Deep in the tangled underbrush of Pictou County’s forgotten fringes, where blackflies swarm like secrets and the East River gurgles with unspoken sins, the sprawling Sullivan property has long been a fortress of rural isolation. But on a drizzly December morning in 2025, as frost clung to the chain-link fence like a guilty conscience, a single witness’s voice shattered the seven-month silence surrounding the vanishing of Lilly and Jack Sullivan. In an exclusive interview with CBC’s Nova Scotia at Five, Janie McKenzie – the children’s 68-year-old step-grandmother, who shared the 12-acre lot with her son Daniel Martell, his partner Malehya Brooks-Murray, and the missing siblings – dropped a revelation that has RCMP brass scrambling and online sleuths in a frenzy: “I heard them that morning, clear as church bells. Laughter, then footsteps… then nothing. Like the woods swallowed ’em whole.” But it wasn’t just her words; it was the “hidden clues” she unearthed in her own backyard – a rusted toy truck half-buried in the sandbox, a child’s sock snagged on barbed wire, and a faint trail of candy wrappers leading toward the steep embankment – that police now say could rewrite the timeline of the May 2 disappearance. As search teams swarm the property anew, one chilling question haunts this hamlet of 100 souls: Were these overlooked relics screaming for attention all along, or is McKenzie’s memory a mother’s desperate mirage?

For the uninitiated – or those weary from the endless scroll of true-crime TikToks – the Sullivan saga is a slow-burn nightmare etched into Canada’s collective psyche. Lilly, the pigtailed firecracker of six with her gap-toothed grin and obsession for Frozen sing-alongs, and her brother Jack, the wide-eyed four-year-old tornado who collected sticks like treasures, vanished without a whisper from their Gairloch Road home in the pre-dawn hush of May 2. The official line from Brooks-Murray and Martell? The kids, home “sick” from Salt Springs Elementary with a shared cough, were tucked in by 9 p.m. the night before. Come morning, as the couple dozed with baby Meadow in the master bedroom, they claimed to hear the siblings rustling in the kitchen – cereal bowls clinking, Lilly’s giggles echoing down the hall. A quick glance, a call unanswered, and poof: The backyard gate, latched but not locked, stood ajar. “They must’ve wandered off,” Martell told officers that frantic afternoon, his voice cracking like dry leaves. RCMP launched a blitz – drones over the 200-square-kilometer search grid, cadaver dogs sniffing septic tanks and mine shafts, even polygraphs for the parents. But seven months on, with 670 tips chased to dead ends and $2 million in volunteer hours logged, the woods have yielded zilch. No bodies, no bikes, no bows in Lilly’s signature pink.

Enter McKenzie, the wildcard in this family thicket. Perched in a weathered camper trailer just 50 feet from the main house – a sagging double-wide ringed by her menagerie of feral cats and a yapping mutt named Buster – she was the on-site sentinel that fateful morn. In her CBC sit-down, filmed amid the property’s eerie stillness, McKenzie recounted the hours with a clarity that belies her arthritis-knotted hands. “Woke at 5:45, same as always, for my tea,” she rasped, gesturing to the frostbitten swingset she’d hand-built from scrap lumber, its blue slide slick with dew. “Heard ’em through the thin walls – Jack babbling ‘Mama, up!’ and Lilly shushing him like a big girl. Footsteps pattering to the door, then… zilch. By 6:30, when I peeked out for the paper, the yard was empty. Gate swingin’ like an invitation.” Police timelines peg the “last sounds” at 8-9:40 a.m., but McKenzie’s account shaves it to dawn – a discrepancy that’s lit a fire under the Northeast Nova RCMP Major Crime Unit. “Her interview’s gold,” whispers a source close to the probe. “Puts eyes on the property when the parents say they were still abed.”

