Pod Insights Canadian True Crime Lilly and Jack Sullivan: Cutting through the noise About this episode Today, we dive into the high-profile, baffling disappearance of six-year-old Lilly Sullivan and her four-year-old brother Jack, who vanished from their rural Nova Scotia home in May 2025.
Kristi is joined by Jordan Bonaparte ofThe Canadian Gothic https://thecanadiangothic.com/ (formerly Nighttime), who has covered the case extensively from the area. Together, they cut through the speculation and conspiracy theories to focus on the confirmed facts.
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Information about Jack and Lilly Sullivan
The Government of Nova Scotia is offering a reward of up to $150,000 for information about the disappearance of Lilly and Jack Sullivan. More details and photos. https://novascotia.ca/just/public_safety/rewards/case_detail_lilly_and_jack_sullivan.asp
Statements referenced in this episode:
Mother Malehya Brooks-Murray https://www.ctvnews.ca/atlantic/video/2025/05/04/mother-of-missing-nova-scotia-children-pleads-for-safe-return/
Stepfather Daniel Martell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Nf-xryymOs
Daniel Martell's mother https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/lilly-jack-sullivan-missing-janie-mackenzie-1.7293141 (also lives on the property)
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Transcript 14,444 words · 14 speakers
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1:31 Speaker 02 Canadian True Crime is a completely independent production funded mainly through advertising. You can listen to Canadian True Crime ad-free and early on Amazon Music, included with Prime, Apple Podcasts, Patreon and Supercast. The podcast often has disturbing content and coarse language. It's not for everyone. Please take care when listening.
1:50 Speaker 03 Hi there, I hope you're well. Just quickly, I wanted to thank you for your patience over the past few months as episodes have been a little more spaced out than usual. There have been some challenges. Nothing bad, I'm working through it and I'll share more details in a future update. All we can do is our best, so thank you so much for hanging in there. I appreciate it.
2:13 Speaker 03 Today's episode takes us to Nova Scotia in Atlantic Canada, where a high-profile case is currently unfolding in the public eye. Six-year-old Lilly Sullivan and her four-year-old brother Jack disappeared from their rural home about an hour outside Halifax in May of this year. Despite an extensive investigation and widespread searches, the siblings have not been found. And the troubling circumstances behind their disappearance has resulted in the case becoming the subject of speculation and conspiracy theories, making it difficult to sort out fact from fiction. We don't usually cover unsolved cases on Canadian True Crime,
2:56 Speaker 03 but this one has been on my radar because of how high-profile it's grown with frequent new updates and developments. And it's become quite confusing with what seems to be a lot of speculation and rumours, and it's hard to keep track of it all. That's where my special guest today comes in. Many of you already know Jordan Bonaparte, one of the OGs in Canadian podcasting and the creator of what became one of the country's most influential indie podcasts. I like to call it "The Pride of Nova Scotia", Jordan will love that. Of course, the show we're talking about was formerly known as "Nighttime", and now it's called "The Canadian Gothic".
3:41 Speaker 04 Hello, listeners. Tonight, we have a deeply unsettling and probably a bit surprising story to talk through.
3:48 Speaker 03 Hi, Jordan. Thank you so much for joining me today.
3:51 Speaker 04 It is great to be here with you, Christy. You've come so far since we first met.
3:55 Speaker 03 Shut up. Yeah, I was but a twinkle in Canadian podcasting's eyes when you started your podcast, and now we're almost like veterans in the Canadian industry or something.
4:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, time passes fast and lots of cases get covered. How many episodes would you say Canadian True Crime has released at this point?
4:14 Speaker 03 We are heading up to our 200th episode.
4:17 Speaker 04 Wow. I release a lot more than you. I've done well over 1,000 at this point, but a lot of mine are like multi-part series covering a specific case or... You know, just randomly kind of bonus content, but I was looking at the list recently and I was a little over a thousand. I'm just shocked at how long this has been going on. And I'm just so glad that you and I are still in it together. I feel like you're one of my, one of the few like coworkers I have.
4:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, I feel the same way. And I still remember you were one of the first podcasters who reached out to me when I first started. And it was so nice because I had massive imposter syndrome. I still do. And you know, life as an indie podcaster can feel really isolating sometimes.
5:00 Speaker 04 Absolutely. Well, it's like when we first started, you're sitting in a basement in a microphone, hopefully someone is listening to what comes out on the other end. And when you've done that for 200 episodes, it, it, yeah, it feels a little weird. And it's good to have, and that's like, that's why having a community of listeners is so important, but also having colleagues that are kind of fighting the same battles that you're fighting to keep everything, to keep the wheels on the bus.
5:22 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
5:29 Speaker 03 The reason Jordan Bonaparte is one of my faves is because he's curious and open minded. And he also has this kind of disarming boy next door personality. People feel comfortable opening up to him. His work has broken stories and brought new information to light. Think Halifax's Glove Guy, which we'll discuss at the end. And he's accomplished it all as a fully independent creator who has just reached an impressive milestone. 10 years of investigative audio journalism, uncovering Canada's most mysterious, unusual and fascinating stories and cases. To commemorate the 10 year anniversary, he's just renamed his podcast
6:11 Speaker 03 from Nighttime to The Canadian Gothic. We'll talk more about that at the end of this episode, too. When it comes to the disappearance of Lily and Jack Sullivan, Jordan has of course been reporting extensively on the ground, sharing real time updates, interviewing those in the know, and getting information through Freedom of Information requests. So today, I want to cut through the noise and bring it back to the facts. And it'll become clear why this case is evolving from a missing persons investigation into something that now appears suspicious and potentially criminal.
6:48 Speaker 05 A desperate search is underway tonight in Nova Scotia. Two siblings, aged just four and six, are believed to have wandered away from their home on Friday morning and haven't been seen since. Police dogs and helicopters have joined volunteers on the ground in Picto County, that's northeast of Halifax.
7:18 Speaker 03 So, Jordan, I know you've been across all the developments and updates when it comes to the disappearance of Lily and Jack Sullivan. Can you walk us through the timeline and what's actually being confirmed about the circumstances?
7:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, I've been watching it closely since the story broke. Ultimately, this is the story of two children who went missing the morning of Friday, May 2nd of this year, 2025. And since then, it has been the largest ground search in the history of Nova Scotia. It's gone on to become an internationally discussed case. There's people all over the world that are closely following this story. And I think a part of the reason for that is it involves two missing children that are siblings, which is unusual. But it's also a pure mystery. There's really no explanation for what could have or what did happen to these kids. We're speaking now five months after they've been reported missing.
8:16 Speaker 04 And there is next to no information that has been revealed that can kind of give you any basis for an opinion. Yet despite that, in the vacuum of information, as you know, theories, online discourse, finger pointing, fake news, AI-generated images, all that stuff will swirl around. And it seems at this point, every person involved in this story has found themselves at one point or another publicly blamed for causing harm to these children. And armies of people online will grab their pitchforks and torches and come at them. And it's been... Endless developments, although never major developments.
9:01 Speaker 04 Like, we could go through, um, almost every day of this case, there seems to be something new that comes up, but it's often based on, uh, poor information or based on something that kind of starts online and people aren't checking their sources. And before you know it, it gets spun into what people believe to be facts. It's, it's a wild story and it's heartbreaking. And again, at the heart of it is a mystery involving the disappearance of two innocent, if not vulnerable, children.
9:35 Speaker 03 So tell me about Jack and Lilly Sullivan. What do we know about them?
9:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, so the story involves four-year-old Jack Sullivan and his six-year-old sister, Lilly Sullivan, so a four and a six-year-old. They lived in an area called Lansdowne Station, which is a rural area, the closest major community that someone from the other part of Canada would know is probably Halifax. So they're about an hour outside of Halifax. They lived in a very rural, remote area. They, think of like a highway where every half a kilometer, there's going to be a host that's set back from, from the highway, that, that sort of place. And in the home that the children lived in, so there was four-year-old Jack and his six-year-old sister Lily, they lived with their stepfather, Daniel Martell, and the children's biological
10:24 Speaker 04 mother, Malaya Brooksmurray. They lived in a, in a trailer. They also had Daniel, the stepfather, and Malaya, the mother, had an infant or an 18-month-old baby as well named Meadow. So the five of, this family of five, lived in the trailer on this property. Behind the trailer was another kind of like rundown RV that the children's stepfather, Daniel Martell's mother, lived in. So there's the trailer out front with the family of five. Behind it, there's the RV with the step-grandmother living in. And then there was this kind of fenced-in little area where the kids had swings, there was a chicken coop and stuff. And this property is, I'll just say it, is pretty rundown. You can see photos of this online.
11:07 Speaker 04 It, it looks like a rundown rural property, I guess is how I would describe it. So the family was living there. Malaya, the children's mother, was a stay-at-home mom. The stepfather, Daniel, he was... Worked at like a local like sawmill, but at the time that this all happened, work was pretty slow. He was only down to working about one day a week. The family was having financial troubles as a result of him having reduced work and Malaya not being, you know, not working at all. But again, when you live in like a rundown trailer outside of the city, you can kind of make ends meet without, without a lot. It seems like that's what this family was doing. A lot of people will ask about,
11:49 Speaker 04 Daniel is the stepfather of the children. People will ask, well, where is the biological father? The biological father of Jack and Lily is a fellow named Cody Sullivan, who hasn't been in the children's lives since the beginning, basically, when not long after the children were born, the children's biological father and their mother Malaya had split up and from that point on Cody wasn't in the children's life. So his name will come up if you, a lot if you read online, but it's been said by many people that he wasn't involved in the children's lives whatsoever. So that's kind of the people involved in this story. But to tell you a little bit more about Jack and Lily, Jack four, Lily six years old, they were both attending school together. They were not
12:32 Speaker 04 diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, but they were going through the process of being diagnosed. It was thought that, that both of them were likely going to either be found diagnosed with having autism spectrum disorder or having some kind of like related learning disability possibly, but that they were in the initial process of going through that assessment at the time that they went missing the morning of Friday, May 2. So that's a little bit of background on the main players to the story.
13:02 Speaker 03 So in terms of the sequence of events and the timeline that led to the discovery that they were missing, how does that all unfold?
13:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, the, the actual disappearance when the children go missing is, it's, it's interesting. So.
13:19 Speaker 04 Again, it's the morning of Friday, May 2nd, at somewhere between 10 and 11 a.m. that they're actually reported missing. But we're going to back up a few days because this is something that you can't go without saying. So the children, for three days before being reported missing, were not in school. They were both reported absent. But there's a bit of an explanation for that. So on Wednesday of that week, the mother, Malaya Brooks, kept them both home because the older sibling, Lily, had a cough. She thought it best to keep them home, so she did. The next day was Thursday. Thursday was like an in-service day in Nova Scotia, so all the schools were closed, so they had no school Thursday.
13:59 Speaker 04 Then Friday morning at about 6 a.m., while Malaya Brooks was laying in bed with her baby Meadow and the children's stepfather, Daniel, she woke up at 6 a.m. with her alarm going off. That's the time she would normally get up, get the kids ready, get them to the edge of the driveway to be picked up by the bus to go to school. Instead, she got on her phone and reported them both missing from school, saying that they would be absent because she suspected Lily wasn't yet over her cough. So the day they went missing, they were marked absent from school, hadn't been at school the two days prior to that. So when that part of the story came out initially, it left a lot of people wondering, you know, when did whatever happened?
14:43 Speaker 04 When did it happen? So the official story, from the very beginning, told by both Daniel and Malaya Brooks to the media, was that at about 6 a.m. she woke up, reported the children missing from school, and kind of lazed back in bed, kind of fell back asleep with her baby and with the stepfather, Daniel, in the bed. From separate bedrooms, Jack and Lily woke up at some point, and they heard Jack and Lily in another room playing, could hear them talking and laughing and doing whatever the children do. Daniel, the children's stepfather, had said to police and media that several times during the morning, Lily would kind of stick her head in the bedroom just to see what they were doing, would see them asleep, and she would kind of go off and go back to playing with Jack.
15:28 Speaker 04 So that was happening during the morning while they were sleeping. Some point around 10 a.m., Daniel and Malaya woke up, and it wasn't like the sounds of the children playing that got them out of bed. It was instead the fact that it was dead silence in the house. So at about 10 a.m., they woke up and thought like, whoa, like, it's quiet in here. Where are Jack and Lily? They got out of bed, couldn't find Jack and Lily in the house. They looked in the backyard at the swing set area. Jack and Lily weren't there. And Jack and Lily weren't children who would wander off. So immediately it was shouting, yelling back into the woods because behind the children's property, it's just deep forest, heavy forest. So they're yelling into the woods for Jack and Lily.
16:09 Speaker 04 When they could not find them, at that point, Malaya got on the phone, dialed 911 and reported them missing. And from that moment on, the children have yet to be found, despite, as I said at the beginning, Nova Scotia's largest ground search in this province's history. So that's, that's kind of the, the play by play of the main events leading to the disappearance. But I do also want to say, it isn't just Daniel and Malaya, the children's stepfather and mother, saying this is what happened. As I mentioned, Daniel's mother lives in an RV in the backyard of, of this house. And she also described hearing the kids at about 9:30. She was in her RV, kind of sleeping,
16:50 Speaker 04 playing on her phone, just doing that lazy morning thing. And she could hear the kids laughing and playing on the swing set. So she also puts them on the property at about 9:30 a.m. So when all the cards are on the table, you have the stepfather and mother saying, we heard them up until around nine. You have the step grandmother who lived in the backyard saying, I heard them at about 9:30. It's at 10 o'clock that the stepfather and mom are in the backyard yelling, looking for them. So it all comes down to about a 30 minute period on Friday morning as far as what happened. Unless you're one of the people who believe that all of these people conspired to cause harm and cover it up.
17:31 Speaker 06 Right.
17:32 Speaker 04 But maybe we'll get to that next. I hate, I hate to just like steamroll the story, but there's one other part of the story that needs to be on the table really before we can talk much more. And that is the fact that the children are reported missing at about 10 a.m. Friday morning. The police take it seriously right from the very beginning. As it turned out, there was another missing person, I think a day, a day and a half before in Nova Scotia. They were, fortunately, they were, they were recovered successfully, but search and rescue was already kind of like manned as a result of this and ready to go. So when the police arrived after Malaya called 911 to report the kids missing, they arrived with like drones, a whole crew of ground searchers.
18:17 Speaker 04 So it was like all hands on deck right from the very beginning. They had set up like a little like kind of camp area where they would use as the search and rescue headquarters. And they're all up in the woods behind Jack and Lily's home because from the very beginning, the theory was that the children wandered off. They had a little cabin area that they played in that was just like a three minute walk into the woods behind the kids' home. So that it was thought maybe they went up there, but they found no sign of them and it wasn't like them to just randomly wander into the woods. And it was also an unseasonably cool morning on Friday, May 2. So anyway, as all of this is happening, at the headquarters that the search and rescue people were, were keeping, the day after they went missing, Saturday, so they searched
19:02 Speaker 04 all day Friday into Friday night. Saturday morning, they were having like a meeting at the search headquarters and they invited Daniel, the stepfather, and Malaya Brooks, the mother, to attend. There was some sort of disagreement between Daniel and Malaya at this meeting that led to a breakup the day after the kids went missing. It seemed that the disagreement related to where Malaya and her baby Meadow, the 18-month-old, where they would live. Would they stay with Daniel or would they go with Malaya and her family who were from another part of Nova Scotia? It seemed that that kind of question led to the stepfather and mother breaking up.
