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Episode: Missing & Murdered Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
Author: CBC
Duration: 00:34:29
Episode Shownotes
Christine Harron, a book-loving teenager from Hanover, Ontario, leaves for school in the spring of 1993 and is never seen again. A suspect emerges, confessing to her murder, but the case falls apart and Christine's family are left without answers.In Season 9 of the award winning podcast Someone Knows Something,
David Ridgen, along with Christine's mother, reopen the investigation and come face to face with the man who said he killed Chrissy.Someone Knows Something is the investigative true crime series by award-winning documentarian David Ridgen. Each season tackles an unsolved case, uncovering details and bringing closure to families.More episodes of Someone Knows Something are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/Dhp7oA5t
Summary
In this episode of "Missing & Murdered: Finding Cleo," David Ridgen reintroduces the unresolved case of Christine Harron, a 15-year-old who disappeared in Hanover, Ontario, in 1993. The narrative captures the emotional turmoil of her family, particularly her mother, as they faced initial police assumptions that Christine was a runaway. Despite a subsequent confession from a suspect, the case suffered from jurisdictional issues and police mismanagement. Ridgen collaborates with Christine's mother to reexamine the evidence and confront the suspect, all while shedding light on the ongoing struggle for justice and closure for the Harron family.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Missing & Murdered Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:01 Speaker_11
Carl Miller spent most of his career writing reports and giving lectures. But a few years ago, he stumbled on something that would change his life forever.
00:00:09 Speaker_01
At first glance, it looked pretty innocuous. It was a Excel spreadsheet full of messages and responses trying to arrange for someone else to be killed.
00:00:19 Speaker_11
I'm Kathleen Goldthar, and this week on Crime Story, Carl Miller takes me through his investigation into a murder for hiresite.
00:00:31 Speaker_09
This is a CBC Podcast. Hi there, I'm David Ridgen. I'm the investigator and host of Someone Knows Something. I want to tell you about someone named Christine Herron. Chrissy was a book-loving teenager from Hanover, Ontario.
00:00:49 Speaker_09
One afternoon in the spring of 1993, she said goodbye to her mother and left for school. Chrissy was never seen again. But in the aftermath of her disappearance, a suspect emerged, someone who I come face to face with.
00:01:04 Speaker_09
The new season is available right now. It's a story of murder and heartbreak and investigative error. Here's the first episode, Chrissy. Have a listen.
00:01:24 Speaker_09
I'm at another river, this one flowing through a southwestern Ontario town on a clear but darkening springtime evening. I recorded these nature sounds well over a decade ago for a TV documentary using the same microphone I now use for the podcast.
00:01:42 Speaker_09
This thing always seems to be standing between me and the unknown, somehow oddly comforting.
00:01:49 Speaker_07
Just crouching at the riverside here in a park in Hanover, Ontario. This is the Saugine River, which the mouth of the Saugine actually empties out into Lake Huron. It's about 60 kilometers downstream, I think.
00:02:09 Speaker_07
The river's flowing clear, but there's lots of debris kind of pushed against the shoreline. There's obviously a pretty high flood plain here. There's an old gazebo, a swing set. There's an old gate.
00:02:28 Speaker_09
I remember focusing on the sounds these things made here. Chains on a swing, muddy logs at the high water mark, brushy grasses along the path, and that metal gate.
00:02:40 Speaker_09
I wonder if these objects, or the sounds they made, ever held any actual comfort for anyone. At one time, this park was Christine Herron's favorite place in the whole world, I've been told.
00:02:56 Speaker_09
If I'd been here before May 18, 1993, I might have seen her down here, catching frogs or fishing. Nobody here today. Just this path next to the river.
00:03:14 Speaker_09
The sounds I've recorded here don't reveal any secrets, but I feel pulled back to places like this again and again. Pulled back into long-term investigations, their grief, and the hope.
00:03:28 Speaker_09
Even after some questions have been answered, there's always more, and more difficult ones. Over 30 years ago, just one week after her 15th birthday, Christine Herron disappeared. And her full story has yet to be told.
