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The Impossible Case of Lilly and Jack: How Did Two Kids Just Vanish in Nova Scotia?
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Published 6:30, April 15, 2026 Gairloch Road in Lansdowne Station, where Lilly and Jack Sullivan lived, is crowded on either side by an almost impenetrable marshy forest.
The hamlet of Lansdowne Station sits along a densely wooded corridor of Central Nova Scotia so remote most residents of the province struggle to picture it.
One hundred and forty kilometres northeast of Halifax, the land here is more easily travelled by all-terrain vehicles than car or truck. The single strip of potholed asphalt, Gairloch Road, is crowded on each side by moss-carpeted thickets of maple, yellow birch, and red pine. Where there are breaks in the trees, bogs teem with cattails, and culverts leaking murky water are strewn with discarded freezers and fridges. Rusty car chassis, dead tires, and ruined farm machinery litter unkempt fields.
The odd pair of horses linger along a fence line; a few Holsteins cluster beneath a solitary tree. Everywhere, more detritus: dented tin buckets, empty liquor bottles, the jagged glass of a broken window. Rubber boots, plastic bottle caps, and deflated bread bags buried beneath leaves resist the forces of biodegradation.
It’s possible to go ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes without seeing another driver, including during months when the province’s coastal gems are overrun with tourists piloting Winnebagos towing Jet Skis and Jeeps.
There isn’t anything to come to Lansdowne Station for—no grocery, no gas station, no park, school, or community hall. Once upon a time, there were copper mines, a campground, even a railway. Now, a freight train might sound its horn once a day or so as it passes through. If it passes. There are more reasons to keep going than to stop—there is no cell service here. Even satellite connections are unreliable amidst all the evergreens. The anonymity of the place is what the few people who call it home appreciate.
Janie Mackenzie is one of them. She lives on a partially cleared section of property with her mutt, Tucker, a flock of chickens, and a handful of barn cats. A few years ago, her grown son, Daniel Martell, came home to live with his pregnant girlfriend, Malehya Brooks-Murray, and her two young children. Mackenzie relinquished her three-bedroom mobile home to the growing family, shifting into a tarp-covered motorhome beside it that promised her some privacy and peace.
Both evaporated on the morning of May 2, 2025. The spring thaw was underway and, according to police documents, Mackenzie was lazing in bed after a phone chat with her brother when she looked outside and saw her daughter-in-law standing alone on the mucky gravel driveway, the baby she had with Martell, named Meadow, slung on her hip. Minutes later, the young mother would be on the phone to police, reporting Lilly, six, and Jack, four, missing.
Belynda Gray, Lilly and Jack Sullivan’s paternal grandmother, flips through photos of the children at her home in Upper Musquodoboit, Nova Scotia.My ties to Nova Scotia go back a decade to a time my partner was transferred to Halifax for work. Our kids were just a bit younger than Lilly and Jack—two and five—when we moved east from Ontario. I was hired as the Globe and Mail’s Atlantic bureau chief, a big title that belied the fact that the bureau was really an office of one. It would be futile to spend my days chasing breaking news.
My modus operandi was to do the opposite, to take my notebook to the out-of-the-way Maritime communities that weren’t attracting the spotlight and report the goings-on there. This approach meant I was much more likely to find myself climbing onto a fishing boat in the dark in Pictou County than holding a tape recorder before the premier in downtown Halifax.
None of the stories I covered for the Globe took me to Lansdowne Station specifically, but I spent plenty of time in similar communities where wages are meagre and the living is hard, yet people persist. Usually, they stay because they don’t have the means to move elsewhere, or because leaving what they know—where they, their mothers, and their grandmothers are known—is unthinkable.
Mackenzie and Martell had lived in Lansdowne Station for many years. As I made my way down the highway toward their remote property last July, I didn’t expect any surprises. I’d driven the route dozens of times. Yet, within minutes of taking the Gairloch exit, the small pit in my stomach I was trying to ignore—it formed when I first learned of Lilly and Jack’s disappearance, as I suspect one did for anyone who found themselves rapt with this mystery—began to swell. The road to where they’re thought to have wandered off from was longer and even more remote than I had envisioned. I drove five, ten, twenty kilometres. There was hardly anyone around.