19:44 Speaker 04 The day after the kids went missing and from that point on, the children's mother, Malaya Brooks, has been out of the picture. She hasn't spoke to the media since then.
19:54 Speaker 03 Wow.
19:54 Speaker 04 She blocked Daniel on social media and he makes no secret about that. He talks about it on like in news clips often, like she blocked me and you know, I hope she's okay. But from that point on, the stepfather, Daniel Martell, whenever there's an update, he's on CBC, CTV, Global. He's seems to have an open door policy to talk to media about what's happened. And Malaya is dealing with this in her own way from another part of the province. And a lot of people online are critical of her decision to do that. But I'm not going to criticize her because I really don't know how I would deal with something like this. And I hope to hell I never figure out. I never learned what it would be like.
20:33 Speaker 03 Yeah. It would be so easy to pass judgment sitting from behind a microphone or whatever. And it's something that comes up quite a lot in the true crime space. You would know, people don't often act or respond the way that you think they're going to, especially when there is potential trauma involved. So, but that said, one thing jumped out at me and I wanted to ask you. So, the alarm went off that morning at six o'clock or whatever. And then two young kids, age four and six, just did their own thing for hours while the parents laid around in bed?
21:08 Speaker 04 Yeah. And I'd be curious what your take on that is because I know you have two of them.
21:12 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:12 Speaker 04 My kids are, there's enough age difference between them that I've never had this experience where I would be laying in bed with one baby while my other two still need care. But yeah, according to both of their, their statements, again, to media and police, Malaya's phone alarm goes off at six, she wakes up, reports them missing from school on some app or whatever, and then just kind of dozes off with her baby. And I can understand that part. But the part that I find strange is an hour or two later, when your four-year-old and six-year-old who are currently going through an autism assessment, when they're awake in the other room. It does surprise me that the mother and the stepfather would stay in bed until 10 a.m.
21:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, I just can't imagine how that would happen. I mean, I think back to when my own kids were that age and there's like, there's no way, like when they're up, you're up.
22:07 Speaker 04 Hmm, at least one of you are.
22:09 Speaker 03 Yeah.
22:10 Speaker 04 That's what I, when I think of it, it's like if, um, let's say my wife had a rough night or something, maybe I, maybe I'd be like, yeah, you stay in bed with the baby, I'm gonna get up. But for both of you to stay in, that's, it is interesting and a lot of people have been questioning that aspect of the story. But the way I see it is like playing devil's advocate or whatever the term would be. It's you don't choose the day this, the worst thing happens and you become in the news and you end up in the news talking about it. So maybe this was a unique thing, but people, like a lot of people listening to this will be, will be trying to guess if Malaya, the mother, or Daniel, the stepfather, could be involved in what had happened to the children. I think what we should do is listen to some early statements from them.
22:54 Speaker 03 We'll be back in a moment.
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25:23 Speaker 03 In the days after Jack and Lily Sullivan went missing, their mother Malaya and stepfather Daniel each gave an initial statement to the media. The clips you'll hear have been edited slightly for brevity. Here's Jordan again.
25:37 Speaker 04 In Malaya's case, the day after the kids were reported missing, she spoke to, it was global news. For about a minute, she kind of described what happened that morning and called out for, you know, support out there. And the children's stepfather did the same sort of thing. Why don't we just listen to their own words describe that moment of reporting the kids missing? Let's start with Daniel Martell. This is the children's stepfather.
26:00 Speaker 08 We were searching. We covered everywhere possible, even in the first day we did. Even with me running through the woods, I was ahead of the helicopters and headed the drones and stuff like that, screaming, screaming loud as I can, just until my throat hurt, running through water that was up to my waist. And as soon as I got back, I wasn't allowed back in the woods until a man in dressed in military outfit said I could go back into the woods. I hate being wet and cold. So they immediately came right back into the house. The only two prints are right beside the house facing the road and then that's it.
26:31 Speaker 09 Martel wants the search to be extended to include provincial borders in case the children were abducted. A reality, he says, is becoming more and more likely.
26:40 Speaker 08 Post, any officers they can get, have New Brunswick border, P I, P I border, and get the meta every, every, every airport possible. Anybody who has any information or you think you've seen something or hear something or any, any messages from friends about hearing something, just contact your local, local police services. Any, anything, guys, anything.
27:04 Speaker 04 So we can talk about that, but when, my thought is, he said, it sounds sincere, genuine, emotional.
27:12 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:12 Speaker 04 And what he's calling out for is, um, consider that this could be an abduction. And he's saying that because at this point, the search was focused on this idea that the children wandered away. But he's saying, you know, put police officers at the border to P E I, New Brunswick at the airport. And the reason that would be important is where these children went missing in Nova Scotia, for them to get anywhere else in Canada or to go down to the U S if someone took them, they would need to either go through P E I or cross the New Brunswick border. So from the very beginning, he is raising the alarm for this could be an abduction and we should consider it. And, and he's still doing that to this day. But what is your take on hearing him?
27:53 Speaker 03 Hmm. Well, I guess I agree with you that he seems genuine and sincere. But what struck me, uh, when he was talking about, you know, running through the woods, outrunning the helicopter and the drones and, and running across the, the river and stuff and, and yelling out, it's, the way he describes it was quite dramatic. And it has a little kind of hyperactive vibe to it. And there's a, there's an extreme of emotion. He goes from, from that to, you know, suddenly almost breaking down when he's describing other parts.
28:34 Speaker 03 I mean, like I said before, we know from this line of work that you can't really judge much from people's reactions. People who are, you know, traumatized or going through a traumatic experience have been known to give reactions that are inappropriate or laugh or
28:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
28:52 Speaker 03 It's, I don't know, it's, it's just weird that he is focusing so much on abduction. But I guess if you don't know and, you know, you say that the kids aren't likely to have wandered off, then I guess as a stepparent or a parent, your first reaction would probably be, well, someone must have taken them. So I guess it sounds reasonable. What, what do you think?
29:19 Speaker 04 That's, that theory, like the idea that they wandered off, to me, makes no sense. Because like I know the way a four-year-old operates, especially a four and a six-year-old together. If they walked into the forest, they're not going to walk forty-five kilometers in a straight line. If, if anything, if they got lost in the woods, they would probably just walk fifteen minutes into the woods and just walk in circles yelling and stuff. And the, the search efforts that were done involved helicopters, drones, you know, hundreds of ground searchers walking in a grid. And it even included infrared cameras, like the helicopters had these cameras where they could spot living things, like they could see an animal or whatever, because it could sense heat. So they, it was a very advanced search.
30:04 Speaker 04 And when that, the first day, came up with nothing, I thought, there's, there's no way the kids are out there. They would have found them. It would only make sense. And this isn't like the kind of forest that is behind these children's home. We've had several like hurricanes over the last probably ten years in Nova Scotia. So there's a lot of downed trees. This would be a really tough walk to get through, especially for a four-year-old. And, you know, anyone who's walked a great distance with a four-year-old knows, after twenty-five minutes, you're carrying them on your shoulders anyway. So it's, that part of it surprised me. Um, but let's listen to the children's mother, Malaya. I think this is her only statement to the media.
30:42 Speaker 03 This statement was given to CTV News Atlantic.
30:46 Speaker 10 As hopeful as possible. I want them home. I want to hold them.
30:51 Speaker 10 And I want them home. What happened was, we woke up, I heard them playing in the next room beside us. And I was drifting in and out of sleep. And they're not the type of kids, we tell them not to go outside on their own. We always make sure that we're out there with them, watching them. And they happened to just get out that sliding door, and we can't hear it when it opens. And they were outside playing. But we weren't aware of it at the time. And the next thing we knew, the room, like, it was quiet. And we get up and I tell him, my partner, Daniel. I tell him, "Do you hear the kids?" And he says, "No."
