The summer of 1981 came and went with the blink of an eye. Fall colors took over Caledon as students returned to the classroom for another year. But Eric Larsfolk and John McCormick Jr. never took their seats in the classroom. They never opened their math book, never got to make a science presentation, never got to go to the school dance. Instead, they disappeared without a trace from the McCormick family farm in late August amongst a cloud of suspicion and mystery.
Weeks after the boys disappeared Bill Currie, a now retired Ontario Provincial Police officer assigned to the case, said it was possible the boys had hitched a ride to the Toronto Exhibition and would come home soon. “It wasn’t uncommon for kids to do this back then,” he said in a recent conversation with The Enterprise. “I just thought they would come back.” Giving way to winter, fall became the past and Eric and John Jr. remained missing. Police searched the McCormick 100-acre property a number of times, with up to 60 officers scouring every inch of wooded area. In November 1981 police searched for any sign of the boys with a helicopter equipped with thermal vision. Currie’s theory of what happened lost steam and he told media it no longer looked like a runaway scenario.
“I guess we are considering misadventure and crime equally,” he said. “I don’t think they ran away.” As Eric’s 15th birthday passed and the years dragged on, Lloyd Larsfolk held onto slim hope he would find his son. And in the beginning, he left no stone unturned. “I walked up and down every road around near our house, knocking on every door asking if they’d seen Eric,” he said with a heavy, tired voice. In the early stages, Larsfolk was a bull in a China shop. He told The Enterprise of a number of instances where he trespassed on property and broke into a home looking for Eric. Larsfolk got an anonymous call one day from someone who said Eric and John Jr. were being kept in the basement of a home in the Caledon area. Under the cloak of darkness, Larsfolk broke into the home after the owner went to bed for the night.
“I eventually got in and just yelled Eric’s name,” he said as a tone of frustration grew from within. “I woke the person up and he came out with a gun.” It wasn’t a smart move, knowing there was a chance he could get hurt. He ran from the house and told Currie what he had done. “I didn’t care at the time,” Larsfolk said. “I just wanted to find my son. It wasn’t the best decision of my life, but what else could a father do?” He changed his ways after, but the mounting frustration of a lack of progress on the case took its toll on Larsfolk and his wife Beverly. Psychics flocked to help police and the families find the boys. Information provided was inconsistent at best, and resulted in no solid leads. However, a number of suspects were at the top of the list, according to Currie, including John McCormick Sr. and his friend George McCullough. In a recent interview, Currie said the two men, who were on the property August 24, 1981 when the boys went missing, were very thoroughly investigated. However, he said John Sr. and McCullough – who many close to the case consider to be a suspect – could never be completely linked to it.
“He was thoroughly investigated,” said a sure-sounding Currie of McCullough. “Everything you think that one would do was done. The suspect list was very short and still is. We thoroughly looked at everyone who was close to the boys.” When asked for information on the friend of her father’s, Kim McCormick wrote in an e-mail that he was a scary man, someone she and her mother didn’t like having around the house. “My mom, brother and I did not like him and we nicknamed him, ‘the weasel’,” she wrote. Knowledge of McCullough’s past is limited, much information coming from people who knew him during the time he worked on the McCormick property, doing work for John Sr. In 1981, McCullough was married to a woman named Isabel Stokes, who he had a son with. He also had three other daughters from previous relationships. Darlene McCormick wasn’t upset when The Enterprise told her McCullough died in 2000 from cancer, months after he was charged with dragging his dog down the road while tied to his truck in Port Hope, Ont. in the fall of 1999.
“I wouldn’t wish anything terrible on a human being, but he was a terrible man,” she said. “I didn’t like him at all.” Darlene said sometime after her nephew went missing, she received a number of phone calls from someone she thought was McCullough. “Watch Sarah,” Darlene said of what the man said to her in one phone call she recalled. “Sarah is our only daughter.”
Larsfolk said McCullough’s truck was on the McCormick property the night they began searching for the boys, remembering it being parked near the barn and the next day, being in a different spot with red clay in the back.Up until months before John Jr. and Eric disappeared, John Sr. owned an auto body shop on Hockley Road, according to Dufferin County land registry documents. Previous to living on Horseshoe Hill Road, he lived in a trailer on a property a few kilometres down Hockley Road from the shop – some eight kilometres from a property McCullough and his wife rented at the time.
[ads2]In an interview in 2008, Kim told Jen Paddon, a private investigator looking into the boys’ disappearance, the shop was a tax shelter and more of a place for her father to go drink with his buddies. Kim said John Sr. had given McCullough his credit card on August 25, the day after the boys went missing, to fill up his truck with gas. It’s unclear whether or not McCullough had taken a front-end loader off the property that night, as some close to the case have suggested, nor where exactly he went with it.
The property McCullough rented, a dilapidated old house in the Dufferin County area on Hockley Road, was never searched according to a former investigator who worked on the case. The investigator had been out to what they thought was the location, but was never able to confirm it was the right one. Kim took Paddon to the property in 2008. The Enterprise located the property, which had rusted out old tractors and a number of old sheds on it, on the banks of the same river running behind the old McCormick trailer property. Current investigators on the case would not confirm whether or not McCullough’s property was searched, nor confirm if he was even a suspect due to preserving “the integrity of the investigation,” said Insp. Karen Medeiros of the Ontario Provincial Police.
Also Read:
https://ucfiles.com/CA/104200182.php
https://www.canadaunsolved.com/cases/missing-boys-of-caledon
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2010/10/25/police_hope_to_solve_mystery_of_missing_boys.html
