It’s a strange place to find a child-sized bootprint — pressed into the mud, surrounded by thick brush next to a clearing in a remote area of Nova Scotia’s Pictou County.
Still, there is nothing ordinary about this case.
One year after Lilly and Jack Sullivan vanished, search volunteers once again took to the woods near the children’s home in Lansdowne, N.S., scouring the area for signs of them.
The volunteers are hopeful the newly discovered bootprint is another clue in the mystery of the missing siblings that has captured international attention. But that is yet to be seen.
In a country where most missing children are found within days, Lilly and Jack’s case stands out: two small children, disappearing at the same time in a way investigators still can’t explain.
“We’re just devastated that there’s still no answers after a year. I can’t really put it in words how hard this has been on myself and my family,” said Cyndy Murray, the children’s maternal grandmother.
“We’re still trying to stay positive and hope for the best, but it’s very tiring. It’s a lot mentally.”
Lilly and Jack Sullivan disappeared from their home in rural Nova Scotia one year ago. Experts say it’s rare for two siblings to go missing together, and even more unusual that they’ve been gone for so long. Now, volunteers are taking to the woods once again, searching for clues. The CBC’s Aly Thomson reports.
Lilly, then 6, and Jack, then 4, were reported missing on May 2, 2025.
Their mother, Malehya Brooks-Murray, and the children’s stepfather, Daniel Martell, both say they heard the kids that morning inside their home in Lansdowne, a sparsely populated area about 140 kilometres northeast of Halifax.
When the mobile home went silent and the children were nowhere to be found, Brooks-Murray ran outside and called 911.
Hundreds of police and search and rescue volunteers descended upon the area. For days, they searched the thick woods of the rural community.
RCMP Major Crime is leading the investigation, which they say has not turned criminal.
Investigators have reviewed 8,132 videos and conducted 106 interviews. Dogs highly trained in detecting human remains have scoured more than 40 kilometres.
RCMP have also examined phone and banking records of those closest to the children, and continue to sift through 1,191 tips from the public.
The sheer volume of information is part of the reason the investigation is dragging on, said Staff Sgt. Rob McCamon. But police are making “forward progress,” he said.
“This is a critical question for our community when two young children go missing and we have no answers. So we’ve not let up the steam and we won’t,” McCamon, the officer in charge of major crime in Nova Scotia, told reporters at RCMP headquarters Thursday.
“I can’t really say what exactly the plan is other than to keep working, finding the information we need and then we will find the answers to what happened to Lilly and Jack.”
The Mounties have not said publicly what they believe happened to the children, but McCamon reiterated Thursday there is no evidence the siblings were abducted.
According to data from RCMP, 62 per cent of missing children or youth cases are closed within 24 hours, while 92 per cent are closed within a week.
The lack of answers in the case has fuelled widespread speculation, rumours and finger pointing on all sides.
Two children going missing at the same time with no explanation is “profoundly rare,” said Michelle Jeanis, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Jeanis said the only similar case she can think of is Diamond and Tionda Bradley, who disappeared from their Chicago apartment in July 2001. The case remains unsolved.
She said the details of the Sullivan case don’t fit into any category when considering the typical markers of a missing persons case.
Sibling disappearances are often family-related — usually a parent taking off with them — while pairs of missing children are usually the same gender and taken by a stranger, she said.
Jeanis said people who are missing long term are twice as likely to be found dead, but the longer a person is missing, the more likely they are to eventually come home in some capacity.
“I think the public should understand that these kinds of cases do not look like procedural dramas on TV and they can take a really long time, and that we should still be looking for these children,” said Jeanis, who has been following the case closely from Louisiana.
“We have seen children found after decades…. What I would want is that we inspire the community to still have a degree of hope.”
Searches continue for Jack and Lilly Sullivan, who disappeared a year ago in Nova Scotia. Nick Oldrieve of Please Bring Me Home, an Ontario-based volunteer organization, calls this case unusual. He led a public search on April 26, where a new child-sized bootprint was found.
Hope is what brought searchers back to Lansdowne last Sunday.
Led by Ontario-based organization Please Bring Me Home, about 40 volunteers — including loved ones of Lilly and Jack — took to the woods once again to search for clues.
“This case is very unusual. We haven’t seen it before where two children this age have gone missing,” said Nick Oldrieve, executive director of Please Bring Me Home.
“I think that’s what the public has a hard time grasping is how could this be that two children could just wander? So we just keep our foot on the gas until there’s a resolution to the case.”
The children’s mother also took part in the search, driving a four-wheeler in between the groups as they scoured several areas of Lansdowne, including where a bootprint cluster was found early in the investigation.
Police have never confirmed the bootprint cluster was made by Lilly or Jack, but it’s one of only two pieces of physical evidence in the case, the other being a piece of Lilly’s blanket found hanging in a tree.
Not far from where orange tape marked off where the bootprint cluster was found, across what’s known locally as the “pipeline trail,” one of the searchers came across a full child-sized bootprint in the mud.
Oldrieve took photos of the print and sent them to RCMP, along with the GPS co-ordinates. The Mounties said in an email it’s “currently under review to assess any potential relevance.”
Oldrieve said while he’s not a bootprint expert, he has been a part of long-term searches and has spotted his own bootprints from the previous summer when he returned in the spring.
“It looks well preserved anyhow,” he said in an interview on the trail, as searchers sipped water and ate sandwiches during a break.
Oldrieve said his group will continue conducting searches in Lansdowne this spring and summer.
In a statement to CBC News, Brooks-Murray said she has never stopped believing that her children will be returned to her.
“I want to let the police and everyone helping to bring my babies home know that they are truly appreciated and all their efforts trying to get Lilly and Jack home are not unnoticed,” Brooks-Murray wrote.
Cyndy Murray, Brooks-Murray’s mother, said her family is living a nightmare, but they will never give up hope.
“That’s what keeps me going,” said Murray, exhausted following a full day of searching for her grandchildren.
“Jack and Lilly are always on my mind. Always.”
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