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[00:00] Hi everyone, it's Delia D'Ambra here, and I want to tell you about a podcast that's one of my personal favorites that I know you're going to love too, Dark Down East. Hosted by my friend and fellow investigative journalist, Kylie Lowe, Dark Down East dives into New England's most haunting true crime cases. From unsolved mysteries to stories where justice has been served, Kylie brings her meticulous research and heartfelt storytelling to uncover the truth behind these cases. If you love the way I take you deep into the details of a case, then I know you'll appreciate Kylie's dedication to honoring the victims and uncovering their stories. There are so many episodes of Dark Down East already waiting for you and new episodes every Thursday. Find Dark Down East now wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi, Park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. And the case I'm going to share with you today is one of those stories that I originally planned to incorporate into a previous episode of Park Predators titled The Pair, because it takes place in the same country, in the same park, with very similar victims. However, after digging into both crimes, I realized the two stories needed their own standalone episodes. Stanley Park in British Columbia, Canada is a recreation space known for its beauty, but it's also a place where multiple sets of skeletal remains and human skulls have been found. And those bones did not come from indigenous burial grounds known to be in parts of the park. The remains I discussed in the Pair episode were those of David and Derek Dalton, two young boys from Vancouver who were murdered and left in the park sometime in about 1947. It might be really helpful to you if before continuing with this episode, you go back and re-listen to that one to get some background info. Today's case is also about two young boys whose remains were found in the woods of Stanley Park, but they weren't discovered until decades after the Dalton brothers. The circumstances of how these two victims ended up in the park and why is a rabbit hole entirely different. Just a quick note, because of how today's episode unfolded in real time, I'll be jumping back and forth in the timeline a little bit, so bear with me. But when I tell you that this story is as shrouded in mystery and dark theories, as much as the Dalton brothers' deaths are, I mean it. In my opinion, what this crime suggests is that for years, something very bad was happening in Stanley Park or possibly the city of Vancouver. And what that bad thing is could be related to a single person or a group of people. I'm still not 100% sure. But I'm convinced a handful of folks possibly still living in British Columbia could shed more light on the matter. Which is why today's episode is so important for all my Canadian listeners tuning in to pay particularly close attention to. This is Park Predators. On Monday, December 18th, 1989, a woman named Cammie Ann Boucher was at home in North Burnaby, British Columbia, when she realized that she hadn't seen or heard from her nephew, 13-year-old Ramsey Rioux, and his best friend, 13-year-old Kenneth Lutz, in about three days. The last time she'd laid eyes on the boys was the previous Friday, December 15th. On that day, the boys had been at the Boucher's home with the family's three kids decorating a Christmas tree and partaking in holiday songs and festivities. Camion was kin to Ramsey's biological mother, who struggled with a substance use disorder, so she and her husband had been looking after him for a while, and he'd been living with them since 1988. According to Eve Lazarus' reporting and coverage by the province, growing up, Ramsey and his mom had moved around a lot, and by the time he was a teenager, his mother was unable to care for him, so his aunt and uncle had stepped in as foster parents. The family had also taken in Kenneth, because like Ramsey, his home life was a bit challenging. He'd been removed from his father's custody in Vancouver due to safety concerns, and because the Bouches knew he was so close with Ramsey and their own kids, fostering Kenneth was a natural decision to give him the life they felt was gonna be the most stable for him. Ramsey's cousin Tisha told Eve Lazarus that initially the transition was bumpy for Kenneth, because he'd had to move from Vancouver's West End, where he'd grown up and where his father lived, all the way to North Burnaby. His only friends there were Tisha, her siblings, Ramsey, and maybe a few other children in the Bouches' neighborhood. As teens, Ramsey and Kenneth had developed a habit of taking off on Friday and spending their weekends venturing into downtown Vancouver or visiting the city's West End. Tisha described the boys' weekend behavior as the sort of thing where they'd follow the Bouches' house rules Monday through Thursday, but when Friday rolled around, they'd be MIA until either they came home for the school week or were brought back by relatives. Tisha told Eve Lazarus that she personally remembered several times where the family had packed into their van and driven around Vancouver looking for Ramsey and Kenneth. And in each of those instances, they always found the pair and drove them home. Cammion explained to the province that overall the boys were good when they were at home. They didn't cause her or other relatives many problems. So on Monday, December 18th, when they failed to show up, she knew something wasn't right. But because of their history of regularly disappearing, Vancouver Police initially didn't consider their absence suspicious. They were categorized as runaways, and it doesn't seem their case was taken that