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 northwest 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.
Lilly and Jack Sullivan lived at this house in Lansdowne, N.S. In May, Daniel Martell, right, waited there with brother Justin for news of the search for the children.Chris Donovan/The Globe and Mail
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 dreamworld.
Lilly and Jack’s family say they played regularly in this patch of woods near their home, where children’s toys were still strewn about in the early days of the search.Steve Wadden/The Globe and Mail
Inside the trailer in Lansdowne, Jack and Lilly’s art was tacked up in the kitchen.Steve Wadden/The Globe and Mail
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.
Daniel says a child’s bootprint was found on the spot marked by this blue pipe, a few metres from the camper where his mother lives.Lindsay Jones/The Globe and Mail
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.
Police checked Earle Martell’s property, home to a cluttered cabin and old campers, for Jack and Lilly in the middle of the night on May 3.
Lindsay Jones/The Globe and Mail
Police also banged on the door of the home of the children’s paternal grandmother Belynda in Middle Musquodoboit, about half an hour from Lansdowne. They were looking to talk to her son, who had been living there for the last nine months after losing his roofing job. But Cody Sullivan hadn’t seen Jack and Lilly since he and Malehya separated three years ago – he’d cut ties after she filed for full custody of the children. Over the coming days, police returned twice more to interrogate him and take photos of vehicles.
Through the night, search and rescue volunteers combed the woods, and helicopters and drones that can detect body heat scanned overhead. Malehya was up too, texting with Belynda. “I have reason to believe they may have been taken by someone,” she wrote. “They should have found them by now if they were in the woods!”
The next morning Belynda set out to help search for her grandchildren. As she drove toward the trailer on Highway 289, past the trail of orange traffic cones, it hit her where she was headed. Over the last two years, Malehya had distanced herself from Belynda – she stopped bringing the children to visit, later explaining that Daniel was jealous and didn’t want her going there or giving out the address. The grandmother said she had never been invited to the house. Until she showed up to help in the search, Belynda didn’t know this was the home her grandchildren were living in – a home that she’d noticed multiple times on her way while driving to Halifax.
“Wow. Wow,” she says she thought, as she stepped inside to speak to Malehya. Everything she saw, from the junk-strewn yard to the cluttered kitchen, was the total opposite of the neat and tidy woman she used to know.
Even though she’d heard it once before, she needed to hear it again. What happened? She asked.
Malehya opened the low-rumbling sliding patio door in the kitchen, demonstrating how she assumed the children quietly left the home while she and Daniel were sleeping.
“Well, Malehya,” Belynda recalled saying, “You’re the mom. You know these kids better than anybody. So where do you feel they’d go? What would take their interest? What direction would they go?”
She had no idea.
Lansdowne Road, about a kilometre from Jack and Lilly’s home, is where police seized Lilly’s pink blanket, which has been sent for forensic testing. The roads around the children’s home wind past an array of rural properties, train tracks, a natural-gas pipeline and a small lake.
Steve Wadden/The Globe and Mail
That day, as search and rescue teams tramped through the woods, rolling ankles and plucking ticks from their skin, Malehya stood on the side of the highway in front of a local television camera.
“It’s been raining and they’re probably soaking wet, but with the sun today I’m hopeful they’re feeling warm,” she said, swallowing back tears. “We’re all filled with pain and sorrow because we just want them found. We want them home. Everyone loves them.”
She also took to Facebook, pleading for police to issue an Amber Alert, a national public alert to help locate abducted children. “I want my babies home! My children are not shy to strangers and will go with anyone. They don’t understand stranger danger!” she wrote on May 3.
Daniel also pushed for such an alert, telling The Globe that abduction is a possibility – something he said he tried to raise early on with police, but he said they looked at him like he was crazy.
Perhaps it’s because the home is so remote, where few travel or have reason to pass by. Also, Nova Scotia police require specific criteria to activate an Amber Alert, including a description of the child, abductor or vehicle, and reasonable grounds to believe an abduction has occurred. In this case, RCMP have repeatedly said they have no such evidence.
