Search for missing Nova Scotia children to resume with cadaver dog teams

HALIFAX – RCMP say cadaver dogs will begin searching for two children who went missing in rural northeastern Nova Scotia in May, a step the children’s grandmother says should have happened months ago. 

Six-year-old Lilly and four-year-old Jack Sullivan were reported missing on May 2 from their home in Lansdowne Station.

Jack and Lilly’s paternal grandmother Belynda Gray said in an interview Friday she had hoped police would be more proactive.

“It should have been done a few months ago … they certainly should have been brought in by now,” she said, adding that she was thrilled police are finally taking more concrete steps on the case.

During a media availability Friday, RCMP spokesman Cpl. Guillaume Tremblay wouldn’t say when or where the dog teams would be dispatched.

“For officer safety and the integrity of the investigation we are not going to disclose where our officers are going to be searching in the coming days or in the coming weeks,” said Tremblay. “We know it’s going to take time, we wished it would be faster but we have to be patient.”

He stressed there was “nothing definitive to support the children are deceased.”

Police have already conducted multiple searches covering about 8.5 square kilometres in the heavily wooded areas near the children’s home, assisted by ground search teams and local volunteers. Tremblay said previous searches included dogs that could pick up the scent of a living person, or someone who had recently died.

He called the previous searches thorough, but added that police are now at the stage where they need to consider whether they missed something and that’s where dogs that are specialized in finding the scent of human remains come in.

RCMP officials said there are currently about six to eight such dogs that work across the country, including one in Prince Edward Island that couldn’t be deployed due to medical reasons. 

Instead, two animals and their handlers are coming from British Columbia. Tremblay couldn’t say Friday whether RCMP had requested the dogs at an earlier stage of the investigation.

Officials said the dogs can pick up the odour of decomposed human remains in water, buried in dirt and in patches of ground where a body may have been moved, but residue remains.

“I’ve done many searches where we haven’t found anything, but that does not mean to say that there isn’t something there, it just means I wasn’t able to get my dog into the proper area where there was the odour that he’s been trained to find,” said Sgt. Dave Whalen, with RCMP dog services in Vancouver.

The officials said the dogs have been able to detect remains years after a person has gone missing.

Meanwhile, Gray said that based on her conversations with police, it’s evident they are working hard. But she said she has grown frustrated that the case has not advanced more rapidly, and that police have not been more forthcoming with details of the investigation.

“To see no new answers coming forward, worries me that maybe they’re dropping the ball here,” she said. 

“I wish they would keep me up to date more, but they don’t,” Gray said, adding that her son Cody Sullivan, who is Jack and Lilly’s biological father, is not getting much information from police either. 

Court documents released in late August show the initial impressions by police of polygraphs given to the parents of Lilly and Jack, and suggest that investigators did not think the children’s disappearances involved foul play. The information is contained in court applications filed by investigators for permission to conduct searches for phone records, banking records, and video related to the case. 

According to one document, sworn by Cpl. Charlene Jordan Curl of the RCMPs Northeast Nova Scotia major crime unit, the children were first reported missing on 10:01 a.m. on May 2 from their home in rural Lansdowne Station, N.S., by their mother Malehya Brooks-Murray.

Brooks-Murray told police she believed the two children had wandered away from home, but the exact time she said she thought they went missing was redacted. Police were on the scene at 10:27 a.m.

The document says the last time the children were seen outside their home was on May 1, when they were captured by video surveillance at a local Dollarama store with Brooks-Murray and Daniel Martell, their stepfather.

RCMP conducted at least six polygraphs during their investigation — the first two were on May 12 with the children’s parents at the detachment at Bible Hill, N.S. Martell’s polygraph “indicated he was truthful,” as did the test for Brooks-Murray that found she was truthful when answering specific questions, although the list of questions is redacted in the document.

An unidentified investigator’s comment included at the end of a section on the results of both of those polygraphs says, “At this point in the investigation Jack and Lilly’s disappearance is not believed to be criminal in nature.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 19, 2025.