Someone Knows Something, Season 1 - The Family

7/25/2020 TRANSCRIPT: Someone Knows Something - Season 1, EP 1 | CBC Radio
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Someone Knows Something, Season 1 -- The Family
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
VOICE 1: There’s evil living here.
ANNOUNCER: From executive producer Jordan Peele.
VOICE 3: I think there's Nazis living in America, and someone out there is taking them out.
[Music]
ANNOUNCER: Now.
VOICE 4: You put together a group of Nazi hunters?
ANNOUNCER: Revenge is righteous.
[Music]
ANNOUNCER: Al Pacino in his first television series.
VOICE 5: Have you had enough?
Because there’s more.
[Music]
ANNOUNCER: Watch the Amazon original series, “Hunters”.
New series, watch now.
Only on Amazon Prime Video.
[Music]
ANNOUNCER: This is a CBC Podcast.
VOICE 1: You're listening to someone knows something from CBC Radio.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sks/sks-transcripts/transcript-someone-knows-something-season-1-ep-1-1.5546133 1/14
In 1972, five-year-old Adrien McNaughton vanished while on a fishing trip in Eastern Ontario.
Documentarian David Ridgen goes back to the small town he grew up in searching for answers.
[Birds cawing]
[Knocking]
MURRAY: Come in!
RIDGEN: Hello.
How are you?
MURRAY: Not too bad.
RIDGEN: Hi. Nice to meet you.
BARBARA: Nice to meet you, too, David.
RIDGEN: Oh, I know you guys. I've seen you.
BARBARA: Yeah, and I worked with your mom for many years...
RIDGEN: Solving cold cases, or as I call them, so-called cold cases, is something we're good at and
something we're not good at. And when I say “we”, I mean “we” because I think that we all think
that we can solve them. It's natural. We tend to impose order where there is none, so that any
puzzle has a solution. We try to resolve chaos.
What I have is another microphone that I would like to put on Murray.
So, before we start can I do that?
BARBARA: I guess so, eh.
RIDGEN: Investigators are compelled by time and budget pressures to follow the strongest
impulse, because it's less risky and cheaper. But sometimes the strongest force in any
investigation can be its weakest point.
[Music]
MURRAY: Well, I can't tell you very much because I just don’t remember a whole lot of...back then.
And Adrien was a vocal boy?
Like, he could speak, he was not mute, he was able to talk and scream and yell.
MURRAY: Oh, he was quite normal, as far as that goes. Quite normal little five-and-a-half-year-old.
Real busy-go lad.
He was a little guy, shy little guy.
RIDGEN: Ruth McCue is a McNaughton family friend.
RUTH: He couldn't tie his shoes. He was only five. So, he would have lost his shoes in that bush, it
was very thick. Bad things happen to little boys, sometimes. And that's what we figured happened
because there was just no sign of anything, anywhere. And there had to have been.
[Music]
RIDGEN: Lee McNaughton is Adrien's eldest brother.
LEE: Being a nine-year-old, I wasn't very reflective. People would ask me, oh, your brother, lost.
How does that make you feel? My gut would sink when someone would ask me, because my
brother had disappeared.
An utter mystery. No idea what happened.
[Music]
RIDGEN: It's because we're fallible, or I am, anyway. Sometimes I imagine that I'm in a screenplay
because it makes things easier to take.
Let me just record a bit of this sound here. We won’t have to stick around too long.
And it's in moments of weakness That we're prone to point fingers
MURRAY: Had a lot of people say a lot of stories that wasn't true.
RIDGEN: MURRAY: McNaughton, Adrien's father.
MURRAY: People imagined that I'd been in an institution, mental institution just sitting there. But
that was not true.
RIDGEN: So, what you're saying is people might have thought you were responsible. MURRAY: Oh
yes.
RIDGEN: That's gotta be pretty hard to take.
MURRAY: Yeah. Sure was. Still-- still bothers a person a bit.
BARBARA: The stories that went about us were just wild.
That none of the children belonged to Murray.
RUTH: Well, a lot of people blamed Murray for it. Yeah, I remember one was MURRAY: had just
got out of jail and he'd murdered them.
BARBARA: I couldn't believe that. I just could not believe it.
RIDGEN: Barb McNaughton used to nurse with my mom at the Arnprior hospital. I'm sitting at her
place with her husband, Murray It's open concept with a big kitchen and a newer construction
because their previous house burnt down, and with it, virtually all their mementos of Adrien's life.
Barb’s just come through some severe health challenges and is resting in a large mechanical chair
that sounds like a garage door opening when it moves, and she adjusts it often to find a
comfortable position for the memory she's confronting.
She smiles when she talks, even when describing the worst and it’s an optimism that must have
carried her through many storms.
BARBARA: Things have run through my mind.
Could it have been...
When you hear today of the sexual predators, could someone have taken him for that reason? He