00:03:50 Speaker_09
I'm David Ridgen, and this is Someone Knows Something, Season 9, The Christine Herron Case, Episode 1, Chrissy. I first learned about Christine in the late 2000s as I was scanning through some of the many unsolved cases out of Ontario.
00:04:13 Speaker_09
I was preparing to make a documentary series for CBC Television's news program, The National. I sorted Chrissy's case into a much smaller pile, a shortlist of sorts, cases that for some reason spoke to me.
00:04:27 Speaker_04
We gather here this morning for a celebration of life.
00:04:37 Speaker_09
I'd learned that a memorial service was being held at a church 17 years after Christine disappeared, so I traveled west to Hanover in the springtime of 2010. Let us pray.
00:04:53 Speaker_04
Loving God, look with mercy on those who mourn for Christine, who has died by the violence of our fallen world. Be with us as we struggle with the mysteries of life and death.
00:05:07 Speaker_09
Framed photos of Christine in curly dark hair and glasses sit on a small table at the front of the church next to the minister.
00:05:15 Speaker_09
There are others, sad people whom I assume are her family, standing close by, including the woman that I know is her mother, Mary Ann.
00:05:33 Speaker_04
In our culture, her loner mentality meant that she was viewed as being different. She wasn't someone who was hung up on appearances or who was doing what with whom. She had other things to do.
00:05:47 Speaker_09
This minister's words, his impressions of Christine, fill me with a chill of sadness. Tears suddenly roll down my face for this young person I'd never met. And right there, I decide that I'm going to do this case.
00:06:06 Speaker_02
This is the last place Chrissy had lived.
00:06:11 Speaker_09
I would take several more months of information gathering before I contacted Chrissy's mother, Mary Ann.
00:06:18 Speaker_02
That front window was the living room. And that's where her and I had spent the morning together watching television with her laying her head on my lap.
00:06:31 Speaker_09
I've got Marianne framed up in my documentary camera on a cool windy day.
00:06:36 Speaker_09
Pale-skinned in glasses with meticulous makeup and shorter hair, Marianne stands in front of the small brick two-story she'd been renting back in the spring of 1993 at the time Chrissy disappeared.
00:06:51 Speaker_09
Marianne gestures to where she says Chrissy walked away from home that day.
00:06:56 Speaker_02
And then she left to go to school. She walked down the other side of the street and around the corner. And that was the last I've seen of her.
00:07:09 Speaker_09
Marianne says she watched from an upstairs window as Chrissy turned the corner. On the way, Marianne thought, to grade nine classes at John Diefenbaker High School, not that far away. It was sometime between 1.30 and 2 p.m.
00:07:26 Speaker_09
Chrissy had not felt well that morning, so stayed home. She'd been known to skip classes and didn't want to go to school that afternoon either. She and her mom had argued about it, and Mary Ann suggested that perhaps Chrissy should get a job instead.
00:07:41 Speaker_09
Chrissy walked out, saying, see you later, and slammed the door. She was wearing blue jeans, a jean jacket, black running shoes, plastic glasses with a broken nose piece on one side, and possibly a silver bracelet.
00:07:58 Speaker_02
She was in a good mood that morning, but she was mad that she had to go to school. We were in the process of packing and moving to another place. And she says, well, even let me stay home and I'll pack all the time instead of going that day.
00:08:11 Speaker_02
But I said, you can't, the officer's waiting.
00:08:15 Speaker_09
There were other tensions in the household at the time as well. Chrissie had been deeply troubled by her parents' divorce years earlier. Her father, Lorne, lived in Western Canada at the time of Chrissie's disappearance and has since passed away.
00:08:30 Speaker_09
Chrissie got along with her younger brother named Sean, but did not always see eye to eye with her stepfather, who was also named Sean. Sean Russworm, who was then age 26.
00:08:42 Speaker_03
Well, she didn't like keeping her room clean. She's kind of a tomboy. Yeah.
00:08:49 Speaker_09
Russworm is a large man in a t-shirt sporting a mustache and smudgy blue line tattoos on each shoulder. Back at their current home, he and Marianne are settled into a couch. Two chihuahuas named Chloe and Angel sit on their laps.