31:31 Speaker 10 And we get up instantly. We're looking outside, we're looking everywhere, yelling for them. And I instantly just called 911.
31:40 Speaker 10 I just had the instinct, I needed to call. They're both really good, lucky children. They're so sweet. They talk to anyone. They'll talk your ear off. They, um... They will speak to anyone in a store, everyone. They're just extremely sweet kids. I appreciate the huge search effort going on right now. But we've been pushing for an Amber Alert, which hasn't been issued. Not just that they could possibly be abducted, which it is a possibility that they could have been. But just an alert to let everyone know that they are missing.
32:24 Speaker 10 We had people text me saying that they weren't aware someone else let them know that they were missing. And it would just be nice if everyone could be alerted. We thought maybe that we found tracks, but it's still uncertain. It's been raining and they're probably soaking wet. But with the sun today, I'm hopeful that they are feeling warm. We're all filled with pain and sorrow because we just want them found. We want them home. Everyone loves them. They are definitely verbal. And they do have possible autism, but it's not extreme autism. It's just...
33:04 Speaker 10 They have um issues with um school and uh they don't catch up with the other kids. I'm just, I just wanna remain hopeful. But there's always, in a mother's mind, you're always thinking the worst. Last night was one of the worst nights because I didn't have them in their beds.
33:26 Speaker 10 And I don't wanna go through that another night without them.
33:30 Speaker 04 So that, that clip kinda skips around from different things that she said, but I think you get the gist of it. When I hear her, my thought is like shell shock, like she just seems shocked and overwhelmed, which I think is pretty justifiable.
33:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, to me, there's a kind of numbness, you know, like a, a person who has spent a considerable amount of time being upset and, and crying and, and now is, is numb. I guess shell shocked is, is the best way to kinda put it, but you know, like I said before, it's, it's impossible to make any kind of judgment call about how they are coming across. Because there's just so many variables and so many possible explanations for it. But I was also interested about the autism thing. If the children haven't been formally diagnosed and whatever their symptoms are has led
34:25 Speaker 03 the mother to believe that they're not on the extreme end of the autism spectrum. I'm wondering why there's such a focus on it.
34:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think uh the reason that that's coming up in both of these early statements is because the initial media reporting was that two autistic children were missing and somehow that turned into whether or not they were verbal or not. So there was, I think in these early statements is a bit of like maybe correction being done on the, the early, early statements that the media made. But I, I, but I think just in hearing their, like hearing their voices in hearing them describe this, I think is important because so many people are gonna make um take a guess as to who is responsible for whatever happened and ultimately. The mother and stepfather and step-grandmother were in the house and reported,
35:19 Speaker 04 or were in on the property and reported hearing those kids right up to the point that they were reported missing. So you really need to, I think, understand who they are and think about them a little bit. But their stories, for the most part, check out, and their stories have been gone through with a fine-tooth comb by the RCMP Major Crimes Unit very thoroughly. I'll tell you a little bit about the actual search, and then maybe we can get into some of the investigation, because we did get a behind-the-scenes look at the investigation as a result of the recently unsealed court documents related to the RCMP's search and seizure warrants. So the RCMP got like a search warrant for a whole bunch of things like phones,
36:04 Speaker 04 computers, bank records, video camera footage from school buses and businesses that the family was at in the days leading up to their disappearance. So we do know quite a bit about what the RCMP has done to investigate. But as far as what the ground search has uncovered, up to this point, now five months later, despite Nova Scotia's largest ground search ever, there's really only two pieces of maybe evidence that was uncovered during all that searching in the woods behind the house. One was what is thought to be a child's boot print, and that was found in like kind of a muddy area about a kilometre from the children's
36:48 Speaker 04 home on this this kind of trail that runs through the woods called the Pipeline Trail. They found this boot print, and they did a deep investigation into it. They took like a cast of it or whatever, and it looked to be the back of a children's boot, and it had some numbers on it. I can't remember exactly what the numbers were, but they ended up taking the boot print, and they went to Walmart and looked at all the different boots that were for sale, because it was thought that Lily was wearing a boot that was bought at Walmart several months prior. They didn't know exactly what boot she was wearing, so they went through Malaya's bank records and found a purchase at Walmart like six months prior, found out what boot she was wearing. They compared the boot print they found with
37:33 Speaker 04 the boot Malaya had purchased.
37:36 Speaker 04 It was a match in terms of style and then it had like the boot print they found in the woods had like these little numbers on it that didn't correspond with like American sizes, but what it ended up being was like the, I think like the UK size. I think the number may have been like 17 or something, but the actual, when they figured it out, the actual size and style of boot print they found was a match for what Lily was likely wearing and went missing with. So that boot print, that would match Lily or be consistent with Lily, was thought to be a major breakthrough. But that said, they only found one of those boot prints and the area surrounding the boot print, they searched high and low and
38:17 Speaker 04 found nothing else. We haven't, we being the public, hasn't, haven't seen like a photo of this print or anything. We just know about it through the court documents that were released. But it's, it's a pretty big coincidence that a kilometer behind the house, you would find an exact match for the style of boot, but it is on a bit of a like walking trail. So who's to say some other kid wa- didn't walk through there with those boots? And where it was purchased at Walmart, you know, it's going to be like the most common boot out there.
38:46 Speaker 05 Yeah.
38:47 Speaker 04 So, so that's one piece of evidence is this boot print. The other one is, is a bit of a strange story. It was a, a piece of a blanket, a torn piece of a blanket that matched one that Lily used to carry around with her a lot several years prior. So it was kind of like Lily's blanket when she was a little kid. They found a piece of it in the woods, kind of looked as if it was thrown up into a tree. It was just kind of like caught up in the branches. But here's the weird part of that, is they take the piece of the blanket, or actually I think initially photos of it, and they show it to Daniel and Malaya, who said like, yeah, like we recognize that blanket, that was Lily's blanket. But what they say is, we actually threw that blanket in the garbage a while
39:31 Speaker 04 ago. And so they searched the garbage in the house. There was like a garbage bag waiting to go out for garbage day a week later, whatever. And they found the other half of the blanket in there. And what the story is, is that they had a drafty window in the trailer. So Daniel took an old blanket and he stuffed it in the, the, kind of the gap in the window or whatever to, to make it tight so that it wouldn't be drafty. But the kids went missing in May. So a couple of weeks prior to this, as the weather was warming. They took the blanket out of the window, threw it in the garbage, but somehow a piece of it ended up in the woods, again, like a kilometer away from the kid's home, which is really weird.
40:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
40:11 Speaker 04 And maybe even weirder, Daniel Martell was asked about this discovery on the news, and he said, um, like, yeah, like, someone must have went in our garbage and planted it there. And then he said, uh, they also stole two of my shirts. I'm missing two shirts as well.
40:29 Speaker 03 What?
40:29 Speaker 04 So it's, you know, and that hasn't really been followed up on, but that always stuck with me. It's like, well, what the hell is going on? Like, who would steal this guy's shirts in the middle of this? But regardless, the blanket, or the piece of a blanket, in that shoe print is the only thing they managed to find in all of the searching for five months.
40:50 Speaker 03 Yeah. And, you know, that's a long period of time, and there's no way to tell how long these things, you know, that boot print and the piece of blanket had been there for. Like, even if the boot print was unique enough to conclude that it absolutely did come from Lily's boot, there's no evidence about when exactly it got there, and no way to kind of narrow down that timeline.
41:17 Speaker 04 No, it's like, there's not really any new information. I'm assuming the police have done investigations behind the scene on the history of this blanket, because it is definitely odd that a part of the blanket that's in your garbage was found up in a tree, you know, a kilometer away. But maybe it's just a coincidence, and that blanket is getting a lot of additional attention as a result of the search for these kids. But it's definitely weird.
41:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
41:44 Speaker 04 There has also been several tips related to this case. And I, I had mentioned there, the search and seizure warrants. So for people who are unfamiliar, if the cops want to take your cell phone or search your home, they need a warrant to do it. And in order to get the warrant, which is approved by a court, the police officer needs to basically apply for it. And the application Includes a justification for the search. So if I'm investigating you, Christie, I would fill out an application saying, I want access to Christie's phone. I'm a cop. The reason I want her phone is because I'm investigating this crime and I have a reason to believe that her phone may have this piece of evidence or whatever on it. So I kind of
42:29 Speaker 04 need to show my math in the application and the judge will make the decision. Those applications eventually become public record when unsealed by the courts. And in this case, a collection of them were unsealed. So we get a bit of behind the scenes look at things like the police investigation into the blanket and the boot print. But they've also included several tips that were received from the public. And there's one that's always stuck with me. And it's a tip related to a passerby, like someone from the neighborhood saw some children the morning Jack and Lily were reported missing. I'm just going to read you a little bit about this tip because this one always kind of never sat well with me.
43:11 Speaker 11 Right.
43:12 Speaker 04 So I'll read it now. "On the morning of May 2, 2025, between 9:30 a.m. and 10 a.m., I'll redact the name, so a local resident was driving her sons in the Lansdowne area when she observed two children walking along Garlock Road towards Westville." And Garlock Road is the road that the kids lived on. "She described a girl, approximately nine to 10 years old, with dark hair and pigtails, wearing a tank top with blue straps, holding the hand of a younger boy who is thought to be about five years old, with dirty blonde hair, wearing shorts."
43:43 Speaker 03 Just as a reminder, here's the details that the family members gave to police when Jack and Lily were first reported missing. Jack was described as having dark blonde hair and was believed to be wearing black Under Armour jogging pants and blue rubber boots with dinosaur print. They described Lily as having light brown hair, and she was believed to be wearing a pink Barbie top, pink rubber boots with rainbow print, and carrying a cream-colored backpack with strawberry print. Back to Jordan.
44:13 Speaker 04 ... dirty blonde hair, wearing shorts. "Slightly ahead of the children, this resident reported seeing a woman, estimated to be between 50 and 60 years old, Caucasian with loose curly hair, dressed in a white shirt and blue shorts. The woman was standing beside an older model, light gold or tanned sedan, which had its rear passenger door open, and she appeared to be watching the children." When later meeting police at the intersection of Gerlock Road and Lansdowne Station Road, this resident indicated that the children had been walking northbound between the train tracks and the intersection and that the vehicle was parked on the gravel shoulder at the Lansdowne Station Road in Gerlock Intersections. So in case you missed it there, the timing lines up.
44:56 Speaker 04 This is between 9:30 and 10 a.m. And this resident who reported this tip to the police, she reported the tip and then actually meets with the police and goes there with them. So it's, it's interesting, but a lot of the finer details as far as what the kids were wearing and stuff don't seem to line up with what Jack and Lily were thought to be wearing.
45:16 Speaker 03 It did strike me that this resident was so specific about what these kids look like.
45:23 Speaker 04 Maybe too much though, because she would have seen these kids before they were reported missing, of course. So she's describing driving down the street this random Friday morning and sees these two kids. It's not until like days, a day later or whatever that they're, it's in the news that they're missing and she comes forward. I can't imagine I would drive by two kids this morning and not even really have any reason to notice them. And then tomorrow I'll be like, you know, this kid, he had this color hair, he was wearing this, that. So I kind of took the, in this tip, I take the finer details with a bit of a grain of salt and I boil it down to the morning the kids went missing, she saw a young boy holding the hand of a slightly older girl walking towards this random car.
46:07 Speaker 04 And if you live in the city, that's maybe not that big of a deal, but if you're in rural Picto County, Nova Scotia on a Friday morning at 9:30 a.m., kids in this neighborhood who go to school would have long since been on the bus driving their, you know, 40 minute drive to school or whatever it is. There's not a good reason that there's two kids there, very close to the house, roughly matching the age description of Jack and Lily.
46:31 Speaker 03 Right.
46:32 Speaker 04 This, the police have investigated this, but they've never been able to determine. Who the person in the car was and they have nothing more than this tip, but I think it's pretty interesting.
46:43 Speaker 03 And it's strange that she remembers the details so vividly.
46:49 Speaker 04 She, the way she describes it is she's just driving past and sees this. And the only reason, I'm guessing, the reason that it stood out to her as odd is because this is an area where there's not normally kids walking down the highway.
47:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, and these ones are supposed to be at school.
47:03 Speaker 04 Exactly. And this investigation into this car or this possible incident, whether her memory, the resident's memory was accurate or not, it could play into some of the investigative techniques the RCMP used. One thing they, they successfully applied for a search and seizure warrant for was um video related to a, there's this one main kind of highway that goes from Nova Scotia to New Brunswick. And if you want it to, from Nova Scotia, go to other parts of Canada or go down to the US, you would likely pass through this one highway that has like a toll booth on it. And the, the RCMP did get video footage of every car that passed through this highway.
47:48 Speaker 04 Like it's starting, I think, two days before the kids went missing, up till like two days after. So a part of that, the fact that the RCMP took the steps to get the video footage of this main strip of highway connecting Nova Scotia to New Brunswick, would tell me that they're at least considering the idea that the kids were taken that direction by somebody. And I have a feeling this gold or tan car, when the police were looking through all the cars passing, I think they were probably taking special note of any gold or tan cars at least.
48:20 Speaker 03 And yet, still nothing.
48:22 Speaker 04 Still nothing. And, and that's only one of the many things they did. They got video footage of the cars going across that highway through that toll booth. They got cell phones from the parents, they got the home router, like for the internet, which would show any other devices, even if someone who didn't live at the home. My understanding is, like, let's say if I went to this, the kid's home and I had my phone in my pocket, my phone may try to connect to their router and leave some kind of digital footprint behind. So that was a part of the, you know, the, the value of getting this router. They got search warrants for bank records for both parents' bank accounts. They followed their timelines in the days leading up to the kid's disappearance.
49:07 Speaker 04 So if the parents said, "We went to Dollarama two days before," the police would go to Dollarama and get video to confirm that. They've double, triple-checked every aspect of that, and nothing seems to check out. But again, reading between the lines as to what their theory may be, what's always been interesting in the many press releases and press conferences that the Nova Scotia RCMP had, is they've often called out for people to provide them with any video from the area surrounding the kids' homes, starting, I think, like, three or four days before the kids went missing, up to two days after. So they've been very interested in who is in the area in the days leading up to the disappearance. And it isn't just this passive call-out on the news.
49:52 Speaker 04 They've even gone door-to-door. There was one woman who appeared on CBC. She lived something like 10 kilometers away from the kid's home. The police went to her door and noticed that she had trail cameras. Like, so she had a video doorbell, but she also had trail cameras on trees and stuff. They asked her for the video footage of all of her cameras. And she appeared on the news to be like, "You know, it's pretty weird that they came. I'm so far away." But as it turned out, the pipeline trail, which is this trail behind the kid's home where the footprint was found, that eventually, if you follow it long enough, will go near this woman's home. So maybe they were just hoping they would find something. But if the police are investigating it
50:34 Speaker 04 based on the kids wandering away and getting lost or whatever, it would make very little sense to be looking for video days before the kids went away, especially if you have evidence of them being alive and well the night before they went missing. And I should also say, they do have that. The Thursday evening before the kids went missing, they have CCTV footage from a, I think it's like a grocery store with a Dollarama connected to it, where they see the entire family going in and coming out safely. So as far as the timeline, if you believe the people associated with it, whatever happened, happened between 9:30 a.m. and 10 a.m. on Friday morning.