was a handsome little boy and I've thought of that. You know, Murray doesn't think that, but I
don't know.
I would pray that he wasn't abused or tortured or anything like that, you know? But if we just
knew-- even if it was something like that, if we just knew. I have prayed that before I go to be with
my Father in heaven, that I will know.
[Music]
RIDGEN: But saying all that, we will also find killers. We will find them by comparing the geography
of a case to the way a bumblebee does its flowers. We will find them by using x-rays and thermal
scans and DNA and-- and we’ll find them, frankly, by simply looking back at the case and going
through it. So, putting chaos in order has its place. And often, everyone knows something.
[Heartbeat thumping]
RIDGEN: And for sure, someone knows something.
VOICE 2: There was nothing ever found. Not a jacket, not a shoe, not a shoe loose. Nothing. It
really upset me. I would like to know what happened to that little guy.
VOICE 3: There is something not reasonable in that case. I think somebody is involved in foul play.
The father was a likely suspect. He turned his back for 15 minutes, never saw the child after that.
And that's a bundle of crap.
LEE: We'd been living there a number of years and my parents are still there. They’re long time
Arnprior people and so people will know that, oh, they lost a child.
That-- that will be just part of the mythology of a town.
[Music]
RIDGEN: The first time I ever heard about someone being missing, I was four years old and living
in the Ottawa Valley in Eastern Ontario. It's a place where everyone talks with a bit of an accent, a
combination Irish-Scottish and something else, I think. And when I go back there, I always slip into
and indulge in a bit of the twang. There was logging in the valley back in those days, white pine
mostly. And I used to run on the booms with my friends in the Ottawa River. But there's none of
that there now, boom and then bust. But it's a beautiful spot, surrounded by a great rugged
wilderness. And it was into that that Adrien McNaughton disappeared when he was five years old.
He was small for his age, hair more white than blonde. And just a year older than me.
BARBARA: He was our child and he was a handsome little boy. Big brown eyes and blond hair. He
was just beautiful. Murray used to call him his little-- his pal, and he’d get up beside Murray and,
you know--
MURRAY: I’d say, “You back again?”
Teasing him.
And his hair was white.
[Music]
SHONTELLE: I remember how cuddly he was, and how excited she'd be for Mum to come home in
the morning. And sometimes he’d crawl in with me, waiting for Mum. I remember that.
Like, I always felt like he was my shadow.
BARBARA: I don't dwell all the time on it. I never wanted my friends to think I was looking for
sympathy. So, I didn't bring it up a lot.
RIDGEN: We haven't talked about that much at all. So why do you think that is? I mean, other than
the obvious reasons.
LEE: Well, there's the pain of it but it's also, in many ways it's-- it's done.
[Music]
RIDGEN: I never knew Adrien, but I moved into the area with my family shortly after he
disappeared on June 12th, 1972, while he was on a fishing trip.
And he was from Arnprior, that was my town.
A place where people were concerned about getting their cat’s licensed but not their guns. And
it's always had this kind of frontier feel to me, isolated in its geography and its own particular
sense of destiny.
[Vehicle starting]
RIDGEN: Adrien's is a case that's hung over the area like a dark mass ever since. I must have
absorbed the case as if by osmosis, because I can't remember people talking about it at the time.
But I remember the fear and the basic detail.
A little boy out there, somewhere. Like me.
[Ticking]
MURRAY: I've collected clocks for 20 years.
And repaired them and got them running.
BARBARA: We built that one.
MURRAY: I put that together out of some parts.
RIDGEN: I’m just gonna record your clock.
[Commotion]
BARBARA: David?
RIDGEN: Yep?
BARBARA: Feel free to use the washroom before you leave.
RIDGEN: Oh, okay, great. I think I’m okay.
[Music]
RIDGEN: But Adrien's disappearance is one that the locals have talked about and wondered
about. Even people who weren't alive at the time have been raised with an awareness of this case,
organizing themselves unconsciously around it like an unchanging contour that you can't help but
go around because going over it's too damn hard. And very few people in this town of now close
to 8,000 were unaffected. My friends, my family. So, I'm starting here.
VOICE 1: There’s evil living here.
VOICE 2: From executive producer Jordan Peele.
VOICE 3: I think there's Nazis living in America, and someone out there is taking them out.
[Music]
VOICE 2: Now.
VOICE 4: You put together a group of Nazi hunters?
VOICE 2: Revenge is righteous.
[Music]
VOICE 2: Al Pacino in his first television series.
VOICE 5: Have you had enough?
Because there’s more.
[Music]
