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Episode 3 - Finding Cleo

Connie: I’m Connie Walker and this is Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo,

an investigative podcast by CBC News.

[driving]

Marnie: Ready to go?

Connie: I think so.

Connie: It’s a gorgeous spring day as we pull into a farm just outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We’re here to meet Johnny Semaganis, the oldest sibling in the Semaganis family. The only one who has memories of his sister Cleo. Johnny has asked us to meet him at his friend Tom’s organic farm.

Connie: Hello!

Tom: Hello.

Connie: How are you doing?

Tom: Nice to see you.

Connie: Nice to see you, too. I’m Connie.

Marnie: I'm Marnie.

Tom: Tom Colten, nice to meet you.

Connie: Nice to meet you, as well.

Tom: Chief’s in the truck.

Marnie: In the truck? Okay.

Connie: We started on this journey to try to find Cleo. But the further we get down this road, and the more we uncover, I realize that as much as I want to solve the mystery about where she is and what happened to her, I also want to get to know more about her. Not just how she died, but how she lived. I’m hopeful that Johnny can help us get to know Cleo. He was four years older than her and is really the only sibling who knew her before they were adopted.

Connie: Hey, how are you?

Connie: Johnny suggests we go to one of his favourite spots on the farm.

Johnny: I usually hang out here on weekends and stuff. It’s nice.

Connie: So these roosters are used to you?

Johnny: Yeah.

Connie: Tom has chickens and ducks and goats…

Johnny: Rabbits in here.

Connie: and acres of fields where he grows vegetables.

Johnny: Watch your step...there's a table and stuff set up in the barn there.

Connie: This is an amazing barn, it’s huge.

[Farm animals making loud noises]

Connie: We’re making them nervous.

Connie: It’s one of those really big old classic barns. It sits on top of a small hill behind Tom’s house, overlooking the fields. The big doors are wide open and we sit at a table just inside, looking out at a row of trees along a small trail that leads into the fields.

Johnny: Yeah, Tom has his corn, last year he gave me right off the stock. It was a reddish color, just like that, it was so fresh.

Connie: I can see why you like it here.

Johnny: It's nice and tranquil. In the summertime, we sit out here in the nighttime. Just relax and it's very peaceful.

Connie: I’m kind of surprised when I meet Johnny. I thought that because he was older when he was adopted, he would sound more like the First Nations people I know from back home. But there is no trace of a native accent. Johnny sounds like an American.

Johnny: Yes, he does things of garlic…

Connie: But looking at him, there is no mistaking his roots. Johnny is a big man and he has long, dark hair and a beard that is flecked with grey. His almond-shaped eyes are brown, and so is his skin. Johnny says there aren’t a lot of Indigenous people in Lancaster, and here, he’s known as Chief.

Johnny: You know, it’s not a sign of respect, it's not a matter of disrespect to me, I don't think. And it, I always tell people first eight years of my life I was Indian, lived on the reservation. Food was pouring water down one hole and getting a gopher in the other end. And that was lunch you know, snaring rabbits. That's what we had in the morning and evening, it was food.

Connie: Like how did you cook the rabbits? Did you make soup?

Johnny: Yeah.

Connie: I remember rabbit soup. I did not like rabbit soup. [laughs]

Connie: But you knew how to set a snare?

Johnny: Yeah, everything, yeah!

Connie: Before we got here, I asked April to describe Johnny for me. She is the only sibling who has seen him in person as an adult. April told me that Johnny looks big and gruff, but really he’s like a soft teddy bear. I like Johnny as soon as I meet him.

Connie: You're from Saskatchewan too, I heard?

Connie: Yeah, I'm Cree from Saskatchewan, too.

Johnny: What part?

Connie: Southern Saskatchewan, near Regina. Yeah, near Regina. Did you ever go back?

Johnny: No, I had no need to. Home is here. Everybody asks me, keeps asking me to come back. I'm like, okay, maybe next year, but I have no desire to. Home is here, family is here.

[door opens]

Connie: Hi, there!

Erica: Hi, nice to meet you, I'm Erica.

Connie: Almost as if on cue, a young woman walks into the barn...

Erica: How's it going, Johnny?

Johnny: Good!

Connie: And gives Johnny a big hug.

Johnny: Did you get off work?

Erica: Yeah.

Johnny: The others are getting here later for... We got oysters and tuna and stuff.

Erica: Cookout! It'll be fun.