51:17 Speaker 04 But if you're willing to consider that the stepfather and the mother and the step-grandmother were involved, then you can put the timeline to any time after, I think like 7 p.m. the night before. But I find it really hard to believe that in the middle of a breakup in a custody dispute over your 18-month-old that you're willing to cover for each other for a murder. I think if they were involved, they would have told on each other by now, I would expect.
51:46 Speaker 03 That kind of reminded me of something that you said earlier about the breakup and that it seems to have been caused by their conversations about where they would live. But to me, it seems like the breakup would happen before the discussions about where they're going to live, not as a result of it.
52:07 Speaker 04 There's a lot that kind of happened right after the disappearance. So what ends up happening is Malaya's from another part of the province. When the kids are reported missing, the property they live at is Daniel's, the stepfather, and his mother. She owns the property. She lives in the RV in the backyard. So Malaya's family comes to the home to assist in the search and support Malaya. Not long after they arrive, there ends up being blame directed towards Daniel from some of Malaya's family. Someone in her family, I haven't figured out who and it hasn't been reported exactly who, someone said, "We know you're involved and we think you're a drug addict." That led to Daniel's mother kicking Malaya's family off the property.
52:52 Speaker 04 Get out of here, you're not welcome on my property. So then the search headquarters kind of becomes home base for a lot of Malaya's family. When this meeting is happening, a sort of a briefing where they're going to where the search and rescue team are presenting to Daniel and Malaya their search efforts. At that same time, Malaya is saying, I'm not going to live with you and the baby. I'm going to live somewhere else with the baby. I want to take the baby to my mom's house. And it seems that Daniel didn't want that to happen. There isn't a lot of like the actual details that have come out. But what did come out is that this happened very quickly. Malaya, the 18 month old Meadow, got in a car with Malaya's mom right outside the search headquarters.
53:37 Speaker 04 And as she drove off, Daniel chased after the car yelling something to the effect of like, I love you.
53:43 Speaker 03 Wow.
53:44 Speaker 04 And then Daniel was on the news not long after that saying, she changed her Facebook status to single and blocked me. So I don't know what's going on. So yeah, it was a very public breakup. And I'm saying this, normally I wouldn't reveal like, you know, this kind of like inner conflict and drama, but this is all public record. And this was like talked about in CBC News reports. So it's a part of the story as ugly as it is.
54:08 Speaker 03 How old are these people, Malaya and Daniel?
54:13 Speaker 04 They're both like mid twenties. I don't know their exact age, but they're mid twenties. Old Malaya, of course, her oldest kid is six. She has four year old Jack, 18 month old Meadow. And yeah, I don't know her exact age, but I believe she's like mid to late twenties.
54:29 Speaker 03 Okay.
54:30 Speaker 04 But it's like all this stuff to consider and everything we talked about, knowing crime stories as much as you do, does this sound like we're describing a criminal case or a missing persons case?
54:43 Speaker 03 Well, I'm no expert, but it definitely sounds to me like it's more on the criminal side.
54:50 Speaker 04 It's how it sounds, right?
54:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, it just doesn't. I mean, the only other explanation is that they wandered off. And if they did wander off, I just don't see how there would be no sign of them whatsoever. And I know there's so many variables, but you know, like you said, why would they wander off for kilometres and leave absolutely no trace?
55:13 Speaker 04 It is puzzling. And there's some other things that can be used to kind of support it being a criminal investigation. For one is, I I I'm sure other parts of the country have something similar. But in Nova Scotia, we have something called the Nova Scotia Major Rewards for Unsolved Crime Programme. And this is a programme by Nova Scotia's Department of Justice that offers a one hundred and fifty thousand dollar reward for information leading to a conviction for a set list of unsolved crimes. So it's mostly like high-profile murders that that are on this this programme. Very shortly after Jack and Lily went missing, their case was added to the programme. The programme is specifically called the Rewards for Unsolved Crime.
55:56 Speaker 04 When their case was added, it it has, you know, there'll be their photos, some of the basic details of what happened, and then a description of, you know, a more in-depth telling of their last known whereabouts or whatever. And in that, when they, when the province published this reward, it initially said, any information related to this crime, please, you know, contact blah, blah, blah. So that came out, they called it a crime, but like four hours later, they edited it to this case.
56:28 Speaker 03 Wow.
56:29 Speaker 04 And I I did a Freedom of Information Act request on all the behind-the-scenes communication about the approval of having this case added, as well as the post-publication editing of that wording. And it was pretty interesting. You see, through that Freedom of Information request, I can see like the head of the RCMP in Nova Scotia, writing the Department of Justice, saying, we have reason to believe that there are people out there who know what happened to Jack and Lily, and we want to get this on there. He didn't describe it as a crime, but if people know what has happened to them, then how could they have wandered away? Like, you don't...
57:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
57:07 Speaker 04 It just, everything tells me that it's a crime, but for whatever reason, the RCMP aren't publicly saying that. Maybe they just haven't found that smoking gun that makes it, that removes any question of it. But another thing it could be is in policing, at least in Nova Scotia, we have something called the Missing Persons Act, which gives police additional authority to do specific things when investigating a missing person. So it gives them kind of like a, an easier route to things like search warrants and whatnot that they wouldn't be able to do with a regular criminal investigation. So maybe that could be a part of it, but it's just kind of puzzling.
57:49 Speaker 03 We'll be back with the most recent update in this case in a moment.
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59:43 Speaker 03 Here's Jordan again.
59:45 Speaker 04 The last update I can give you, and this is the most recent update in this case, is immediately after the kids went missing. I mentioned there's drones, there's helicopters. Of course, there were search dogs as well. It was said that the search dogs hadn't been able to follow a scent, led them nowhere. But a lot of people had been asking for a more detailed search dog search using cadaver dogs, which are highly trained dogs that can sense or smell decomposition of human remains. It was only the last week of September, September 22nd, for a three day period, two cadaver dogs from British Columbia came to Nova Scotia, searched the children's home
1:00:30 Speaker 04 in a roughly 40 kilometer area in the woods behind the children's home. And cadaver dogs, like I don't know how much your listeners know about cadaver dogs, but they're like highly effective. They can sense the decomposition of human remains that's up to like three feet below ground and up to like hundreds of years old. Like they're incredible and they found nothing. So I think the biggest update that that gives us is that searching the woods behind the kids home is probably a closed book at this point. If all of the searching found nothing, it's clear to me, and I think it should be clear to everybody, that the answer to what happened to Jack and Lilly Sullivan isn't going to be found in the woods behind their house.
1:01:14 Speaker 03 So have you shared publicly any personal opinions that you might have on this case?
1:01:21 Speaker 04 It's hard to have an opinion, but when you look through the search warrant applications, you see that the police had done polygraph testing of everybody involved. They polygraphed Daniel, the children's stepfather. They polygraphed Malaya. They polygraphed the biological father, Daniel's mom, who lived in the RV behind the house. Everybody passed their polygraphs with the exception of Daniel's mom, and it's not that she failed it. It was she gave a polygraph test, but they said in the search warrants, it said, due to her physiology, it was inappropriate for testing. And I did a bit of reading on what that could mean. And that could even be like someone with heart issues, or even like a cognitive impairment or anything. And I will say,
1:02:07 Speaker 04 Daniel's mom appeared on CBC. She gave a little tour of her property, and she did come across as having a lot of personality. How about I'll say that. When I read that her physiology was inappropriate for polygraph testing, I thought of her appearance on CBC. And I thought like, okay, maybe they can't read that. But you'll see what I mean.