seriously. But that classification didn't sit right with Cammion and other relatives. You see, when the boys were last seen, they didn't have much with them in terms of personal belongings. According to the available coverage, they were wearing the clothes on their backs and new denim jackets with wool collars that Cammion had given to them as early Christmas presents. They didn't have money of their own, and it was assumed that they likely wouldn't have made it far because of their lack of resources. Still, it seems that based on the lack of news coverage from 1989 until 1991, Vancouver PD didn't make the boys' missing persons case a high priority. However, in 1992, Ramsey and Kenneth's names briefly popped back up in headlines after a Canadian television show called Missing Treasures featured their case in the spring of that year. Exposure on that program resulted in someone contacting authorities to report that they'd seen Kenneth in Clearbrook, British Columbia, some 45 minutes southeast of Burnaby. The local police where the information originated from took the tip seriously enough that they distributed missing persons posters for the boys throughout the community, hoping someone would come forward and provide further information. By that point, Ramsey and Kenneth would have aged a few years and been about 16 years old. I'd imagine the likelihood that they'd appear drastically different from when they vanished in 1989 wasn't too much of a concern. A local police official told the Abbotsford News, quote, we are hoping that the tip was accurate. It did not give a specific location in Clearbrook. If Kenny has fallen prey to someone, then we would like further assistance from anyone out there with further information, end quote. At the time of his disappearance, Kenneth was described as five foot three inches tall with dark hair and brown eyes. He reportedly weighed 105 pounds and had a noticeable scar above his left eye and another one beneath his chin. Ramsey was also five foot three and had brown eyes, but he was estimated to weigh 110 pounds and his black hair was described as wavy. On the day they were last seen, they'd been donning similar outfits. Both were in black jeans, white sneakers and wearing the denim jackets their foster mom had given them. For most of the early and mid 1990s, the teens missing persons case was stagnant. No major breakthroughs, no idea where they were and no clue what had happened to them. But what authorities didn't know was that the boys were somewhere, not far from home. They were just patiently waiting for forensic technology to evolve. Okay, so let's rewind for just a minute, because the timeline in this case is a little wonky, but stay with me, because it's all eventually very important. In July 1990, so this would have been less than a year after Ramsey and Kenneth vanished, a man who was hiking, though some sources say cycling, was in Stanley Park in an area of the forest north of Beaver Lake when he found a human skull that did not have a jawbone. Law enforcement was quickly alerted to the discovery, and upon closer examination, determined the skull had a hole in it that was the result of blunt force trauma from a man-made instrument. But other than that, who the skull belonged to was a mystery. An indication that it had not been transplanted from one of the indigenous burial grounds in the park was that it had signs of modern dental work. So because of that detail, authorities knew it belonged to someone who'd lived during an era when dentistry was commonplace. The fact that dental work had been done gave investigators somewhat of a good place to start in terms of trying to determine who the person was. Forensic scientists at the coroner's office didn't have access to DNA testing in 1990, so they relied on studying the bone structure and teeth of the victim to determine their estimated sex, appearance, age and ethnicity. Where they landed after looking into all that was that the person was likely an Asian or indigenous girl between the ages of 14 and 16, who had been killed some time in the previous five years or so. Investigators checked with dentists from all over Canada and the United States to try and figure out who might have done the dental work observed on the skull. But unfortunately, despite authorities' best efforts, they didn't find a dentist who recognized or claimed to have performed the work. So to learn more, investigators returned to the area of Stanley Park where the person who had found the skull first discovered it. And they searched the forest for additional remains, but no other bones turned up. Eve Lazarus reported that one of the police's theories was that the rest of the skeleton was likely somewhere else in the park, possibly in a shallow grave. But just the head had been dug up by animals and transferred to where the skull was found. That was one possible explanation as to why it was seemingly all by itself. By 1991, Vancouver Police had made little progress in identifying who the victim was or the person responsible for their murder. All the police could tell reporters was that the skull belonged to a murder victim. But other than that, they had nada in terms of leads to follow. And for the next few years, it stayed that way. In 1993, investigators had a composite sketch made based on the skull's bone structure and approximate features related to sex, age and ethnicity. And the end result of that endeavor was an image that portrayed a teenage girl with dark hair. It doesn't seem as if law enforcement thought this unknown victim could be in any way connected to Ramsey and Kenneth's case because they were missing males and weren't seen in Stanley Park when they vanished in 1989. But fast forward to