Connie: So you guys are related?

Johnny: Yeah, she's my little sister.

Erica: Yep, we are both adopted.

Connie: I just want to paint this picture for you. Physically, Johnny and Erica couldn’t look more different. He is a large Cree man in his mid-fifties. She is a tiny black woman in her early twenties. They look nothing alike but it’s obvious they’re close. And today, Johnny has asked his little sister to be here for moral support.

Erica: I just hope like he gets some answers. It's something that’s in his mind, so it’d be so nice if we could get some answers for him.

Connie: So you've known her since she was born.

Johnny: Like I said, I think it helped me because since I didn't grow up with my other sister, I got to watch her grow up, which helped me out in the end, too.

Connie: The other sister Johnny is talking about is the reason we're all here: Cleo.

Now remember, for decades Johnny and his other siblings thought Cleo was adopted in Arkansas. But now we've discovered she was actually adopted in New Jersey.

Johnny: If it's true she's in New Jersey, she was in the next state over.

Connie: Lancaster, Pennsylvania is less than two hours from the New Jersey border. Although we don’t know exactly where Cleo was adopted in New Jersey,

it’s not a huge state. There is a good chance that after their adoptions, Johnny and Cleo were just a few hours apart without ever knowing it.

Connie: What did you call her as a kid? Did you call her Cleopatra or Cleo?

Johnny: Cleo.

Connie: As we talk, Johnny's fidgeting with his keys and looking down at his phone.

Johnny: Like I said, I see her on the phone every day.

Connie: She's your screensaver?

Johnny: Yep.

Connie: You want to be reminded of her?

Johnny: Yeah. Because I've found everybody else, but this is the only one I haven't found.

Connie: So in Christine's story that she wrote about Cleo that we read, it said that Cleo had been found in Arkansas and that she had been murdered. Is that something that you had heard?

Johnny: That's what I heard too, but then my mother told us something different, our aunt said something different. I didn't know what to believe, so.

Connie: She has a lot of desire to find out what happened to Cleo and what happened. Do you have the same?

Johnny: Yeah, I do. I've been searching for years. But after a while, you just don't know what to do and I think us Natives, they just don't care about us. But I care about, I care about finding my sister, you know.

Johnny: I could say, "well, she's dead, big deal," but I don't feel that way. She's family.

Connie: I know that Christine and April feel this, too: a longing to find their sister, Cleo. But Johnny’s quest feels a little different. Unlike his siblings, his vision of Cleo is not only based on that little photo that they all hold dear. Johnny grew up with her. He has memories of Cleo.

Johnny: She was behind a tree, smiling and I couldn't see half her smile. But, yeah, we were family. But then, like I said, we got adopted out of there, and we always got taken away.

Connie: It must've been hard to form attachments and relationships when things were so in flux.

Johnny: Yeah.

Connie: The memory of Cleo that Johnny can’t stop thinking about is the memory of the last time he saw her.

Johnny: It was funny they took us… they didn't take us anywhere public, it was like a frickin field.

Connie: Johnny says that he and Cleo were living at different foster homes at the time and a social worker picked him up and drove him to meet Cleo to say goodbye.

Johnny: It was like halfway between somewhere. Here's your sister. Old station wagon. She came in, and…

Connie: It was in a field?

Johnny: It was funny, you'd think it would be at a house or something, but it was like a rest-stop or something. "There's your sister, go say goodbye to her."

Connie: Cleo was about to be adopted but he didn’t know where she was going

or if he’d ever see her again.

Johnny: I said, I’ll try to find her. And I’ve been trying, but... but yeah, it was ‘74, I would have been 13, I guess.

Connie: So Cleo would have been eight or nine.

Connie: Do you remember anything about what she said?

Johnny: Not really, I think I did most of the talking.

Connie: Was she crying?

Johnny: Yeah. I think I was, too. But I remember telling her I hope I'd find her, but… It was a little lie to make to her, but I wanted to make her feel good.

Connie: Why did you say it was a lie?

Johnny: I lied to her because I didn't think I'd ever do it. And I didn't think I'd ever... I mean, I was trying to be strong for both of us. What do you tell her, I was her big brother.

Connie: It's just such a heartbreaking scene to imagine, two siblings meeting in a field to say goodbye.

Johnny: Yeah. It was tough. She was driven away and I went the other way. And I've been looking for her ever since.

Connie: What do you think will happen when and if you find out about Cleo, what will that mean to you?

