On the frozen morning of November 23, 2025, six months and three weeks after Lilly and Jack Sullivan vanished into thin air, a lone hunter walking his dog along an abandoned logging road two kilometres from the children’s home made a discovery that has detonated the entire investigation.

Wedged between the roots of a fallen birch, half-buried under six months of pine needles and frost, was a child’s pink winter mitten.

Inside the cuff, written in faded purple marker that somehow survived rain, snow, and time: LILLY.

The RCMP isn’t calling it a breakthrough yet. But behind closed doors, sources inside the Major Crime Unit say it just shattered every working theory they had.

Because that mitten was never reported missing. Because the logging road it was found on was searched three times in May with cadaver dogs and thermal drones. And because the last person known to have touched that exact mitten was Lilly Sullivan herself, the morning she disappeared.

Within 48 hours, the case that had quietly drifted toward “presumed lost in the woods” has exploded into a full-scale criminal re-investigation.

Ground-penetrating radar teams are tearing up the forest floor. Divers are back in the Middle River dragging sections never touched before. And for the first time in six months, the RCMP has issued fresh search warrants, this time for the Sullivan family’s phones, vehicles, and the locked shed behind the house that was dismissed as “just storage” back in May.

The mitten changes everything.

It was found 1.9 kilometres from the house, in the opposite direction from where the original search grid focused. It shows no animal chew marks, no blood, no decomposition staining. And most chilling of all: it was found laid flat, palm-up, almost deliberately placed, as if someone wanted it to be discovered now, not then.

The hunter, 64-year-old Gerald MacDonald, a retired fisherman who knows every deer trail in Pictou County, swears the spot was bare when he walked it with searchers on May 5. “I would’ve seen pink a mile away,” he told SaltWire, voice shaking. “That mitten wasn’t there in May. Someone put it there this winter.”

RCMP Corporal Jolene Garland refused to comment on theories of “evidence planting,” but confirmed late yesterday that the mitten has been rushed to the national forensics lab in Ottawa. Early indications: the purple marker is the exact brand found in Malehya Brooks-Murray’s kitchen junk drawer. The handwriting has been tentatively matched to Lilly’s Grade 1 printing practice sheets.

And then came the second bombshell.

On the same day the mitten was found, a woman in Amherst, 45 minutes away, called the tipline with a story she’d been too afraid to tell in May.

She claims that on May 2, between 9:15 and 9:40 a.m., she saw a dark blue pickup truck, muddy, with a loud exhaust, stopped on Gairloch Road near the Sullivan driveway. A man was outside the truck, arguing with a small child in a pink coat who was crying and pulling away. A second, smaller child was visible in the backseat, banging on the window.

The witness wrote down the plate in her daytimer at the time. She never called police because “everyone said the kids just wandered off” and she didn’t want to ruin someone’s life if she was wrong.

The plate she wrote down traces to a 2011 Ford F-150 registered to a name very familiar to investigators: a close male relative of Daniel Martell who lives less than 10 kilometres away and who has never been publicly identified.

That relative was interviewed for 45 minutes on May 3 and voluntarily provided DNA. He is now, according to sources, being brought in for a second, much longer interview, this time with lawyers present.

Meanwhile, Malehya Brooks-Murray collapsed outside the Truro police station yesterday when shown a photo of the mitten. Video obtained by Global News shows her on her knees in the parking lot, screaming “That’s hers, that’s my baby’s, oh God they’re still alive.”

Daniel Martell, pale and chain-smoking, refused to speak to reporters but was overheard telling a family member, “They’re twisting everything. We never hurt those kids.”

The community that once wrapped the family in yellow ribbons is fracturing. Longtime neighbours who organized candlelight vigils in May are now whispering about locked doors, late-night bonfires, and why the backyard shed was suddenly padlocked the week after the disappearance.

On Reddit and TikTok, the case has exploded again. #LillyAndJack trended worldwide within hours of the mitten photo leaking. Armchair detectives are combing satellite images from May, claiming to spot freshly turned earth behind the Sullivan property that disappeared under new gravel by June.

One poster, a former search volunteer, dropped a chilling detail: “We were told not to search the shed or the ravine behind it because ‘the family asked for privacy there.’ I thought it was grief. Now I’m not so sure.”

As of this morning, November 25, the RCMP has expanded the active search zone to 12 square kilometres. Cadaver dogs from Alberta are flying in tonight. The reward has been quietly doubled to $300,000, no questions asked.

And for the first time since May, Corporal Garland used a word the families have been begging to hear:

“We are now investigating all possibilities, including third-party involvement.”

Somewhere in the frozen woods of Pictou County, a little girl’s pink mitten, impossibly clean, impossibly deliberate, lies in an evidence bag.

It is screaming what two small children no longer can.