6 Boys Vanished in One Night and STILL No Answers — The Lost Boys of Pickering

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In a small town, everybody knows everybody, so when one kid goes missing, well the whole place feels it, and everybody goes looking, but now imagine it's not just one kid but six. Six boys from the same town all gone in the same night, and none of them are ever seen again. There's not one body or answer that's ever shown up, and it's been like that for the past 31 years. Hey guys, it's Andrew and welcome to every town, but today we're looking at one of the strangest disappearances in all of Canadian history, and after three decades, we still don't really know what happened all these kids. So let's head up to Ontario now and dig in together. This is The Lost Boys of Pickerang. At St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1995, when Pickerang is a nice lakeside suburb just east of Toronto, small enough that most of these kids in town all knew each other, and they grew up in the same schools, playing on the same baseball teams, probably dated each other's friends at some point, and that night, a group of teens, while they were celebrating the holiday. It was a house party where the brews were flowing, some Guinness' being drank, typical 1995 teenage stuff for the most part, except something extraordinary was about to happen that still haunts this town to this very day. On 12.40 in the morning, six of the boys there headed out together. There's 17-year-old J. Boyle, 18-year-old Chad Smith, and 17-year-old Robbie Rumble, all of them from Pickerang. They were there along with 16-year-old Danny Higgins out of Ajax, 17-year-old Michael Cummins from Ashua, and 17-year-old Jamie Lafer, who'd come in from Scarborough. On his way out the door, J. Tells a friend where they're headed, down to the water he says to goof around on a boat. Nobody thinks anything about it because it's St. Patrick's Day and everyone's been having fun. In Pickering, it sits right on the shore of Lake Ontario, so on the water is a familiar character. They all grew up there and never had a single issue. And they make their way toward Frenchman's Bay, a small sheltered harbor, dotted with marinas, sailing clubs, and rows of motorboats still shrink wrap from the winter. And right here, it's where the story starts to blur because from this point forward, almost everything we think we know, it comes from fragments, a grainy security tape, a handful of scattered witness accounts, and a whole bunch of theories as to what really went down. And what investigators eventually piece together, or at least claim to piece together, goes something like this. The boys broke into the east shore marina, on the repul road, and once they were in, it's believed they grabbed a case of beer and had been sitting left in somebody else's boat, and then help themselves to two vessels that didn't belong to them either. One was a roughly 13-foot imitation Boston whaler, basically a small motorboat. The other was a three-wheeled paddleboat, something described as a water tricycle, which some accounts say they'd actually swiped from a different marina the night before. But either way, what you have are six boys and two stolen boats, and according to the official theory, well, this is the point where they pushed out on the Lake Ontario and the dead of a march night, on water that was barely above freezing. At 1.48am, a security camera on the marina cop movement, and three of the six, Michael Jamie and Robbie, walk into frame and onto the marina grounds, but Jay, Chad, and Danny were there nowhere on that footage, and then somewhere between 2.30am and 3am, a few of the residents living around the base say they heard a motorboat engine running out on the water. After that, the trail just goes cold, no camera ever picks them up again, nobody else reports seeing them. And most importantly, well, not a single one of the six boys has turned up since a live or dead in the 31 years that have followed. Now two of the boys had girlfriends who had been at that party when the guys didn't come back, these girls got worried enough to actually pick up the phone and call the police. At 3.30am in the morning, they called Durham Regional Police to report that 16 were missing, and that they believed the boys had gone out onto the lake on stolen boats. The officer who took that call was constable James Gillam, but instead of treating it like the kind of emergency it really was, teenagers and freezing water, possibly stolen boats all in the middle of the night, well Gillam basically just brushed them off. It sounded to him like some kids just up to no good, but getting police involved, he didn't feel the need. He told the girls there was no specific location to search, but this wasn't something he could do anything about right then. And that day, she had the boys' mothers filing official missing persons report through the proper channels. And according to Bruce Ricketts, the private investigator would go on to spend nearly two decades of his life digging into this case, well Gillam actually went a step further than that. Ricketts says the officer effectively logged the girls report as "unfounded." As in, filed it away as though nobody was really missing, or in any danger at all. Now, hindsight is 2020, but it wasn't up