00:09:06 Speaker_03
As long as they behave, then maybe they can stay.
00:09:12 Speaker_02
The best thing to do is to hand her to you and let you hold her. There, Angel. See?
00:09:22 Speaker_09
Marianne hands me Angel, the extra small one, so she can get used to me and stop barking.
00:09:28 Speaker_09
I walk around the room a bit with the dog in hand, looking at some photos of Chrissy spread out on a coffee table, with a yellow lunch pail on her first day of kindergarten, blowing out birthday candles in red-ribboned pigtails, and Christmas tree moments.
00:09:44 Speaker_08
I'm just going to try something with that light behind me. OK, good. Yeah, it is there.
00:09:50 Speaker_09
The dogs seem calm and we start talking about Chrissy.
00:09:56 Speaker_03
I like to take stuff apart, put it back together to see what made it work.
00:10:02 Speaker_02
She loved kids, loved going for walks into cricks, catching frogs and what have you.
00:10:12 Speaker_09
I see Chrissy seeming to watch me through her big glasses in the photos.
00:10:15 Speaker_10
I love those glasses.
00:10:21 Speaker_03
There was times where other people would pick on her younger brother, Sean, and then Chrissy would be right there, sticking up for her brother. Chrissy was right there and punched out a couple of boys that were picking on Sean.
00:10:35 Speaker_03
This was in public school already. So she could hold her own when she was feisty and when she needed to be.
00:10:46 Speaker_09
Sean admits that his relationship with Chrissy was sometimes strained, and he says that he is bipolar and sometimes can be aggressive. But he says that one of his last memories of Chrissy is her helping him replace the spark plugs in his car.
00:11:01 Speaker_03
When we started to get closer, she'd come out to the garage and ask me if she could use my tools. Yeah, they're right there. If I'd go to help, no, no, she'd want to do it herself.
00:11:15 Speaker_02
But she wasn't one to go out to parties or anything like that. She'd come home a couple of times and said, well, they're drinking, so I left.
00:11:23 Speaker_03
So she left.
00:11:24 Speaker_02
She was against smoking. She was against drinking.
00:11:26 Speaker_03
We connected and told her we were really proud of her for that.
00:11:29 Speaker_02
Yeah. She was close to her grandma, my mom.
00:11:33 Speaker_03
Very close.
00:11:34 Speaker_02
Yeah. They spent a lot of time together.
00:11:40 Speaker_12
We always had a good relationship. For any reason, if she just wanted to talk, she'd call me. She used to spend a lot of time out there with me.
00:11:53 Speaker_12
And then when, in 93, we moved to Guelph, that's what upset me so bad, because I felt, if she's out there, she's going to try and reach me. Because she always did, if she wanted something or other.
00:12:09 Speaker_12
And I thought, when I move away, she won't have my phone number. And that's upset me. And once I moved away, I couldn't even look at her pictures anymore for a long time. It really upset me bad.
00:12:20 Speaker_05
It says grandma. No, it says grandpa. It says grandma. Grandpa. Well, I don't think so. C-G-R-A-N-P-A. Grandpa. Uh-huh, it says grandma.
00:12:41 Speaker_09
Christine sits around a Christmas tree with her family in 1990. I watch the grainy archival video as she quietly makes sure that everyone has a gift to open before she does.
00:12:52 Speaker_09
Then the footage shifts to a Santa theme park and Christine's pretending to be a reindeer in front of a big red sleigh, a mischievous strength to her every move, just three years before she walks off into oblivion.
00:13:08 Speaker_12
Well, I got a new sewing machine. I remember bringing her out and letting her use it. She made an apron the one time she was out, and we'd bake, and we'd just play games. We always used to go do worm hunting, picking ones or two, and she'd go fishing.
00:13:25 Speaker_12
I just couldn't believe it when she disappeared and she didn't call me. It's something you can't never forget, I don't know. No matter what, you can't forget about it.
00:13:40 Speaker_09
Marianne reported Chrissie missing to Hanover police at 9.21pm on the day she disappeared, May 18th, 1993.