VOICE 2: Watch the Amazon original series, “Hunters”.
New series, watch now.
Only on Amazon Prime Video.
RIDGEN: It's mysterious and it's perplexing, and my hair is standing on end right now just thinking
about where we're going.
Just tell me what we're doing here.
MURRAY: We're turning in the road to Holmes Lake.
RIDGEN: Adrien's father, MURRAY: McNaughton, is driving this truck we're in.
It's packed with tools and the odds and ends of someone mechanically minded. Someone who
instinctively collects things, saving them for unknown future projects. MURRAY: is a short man of
few words, now 83 years old and much slower. And he was with Adrien the day he disappeared
but has almost never spoken about it since. His daughter, Shontelle, has come along too.
Shontelle McNaughton was only two on the day her brother disappeared and stayed home with
her mother, Barbara. Today, she's decided to come along for the first time to see the scene with
her dad. She's calm and thoughtful, shorter in stature, priding herself on a daily workout regimen.
And like the rest of the family, seems suddenly stricken when confronted with a moment of
discussing Adrien's case.
SHONTELLE: I don't remember him at all. I feel like I was robbed. I don't have any memories of
him.
[Breathes deeply]
[whispering] Sorry.
I just...
I don't remember. I hear the stories, and it makes me think I have a memory, but I don't. There’s
nothing at all that even-- I see the picture of him, but that's the only thing I know of him, is a
picture. I do feel like I have a phantom sibling...somewhere.
RIDGEN: So, what do you think about, Shontelle, about coming back here. Coming here.
SHONTELLE: Um, I don't know. It's-- like I say, I don't have much memory of any of it, so...
Don't really have a lot of thoughts on it, to be honest. Not at the moment anyway. Might be
different once we get there.
RIDGEN: But Lee McNaughton was at Holmes Lake that day. Adrien's eldest brother, Lee was nine
years old at the time and he's now an Anglican priest.
[Knocking]
LEE: Hi.
RIDGEN: Hi.
LEE: Come on in.
RIDGEN: How are you? Nice to see you. Oh, you look like your dad.
LEE: People say it's my mother.
RIDGEN: He looks like his father, Murray, except four times the size.
His hallway is lined with floor to ceiling bookshelves and later, he quotes Dostoyevsky as perfectly
as I've ever heard it.
Before we begin our interview, we talk for a while about why I'm doing this podcast, and...it gives
me a chance to go back over the reasons for it myself. I try to explain that I'm not a media weasel
looking to dig a hole in his family. And I think he believes me.
LEE: Some would say, from a Catholic perspective, natural law says that if someone has done
something horrible like that we need to be found out, and that's why we like murder mysteries.
We want something solved because there is truth in the world. And so, someone did it or
someone didn't do it. We want the truth to come out.
RIDGEN: Back on the winding, beautiful Calabogie road, we've just passed a dirt smudge near
some power lines. Murray slows down and seems disappointed.
MURRAY: And there’s the power line. Oh, gonna have to turn around.
I missed a turn.
As you can see, it's a while since I've been here.
RIDGEN: Wonder even if he tried, like, how far a 5-year-old guy like Adrien could have gotten in a
ground like this, you know?
MURRAY: Yeah.
RIDGEN: It's a surprisingly small lake. Somehow, I had imagined something much larger. And you
can see most of it from any place on the shoreline.
But the area around it, I suspect, holds both the key and the lock to the case.
We've apparently parked in the place where Murray left his vehicle 43 years earlier. From there,
we make our way along a sublime pine needle path, with red squirrel and Canadian Shield
accompaniment.
MURRAY: Little farther than I thought.
RIDGEN: Murray moves slowly and with effort. I think he's anxious to get this over with.
It's been tough on him and his family. Especially so, because as any victim's family member will tell
you, the first order of business in any investigation is to rule out those very family members as
the perpetrators.
[Music]
MURRAY: That’s where we were fishing, right along there.
Right at that tree, that was the last time I saw Adrien.
RIDGEN: He was that close.
MURRAY: He—
[Laboured breathing]
--said he didn't want to fish anymore, so I went over and got the rod from him and he walked up
there.
RIDGEN: I see.
MURRAY: And I didn't--
I didn’t see how far he went.
And I think he went that way.
RIDGEN: You think he went that way?
MURRAY: I think so. I don't know.
RIDGEN: What makes you think he went north?
MURRAY: Well...
RIDGEN: As MURRAY: tells his version of the story, I watch Shontelle slip into a fugue state in the
background. It seems to suddenly have become hard for her to breathe.
[Music]
RIDGEN: Shontelle, what do you think being here?
How does it make you feel, at the site? I mean—
SHONTELLE: It is weird. Now, being out here and after you asked me earlier, just driving in,
