I do that? I can't. 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 uh I just don't remember a whole lot of that. 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. But I almost don't want to talk about it because I don't want to relive it. I think I have a ton of 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 and Adrian was a vocal boy, like 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, but he was Ruth McHugh is a McNaughton family friend. It was very thick. 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 and utterly. 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 uh 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. And a lot of people uh said a lot of stories that wasn't true. Murray McNaughton, Adrian's father. People will imagine that I've been in an institution, mental institution just sitting there. But that was not true People might have thought you were responsible. Yeah, sure was. It still still bothers the person a bit. Uh the stories that went about us 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 uh Murray had just got out of jail and he'd murdered him. I I couldn't believe that I just could not believe it. Barb McNaughton used to nurse with my mom at the Armprior Hospital. I'm sitting at her place with her husband. 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 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. Things have run through my mind. Could it have been when you hear today of the sexual predators? Could someone have taken'em?

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 and we'll find them frankly by simply looking back at the case and going through 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 foul play. The father was a likely suspect. He turned his back for fifteen minutes, never saw the child after that. And that's a bundle of crap.

We'd been living there a number of years and and my parents are still there. They're long time arm prior people and so people will know th oh, they lost a child. That that will be just part of the mythology o 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 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 but 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 so And just a year old. He was our child and 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 Back again. His teeth and the And his hair was white. Thank you.

I remember how Cuddly he was, and how excited he'd be for mum to come home in the morning, and sometimes he'd crawl in with me waiting for mum. I remember that. I g 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 f 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. 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 twelfth, nineteen seventy two, 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 cats licensed, 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. Well I uh I collected clocks for twenty years and repaired them and got them running, huh? He built that one. I put that together out of some parts. I'm just gonna record your clock. Thank you. Feel free to do that.

Use the washroom before 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,'cause going over it's too damn hard. People in this town of now close to eight thousand were unaffected. So I'm starting here.

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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 eighty three 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

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 workout regimen, and like the rest of the family, seems suddenly stricken when confronted with the moment of discussing Adrienne's case. I don't remember him at all. I feel like I was robbed. Thank you. Sorry. I just I I don't remember. I hear the stories and it 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 as a pitcher. I do feel like I've I have a phantom sibling somewhere. So what do you think about Chantal coming back here and coming here? Um I don't know. It's uh like I say I don't have much memory of any of it, so Terima kasih. 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 Holmes Lake that day. Adrian's eldest brother, Lee was nine years old at the time, and he's now an Anglican priest. 감사합니다. Hi, hi. Alright, nice to see you. Oh you look like your dad. People say it's my mother, but

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 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.

The winding, beautiful Calaboge Road. We've just passed a dirt smudge near some power lines. Murray slows down and seems disappointed. And there's the power line. Whoop, when I turned around because I missed the turn. Thank you. As you can see it's a while since I've been here. Wonder even if he tried like how far a five 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 cage. We've apparently parked in the place where Murray left his vehicle forty three 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're 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.

Yeah. So you think he went that way? I think so. What makes you think he went north? Well, 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. Chantel, what do you think being here? How's it make you feel with this site? I mean 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.

But it is possible, anything's possible. Not in the immediate vicinity, I don't think. But it's a big area. A lot of bush. Yeah. Just when I went back to get your camera and came back, I walked right past the path and like, wait, is that where I'm supposed to go? Like two seconds. And I turned around and wow. That was 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.

respect respect the truth. But I walked away over the end of the lake with the kids yelling, it I took about and told'em to stop yelling'cause it echoes their own sound like wild animals. Let me just try to say hello here and see if there's an echo. Hello! Substantial alcohol. That sounds over to the west like it did before. Hello? Hello? Way over to the west. Y you your documentary, I hope it works. I really do. But if it doesn't turn out

that's not going to surprise me. It uh you know. I would have assumed if Adrian was gonna 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 forward and say, I suspect we're not gonna know and if there is that person

Look into your heart and know that there's a family that has for countless years and j uh 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? Well it didn't bother me. No, not for this case anyway.

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 in the But no and the family who doesn't talk and the boy who is small for his age. People searching in the woods in a careful grid work with their dogs and the army and their hope. And no body. 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 nineteen seventy two. and disappeared into thin air. And where did Adrian go? 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, uh Danny Rain. My fish and body. How are you?

I 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 that's not important. Visit cbc.ca slash sks to see a photo. 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 Ridgeon.

The show is also produced by Ashley Walters, Sandra Bartlett, and Steph Kampf. The music is by Bob Wiseman. For more C B C podcasts go to cbc.ca.