Mystery Monday: The Lost Boys of Pickering

hello everybody and welcome back to my channel I'm excited because I'm bringing mystery Monday back I mean at least for this week I don't wanna make promises going forward because you know y'all will hold me to it but at least for this week we are bringing mystery Monday back we haven't done mystery Monday on this channel in a long long time so I am pumped about it today we're talking about a very bizarre case one that I have found myself thinking about and going over the details trying to figure out an actual reasonable explanation for why this could have happened so I'm really really glad to be sharing it with you guys because I know in the comments section you're gonna give me your insights your opinion and maybe we can figure this out together the case I'm talking about is called The Lost Boys of Pickering and it is a case where six teenage boys essentially vanished into thin air in 1995 and there has been no sign of them since well we get started I want to have a word from our 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Pickering is a city that's located in southern Ontario Canada about 30 miles east of Toronto according to the Durham Region property search website Pickering is a picturesque town nestled along the northern shore of Lake Ontario and it offers residents scenery amenities and a strong sense of community because of its close location to Toronto many people who live there enjoy the benefits of working in a big city while also being able to enjoy a small-town living experience although some choose to commute to Toronto for work there are opportunities closer to home such as the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station which is the city's largest single employer one of the best attributes of the town besides being the birthplace of Shawn Mendes is beautiful Frenchman's Bay which offers many activities for its residents along with breathtaking views of Lake Ontario if you're a teenager in Pickering Frenchman's Bay would be the place you'd meet up with your friends to hang out by the water maybe grab some poutine from a food truck maybe do some shopping at one of the many stores lining the Main Street area maybe you would even go there after the Sun sets for some shenanigans that is exactly what six teenage boys decided to do on March 17th 1995 these six boys were 17 year old Jay Boyle Michael Cummins Jamie LaFave Robby rumbled 16 year old Danny Higgins and 18 year old Chad Smith five of these boys attended a Spring Break basement party and there's about 50 people there 50 other people and there was also a good amount of booze and weed and around 12:30 in the morning witnesses claimed that the boys said they were going to go goof around at a local marina and they'd be back before the Sun rose on the way to the marina they stopped to the house of Danny Higgins to pick him up this was the last time anyone would see any of these teenage boys and to this day what happened to them remains a mystery as much as I wish I could tell you that I know a lot about these young men I don't I usually like to give you guys a good idea of who these people are who these people are that we talk about in these videos specifically because even though it sounds like I'm telling you a story I'm talking about actual people who had actual lives and families they liked certain types of music they took part in different hobbies they had specific dreams and hopes they had pasts and childhoods and they had plans for the future before they became subjects of this channel but for some reason I think because this case wasn't hugely publicized there's a lack of information about these six boys personally so I'm gonna share with you what I know about one of them Jay Boyle Jay was 17 years old he was an avid baseball player who lived with his girlfriend Monica and their new baby daughter Jay also had a family parents and four sisters who have not stopped looking for him till this day they're not alone in their search however as a man named ricketts a private investigator was so interested in this case he decided to help them figure out what happened to their brother and son I was lucky enough to be able to speak with Bruce and get some files and information and it cleared up a lot of questions that I had about this case with Bruce's help I am able to piece together the last moments of the boys movements and investigate some of the theories of what may have happened to them after they vanished into thin air when the boys didn't return to the party two of their girlfriends called the police and reported them missing according to a report from the Durham Regional Police it appears that their first point of contact at the police department was an officer James Gilliam and this man didn't appear to be overly concerned about the absence of these boys he told the girlfriends to call the mothers of the boys and then have them file a report whether it was at that time that night or the next morning in this report he wrote quote since no specific locations were known to look for the boys I couldn't do much for them he also claimed that he believed a person who he had spoken to was not being completely truthful and he didn't believe that the boys were in any danger this report however was not written on March 17th the day they went missing it was only written a week later on March 23rd after officer Gilliam was requested to do so by a superior there's a few problems with a report like this being written a week after first receiving information although police officers are trained to pay attention to details and to have a memory for these things they're still only human and human memory is notoriously unreliable therefore writing a report several