00:13:49 Speaker_09
Chrissie was known to have a poor sense of direction and would get lost easily, but despite this and her habit of skipping classes or sleeping over at friends' houses, Marianne and others say that Chrissie would always call home and never go far.
00:14:04 Speaker_02
When she didn't show home, I started phoning her friends and my family just to see if maybe she went to one of her friends' house after school or something.
00:14:15 Speaker_09
The story of Christine's case, at least in the beginning, is a familiar one. A teenager leaves home, supposed to be somewhere, school, but never makes it.
00:14:26 Speaker_09
Local police, investigatively inexperienced, finding nothing and flying in the face of what a mother knows.
00:14:34 Speaker_02
and nobody had seen her or heard from her. So then the family and I, we started going out and looking for her, looking in parks and in the area just to see, you know, if she was someplace else and just hadn't come home yet.
00:14:49 Speaker_02
We had phoned the police and they said it was too soon yet to do anything. What we actually got from the Hanover police chief himself was that his daughter runs away a lot, takes off for days. So mine probably did the same thing.
00:15:04 Speaker_02
So she never showed home and I sat up all night and waited for her and worried. I even had the feeling too all along that she was down there by the park somewhere. I kept trying to get them to search more.
00:15:20 Speaker_02
And the church and I, we even got together and formed our own search. And we wanted to search down there and they wouldn't let us. They made us go in the opposite direction.
00:15:31 Speaker_03
And the town police was very upset when we set that up. They were not impressed. But you had set up a search?
00:15:41 Speaker_02
Yes. They didn't want the public to panic.
00:15:44 Speaker_03
We were told if we went anywhere near the park that weekend, the very first weekend she disappeared, there would be consequences and repercussions.
00:15:54 Speaker_08
Who told you that? The police.
00:16:00 Speaker_09
There had been an antique car show on at the park that coming Victoria Day weekend, and police were concerned about disrupting it, according to Marianne.
00:16:09 Speaker_09
The Hanover Police and Fire Department did eventually coordinate and conduct a single search using volunteers on May 23, 1993, five days after she disappeared.
00:16:23 Speaker_09
The search encompassed the Hanover Park, the south shore of the Saugeen River going east, and the town water tower. No trace of Christine was found.
00:16:34 Speaker_02
I think everybody just wanted to believe she was a runaway. Nobody would actually think of her as something that happened, not in a small town, not to their town. So everybody just told us, no, she's a runaway. She'll come back when she's ready.
00:16:49 Speaker_02
Even when we were putting up posters, people would take them down. They just didn't want to believe it.
00:16:54 Speaker_03
The town police took them down.
00:16:56 Speaker_02
Yeah. but nobody would believe it. I actually got phone calls from people, you know, stop making such a fuss. She'll come back.
00:17:09 Speaker_08
Did you ever cast any suspicion or doubt, suspicious of people in town or anything? No.
00:17:16 Speaker_09
Nope. Marianne and Sean didn't have any suspects, but almost a year later, they had to be ruled out as suspects themselves.
00:17:27 Speaker_02
Yes, we all were at one point. They asked us to take polygraphs and I agreed just to rule out being a suspect so that they would get on with the case and find the person that did it.
00:17:38 Speaker_02
I did it willingly, knowing that it would clear me and would help the case. I would have done anything at that time. And you went through two of them.
00:17:48 Speaker_03
I went through two. The first one was fairly basic. It didn't bother me too much. The second one was at a very tense time in my life. My employer at the time was on strike in 1999.
00:18:04 Speaker_03
I had the interview over at Mount Forest OPP station in, I believe it was October of 1999. and I was interviewed by one of their forensic people from Kingston, supposedly one of their head people. It was very, very intense.
00:18:26 Speaker_03
It was about a four to five hour process, and they accused me in many different ways of murdering Christine, strangling, rape, shooting her, drowning her, and just everything they could to push my buttons.
00:18:44 Speaker_03
What pushed my buttons the most during this process, I know that they were videotaping and recording the session. They mentioned that they had Paul Bernardo in another room. They wanted to know what my thoughts were.
