For the past 55 years, the people of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, have been searching for clues tied to the Aroostook County deaths of three Canadian teens killed on the train tracks in Smyrna Mills just past Timoney Crossing.
The teens’ 1970 deaths were never resolved, and since then they have become known as the Cape Breton Three.
Now, nearly 3,000 Nova Scotians are petitioning Maine officials to re-open an investigation into the deaths of Kenny Novak, 15, David Burrows, 17, and Terry Burt, 19, all from Cape Breton Island. The petitioners and families also want an apology from the state over how the case was handled and the death certificate for each boy, which they never received. The move opens up a case that still pains this community more than half a century later.
The unanswered questions around missing personal effects, including identification, found at the scene and the abrupt closure of the case by the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Office point to an unresolved tragedy, said Kenny Novak’s older brother, Richard, on Wednesday.
“All who knew the three boys have carried the heavy burden of this unresolved sorrow for a lifetime,” said Novak, 78, of Nova Scotia. “We want closure for the families and the people of Cape Breton Island.”
In addition to filing a Change.org online petition, Novak has reached out to 60 outlets this past week, including national and local media, law enforcement, the Maine attorney general and the FBI.
The attorney general’s office “cannot confirm or deny the existence of any investigation,” spokeswoman Danna Hayes said.
In July 1970, the three boys were camping at Ingonish Beach Campground in Cape Breton, about an hour and a half from home.
As many teens did at the time, the trio left the campground without telling their parents, and hitchhiked to the border crossing near Houlton, 500 miles away. No one knows if they checked in with customs when they entered the U.S., although crossings then were fairly casual and oral declarations of place of birth were common.
U.S. Customs and Border Agent William Butterfield tried to stop the boys, believing they were in the U.S. illegally, according to Richard Novak who has been gathering reports and witness accounts for years. They allegedly ran from Butterfield on July 9, and Butterfield went back to the station and got an unmarked border patrol car to look for them.
That night, the three teens went to The Dairy Bar in Houlton, a popular late night hangout and carhop, for ice cream, burgers and fries, Novak said. Some have speculated, including Novak’s older brother Lorne, who is now deceased, that a fight with locals transpired there.
The boys then hitched a ride with Royden Hunt and Mike York, who dropped them off in Smyrna Mills near the tracks. The trio walked a mile and a half along the railroad tracks to a secluded area, near where their bodies were later found zipped into sleeping bags lined up between a less than five-foot rail bed, Richard Novak said.
“The last people to see them alive were Hunt and York, who were not interviewed by police,” Novak said.
It was sunny and 68 degrees the next morning. Many have questioned how the boys could still be asleep, zipped into sleeping bags.
For Novak, it makes no sense. He wonders how they wouldn’t have moved when the train whistled and the tracks began shaking.
Some speculated that they were either drunk or on drugs, but autopsies revealed that there were no barbiturates or alcohol in the boy’s systems, according to the chief medical examiner.
The northbound Bangor and Aroostook diesel train from Oakfield to Caribou had just rounded the ledge north of Timoney Crossing at about 7 a.m. The engineer, Earl Capen of Presque Isle, thought he saw a rubber raft on the tracks. But railroad fireman Ralph Fowler yelled, “It’s sleeping bags.”
Capen pulled the emergency brakes, but it was too late. The fast moving 19-car train could not stop in time and ran over the boys.
David Sjoberg, 74, who now lives in Ohio but grew up in Hodgdon, was working at Dunn Funeral Home in Houlton for the summer. He was 18.
The remains were brought to the funeral home by the ambulance that was called to the scene, he said Thursday.
“The bodies, as I recall, were in three body bags,” he said.
As the news broke, there were stories around the nation from Washington state to Georgia, Florida and Maine.
The Bangor Daily News interviewed the boys’ fathers, who came to Houton to identify the bodies that weekend, in 1970. They said they didn’t know why the boys went so far from home, where they were going or what would make them sleep on the tracks, especially because they normally would have chosen the field next to the tracks.
During the 1970 BDN interview, the reporter handed Frank Novak, Kenny’s father, a metal button embellished with a crown over a cannon that he had picked up at the scene.
“That’s Kenny’s,” he said.
Sjoberg, the Dunn Funeral home worker, drove the three bodies to Nova Scotia that Sunday.
He said he remembers people close to him talking about the incident. He heard bits and pieces of what people were surmising about the situation, he said.
“People were guessing that the guys were perhaps hippies, perhaps on drugs or drunk,” he said.
Ricker College was open in Houlton at the time, he said, adding that a “a lot of big city kids came to that school and brought a different culture that most of the people in northern Maine were not used to, like long hair often associated with hippies.”
Novak believes anti-hippie sentiment played into the tragedy on the tracks.
About a year or so ago, Sjoberg stumbled onto Novak’s Facebook page about the Cape Breton Three, and it wasn’t until then that he realized there was skepticism about the case, including why then-Sheriff Darrell Crandall closed the case quickly without a thorough investigation.
“I began to wonder about it,” he said. “Since then, I can understand why they have questions and wonder about the way police handled it and the way the media reported it.”
The late Sheriff Darrell O. Crandall died in 1996. At the time of the accident, he’d been with the sheriff’s office for 24 years, first as a deputy and then as sheriff.
Crandall told the BDN in 1970 that they did not know if the boys had checked in with customs, but they were not going to investigate that because it didn’t matter — it was a tragic accident.
“No interviews were done, the railroad [allegedly] cleaned up the body parts, there was no forensic investigation of the scene, there was very little blood at the scene, which may indicate they were killed somewhere else,” Novak said.
According to Novak, the lack of an investigation has left a profound void sustained by decades of silence, missing documentation and institutional inadequacies for the families and people of Cape Breton.
Critical protocols such as proper forensic logging, comprehensive witness interviews and timely documentation were not followed, he said, adding that the case was concluded in four hours and dismissed within days.
“The premise that three individuals could remain motionless, zipped inside sleeping bags lying on hard railway tracks, while a freight train sounded its horn and approached with screeching brakes is fundamentally questioned, by common sense and logic,” Novak said.