days or a week after taking the call could result in things being forgotten or remembered incorrectly either way that's what happened and that on its own it's not too suspicious it's pretty common especially in the past year it's not so common now but for police to say oh give it a couple hours especially if it's a young kid or a teenager like they're probably not missing they're probably fine probably just had a little too much to drink maybe they're sleeping it off we've seen this multiple times before with the kanika Jenkins case that's the one that comes to my mind at this point we can't blame the police department too much I suppose you have six teenage boys who went to a party they were drinking they said they were gonna go out and have some fun and then they never returned to the party this could mean they had a little too much to drink went home or crashed somewhere to sleep it off it could mean they weren't done with whatever activity they've gotten themselves into however when the boys still had not returned home by the next day their disappearance was taken a bit more seriously by 2:00 p.m. on Saturday the 18th a search had begun and the Durham Police were joined by the Metro Toronto Police Marine unit and the Coast Guard now keep in mind this is Saturday at around 2 p.m. so these kids have been missing for quite a while at this point they also brought in a helicopter and a plane from the air sea rescue unit at Canadian Forces Base Trenton additionally civilians with their own boats and planes took part in search but there was no sign of the six boys this search went on for two days until March 20th the investigation produced very few leads one of the first pieces of information discovered in the early days was an alleged surveillance tape captured by a camera at East Shore marina in Frenchman's Bay this camera captured three of the six boys allegedly Michael Jamie and Robbie entering and taking beer out of a boat docked at the marina the next day two water vessels were reported missing from two separate marinas a 14-foot imitation Boston Whaler and a three-wheel pedal boat also described as a water tricycle it's worth noting there's no video evidence of any of the six boys physically taking this boat or water tricycle and the boat that three of them were seen taking beer out of was not the Boston Whaler that was reported missing the next day additionally two year round boat dwellers reported hearing the sound of boat engines around 3:00 a.m. but let's talk about these two vessels quickly before we move on a Boston Whaler is typically known as an unsinkable boat due to the foam core construction it said that the Whaler will remain afloat even when sawed completely in half they're also said to remain afloat when completely full of water now it's true the boat that was missing believed to have been taken by these boys was an image not a genuine Boston Whaler however since it was an imitation it would have been built most likely to contain a foam core and mimic the real Boston Whaler and it would still be tougher to sink or capsize than an average boat that didn't include that foam core now a water tricycle is basically exactly what it sounds like it looks like a big water bike it's a bike with three buoyant wheels that allow you to pedal through the water I've never been on one myself but I really really want to now because they look awesome but based on my absolutely non expert opinion I also think that this this water vehicle would be incredibly hard to capsize or to have it sink because it's just a big big water bike it's very wide at least I feel like it would be difficult to capsize on Lake Ontario maybe if you were in the ocean and you got hit with a massive 10-foot wave you could definitely knock that thing over pretty quickly but Lake Ontario is a different story additionally even though it was the middle of March and it was very cold there weren't huge winds or any storm or anything crazy like that going on with the weather so according to what the police believed the six teens took these two vessels and they traveled from Frenchman's Bay into Lake Ontario but because they were drunk or they encountered some trouble they capsized the boat and the water tricycle and went into the water it was the middle of March like I said Lake Ontario gets very very cold so within minutes they would have succumbed to hypothermia and died and at first glance this does seem like the most obvious theory however there's many more factors to take into consideration before we make our decision on whether or not that feels plausible first there's no actual proof or evidence that the six boys took either of these water vehicles the only thing that connects the Lost Boys of Pickering to the boat in the water tricycle is that they all happen to vanish on the same night and although that may seem like a strong connection it's still only circumstantial it can easily have just been the owners of the boat or the tricycle or both wanting to collect insurance money and using the disappearance of the boys to do so I'm not saying that's what happened but I am saying that it's possible either one or both of those water vessels had a thing to do with the Lost Boys of Pickering additionally as I said the lake was fairly calm that evening as calm as Lake Ontario gets what would have caused six boys who most likely had been on boats and water vehicles before in their lives to suddenly all go into the water now if you told me that a single guy one guy took his boat out onto the lake in the middle of the night and never came back it would be easier to believe that something had happened to cause him to go into the water and drown but six people it's a lot harder to believe they would have all had to have gone