“I asked them to go to every airport, all the airports, and intake for different provinces, PEI and New Brunswick,” Daniel said, breaking down crying.
“They will go with anybody. Because they’re undiagnosed autistic they will go with anybody. As long as you offer them food or water, say ‘I’ll take you home to mom or dad’ and they’ll immediately get with them.”
While the search team continued their work from this base camp in Lansdowne Station, Malehya and Daniel Martell pressed police to issue an Amber Alert to look for tips from farther afield.Ron Ward/The Canadian Press
It was late afternoon that Saturday when Daniel and Malehya’s relatives began to turn on each other. In the dooryard of the trailer, a discussion about meth use in the home led one of Malehya’s family members to hurl an accusation – that Daniel must have something to do with the children’s disappearance. The charge ignited a blaze of angry words. Eventually, Daniel’s mother Janie ordered some of Malehya’s family members off her property.
Just up the road, Daniel and Malehya waited at the search and rescue headquarters for an update from police. It was around suppertime when officers pointed out on maps where searchers had been. Suddenly, Malehya said she wasn’t feeling well. She walked out with Meadow on her hip.
In the back of an ambulance, Malehya sobbed uncontrollably, her mother, registered nurse Cyndy Murray, at her side. Daniel pleaded with Malehya to speak to her alone but her mother stepped in front of him.
“Cyndy, get the fuck out of here,” Daniel recalled saying.
The women hustled to Cyndy’s car, strapped in Meadow and sped off down the dirt road. “I love you,” Daniel called out to his child through the rolled-up back window.
It was the last time the couple was together. After that, Malehya blocked Daniel from contacting her and later changed her Facebook status to single.
The searchers marked trees near the children’s house with tape as they fanned out through the woods.Steve Wadden/The Globe and Mail
Belynda emerged from the woods just before dark. It had been 36 hours since the children had disappeared and she was considering sleeping in her car, to begin searching again at first light. But then she learned Malehya had left Lansdowne, something that has troubled her ever since. “If she could leave,” Belynda said, her chin quivering in sorrow. “Then it meant she knew her kids weren’t coming back.”
Daniel was also upset that Malehya left. “I’ve been the only one there for them,” he sobbed in an interview. “She can’t control them. Only I can. They act out whenever she’s there. She always gets me to calm them down, or get them to stop fighting, or feed them, or get them up, and put them to bed every night. She was asking me to do everything. It just breaks my heart not to ever see everybody.”
The day before the children were reported missing, the Mounties say the children were observed in public with family members. It was the last time they were seen by anyone outside the home.
Daniel has said in an interview that the evening before the kids disappeared, everyone was home. He said he spent the evening working on the fence in the backyard – it was a night just like any other for the young children, he added, though he couldn’t remember what time they went to bed.
There is however at least one account of strange activity at the mobile home that night. RCMP spokesperson Corporal Carlie McCann confirmed that police received a tip on May 8 from a neighbour who described hearing a vehicle come and go from the mobile home throughout the night before the children were reported missing. “Investigators are continuing to review and assess more than six hundred tips from the public and follow up on over eight hundred tasks,” she wrote in an e-mail.
The neighbour spoke to The Globe and said they were working on a vehicle in their own yard when they heard the same loud, five-speed car come and go from the trailer about six times, from midnight to 5 a.m. After the children’s disappearance, the neighbour considered it important information and reported it to police. The Globe agreed to protect the identity of the neighbour because of concerns for their safety in the community.
Dozens of people, including some members of Jack and Lilly’s family, attended a candlelight vigil for the children outside the Stellarton detachment of the RCMP.
Ingrid Bulmer/The Globe and Mail
For the next five days, search and rescue teams pored over the area. On the sixth day of the children’s disappearance, police announced they were scaling back. It was unlikely, they said, that the children were still alive.
