Nova Scotia's Pictou County has been waiting for answers about what happened to Lilly and Jack Sullivan, aged 6 and 4, who disappeared from their home in Lansdowne in May. Locals erected a makeshift memorial near the RCMP station in Stellarton.Ingrid Bulmer/The Globe and Mail
The mysterious disappearance of two young children from their mobile home in the rural Nova Scotia hamlet of Lansdowne has captured headlines around the world. It has been more than three months since police and search and rescue teams began scouring the thickly wooded land and waterways, searching for any trace of six-year-old Lilly Sullivan and her four-year-old brother Jack.
The community is in a far-flung corner of Pictou County, with the closest town a 15-minute drive away. A few local cars, logging trucks and the big yellow school bus are usually the only traffic to be seen. A network of backcountry roads that only the locals know crisscross rivers and dense forest that’s swarming with blackflies. There’s no cellular service.
Many of the roughly 100 people who live in Lansdowne are related, and have been there for generations.
Lilly and Jack, along with their pregnant mother Malehya Brooks-Murray, moved to the community two years ago, into the childhood home of Daniel Martell, who describes himself as the missing children’s stepfather. The children’s biological father has no contact with them, according to their family. Mr. Martell’s mother also lives on the property, in a dilapidated camper with multiple cats and a dog. It overlooks the fenced-in backyard where Ms. Brooks-Murray and Mr. Martell reported the children must’ve escaped from and wandered off.
The following is a timeline of the search for the two missing children so far.