to Gillam to decide how serious this situation was. It's his job to investigate it, and to frighten teenage girls did exactly the right thing. They called the police in the dead of night to say their boyfriends might be in trouble. And they just got sent away and told to come back later with an official form. And it actually gets worse. The official search for the six boys didn't even begin until that Saturday, which was a full 36 hours after the girls made that first call. And when it finally did get going, it was actually a serious operation. You had Durham Regional Police, the Canadian Coast Guard, the Metro, Toronto Police Marine Unit, a C-130 Hercules aircraft and a helicopter from the Air Sea Rescue Unit out of Canadian forces-based Trenton. They were all brought in on it. On top of that, hundreds of volunteers from across southern Ontario came out to walk the shorelines and scan the water. After all that, all that manpower and all those resources, they came back with absolutely nothing. There was in a single trace of these boys, so what on earth happened to them and those two boats? When I moved to my new town, I had a whole list of things I was thinking about and what wasn't on it. It was the fact that I had left every one of my doctors behind and would need new ones. Dr. Dennis, all of it was gone, I was starting from zero in a place where I didn't no anyone. That's exactly where Zock-Dock came in, and this episode sponsored by Zock-Dock. Because of them, you don't have to get stressed out at any point about trying to take care of your health. Zock-Dock lets you search and compare high-quality in-network doctors, so you're only ever looking at people who actually take your insurance. You get real reviews from real patients before you book and appointments, they happen fast, usually within 24 to 72 hours, sometimes same day. So whether you're moving, or you've just been putting it off because it feels like a chore, Zock-Dock makes the whole thing easy. Your health matters and taking care of yourself shouldn't be complicated. Find and book the right doctor with Zock-Dock. Head to Zock-Dock.com/everytown to get started, and check that appointment off you to do list at zocdoc.com/everytown. Now before we go any further, I want to talk about Jay Boyle specifically because out of the six boys, he's the one we actually know the most about, and his story is a bit heartbreaking on its own. By 17 Jay had already had a few brushes with the law, and he'd done time for assault, and at the time he disappeared, he was actually facing more charges on top of that, assault and weapons this time. He was living in a small rented basement apartment with his girlfriend, Monique, and their baby daughter, Kiera. And on the night of the party, it was Jay's mother Patricia, who was back at home looking after her granddaughter while Jay went out. Now to the police, and to a lot of people who only ever knew the surface-level details, Jay fit a certain profile. He had the prior record, was facing new charges, and here he was out drinking on St. Patrick's Day with his daughter at home. And so you can kind of see how investigators might have looked at that file, and while he decided this was just a kid who was always going to end up in trouble one way or another. But to the people that actually knew him, that description it didn't even come close. His mother and his two sisters, Chavon and Amanda, they described Jay as funny and fiercely loyal, and he would drop everything to stand up for someone he cared about. He was also a genuinely a gifted baseball player, and good enough that teammates and coaches thought he might really go somewhere with it. And he was just young and a bit misguided, and you probably knew someone like that yourself growing up. Rough around the edges, but deep down, there was a good person. Not a saint by any means, but not a demon either. His youngest sister, Amanda, was 15 at the time, and she was actually supposed to be at that party. And she come down with something and stayed home instead, which meant she wasn't there the night her brother vanished for good. And when Word came from O'Neeck, that Jay hadn't come home, the family's first reaction wasn't panic. And Jay, he had a lot of friends, so a lot of coaches, he could have crashed on. But as the hours stretched into days, all that hope slowly started churning into something much darker, then baseball season rolled around that spring and Jay obviously missed the season. And that, more than anything, is when the family really understood that life for them was never going to be the same. And so for years, that's basically how this case rolled along. Take a single individual going missing, and that takes time for people to process. When it's six boys, it takes a bit more time for that to really sink in. All they had really was a theory about stolen boats and freezing water, but not one shred of physical evidence to actually back any of it up. And then, in 1998, something happened that by all rights should have blown this entire investigation wide open. And then, it just didn't. Human remains were discovered along the Niagara River, over on the American side near Wilson, New York. That's roughly 62 miles from Pickering as the crow flies. And honestly, a good deal further than that, if you actually traced the path the