In the following weeks, searchers returned twice more. They zeroed in around the home and the natural gas pipeline, a clearcut trail of land that runs through the countryside, where a possible child-sized boot print was found. Lilly’s blanket was also nearby. Police divers scoured lakes. They drained the septic tank of the mobile home. And inspected four abandoned mineshafts in Lansdowne – a search that’s eerily familiar for locals.
In 2002, amateur mineral explorers discovered the remains of a man, who had disappeared 19 years earlier, in one of these old copper mines. Thirty-nine-year-old Alex Penney’s car was found abandoned on a dirt road in Lansdowne, months after his mysterious disappearance. It’s a chilling homicide that has never been solved, one that rattles around in the collective memories of the people who live here.
Police have said they plan to search more of these old mineshafts for the children. A provincial database shows five within several kilometres of the mobile home. Dozens more pepper the backwoods and rural highways of Pictou County.
Police have described the case as highly unusual. Most missing persons cases are resolved shortly after they’re reported to police. But the disappearance of Jack and Lilly has become a complex and intensive major crime investigation involving a “tremendous amount of careful, deliberate investigative work,” said RCMP Staff Sgt. Rob McCamon in an update last month. The Nova Scotia government offered up a $150,000 reward for information.
RCMP Staff Sgt. Rob McCamon updated the news media in May. He called Jack and Lilly’s case a complicated one requiring tremendous care.Ron Ward/The Canadian Press
So far the Mounties say they’ve drawn on units from other provinces, interrogated dozens of people, sought 10 judicial authorizations to seize records or search warrants, administered polygraph tests, took possession of electronic devices, viewed thousands of video files, and are awaiting forensic tests on items found during the search, including Lilly’s pink blanket.
Daniel initially told police and The Globe on May 5 that the pink blanket found in the woods did not belong to Lilly. But he later changed his story. In a subsequent interview, he suggested the blanket was planted – taken from his week-old garbage. He also claimed two of his sweaters mysteriously disappeared from his home after the kids went missing. He declined to elaborate further.
Behind the scenes, people’s concern for the children’s welfare had already raised red flags. A child protection supervisor in the nearby town of New Glasgow rushed to prepare a memo for Deputy Minister Craig Beaton about Jack and Lilly on the day the children disappeared, according to redacted briefing notes obtained by The Globe through Freedom of Information legislation.
Two weeks later, in mid-May, another memo about the children was prepared for senior staff in the province’s child welfare department. Opportunities and Social Development Minister Scott Armstrong, who also told The Globe he asked for more information about his department’s interaction with the children, has so far declined to discuss how the government responded to concerns about Jack and Lilly’s wellbeing prior to their disappearance.
What is known about Jack and Lilly’s interaction with child welfare authorities is that a social worker came to the trailer over concerns raised by the school several months before their disappearance to assess their home life.
Teachers and other professionals who work with children have a legal duty to report if they have reasonable grounds to suspect a child has, may have, is, or is about to suffer abuse, and home visits occur when there’s reason to be concerned about a child’s safety and care. Daniel, however, told The Globe the visit was related to the kids’ learning difficulties at school. He said the children were suspected of having autism and were scheduled to see a doctor the same month they vanished. He declined to answer further questions about the involvement of child protection staff in the kids’ lives.
Jack and Lilly attended Salt Springs Elementary, about a 20-minute bus ride from their home in Lansdowne. A child protection social worker, contacted through the school, paid a visit to the mobile home in the months before the disappearance.Steve Wadden/The Globe and Mail
From the outside, there were signs the children’s home life was strained. They were developmentally behind other children, and arrived at school grubby and without appropriate winter clothing, prompting staff to provide it for them, according to a school board employee with direct knowledge. The Globe is not identifying the source because they’re not authorized to disclose details about students.
