[Music] my name is Marco and I'm writing to you from Estonia we have a really weird town here called carda where a lot of weird scary stuff happened back in the80s and I think your viewers would be interested in hearing about it I don't expect many of your American listeners to know where Estonia is but that's not trying to clown on you guys as they say if you put a gun to my head and ask me to point to the state of Idaho on a map I'd tell you to pull the trigger and I'll never
be convinced that kalamazo is a real place until I actually see it for myself now my point being is that my geography of far off places isn't all that great either so allow me to explain where Estonia is and what we're all about and to put it very simply Estonia is situated in Russia's armpit it's not so much the armpit part which makes that so bad because if Estonia was situated in Margot Robbie's armpit I think that would be fantastic but instead we're in Russia's armpit with little lvia to our South and freaky Finland to
our North they're Freaks and they know it don't worry about calling them out on it we are reserved independent and nature-loving people and by that I mean we're a bunch of emotionally distant loners who love long hikes where we drink vodka and complain about the weather estonians are so terrible about talking about their feelings that if I asked how are you and you replied I'm good thank you I would consider that a deep heart-to-heart conversation as if you have laid out your entire soul to me if Estonia sounds kind of like a weird place than
my job has done because it is a weird place it's always been a weird place because you have to be weird if you want to survive especially when you're a tiny country trapped between the twin Titans of Europe and Asia but from what I understand things got even weirder when the Communists took over Estonia was Communists from the 1940s until 1991 and we tried our best to resist the Russians but there were too many of them and after they installed Estonian Communists as our government they started to ethnically cleanse us from our own country they
sent out lots of people to Siberia for a variety of crimes some real some imagined whilst importing native Russians to try and change the demographics we went from 97% native Estonian to only 62% native Estonian by 1989 and everyone either worked in the factories or was enlisted into the army and we became second class citizens in our own country the secret police was everywhere you couldn't even go to the beach without permission and if you were caught watching anything but Russian TV it was just like that guy in parks and wreck saying straight the jail
it was a terrible time for us a time of hatred and paranoia and the closer we got to Independence the more frustrated and volatile people became and none more so than in a small coastal town known as carda carda is the only town in the small island of hia which lies in the Baltic Sea most of the people there make their money from either fishing or tourism because there's a big Nature Reserve in the center of the island but the third of card's major industries is what's referred to in English as wrecking Wrecking is basically
when a team of divers strips a sunken shipwreck of anything valuable and while it's not nearly as common as it used to be for Coastal communities around the world the waters around hium were a hotspot for Naval Combat between Germany and Russia during World War II there's a lot of money to be made in bringing back military Salvage but the practice caused a huge Rift between cardless Wreckers and its fishermen the fishermen all said that disturbing the drowned sailor final resting places would bring bad Omens to carda but then especially during communist times people were
encouraged to dismiss such silly superstitions as relics of an oppressive past the government then paid much better wages for Wrecking than fishing which further widened the rift between those two groups and for a prolonged period I'm talking many years there was a general feeling in town that something bad would eventually happen either because of the hatred between the Wreckers and the fishermen because of the bad luck that the latter was bringing or because of a third reason the curse of the hauma witches now I don't believe in this kind of thing but it's worth mentioning
because a lot of people around hauma do believe in it and as we all know believing can make a regular person do some very strange things there's a local Legend which says hea used to be home to a coven of witches witches who would cast spells shapeshift or summon storms especially to SN ships or cause bad luck to unwanted visitors one story claims that many hundreds of years ago a fisherman insulted a group of witches and they cursed his family his descendants were then plagued by Misfortune for generations and since many of card's fishing amilies
were descended from this very same family The Witch's Curse was often alluded to following the sudden and tragic loss of a local fishing vessel again I don't believe in witches or Giants or any stuff like that but I do believe it's Legends like that which contributed to what you might call cardless psychic earthquake that might sound a little woo woo to some but I don't use the term in any kind of Supernatural sense what I mean is all that tension in the region was like the fault lines in an earthquake zone it kept building up
