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The Current Transcript for June 24, 2019

Host: Megan Williams

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with some intentionally inflammatory language there about the situation of migrants on the southern U.S. border. The war of words over the treatment of migrants may be heating up, but the situation on the ground is by all accounts dire, especially when it comes to children. Lawyers representing migrant children say kids are being held in camps without access to soap or toothpaste. They're calling it a Lord Of The Flies situation and warning about where it could lead. Today, we start with the rhetoric and the reality of children at the border. Then, talk about first world problems, like grownups in cities such as Toronto who are desperate for play time.

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VOICE: I remember coming home and we would just be playing outside, street hockey, mini sticks, basketball for hours and that was really I think sometimes as an adult is we do forget to play sometimes.

MW: He's the entrepreneur behind a playground for adults. It's a space and place meant to help overworked, overstressed grownups unwind and get back in touch with their inner child. Is it a trend we should embrace? Our producer Julie Crysler jumps into the ball pit to find out. Plus, all summer long we'll be featuring some of the best of CBC podcasts, starting today with episode one of CBC Uncover: The Village.

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VOICE: The police closed their investigation, the media moved on, but still those disappearances nagged at me. This was personal. This was my community.

MW: I'm Megan Williams and this is the summer edition of The Current.

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Migrant kids in U.S. detention are separated from adults for their own safety, says former immigration judge

Guests: Warren Binford, Andrew Arthur

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VOICE 1: The stories are horrible Mr. President. You have children without their parents. You have kids taking care of kids.

VOICE 2: Yeah.

VOICE 1: You've read these reports. I know people are coming to you.

VOICE 2: And President Obama built the cages. Remember when they said that I built them and then it was 1914.

VOICE 1: Do two wrongs make a right?

MW: Speaking with Meet the Press' Chuck Todd yesterday, U.S. President Donald Trump addressed criticism of the condition of migrant children in detention centres. As you've just heard, Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called these detention centres concentration camps, a term that has caused some controversy. President Trump also announced over the weekend that he's delaying for two weeks U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that were slated to take place yesterday in 10 major American cities. Although the Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE raids have been delayed, the government has announced it's planning a new facility for detained children in Fort Sill, Oklahoma in the sight of a former internment camp for Japanese-Americans. Meanwhile, lawyers who have been at the border facility near El Paso say the conditions for children and young people there are inhumane. Warren Binford is a law professor at Willamette University and an international children's rights expert. She met with some of the children at two facilities in Texas. Warren Binford is in Los Angeles, California. Hello.

WARREN BINFORD: Hello Megan.

MW: Good morning. Professor Binford you visited two facilities in Texas last week, where you saw a number of children being held there. Can you tell me about the condition they were in?

WB: Yes, the children at the border patrol facility in just outside of El Paso, Texas were just living in horrendous conditions. The children were sick. They were dirty. They were severely neglected. They were being, some of the children were being warehoused in a new structure that had just been thrown up on the property and other children were being held in holding cells that were intended for adults. These cells held 25, 40, 50, 100 children. There are open toilets in these cells. There are children ranging in age from 0 to 17 years of age. There are infants, toddlers, preschoolers, school aged children, many of whom had been separated from family members and were left to take care of themselves and one another.

MW: Well now you say many of them were sick. What what kind of illnesses were they suffering from?

WB: Well what we're seeing several of these border facilities is an influenza outbreak. It's very severe influenza. So children complained of symptoms that included high fevers, dizziness, headache, vomiting, diarrhoea. It was they had runny noses. They had cough. Part of it, influenza appears to have a respiratory component. You probably have read that there have been approximately six children who have died in recent months in these facilities and we are hearing reports of children who are currently in the hospital or recently in the hospital and at risk of dying.

MW: Now we know they haven't had access to basic things like toothpaste and soap. What about medicine?

WB: We are hearing mixed stories about medicine. One of those stories that we've heard from different children is that when they first are encountered by Border Patrol that all of their belongings are taken away. So this includes medicine and formula and bottles and baby diapers and baby food. And so what happened to one child mother is that her infant developed a high fever while they were travelling through Mexico. The Mexican authorities provided medical care to the child and prescribed amoxicillin. The mother vigilantly gave her baby the amoxicillin which she kept the fever under control and then once they entered into Border Patrol custody the medicine was taken away from the baby and the child's mother and the baby's fever immediately returned.

MW: So is there anybody inside these facilities caring for the children?

WB: Well the problem is that these facilities are not meant to hold children. That there are no child care providers in there. There are no social workers, there are no parents in there. And so basically all you have Border Patrol agents who have been trained to apprehend people coming across the border without appropriate documentation and then hold those people and process them through the legal system within a few days. So this is not a setting for children. It's not staffed for children, they are not trained for children and they simply do not have the resources and the space to care for children appropriately in a safe, sanitary and developmentally appropriate ways.

MW: Now you spoke with some of the children there and of course some of them were too young to speak, but the ones that were old enough to to express themselves properly, what were they telling you?

WB: Well let me just say that we interviewed approximately 60 children while we were at this facility Monday through Thursday of this week and we tried, we immediately because when we showed up, we weren't expecting very many children to be there because this is not a facility that historically has had children. So when we first got there there were over 350 children at this site that historically only had capacity for 104 and so we were taken aback by the sheer number of children who were there. And then when we scanned the roster we were again taken aback because of the significant number of young children who were there. There were over 100 young children there. So immediately we started asking the guards to bring us the youngest children, the child mothers and the children who had been there the longest. And when they walked in to the room to be interviewed, we had four interviewing teams going at a time. We were taken aback because the children were just filthy dirty. They haven't been given showers. Their teeth had not been brushed, their hair was matted, they had mucus on their shirt, they had breast milk, the child mothers some of them had breast milk on their shirt. They had you know dirt and stains and food and it was just unlike anything that we've seen. Certainly Border Patrol facilities in the United States are notoriously wretched facilities, which is why children are supposed to be moved out of there as expeditiously as possible, but what deeply concerned us about this particular facility and why we asked for permission to go to the media is because of the number of children who are being kept there, the you know the ages of the children being held there and the length of time that they're being detained there unlawfully. They are supposed to be out of these facilities in a matter of hours and some of the children we interviewed have been there for for over three weeks.

MW: Right. And just to be clear, what are the existing rules governing for how the children should be housed and for how long?