1:02:33 Speaker 03 A prerequisite public service announcement that polygraph results are inadmissible as evidence in court, and the Supreme Court of Canada found they're unreliable, unnecessary, and risky. Polygraphs or lie detector tests don't reveal or prove deceit. They only indicate a change in stress levels, which the operator can choose to interpret as evidence of deception. Polygraphs have been scientifically debunked, but they're still used by police as an investigation tool. Here's the CBC clip Jordan mentioned with Daniel's mother. It's been edited slightly for brevity.
1:03:10 Speaker 06 The finger has been pointed towards you and Daniel?
1:03:14 Speaker 12 Yes, I do. Because I live on the property. Come on.
1:03:18 Speaker 06 Do you think your son had anything to do with the disappearance of Jack and Lily?
1:03:23 Speaker 12 No, I don't believe Daniel had anything to do with the disappearance of Jack and Lily. Our heart don't lie. And my heart is telling me that my kid did not have nothing to do with this. And I had nothing to do with this.
1:03:36 Speaker 03 So this is the same person who said she heard Lily and Jack laughing and playing that morning.
1:03:43 Speaker 04 Hmm.
1:03:44 Speaker 03 Do you think that whatever the situation was, that meant the police determined she was not a good candidate to clear by a polygraph? Do you think it could have any bearing on her account of that morning?
1:03:59 Speaker 04 Um, I I don't think so. And her her story with Daniels and Malaya's all kind of makes sense. So I think like maybe they're all off by a couple of minutes here and there, but I think their stories are compatible enough that whatever happened, happened in a very short amount of time. The the investigation in this case is so deep and thorough that the only people who could have gotten away with it are like criminal masterminds. And to put it politely, if you watch video interviews with the people associated with this case, it doesn't seem like you're dealing with a bunch of criminal masterminds. Add in the fact that there's like a breakup and all this other stuff happening.
1:04:44 Speaker 04 I feel like this would be a case that if somebody was involved that's close to the story, a pretty good investigator would have been able to crack it, especially given the access to the phones and everything else. Like you you you think that it would have been solved if it was the obvious answer. And that's what always pushes me towards it being some sort of an abduction. But that said, an abduction by a stranger is so incredibly rare, much, much rarer than people probably think. And when it does happen, a a an abduction by a stranger, it's usually in a metropolitan area. It's going to be like, you know, a kid downtown Toronto or something like that. Uh, like when you're not talking about human trafficking of, you know, teenagers and stuff, like a four and a six year old getting scooped up by a stranger.
1:05:29 Speaker 04 It's incredibly rare, especially rare for it to happen to two of them at the same time on a random Friday morning in rural Nova Scotia. The odds of that are just astronomical. But at the same time, I don't know what else makes sense here.
1:05:44 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:05:44 Speaker 04 And it's, if this is a stranger abduction, then I don't know how they'll ever solve it if they haven't been able to yet. It's ter- it's terrifying. Yeah.
1:05:54 Speaker 03 So I've got a question about that morning, something that stuck with me. Did I hear you correctly when you said that Malaya only called Lily in sick to school?
1:06:06 Speaker 04 Oh, no, she called in both of them sick, but the reason is Lily had a cough, which, and again, this, to me, this is a little weird. Cause having two kids, if one of my kids is sick and I gotta keep that kid home with me all day. That's like, there, there goes my day. I'm not getting groceries. I'm not doing laundry. Add the second kid, you know, that's, that's a busy day. I feel like if my kids were sick and all, or if one of my kids were sick, I can't imagine why I would keep both of them home. It's just, you know, as a parent, that's just so much work.
1:06:37 Speaker 03 Yeah. I mean, yeah, it is, but maybe they didn't want Jack to have to catch the bus by himself if he's only four. Maybe, maybe that's.
1:06:47 Speaker 04 That's a good point.
1:06:48 Speaker 03 I mean, it's a possibility, but the other thing that I don't understand is that the alarm went off at six and Malaya preemptively decided to report both kids absent from school because Lily had a bad cough. Yet she didn't even check on Lily or ask her how she felt. So to me, it seems puzzling that Malaya chose to laze around in bed all morning with Daniel and the baby. Instead of caring for the child that she decided was too sick to attend school. And it's also strange that Lily was apparently outside playing and laughing that morning with no mention of a bad cough.
1:07:30 Speaker 04 It, it is strange and I think that's one of the details that a lot of people have a problem with. The, the people that are discussing this and this has become one of those cases that has a huge community of people online that follow every single update, both factual and non-factual updates. Like one story that had stuck around since the beginning was this. People had claimed that the night before the kids went missing, that Thursday night, there was a huge drug party at the children's home. And that something must have had it happened at this drug party and the parents were trying to cover up. And now it sounds a little crazy, but that from the very beginning was like a part of the discussion. And when you read online about this case, people would be mentioning this drug party,
1:08:15 Speaker 04 was there meth at the party, you know, that sort of thing. But what it all came down to, and when people found the source of this party, what it was was somebody had made, um, somebody shared on Facebook a screenshot of a direct message exchange they had with somebody who lived in the area of the children's home. And in the messages that were, the screenshot showing these messages that were shared, that person said something like, I drove by there a few days ago and there was a couple of cars outside. Um, I don't know what that was about, you know, that was like all that was said, but somehow this, there was a few cars outside a couple of days ago, turned into, there was a bunch of cars there that night before and they were all doing drugs inside. Oh, God.
1:08:57 Speaker 04 So that, that's just, I tell that story because it's an example of how this one little detail, when sprinkled over like this ravenous quest for information on Facebook, can become a part of the story. And there's multiple times that things like that had happened, which is kind of scary and sad and, and maybe a part of the reason why it's happened so easily now. I, I'm sure a lot, the majority of your listeners are probably Canadians, so they know this, but for people who aren't in Canada, right now, our government is having a dispute with Meta, who own Facebook. And that dispute has led to, um, news sites not being able to have their articles shared on Facebook. As a result of that, the mainstream media, CBC or whatnot, their articles won't appear
1:09:42 Speaker 04 on Facebook, but Joe Blow's blog of nonsense, that can be shared far and wide. And I really see that playing into kind of the Miss or disinformation being shared about this case specifically on Facebook.
1:09:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, this whole meta situation with the government has been so incredibly disappointing and frustrating that we here in Canada can't share news articles from legitimate media organizations written by proper trained journalists and instead it's this proliferation of conspiracy theories and misinformation which has been responsible for a lot of the things that we're seeing going on in the world right now. But overall, it's such a tragedy.
1:10:31 Speaker 04 It is. And that's why, like what I've been doing on the Canadian Gothic series, I've done 12 episodes so far about Jack and Lily and I've avoided any of the speculative rumor mill stuff. I've just done episodes just covering like the factual developments, the stuff that often gets overlooked by the more salacious information. Like an example, one thing that I couldn't help but laugh at is somebody shared a photo, it was clearly edited. It's Daniel Martell with a fishing rod in a body of water and there's like alligators around him. Somebody shared that being like, have they checked Daniel's fishing site? Like they could have, he could have fed the kids to the alligators. But this is someone
1:11:14 Speaker 04 from, you know, God knows where, who doesn't realize that we don't have alligators in Nova Scotia. It's clearly like some kind of AI nonsense. But things like that get a lot of attention because it's so salacious. On my series, I've tried to just stick with, here's the facts, what could this possibly mean?
1:11:31 Speaker 03 Yeah. So is that everything that's up to date about the disappearance of Jack and Lilly Sullivan?
