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The Impossible Case of Lilly and Jack: How Did Two Kids Just Vanish in Nova Scotia?

The search in the woods, the scrutiny of a rural community, and the suspicion that remains

The Impossible Case of Lilly and Jack: How Did Two Kids Just Vanish in Nova Scotia?

The search in the woods, the scrutiny of a rural community, and the suspicion that remains

PHOTOS BY DARREN CALABRESE

Published 6:30, April 15, 2026

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.

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.

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........

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