LANSDOWNE STATION, Nova Scotia — Six months of hope, prayer vigils, and frozen boots in the mud came crashing down Saturday when volunteer searchers with the group Please Bring Me Home made a horrifying find deep in the tangled woods behind the Sullivan trailer: small human bones, scattered clothing fibers, and what appears to be a child’s pink rubber boot — the exact style Lilly Sullivan was wearing the morning she and her little brother Jack vanished without a trace.

The discovery, confirmed by multiple sources close to the search effort, happened around 2:45 p.m. on November 15, 2025, in a steep ravine roughly 1.8 kilometers northeast of the Gairloch Road property — an area that had been swept by RCMP canine units in May but was deemed “inconclusive” due to heavy rain and thick underbrush. Volunteers, many of them local hunters familiar with the terrain, pushed farther than official teams ever did after the formal search was scaled back in early summer.

“It was a boot first,” one volunteer, who asked not to be named because of the active investigation, told The Post. “Sticking out of a pile of leaves like it had been placed there. Then we saw the bones — tiny, white, some still with bits of fabric. We all just froze. Nobody wanted to believe it.”

RCMP Major Crime Unit swarmed the site within an hour, erecting a massive white tent and cordoning off a half-kilometer radius. By nightfall, forensic anthropologists from Halifax were airlifted in. As of Sunday evening, police have refused to confirm the remains are human, let alone those of Lilly or Jack, but sources inside the investigation say the size is consistent with a child under seven. A second boot — blue with cartoon dinosaurs, matching Jack’s footwear — was reportedly recovered 40 meters away, half-buried under a fallen birch log.

The location is chilling for another reason: it sits almost perfectly along the straight-line path that search dogs hit on repeatedly in the first 48 hours, only to lose the scent near a fast-moving brook now swollen with November runoff. Back in May, cadaver dogs had shown “strong interest” in the exact ravine, but heavy equipment couldn’t be brought in because of the terrain. That alert was officially logged as “environmental contamination.”

For the families, the news detonated like a bomb.

Belynda Gray, the children’s paternal grandmother who has led private searches every weekend since May, collapsed when told. “I knew in my gut they never walked out of those woods alive,” she sobbed to reporters outside the RCMP detachment in Stellarton. “But knowing and seeing are different kinds of hell.”

Malehya Brooks-Murray, the children’s mother, has not been seen publicly since Friday. Sources say she was informed by victim services while staying with relatives in Truro and immediately became hysterical, screaming, “That’s not my babies, that can’t be my babies.” She was sedated and taken to Colchester East Hants Health Centre. Her current condition is unknown.

Daniel Martell, the stepfather, was observed arriving at the crime scene perimeter Sunday morning in his pickup truck. He sat in the cab for nearly an hour, head in hands, before driving off without speaking to waiting media. Neighbors say he hasn’t slept at the trailer since the volunteer discovery broke.

Online, the case — already a powder keg of accusation and conspiracy — exploded. The Facebook page “Justice for Lilly and Jack Sullivan” surged past 180,000 members overnight, with users posting side-by-side photos of the recovered pink boot and the one Lilly was wearing in a Dollarama surveillance still from May 1. Comments range from grief to outright rage, many demanding Martell and Brooks-Murray be re-interviewed — polygraphs or not.

Adding fuel: a detail that leaked late Sunday from a volunteer’s private TikTok (quickly deleted but screen-recorded and reposted thousands of times). The video claims one of the bones — a small femur — showed what appeared to be “tool marks,” not animal predation. RCMP have neither confirmed nor denied the claim, but the phrase “not consistent with an accidental death” is now circulating among law enforcement circles, according to two separate sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Complicating everything is the weather. A major nor’easter is barreling toward the Maritimes tonight, expected to dump 20-30 cm of wet snow across Pictou County by Tuesday morning. Forensic teams are racing to excavate the ravine before the site is buried. Ground-penetrating radar units arrived from New Brunswick at dusk.

Premier Tim Houston released a brief statement Sunday night: “The people of Nova Scotia are holding Lilly and Jack’s loved ones in our hearts tonight. We pray for answers and for peace.”

But peace feels impossibly far away. At the Lansdowne Station crossroads, someone has already tied two tiny teddy bears to a telephone pole — one pink, one blue — with a hand-painted sign that reads, “We never stopped looking.”

As the snow begins to fall and the white tent flaps violently in the wind, the question that has haunted this province for half a year is finally clawing its way toward an answer nobody wanted.

Are the bones in the bush the last chapter of Lilly and Jack Sullivan?

Or just the beginning of something far darker?

Police are asking anyone with information to call the tip line at 1-888-710-9090. The reward now stands at $250,000 after private donors doubled it overnight.