Unsolved Canadian Mysteries · Unsolved Canadian Mysteries

Bonus - The Lost Boys of Pickering

·26 min·1 clip

Bruce Ricketts wrote The Lost Boys, What We Know and What We Believe and ran a case-specific website.

1. Unsolved Canadian Mysteries covers the 1995 Pickering disappearance of six teenage boys near Lake Ontario. 2. Kenton DeYoung hosts with Christina Cootsie and Dylan Fehrman, and their roles matter because they trade theories as the timeline unfolds. 3. The episode asks what happened on one March night when Jay Boyle, Chad Smith, Daniel Higgins, Jamie LeFevre, Michael Cummins, and Rob Rumbolt vanished. 4. Kenton says the boys were 16 to 18 years old and were at a party with drinking and smoking. 5. He places the key action between midnight and 3:30 a.m., when the boys left the party and were seen near the East Shore Marina and Frenchman’s Bay Marina. 6. Kenton says the boys decided to steal boats, including an imitation Boston Whaler and a fiberglass tricycle boat. 7. He adds that one theory says the tricycle boat may have been taken the previous night and simply floated off because it was not tied up properly. 8. The episode says a girlfriend called police around 3 a.m. after one boy said they were at the marina and planned to take a boat out. 9. Kenton notes that neighbors heard a boat engine around 3:30 a.m., which matched the time the boys were believed to be on the water. 10. Police searched Lake Ontario for days, brought in helicopters, and found no boat or people. 11. Bruce Ricketts later took on the case as a private investigator and wrote The Lost Boys, What We Know and What We Believe. 12. Kenton says Ricketts also ran a website with case updates, but archive.org now preserves only part of it. 13. One clip of the marina shows three boys, while another grainy clip shows a man and two women, and Kenton says the man appears to hold a gun. 14. Kenton connects that footage to the idea that a drug deal or other confrontation may have been happening at the marina. 15. He also mentions a mysterious phone call telling a girlfriend not to come to the marina. 16. Another disputed clue is a dented gas can with English and French writing that was found on the American side of the border. 17. Kenton says bones found later with red Levi jeans were dated to a man older than the boys, which complicates the identification question. 18. Christina and Dylan steer the conversation toward Lake Ontario geography, the Marysburg vortex, and the idea that magnetic forces might pull boats down. 19. The tone stays informal and conversational, with jokes about drinks, bears, dinosaurs, and the age of the case. 20. Listeners who like Canadian cold cases and competing timelines will get the most out of it; people wanting a tight evidence-only recap may skip it.

As heard by us

A Pickering case built from missing footage, a disputed age estimate, and a boat that never turned up.

This Patreon-exclusive Unsolved Canadian Mysteries episode revisits the Lost Boys of Pickering with the 30th anniversary in view, following Kenton DeYoung, Christina Cootsie, and Dylan Fehrman through a case that still resists clean answers.

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Why you'd press play

A missing boat, shaky evidence, and a case that keeps slipping sideways.

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