00:19:03 Speaker_09
Paul Bernardo was a serial rapist and murderer in Ontario in the 1980s and 1990s. He and his partner, Carla Homolka, horribly murdered two young women.
00:19:15 Speaker_09
Bernardo had been arrested and jailed months before Chrissy disappeared, so using his name here was a tactic to get Sean talking.
00:19:24 Speaker_03
And with myself already being bipolar and things that were going on in my life at that time, I completely lost it. I jumped out of my seat. I seem to remember throwing a couple of things around.
00:19:35 Speaker_03
I just said, let me at this son of a bitch, because only one of us is going to walk out of the room alive. I completely lost control. They tried to calm me down. I shook them off. All I had in my mind was looking for Paul Bernardo. I wanted Adam.
00:19:52 Speaker_03
And I wanted him dead. And that's the last I can remember.
00:19:58 Speaker_09
Russworm had been at work until 3pm in Durham, Ontario at the time Chrissy disappeared, about a 15-minute drive away from Hanover. After work, he drove to Mary Ann's, where he heard that Christine had left for school shortly before he arrived.
00:20:15 Speaker_08
And what did they tell you about the results of either of those polygraphs that you took, Sean?
00:20:19 Speaker_03
That I was cleared. As far as they were concerned, I had nothing to do with it. But they said they had to do what they had to do to prove that I was not guilty.
00:20:31 Speaker_09
Sean and Marianne did pass their first polygraph tests, according to documents, and neither was ever arrested or charged in Christine's case.
00:20:41 Speaker_03
Do I wish anyone to ever go through a process like that? No, it's hell. It's not a very nice process. But they did everything that they needed to do, and I commend them for doing it.
00:20:54 Speaker_03
I just still wish that we had something more to bring justice and bring Christine home.
00:21:02 Speaker_02
I did know before the night was over she was dead, though. Call it mother's intuition or whatever, I knew she was gone.
00:21:16 Speaker_00
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00:21:32 Speaker_00
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00:21:46 Speaker_00
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00:21:58 Speaker_09
There weren't many Christine Herron news reports to look at early on in my investigation.
00:22:04 Speaker_09
Items I could find talked about the local Hanover police making no headway in Christine's case, claiming even a year later that there was no evidence of foul play.
00:22:14 Speaker_09
Even though Chrissy had left her house without her ID, any extra clothing, or the $80 in birthday money she had just received, police continued to suggest that she was a runaway, that there were sightings of her.
00:22:27 Speaker_09
Christine was in Toronto with skinheads who had been seen in Hanover. She'd dyed her hair blonde and shaved the side of her head, or she'd left home to go live with her father Lorne out west.
00:22:38 Speaker_09
But she never appeared there, or Toronto, or was seen anywhere else again after May 18th, 1993.
00:22:47 Speaker_03
Marianne and I spent a lot of time. The first six months to a year we went to Kitchener, London, Toronto. Where else did we go, dear? I can't even remember.
00:23:02 Speaker_09
Even if police weren't looking for Christine, Marianne and Sean were trying their best.
00:23:08 Speaker_03
Every chance we had going to places that we probably, we checked shelters. We went into, I'm not sure if it's a halfway house or a drug house or what it was.
00:23:19 Speaker_09
The media would report on these supposed sightings of Chrissy and help to generate more rumors. And to make matters worse, according to Mary Ann, the few articles that were written were often filled with inaccuracy.
00:23:33 Speaker_02
I found that whenever you tried to tell them something, they twisted it into something else. It was never what you were trying to explain. They always just took bits and pieces and made their own sentences.
00:23:49 Speaker_03
It wasn't always the truth that we had said. So it became frustrating and upsetting to the point where we just had to refuse to speak with them.
00:24:04 Speaker_03
We were so scared of jeopardizing Christine's case that we shut out all reporters for quite a while, until now.
00:24:18 Speaker_02
I've kept most of the clippings for the newspapers all these years. Got those and the posters.
00:24:28 Speaker_10
So do you think that there's a chance in this case still or what's your aim then?
00:24:38 Speaker_02
I want it solved. Justice and solved.