Johnny: Closure. Fulfilled promise. I think I'm just... staying alive just so I can fulfill this promise. [breathing]

[soft piano music]

Connie: Much of my work over the last few years focuses on unsolved cases of missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls. And in our interviews, almost always, families talk about wanting closure. About how important it is to know the truth about how the wondering and unanswered questions lead to a sense of injustice. But I wonder if for Johnny and his siblings, getting closure is about more than finding Cleo, but also finding some resolution about what happened to them all as children. Since being adopted in the United States, Johnny has never returned home to Saskatchewan. But the memories of his difficult childhood are never far from his mind. Memories of child welfare authorities showing up at their house, sometimes with the police, to take him and Cleo and all of their siblings into government care.

Johnny: Where we got picked up at, at the one place in South Battleford.

Connie: What do you mean got picked up at?

Johnny: We got. From the agency social services. I remember I had a giant stick. I was the last one to go.

Connie: What do you mean? You were trying to fight them or get away?

Johnny: Yeah, yeah.

Connie: By this point, their mother Lillian had left the reserve and moved the family to Battleford, a small city in Northern Saskatchewan. Lillian was a single mom to six kids, and she sometimes got her nieces, who lived just a few blocks away, to help look after the kids. Wilma Semaganis still lives in Saskatchewan and remembers the day - more than 40 years ago - when her little cousins were taken away. She and her sisters were babysitting for their Aunt Lillian.

Wilma: It was after school. It was a school day and we, I went home and my mom said that you've got to go over to Auntie Lillian's and watch the kids, she's going to go to an AA meeting. So Anita came with me and most of the kids were outside, but they were coming and going in the back door, but the baby was there in a blue bouncy chair. And auntie was there, she had a skirt and I remember she had a scarf on her head. She went out the front door. It didn't seem very long and then all of a sudden, you know, the door just burst open. There's police officers there and then, and then the social workers came in. And then they just started loading up the kids. The kids were just crying. And the last one they loaded up was Crystal, the baby - Chris Cameron, now. And they were loading her up, in fact, when Auntie came back in. She had forgotten something. She knew what was going on and she got just hysterical. She was yelling, she was crying, and the police officers handcuffed her to a door.

Connie: Oh, my gosh.

Wilma: She was on the floor and she was she was crying and just screaming and...

Connie: What was she saying?

Wilma: Yelling, like, "Don't take them, don't take them."

Connie: Wilma says police left Lillian handcuffed to the front door after they took all of her children away.

Wilma: She never stopped crying and it just seemed like it was such a long time. It got dark. And my dad came in and he was quite upset, and I spent that whole time sitting beside her. And I remember I got her water, and I gave her some water. The whole time she was just handcuffed to the door, the wooden door with those old style brass door knobs. Then my dad left. He had to go to the police department to tell them to come and un-handcuff her. And that was the last time we ever, ever saw those children.

Connie: How could something like this have happened? Why did social workers take Johnny, and Cleo, and their siblings? Was there suspected abuse because of the blue bum birthmarks that Christine had mentioned? Something here isn’t adding up. More than ever, I want to find out what led social workers to take the Semaganis kids from their mother. Johnny says that after they were apprehended, he and Cleo and their siblings were taken to a group home in North Battleford.

Johnny: It was the Robinson group home in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. I remember that. And they weren't very nice, ‘cause I tried to be protective of them, but they thought I was being bossy. I use to end up in the… the padded room downstairs.

Connie: They had a padded room downstairs?

Johnny: Yeah in case I acted out, they'd lock me in there. I mean, that's why I like

being alone.

Connie: That's terrible!

Johnny: Yeah.

Connie: The group home seemed to be temporary and eventually, Johnny and his siblings were placed in foster homes, living with families in rural areas near Battleford. We know that April and Annette were placed together in one foster home and Johnny also remembers at one point being in a foster home with Cleo.

Johnny: We used to speak our language, but they wouldn't let us speak the language because we'd be like talking to each other. And I’ve since lost the language.

Connie: You grew up speaking Cree?

Johnny: Yeah. We were together that one year. We were both at the same school in Medstead.

Connie: Do you remember who the foster parents were?

Johnny: The Meshanicks.

Connie: I wonder if we can find this foster family. I really want to talk to someone who knew Cleo and Johnny at that age. We start to search for anyone with a similar name who ever lived in Medstead, Saskatchewan.