WB: So so basically what happens is in the United States children who come across the border who come with family members are supposed to be kept with family members. There was a decision that was made last year when parents were being a children or be separated from their parents. And the judge in that case world that there is a constitutional right to family integrity and that if you remove children from their family it's a violation of their constitutional rights and parents constitutional right. So we are seeing children continuing to be removed separated from their family members and then we classified as unaccompanied children and there's a special set of laws that apply to unaccompanied children in the United States. So unaccompanied children in the United States are supposed to be in Border Patrol facilities if at all for no more than 72 hours maximum. They then are supposed to be transferred to appropriate facilities for children. And those facilities are run by what's called the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the United States. And children are only allowed to be in these are our facilities for a matter of days. And so that are can we unify these children with their family. The majority of these children have family in the United States approximately half of these children last year were reunified with parents in the United States and another about 20 something percent were reunified with other family members in the United States. An additional 15 percent or so were placed with other sponsors and the laws in the United States require the government to place the children in order of preference with a parent in the U.S., another family member in the U.S. or another adult living in the U.S. who has been approved by the parents. Not the government, the parents and only if the children cannot be placed in one of those three settings is the government allowed to place them in an appropriate licenced facility.

MW: Right and I'm assuming this is what you would like to have happen at this point?

WB: Absolutely these children need to go back to their families immediately. These children have parents who love them, who want to take care of them, who are able to take care of them. The facilities that the government is running for these children cost the American taxpayer $775 a day. It is an outrageous amount of money for incredibly low quality care and we need to keep children out of these government facilities and get them back with their families immediately.

MW: OK. Well we're going to have to wrap it up there, but thank you very much for speaking with me this morning.

WB: Thank you Megan.

MW: Thanks. I've been speaking with Warren Binford who is a law professor at Willamette University. She met with some of the children at the facility in Clint, Texas and another one as well. She is in Los Angeles, California. These stories coming out of these border facilities are disturbing, but according to my next guest, the rhetoric around them is overblown. Andrew Arthur is a former immigration judge and a resident fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies. It's an independent research organization that bills itself as low immigration, pro immigrant. Andrew Arthur is in Baltimore today. Hello.

ANDREW ARTHUR: Hello and thank you for having me.

MW: Can you let me know your reaction to what you just heard about the condition of these children in the centers in Texas?

AA: Well I would note that Professor Binford conflated a few different concepts, but let me just go back to May the 1st. On May the 1st, the president asked Congress for $4.5 billion to help ameliorate the conditions that are at the border. We've seen a huge number of people, we saw a 144,000 people apprehended at the border and more than 60 percent of those people were family. And that's parents with children who were apprehended at the border last month in the month of May 2019. The border patrol facilities that Professor Binford visited were never meant for this population of individuals. They were meant for single adult males, primarily which was the population of people that we had traditionally seen. These facilities were built in the 80s and 90s and again were never meant for either families with children or children or for long term care. As Professor Binford noted, within 48 hours those children are supposed to be turned over to Health and Human Services. Part of the reason that the administration asked for that additional money is because Health and Human Services is out of bed space. Congress has failed to act since May the 1st on that request. We had the Senate Appropriations Committee act last week. We had the House Appropriations Committee act at the end of last week. It's just unconscionable that they're sitting there waiting for this to happen. There were 2350 unaccompanied children who were in border patrol custody awaiting placement in shelters with Health and Human Services and yet Congress failed to act.

MW: And yet the children are living in these terrible conditions. Is it not the responsibility of the government to do something to get them access to things as basic as soap or toothpaste or showers or clean clothing?

AA: Absolutely. I mean it's absolutely the responsibility of the government to get them into shelters where they can be cared for, but the problem is there's no money because Congress hasn't appropriated the money and Health and Human Services ran out of money for this year for that purpose. We didn't, we don't have the shelter space. We don't have the money to pay for additional shelter space. That's why the president asked on May the 1st for this money. Thatis 55 days that we've been waiting for the funding. It's unconscionable and it has to be done, which is why it amazes me that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is a member of Congress, who does have the ability to change the laws, is talking about these things, but not doing anything about them.

MW: Well you know I think there are arguments against that and obviously many people are calling for the Trump administration to do something. Now you mention the congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, she recently called the facilities concentration camps. Do you think that's a fair comparison?

AA: No, it's completely overblown rhetoric because again, even if you look at the sources that the congresswoman refers to, it talks about separating one population of individuals from another, which is what concentration camps are and they run the gamut. I was a Russian history major, student of history and certainly understand the difference. This is a population of people who are overwhelming our immigration agents at the border, our border patrol agents, our detention facilities. We only have about 2500 beds for families and again 60 plus percent of the 144,000 people that showed up last month were families. These individuals have to be processed, so that they can be either detained for removal proceedings or alternatively be removed or be released into the United States, but they have to be processed first.

MW: Is it necessary though? I mean I would assume a lot of people listening have seen the photos of the children behind chain linked fencing and sleeping on the floor under foil blankets. I mean is it necessary to keep the people as they're being processed, children included in these kinds of conditions?

AA: Well let's break that down Megan. What are you going to do with the kids? Are you simply going to release them into the United States? Think about the opportunities for trafficking and exploitation. Those children if they're not processed and simply released into the United States and to whom are you releasing them? Now Professor Binford referred to the separation of families, but I'm not entirely sure what she's talking about in that context because the administration currently doesn't have a policy of that, but minors who arrive with adults will be separated in a variety of different situations. One, if the individual accompanying them is not actually their parent or guardian, two, if the individual who's accompanying them is a danger to them or three if there is some allegation, some fear of fraud and we've seen more than 4000 different fraudulent family units come across the border. We are desperate not to have a situation in which these children are exploited. They're in facilities that were never meant for this purpose. The segregation of these children within the facilities has to be done in order to keep the minors away from primarily adult males. Again, because we don't want anything bad to happen in the facilities and the quickest way to do that is to erect chain link dividers within the facilities. These aren't caged children. These are children who are being separated from adults who may pose a danger to them.

MW: In cages.

AA: In facilities that were never meant to house them, which is why the president asked for th money.

MW: I understand that, but the children are being held in cages. I mean you can argue that that's for their own protection, but nonetheless it's you know I don't think any of us would want to see our children held in cages.

AA: Absolutely not and think about what would happen if Canada had to deal with the same situation. They don't have the facilities there. They have fewer facilities at their border than we have, but imagine if there was a huge population of children that flowed over the border, even into Ontario, we're not even talking about Manitoba or Saskatchewan, you would have to process those children humanely and make sure that they're placed safely. That's the situation that confronts the United States government right now and we're doing the best we can with what we have, but we need more. The president has asked for more and you know I know that sometimes the president's rhetoric is overblown, but on this particular issue, the administration is dead on. We need more money so that we can place these children safely and securely.