into the water around the same time in order for this to have taken place and yet they were believed to have been separated on different water vessels so how does something like this even happen what's even more mysterious is nothing was ever found not the boat or the tricycle nor any of the boys bodies are belongings nothing as you get deeper into this case the simple explanation of them all going into the water and drowning seems a lot harder to swallow something was found that was believed to have been from the imitation of Boston Whaler that was taken from the harbor on March 29th in orange gascan was found floating upside down at the shore across the lake at Wilson New York writing on the tank was in both English and French so the American officials contacted the Durham Regional Police and they had the tank sent there now apparently this tank had some sort of like indentation in it that matched the one that had been on the boat that went missing so they said okay this this gas tank belongs to the boat that went missing with the boys but what's strange about this is that Wilson New York is directly across the lake from Pickering almost a straight shot due to the winds and the currents on the night that the boys went missing there's really no way that the gas can would have floated directly across it would have been pulled further east having it wash up closer to Rochester in New York which is where I live a worker at the marina who had been in the missing boat said that the gas tank would have been attached to the boat by the gas line and it would have had to have been disconnected somehow either by a person or by the boat encountering some kind of trouble additional the boat only had enough gas to get these boys about 25 miles from where they started and the gas can ended up 123 miles away directly across the lake as I previously stated nothing else from the boat or water tricycle have ever been recovered now it is possible that the gas can could have washed up at that location that it did if the boys had taken the boat west towards Toronto and I suppose they could have encountered some trouble on the way and something could have happened to the boat but they really wouldn't have had enough gas to get them as far away from Pickering for the gas can to have landed in Wilson now this water cycle this huge water tricycle it should not have sunk unless it's somehow had gotten holes in it and filled with water the immitation Boston Whaler was also reported to have been in quote rough condition and there was a pin sized hole in the bottom as well as a cracked backseat but like I said that boat was built with a styrofoam core which still would have made it tough to sink or capsize I mean I've seen videos where they take it an actual legitimate Boston Whaler inside in half and the boat still floats so the trail essentially went cold and although the case was left open it wasn't really being investigated anymore and that's when Bruce pickets began looking into it and discovered some rather glaring inconsistencies in the investigation now like I said Bruce is a private investigator who specializes in cold cases and he found this one just irresistible there's something about it he was drawn to he came on to the case in 2012 hoping to find some new leads using his excellent investigative skills we can now launch into the theories portion and try to figure out what might have happened to these boys okay theory one this is pretty much what the the police say happened something happened out on that dark Lake the the water vessels they were on capsized or they all went overboard in drowned once again although this is the easiest theory to believe it's very hard to swallow what would have happened to cause them all to go into the water at or around the same time especially if they were on two separate vessels even if one of them had accidentally fallen in it's hard to believe the other five would have all jumped in after him Bruce believes that they could have all been on the boat and that one boy fell in and the other five moved towards him to catch him which threw the board off-balance and caused them all to fall in the water but if this happened even with the water being cold wouldn't they have been able to quickly grab back onto the boat and climb in they could have been severely under the influence of alcohol which may have lowered their reaction time but I feel that a shocking dose of cold Lake Ontario would have surely sobered them up enough to realize they need to get back onto that boat quickly and if this is what happened where did the boat and water cycle go let's say these boys took out two separate vessels three of them in the boat three of them on that water tricycle and then they met somewhere and then they all climbed onto the boats if they'd fallen overboard then the boat and the water tricycle would still be floating around somewhere right and they would wash up or be found the situation we have here assuming that they all six went out together but on two separate vessels something would have had to have happened to the boat and the water tricycle to cause them both to sink as well as six people to fall into the water and drowned what happened I mean we're not talking about the middle of the Atlantic Ocean here this is Lake Ontario it can get rough is very cold but I'm not sure what could have happened to the boat and the water tricycle at the same time and to all six boys at the same time let me know what you think a lake ontario is the smallest of the five Great Lakes positioned at the base of Niagara Falls and bordered by Ontario Canada to the north and New York to the south the lake has a mean depth of 283 feet and it can be as deep as 802 feet in some places so it's not