looking around, thinking...he could still be out here somewhere. That is possible, anything's
possible.
MURRAY: Not in the immediate vicinity, I don’t think.
SHONTELLE: No, but it's a big area, and it's a-- there’s a lot of brush. MURRAY: Yeah.
SHONTELLE: Just when I went back to get your camera and came back, I walked right past the
path.
I’m like, wait, is that where I'm supposed to go? Like, two seconds and I had turned around
and...wow. Does give you a bit of a strange feeling in the pit of your stomach.
MURRAY: When he disappeared, that stopped all the fishing. The kids chattering, and I was fishing
right here.
Fishing for-- for speckled trout. But I walked away over the end of the lake with the kids yelling.
I had to come back and tell them to stop the yelling because it echoes around and sounds like wild
animals.
RIDGEN: Let me just try to say hello here and see if there's an echo.
[Shouting] Hello!
[Echoing]
RIDGEN: Substantial echo.
[MURRAY: chuckles]
MURRAY: Yeah.
RIDGEN: Hello!
[Echoing]
RIDGEN: Hello!
MURRAY: Sounds over to the west, like it did before.
RIDGEN: Hello!
Hello!
MURRAY: Way over to the west.
RIDGEN: Could you tell in any way where I was there?
SHONTELLE: Sounds like it...
VOICE 4: Your documentary, I hope it works. I really do. But if it doesn't turn out, that's not going
to surprise me. It, you know-- I would have assumed if Adrien was going to show up, he would
have showed up by now. But because it's been so long...unless some one person who knows
exactly what happened, and their conscience has weighed on them, unless they themselves say, “I
know.” And come forward and say, I suspect we're not going to know. And if there is that person,
look into your heart and know that there's a family that has, for countless years and over a
generation now, wants to know where their son and brother is gone.
And if anyone knows, please, say something.
RIDGEN: How’d that make you feel, going back there?
MURRAY: Didn't bother me. No. Not for this case, anyway. Just another day. You might as well
turn that off now. I'm done.
RIDGEN: Okay. It was a long day for Murray.
Then, and now. And I know I've hit he and his family hard with my presence and my questions. And
predictably, I feel like shit for it.
But there's new information. Murray said that there was a second dad out there on the day
Adrien disappeared. A fishing buddy named Donnie.
And he's never been reported about before, I'm certain. I wonder why.
I do like trying to figure it all out. The process of it. It's a kind of intoxication to find out who did it.
Who might have done it? What happened. And I think it's also a kind of arrogance that I bring to
these cases where I actually believe that I can put 2 and 2 together and get 4. Instead, I should be
wondering what the hell a “2” is anyway. A symbol for a number. The symbols we follow that
create the narrative because we make the links between them. The fishing trip, the ticking clocks.
The sound the truck makes as we drive to the scene. They're all connected, right? The townsfolk
who weren’t there but know, the family who doesn't talk, and the boy who was small for his age,
and the people searching in the woods in a careful grid work with their dogs and their army and
their hope. And no body. Frustratingly few details, such a simple chain of events leading up to a
blooming catastrophe. Murray's 5-year-old son walked away from him that day on a fishing trip at
Holmes Lake in June 1972. And disappeared, into thin air. And where did Adrien go?
[Music]
[Singing]
MARY MARGARET O’HARA: I will never stop my love.
I will never sleep.
Something here IS precious.
A memory we keep.
I will never stop...
VOICE 1: On the next episode of Someone Knows Something...
[Music]
RIDGEN: So, tell me about who else was there with you.
MURRAY: Well, I don't know whether he wants me to mention his name or not, but Danny Ring.
My fishing buddy.
[Dog barking]
[Door closing]
RIDGEN: How are ya?
[Dog barking]
RIDGEN: I-- I've read a lot of news articles about the story of Adrien, and I've never heard anything
about another guy being there.
MURRAY: Yeah.
Well, I guess it wasn’t that important.
[Music]
VOICE 1: Visit cbc.ca/sks to see a photo of Adrien McNaughton and news clippings from after his
disappearance. Subscribe in iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like the show, tell your
friends. Someone Knows Something is hosted, written, and produced by David Ridgen.
The show is also produced by Ashley Walters, Sandra Bartlett, and Steph Kampf. The music is by
Bob Wiseman.
[Singing]
MARY MARGARET O’HARA: I will never stop my love.
I will never sleep.
Something here precious.
A memory we keep.
I will never stop my love.
I will never, never sleep.
All I want is an answer for this mystery we keep.
VOICE 5: For more CBC original podcasts, go to cbc.ca/originalpodcasts.
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7/25/2020 TRANSCRIPT: Someone Knows Something - Season 1, EP 1 | CBC Radio