But the real gut-punch? The “hidden clues” McKenzie claims to have spotted – and ignored – in the chaos of those first search days. As volunteers trampled the 300-foot treeline in May, she says she dismissed them as “kids’ litter,” too shell-shocked to connect dots. First: That toy truck, a battered red Tonka relic Jack adored, unearthed nose-down in the sandbox like it’d been hastily shoved. “Found it June 1, digging for carrots,” McKenzie told CBC, holding the cab’s cracked grille aloft. “Mud caked fresh, like it’d been out overnight – but Jack put it away every night, religious-like.” Forensics, rushed back post-interview, revealed faint smears of what tests peg as “organic residue” – inconclusive, but enough for RCMP to cordon the sand pit for ground-penetrating radar. Then, the sock: A tiny, polka-dot ankle number, Lilly’s from her school uniform, tangled in the fence’s rusted barbs near the gate. “Snagged high, like she climbed over, not squeezed under,” McKenzie mused, pointing to the wire at knee-height for a child. DNA swipes came back positive for Lilly’s – a match that screams “struggle” or “scramble,” not casual wander. And the wrappers? A trail of three – Snickers minis, Jack’s contraband stash – fanning from the porch steps to the embankment’s lip, vanishing into the 40-foot drop toward the river. “Windblown, I thought,” she shrugged. “But now? Looks like breadcrumbs to nowhere.”

These “clues,” unverified till now, clash hard with the parents’ narrative – and echo two neighbor witnesses’ eerie accounts from October’s unredacted warrants. One local, a 52-year-old mill worker, told RCMP he heard a vehicle rev on Highway 289 around 1:30 a.m. May 2 – idling near the railway tracks by Gairloch, then peeling toward Lairg Road. “Sounded like a pickup, heavy load in the bed,” he said. Another, an elderly widow, swore she glimpsed “two small shapes” darting across her driveway at 5 a.m., “hand-in-hand, toward the Sullivan gate.” RCMP dismissed the car as a “false positive” after CCTV scrubbed clean, but McKenzie’s interview revives the specter: Did the kids bolt earlier than admitted? Was the property a staging ground for something sinister? Polygraphs cleared Brooks-Murray and Martell of foul play, but whispers persist – Martell’s “repeated pleas” on social media reek of overkill to some, while Brooks-Murray’s estranged ex, Cody Sullivan, fumes from afar: “They know more than they’re saying.”

The property itself? A suspect in its own right. Sprawling and sinister, it’s a 12-acre snarl of steep banks, thick brush, and forgotten outbuildings – the camper, a sagging barn stuffed with Martell’s tools, even an old well capped since the ’80s. Volunteers from Please Bring Me Home scoured it in November, unearthing “irrelevant” animal bones wrapped in a blanket (dismissed by an on-call anthropologist) and heat signatures from a May 2 drone flyover that fizzled into deer tracks. But McKenzie’s tour for CBC peeled back layers: The fenced yard, touted as “escape-proof,” boasts a loose panel near the slide – “Kidsized gap,” she noted. The embankment, a sheer plunge to the river, hides “dozens of game trails” snaking into the forest, black with flies come summer. “If they went down there, hypothermia or a slip… poof,” she trailed off, eyes on the water. RCMP returned December 7, post-interview, with excavators probing the sandbox and wrappers’ path – a “targeted dig,” per a terse release, yielding “items of interest” sealed in evidence bags.

Fallout? Swift and savage. #SullivanClues exploded on X with 1.8 million impressions, armchair detectives dissecting McKenzie’s every pause. Family fractures deepen: Brooks-Murray, holed up in New Glasgow with Meadow, issued a statement via lawyer: “Janie’s memories are her own; ours are etched in loss.” Martell, radio silent since a June presser, posted a single photo – the swingset at dusk – captioned “Still searching.” Cody Sullivan, from his Moncton apartment, demands a full property teardown: “Those ‘clues’? They’re screams we ignored.” International eyes – from Dateline producers to U.K. tabloids – swarm, dubbing it “Canada’s Madeleine McCann.” RCMP, battered by 488 tips, begs restraint: “Speculation hinders; facts heal.”

Yet in Lansdowne’s hushed lanes, where relatives knot half the homes, hope flickers like fireflies. McKenzie, stroking Buster amid her cats, ends her interview with a plea: “If those clues lead anywhere, let ’em bring my grandbabies home. Laughter to nothing… that’s no way for tots to go.” As digs chew the earth and drones hum anew, the Sullivan property – once a haven of homemade swings and sibling squabbles – stands accused: Silent witness, or shallow grave? The woods, as ever, hold their tongue. But Janie’s words? They’ve cracked the case’s facade, unleashing a torrent no warrant can redact. For Lilly’s pigtails and Jack’s stick collection, the search – and the secrets – grind on. Tips to Northeast Nova RCMP: 902-896-5060. In these hills, every rustle counts.