00:24:40 Speaker_03
I think there's still a chance. I hope this will bring her home. We'll do our best.
00:24:56 Speaker_02
No barking. I'm sure you will. But Hanover does not feel like home anymore. Ever since she went missing.
00:25:05 Speaker_03
No, not to us.
00:25:07 Speaker_02
It's not our home.
00:25:19 Speaker_13
Cindy Galen McPherson, one of Christine Heron's school friends. How so? If somebody said, well, why don't you go do this? She'd go and do it because she wanted to be accepted. People would throw her in a locker. She'd just stay there until we were gone.
00:26:01 Speaker_13
And I'd come and be like, OK, you can get out now. She really wasn't one for conflict either. If people were fighting or if there was a chance that they could be fighting, she was out of there. We'd hang out pretty much every weekend.
00:26:20 Speaker_13
And I'm like, is Chrissy there? She's like, no, she hasn't gotten home from school yet. I thought it was kind of weird. And I'm like, well, she didn't, she wasn't at school. And her mom's like, oh, OK.
00:26:35 Speaker_13
And then I think it was about two hours later, I got another phone call. And she's like, are you sure Chrissy isn't there? And I'm like, no.
00:26:44 Speaker_09
Cindy and her father drove the roads that Chrissy might have traveled to get to their farm.
00:26:48 Speaker_13
Cindy had spoken to Chrissy on the phone the night before she disappeared. They were planning the May long weekend where Chrissy was supposed to come to Cindy's farm. Like, I was the last person to talk to her. And everything seemed fine.
00:27:19 Speaker_13
She was excited. She loved being at my house because of all the animals and everything like that. Being there, we had baby goats and sheep and calves and pigs. And she was excited to come and see them. And I didn't really think anything was up.
00:27:37 Speaker_07
OK, so the police then, did they talk to you?
00:27:40 Speaker_13
Every couple of years, they come and they
00:27:43 Speaker_09
Cindy says she spoke to police several times over the years and that sometimes they would insist that Cindy knew more, that she knew where Chrissy was. But she didn't.
00:27:55 Speaker_09
The best Cindy could do was tell police about what Chrissy was like, her routines and habits, certain places she liked to go.
00:28:03 Speaker_13
Chrissy used to go and put on the swings at the park and just drink. She said that's what she liked to do when she wanted to think, was go and sit on the swing. Like, Chrissy was a very good friend to me.
00:28:18 Speaker_13
And it kind of hurts me to know that she's missed out on a lot of stuff that I've gotten to do.
00:28:25 Speaker_08
What's your theory? Everyone's got one.
00:28:27 Speaker_13
I think somebody picked her up because she would have gotten into a car with somebody.
00:28:31 Speaker_08
You think that she would have gotten into a stranger's car?
00:28:34 Speaker_13
If they were nice to her, probably. She was, like, just striving for some sort of adult approval.
00:28:43 Speaker_13
So if you were older and you were nice to her, she would, like, move heaven and earth to keep that, like, that, um... I don't even know the word I'm looking for.
00:28:56 Speaker_08
That kind of attention?
00:28:57 Speaker_13
Yeah. To keep that attention on her.
00:29:00 Speaker_08
So, um, you think she got into a car and you think that it was the wrong car?
00:29:06 Speaker_13
I honestly do.
00:29:10 Speaker_09
It should be noted here that some feel Chrissy would be shy of strangers or even run away from them if she were alone.
00:29:17 Speaker_13
For sure she would have phoned me if she was still alive, like for sure she would have phoned me. And I kind of knew deep down I had to say, I'm like, she's not around anymore. She's dead.
00:29:38 Speaker_09
I'm sitting in the passenger seat as Sean and Marianne give me a short tour of Hanover. Main street, the river, the school, the park.
00:29:48 Speaker_09
Population about 7,700, Hanover rose and then fell as a furniture-making capital of Canada, with much of that business gone now overseas. A town at the time of her disappearance down on its luck, but where Chrissy called home.
00:30:04 Speaker_09
Sean and Marianne moved not long after Chrissy disappeared to shelter themselves from what sounds like an onslaught of neighbors.