[dialing]

Connie: One two three, one two three, okay.

Connie: We find a woman named Donna Miszaniec, who says yep, her parents fostered kids in the 1970s.

Donna: It’s been 45 years but we’ll see… [laughs]

Connie: So, we give her and her mom Yvette a call.

Connie: Do you happen to remember a First Nations family that might have come to your home in 1972, a girl named Cleo?

Yvette: Yes!

Connie: You do!

Yvette: I remember Cleo and Johnny.

Connie: What do you remember about them?

Yvette: Oh, just very quiet kids. Cleo was kind of a little bit shy. Took her a few days to settle in a bit. Johnny was always hungry. That's the main thing I can remember about him. Like, their clothes were very very limited. They didn't have much of anything, really.

Connie: What about Johnny and Cleo, were they like, were they close? Were they affectionate with one another? Did you feel like they were a comfort for each other?

Donna: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I always thought they were very close. Yes. And like I said, I mean, it kind of makes sense when your brother and his sister are shoved together into a stranger's home, means that you're going to, you're going to bond like that anyway. But they did seem to be close. But Cleo she was just always smiling.

Connie: Really?

Donna: Johnny was probably a little bit more serious than Cleo. But yeah Cleo was always smiling, enjoying life.

Yvette: I just particularly remember going down to Johnny's bedroom to make his bed and whatnot and finding the fruit jars and tins open in his closet where he'd been taking food out of the storage room. And so I remember telling him he could open up the fridge anytime he wanted if he was hungry during the night to go eat. I guess he'd always maybe had been hungry and had been deprived of food.

CONNIE: That's heartbreaking to feel that, or to know that he was worried about food as a child.

Yvette: Well, that's just it.

DONNA: Yeah, we take it for granted. But lots of kids, they don't know if there's going to be food in the house or when they're going to have their next meal.

Connie: The Miszaniacs seem like nice people. I’m glad that Johnny and Cleo ended up in a safe home. But I can’t help but think of their sisters April and Annette, at a foster home just a short drive away experiencing what they described later as terrible abuse. I wonder how families were chosen to become foster parents in the 1970s.

Yvette: They just said, yeah you'd be willing to take in kids and help out. And you know one day they'll show up with the kid. You don't get any notice and then if they decide they're adopted and they're gone that that day.

CONNIE: Do you remember saying goodbye to Johnny and Cleo?

Yvette: Yes.

CONNIE: What was it like, can you describe it?

Yvette: Worrisome, wondering what was going to happen to them I guess. I think about what happened to Cleo, and I guess I had good reason to worry.

Connie: I’ve been thinking about how the Semaganis kids found out about their adoptions. According to April and Annette’s adoptive parents, Jeff and Kay, the girls were so excited to meet them and to be adopted. They called them Mommy and Daddy as soon as they met. But Cleo and Johnny were older. Did they want to be adopted? How did it happen? Why were they both sent to the United States instead of being adopted in Canada? I ask Johnny what he remembers.

Johnny: When I got adopted, it was great. I'm like, oh good, I get to... it was up to me, they gave me a prize. [laugh] They sent me to hockey camp and he gave me a bicycle with a banana seat. It was like a prize, like it's up to me. Do you want anything. Yeah, they sent me to hockey school with the Philadelphia Flyers 1974, when they won the first Stanley Cup.

Connie: Who, who’s they?

Johnny: The agency, people from the agency. It was like a prize, at the time you don't think about it.

Connie: And in exchange for those prizes, what happened?

Johnny: I was allowed to come to United States.

Connie: I'm kind of confused, I don't quite understand.

Johnny: What they said it was up to me. What do you want, if you agree to this.

Connie: If you agree to be adopted, you can get a prize?

Johnny: Yes, that's technically what it was.

Connie: And if you'd said you didn't want to be adopted?

Johnny: I wouldn't have got anything, I thought, well...

Connie: I’m shocked by what Johnny is saying. He believes that social workers essentially bribed him to agree to be adopted.

Connie: Like it was an incentive to be adopted?

Johnny: Yeah and I wanted to go to, I wanted to leave anyway, which I did.

Connie: Looking back on it, do you think that's a fair choice to present to a kid?

Johnny: At the time it was, but right now-- hey, I was glad to leave. So... I'm here. I think I'm better off.