and building up and when it finally got released it was very bad it all happened in the space of just one week back in September of 1989 there's another reason that compareed this to an earthquake and that's how there was one big earthquake then a handful of psychic aftershocks which followed almost like Echoes of the original incident the first incident the earthquake if you will took place when a girl girl named Dasha brova blew up a Russian Cafe by flooding the kitchens with gas and then igniting it the explosion took place towards the end of
service on a Saturday evening so the restaurant was packed and the kitchen staff was in the dining area enjoying some hard earned vodka after work and by the time they smelled the gas it was too late and when all was said and done 14 people ended up in a hospital some with life-threatening injuries and five more ended up in the morg the authorities were quick to blame anti-russian sentiment and were ready to use it as an excuse to arrest dissident estonians who were suspected of raising support for an independence movement but when it was discovered
that the perpetrator was none other than a 16-year-old Russian cocktail waitress everyone in carda was stunned Dasha had no history of violent or destructive Behavior by all accounts she was quiet fairly popular and she did well in school but what caused a well- behaved unassuming school girl to suddenly want to blow herself up and take as many people as possible with her police were still trying to figure out what the hell had happened when just 2 Days Later a Russian fishing boat worker swerved his car into a line of school children all waiting for the
bus to school he was blackout drunk at 7:30 in the morning and Witnesses said it looked like he deliberately swerved into the kids after putting his foot down in the accelerator the drunk must have knocked himself out after slamming into a wall because he stayed in his driver's seat until the police showed up to drag him out of it but when they did he was laughing everyone saw it too the police the Medics all the members of the public running around trying to save the kids' lives they all saw clear his day because when the
drunk saw what had he done he started laughing so hard that you'd have thought that he was about to piss his pants as they dragged him to the police car the drunk was shouting Onin D CH which is Russian numbers counting from 1 to four he was counting the number of children that he hit that weren't moving or crying or Screaming he was counting the ones that were dead as you can imagine the residents of carda were in a State of Shock within just 3 days they had the restaurant explosion then the four dead school
children and with many more injured and the local medical clinic was completely full so many of the kids had to be taken to the mainland for proper treatment it was so shocking to people that it almost felt like a ward started it felt like we were under attack from some unknowable force from the outside but after the incident with the kids people told themselves in typical Estonian fashion well now things can't get any worse so it's all uphill from here but then things did get worse there was a big funeral and vigil held for the
school kids who lost their lives the morning that drunk decided to smash into them everyone in carda was in attendance at least almost everyone because almost everyone being in the streets then walking to the cemetery together it made it very easy to figure out who was and who wasn't there and the more people started to notice that one particular family was missing the more they started to ask questions and the more they started to become concerned a small group of people then went to check in on the absent family only to make a truly terrible
Discovery a boy of just 11 had convinced his little sister of around 7 to join him in murdering their mother and father they woke up early then while their parents were still in bed they crept downstairs to their kitchen and retrieved a pair of very sharp kitchen knives then they walked back upstairs into the parents' bedroom then cut both their throats while they were still sleeping obviously people don't just die if you cut their throats especially if you don't get all the major blood vessels so instead of pumping out blood so fast that they were
too weak to move or scream the kids parents tried frantically to both stop the bleeding and to stop their children from attacking them but sadly their efforts were in vain they found the mother's corpse in the bathroom and the dads in the kitchen downstairs he passed out and died trying to reach the phone to call 03 which back then was the Soviet emergency number specifically for medical emergencies and this marked the third incident of multiple murders within just a week then instead of telling each other cheer up things can't get any worse people began to
wonder what the next thing would be they went from shocked and saddened but still stoic to almost a full-on panic descending on their Town people wouldn't let their kids go to school they refused to go to work or do anything remotely dangerous it it was like people were convinced that there was some kind of curse on the town which there obviously wasn't but that didn't matter because if people believe something they truly believe it then they can act in all kinds of ways you never expect them to the recers started to throw back some of