The facts of the case cycled through my mind on a loop as I neared the Martell property. By the time I pulled into the dusty drive, it seemed impossible that two small kids could have made it very far at all on foot. My eyes roamed over the marshy area at the edge of the property, snagging on pieces of trash, desperate to see something someone had missed.
On her fridge, Gray keeps a notice from when the kids went missing.Martell’s mobile home has a small yard hemmed by tall trees and overgrown bush. A steep, hard-packed embankment rises up to one side of the property. On the other, it’s marshy wetland. Lilly and Jack loved to horse around in the fenced backyard where Mackenzie kept her chickens, but they knew not to leave it. When they weren’t searching for bugs or playing with dinosaurs (Jack’s favourite), the kids, each with the same tiny gap between their front baby teeth, were squealing at Tucker to get him to bark. When Martell’s two older kids visited on weekends, the four built forts near the woods. During the winter, the grandmother shovelled snow into small hills the kids could sled down. She considered whether they could put in a small pool for summertime fun. From the window of her motorhome, Mackenzie kept an eye on Lilly and Jack while they played in the yard. Their mother, Martell tells me, was often tied up indoors with Meadow. (Brooks-Murray did not agree to speak to me for this story.)
When it was just Lilly and Jack, the kids had no trouble amusing themselves. “Sometimes they let the chickens out,” Martell says, smiling and shaking his head at the memory of their mischief. “They called each other best friends.” At home, the pair were rarely apart and shared a bedroom. The light timbre of their laughter—a sign there was more silliness than sleep going on in their room—often sounded through the trailer’s thin walls.
Last year, both Lilly and Jack were old enough to climb aboard the yellow school bus each morning for the twenty-minute ride to Salt Springs Elementary, located in a rural community roughly twenty kilometres west of New Glasgow. “They liked school, but they had some behavioural problems,” Martell says, adding that educational assessments to test the kids for developmental delays were scheduled for last May, but the kids disappeared before testing took place. Jack, Martell says, “has a temper.” Teachers regularly called home to discuss the little boy “acting out.” Martell tells me that, at home, even Brooks-Murray found the kids’ behaviour overwhelming. She leaned on Martell for help.
“She would call me at work and tell me to try to come home,” Martell says. “I had to leave work four times over the last couple of years because she couldn’t handle the kids.” In a police statement, Brooks-Murray said Martell was never physical with Lilly and Jack, but he “had a voice they listened to.”
When he talks about it now, Martell’s voice takes on a tinge of tired pride that is a hallmark of parents surviving the toddler years. He says he even helped three-year-old Lilly give up her soother. “I potty-trained. Like, I did everything.”
When Martell first met Brooks-Murray, through Facebook Dating, the fact that she had two children didn’t deter him. In fact, he thought it made them a good match. “I already had two kids . . . so I knew how to raise them,” Martell says. Within two weeks of that first online meeting, Martell and Brooks-Murray moved in together.
The kids’ birth father had fallen out with Brooks-Murray in October 2021 and stopped being involved with their children. But his mother, Belynda Gray, kept in touch. Gray is the sort of grandmother who prints out every new Facebook photo of her grandchildren to display on her crowded fridge in her home in Upper Musquodoboit. She wasn’t happy about the split. “I was worried sick that it was going to ruin our relationship,” Gray tells me.
She’s known Brooks-Murray since she was barely twenty and full of girlish innocence. “She was very sweet. You hear stories of people going on about their daughter-in-law and all that. I thought she was a gift.” That sentiment only deepened after Brooks-Murray gave birth to Lilly and, later, Jack. “I thought she was the best mom ever.”
Gray made an effort to keep up with her daughter-in-law, inviting Brooks-Murray to visit with Lilly and Jack. “She would come and spend the day and stay for supper.” There’s a fondness in Gray’s voice when she describes how the kids clung to their mother. “If she went out to the car to get something . . . Jack was crying at the door. The kids were very much mama’s babies.” As time passed, Brooks-Murray visited less, but Gray made a point of dropping off presents or sending cash transfers for birthdays.
When Brooks-Murray started dating Martell, she grew more reluctant to visit Gray. “I said, ‘Why don’t you bring him with you?’” She said she would. But it didn’t turn out. Gray says Brooks-Murray told her Martell didn’t want her visiting her ex’s house. Then, Gray got a call from Brooks-Murray to say she, Lilly, and Jack were moving from Truro to Lansdowne Station.