1:11:39 Speaker 04 That is the big information. There's a whole lot of other little pieces of the story, but what I gave you there was kind of the framework or the foundation of what happened, where are they looking, what information surfaced. But it's still, it's a complete mystery at this point. And there's, there's nothing that I left out that will point you to like, oh, that's what happened. Like this is. It it's kind of shocking and surprising that two siblings can completely vanish without leaving a trail and a four year old can't get far, a four and a six year old can't get far. And one thing that's always stuck in my mind as well is in the woods behind Jack
1:12:21 Speaker 04 and Lily's home, yeah, it's it's a thick dense woods and there are like lakes and swamps and stuff, but there's not running water. Like if there was a large river, let's say, that fed into the ocean, there could be an explanation for why they're not there. But even if they, two of them as well, one of them ends up in the water, the other one maybe would run back home or maybe get into the water to try to help them. And maybe that could be an explanation for both of them drowning, if that's what happened. But these are bodies of water that have been searched, cadaver dogs went by, it's not running water. So it it just in my mind, there's no explanation for why they wouldn't be found in the woods behind their home. And I don't think there's any chance they
1:13:03 Speaker 04 made it 40 kilometers away. Like my, my kids, when they were four, I could hardly get them to walk from one end to the mall to the other. And if I put them out in the woods, they would have just walked in circles screaming or something like, there's no way they'd walk in a straight line to get that far away. I just, I don't see it as a possibility that they wandered off that far. I don't think it's likely that the people close to the story are responsible because I feel like the police would have cracked the case by now. If it's an abduction, it's either a stranger abduction, which is incredibly unlikely and statistically improbable, but possible, or it could be an abduction by someone close to the children, maybe a distant relative or something. That may point some
1:13:48 Speaker 04 people to suspect the children's biological father, Cody Sullivan, who hasn't been in the children's lives. But he too has been investigated, spoke to police multiple times, and it seems that he's been ruled out as a suspect as well. So I have no explanation for this case. And maybe that is why I'm so like fixated on every little update, because it's such a mystery and it. It just seems like in 2025, we live in a world where this shouldn't be able to happen.
1:14:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, and especially since the police have asked for all the camera footage and everything else, it must be incredibly frustrating for their loved ones. And I, I hope that they receive answers as soon as possible.
1:14:30 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely. Answers as well as a bit of like redemption. Because in a lot of ways, everybody involved in this has been blamed multiple times from large groups of people on the internet. So there's, there's that too. I think Jack and Lily deserve justice or an explanation or to be found, but so does everybody else affected by this. And even broader than that, I think just people following the story, because the public interest in a case that involves two children disappearing is so incredibly high that people need to know how this could happen and what can be done to make sure it never happens again.
1:15:08 Speaker 03 The government of Nova Scotia is offering a reward of up to $150,000 for information deemed to be of investigative value to the search for the missing siblings. You can find more details in the show notes.
1:15:25 Speaker 03 So Jordan, for so many years, everyone has known of you as Jordan from the Nighttime Podcast, but you've recently rebranded. Can you tell me about that?
1:15:35 Speaker 04 Sure. On the 10th anniversary, which was the beginning of September, I dropped the name Nighttime and I'm now using the Canadian Gothic. And the reason is, is quite simple is, is for one, like when I started 10-ish years ago, I almost used the name Nighttime as a placeholder. And I never really liked it because it didn't explain what I, what kind of content I was covering. It didn't explain that I was specifically focusing on Canadian dark stories.
1:16:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:16:02 Speaker 04 Just nighttime. And what has happened is a few things. For one, there's this whole genre of podcasts that now exist that are specifically designed to put you to sleep.
1:16:11 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
1:16:12 Speaker 04 And many of them, for whatever reason, have night, nighttime, you know, that sort of thing in the title. So it kind of messes with how my show looks on paper without further explaining. It's this guy does Canadian crime and mysteries and dark stories. So there was that. So I wanted to separate myself from Listen to Me to Go to Sleep, but also like I wanted a name that said what I was covering. Canadian True Crime was already taken sadly, so I couldn't go there.
1:16:41 Speaker 03 The other thing too is that your show is not just crime.
1:16:45 Speaker 04 That's right. And I do more than just crime. The way I kind of describe my show is I'm covering Canadian crime, mysteries, the unusual, and basically dark stories. In a while back, I was toying with the idea of rebranding. I've probably been thinking about it for the last like four or five years. And I've always been like, I'm going to use the Canadian Gothic for something. I love that name. Someday I'll do it. And actually, you and I had talked about maybe trying to do like a weekly series called Canadian Gothic.
1:17:14 Speaker 03 Yeah. Yeah. And you would have done it for sure. But for me, it just ended up on that long list of things that I said I would do one day, get around to, but never actually end up doing anything. So I'm glad. I'm glad that you used it because it's gold.
1:17:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's right. Actually, when you asked that question, I forgot that you and I were going to use that name. It was going to be you and I and Jack Luna.
1:17:36 Speaker 03 Yes, Jack Luna from Dark Topic, another one of our OG podcast pals.
1:17:42 Speaker 04 Yeah. And but that didn't happen. And now I've used the Canadian Gothic for my show. And as I said, Canadian crime, mysteries, dark stories. I like to think of it, what I do, as something between like a late night talk radio and Unsolved Mysteries episode, like somewhere kind of in the middle of that is what I do.
1:18:03 Speaker 03 Yeah. And I know that you would never say it, but I want the listeners to know that you're kind of a big deal in Atlantic Canada.
1:18:10 Speaker 04 Oh, I would say it.
1:18:12 Speaker 04 I would. I'm kidding. I wouldn't say that. I what not a not a big deal. What I am is I've just been around a long time.
1:18:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:18:21 Speaker 04 And so when you go through like odd stories from Atlantic Canada's past, things will come up mainly like my series. I did episodes on the Halifax Glove Guy, which is this kind of urban legend folklore from my city of Halifax about this guy. It was this guy who's been since I lived here, twenty something years now, who's been driving around late at night, appearing something between like a taxi and an Uber. When you get in his car, you're offered tight fitting leather leather gloves that if you will try them on, he will drive you home. And the story is so bizarre that when I moved to Halifax, I never thought that
1:19:02 Speaker 04 that was real. I thought it was a bizarre exaggeration, but I decided to dig into that story on my show and found a whole bunch of bizarre things that led to CBC articles about the actual Glove Guy coming after me and everything else. So that was a weird blip in time.
1:19:21 Speaker 03 It was a very weird blip in time. Very interesting series, though. So Jordan, where can people find you if they want to listen to your podcast or watch your YouTube videos on on, you know, the Jack and Lilly Sullivan case and any of your other signature series? Where can they find you?
1:19:39 Speaker 04 The easiest way to find me is is search for the Canadian Gothic wherever you listen to Canadian true crime. The podcast version is is my ideal version. I do like, like you said, I like YouTube and video and all that sort of stuff, but all of that is watered down versions of the podcast. So search for the Canadian Gothic wherever you get Canadian true crime and you'll hear my 12 episodes covering Jack and Lily's disappearance as well as hundreds of other episodes covering Canadian crime, mysteries and unusual stories that will fit right into people who listen to your show. Although I will say I'm not nearly as professional as you are. So forgive me. And don't look bad at Christie for hanging out with me.
1:20:21 Speaker 03 I mean professionalism is a subjective thing, isn't it?
1:20:26 Speaker 04 That's that's a good point. It's a good point.
1:20:34 Speaker 03 Thanks for listening and special thanks to Jordan Bonaparte from the Canadian Gothic for joining us. You can find more information about everything we've been talking about in the show notes or visit canadiantruecrime.ca. The podcast donates monthly to those facing injustice. For the next few months, we're donating to the Sexual Assault Centre of Kingston, who are supporting 28 victim complainants involved in the ongoing sex trafficking trial of Michael Hamer of Kingston. More to come. Eric Crosby voiced the disclaimer. Our senior producer is Lindsay Eldridge. And the theme songs were composed by We Talk of Dreams.
1:21:16 Speaker 03 I'll be back very soon with another Canadian True Crime episode. See you then.
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