Wild Boys · Campside Media / Sony Music Entertainment

Part 2: The Skeptic

September 9, 2025·37 min·2 clips

Tom wore Ray-Ban sunglasses 'in a casual, fashionable way' — not consistent with someone raised in a cave.

A warning comes first. The episode opens carefully around eating disorders, then Sam Mullins returns to Vernon, a town he remembers as generous, friendly on the surface, and unusually good at keeping secrets. That innocence has an edge. Mullins brings in Sean Harvey, Vernon's young mayor when the boys arrived, and sketches a place where people might accept an impossible story because doubt would feel almost rude. Proce is the skeptic. He wants to know who the boys really are, but the people protecting them fear police attention will only make a delicate situation worse. Their protectiveness is understandable. They see two vulnerable boys who may need medical help, social services, and some kind of route into whatever life comes next. Proce tries another way in. After hearing that the biggest law firm in town is involved, he calls their lawyer and asks for enough information to tell parents, relatives, or friends that the boys are okay. Dale Kermode shuts that down. He says helping Proce would not serve the boys' interests, and he sees the RCMP's attention as public relations rather than peacekeeping. Tammy and Dale are on the same page. Back off, they say in effect. There is already a plan, and the boys do not need cops circling it. Then the story leaks beyond Vernon. Mullins says a media frenzy was almost unavoidable once word of Tommy Will Green moved through town. The newspaper wording sharpens the myth. A November 2, 2003 article in The Province calls them the so-called Bush Boys and lays out the strange tale of brothers coming out of the remote backwoods of B.C.'s interior. Everyone can see something is off. What no one can settle is whether that oddness means trauma, deception, isolation, or some messy blend Vernon is not ready to say aloud. Mullins stays calm and lets the pressure build between compassion and suspicion, between a town ready to help and one man asking the question others keep pushing away. The credits return to care, with eating disorder helpline information that leaves the mystery beside real vulnerability, not above it.

As heard by us

A patient, uneasy chapter where Vernon kindness starts to collide with doubt.

Part 2: The Skeptic shifts Wild Boys from strange arrival story to the quieter machinery that let the story take hold. Sam Mullins frames Vernon as generous but surface-level, the kind of town where two boys with a hidden past could be taken in without too many hard questions.

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Why you'd press play

You want a patient true-crime story where a town's manners hide something unsettling.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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