00:30:14 Speaker_02
They were very rude with us. A lot of negativities. Yeah. I actually had phone calls. You get a lot of calls in the middle of the night. We're hanging up, so we had the Hanover police put a trace on our phone.
00:30:32 Speaker_02
They could try and find out who was doing the phone calls, but they never did.
00:30:38 Speaker_09
A brief flurry of police activity surrounded a call that a boy going into grade 10 named Mark Kuntz received in July 1993, a couple of months after Chrissy disappeared.
00:30:51 Speaker_09
The call, Kuntz told his parents and police, came from someone who said they were Chrissy. The girl on the other end said she was calling from a payphone and that she was near one of the abandoned factories in town.
00:31:05 Speaker_09
The person on the phone said she had run out of money and asked Kuntz to meet her behind a shed near the school. She also told him that she wanted to have sex with him.
00:31:16 Speaker_09
Kuntz says the person sounded like Chrissy, but when he went to the shed with police standing by, nobody appeared. Later that night, another call came in where the girl's voice asked Kuntz if he had told police.
00:31:29 Speaker_09
He said he had, and the voice said, thanks a lot, and hung up.
00:31:34 Speaker_09
Koontz admitted later that he had previously received crank calls on other topics and also that he had not heard Chrissy's voice for well over a year and barely knew her or saw her even then.
00:31:47 Speaker_03
We had asked for the OPP to be able to step in. We pleaded with Hanover police to bring the OPP in. They said no, it's their jurisdiction. They don't have to bring an outside source in.
00:31:59 Speaker_03
And it turned out to be six years later before we were able to have the OPP come in.
00:32:09 Speaker_09
In 1999, Hanover Police requested the assistance of the Ontario Provincial Police on Chrissy's case. At that time, a cataloguing of the case was undertaken by the OPP and new interviews were conducted, along with re-interviews.
00:32:24 Speaker_09
DNA samples were taken from Mary Ann and a profile obtained for Chrissy from a tube of her lipstick. A reward fund for $30,000 was renewed on the 10-year anniversary of Chrissy's disappearance.
00:32:37 Speaker_09
In 2003, one of the original investigating officers on the case, Stanley Edwards, is charged with several criminal offenses, including robbing a bank, forcible confinement, and sexual assault. None of the charges were connected to Chrissy's case.
00:32:58 Speaker_08
Did you ever receive any documents from the OPP about the case?
00:33:06 Speaker_02
No. The OPP wouldn't let us know anything.
00:33:11 Speaker_08
And since that time, we're now in 2011 here, what has the OPP done to your knowledge? How have they communicated to you?
00:33:19 Speaker_02
They followed up on some other leads, but we've never been told any results from those. We haven't heard from them, so as far as I know, the case is closed.
00:33:32 Speaker_08
I'll get into telling you what I know myself. I'm going to leave you with some today that you guys can read.
00:33:40 Speaker_09
Back at Marianne and Sean's place, I share some documents with them that the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General has sent me.
00:33:47 Speaker_09
The basic story that they tell is known to Marianne and Sean, but the crucial details have remained hidden and out of reach until now. Details about a local man named Anthony who had a frustrating night at an August 2004 party.
00:34:07 Speaker_09
He'd had a few drinks and then confessed to killing Christine Herron. This season on Someone Knows Something, the Christine Herron case.
00:34:27 Speaker_03
The Crown Attorney told us it was a slam dunk at one point. He was 90% sure he was going to be convicted.
00:34:37 Speaker_05
Listen to me very carefully. Right now, you're under arrest for the murder of Christine Heron because you told that police officer that you killed her.
00:34:45 Speaker_04
This story here, you know what I mean? Till the day I die, I fucking doesn't leave these lips.
00:34:53 Speaker_10
Did you know Christine? Did you kill Christine? Why did you confess to their murder?
00:35:03 Speaker_09
That was the first episode of the new season of Someone Knows Something, The Christine Herron Case. You can listen to episode two right now on YouTube and everywhere you get your podcasts.
00:35:14 Speaker_09
You can also get the entire series by subscribing to CBC True Crime Premium on Apple. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.