terribly deep as far as lakes go however according to experts it wouldn't take more than an hour or two for even a strong swimmer to succumb type-o thermia in a recent study ten young strong and experienced swimmers were asked to swim in water that was as cold as Lake Ontario for most of them the maximum amount of time they were able to continue swimming was just one or two minutes and many of them had to be pulled out from the water after reporting they'd lost their sense of direction some of them said they couldn't even lift or move their arms and legs anymore they claimed they had trouble been keeping their heads above water not only were their physical abilities altered but their mental ones too according to bar buyers of the Life Saving Society someone who falls overboard may be so shocked by the cold temperatures of the water they would open their mouth like you do when you're shocked you know like and swallow water reports from the boat and the water tricycle that were taken showed that no life jackets were aboard either vessel however according to dr. Christopher Milroy of the University of Ottawa once a body drowns it will sink and then rise again a few days later as the composition occurs now this may be delayed if the body gets snagged on something in the lake such as branches or rocks but the body should resurface and this is kind of my problem with the case six boys go in the water and not one of them ever comes back up not their baseball caps they were wearing no clothes no shoes nothing even if six people could follow the boat and drowned and all their bodies got caught on rocks or branches or something to keep them from resurfacing wouldn't a shoe have come off or a head or something wouldn't something have floated to the surface by now now in April 10th 1998 three years later two sets of human remains were recovered from the Niagara River near the intake channel four sir Adam back hydro generating station in Niagara Falls one set of remains was just bones but the second set is what we're interested in the purposes of this case because some of the clothes were still intact the report from law enforcement officials who were first on scene described the clothing as red levi-strauss denim jeans with a size 32 waist and a 31 inseam a dark brown belt white athletic socks with a red white and blue stripe and a black wallet that was empty now according to Jay Boyles mother Patricia before her son went missing she purchased him two pair of Levi's jeans one pair was green and the other was red on the day he went missing Jay was wearing this pair of jeans he's pictured here wearing this pair of jeans so we know for a fact we have evidence that he owns a pair of red Levi's jeans and when his sister was shown a picture of the belt she said looked like J's belt at first these two cases were not connected but eventually the discovery of these remains did come to the attention of J's family and Bruce Ricketts and they requested that the Durham police investigate to see if these remains could possibly be the missing boy detective Sheridan of the Durham Regional Police refused to pursue the lead claiming that the cost would be too high and he didn't believe that a body which started in Lake Ontario could end up in the Niagara River the only problem is the police had no idea where J and his friends went into the water if they even did at all there is no proof or evidence that those six boys drowned in the lake that night so J's family offered to pay for the DNA testing and Ricketts sent a request for information to the Niagara police on December 16th of 2013 now according to Ricketts he has never had such trouble obtaining information from a police department as he did at this point with the Niagara Police truthfully it's not as easy in Canada as it is in the u.s. to gain police files through the Freedom of Information Act but it's still pretty much unheard of to have to jump through as many hoops as Ricketts was asked to jump through in order to get these remains so they could be tested now I'll read Ricketts exact words when talking about this he said quote the case numbers used were OPP case numbers as those were the only identifiers 's available to this investigator at that time OPP stands for Ontario Provincial Police the description of the case specified date and location of the unidentified remains the response to this ATI contained the following statement this request is an OPP matter and was refused this investigator contacted the OPP missing persons unit and was told that the OPP case number was merely an identifier for their database and that the case was indeed owned by NR P and our P stands for the Niagara Regional Police the contact also provided the NRP case number which was used to refile the ACI request on 13 January 2014 this second request was also refused because as was stated by a foi officer at an RP in a telephone conversation on January 29th two in 14 the request was not accompanied by notarized ID there is no requirement in the municipal Freedom of Information and protection of Privacy Act of the province of Ontario to provide notarized ID when requesting ATI files it is the opinion of this investigator that an RP s two refusals are a form of obstructionism okay so basically he asked for the information and they said this is in our case he got the NRP case number from the OPP and requested it again but he was denied again because it didn't include two forms a photo ID that were notarized even though this isn't a requirement when he finally did get the records they were heavily redacted names places dates even full paragraphs of testimony were blacked out it seems strange that a missing-persons case would require so much caution and security I just want to clarify