Connie: I wonder how Cleo’s adoption was presented to her? Did she have any choice but to go? Johnny says he was happy to leave Saskatchewan but I can’t help but think of his memory of Cleo, a young girl crying in a field saying goodbye to her brother. It doesn’t sound like she was so happy to leave. After Johnny finished the hockey school he says he was promised, when he was 14 years old,

he got on a plane with a social worker to meet his new family.

Johnny: Here’s when I got adopted by these lovely people...1975.

Connie: Decree of adoption.

Johnny: Yes.

Connie: Where was that?

Johnny: In Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They lived on a small farmette, this is what it was. I always thought they were there to help us with their farm.

Connie: Oh.

Johnny: That's what it seems like to me.

Connie: Oh, you think that they wanted to adopt you because they wanted help.

Johnny: Small farm, stuff like that.

Connie: Actually, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard that story. Indigenous kids adopted in the Sixties Scoop who believe they were not only adopted to become sons and daughters in a new family, but so they could help out as farm hands. When Johnny arrived in Pennsylvania, he found that the family had already adopted two other Indigenous kids from US tribes.

Johnny: When I came down here, the two adoptive Natives that they had, they’re from Yakima, Washington. They were Yakima and stuff Indian. They were running away, planning the stuff they were going. You know, I’m like, what's going on? I didn't know what was going on.

Connie: It must have been just jarring, right, to be moved completely across the continent. And then in a family that there was already stuff going on there.

Johnny: Oh yeah. It was just, it was very strange.

Connie: Johnny says that he and the other adopted kids slept outside in tents in the summer, and took refuge in the barn when it rained hard. The family’s biological kids slept inside the house. At some point, Johnny says his adoptive parents actually built a separate building for the adopted children to live in, but it wasn’t connected to the house.

Johnny: And I didn't know what to do. They left. They ran away and I was like, by myself, and I ran away eventually too. ‘Cause it just didn't work out.

Connie: Johnny ran away. Just like his sisters April and Annette who lived on the streets of Toronto at 13, and just like his sister Cleo who tried to hitchhike back home to Saskatchewan. Johnny speaks so matter-of-factly about his experience

that it’s hard to get a sense of just how much this has affected him. But I can only imagine how difficult it would have been for him and for Cleo to move - all on their own - away from their families, away from everything familiar, and end up in a new place in a new family. I hope that Cleo had a better experience than her brother. Johnny expected to be welcomed into a new home. Instead, he slept outside with adopted siblings who were also miserable. And that’s not all.

Johnny: Here's the funny thing. On the farm, I think I've come to grips with it, I think I was abused on the farm. I can say this now because I told friends about it. It wasn't any kind of insertion or nothing. They played like, oh, you're the cow, we're the bull. It was a weird game. But it was like at the time, you don't think nothing of it. But it was like nothing inserted. But it was still strange. I thought about it. I was sitting one day thinking about it. Like, I think I was... I came to the revelation, I think I was abused but I wasn't really abused, does that make sense? It just seemed like a game to them. That was all it was. But I don't, was that abuse? I guess?

Connie: Johnny says he only thought about that experience after getting information about one of the lawsuits launched by Sixties Scoop survivors

against the Canadian government.

Man: I was taken from my mother’s arms in the hospital. For a long time, I was ashamed.

Woman: I lost who I was, who I was supposed to be.

Connie: A group in Ontario representing 16,000 survivors sued the federal government for its role in the Sixties Scoop.

Woman: There was an officer there who had a gun and my mother thought she was going to get shot, so she held back from trying to grab me and save me. Our children are valued, we want them back. We have to stand up, and say this can’t happen anymore.

Connie: The survivors claimed they suffered a devastating loss of culture when they were taken from their homes and adopted into white families.

Woman: The worst days of my life were my childhood.

Woman: I grew up not even knowing that I was Native.

Man: I used to lie awake at night thinking I was a little alien baby and sometime, somebody would come back for me.

Woman: I was wondering as a child, how come I was alone? Where did my family go?!

Connie: Many say they went through trauma and experienced abuse in their new homes. In 2017, they won. The judge sided with survivors and said that the government of Canada failed to properly consult with First Nations and failed to protect children from the loss of identity and culture.

Marcia Brown Martel: It is a great day in Canada when Canada’s judicial system chooses to say that our children are so valuable and sacred and precious that we will protect them by law, what a day this is, yes... [cheers]

Connie: Following the decision, the federal government announced a settlement with survivors worth $800 Million dollars. The details are still being worked out,

but we know the settlement does not include Metis or non-status Indians.