“She stated that Daniel’s mother had a nice property, a nice farm. She was going to stay in the main house, and [his mother] had a trailer. I thought, ‘Well, she’s getting her happy life that she wants.’ I was happy for her.”
After the move, calls from Brooks-Murray became few and far between. When Gray did connect with her, usually on Facebook Messenger, Brooks-Murray cited poor cell service as the reason for her radio silence. “I assumed she was living her best life,” Gray says. In pictures online, Lilly and Jack looked happy. “What right did I have to mess that up?”
Daniel Martell, Lilly and Jack’s stepfather, leaves the Pictou courthouse on March 2, 2026. The charges against him are not directly related to the RCMP’s investigation into the children’s disappearance. When search parties comb through the forest, they leave pink and orange ribbons to mark where they’ve been. At another court date in early March, community members try to keep the focus on Lilly and Jack with handwritten signs and T-shirts.On the morning of Friday, May 2, 2025, Brooks-Murray woke shortly after 6 a.m. and opened an app on her cellphone used to report student absences. In interviews with police, Martell and Brooks-Murray said that Lilly and Jack had stayed home sick with coughs the day before. By late afternoon Thursday, they were well enough to go into New Glasgow. The family stopped at the Big Stop for gas, then hit Tim Hortons and Starbucks. Martell said the plan was to send them back to school the next day. But Brooks-Murray, with Martell and Meadow sleeping beside her, marked the older kids absent again and closed her eyes.
As they drifted in and out of sleep that morning, Brooks-Murray and Martell could hear Lilly and Jack through the walls, playing. From her bed, Mackenzie thought she heard the kids plodding around the backyard; her dog was looking out the window, barking at them.
Inside, when Brooks-Murray woke up again, just before 10 a.m., it was too quiet. The twenty-seven-year-old mother began looking for Lilly and Jack. They weren’t in their room or watching TV. She noticed the kids’ rubber boots were gone—Lilly’s, pink with rainbows, and Jack’s, blue with his beloved dinosaurs. Panic pushed her outdoors. There was no sign of the kids in the yard; from the foot of the drive, she couldn’t see anyone up or down Gairloch Road.
At 10:01 a.m., police records show, Brooks-Murray called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and said Lilly and Jack must have wandered off. Twenty-six minutes later, officers arrived at Lansdowne Station, where Martell, Mackenzie, and family members who lived close by had already fanned out through the bush and over the old rail line to look for the kids. In the ensuing hours, dozens of officers, trained dogs, helicopters, and about 160 volunteers—family, friends, and total strangers—joined in the search. Gray had been out of town when the children went missing. By the time she drove in on Saturday, she was skeptical that they could have gotten anywhere on foot.
“It was a miserable morning. They were barely dressed. Where are they going to wander to? Those woods are treacherous,” Gray says.
As police released information about Lilly and Jack to the public, including requests that people keep away from the area to avoid compromising the around-the-clock search, the hunt rapidly captured the public’s curiosity.
So did the relationship between the children’s mother and stepfather and their family life. Martell’s hours at the sawmill had been cut back due to tariffs. With news cameras panning over their yard, the worn condition of their mobile home was on display. It became instant fodder for social media commenters, who jumped to unsubstantiated conclusions: that the children were neglected, that there was drug use in the home, that Martell and Brooks-Murray were to blame for the kids’ disappearance.
Martell spent that entire first day scouring the bush for Lilly and Jack. “I was running through the woods . . . running so hard my lungs hurt.” He splashed through rivers that were still frigid from the spring thaw. “My bottom half would be frozen, then it would be numb, and then I would start running again and warm up.”
As the day wore on, Martell grew wild eyed and frantic; he became a magnet for reporters and cameras. Martell took advantage of their attention, agreeing to do every interview he could; they were broadcast and recast, including on the plethora of social media channels used by amateur sleuths who weren’t shy about sharing their suspicions of him.
“Online, people think I’m a murderer,” Martell tells me. “People think I fucking did something to the kids. It’s just craziness.” Martell’s response to the allegations has been to defend his innocence in the media and online, in chat groups, on Facebook and YouTube, even when commenters deride and goad him.
