David Ridgen
Appearances
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
No. Marianne and Sean didn't have any suspects, but almost a year later, they had to be ruled out as suspects themselves.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. Bernardo had been arrested and jailed months before Chrissy disappeared, so using his name here was a tactic to get Sean talking.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
Russworm had been at work until 3 p.m. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
Sean and Marianne did pass their first polygraph tests, according to documents, and neither was ever arrested or charged in Christine's case.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
The river's flowing clear, but there's lots of debris kind of pushed against the shoreline. There's obviously a pretty high floodplain here.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
There weren't many Christine Herron news reports to look at early on in my investigation. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. Christine was in Toronto with skinheads who had been seen in Hanover.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. But she never appeared there, or Toronto, or was seen anywhere else again after May 18th, 1993.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
Even if police weren't looking for Christine, Marianne and Sean were trying their best.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
Cindy and her father drove the roads that Chrissy might've traveled to get to their farm.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. The best Cindy could do was tell police about what Chrissy was like, her routines and habits, certain places she liked to go.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
It should be noted here that some feel Chrissy would be shy of strangers or even run away from them if she were alone.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
If I'd been here before May 18th, 1993, I might have seen her down here catching frogs or fishing.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
Sean and Marianne moved not long after Chrissy disappeared to shelter themselves from what sounds like an onslaught of neighbors.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
He said he had and the voice said, thanks a lot and hung up. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
In 1999, Hanover Police requested the assistance of the Ontario Provincial Police on Chrissy's case. At that time, a cataloging of the case was undertaken by the OPP and new interviews were conducted, along with re-interviews. DNA samples were taken from Mary Ann and a profile obtained for Chrissy from a tube of her lipstick.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
A reward fund for $30,000 was renewed on the 10-year anniversary of Chrissy's disappearance. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
Back at Marianne and Sean's place, I share some documents with them that the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General has sent me. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
He'd had a few drinks and then confessed to killing Christine Herron. This season on Someone Knows Something, the Christine Herron case.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. You can also get the entire series by subscribing to CBC True Crime Premium on Apple.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
And her full story has yet to be told. 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. I was preparing to make a documentary series for CBC Television's news program, The National.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
I sorted Chrissie's case into a much smaller pile, a short list of sorts, cases that for some reason spoke to me.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
I would take several more months of information gathering before I contacted Chrissy's mother, Mary Ann.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
I've got Marianne framed up in my documentary camera on a cool windy day. 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. Marianne gestures to where she says Chrissy walked away from home that day.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
Marianne says she watched from an upstairs window as Chrissy turned the corner. On the way, Marianne thought, to grade 9 classes at John Diefenbaker High School, not that far away. It was sometime between 1.30 and 2 p.m. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
She and her mom had argued about it, and Marianne suggested that perhaps Chrissy should get a job instead. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
There were other tensions in the household at the time as well. Chrissy had been deeply troubled by her parents' divorce years earlier. Her father, Lorne, lived in Western Canada at the time of Chrissy's disappearance and has since passed away. Chrissy got along with her younger brother named Sean, but did not always see eye to eye with her stepfather, who was also named Sean.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
Sean Russworm, who was then age 26.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
Marianne hands me Angel, the extra small one, so she can get used to me and stop barking. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
The dogs seem calm, and we start talking about Chrissy.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
I see Chrissy seeming to watch me through her big glasses in the photos.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
Someone who I come face-to-face with. 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. I'm at another river. This one flowing through a southwestern Ontario town on a clear but darkening springtime evening.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
Grandma Phyllis Sachs at her home.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
Marianne reported Chrissy missing to Hanover police at 9.21pm on the day she disappeared, May 18th, 1993. Chrissy 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 Chrissy would always call home and never go far.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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. Local police, investigatively inexperienced, finding nothing and flying in the face of what a mother knows about.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
I recorded these nature sounds well over a decade ago for a TV documentary using the same microphone I now use for the podcast. This thing always seems to be standing between me and the unknown. Somehow oddly comforting.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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 Mary Ann. 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.
Sea of Lies from Uncover
Uncover Introduces: Someone Knows Something Season 9
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.