water, it would have to travel to carry a body from Lake Ontario down into the Niagara River system. Those remains, while they were found wearing a pair of red jeans. And Jay Boyle was photographed the night he disappeared wearing a pair of red Levi's. It's a very specific item of clothing and pretty unique. And you would think a detail like that would set off alarm bells. But instead, according to his family, this discovery, it just sat there, completely unknown to them for 15 years. Wasn't until late 2013 that the Boyle's even found out, those remains existed. And the way they found out is almost hard to believe because it happened after a psychic of all things. Told them to go digging through the Ontario Provincial Police's own missing person's database. And that's where they came across a photograph of unidentified bones, still wrapped up in a pair of red jeans. Jay's sister talked about looking at that photo and just knowing, right down in her gut, that she was looking at her brother. So, my family does the obvious thing from there. They push for DNA comparison. They asked Detective Sheridan of the Durham Regional Police to have Niagara Police run a profile on those remains against the DNA sample from Jay's mother. One, I was actually already sitting on file at DRPS headquarters. And this is where the case takes another one of those turns to get your blood pumping. Because the Niagara Police, they reportedly refused to run the test. And their reasons are almost insulting. The first one was cost. Even though the Boyle family said flat out that they would personally pay whatever it took. And the second was this claim that a body that drowned in Lake Ontario simply couldn't, current-wise, ever end up in the Niagara River because of the way the water moves between the two. And they aren't wrong about that. The Niagara River flows north from Lake Erie down into Lake Ontario and not the other way around. So no, a body isn't going to float up the river from the lake because the water is moving against it the entire way. But we also don't know where these kids went with their boats. We don't know who did what or ended up where. So 62 miles is a lot but not so far that they shouldn't at least check. Eventually years later, the DNA test the family had been fighting for finally happened. And the result, it came back negative. Whoever those remains belonged to, they weren't Jays. A second separate set of remains were also discovered from the Niagara River back in 1998, reportedly matching the general description of two of the other missing boys. But as far as public information goes, that lead never produced a confirmed identification either. So a one piece of physical evidence this case ever had. A coincidence, so specific, it seemed almost too perfect, turned out to be exactly that. A coincidence and nothing more. Which brings us to Bruce Ricketts. And without this guy, I'm not sure we'd even be talking about this case today. Now, Ricketts was a PI out of Ottawa and he first got pulled into the lost boys' mystery more than a decade after they vanished. And once he was in, ended up sinking years of his life into it. He filed something close to 30 separate access to information and privacy requests, just trying to pry the original police files loose. And what he eventually dug up, did not exactly inspire confidence in how any of this had been handled. And take that security footage from the marina. One everyone had been told showed only three of the boys walking in at 148 a.m. Well, it turns out that tape was a whole lot more complicated than the official version let on. Because when Ricketts first went to the police and asked for a copy of it, well, he says he was told it didn't even exist. Not that they didn't have it anymore, but they didn't even know what he was talking about. It took them three separate requests before they finally let them view it. And even then, by the time he got the footage, it was heavily redacted. But he sat down and watched all 16 hours of it anyway, and what he found on that tape was in none of the official police reports, because at around 2-10 in the morning, so roughly 20 minutes after those three boys appeared, three more people they walked into the marina. It's two women and one man, and as they're walking, the man suddenly moves out ahead of the two women, turns back around to face them and raises his hands like he's pointing something out to them, gesturing off toward the water or maybe those boats. And the video is too grainy to make out any faces. You can't identify a single one of them, but according to Ricketts, none of this ever made it into the file, which means that as far as anyone can tell, it was just never looked into. Those three people, they've never been identified. And then there's the camera itself, because a 2-21 AM, just minutes after those three unidentified people show up on tape, the single most important camera covering the dock reportedly shuts off. It cuts out completely, and to this day, nobody's ever explained whether that was a technical glitch or whether it was something a little more deliberate than that. Ricketts also turned up the fact that Durham police actually had access to side-scan sonar. Now, this is the real deal, heavy-duty equipment, used to find shipwrecks at the bottom of Lake Ontario, to top of the line