Man: There’s a lot of loss here that took place, there’s going to be intergenerational effects of this, historical trauma is going to take place because of this. To assume this is over is a misconception.

Connie: We don’t know if Johnny or his siblings will be included. If they are,

it could mean they each will get a payout between twenty-five and fifty thousand dollars. But an advocate for Indigenous kids did the math and found the settlement amounts to about $3.80 per day of a survivor's lost childhood.

Man: I'm supposed to be grateful?! That they took me and robbed me of a chance to know my family?

Connie: The prospect of money from a settlement isn’t what motivates Johnny either.

[footsteps walking]

Johnny: I have nothing to gain for it. I just want to look for my sister, that's all.

Connie: A lot of the people who call themselves survivors of the Sixties Scoop feel like they were wronged in that they were taken away from their families and their communities, and they lost their language and their culture. Do you feel regret about any of that?

Johnny: No, not at all. Like I said, it's just a different part of my life. I can't, you know, for the longest time it did bother me. If you wanted to talk to my ex-girlfriend, she'll tell you stuff I did back in, started drinking a lot when I was with her, and that's how we broke up. But it's sort of strange, I guess, I've come to deal with it. Like I said, if it wasn't for our family, I'd say I'd be dead or in jail, I think.

Connie: Johnny credits his survival to the people he now calls mom and dad. Not his biological parents or his adoptive parents. Bill and Kay Henry are Johnny’s foster parents. A couple who took him in after he ran away from his adoptive home in Pennsylvania.

Erica: Yeah, I was just over there today.

Connie: They’re also parents to his little sister, Erica.

Erica: They live like about 15 minutes from here and they're in their 70s, they're getting a little bit older, so it's just them now.

[car driving]

Johnny: Back windows don’t open, got to get air conditioning in here…

Connie: I drive with Johnny to meet his parents. He has one of those big vans that looks like it’s from the '70s or '80s, before they invented minivans or improved mufflers. While we’re driving, Johnny says something that has stuck with me.

Johnny: What are they trying to do to you? I said, they’re trying to assimilate us to res -- to you know.... Francis Scott Duncan would be proud. I've been assimilated, I think.

Connie: Johnny means to say that Duncan Campbell Scott would be proud because he - Johnny - has been assimilated. You may not know the name Duncan Campbell Scott, but he was deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs for the government of Canada in the early 1900s, and he’s considered the architect of the residential school system. For over 100 years, 150,000 Indigenous kids were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to residential schools to be educated --- and assimilated. Campbell Scott’s goal was to "get rid of the Indian problem" in Canada. On top of the incredible loneliness after being taken from their families and communities, the children in residential schools-- some as young as five or six years old-- were beaten and punished for speaking their language or practicing their culture. Many went through horrific physical and sexual abuse. Kids were forced to attend and live in these schools year after year. Thousands of kids tried to escape residential schools. Some were found and sent back, others died trying to find their way back home. The last school closed in 1998, but generations of Indigenous families are still dealing with the effects. It’s been described as cultural genocide and many see a direct link between the racist attitudes that led to residential schools and the child welfare policies enforced during the Sixties Scoop. Johnny grew up on the reserve, but because he was part of the Sixties Scoop, he is disconnected from his biological family, his community, and his culture. He has been assimilated. But despite everything he’s been through,

Johnny doesn’t see himself as a victim.

Johnny: Like I said, I don't go, like, "oh my life sucks," it doesn't. I have friends, you know. I live paycheck to paycheck and I'm happy with that.

Connie: We arrive at Bill and Kay’s house.

Johnny: It’s funny, every time I come over I still knock.

Connie: They have a little weathered cloth banner in the garden by the front door that says 'Welcome All'.

Bill: Hi.

Connie: Hi I'm Connie.

Bill: Hi, I'm Bill.

Connie: Nice to meet you.

Kay: Good morning-- my hands are cold and I haven't even been outside.

Connie: Connie, nice to meet you!

Kay: Yours are nice and warm, it's nice to meet you too.

Connie: Not only did Bill and Kay adopt nine kids on top of having three biological sons, they were also foster parents to over 130 kids over 30 years.

Connie: Do you remember the day that Johnny came to live with you?