really could cuz there's a lot of acronyms that are being used the case happened the six boys went missing in the the Durham Region so they went missing and Pickering but the remains that were not connected to the six boys at first they were found in the Niagara region so there's two different jurisdictions here but any information that Ricketts got from the Durham Police or the Niagara police was very redacted and very secretive and he basically had to pull teeth to get it but finally they were able to get the red pants and the remains over to the Toronto coroner for testing and rickets in the family were called in for a meeting which he described as bizarre they claimed that there wasn't enough biological evidence to do DNA testing on and that the pants had been incorrectly described in the police report they were not read genes after all they were orange pants made from like a lighter material with a waterproof and flame-retardant chemical or coating on them rickets was not even allowed to see the pants and a comment was made during this meeting that was not included in the minutes that were sent to him later the coroner's office claimed it had taken such a long time to do the testing because the Niagara police had misplaced the evidence box that contained the remains and pants once again I will read directly to you from Bruce's words to explain to you why this might be an issue in the chain of custody of evidence he said quote the evidence in this case consisted of one or more bones red pants a belt some socks and a wallet with no contents the evidence was taken into custody by an RPS and 17 days later was sent to Hamilton General Hospital for autopsy here is where things start to go wrong following autopsy was the evidence retained at the hospital or returned to an RP s if retained at the hospital where was it stored was it under lock and key who had control over the storage area if the evidence was returned to an R PS who picked it up at the hospital and brought it to the NRP s office where did an RPS store it was it under lock and key did he remain in one place between the period 1998 in 2014 when it was shipped to the Ontario corner so basically what what Bruce is saying here is where was this evidence between the time when it was found in 1998 and 2014 when we were finally able to get it to the coroner for DNA testing where was it who had it who had access to it according to the Niagara Police it had been sent to the hospital to have an autopsy done but there's no there's no paper trail after that to say what happened to it after the autopsy was done now Jays sister Amanda Boyle was told that the evidence had been misplaced during some renovations at the NRP s the Niagara Police and this was why I DNA testing had been delayed because they couldn't find the evidence that they needed to test but in an email to Ricketts in July of 2017 detective staff sergeant Dan Savoy stated that the evidence was kept at the Hamilton General Hospital once the autopsy was complete and to his understanding that's where it stayed until it was sent to the Ontario coroner in 2014 that leaves 16 years where it was allegedly at the hospital but the coroner's office told the family that it had been misplaced when there was renovations happening at the NRP s the Niagara Police there's no paperwork to show where it was where it traveled who had access to it I guess the point of all of this is how do we know the same pants which were recovered in 1998 are the ones that were tested in 2014 according to the initial report the person who described the pants their remains were found said that they were read at denim Levi's but the pants the coroner got were an orange lighter fabric not jeans at all this investigator whose name and badge number has been redacted in the files would have had to have handled this material in order to get the waist and inseam measurements so how would he or she have mistaken orange lightweight pants for red denim Levi's even going so far as to use the words Levi Strauss to describe them as if he saw this on a label this leaves us with only a couple of options the evidence was either incorrectly described in 1998 or lost between 1998 and 2014 and replaced with other pants when sent to the coroner eventually the family was able to put enough pressure on the coroner to do the DNA testing on the unidentified remains using Jays umbilical cord from when he was born as a point of reference for DNA but then the lab told Jays mother that the results were negative this was not her son but this is confusing right because at first they said they didn't have enough material enough biological material to even test and then they did test it and said that their remains weren't Jay it's all very questionable and it seems due to the extremely redacted reports there may be something to hide here allegedly not saying there is not saying anybody did anything wrong just allegedly someone might have something to hide in a situation such as this additionally that surveillance video which showed three of the six boys at the marina that night taking beer from the boat it appears to have vanished now it does seem like it existed at one time the families did see it initially they had to so they'd be able to identify three of the boys that were at the marina but when an FOI a request is done port now zero results come up the video appears to have never existed at least there's no record of an existing so foi a is Freedom of Information Act and this is a tool that investigators can use when they're looking into a case they can request files whatever the police departments have on a certain case but when Bruce rickets asked to see this tape or two you don't get a copy of it so we could watch it they came back with