the spring of 1998, and a detective with British Columbia's Provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit named Al Catley had an intrusive thought he couldn't shake. In March of 1998, Catley had watched from afar as advancements in DNA testing helped investigators correctly determine the sex and familial relationship between the two victims in the infamous Babes in the Woods case that had been discovered in 1953 in Stanley Park. In that investigation, police had contacted an expert in forensic dentistry at the University of British Columbia named Dr. David Swede. Swede had extracted and sequenced DNA from the teeth in the Babes in the Woods skulls and determined that the two victims were both boys and they were related, half brothers to be exact. Prior to that discovery, law enforcement had been working off an incorrect assumption for decades that the Babes in the Woods victims were a boy and a girl. So after this revelation, Detective Catley wondered if maybe the same sort of mix-up had occurred with the skull that was found in Stanley Park in 1990. To find an answer to that nagging question, he turned to Dr. Sweet and asked him to test a tooth from the 1990 skull. And when you know it, DNA test results revealed that the skeletal remains belonged to an approximately 13-year-old boy, not a teenage girl as was previously assumed. So similarly to what investigators in the Babes in the Woods case did when they learned that the info they'd always been operating off of regarding their victims was wrong, Catley tossed out what he thought he knew about the 1990 Skull case and essentially began from square one. He and others in the Cold Case Unit combed through missing persons' reports for teenage boys that were filed in 1989 and 1990. And by process of elimination, Kenneth and Ramsey's case rose to the top. After retrieving the boys' dental records, Catley thought that the 1990 Skull had more similarities to Ramsey's dental history than Kenneth's. So, acting on a strong hunch, he approached Ramsey's biological relatives and asked them for samples of their DNA to compare with the DNA profile that had been extracted from the 1990 Skull. The end result of that analysis proved conclusively that the 13-year-old boy was none other than Ramsey Rioux. Now, the formal identification was seen as a win for police, but it raised a ton of new questions at the same time. Like, how did Ramsey end up in Stanley Park? Where was his buddy Kenneth? Was there more evidence that had been missed somewhere in the forest? Investigators and the public had all the questions. And based on the damage and evidence of blunt force trauma to Ramsey's skull, authorities knew he'd been murdered, and since Kenneth had been missing for as long as he had, the natural assumption was that Kenneth had also been a victim of foul play. Detective Al Catley and his team searched Stanley Park in June of 1998 and found some items including knives and clothing that they suspected could be related. But subsequent forensic testing did not link that stuff to the boys. A few months later, on October 29th, 1998, Detective Catley, members of law enforcement with cadaver dogs, anthropology students, and more than 100 volunteers returned to the area in the park where Ramsey's skull had been discovered in 1990. The group conducted a more robust search for additional remains and evidence. The objective was to, of course, try and find any other bones that might belong to Ramsey, but also find out if Kenneth was in the forest too. Al Catley told the press and a crew for America's Most Wanted that tagged along during the search that he was confident Kenneth was somewhere in the woods still waiting to be found. But the terrain was challenging for searchers to comb through. Years worth of fallen foliage had blanketed the landscape burying potential vital evidence or remains. There was also a lot of brush and vegetation that had grown, so to tackle the search radius efficiently and thoroughly, crews went out in two separate waves. The first wave was composed of volunteers armed with dogs, metal detectors, sticks, ski poles, and their own two hands to prod at the forest floor and turn up the ground. The second wave was made up of detectives and anthropologists who concentrated on specific areas of interest, like soft spots in the earth or sections of the ground that looked suspicious. 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Chime card on time payment history may have a positive impact on your credit score. Results may vary. See chime.com for details and applicable terms. Scattered and buried in the 10 acres or so of woods that searchers and police scoured looking for additional evidence related to Kenneth and Ramsey, they found some dental fillings, a Canadian postal bat, a small bit of bone with hair on it, which was later confirmed as animal, hammerheads, axe heads, and a shotgun that's barrel had been shortened. None of the items could be directly linked to the two boys, but all the stuff certainly raised authorities' eyebrows, so to speak. According to coverage by Cold Case Files, the postal carrier bag was of particularly strong interest to the police because historically postal bags in Canada bore a stamp on the outside that designated the year they were put into service. The bag that had been found in the forest bore the service year 1989, the same year Ramsey and Kenneth vanished. Inside it, Catley and his team discovered three belts, a roll of duct tape, a pair of white tennis shoes, a large battery, an umbrella, and a piece of wet newspaper that was dated March 19th, 1992. Which just based on the publication date proved that the postal bag had been placed in the forest well after Ramsey's murder. I