Kay: Almost vividly. He had his hair really, really short. I just remember them telling me that they had a child that had put himself on the streets because he was in a bad situation, and so he was coming to our house. There he came. And he's been one of the best, believe me. I wouldn't trade him for the world, and I am not saying that just to you. I mean it.

Connie: Kay looks exactly like she sounds: like a sweet little old grandma.

Her white hair is parted in the middle and pulled back into a low ponytail. She’s wearing a faded floral smock that she made herself, and next to her on her couch is a little embroidered pillow that says 'The heart that loves is always young'.

Connie: So what did you know about John and about his experience before coming here?

Kay: I knew it was bad. I knew the adoption was very, very bad. I knew that they were abused. And I knew that it didn’t go well.

Connie: When we were back at the farm, Johnny told me that a few years after he moved in with Bill and Kay, he wrote a letter to Saskatchewan social services asking about Cleo.

Johnny: I got a letter saying she died in ‘74. And that was it.

Connie: I know it was a long time ago, but do you remember what it said in that letter back from social services?

Johnny: No-- well, when she died, that was it. They just said she died in 1974 and that was it. That would have been the same year-- she was adopted before me-- and that's all it said.

Connie: 1974? The letter April showed me from social services said plans were underway for Cleo's adoption in 1974. Did that mean that she died in the same year she was adopted?

Johnny: I wrote a letter back to them and they didn't really respond, they didn't want to give me any information, anyway.

Connie: What was your reaction, must have been awful?

Johnny: Oh yeah it was, I was 15 at the time. Started doing drugs and drinking.

Connie: I ask Kay and Bill what they remember about when Johnny found out about Cleo’s death.

Kay: I remember when he said that, yes. Okay, where? How? Was she with her family? Was she murdered? Did she just die from being sick? I mean these are the questions that you have. What is the big secret? They are just acting so secretive and so strange. But to not know anything, not be told anything. And then this child just disappears into thin air. No. Something's amok. And a little answer goes a long way.

Bill: Which means that there’s unanswered questions out there, that something’s not right.

Kay: And if she was killed, why not tell him? How? What?

Bill: That's what I mean….

Kay: If they knew that much, they had more information.

Bill: Even if they didn't want to tell them how the situation happened, they could at least tell him that. And they don't even want to tell him that.

Connie: What would it mean, do you think, to get answers to some of those questions?

Kay: They could have closure. This way, he has nothing. He took care of all of these babies until he was placed down here, and now he just can't account for this one.

Connie: Having that responsibility as a child, that must have been hard for him.

Kay: That must have made him the man he is today, and it was hard for him. Sometimes we turn out good because of hardships, and sometimes we don't. But he did.

Connie: Meeting Kay and listening to Johnny talk about her, I can’t help but notice that he doesn’t talk about his biological mother Lillian in the same way. He only ever calls her by her first name, never mom. To Johnny, Kay is his mom.

Johnny: And she knew I didn't have anybody down here, and she kept me. If it wasn't for her, I said, I'd be dead or in jail. She was always there for me anyway, so unlike, my other, unlike Lillian.

[rooster crows]

Connie: Back in the barn, Johnny is looking at a picture of Lillian that April gave us to give to him.

[paper crumpling]

Connie: Is that what she looked like when you were a kid?

Johnny: Yeah, yeah.

Connie: Did she wear her hair in braids like that a lot?

Johnny: Yeah.

Connie: Lillian looks really young in this photo. Maybe in her late teens or early 20s. She’s really pretty. She has long dark hair that she wears in two braids, and the ends are tied with strips of leather.

Johnny: It’s like looking at a stranger. I hate to say it. I don't mean sound like I'm... It's like here, there's somebody's mother. Yeah. Now I just, I know it's my mother, but to me, it's Lillian. Nice picture of her, though.

Connie: So you don't, you don't feel any kind of attachment to her?

Johnny: Not really. I hate to say it but...

Connie: Johnny seems angry with Lillian. As the oldest, he spent the most time with her, and he remembers all of the times she let him down.

Johnny: Let me see here, this one here the other day, it sort of... broke me up here. What was that? Didn't I show you that picture?

Connie: Which one?

Johnny: Look here, I've got to find it.

Connie: Johnny wants to show me a different picture: something he saw online that triggered memories of his childhood.

Johnny: Oh, it’s a picture of Mounties and priests and nuns taking kids away from a house. It just reminded me of what happened but it is…

[solemn music starts]

Johnny: It was taking kids away, but the parents were there and everything. Kids running away. Except I didn't run, I was there trying to save us. I think in my mind, I remember thinking, "Lillian’s going to come save us." But she never did.