zero results like it never existed so assuming it did exist at one point because people did see it the families saw it since that happened the tape just went missing either lost or purposely lost finally I want to talk about a company called ocean scan systems in Belleville Ontario this is a company that uses side scan technology to look for shipwrecks and they were contracted by the Durham Police Department to do a scan of Lake Ontario near Pickering but just before it was planned to happen the Durham PD changed their minds and cancelled the contract why something interesting to note as well is that while the Royal Canadian Air Force had planes and helicopters in the air when they were searching for the boys initially one of the planes noticed a boat in the lake just under the surface not visible from land but able to be seen from the air this sighting was never followed up on by the police department as far as Ricketts can tell from the reports and when he contacted the Royal Canadian Air Force to see if he get their logs they said you know they no longer had them it was a long time ago now if the boys had been on a boat together and for some reason the boats sink completely by the time they had planes and helicopters looking for the six boys that boat would not have been completely sunk to the bottom of the lake yet it still would have been just under the surface you know probably sinking slowly and it would have been visible from a plane so why if the the Royal Canadian Air Forces planes saw this boat under the surface and gave the the Durham PD the location allegedly why was it never followed up on especially if the police claimed that they believe these boys drowned and went down with the boat another theory has to do with a potential drug connection in 1995 the Pickering area had an issue with drugs people would use the lake to transport these drugs back and forth between Canada and the United States from what I can tell in my research it seems to still be happening in that area I'm sure it is but in 1999 a disciplinary hearing was held for a man named Martin Lewis Hungerford and this man Martin Hungerford was a teacher and guidance slur at the dr. Robert Thornton public school in Whitby now is seen that Hungerford was pretty involved in the drug culture in the Durham Region he even had a nickname like a street nickname they called him the teacher although he had a criminal record dating back to 1980 which included possession of narcotics in 1995 the same year that the six boys went missing this man did not lose his license until 1997 when it appears they found him in a room that he rented from a boardinghouse with a lot of cash and a lot of coke onto the bed now he claimed that he didn't know where the drugs came from of course I mean what do you what do you expect him to say yeah that's all my coke but I do the same thing back in the day in high school you know I'd have like a pack of cigarettes in my bag and then my mom would be like whose cigarettes are those that I'd blame like my friend I believe those are Lindsay's she wants me to hold them for her so her parents don't find them deny deny deny that's that's the way you do it but he was sentenced to seven years in prison what happened to Hungerford after we don't know since his records had been sealed now in Canada they have something called a record suspension and I'm not Canadian so it's very confusing to me hopefully some of my Canadian subscribers out there can help me out so according to the Government of Canada website a record suspension allows people who were convicted of a criminal offense but have completed their sentence and demonstrated that they are law-abiding citizens for a prescribed number of years to have their criminal record kept separate and apart from other criminal records a record suspension removes a person's criminal record from the Canadian police Information Center database this means that a search of CPIC will not show that the individual has a criminal record or a record suspension this helps them access employment and educational opportunities and to reintegrate into society so what it sounds like to me is you go to jail for a crime you serve your time and you behave yourself and then you show that like you're still a good person and they're like okay clean slate clean slate right you don't have a criminal record anymore so this guy technically could have gone and become a teacher again which is terrifying how do you guys feel about that how do you guys in Canada feel about that what's interesting though is three of the six boys attended the school where Hungerford was a teacher and account flare but two of them had dropped out one of the requirements of that school before allowing a student to leave is that they must meet with the guidance counselor beforehand which I assume is for the purposes of the guidance counselor making sure this is what student really wants helping them you know talk about employment opportunities what they can do once they're out of school I'm sure that's the benefit of it that's what he's supposed to be doing but it leads us to realizing that Hungerford would have had contact with at least two of these boys at one point recently before they went missing so is it possible that Hungerford was using his position at the school where he was supposed to be a guidance counselor he's supposed to guide and counsel students that are talking about dropping out of school but was he using that position to possibly recruit students to either work for him or with him maybe their affiliation with this enterprise caused them to go to the marina that day to meet somebody to meet him to make a drop to get paid whatever I don't know drug lingo whatever they do maybe they were going