Brooks-Murray has taken the opposite approach. Looking visibly shaken, the young mother of three gave a single statement to news crews on the day Lilly and Jack disappeared. Through tears, on May 2, she pleaded for the safe return of her kids and asked for a province-wide AMBER Alert. She has not spoken publicly since that day despite repeated media requests for interviews. Her family has cited police advice as the reason she is staying silent.
As for the AMBER Alert she asked for, police did not issue one. “RCMP officers responded to a report of the children having wandered away from their home; there was—and continues to be—no evidence of an abduction,” a spokesperson for Nova Scotia’s RCMP said in a statement.
Instead, police treated Lilly and Jack’s disappearance as a “vulnerable missing persons” case. Public alerts asking people to keep an eye out for the children were issued to just three local counties in the first thirty-six hours they were gone. Brooks-Murray told the RCMP that Lilly and Jack’s biological father, Cody Sullivan, might have taken them to New Brunswick. To check the tip, police arrived at Sullivan’s house near 3 a.m. on May 3, less than twenty-four hours after the kids disappeared.
“Cody said he had not seen Jack and Lilly in three years and confirmed they were not with him,” RCMP corporal Charlene Curl wrote in a report. Sullivan did not agree to an interview for this story.
The search continued throughout the night. While Martell, exhausted from looking all day, slept atop a pile of laundry on their bed, Brooks-Murray lay awake for the most part. Drones with thermal imaging technology scanned the woods for heat signatures.
Morning dawned, and Lilly and Jack had still not been found. All police had to go on was a section of Lilly’s pink blanket that had been found by a family member near the edge of the road and a child’s boot print that investigators believe could have been Lilly’s.
Brooks-Murray’s mother, Cyndy Murray, arrived to join the search that morning. Emotions were running high. A driveway altercation between Mackenzie and some of Brooks-Murray’s extended family resulted in a shouting match. Martell says he stood, helpless, as Murray told her grown daughter they were leaving. “Malehya got in the car. Cyndy did a U-turn. The only chance I got to say goodbye to Meadow was just put my hand on the window and say ‘I love you’ to her.” Later, he discovered Brooks-Murray had left him a parting message in their bathroom.
“She wrote on the mirror, ‘I’ll always love you forever.’ She wrote it in lipstick or marker or something else.” When Martell tried to call and text her, he found Brooks-Murray had blocked his number. They haven’t spoken since that day.
Neither parent is considered a suspect by police. Both Martell and Brooks-Murray have been interviewed by investigators several times, and both have passed police polygraph tests. Mackenzie has been repeatedly accused by amateur sleuths in Facebook groups of having something to do with the kids’ disappearance.
Police interviewed her, searched her motorhome, and gave her a polygraph. At least three other family members—Murray, her boyfriend, Wade Paris, and Sullivan—have passed polygraphs. Police say that none of Lilly and Jack’s family members are suspects in their disappearance. However, in January, police charged Martell with sexual assault, assault, and forcible confinement; the charges relate to an unnamed adult complainant and a time period during which Brooks-Murray was living with Martell.
Police continue to investigate the children’s case under the Missing Persons Act; they say they do not have grounds to believe any criminal offence has occurred. Hundreds of hours of trail-cam footage was handed over to investigators by neighbouring property owners. Police are sifting through more than 8,000 videos and over 1,100 tips. A $150,000 reward has been offered. Search and rescue teams, including cadaver dogs, have scoured tens of kilometres of forest, a small lake, shuttered mineshafts, beneath the mobile home, and across the network of streams and small rivers that meander through the undeveloped land circling Lansdowne Station. Investigators have also combed through Global Positioning System data, bank accounts, and the cellphones of both Martell and Brooks-Murray.
None of it has led to Lilly and Jack.
Last summer, I spent several days in Lansdowne Station and nearby towns, and then more time in late fall, with civilian searchers combing acres of bush in hopes something would be unearthed before the snow flew. I was certain more time on the ground would give me clarity, some sense of what had gone on.
On a sweltering day in Lansdowne Station, Martell is perched beside me in the open trunk of my SUV for shade. He tells me he believes the kids are alive and that they were taken by someone they know.
When I press him to explain more, to tell me who he thinks took the kids and where they’ve been kept undetected for so long, he is out of ideas. It irks him, he’s told me several times, that Brooks-Murray hasn’t defended him in the media (neither has she accused him of harming the children, he points out).