mean, his skull was found in 1990, and the newspaper inside the postal bag, like I said, was dated March 1992. That's a pretty big gap in time. Eve Lazarus and Cold Case Files reported that the shotgun searchers had unearthed was a Remington pump action model that had been wrapped in a bed sheet and stuffed into a hockey bag. Scorch marks found on the fabric indicated to detectives that the comforter might have been used as a makeshift silencer. But why did someone bury the gun in Stanley Park? No one knew. And unfortunately, the gun was never definitively connected to Ramsey or Kenneth's case, or any other crime that I'm aware of. A third search of the park about a month after the one in October didn't produce any further evidence. However, media exposure about the endeavor did result in folks contacting the police with tips. One tip came from a man who'd called Crime Stoppers to report that he'd seen Ramsey and Kenneth with an older man in Vancouver's West End around the time they disappeared. However, the caller had phoned in anonymously and when police published a request in a local newspaper for him to call them back, he never did. Authorities also received a tip to the police department's hotline from a social worker who claimed to have known the victims. That guy reportedly worked in Vancouver's West End when Ramsey and Kenneth vanished, and so investigators wanted to interview him to learn more about where the boys hung out there, their last known movements, or really anything about what they did and who they spent time with in that part of the city. But it's hard to tell for certain if that tipster got back in touch with the police. However, not all hope was lost because the news coverage about the searches in Stanley Park also got the attention of a friend of a local resident named Peter Mack. Turns out, Peter regularly foraged for wood in the park, and during one of his trips to the forest in 1995, he'd stumbled upon a human skull in an area close to where he lived. But instead of contacting the police about the skull, Peter just took the skull home with him in the basket of his bicycle because he reportedly liked how it looked. He'd periodically show it off to people at his house, but eventually he put it on a shelf in his basement and kind of over time forgot about it. However, in November 1998, a friend of his came over and that guy had been watching and reading the news about the police's search for Ramsey and Kenneth. And Peter's friend told him that he should probably take the skull in his basement to the police, you know, just in case it was somehow related. Peter did what his friend suggested, and when Detective Al Catley got together with Peter, he asked Peter to take him to the area of the park where he'd found the skull in 1995. To Catley's surprise, the spot Peter directed him to was just a few hundred feet away from the location where Ramsey's skull had been discovered in 1990. So once again, working off a strong hunch, Catley compared the skull Peter had found to Kenneth's dental records. And sure enough, the results conclusively determined the skull was Kenneth's. The episode of Cold Case Files on this story reported that DNA testing was later performed and resulted in a confirmed match. Interestingly, there was no evidence of trauma on Kenneth's skull, or other bones buried in the area where Peter told Catley he'd found it. So the police weren't sure how Kenneth had died, but they were operating off the assumption that, like Ramsey, he'd been murdered. Kenneth's 72-year-old father, who was also named Kenneth, told the Vancouver Sun that getting confirmation his son was dead, validated a nagging suspicion he'd had for years. He told the newspaper, quote, I figured all along that they were both dead. I had it in the back of my head. Two years after my son went missing and I haven't heard a word, I figured right there and then. He later continued, I've been sitting here for eight, nine years, waiting for some kind of action, and now I finally get it, and we can put it to rest. The only thing is, I'd like to find the ones that killed the pair of the boys, end quote. He told the province something similar when he remarked, quote, I don't think there will ever be closure until they get the sucker who killed those boys, and even then, I don't think I will have peace of mind, end quote. As a matter of due diligence, Detective Catley questioned Peter Mack because, after all, he'd kept a human skull in his house and never reported it to police. But even as odd as Peter's decision making had been, he was eventually cleared of any involvement in the boys' deaths. He told producers for Cold Case Files that he would never kill anyone, especially a child. In May 1999, investigators returned to Stanley Park to search for more of the boys' remains or any other evidence, but like all the times before, they didn't have any luck and nothing new surfaced. A member of British Columbia's Coroner's Service told producers for Cold Case Files that he suspected Kenneth and Ramsey had been dumped in different areas of the park after being killed elsewhere. And Detective Catley shared a similar theory when he spoke with Eve Lazarus. He remarked that it seemed more likely the boys had been murdered somewhere else and then dumped in the woods. Why? By whom? Catley wasn't sure. And to this day, no one can answer those questions. What we do know is that after the year 2000, progress in the police's investigation and news coverage about Kenneth and Ramsey's case grinded to a halt. Years after he retired, Al Catley told Eve Lazarus that he remembered his department receiving a couple of phone calls from people who'd visited the park who claimed their dogs had found bones