to the marina that night to do something for their job and maybe they met foul play there maybe they met somebody they weren't supposed to maybe they weren't even involved with Hungerford and whatever nefarious deeds he was up to it's possible that just being there at that place so late might have brought them right into the middle of something else drug-related maybe they saw something that they weren't supposed to have seen another theory is that they were out on the lake but since it was the middle of the night and it was dark a passing freight boat ran into them so a lake freighter is huge okay even though they refer to as boats they would more accurately be described as ships these are large vessels and they carry bulk cargoes of materials such as limestone iron ore grain coal or salts from the mines and the fields of the Upper Great Lakes area to the cities to the east in the dark it's likely that if the boys were in this this small Boston Whaler they would have gone on scene however a search of the shipping records for this time and place showed that no large vessels were scheduled to be going through that area at that time is it possible that one was there maybe off the schedule maybe off the books it's possible but we don't know if a freighter that large hits their boat and their water tricycle I do believe it would have most likely just demolished both of those those water vessels and and a lot of that would have sunk and maybe then we wouldn't have found anything from the water tricycle or the boat once again this is just speculation because due to whatever records they have no large freighters were there at that time another theory is that the six boys purposely went away that night knowing they were never coming back they landed in the US and started new lives there was I witness sightings of them at Q beach in Toronto in order to have gone to that area they would have needed more gasoline since remember they only had enough to get 25 miles but as far as we can tell the police never investigated at the Pickering marinas or the marinas along the way to Toronto to discover if anyone had reported gas being stolen there was also a sighting of a Chad Smith right in Pickering a passing motorist whose name has been redacted of course she claims she saw him walking in the direction of his mother's house and he smiled at her as she was driving now this happened on March 17th at approximately 11:50 a.m. later this witness visited Chad's mother and remarked that she'd seen him and Chad's mother claimed she'd been out of town all day but when she returned home she felt someone had been in the house and that things were out of place another person who knew Jamie Lefevre claims that she saw him at a Burger King off i-90 in Clarence New York this person was from Toronto and claimed that the boy they saw resembled Jamie greatly and he was wearing converse running shoes just as Jamie had on the day he disappeared now usually I don't put a lot of stock in eyewitness accounts especially when the case is highly publicized you're bound to get false sightings from very public cases for a lot of reasons a person wanting attention or just seeing the face of a missing person on another person because you've been following the case so closely we saw this with Madeleine McCann a lot a lot of people all over the world claimed they saw Madeleine McCann and I do believe it was because they were watching the TV and watching the case unfold and seeing her picture everywhere so they just started to see her face on every little blonde girl that passed by however this case really didn't get a lot of publicity so the eyewitness sightings do make me wonder however J's family is understandably unwilling to believe this theory they know Jay loved his family his baby daughter he'd never leave them willingly he was described as very loyal to those he cared about his mother Patricia said that Jay was funny outgoing but more importantly he loved his family and he'd stick up for his friends his sister Siobhan was just 12 years old when he disappeared she doesn't believe her brother would abandon them or his daughter who's now a young woman in her 20s Jays girlfriend made sure that their daughter always had pictures of Jay in her room and knew who her father was and every year they go to the beach on his birthday to remember him to talk about him to keep him alive in their memories another sister of Jays Amanda was 15 in 1995 and she remembered that her brother had friends in Toronto and he'd sometimes go there but he always let them know he always kept in touch Jays family also wants to know why the video at the marina only showed three boys not all six if they were supposedly all together why weren't they all there on that video I suppose the other three could have been at another marina stealing the water tricycle but then where do they meet up after how did they arrange that there's a lot of unanswered questions and there's also a lot that just doesn't add up now sergeant Steven Henkel who was the former head of the Toronto Police dive team and who lectures on underwater forensics thinks that if the bodies of the six boys had sink deep enough and it was cold enough the bodies would never be able to build the gases necessary for decomposition the gases that would inevitably bring them to the surface even in the warmer months between April and July the deeper water offshore would remain freezing he believes that if they did go in the water and sink they're most likely at the bottom of the lake still well preserved but there's just too much area to cover to search for them and without knowing where they went down it would truly be a needle in a haystack situation so was this an accident or did the boys meet with