🚨 Nova Scotia: Life in Lansdowne Before the Disappearance of Jack and Lilly Sullivan
Deep in the middle of Nova Scotia, far from its quaint coastal towns, sits Lansdowne – a hamlet of around 100 people in a cellular dead zone. It’s surrounded by endless spruce forests, bushes like razor wire and bogs that breed swarms of black flies.
Like many faded settlements across the Maritimes, Lansdowne reached its peak more than a century ago. About 150 kilometres northeast of Halifax, it was once a busy railway stop bustling with Scottish immigrants who dug iron and copper mines deep into the hillsides.
Today, those mine shafts are abandoned. One lone train a day cuts through the community with a melancholic blare.
Most of the people here live a quiet rural existence in secluded homes scattered along back country roads that only the locals know – where chickens and large dogs roam free, and the rusted skeletons of old vehicles sit marooned in the dirt.
Much like American Appalachia, this once-prosperous corner of Pictou County is now economically stagnant. One in five children live in poverty – higher than most other counties in the province.
It’s here where the lives of Lilly and Jack Sullivan were implanted two years ago – to a rundown trailer set back from Highway 289 with their pregnant mother and stepfather. They needed a place to live, and their step-grandmother, who owned the home, welcomed them to live with her. Life for Lilly, 6, and Jack, 4, inside the cluttered trailer in Lansdowne was chaotic. There were holes in the floor of the front stoop. Tarps to protect the underside of the trailer from the elements. And so much racket from the lively children that their step-grandmother soon retreated to a camper in the driveway.
Their stepfather, Daniel Martell, 34, with pale eyes and ropey arms, worked at the local hardwood mill. Their mother Malehya Brooks-Murray, 27, a member of Sipekne’katik First Nation with chin-length dark hair, stayed home with their baby Meadow.
Inside the mobile home, a large woodstove filled up most of the living room. The kids’ artwork was pasted to the kitchen wall, next to the sliding patio door that led to a yard where they spent hours playing next to the chicken coop.
Lilly chattered away to her dolls and stuffed animals. Jack turned over rocks and pieces of wood in search of bugs and worms. Outside the fenced backyard, and up over a steep embankment, the children sometimes played in a small fort nestled beneath boughs of spruce. It was like their own little dream world. Most days Jack and Lilly hopped on the bus to attend Salt Springs Elementary, a rural school about a 20-minute ride from their home. Jack, smaller than his peers, was strapped in at the front of the bus, next to his sister.
The morning the children were reported missing, the big yellow school bus rolled past the mobile home without stopping for a second day in a row. Jack and Lilly were usually standing by the side of the road, waiting to be picked up.
But earlier that morning of May 2 their mother had marked them absent from school at about 6:15 a.m. Both parents have said it was because Lilly had a cough.
They say they heard the children playing in the next room while they dozed in the bedroom with their toddler. Daniel has said he saw Lilly pop in and out a few times. At about 9:40 a.m., the couple says, they awoke and realized the kids were gone.
“They were outside playing, but we weren’t aware of it at the time, and the next thing we knew it was quiet,” she told CTV Atlantic. “We get up and I tell my partner Daniel, ‘Do you hear the kids?’ and he says ‘No,’ … Instantly we are looking outside, we are looking everywhere, yelling for them.”
Jack and Lilly’s mysterious disappearance has baffled the country. More than three months after they were reported missing – after one of the largest searches in Nova Scotia’s history and an intensive police investigation – police still haven’t confirmed the circumstances of how the young siblings went missing. It’s possible that there were clues, even potential warning signs, in their home life. A closer look into the lives of Jack and Lilly shows that all was not well in the trailer in Lansdowne.
That morning, Jack’s blue dinosaur boots were gone. So were Lilly’s pink rubber boots and her white backpack with strawberries. The only clue left behind, according to the parents, was one child-sized boot print in the dirt driveway, a few metres from the home.
Malehya called 911 at about 10 a.m. Daniel said he jumped in her white SUV and left to check nearby dirt roads, culverts and streams. Soon an army of search and rescue volunteers arrived wearing orange hunting vests. They fanned out, conducting a grid search in the swamp and thick woods around the home. Drones and a helicopter scoured overhead. A police dog, on a leash with a handler, set about the yard.
Police combed every inch of the property. They rummaged through the mobile home. Reached inside a hamster cage. Tore apart a brush pile. Unzipped the suitcase lying in the middle of the yard. They opened the top of the dryer at the end of the driveway and peered in the chicken hut. They searched the camper van where Daniel’s mother Janie MacKenzie lives three times. That morning, Malehya messaged the children’s paternal grandmother, Belynda Gray. “I never thought they would run off on me like that!” she wrote. “I’m so distraught.”
Hours later, and still no sign of the children, Malehya floated the idea that Jack and Lilly were abducted. “Many are suspecting they were picked up by somebody,” she texted Belynda. “Cause there is no trace of them or Lilly’s backpack.”
Daniel, meanwhile, was tearing through the woods on foot and wading in streams – telling people he was moving faster than the police helicopters. That day, carloads of family members pulled up to help search. In the mid-afternoon, a non-encrypted radio channel crackled with voices of emergency responders. “Families brought us to a location there, not far away, that there’s a piece of a blanket which the mother says she believes belongs to her daughter,” radioed an official.
Emergency responders dispatched a canine unit to the site, where they seized Lilly’s pink blanket, torn and wound around the lower branches of a spruce. It was about a kilometre from the mobile home, off the gravel Lansdowne Road where Daniel’s father and uncles live. The road runs deep into the backcountry, connecting with dirt roads that snake further into the wilderness to remote lakes, backwoods dumps and clearcut tracts of land.
When a police officer asked Daniel about the pink blanket, he said it wasn’t Lilly’s, at first.
Police began pounding on doors into the early hours of the next morning. They came to the door of Daniel’s father, Earle Martell, a retired tire plant worker who lives atop a hill in a bungalow he built himself 40 years ago.
Officers peered with flashlights into the corners of his living room, jumbled with the craft supplies and Hot Wheels of Daniel’s two school-aged biological children, who often visit on weekends.
Earle guided police into the yard, to old campers and a derelict log cabin filled with junk, and to Daniel’s older-model black sedan, in need of repairs he couldn’t afford.
READ FULL ARTICLE AT: The Globe and Mail
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