the more valuable and precious things they'd kept from the great sunken graveyards they'd made their money from they threw back medals trinkets all kinds of things and in the middle of the night some men walked out of their houses and tossed their trophies in the cardless harbor and watched them sink to the bottom all in hopes that it would put the dead sailor's angry spirits to rest some of the fishermen on the other hand left offerings in the woods for the witches of hium who they firmly believed were behind all the horrifying going SS it
was like the vast majority of the people in town all fell victim to the sudden all consuming and Collective Madness one that made them lash out at each other and act in all kinds of bizarre ways they kept waiting and waiting for the next terrible thing to happen but thankfully for them the psychic storm hovering over the town had finally abated again I don't use that term in the literal sense but to me it's the only term that actually broaches on what happened during that one week back in 1989 carda went from years and years
without so much as a common assault and then during the space of just 7 days a dozen people all lost their lives in a series of senselessly violent acts it's almost enough to make a person believe in Restless Spirits or ancient Wicken curses but if you ask me what's to blame is something that's in our programming as biological machines lines of code we've been running since the days we lived in caves and the Shadows cast monsters on the walls during long and uncertain nights [Music] without a doubt the biggest Scandal to ever hit my small
Arkansas town was one summer my nth grade girl ended up in the hospital after being attacked while walking home from school whoever attacked her hadn't just beaten the crap out of her they'd violated her to the point that she needed actual surgery to repair the damage the doctor who performed the surgery broke down into tears during the Press conference afterwards it was his job to tell everyone the good news that the surgeries had been successful and her life had been saved and he still broke down into tears obviously the next phase was trying to find
the guy who did it the victim's memory of the incident was hazy and she couldn't give a detailed description of her attacker and so the whole town descended into this total state of paranoia trying to figure out who it was State Police were running the investigation while local cops were going door to door or making visits to Local Schools to make appeals for information and it was a very intense time we'd never known anything like it either someone's getting a speeding ticket around here and it's all people are gossiping about for maybe weeks wondering where
they'd been speeding to or who they were speeding from so to go from low crime to Woe crime well that was quite something everyone was praying the attacker would be found and that they'd be found fast and then out of the blue a local Pastor walked into a 17-year-old son's bedroom and shot him point blank in the head it was his wife the boy's mom who called the sheriff's on him and she was still there screaming bloody murder when the deputies showed up to arrest him the pastor didn't resist he just let those boys cuff
him and then he walked with him to their Cruiser and off he went and down at the department the guy made a full confession told them the whole chain of events too he and his boy had been talking and had come to a disagreement the pastor then walked downstairs took a pistol out of his gun safe and then walked back upstairs and shot him he told them what gun he used the caliber of the bullet everything except why he did it the deputies asked him over and over what it was he and his boy disagreed
over and why it was so bad the pastor felt he had to shoot him afterwards but no matter how many times they asked no matter how many times they phrased the question or threw out guesses the pastor wouldn't say what caused it he simply repeated that he did it and asked to be taken to jail officially speaking no one knows why the pastor killed his boy just over a week after that ninth grader ended up in the hospital but off the Record we all know why it's the reason the girl's attacker was never caught the
only thing that really remains a mystery to everyone is how the pastor found out because outside of a straightup confession it's hard to imagine how a father might come to learn something like that from his own flesh and blood there's a lot of speculation around here some of it good-natured a lot of it not so good-natured but it also doesn't seem to bother people that they'll never know how the pastor figured out his boy was the one that attacked that little ninth grade girl because however it happened some folks around here are very much of
the opinion that the pastor did the right thing and putting his boy down [Music] in late August of 1996 when I was just 19 years old I arrived home to find my mom sitting at the kitchen table I've been in a house party with my then girlfriend the night before and following one of my first real experiences with alcohol I wasn't feeling my best I walked through the front door into a house so quiet that I thought my mom and sister were elsewhere but when I walked into the kitchen I saw my mom just kind