foul play are they forever law to Lake Ontario or are they living normal lives somewhere in Canada or the US Michael Cummins mother remembered the night her son left for the party he said goodbye to her in a way he never had before he took off his gold chain which had four small charms on it a small horn his initials and Eagle and the words I love you he handed this necklace to his mother and said that she should wear it she said quote after all that's happened I thought it was planned because why would he take off his charms and tell me to keep them and wear them I can't even imagine how his mother felt when he disappeared and she remembered her last interaction with him but sometimes in the aftermath of a tragedy we can look back and interpret things in ways we might not have had the day and night gone normally maybe Michael wanted her to keep them safe as he knew he'd be drinking that night and he didn't want to risk like losing or breaking his chain or having it stolen either way these families have no closure the case is still considered open even though the police say that they believe the boys encountered some trouble out on the lake and that their boat sank and they drowned Jays daughter grew into a child who took her first steps learn to talk and walk without her father there she went to her first day of kindergarten without her father there to proudly look on take pictures she went to high school dances without her father there to threaten her date with bodily harm she graduated from high school without her father there to wipe away his tears before anyone saw them six teenage boys vanished without a trace and they left people behind who haven't forgotten them for 25 years who haven't stopped missing them a tragedy like this doesn't just affect those who are missing but everyone in their orbits everyone they cared about who cared about them even the news that these boys did fall into the water and drown would be better than not knowing it all which is why I don't understand why a more thorough search and investigation wasn't done and why information requests have been answered by reports that have been so heavily redacted they're barely readable and now I hand it over to you I mean this is a crazy case I don't even know what I think about it what I can tell you is I don't think it was as simple as they just went out on this boat in this water tricycle and fell into the water and drowned because nothing has ever turned up from this boat this water tricycle or any of these six boys not a thing besides that one gas tank which to be fair I don't even think you can prove came from that exact boat bruce rickets told me and i'm trying to remember exactly what he said but apparently the marina that the water tricycle was allegedly taken from has a sister marina right across lake ontario at wilson new york so it's possible that that gas tank could have just come from the canadian marina that has a sister marina in wilson new york by the same name i believe he even said it's possible that that gas tank it didn't come or that gas can didn't come from the boat at all that that was missing there's so much evidence here that is being used to determine that these kids fell in the water and drowned that's not really evidence it's it's simply circumstantial so what do you guys think do you think that they just drowned something crazy happened on the lake and a boat in a water tricycle and six kids are gone vanished do you think that there was some sort of drug activity involved that they got themselves mixed up into something that that caused them to meet with foul play do you think that they just wanted to start new lives do you think they could have possibly been in that boat and gotten hit by a lake freighter I mean to me that's more plausible than them just falling in and everything vanishing do you think they sailed into a different dimension it was it aliens let me know what you guys think in the comment section as always and I will be in there talking to you and letting you know what I think about your opinions and your theories because sometimes you guys come up with the craziest theories that I never thought of and I'm always like what when I read it I'm like what I never even thought of that that's why I love you guys that's why I love this community that's why I love that we have each other to bounce things off of and talk about things and talk about these cases that just have so much mystery in them so many unanswered questions that it drives people like us crazy because we want to know the answers thank you so much to bruce rickets for helping me with this case he was amazing amazing so helpful so kind he gave me so much of his time and and I'm just really grateful for that thank you so much to audible for sponsoring this video thank you so much to my patreon for continuing to support me and allow me to make these these videos for you guys and for everybody else and thank you to all of you out there who are continuing to watch I hope you're safe I hope you're happy I hope you're doing well I'm gonna record a corentin´s favorite video tomorrow so I can tell you exactly what I've been doing and how I've been filling my time during this period of isolation and until next time I love you guys so much stay kind stay beautiful stay safe stay healthy and stay home bye [Music] through the tears faded [Music] heavy hearts consumed [Music] memories this mean encircled [Music] and every breath reveals one more sky [Music]

Channel: Stephanie Harlowe

Views: 335,902

Rating: 4.9170856 out of 5

Keywords: mystery monday, stephanie harlowe, true crime, mystery, unsolved, the lost boys of pickering

Id: K9rYGGNaugk

Length: 48min 9sec (2889 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020