Someone Knows Something, Season 1 -- The Family

VOICE 1: There’s evil living here.

ANNOUNCER: From executive producer Jordan Peele.

VOICE 4: You put together a group of Nazi hunters?

ANNOUNCER: Revenge is righteous.

ANNOUNCER: Al Pacino in his ﬁrst television series.

VOICE 5: Have you had enough?

Because there’s more.

ANNOUNCER: Watch the Amazon original series, “Hunters”.

New series, watch now.

Only on Amazon Prime Video.

ANNOUNCER: This is a CBC Podcast.

VOICE 1: You're listening to someone knows something from CBC Radio.

MURRAY: Come in!

How are you?

MURRAY: Not too bad.

RIDGEN: Hi. Nice to meet you.

BARBARA: Nice to meet you, too, David.

RIDGEN: Oh, I know you guys. I've seen you.

What I have is another microphone that I would like to put on Murray.

So, before we start can I do that?

BARBARA: I guess so, eh.

He was a little guy, shy little guy.

RIDGEN: Ruth McCue is a McNaughton family friend.

RIDGEN: Lee McNaughton is Adrien's eldest brother.

An utter mystery. No idea what happened.

And it's in moments of weakness That we're prone to point ﬁngers

RIDGEN: MURRAY: McNaughton, Adrien's father.

RIDGEN: That's gotta be pretty hard to take.

MURRAY: Yeah. Sure was. Still-- still bothers a person a bit.

BARBARA: The stories that went about us were just wild.

That none of the children belonged to Murray.

BARBARA: I couldn't believe that. I just could not believe it.

BARBARA: Things have run through my mind.

Could it have been...

RIDGEN: And for sure, someone knows something.

That-- that will be just part of the mythology of a town.

MURRAY: I’d say, “You back again?”

And his hair was white.

Like, I always felt like he was my shadow.

And he was from Arnprior, that was my town.

But I remember the fear and the basic detail.

A little boy out there, somewhere. Like me.

MURRAY: I've collected clocks for 20 years.

And repaired them and got them running.

BARBARA: We built that one.

MURRAY: I put that together out of some parts.

RIDGEN: I’m just gonna record your clock.

BARBARA: Feel free to use the washroom before you leave.

RIDGEN: Oh, okay, great. I think I’m okay.

VOICE 1: There’s evil living here.

VOICE 2: From executive producer Jordan Peele.

VOICE 4: You put together a group of Nazi hunters?

VOICE 2: Revenge is righteous.

VOICE 2: Al Pacino in his ﬁrst television series.

VOICE 5: Have you had enough?

Because there’s more.

VOICE 2: Watch the Amazon original series, “Hunters”.

New series, watch now.

Only on Amazon Prime Video.

Just tell me what we're doing here.

MURRAY: We're turning in the road to Holmes Lake.