technology. He says DRPS did reach out to a man named Ed Byr, a ran-a-company called Ocean Scan Systems, but running a search of the Lakebed near Frenchman's Bay with this equipment. But then, before birth, it actually get out there and do it, but the contract was reportedly cancelled. Why exactly? Well, we don't know. On top of that, Ricketts noticed that Durham police never seemed to have formally asked for help from either the Ontario Provincial Police or the RCMP. And that's strange on its own because, based on how much fuel that stolen boat likely had in it, its range could have easily carried it right out of Durham's jurisdiction, possibly even across the international border and into the U.S. And look, taking one at a time, and you can maybe explain some of this away, is just ordinary 90s small town police sloppiness. It's a little department with limited resources, but just wasn't exactly made to investigate a six person disappearance. And maybe that was some of it, but that wasn't all of it. You dig a little deeper onto the surface, and this one starts to look like a case that certain people just didn't want anybody looking at too closely. Ricketts himself said there was evidence to suggest that Durham Regional Police had a strained, maybe even openly hostile, relationship with some of the boys before that night, and Jay in particular, given his prior record. And Ricketts openly floated the idea that the lax, almost dismissive way this case was handled in its earliest hours, and might have had less to do with incompetence, and more to do with a kind of quiet payback. A group of officers who had already decided in their heads what kind of kids these were. And who simply didn't move with an urgency once they were missing. Officially, the full working theory that police landed on early and never really moved off of is straightforward enough. He got six intoxicated teens who steal a boat and a paddle tricycle in the middle of the night. They take them out onto the lake and near freezing water with no life jackets on, and then at some point, while the boat capsizes or takes on water and all six of them drown. Some of the investigators and water experts have suggested the boys may have tried to pile on to that smaller paddle tricycle once the motor boat started going under, and that their bodies, they could still be down there, trapped in what sometimes called a thermal layer, deep down in the lake. It's basically a band of consistently frigid water that holds on to whatever sinks into it and never gives it back. It's a theory that makes the most sense. You can see six drunk teenage boys thinking let's go steal a boat and have some fun and then tragedy-hitting. But it's still just a theory, and the lack of any real evidence is what keeps it from bringing a sort of satisfactory feeling. No boat has ever been recovered, not nearly 30 years from a lake that gets searched and dredged and dived on a fairly regular basis. No confirmed remains belonging to any of the six boys has ever been found, and there's also still no real explanation for who those three people were, the ones walking into the Marina 20 minutes beyond the boys, or why that camera that might have actually caught them clearly just so happened to quit working a few minutes later. And of course the general lack of police urgency, it doesn't help close the case either. And so for nearly three decades now, the families of these six boys have essentially been left to investigate their own children's disappearance. As a Facebook page dedicated to the case that's still active today, still fielding tips and occasionally getting messages from people claiming to have new information that so far has never actually panned out. Bruce Ricketts continued work in the case right up until his death a few years ago. He never did manage to get the police or the Ontario government to reopen a formal investigation into either the original disappearance or the 1998 remains found near Niagara, despite years of advocacy and by his own account dozens of freedom of information requests. He passed away having spent close to two decades of his life trying to get straight answers for a group of families he wasn't even related to, simply because he believed they deserved better than what they've been given. As far as the Durham Regional Police are concerned, because they only have theories, this case remains officially open and unsolved, and the boys are still technically missing persons. I presume dead and not declared drowned is missing. As to what actually happened on Frenchman's Bay that night, obviously nobody can say for certain. And that's the main reason why this case doesn't sit right with most people. Because it's one thing for a single case to go cold because there's nothing left to find. It's another thing entirely when six boys vanish and it doesn't feel like the system in place meant to find them, ever really started looking in the first place. So that's going to do it for today's episode of Every Town, hope you enjoyed it. If this one resonated with you, well then go check out some of our other cold case episodes because we got plenty more where that came from. Remember to come on back next week for another episode filled with scary, strange and mysterious stories, because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.