MW: OK. Now you've mentioned there are large numbers of people crossing over the border. Why do you think that is? Why are we seeing so many families and unaccompanied children coming to the United States from Central America now?

AA: And we've seen these newspaper articles. The Homeland Security Advisory Council had a bipartisan panel that looked at this issue and the reason is pull factors. That is things are encouraging people to come to the United States and the biggest pull factor right now is something called the Flores Settlement Agreement. It goes back to 97, I believe it was referenced by Professor Binford in her comments. I don't think that she called it this, but in 2016 the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sitting over in California said that children could not be detained for more than 20 days. Minors cannot be detained for more than 20 days. And that was regardless of whether they showed up with their parents or they showed up alone. So adults know this, they are taking a child with them to the United States expecting that they are going to get released as soon as they get to this country, which is why we're seeing this huge influx of family members right now.

MW: OK. I'm sorry we're going to have to wrap it up here. We're running out of time, but thanks very much for speaking with me this morning.

AA: Greatly appreciate it.

MW: And that is Andrew Arthur who is a former immigration judge and resident fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favours low immigration numbers. He was in Baltimore. The CBC News is next, then adult playgrounds are a thing. Our producer Julie Crysler visits one in Toronto that's designed to reignite the childhood joy of play. But is that a good thing? I'm Megan Williams and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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Adult playgrounds 'reignite' childhood joy, but is that a good thing?

Guest: Julie Crysler

MW: Hello. I'm Megan Williams and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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MW: Still to come, this summer we're doing something a little different. We're going to feature some of the best CBC podcasts and we're starting with the new series of the CBC News Investigative podcast, Uncover. We'll be playing you the whole season, episode by episode, starting later this half hour. So stay tuned for episode one of The Village. But first, it's play time.

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VOICE: We have our swimming pool, 30,000 balls. It's a really hard feeling to describe actually being immersed in these balls and what's fun is that even being in a ball pit just takes us back to our childhood.

MW: And that's the whole point of this giant ball pit. It's a playground called HideSeek that's open through to July 28 in Toronto. It's not a kid's playground, it's for adults hoping to rekindle their childlike spirit and it's part of a growing trend across North America. The Current's producer Julie Crysler went to check it out then told Anna Maria Tremonti all about it.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Did you jump into the ball pit?

JULIE CRYSLER: Well I did not, but I did get in there. Here's a little bit of what it sounded like.

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[Sound of jumping into a ball pit]

AMT: Is that you?

JC: It's not me, there are a couple of other young women who are a lot braver.

AMT: It is the size of a pool. What else is going on in this playground? Well there's a lot going on there. The space was divided up into a series of colourful rooms, each on a different theme. One was full of giant silver beachballs, another with rainbow slinkys. And you know those circular Velcro paddles and balls you played with as a kid?

JC: Yeah.

JC: And they stick. You know there was a room where the walls and ceiling were all covered with the paddles and then there were buckets of balls to throw all.

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[Throwing velcro balls]

JC: So Instagram worthy was how a lot of people described the space to me. People were taking a lot of pictures.

AMT: I can imagine. I would too. So who was there?

JC: Most people were in their 20s or 30s, couples, young families, a few kids. Lots of young women in pairs and small groups, but there were two people who really caught my eye. Joyce Lam and Tom Chin. They were older than the rest. They're both 60.

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VOICE 1: She's a cougar though. She's six months older than me, but we've known each other since we were 10 years old.

VOICE 2: So we actually had recess together.

VOICE 1: But she says that I didn't play with her during recess.

VOICE 2: He plays with me now.

VOICE 1: Recess today. I have the same level of maturity I think.

AMT: They're having a lot of fun.

JC: They were having a blast. Some of the people there were a bit tentative about playing like me, but Joyce and Tom were just completely letting loose.

[sc].

VOICE: Grow up. It's my back, it's so stiff. There go my dentures.

AMT: I'm having fun just listening to him. There go his dentures. So is this just all about fun or is there a bigger purpose here?

JC: This is a business. Lee Davis had all the buzz words about social media marketing strategy and customer experience, but he told me the inspiration for HideSeek was really personal too.

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VOICE: I remember coming home and we would just be playing outside, street hockey, mini sticks, basketball for hours and that was really I think some times as an adult is we do forget to play sometimes and I think we need to remind ourself it's okay and that's something we're trying to do here. We want to remind people you know what it's okay to jump in a shopping cart and have fun and that's what we're really trying to reignite and hopefully you can bring that style back into your everyday life.

AMT: Are adult playgrounds a common thing now?

JC: They seem to be growing in popularity for sure. There are a number of them across North America and ball pits in particular are really big on Instagram. You may have seen the stories last year out of the UK about the bouncy castle for adults. There were sellout crowds when it toured the country.

AMT: What's the point of bringing this kind of play back into our lives as adults?

JC: This is something I asked Jane Clapp about. She's really excited about this trend. She's a movement coach in Toronto. She uses physicality to help people who were living with trauma and chronic illness and she says they can really help.

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VOICE: I feel like Mr. Rogers. There's so many things put away that you can't see.

JC: Her studio is in the West End of Toronto. It's a warehouse space with high ceilings, bright white walls and lots of stuff to play with.

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VOICE: I have a trampoline, a rebounder. I've got tonnes of balls, all different colour balls put in there. I have oh my gosh I even have a SkipIt. Do you know what, I'm going to go and grab it. This is the thing that people used to do when they were kids, where they hook something around their ankle and then they swing it around and jump over it with the other foot. I'm going to see if I can do it. It's so hard. So I'm flipping this SkipIt around and it's swinging around my ankle and then I have a ball on a string that jumping over with the other foot.

JC: So do you remember playing with a SkipIt, Anna Maria?

AMT: I do and I can hear it. Like as she does it, I can remember it, yeah. But how does playing with a SkipIt or jumping on a rebounder help people who are dealing with trauma?

JC: Well number one, to do it without tripping, you really have to pay attention to what you're doing. So it forces you to stay focused on the present moment rather than the pain of the past or fear of the future. And you can hear it's fun too, right and it also goes deeper than that.

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VOICE: I had one psychotherapist in one of my certification programs, call me in for trauma. Who jumped on a rebounder for the first time and cried. She's like I can't believe how much I was missing this feeling of joy and play in my body. It was like heartbreaking because I feel like so much of the suffering and stress and mental health issues that people are experiencing have to do with like not being able to access that in their bodies. Joy isn't a mental thing right. It's what we feel on the inside and it's just like I see this shift in people's faces of they have a break from what feels like what's weighing them down and I don't know how we survive if we don't get those breaks.

AMT: She's talking about finding that joy and letting go the way kids do. The way they can.

JC: Yeah and it was it was quite moving to talk with her to too, right. She seems so compassionate and the people she works with are dealing with a lot.

AMT: And is that what we need to be encouraging in adults to be more like kids?

JC: There are people who are worried about that. Who think that in some ways we're too much like kids already in our society and one of them is Simon. He's a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He points to things like superhero movies, which are really popular with adults or the way that advertising often uses cute cartoon characters even for things like insurance or toilet paper. But what really worries him the most is technology and he thinks that computers and smartphones are encouraging us to act like babies.

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VOICE: So we are the centre of our own little universe. And whenever we touch on the key, there's an immediate answer. So I think we're getting used to a terminal life, a terminal environment, where every one of our impulse or instincts have to have an immediate answer and it is also infantilizing, right. So it seems to me that in every society and in every period of history, every child has always had to learn the basic lesson that in order to grow up, you will have to learn to postpone. But I think that we are increasingly taught, there is no reason to postpone. That's the new slogan of Amazon: whatever you want, right now.

VOICE: And whatever we want right now, what is wrong with that?

JC: Well on one level it's amazing right, but the irony is when we all act like that expecting immediate responses to our Amazon orders or e-mail or social media, it just contributes to the kind of stress that people end up wanting to go to indoor playgrounds to escape.

AMT: So it's a vicious circle.

JC: Right. And Simon is also worried that we're losing our ability to deal with big problems. We're outsourcing our memory. We're losing our ability to navigate without GPS. We're relying on technology to think for us and we're becoming more and more distracted.

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VOICE: We are facing such complex situations. We can barely manage our affairs at the national level and as we all know not ours, every society is connected to every other society. So if something happens in Tokyo right now, we are affected immediately. Not only do we need to wrap our minds around the global system and on top of it, try to manage that as impossible as it is, and on top of it we have to also deal with the threat of imminent ecological collapse. So of course I mean what could be more tempting than to winthrdaw into the machine where we are the centre of the universe and everything that we want is available right here, right now at just the touch of a finger.

AMT: So we start off talking about playing and now we're talking ecological collapse, Julie?

JC: You don't see the connection Anna Maria? Let me take you back to the playground. Remember Joycem, the 60-year-old who was having the time of her life?

AMT: Yes.

JC: Well she had a little bit of a moment in the ball pit, one that might remind us of the value of embracing our inner child.

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VOICE: Can you get suffocated in here? Okay inner child. Inner child. It's kind of scary. I don't think I could get up. It's like help, I'm falling, I don't think I can get up. Can you give me a hand. Okay now I'm panicking. Tom pull me up.

AMT: That's bad.

JC: For a moment there, before Tom helped her up, Joyce really did look genuinely scared. Her eyes were big and I think you can hear it in her voice, even as she's joking.

AMT: I heard it a little bit, Tom pull me up now, kind of thing.

JC: Yeah, but when I spoke to her as she was leaving the playground, she told me the ball pit was her favorite part.

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VOICE: It was really scary, but once you do it and you feel so accomplished, It's less scary. So you feel really good about yourself. So I think that's what kids learn when they play. So if you're a little bit scared and you do it and then you realize you can do it, it's amazing what it does to self-confidence.

AMT: So she's talking about tapping into that, reminding yourself what you learned and using that again.

JC: Yeah.You know it's a small problem right, getting over your fear of a ball pit, but in a way it also speaks to the kind of courage and creativity that we might need to solve those bigger ones. So maybe there are good reasons to take inspiration from kids as long as we're focusing on the right qualities.

AMT: Thanks Julie.

JC: Thank you, Anna Maria.

MW: The Current's producer Julie Crysler speaking with Anna Maria Tremonti this spring. HideSeek is open in Toronto through to July 28th.

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Uncover: The Village - Episode 1

MW: You're listening to the summer edition of The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Megan Williams. We're going to be sharing some of the best of CBC podcasts with you throughout the summer. We're starting today with the latest season of the investigative series, Uncover, called The Village. In 2010, men with similar characteristics started mysteriously disappearing from Toronto's gay village. All were ultimately linked to one man. Investigative journalist Justin Ling follows the case as friends searched for loved ones and police provided few answers. Here is the first episode of The Village, titled "How Can You Not See This?

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KAREN FRASER: This was a green yard with flower beds. This is the section in the middle of it they tore up last winter and dug down a few feet. Took weeks and of course they don't call this Pottery Road area for nothing. The ground is rock hard.

JUSTIN LING: It's a sweltering day in August. I'm in the backyard of a tucked away house on a quiet street in Toronto.

KAREN FRASER: Back here was all green until they came two weeks ago. You can imagine the mess that it made.

JUSTIN LING: Karen Fraser lives here. She is an unlikely central figure in this whole story. She's showing me her garden or at least what's left of it.

KAREN FRASER: There's nothing left on the side of this hill.

JUSTIN LING: I've known Karen for the better part of a year. She's slight. She has a head of swept back red hair, big brown eyes and an oddly endearing sense of humour. That is what kept her sane I think throughout this whole horrifying ordeal.

KAREN FRASER: We have deer who come. I don't know if they'll come now.

JUSTIN LING: Her secluded backyard slopes down to a pair of railroad tracks. Beyond that is a deep ravine.

[Sound of train passing by]

JUSTIN LING: It's a leafy hideaway in the city. It's also the perfect place to avoid being noticed.

KAREN FRASER: So that was our compost pile in the corner for leaves in the fall and apparently it had things. And then over around here we'll have to look over this edge, it's where the major.

JUSTIN LING: Just a month before investigators were here combing through her yard, her garden and the wooded ravine below. They sifted through the dirt and the soil one bucket at a time, painstakingly looking for clues. It would become the largest forensic investigation in Toronto Police history.

KAREN FRASER: They scoured it basically. Scoured it all the way down.

JUSTIN LING: Oh yeah. But didn't find anything thing back here in the end? They did.

KAREN FRASER: Basically all over the yard.

JUSTIN LING: Oh geeze.

KAREN FRASER: We had a lot of lilies and tulips. That's what's left of the lilies.

JUSTIN LING: Karen is trying to help me picture her yard as it used to be. There were flower beds and big colourful stone planters.

KAREN FRASER: And our tulips and daffodils along there, lots of periwinkle. I like it because it starts very early in the spring. You get something.

JUSTIN LING: All of this was designed and maintained by her faithful gardener, Bruce.

KAREN FRASER: And he took good care of it and it was quite lush.

JUSTIN LING: Bruce had his run of Karen's backyard.

KAREN FRASER: He was conscientious. Very professional, very talented, very kind.

JUSTIN LING: Their families had known each other for years.

KAREN FRASER: We got a call from Bruce's sister saying that her brother had just purchased a gardening business and she said I understand you have a double garage and you're not using it. So, simple arrangement. Sure, he could store his things in our garage if he would cut our lawn when we went away on the weekends in the summer. And over the years he expanded. He decorated all the pots on the property, gave us things at Christmas, you know it just it grew. Was never social. It was just a nice working relationship. Simple, not complicated.

JUSTIN LING: But it wasn't a one man job. What do you remember about the people who would lend a hand when he was landscaping your place?

KAREN FRASER: Many of them were obviously newcomers. Some were quite shy. Most we saw once, sometimes just a head of hair going by the window holding up two hanging baskets. We didn't actually meet them at all. I think of all the men who met the horrible fate. I know I met one. I think I met a second man one time. Very shy, stared at the ground and Bruce and I were bantering back and forth and I could see that the man he had with him was staring at the ground and laughing because he found it funny. The second man I really felt sorry for him. He was off to the side and Bruce was annoyed with him and said he's just not going to work out. And since all of them appeared to be amateurs or very new, I didn't know what this poor man had done. His clothing was not as nice as many of the other men and I felt badly because he seemed to be really trying. Had no idea what he was doing and about a month later I sent Bruce an email and said so how did your new man work out? He didn't respond and it was never mentioned again.

JUSTIN LING: Memories of these men stick with Karen. She tells me she had forgotten their names and their faces for years, but now she can't stop thinking about them all because of what happened on a cold day in January 2018.

KAREN FRASER: It was about 10:30 in the morning. There was a severe pounding on the door, so I came down expecting a delivery and looked to the street and I turned and there were two men in navy blue and one of them said are you Karen Fraser? Are you Karen Fraser? You've got five minutes to get out. There's been a serious crime. Bruce McArthur has been arrested.

[Music]

JUSTIN LING: My name is Justin Ling. This is Uncover: The Village. I'm an investigative journalist and I've always been on the lookout for stories that have been passed over or forgotten and four years ago I started working on a story that was both.

VOICE 1: Didn't look good, people just don't disappear.

VOICE 2: Car was located, but he was nowhere to be found.

VOICE 3: It's kind of like I feel terrorized.

JUSTIN LING: A string of queer men of colour had gone missing from Toronto's gay village. For a time, fears of a serial killer stalked the village, but that fear, it faded away. The police closed their investigation. The media moved on. But still those disappearances nagged at me. This was personal. This was my community. It started to become clear that their sexuality and their skin colour made them easier to forget. Easier to write off. But I never imagined where the investigation would go and just how awful it would get. This is a story about missing men, yes, but it's about so much more than that. It's a story about homophobia and violence against marginalized people. It's about a community that demanded answers and which didn't get them until it was too late.

[Protestors chanting "Gay rights now."]

JUSTIN LING: Toronto's gay village is only about three city blocks. The main focal point is the intersection of Church Street and Wellesley Street. It's not hard to notice that you're in the heart of gay Toronto. There are pride flags hanging from shop windows and telephone poles and as you walk up Church Street, there's a bronze statue of a dapper man with a flowing coat and a walking cane. And then there are the 20 foot tall poles. They're decked out with giant rainbow spirals and on the top is a shimmering disco ball. They're supposed to welcome everyone to the Church and Wellesley village. They are incredibly gaudy. The Gay Village has been around in one way or the other since the 1960s. Early on there was just a few discreet bars and then there was the gay friendly travel agency and then the clothing stores. Queer as Folk, a TV show that ran in the early 2000s, was set in Pittsburgh, but filmed almost entirely in the Church and Wellesley village. For lots of people the village is a sort of refuge. There's plenty of village residents who were born outside of Canada, but who have adopted it as their second home. Others are expats from small town Canada, like me and like Joel.

JOEL WALKER: I started seeing him around the local pubs on Church Street.He was kind of a loud character and so am I guess. So that's kind of why.

JUSTIN LING: Joel Walker came here in 2008 from Manitoba.

JOEL WALKER: He's a very vibrant person. He was constantly laughing.

JUSTIN LING: He's talking about his friend Skandaraj Navaratnam.

JOEL WALKER: Everything was hilarious in life. I loved him for it. If I was in a bad mood he would draw it out of me and immediately I'd be fine.

JUSTIN LING: To his friends, he was just Skanda. He had come to Toronto from Sri Lanka, where he had fled a decades long civil war. He lived just outside the village and had a wide circle of friends. Skanda is the same man Karen Fraser remembers standing in her garden years ago.

[Music]

JUSTIN LING: Like so many people in the village, Joel and Skanda were transplants.

JOEL WALKER: We started playing pool obviously together. It was something we did as a hobby and I was, I wish he was here to hear this, giving him lessons because he sucked at first and I'm an alright shot, but came a very long way very fast. And then he started beating me and it was like the teacher getting beat by the student. It was a really good feeling and so like we bonded really majorly over the games. Kind of funny but.

JUSTIN LING: Is it possible he was a shark? That he just tricked you into thinking he was no good?

JOEL WALKER: I wish I could say so for his family to hear, but no he was not that good and I handed it to him every time.

JUSTIN LING: So where would you go? You said you saw him at kind of the same couple of pubs. You know, what bars would those have been?

JOEL WALKER: Zippers definitely was our main spot.

JUSTIN LING: Zippers was a community institution. Some nights it was a piano bar, ohers it was a dance club. But on Sunday, it was retro night. Retro night was a sort of Sunday service. It was a mix of those who came of age in the 70s and 80s dancing alongside 19 and 20-year-olds who had just come out. If you didn't get there early, you'd be stuck waiting in a line that would sometimes wrap around the block. But Zippers was also a place to just shoot pool with friends.

JOEL WALKER: But there was another pool hall right on Church Street that I can't remember for the life of me what it's called.

JUSTIN LING: Is it the one upstairs?

JOEL WALKER: Yes.

JUSTIN LING: Pegasus?

JOEL WALKER: Thank you.

JUSTIN LING: Yeah you're welcome.

JOEL WALKER: Thank you. Horses. Horses.

JUSTIN LING: Yeah.

JOEL WALKER: Okay yeah.

JUSTIN LING: Pegasus though is still open with four large pool tables in the back and cheap pitchers of beer every night. As they spent more time together, usually playing pool, Joel and Skanda became increasingly close, but they never dated. They weren't eachother's type.

JOEL WALKER: Like me and him had no interest in each other. He was into something completely different than I was and I was too. I mean I sure, I found him attractive, but I loved him like a brother. I never ever looked at him a different way and.

JUSTIN LING: Skanda was tall, dark and lanky. You couldn't miss him. So he was pretty unique. His unique style.

JOEL WALKER: Absolutely. Like he was very fashion forward. He had a lot of jewellery. He wore jewellery, rings on every finger. Multiple rings, like two to three sometimes on his finger. It normally sounds way over top gaudy, but for him it worked with his nationality. I didn't see anyone that dressed like him. He dressed like a part of our culture with a part of his culture with a part of his own mix. I love fashion a great deal and so it inspired. It always inspired me to like one up him, but I didn't have enough fingers or rings to do it so. He was definitely into an older gentleman type. He had a name for them. It was called "silver daddies." That was his thing. He was very intrigued and attracted to them and every one of them I ever met was fine, except for one and that person was very, very jealous and very, very obsessive and controlling.

JUSTIN LING: And who was that?

JOEL WALKER: And that was Bruce McArthur.

MW: In our next half hour, episode one of CBC Uncover: The Village will continue. I'm Megan Williams and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MW: I'm Megan Williams and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current. In our last half hour we heard the first episode of the CBC podcast, Uncover: The Village. It features investigative journalist Justin Ling on the case of a series of mysterious disappearances in Toronto's gay village. You can find the entire series wherever you download your podcasts and here at The Current we'll be featuring it and other CBC podcasts throughout the summer. Now we continue with The Village, Episode One, titled "How Can You Not See This?"

SOUNDCLIP

JUSTIN LING: So how often did you see Bruce McArthur around?

JOEL WALKER: He started coming around when Skanda was out later at night. He was there every time, but he never went to the normal bars when he was with Bruce. He most mostly stayed with him I guess at his home or the Eagle, which was a leather bar. It was very dark. It's very nice people there and everything like that, but it is a very good place to hide and be anonymous.

JUSTIN LING: And so what was Skanda like when Bruce was around?

JOEL WALKER: He was constantly attentive to him. He was constantly trying to console and reassure him that things were fine and that he was not looking at someone else and that he was just with him. At first I didn't realize what they were arguing about, but after a while it was happening so often that I could see in his face that he was almost frantic to make sure that he was OK. And Bruce was always looking like he was ready to leave and always like in a service scolding type of way talking down to him. He just he always wanted to make him chase him all the time.

JUSTIN LING: So do you think that was jealousy?

JOEL WALKER: I think it was his way of control. I kind of faded from him at that point for a little while of hanging out with him. We still played pool, not every day though honestly. It actually stopped being everyday for a while he was with him predominantly. And then all of a sudden I didn't see him, but he was talking about him at the time. Like I was with Bruce. And I'd be like what do you see in that guy? Seriously I kind of like when he wasn't around I'd try and give him the gears about him a little bit and he'd always be like oh well Bruce is this and he's that, but you know he's got a good heart and he always saw the good in people.

JUSTIN LING: Joel was nearing his wit's end. Despite Skanda's insistence, Joel knew that Bruce was bad news. As the weeks went on that summer, Skanda was around less and less. He was with Bruce. Joel made another effort to see his friend and he showed up for a game of pool, but he quickly had to leave.

JOEL WALKER: And I think he got called by Bruce and he just left really fast. And I remember thinking like this is getting worse. How he's just not giving a crap. I remember being a little upset with him actually in the week or two before because he was just neglecting everything that he normally does and thinking he could just come back to me because I'm sick of phoning him and trying to set things up and he's never showing. He's never doing what he said he's going to do. He just changed. He completely changed overnight.

JUSTIN LING: Skanda didn't show up for work on Tuesday. His friends couldn't reach him. And when they checked his apartment, they found no sign of him.

JOEL WALKER: He had gotten a puppy recently. It was a husky and that thing would go everywhere with him. It was like all of a sudden his new best friend. It was a beautiful dog. And the next day when it came about that he wasn't where he was supposed to be all over the place for the entire day, it was brought to our attention that his wallet, ID and that dog were still sitting at the house.

JUSTIN LING: Skanda's friends didn't know what happened, but they knew something was off. They covered the village in missing persons posters. They even searched nearby ravines.

JOEL WALKER: Our conversations went from fluff to so have you heard anything about Skanda. It would go off like that and when that started, everyone's mood would change. I remember I came down to the Play Bar cards, it's like a bingo drag queen bar and there's a corkboard downstairs of missing people and concerts and events and everything like that. And I saw somebody ripping his picture down because they didn't know and I took their papers and ripped them in half, all of them and put his ripped page back up there. And I yelled at them really, really loud and I said this is the only thing that matters on here. It was becoming an anger of not knowing. There was just nothing to go on. It was just like he was just picked up off this planet and taken by something like an alien abduction or something like that because that's how it just happened. It just the guy was in everybody's life and he was a major part of this scene. He came from a bunch of different worlds all at once and he somehow fit into all of them. And I should have just watched him more closer.

JUSTIN LING: Skandaraj Navaratnam was seen leaving Zippers on Sunday night, Labour Day weekend 2010, after one of those iconic retro nights.

JOEL WALKER: I was told he was last seen in a bank actually on some bank camera taking money out with someone else and they couldn't tell who it was.

JUSTIN LING: Oh.

JOEL WALKER: Yeah that's what I was told.

JUSTIN LING: Joel says police found security footage of Skanda withdrawing money a few blocks away shortly after he left the bar. That was the last time he was seen in public. And who told you that?

JOEL WALKER: I think it was just friends, like really really close friends that were hearing excerpts from what the police were telling them.

JUSTIN LING: So do you remember anything about what they would have said about the other guy that was on the security footage?

JOEL WALKER: They couldn't see his face.

JUSTIN LING: Even like height, build?

JOEL WALKER: It had to have been him. I'm guessing, I mean there would be no reason for it to be someone else if he went missing that day. That was the day he went missing for a reason.

JUSTIN LING: Joel says that crumb of information is all police shared.

JOEL WALKER: When you're dealing with the police the gay community there is some hard feelings from once upon a time. We won't forget that. I remember thinking like you just don't care because of his sexuality and what not, but I really I know that they had nothing for the longest time.

JUSTIN LING: Joel didn't have any answers as to what had happened, so he had to come up with his own explanation.

JOEL WALKER: I had to come to some sort of answer. It was that he had to relocate and that's where I left Toronto thinking that. I'm like that's where I'm going to stay with that he just, he's out there some day. He's going to, I'm going to get a message on my Facebook and he's going to say, hey I'm OK.

JUSTIN LING: A 40-year-old man from Sri Lanka vanishes from Toronto's gay village. He leaves behind his wallet and his newly adopted puppy is left without food. He was in a controlling relationship with an older man. It was mysterious, but it was only one case.

[Sound of vehicle in operation]

JUSTIN LING: So Kyle's property sits on a dirt road, the very end, just on the water. It's pretty secluded. It's a pretty quiet little neighbourhood. Kyle Andrews was a transplant in Toronto's gay village as well. He's originally from a small town in Nova Scotia and that's where I find him.

[GPS voice]

JUSTIN LING: When he was in Toronto, he was an activist and a familiar face on Church Street. Now he's living a quieter life in rural Canada.

[GPS voice]

KYLE ANDREWS: I used to go to Zippers on Sundays to dance in the back and sort of hang out the other side because I was shy, nervous about dancing until you know a good east coast boy, a couple of rum and Cokes and a few beers or shots or something. Coolers probably then and it just felt like when being gay wasn't cool, it was like a camaraderie. [Whispers] It was like the secret club. Shh don't tell anybody.

JUSTIN LING: I'm here because I want to know about Majeed Kayhan. Known to everyone as Hamid. Kyle and Hamid were close. Very close.

KYLE ANDREWS: I met Hamid at either the Black Eagle or Timothy's because we had known each other so long and he seemed to be alone and I thought he was attractive, so I went up and said hi to him. And over maybe a year and a half we traded phone numbers and started to hang out and whenever we'd see each other at the bar we'd buy each other a drink. Him and I had connected because we were both kind of in the corner by ourselves.

JUSTIN LING: Hamid had come to Toronto from Afghanistan.

KYLE ANDREWS: And even though you think Afghanistan you don't think there was a disco scene but there was we would be listening to the radio like chump F.M.. You would have a lot of 80s hits and he'd be like Oh I know this song and you know all the words but he would know the artist and he could sing. He could belt out a song quite well. And. He would play for me some records that he would scrounge up through you know friends at the Kabob House.

JUSTIN LING: Hamid fled Kabul amid war but found refuge in Canada. When he came to Toronto he came with his wife and kids. But within a few years Hamid realized something about himself. He was gay.

Well he had said to me that when he first started to explore who he thought he was as a gay man he would go to Oakley spa and that was kind of a mishmash of different cultures and gay and straight things.

Eventually Hamid left his family home and moved into the village. He began living his life as a gay man but still Hamid struggled to find peace because he came all this way to be happy and he still wasn't happy.

He couldn't come out to his family.

KYLE ANDREWS: He couldn't really be himself to everybody that he cared about and that affected him.

JUSTIN LING: Did he ever talk about his wife and kids?

KYLE ANDREWS: I actually met his daughter one and his son and he was very proud of them.

And I think it was just hard for him because he knew quite possibly they wouldn't accept him back if he was true with them.

JUSTIN LING: You don't think he ever told them that he was gay?

KYLE ANDREWS: I know that they had suspected because his daughter would ask questions and he would ask me Well how would I respond. And I. Told them Well that's for you to decide if it was me I'd say this but I'd been pounding my little gay drums since I was 19 and you were 40 some years old coming under 50 and you're from a strict religious background. I just know that that he would feel that was impossible because Hamid spent a lot of time at the Black Eagle.

JUSTIN LING: That's probably where he met Bruce McArthur. Did you see Bruce and Hamid together often?

KYLE ANDREWS: A few times the second last time I saw Hamid was with Bruce McArthur and his apartment. And it kind of freaked me out because we were hanging out and. Some booze and marijuana and we're having a little bit of a good time listening to the radio and. Being intimate and Bruce McArthur comes to the door and Hamid had a couple of drinks and boom. So I think he didn't expect me to pop in and Bruce was supposed to meet him later so Bruce came in and was all upset and he left and I and I would've been upset to you show up at a at a date's house and there's another date there. What's going on.

JUSTIN LING: At the time the interaction didn't mean that much. Kyle just went back to Nova Scotia that summer as he often did. But when he tried to reach Hameed he couldn't.

KYLE ANDREWS: And then I had left him a voicemail shortly after that or in the middle of summer about how I was pissed off that he wasn't calling me back. I was kind of worried he got the drugs.

JUSTIN LING: Kyle kept trying. When he came back to Toronto that fall he kept calling. Hamid never answered. The calls went straight to voicemail. So you've been trying to call him.

KYLE ANDREWS: Yeah and I thought you know how it happens in the gay community before Facebook it used to be a friend would die.

You never know until you run into friends at the bar and be like oh yeah so-and-so drowned or they died HIV or cancer or they moved away or whatever.

JUSTIN LING: Toronto's queer community has dealt with a lot of loss LGBTQ people see higher rates of murder and assault. The AIDS epidemic wiped out thousands from the community over decades. And sometimes people just pick up and leave. Kyle has experienced all of those realities but when he came back to Toronto a few months later he was still looking for Hamid and eventually he found him just not where he expected.

I was walking down the street and there's this picture on a telephone phone. It was a Toronto police poster in the picture. Hamid is wearing a crisp navy suit with a maroon pocket square and a matching tie. His smiles crooked and his left eyebrow is cocked upwards his full beard is almost entirely Grey. But it wasn't just Hamid's picture on the telephone pole.

JUSTIN LING: Next to him is another Afghan national who'd emigrated to Canada, Abdulbasir Faizi. He was known to his friends as just Basir. He was also a regular in the Church Street bars, which was a shock to his wife and children. That's who reported him missing when he didn't come home from work one day. He went missing in December of 2010, just three months after Skanda disappeared. In the picture Basir is wearing traditional Afghan dress. His salt and pepper goatee matches his black and white tunic. He has a big grin on his face. The third photo was Skanda. Skanda is smirking from underneath a tightly trimmed goatee. He has a gold earring in one ear and his shirt is open at the top button. The similarities are impossible to ignore: three middle aged men, all with brown skin, all with facial hair. Above each of their faces in red block letters is the word "MISSING."

Well I saw the poster and I called my good friend Christian and was like why when you tell me this because forests everywhere was all over TV and the news and I was living in a tent in Nova Scotia when I was there so sick guys and some other guys and I go serial killer and he's like probably.

[Newscasts]

REPORTER 1: Police from 51 Division were canvassing today hoping these posters will jog someone's memory. In a strange case of three missing men whose only connection seems to be this neighbourhood.

REPORTER 2: All three men did not know each other, but they have similar appearances and they were known to frequent the area.

JUSTIN LING: News vans lined Church Street and reporters set up on the sidewalks interviewing anyone who walked by about the disappearances.

MITA HANS: It's hard to think that they're not connected somehow by something.

JUSTIN LING: Plenty of people saw the connection. Mita Hans is one of them. She's a longtime activist and is well-connected in the queer community. Mia invited me to her home just south of the village. She's got a wide smile and she's impossibly friendly. We're on Meet his back patio. It is so hot I have to keep wiping sweat from my forehead.

MITA HANS: I have some Tamarind juice.

JUSTIN LING: Sure, thank you.

MITA HANS: Indian drink, it cools you down like nothing else in summertime.

JUSTIN LING: Mota has this wonderful habit. She'll go out of her way to introduce herself to other queer people of colour she sees on the street. That's how she met Skanda.

MITA HANS: And a friend of mine who's also Tamil, we were outside exchanging dog stories shopping at the market and Skanda happened to be by and when you see another brown queer person, as a brown queer person, you get really excited goming oh my God look look there's one more because we all know each other and recognize each other and watch out for each other. That there's that that level of connection that's instantaneous of knowing each other's struggles and he was lovely and he really liked dogs. And then we started talking, I had a German Shepherd at the time and she really liked him. He was very good with her. He had connections to the community. He had roots here that that's not somebody who would leave. He had given up a lot to become a part of this community.

JUSTIN LING: So there's obviously a red flag when he didn't show up.

MITA HANS: Huge red flags everywhere. I mean you know I know people I was checking in on when the third person, the second person had gone missing, going there's a similarity. And you kind of look like that. You're a brown person with a goatee and be careful. Be careful. And people don't just leave. They don't get up and leave their apartments. They don't get up and leave their friends. They don't get up and leave their community that they worked so hard and lost so much to form that when people go into the village it's to seek out something that is not available to them anywhere else. People don't get up and leave all of that without saying goodbyes.

JUSTIN LING: Mita, Kyle, so many others, they all came around to the same conclusion that something was very wrong here.

MITA HANS: I think everybody who saw the posters brought up specifically the word serial killer. I remember hearing it, poster-serial killerm poster-serial killer. That this is not chance, this is not a lover's quarrel gone awry. This is a pattern. This is a definitive pattern.

JUSTIN LING: But as the community came around to the idea that someone was targeting brown gay men police were still reticent. Initially I think the tones were very simple asking for help.

MITA HANS: Asking for acknowledgement asking for a spotlight to be shone on this because obviously there's something going on. And when that didn't happen I think the tone became more urgent and more animated and finally the tone became very angry of why are you not listening? We see this is happening of everybody we know sees that this is happening. How can you not see this. Why are you not seeing this?

JUSTIN LING: How can you not see this is exactly how most of the community felt. It's exactly how I felt, but the police weren't seeing it or if they were, they weren't saying so publicly. This is Officer Tony Vella speaking to queer newspaper Extra in 2013.

OFFICER TONY VELLA: Those are just the similarities between all three men. Does it mean anything. It's still unclear at this point. It could mean something, but at this point it's still unclear.

JUSTIN LING: The theory that seemed to be driving the police investigation and the media coverage is that these men just took off. Maybe Hamid and Basir went back to Afghanistan, even without their passports. Maybe Skanda just skipped town. Maybe nothing bad happened at all.

OFFICER TONY VELLA: What we're looking at right now is a missing person investigation. That's what we have. Foul play suspect is still unclear. So right now a task force of officers have been assigned to the investigation. The falling on all different leads trying to turn exactly what's happened to the three men and they don't even know each other. There's no evidence to suggest they even knew each other., so that's what's concerning here. But the key thing is we're urging anyone that may know who the three men are, if you haven't contacted police, please give us a call, regardless of if you think the information is relevant or not. Call us because it could very well be.

JUSTIN LING: Kyle did call. He sat down with police to try to help solve his friend's disappearance.

KYLE ANDREWS: The first investigators did an amazing job. Like they didn't make me feel intimidated like I talked about sex and marijuana and booze in the gay village and they didn't bat an eye or anything, you want a coffee? You know they were very professional about it and so you know how'd you know Hamid? How well did you know Hamid? Do you know one of his family? Where'dyou see him last? What was he wearing? What did he do for work? Where'd he come from? Where'd he go? Where'd you meet? Where'd do you spend time? Like a lot of questions. It was about four and a half to five hours that I spent with them.

JUSTIN LING: Did you mention Bruce's name or did you say you know I remember seeing him.

KYLE ANDREWS: I knew, I said that the last time I talk to them and I gave a physical description and I tried to look him up on the Internet and that his name was Bruce and I didn't know his surname. I gave them not really enough details to track him down, but they had said that they had other people mention and they even tried to lead me on like do you know what kind of work did he do? Like outside with flowers or did he mow lawns? Or was he an arborist? So they somebody else had talked about Bruce, but they didn't have enough juice to go.

JUSTIN LING: So one of the first interviews you did they had said oh yeah we know that this guy named Bruce is a landscaper.

KYLE ANDREWS: Yeah another friend of one of the other guys had mentioned Bruce and they didn't give me enough details, but I mean one of the other men had dated Bruce. You the last time I saw him that's what happened was that Bruce was there.

JUSTIN LING: Kyle sat in that interrogation room and gave police the name Bruce. That piece of information, that name was a huge tip. Bruce, the landscaper who had dated Skanda. The one who had been seen with Hamid before his disappearance. That could have been the tip that cracked the case, but it didn't. The police task force set up to investigate the three men had a name, Project Houston. As in Houston, we have a problem. A year and a half after it was started, just months after Kyle sat in that interrogation room, project Houston was shut down and in the village men would continue to go missing.

[Music]

MW: That was episode one of the CBC podcast, Uncover: The Village. We'll bring you episode two tomorrow. And we're featuring some of the best of CBC podcasts all summer long. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. I'm Megan Williams. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music]

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June 24, 2019 episode transcript

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