Last December, Jack came to school with a black eye, according to a photo of him posted by his elementary school. The photo of the class trip on Dec. 13, 2024 – five months before he and his sister disappeared – shows him sitting next to other students in the forest with a green and purple bruise below his left eye.
Another photo shows a possible black eye and bruising on Jack’s face in a photo taken in September 2024, an injury that Daniel defended on social media, saying it was caused by Lilly.
Daniel did not respond to questions asking how Jack received the black eye in December, but in private Facebook messages that were shared with The Globe he acknowledged Jack had many black eyes.
“One time, Lilly punched him in the face,” he wrote.
He also said Lilly had a black eye when the children went missing – from an incident with a Tonka truck that occurred on May 1, the day before the children disappeared. “She pushed down on the truck and it swung up and hit in the face!!”
Salt Springs Elementary shared a Facebook photo of Jack on a field trip last Dec. 13. His stepfather said Jack had many black eyes, including one caused by his sister.Supplied
The family was under pressure – a confluence of financial woes left the couple turning to relatives for help. Like many lower-tier workers at the mill, Daniel had been cut back to one shift a week during the spring thaw, because of an annual ban on heavy logging trucks on soggy local roads. His car, off the road because it needed repairs he couldn’t afford, wasn’t drivable, and he had to rely on his uncle who also worked at the mill, to take him to work, or Malehya, whose maternal grandmother had recently helped her buy a white Nissan SUV.
Daniel’s father Earle said he bought the couple groceries and gas, and provided firewood to heat their home. Daniel, however, denied having money problems, and had claimed to friends that he was getting into investing and turning his life around after a divorce.
Other means of cash flow had also been cut off. In recent months, child support payments from Jack and Lilly’s biological father had stopped after he lost his job. Malehya’s monthly Canada Child Benefit cheque, or baby bonus – which under federal guidelines would be about $1,900 per month – was halted because Daniel hadn’t filed his taxes which were due by April 30.
The struggles didn’t end there. Malehya described Daniel as controlling and said she had wanted out, writing in a message to Belynda on June 15 that “I never wanted to stay there.”
Belynda wrote back, saying she wished Malehya would’ve reached out. “We would have done what we could to help.”
“I know,” Malehya responded, “My mom is saying the same thing.”
Cyndy, Malehya’s mother, declined to be interviewed.
After the children’s disappearance, Malehya also confided in her paternal grandmother, Connie Brooks, a member of Sipekne’katik First Nation. She described how Daniel would hold her down and take her phone. “He was having her, I don’t know what you call it, scared. She couldn’t go anywhere, do anything,” Connie said. “That’s what she told me and that’s what I told the detectives.”
When she asked her granddaughter about drug use in the home, she said Malehya told her that Daniel concealed a drug addiction for nearly the first year of their relationship.
Daniel did not respond to questions about these allegations, but he has insisted in interviews with The Globe that he’s never struggled with drugs and does not have a drug problem. Despite that, he has admitted to taking methamphetamines and “pretty much everything.” He said he recently started attending Narcotics Anonymous three times a week, and is taking online courses in anger management, depression, parenting, child protection, substance abuse, suicide and violent behaviour that are recognized by child protection officials. “I have to clear my name for CPS,” he said. “It’s best to do that.”
Without answers, theories abound. For some, maybe they’re a way to hold out hope, or to shift attention elsewhere.
There are those who believe the children are still alive – taken or hidden somewhere. One such rumour circulating in social media group chats is that Lilly and Jack were taken by one of Malehya’s relatives and are being held on a reserve.
The rumour prompted Sipekne’katik Chief Michelle Glasgow to respond on social media. “That whole dialogue was made up by a racist fool and anyone entertaining it is a racist fool,” she wrote in a text message that she posted to Facebook on July 10.
The vacuum of information about the missing kids has stoked a voracious demand for clues and conjecture, on social media and in the online true crime community.