The fact that Brooks-Murray remains so closed off is perplexing—and not just to Martell. Online comment forums and coffee-table chats about Lilly and Jack’s disappearance are rife with wonder and suspicion. Gray told me she was shocked Brooks-Murray left Lansdowne Station the day after Lilly and Jack went missing. “That told me the kids were no longer here,” Gray says. “She would have never left otherwise.”
I’ll admit that Brooks-Murray’s absence from the spotlight has sent my internal compass into a tailspin. I find it hard to know what to make of a mother who seeks privacy instead of issuing public pleas for the return of her children. But, then, the fact that Brooks-Murray isn’t performing parenthood the way many of us think she ought to isn’t a reason to consider her suspicious. Many others living in and around Gairloch Road have become more withdrawn as public and online scrutiny has intensified.
It could be that Brooks-Murray is simply trying to avoid what happened in the wake of an eerily similar case that took place down the road. In Truro, three-year-old Dylan Ehler went missing on May 6, 2020—almost five years to the day of Lilly and Jack’s disappearance. He was playing in his grandmother’s backyard while she attended to a dog. Her property backs onto a river, which was moving quickly that day, and when she returned, Dylan was gone. Despite extensive searching, including shortly after Lilly and Jack made headlines last spring, the boy has not been found.
After appealing to the public for help finding Dylan, the boy’s parents, Jason Ehler and Ashley Brown, were targeted by online pseudo-sleuths, who falsely accused them of negligence, orchestrating Dylan’s disappearance, and even murdering their son. The pair were stalked in real life and grew afraid to leave their home. While they ultimately won a court case against their cyberbullies, the damage wrought by the experience was irreparable.
Gray says she tried to stay in touch with the kids after they moved from Truro to Lansdowne Station. Onlookers have spun careless theories about where the children could have gone.Snow was threatening on the cold November morning when about thirty volunteer searchers assembled at the Union Centre Community Hall in Westville, the closest town to Lansdowne Station. Freshly printed maps of the waterways and trails cutting through the forest were spread out on tables in the one-room hall. There was a hopeful but nervous tension in the air as volunteers spoke quietly over paper cups of lukewarm Tim Hortons coffee. Friends and close family members of Brooks-Murray clustered in one corner of the room while Gray’s side sat together in another. It was Gray and Cheryl Robinson, another relative and close friend of Brooks-Murray, who lobbied for the day-long civilian search, led by the organization Please Bring Me Home.
Nick Oldrieve, the executive director of Please Bring Me Home, spoke to the searchers before they donned fluorescent vests, pocketed cans of bear spray, and prepared to fan out across Lansdowne Station.
“We’re focusing on wandering and misadventure,” he says. “We’re not here to do any searching based on potential foul play. We have had success by revisiting water on previously cleared areas.” Oldrieve’s organization has found more than fifty missing people since its inception in 2018. They have also been involved in the unsolved disappearance of little Dylan.
Search group three, led by Robinson, is assigned the banks of Middle River, a meandering body of water not far from Lilly and Jack’s home. Fluorescent orange and pink ribbons flutter from some of the tree branches in the surrounding forest, signs of searches past.
Murray is the first to plod into the water, bending low to look in the hollows beneath tree roots at the river’s edge, to forge deeper into thick brush and up an embankment. As she traverses the river on fallen logs, rotten wood occasionally betrays her, forcing her into cold water that fills her rubber boots and makes them leaden.
On one side of the river, another member of the group unearths a geocaching box with a notebook inside bearing Martell’s signature and the date May 3, 2014. The find heightens emotions and suspicions in the group as the women try to decode whether it could have meaning beyond the fact that Martell was present in the remote section of woods more than a decade earlier.
They’re discussing it when Martell’s uncle, Wayne Mackenzie, appears at the top of a nearby ridge, yelling that he didn’t consent to a search of his property, and that he has rams in his field that could be dangerous. The children aren’t here, he adds.
“How do you know?” someone screams.
This section of the bush is so overgrown that few people could manage to traipse into its depth. But Mackenzie’s territorial approach, even over such an impenetrable part of his property, is a reminder of the desire for privacy I’ve witnessed since I arrived.
Robinson calls out again, but the question feels futile: “Where are Lilly and Jack?”
The post The Impossible Case of Lilly and Jack: How Did Two Kids Just Vanish in Nova Scotia? first appeared on The Walrus.
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