of sat there very silent with a glass of wine in front of her it was so unexpected and I was so hung over that seeing her actually made me jump a little but then that feeling of surprise was quickly replaced by one of dread mom never drank in the daytime and she never just sat around the kitchen table quiet like that and so very likely I started to suspect that I might be in for some very bad news she asked me to sit down and when I did she told me that my dad was gone
and that he wasn't coming back I asked if gone she meant dead when Mom shook her head and told me no he just left I remember floating on an island of relief for a moment before sinking back into a sea of shock and once I was able I followed up with a ton of questions asking how she knew where he'd gone when he' left and stuff like that and the short answer to all of them was she didn't know and the harder she tried to come up with any substantial response the more upset she got
he hadn't warned her he hadn't left a note he just packed a suitcase got into his car and then drove off to God knows where the conversation ended with my mom crying and me hugging her while I told her everything was going to be okay but as I unfortunately came to discover everything was not going to be okay for the first 2 or 3 months no one really talked about my dad leaving there were routine calls and visits from relatives to check in on us but the discussions focused on our welfare not why dad had
left or if he'd be back anything further than that anything which rubbed up against the mystery of the whole situation tended to upset mom to the point that she couldn't talk about it anymore and I'd be lying if I said that I didn't feel the same way but then after letting the shock fully wear off all the pain and grief was replaced by a burning curiosity and one which was only made worse by my mom's deliberate and enduring silence on the subject she wasn't in denial or anything and people grieve in different ways but whenever
I brought up the subject of my dad she'd either start crying or get super angry and start yelling stuff like you don't talk to me about that piece of crap he's dead to me and I had no choice but to seek answers elsewhere and since I strongly suspected that Mom was hiding something from me I did so with great intensity my first move was to contact one of my dad's friends his only real friend in fact who I figured was the most likely to have knowledge of his whereabouts dad was an only child and both
his parents died before he was 30 but he and his friend Carl had been close since their college days together which is even longer than he'd known my mom I thought if anyone knew where my dad was it' be him but when I called him he said that my call was the first that he'd heard of it he had no idea why my dad might have left but he did know a few places that he might have gone and one of those places was a small town up in the Wilds of Northern Canada named Wrigley
I managed to rule out the prospect that he'd stayed in Portland because he wasn't going to his job anymore I then tried his hometown of Lincoln City but as as far as I could tell he wasn't there either then and only then did I consider traveling all the way up to Wrigley the furthest of the three potential locations because doing so would mean driving for 30 hours straight through some of the most remote areas of the Canadian wilderness and Carl said my dad had spent a summer there back during his college Years and frequently reminisced
about it he'd also mentioned wanting to go back there one day so according to Carl there was a good chance that if he had indeed suffered some kind of sudden midlife crisis he traveled up to Wrigley Wrigley which is just over 450 miles from the nearest big city has a population of around 100 mostly First Nation citizens it has one gas station one medical clinic and the nearest RCMP offices over 200 Mi away is the very definition of a small town but to me that was good news cuz there'd be nowhere for my dad to
hide I was warned against any kind of winter travel because it can reach minus 60 up there during the winter months and so instead I made sure to drive up in the summertime I arried in Wrigley on Wednesday July 22nd of 1998 after 3 days of driving up from Portland the nearest motel was over a 100 miles away but since I was only planning on staying in town for around 48 hours at the most I figured I could just sleep in my car which inadvertently brings me to my first stop in town the gas station
Wrigley's one gas station was staffed by a guy remember named Winston and Winston was a great guy who looked to be in his late 30s or early 40s and we made Small Talk At First and he remarked about how rare it was to get any Outsiders coming through that gave me a golden opportunity to ask about my father so I did while showing him the most recent photo that I could get my hands on Winston didn't recognize him from the most recent photograph but he did recognize someone in the second picture I showed him which
I fished out of all the possessions my dad left behind it showed a much younger College age version of my dad along with a similarly aged woman both were dressed in hiking gar and were standing on either side of a large Rock pointing at what appeared to be some kind of mineral deposit running all the way through the center Winston recognized it as Hunter's Rock a landmark about 10 miles outside of town it had been kind of famous back in the'80s because some geologists had come up from Vancouver to take a look at it and
local Legends said that it was the Spear of some ancient gargantuan hunter that become embedded in the earth when they missed their intended target and this gave rise to rumors that Hunter's Rock was some kind of meteorite that had indeed buried itself deep into the Earth after falling from the stars the geologist's arrival caused quite a stir in town because while many were excited to learn the truth of The Rock's Origins others believed applying such scientific rigor would be disrespectful to the beliefs of their ancestors The Rock turned out not to be any kind of
meteorite nor was it the gigantic Spear of some Titanic Hunter of yor but interestingly enough the geologists estimated that it did extend deep into the Earth potentially for almost a mile and unless the area was actually some kind of extinct volcano he had absolutely no clue how it had gotten there I say all this because I was very interested to know why my dad had visited the place I didn't remember him having any kind of interest in geology but then again he might have figured seeing that it was just something to do while he was
in the area but then after Winston filled me in on Hunter's Rock and I showed him the pictures one more time he started staring intently at the girl in the second picture he asked if I knew who she was and when I said no he asked if it was okay if he took the picture into the back while he made a phone call he proceeds to tell me that with about 80% certainty the girl in the photograph was the same one that had gone missing back in the early 70s out near Great Bear Lake he
said that there were some people that I should check with to be 100% sure but that her face was remarkably similar to the one that he'd seen on missing posters back when he was a kid I then asked him who he needed to talk to in order to be certain I mean and he told me that I needed to visit the local government office which was inside of the town's medical clinic since I arrived in the very late afternoon the office would be closed until the following morning so after Winston wished me luck in finding
my dad I took a walk around town and then headed back to my car the next morning I walked over to the gas station to get some coffee and breakfast and swapped small talk with Winston before heading over to the clinic there I met with Irwin chief of the pedaki first nation and while that sounded like an awfully Grand title he told me he felt like little more than a clerk at times and that his title was almost purely ceremonial he was a welcoming and generous man and the moment I met him I just knew
that he'd be willing to help but unfortunately Chief Irwin had some bad news to share with me the chief who operated out of an office of the size of a broom closet was happy to welcome a rare visitor into town and assuming I was some kind of tourist offered to answer any and all questions I had he even offered to set me up with a guide who'd take me around the area in an off-roader so I could see all of his tribal lands from the comfort of a passenger seat but when I told him my
story as in that I was looking for my dad his face softened then when I showed him the second picture the one from what I assumed were his college days I'll never forget how the chief reacted he went from happy and smiley to having look so cold it almost scared me and then he simply said I think you and me should step into my office now it might sound morbid to some but I was excited he was clearly in possession of some valuable information the exact thing that I'd driven more than 1500 miles for but
what he told me raised many more questions than it answered Chief irn told me that the girl in the picture was named Susan Calvert and was a king's University graduate who disappeared in the summer of 1973 but then he pointed to my dad and told me that he'd been one of the potential suspects arrested by the RCMP and that he'd been questioned in connection with Susan Calvert's disappearance not once but twice obviously that was all very shocking and again this might make me sound like a kind of psycho but it was progress solid progress for
the first time in literally 18 months everywhere I'd gone everyone I'd turned to it had all been dead ends so even if it was bad news that my dad had potentially been a murder suspect it was still something solid to cling to which gave me an idea on why he might have left us in the first place I mean think about it you're in college you head up to Canada for a summer hiking vacation you meet a girl maybe fall in love but that girl ends up going missing and you're one of the suspects that'
be just about enough to screw anyone up for life I mean provided you weren't the cause for her disappearance so by that point it seemed highly probable that Dad had made a late life pilgrimage back to Wrigley to get answers about the girl he' loved and lost that last Point kind of circles back to why I was so suspicious mom was hiding something from me she was so upset then so angry at my dad and it made me think that she knew something about this girl Susan and that my dad sudden disappeared might be connected
to her own Chief Irwin went on to tell me that Susan culbert's remains had never been found so no one had ever been charged in connection with her disappearance but he also mentioned that her last known location was in the jaws of Great Bear Lake out in what are known among the tribes as the satu lands and that was where the mounties had found her campsite totally abandoned but also totally undisturbed he took a good look at the more recent picture of my dad before telling me that he hadn't seen him but the chief was
also quick to add that if Dad had been heading straight toward Hunter's Rock there was no real reason for him to stop back in town especially if it was a place that held the bad memories of being arrested if he wanted to really look for the missing girl or even if he just wanted to pay his respects at the place that she was last seen alive it made sense that he went straight up to the Great Bear Lake at least if he was up there in Canada and not some Place house entirely and the only
issue was getting there from Wrigley it was about a 200m drive to get to a place called delene and if you didn't have a decent 4x4 which obviously I didn't then there was no point trying to make the drive but even if I did have one I was still looking at a 30m hike out into the marshlands through all kinds of crap and mosquitoes yes they still have them up there to the place Susan Calvert's camp site was found I could go through the process of hiring a 4x4 driving up to delene then hiking for
3 days through some pretty hellish terrain and it could end up being for nothing granted I considered it all a very Noble Pursuit there was literally nothing more important to me than trying to find my dad and potentially bring him home but like any great effort the spirit was willing yet the flesh was weak and in my case my bank account was even weaker I simply couldn't afford to extend my stay by another few days as I'd already taken a whole week off of work and had spent a ton of money on gas motel rooms
and road food it was either throw in the towel or call Mom and beg her to transfer some money into my account I'd then have to call work and risk getting fired after begging for a few extra days off when I'd already put my manager in a pretty bad bind by requesting a week off at relatively short notice and calling call it quits and then maybe heading back at a later date seemed like The Logical course of action being up there in the Northwestern territories made me feel like I was close you know what I
mean so close that I could practically feel him up there with me somehow then the more I thought about it the more I realized that there was no turning back not unless I wanted to live with the regret of inaction for the rest of my goddamned life but the thing that really sealed it was when Chief Irwin told me that delene had an RCM office and how that was the place they'd questioned my dad after his friend Susan disappeared they'd have records written reports everything I needed to get more information about what had happened to
her and my dad and with that in mind I called work and then I called my mom now getting the time off was easy cuz I was just honest with my manager and told him what I was doing my dad had left we were worried about him so I was off looking for him in the hopes of bringing him home and hell maybe even saving his life too and at that my manager said take all the time you need Mom on the other hand was not so easy to convince she didn't know where I was
or what I was doing so when I called her and informed her of the situation she was not happy at first in light of what I was doing she refused to wire me any money and told me to return home immediately I had to argue with her for about a half hour straight using the phone in the wriggly gas station's office before she finally relented and agreed to send me some money I'd be lying if I said that it didn't get a little tearful at points and I'll be forever grateful to Old Winston for giving
me my privacy during that phone call it was quite possibly one of the most intense I've ever had I also owe Winston in another way and even bigger one too because it was he who agreed to drive me all the way up to dine near Great Bear Lake in exchange for nothing but gas money and I guess he was pretty invested in my little Story by that point especially once I shared what I'd learned from Chief Irwin but before we set off the next day he told me that he wouldn't be following me out into
the marshes I told him that I wasn't expecting him to and how I wasn't 100% decided on whether or not I was headed that far anyway but then he said something that sticks with me to the day I die he asked if your dad's out looking for the girl and you're out looking for him who's going to end up looking for you you ever think about that and I remember the those words and I hadn't I'd never even paid one single iota of thought towards that concept but when I did and the moments after Winston
asked me it chilled me to the bone on the drive up to delene the next day Winston managed to completely talk me out of walking 30 plus miles into the marshes if my dad was out there and he hadn't gone completely crazy then he would have had at least some basic camping gear with him whereas I didn't even have a tent let alone enough camp food or the right Footwear to make it through 30 Mi of marshy Wilderness and back and so realistically there was no going after my dad in the sawu Lance but what
I could do was check in with the RCMP up in delene let them know about the situation with my dad and then give them my contact details so they could get in touch if there were any sightings of him and maybe just maybe someone up there would be able to tell me more about why my dad was arrested and connect ction with his friend's disappearance it took us about 5 hours to get up to delene and then when we arrived Winston drove us straight over to the RCMP office which thankfully was right next to a
grocery store he said he'd pick us up some sodas and hot food and then I headed into the office alone the office was just a small reception area with a larger room behind it and after looking through the open doorway I traded greetings with a younger looking red coated mounty Constable Jacobs who was around my age seemed only too happy to help me but when he realized that I had more than just a basic inquiry in mind he told me to sit tight while he radioed the only other Mount and delene a man named McKenzie
not his real name and the need for the pseudonym will shortly become clear McKenzie who was considerably older than his Junior co-workers seemed far more equipped to help with inquiries of a historical nature and he did help he was a little Frosty with me at first but after I told him the whole story about looking for my father he warmed up enough to talk to me McKenzie actually remembered the incident involving Susan Culver and my father because he'd been a junior consal way back in the 70s at the time of the investigation he remembered my
dad stumbling back into deene on his own he remembered how it was he who had reported Susan missing and he also remembered how following the initial round of question ing the mounties basically had no choice but to consider my dad as a suspect McKenzie hadn't been present for either interview so all he knew was that my dad had somehow implicated himself but that's all he knew they had all the files and reports on site but McKenzie said he couldn't share them without the proper clearance and that might only come after a lengthy Freedom of Information
request if he had showed me the files he might actually lose his job and as he put it he hadn't worked just shy of his 30 years only to lose his pension after a little snafu like that it was frustrating but also strangely cathartic I kind of hoped that they might just show me the files in the back room or something but I guess that was purely wishful thinking on my part filing out a foyer request might take months but to me it was just another step on what had already been a long journey of
tracking down my dad I've been searching for like 18 18 months by that point and I sure as hell could have waited a little longer and even though I traveled all that way I knew I wasn't going home completely empty-handed McKenzie and Constable Jacobs both promised to keep an eye out for my dad and even promised to call me if they' heard or saw anything out there in the jaws of the bear and by that I mean the marshlands where Susan Culvert when missing and before I left McKenzie asked what my plans were I told
him I was heading back to Wrigley and I would probably spend another night in my car before heading south in the morning he wished me luck and I thanked him and then I walked outside to meet Winston near his truck he picked us up some sandwiches and then as we got on the road back to Wrigley I gave him the low down on what the malies had told me Winston said that he'd been keeping me in his prayers hoping that I'd get my hands on those interview tapes sooner rather than later I wouldn't say that
I was a religious person not by any stretch but sometimes just sometimes I think Winston's prayers found someone's ears because that night as I was trying to get as much rest as possible prior to my drive back south I woke up to hear someone knocking on the glass of my car's window then when I looked outside and saw a distinctive red jacket I realized who it was it was McKenzie the mounty from up in delene I lifted my seat up opened my car door and he asked if he could come sit in the passenger seat
and I told him sure sure then when he climbed inside I remembered that he reached into his pocket and produced a cassette tape with a scribbled label I couldn't read it right away I had my internal lights switched off so I wouldn't kill my car's battery and be stuck out there but I had a strong feeling it was something very specific something he definitely should not have been showing me McKenzie told me to turn on my car's tape player and so I did and then after he slid the tape into the slot my suspicions were
confirmed it was the tape with my dad's first interview on it the one from before he was arrested since he wasn't considered a suspect during the first police interview my dad was very forthcoming with certain pieces of information and as it turned out he and Susie as he called her were out camping near the marshlands when Susie got up in the night to go pee outside the tent after Susie's exit woke him up my dad had simply rolled over and attempted to go back to sleep but just seconds later he heard Susan Calvert scream dad
said that he rushed to put his boots on grabbed a flashlight and then ran out into the night to see what had scared Susan so badly and that according to him as when he saw them one of the interviewing mounties asked my dad who they are and my dad responds by saying that if he tells them they'll think he's crazy dad then says something about how if he knew they were out there he and Susie wouldn't have gone anywhere near the place not in a million years one of the mounties then asked my dad where