One of the most popular online sources in the true crime amateur community is It’s A Criming Shame, a Vancouver-based YouTube channel, which has morphed into exclusively discussing the case. Its livestreams about Jack and Lilly have been viewed half a million times. For several hours multiple times a week, host Sunny Austin invites guests on the show to discuss the case and rants provocatively, calling out those who she disbelieves, in the case of Jack and Lilly. Daniel frequently pops up in her live chats “like a Whac-A-Mole,” she says. Belynda has also called in as a guest. Most recently, she presented text messages with Malehya, who when reached by phone, refused to verify whether the text messages were hers.
Malehya has also repeatedly declined to be interviewed by The Globe, saying police advised her not to speak to the media. She said she has put her faith 100 per cent in the authorities to find Lilly and Jack.
On the ground, the high-profile case has also conjured up other drama. Recently, a local online content creator arrived at the home of Malehya’s mother Cyndy under the auspices of buying a horse trailer. The man surreptitiously recorded a 45-minute interaction with her partner, Wade Paris, discussing the missing children and posted the video online.
Daniel says he’s frustrated with the accusations he faces from strangers about what happened to Jack and Lilly.Chris Donovan/The Globe and Mail
In interviews with The Globe, Daniel has said he had nothing to do with the children’s disappearance, and he said he has passed a polygraph test with police to prove it.
He lamented the stigma the case carries over into his everyday life. He’s on stress leave from the mill. People stare or give him dirty looks whenever he goes out in public. Recently, at a used car dealership, he said a salesman snatched a vehicle key from his hand and walked away when he realized he was talking to Lilly and Jack’s stepfather. His Facebook is filled with direct messages from strangers calling him a “child killer.” “Where are the bodies?” he said they ask every day.
But then a Facebook profile that The Globe has previously communicated with Daniel on also appears in social media chat groups frequently, offering up riddles and conjecture that the children were taken by someone they know and are being held prisoner. “As long as I remain the target the sick person or persons that have the kids may relax and make a mistake!! RCMP better capitalize on that,” the user wrote this week.
His mother Janie has said she also believes the children are still alive, because she says they have never gone into the woods by themselves or wandered off. A self-described hermit, it took her more than two months to speak publicly – doing an interview for CBC and releasing voice memos in a public social media chat. She said she heard the children playing in the backyard from inside her camper on the morning they disappeared, and she too believes someone took them.
In Malehya’s Mi’kmaq community of Sipekne’katik, her father Henry Brooks is hopeful his grandchildren will be found. He says the last time he spoke with the children, Jack told him he loved him. “It’s weighing heavy on me,” he said. “Really heavy.”
At her home in Middle Musquodoboit, Belynda spends her days alternately tending her sprawling back garden, and advocating for her missing grandchildren. She appears on YouTube livestreams and in social media chats – picking up breadcrumbs along the way that she hopes will lead to Jack and Lilly.
In her blue and white kitchen, where Jack once crawled across the laminate floor, and Lilly hammed it up in her gardening hats and old eyeglasses, she is resigned to a grim reality.
“I think somebody there must know what happened,” she said about the mobile home in Lansdowne.
“I don’t believe my grandchildren are alive. But to not get answers, it’s like no, no – there’s answers out there. Two kids don’t just disappear in the morning and nobody knows nothing. So, if they don’t find answers outside that home, then the answers are inside that home.”
In hindsight, she says she wishes she would’ve pushed harder to see the kids, to see Lilly on her birthday in March. Looking at photos of the children from the past two years, she noticed they looked thin, possibly malnourished with dry cracked lips – something she says she might’ve picked up on had she seen them in person. And it makes her wonder about the other adults in their lives. She recently learned others had concerns about the children’s safety in the home. She also wants to know what child protection social workers knew prior to Jack and Lilly’s disappearance – whether they suspected the children were abused and what was being done about it.
“I hate to say it but every one of us failed them,” Belynda said. “We all failed these kids.”
Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail