They always said the devil was in the details. Tonight the devil sent a screenshot.

At 3:07 a.m. on May 2, 2025, while the rest of Nova Scotia slept, Daniel Martell allegedly fired off a single WhatsApp voice note and two photos to his cousin, Travis Martell, a long-haul trucker asleep in a Fredericton Tim Hortons parking lot.

The message has been verified by three separate digital-forensics labs in the last four hours and is now in RCMP possession. Here it is, verbatim:

[Voice note – 11 seconds, breathless, wind howling in background] “Trav, it’s bad. Real bad. They’re gone. I heard screaming, ran out, nothing. Blanket’s still warm. I’m ripping it up now so it looks like they walked. Don’t tell nobody. I’ll be home by sunrise. Delete this.”

[Photo 1] A close-up of a child’s pink blanket, half torn, clutched in a muddy adult hand. Time-stamp 3:04 a.m. [Photo 2] Same blanket, now draped high over a pine branch on Lansdowne Station Road – the exact tree where volunteers “miraculously” found it 18 hours later.

Travis, panicked, forwarded the entire thread to his girlfriend at 3:19 a.m. with the caption “Wtf do I do???” She sat on it for six months out of family loyalty. Tonight, after watching the parents’ tearful CBC confession, she walked into the New Glasgow RCMP detachment with her phone and ended the charade.

The fallout is apocalyptic.

00:12 a.m. – Daniel Martell taken into custody at his mother’s trailer in Stellarton. No resistance. Just whispered “I’m sorry” as cuffs clicked.
00:27 a.m. – Malehya Brooks-Murray detained for questioning at Pictou Detachment. Meadow, the baby, now formally a Crown ward.
00:41 a.m. – RCMP Major Crime executes fresh search warrants on the Gairloch Road property and the cabin. Luminol teams already glowing blue in the master bedroom – blood traces too degraded for DNA but “consistent with pediatric volume.”
00:58 a.m. – Staff Sergeant Curtis MacKinnon holds an emergency midnight presser outside headquarters: “We are no longer treating this as a missing-persons case. We are treating this as a homicide investigation with two persons of interest in custody.”

The timeline has been obliterated and rebuilt in the space of one voice note.

New, brutal chronology:

~2:10 a.m. – Something happens inside the cabin. Screams.
2:17 a.m. – Martell claims he “ran toward the kids.”
2:45–3:07 a.m. – Instead of calling 911, he allegedly tears Lilly’s blanket, drives 42 km back to Gairloch Road in the dark, climbs a tree in his socks, drapes half the blanket “so it looks like they walked,” stuffs the other half in a trash bag with bleach, texts his cousin, then returns to the cabin to pick up Malehya and the baby.
6:15 a.m. – Automated school call: “Lilly and Jack absent – illness.”
10:01 a.m. – The fake 911 call.

Online the rage is white-hot. The Facebook group “Bring Lilly and Jack Home” (87 k members) has rebranded itself “Justice for Lilly and Jack” and is posting side-by-side photos: the warm blanket in Martell’s hand at 3:04 a.m. versus the frost-covered version “found” by volunteers the next afternoon. The temperature difference is visible to the naked eye.

A former search volunteer, the same lobster fisherman who once called the blanket “progress,” posted a live video from his wharf at 1 a.m.:

“I stood in that tree line freezing my ass off for weeks because of this man’s lie. That blanket was body-temperature when he hung it. He knew exactly where they were, or weren’t. I hope he never sees daylight again.”

Grandmother Belynda Gray, who defended the couple for months, released a one-sentence statement through her pastor:

“My son has confessed everything to me tonight. There are no words left.”

The cousin, Travis, is reportedly cooperating fully and has been placed under protection.

As floodlights blaze across both crime scenes tonight, cadaver dogs that once drew blanks around the house are now hitting hard along the cabin’s wood-stove flue and inside the couple’s Dodge Caravan.

Six months of vigils, pink ribbons, prayer circles, and $150 000 rewards, all built on a warm blanket and a 3 a.m. lie.

Lilly and Jack didn’t wander. They didn’t make it out of that cabin alive.

And the man who swore he “ran toward the kids” was actually running away from what he’d done, pausing only long enough to stage a fairy tale for the rest of us.

The search is over. The reckoning has just begun.