there. But the callers informed police that they hadn't kept the bones because they suspected they were from animals. Catley explained that as far as he was aware, the only parts of Ramsey and Kenneth that have ever been recovered are their skulls. Nothing else. One of his theories as to what happened to the boys involved an alleged pedophile ring that was said to have operated between British Columbia and California when they vanished. Catley explained that he suspected Ramsey and Kenneth might have become victims of that, or they might have fallen prey to someone in Vancouver's West End, which was an area of the city reported to be rife with the sexual exploitation of young men and boys during the 1970s and 80s. Journalist Eve Lazarus pointed out in her reporting that even though there's no direct evidence the boys were being trafficked, the fact that they were known to spend time in the West End because that's where Kenneth had grown up and frequently visited his father, it's certainly a possibility. Detective Al Catley told reporters that police had established by some means that one of the boys, though one source specifically alleged it was Kenneth, had been sexually assaulted in the West End prior to the pair's disappearance. What the circumstances of that crime were though, who that information came from and when exactly the incident occurred are unclear. But for a little while at least, Catley told the press he wondered if Ramsey and Kenneth might have been victims of a pedophilic serial killer. He'd pursued that theory briefly after learning about two boys in San Diego, California named Charlie Kever and Jonathan Sellers, ages 13 and 9 respectively, who had been abducted, sexually assaulted, tortured, and killed in an open area on the banks of a river in 1993. Both of those victims had brown eyes and dark hair, like Ramsey and Kenneth. But subsequent DNA testing in 2001 ultimately identified their murderer as a man named Scott Erskine, and he was not linked to Ramsey and Kenneth's case. But despite not being connected to the California crime, Al Catley told the National Post that he still believed whoever was responsible for Kenneth and Ramsey's murders was probably a lone pedophile, who didn't have an accomplice, and was someone who'd likely keep killing. Journalist and author Eve Lazarus, who's done some extensive work on this case, interviewed a woman named Karina, who was Kenneth's girlfriend in 1989. After his skull was found and identified in the late 90s, Karina, who was in her 20s by that point, had called the police's tip line to report brand new information about the boys' whereabouts on the day they vanished, the authorities had presumably not known about before. For some reason, she'd never been interviewed by police as a teenager or in the years afterwards. Anyway, she told Eve Lazarus that on the morning of December 18th, Ramsey and Kenneth had stopped by her house to drop off a Christmas present. And during that visit, the boys had expressed that they weren't going to go to school that day. Instead, they were going to run away to Saskatchewan. According to Carina, the boys asked her if they could stay the night at her house while they figured out a way to earn some money for their trip. At the time, teenage Carina didn't actually think Ramsey and Kenneth would make it very far and assumed that after a day or so, they'd change their minds and return home. When she last saw them, they'd only had backpacks with them too, so not enough stuff to go on a big long-distance trip. Well, fast-forward to when she contacted authorities, and according to Carina, when she tried to explain all this information to dispatchers monitoring the tip line, they kind of dismissed her and no detectives ever followed up. Which to me is kind of bananas, like how did investigators back in 1989 never get around to speaking with Kenneth's girlfriend? I mean, if Carina's account is to be believed, it changes so much about the boys' timeline in the morning they vanished. It could open up any number of possibilities about where they went that day, who they might have encountered while seeking money to travel, all sorts of things. According to Carina, neither Ramsey or Kenneth used substances or smoked cigarettes. She says they were both innocent teens. If they were still alive, they'd both be 50 years old by now. I truly believe that their former peers or maybe even some other witnesses who might have seen them on December 18th, 1989, could hold the key that breaks their case open one day. If you know anything about the unsolved murders of Ramsey Rioux and Kenneth Lutz, please contact the Homicide Unit of the Vancouver Police Department at 604-717-2500. You can also submit tips at the email address, coldcasevpd.ca. Links to those resources can be found in the show notes, and on the blog post for this episode. Park Predators is an Audiochuck production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, at parkpredators. I think Chuck would approve. Hey Park enthusiasts, it's Delia. And if you enjoy unraveling the haunting tales that we explore here on Park Predators, there's another podcast that dives deep into all things mysterious and bizarre that I think you'll enjoy. It's called So Supernatural. Hosted by my friends, Rasha and Yvette, So Supernatural explores some of the most puzzling and eerie cases, ones that often leave investigators and witnesses wondering if the truth lies beyond the realm of the explainable. From mysterious disappearances to legends and lore steeped in history, Rasha and Yvette break down every possibility no matter how strange it gets. So after you're all caught up on episodes here, be sure to listen to So Supernatural wherever you listen to podcasts.