they took Susan cver and dad said he didn't know but wherever it was he knew Susie was probably dead she had to be because there was no way that she could survive what they were doing to her again one of the mes asks who they are and Dad explodes he asked one of them how do you guys not know you live out here and all this other unhinged sounding stuff like it's no wonder the mounties assume that he murdered Susan Culver because he really did sound out of his goddamned mind the mounties asked a few
more questions but with each answer my dad kept getting more and more agitated he didn't know why they didn't take him too they hadn't seen anyone following them over the previous few days and he couldn't explain why there wasn't a drop of Susan's blood anywhere despite my dad's claim that they were violently attacking Susan and after that the mounties announced that they were terminating the interview and the tape went dead when I asked McKenzie if he'd brought the second tape he shook his head and told me it wasn't worth listening to and based on what
my dad had said during his first interview the mounties placed him under arrest on suspicion of Susan culbert's murder remember my dad said that he knew for certain that she was dead but then put him through a second round of questioning but the reason it wasn't worth listening to is because my dad totally stonewalled the two mounties asking him questions when he figured that they might at least partially believe his story my dad was very chatty but then once he realized that he was a murder suspect he did the smart thing and didn't say another
word until he was released due to lack of evidence McKenzie said that after he was released my dad left town but the search for Susan Culver continu continued for another 10 days and the search and rescue team found the campsite that she'd shared with my dad but they didn't find any trace of the girl herself no clothes or blood or human remains and the search effort was eventually called off and many years later her parents had her declared dead for some sort of legal purpose and she was taken off the missing person's register up there
in Canada but according to McKenzie there was something in the files that caught his attention at one point towards the end of the search a dog from an RCMP search team ran off and was never seen again and the dogs disappear and sparked a whole new search in rescue operation a kind of mini search within the larger effort mounties searched high and low for this missing Hound as well as Susie Calvert but neither of them were ever recovered McKenzie said the dog's disappearance was eventually put down to an operational Hazard and it was mourned and
then replaced but he thought that there was a lot more to it than just a dog getting a little over excited and then drowning in a marsh remember they never found Susan's body or the remains of that dog in which case where the hell did they go McKenzie finished by saying that in his opinion my dad and Susie culbert had come across some kind of grow site either marijuana opium poppies or maybe both and it was quick to add that he had absolutely no proof of that theory but very little El explained some of the
comments my dad made during that first interview after I expressed my gratitude for bringing me the tape McKenzie left and left me to an uneasy sleep it was weird hearing my dad that young though he sounded a lot like me whenever I heard my own voice on tape but that's obviously not what stuck with me that night it was what he'd said during that first interview along with how he'd said it now driving back I had these strange mixed feelings of sadness and fear I'd never felt so close to finding my dad and at the
same time he'd never felt so distant all his life he'd probably been dealing with the aftermath of what had happened up in the Northwest Territories and I can't speak from my mom because I still don't know to what extent she knew all of this but personally I had no idea and that was almost 2 years ago and at the time of writing now this is in April of 2000 I'm still no closer to finding out the whole truth about my dad's disappearance but these days I have a much better idea of where to look and
now that I can hold my own on a solo hiking trip I think I'm just about ready to go looking for him I'm planning on heading back up to delene in the summertime sometime possibly in June and I'll be sure to write up everything I find I don't know how many of you will actually read this but I don't care this is good for my sanity and when I find out anything else this will be the first place I post to I imagine that I'll be posting another blog in a few months and if I
don't I either found my dad or something else happened I guess we'll just have to wait and see hey friends thanks for listening click that notification Bell to be alerted of all future narrations I release new videos every Monday and Thursday at 9:00 p.m. EST and there are super fun live streams every Sunday and Wednesday night if you got a story be sure to submit them over email at let's reads submissions at gmail.com and you might even hear your story featured on the next video and if you want to support me even more grab Early
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