Connie: Was it a painting?

Johnny: Yeah.

Connie: Was it that Kent Monkman painting?

Johnny: Yeah, I think so.

Johnny: I know the painting he’s talking about. It’s by Cree artist Kent Monkman and it’s called "The Scream." Honestly, I have a hard time looking at it. I mean it’s beautifully done, Kent is an amazing artist, but it’s a horrific scene. It’s basically a depiction of an apprehension of Indigenous kids. It looks like it’s in front of a house on a reserve. There are priests, nuns and several Mounties, Royal Canadian police officers in their red serges, ripping Indigenous kids and babies from their mothers’ arms. The children in the painting are crying, their arms are outstretched, reaching for their siblings or their mothers. Some are running away, trying to escape the arms of the white men and women who are there to take them away. My eye keeps going back to the faces of the mothers. They’re screaming, crying out in anguish, desperate to hang on to their children. But then you notice the Mountie’s gun and you know who is going to win this battle. It’s a scene that you can imagine has played out hundreds of times in Indigenous communities over generations. First in residential schools, and then again in the Sixties Scoop. As if Kent is trying to make that exact point, on the bottom right edge of the painting, a Mountie looks like he is literally about to scoop up a small child who is trying to run away.

Johnny: It just brought back memories, you know. But she was never, my mother wasn't there to rescue me, though. They didn't-- she wasn't, like, there was a lady there but that wasn't-- their mother wasn't there.

Connie: you mean, because the woman in that photo is reaching for her kids and the police are holding her back?

Johnny: Yeah, But that didn't happen with me. Us. So...

Connie: The scene in the painting actually reminds me of the memory that Johnny’s cousins have about their apprehension in Battleford. I don’t know if Johnny remembers it differently or if they were apprehended more than once.

But either way, I think that if I find this picture hard to look at, I can only imagine how difficult it is for Johnny, who has memories of Cleo and the rest of his siblings

being taken away.

Connie: When they came to take you guys away...

Johnny: They took everybody.

Connie: That must have been scary.

Johnny: Yeah, it was. I was the only one that was there resisting because they didn't know any better.

Connie: What do you mean, you resisted?

Johnny: Well I had a stick, a big stick. Kept looking around for Lillian, but she never came.

Connie: Were you trying to prevent them from taking you or from taking your siblings?

Johnny: Yup.

Connie: Did you wish that you could have stayed with relatives?

Johnny: I don't think they had a choice. Or Lillian didn't tell them about the choice they could have had.

Connie: Johnny is so calm when he talks about this. But clearly, it’s an incredibly painful memory he’ll always have. I feel like with each interview with Cleo’s siblings, we’re learning snippets about their mother Lillian. I cannot fathom the pain she experienced as a mother, having her children taken away. But we know that she may have also experienced that same scene years earlier as a child.

Because the one thing we do know about Lillian is that when she was seven years old, she too was taken from her home and sent to a residential school. Johnny didn’t know this about his mother until right before she died.

Johnny: And hopefully with a story like this, it'll make someone want to help. It's not just about me missing my sister, or my family missing a sister. People don't realize, I just told my girlfriend last night, she didn't know about residential schools, Sixties Scoop, and missing and murdered Indigenous children, she didn't know. Because some people just don't care. But when someone's missing, you know you want to know.

Connie: You mention residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, and missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, do you think those issues are all connected?

Johnny: I think so. I could have had a better relationship with my mother if she would've told me what happened. I make a joke out of it. I think I hit the trifecta. Got all three things going for me- mother, me, and my sister. I know it sounds bad, but sometimes you gotta laugh about it, because what are you going to do?

Connie: Johnny suggests that one of Lillian’s sisters might have more information.

He shows me one of his messages with a woman named Marlene Semaganis, Lillian’s sister who still lives on Little Pine.

Connie: She says, [reading]" I remember all of you I have pictures of all of you, just happy and always smiling."

Johnny: It says, [reading] "My sister loved you, she loved all her kids, what's happened back then was part of Sixties Scoop."

Connie: I mean do you mind going up a just little bit, because-- does she talk about getting a letter from Cleo?

Johnny: Well I said apparently, yeah. Oh here, this one?

Connie: What is that one?

Johnny: It says, "Cleo wrote me a letter telling me she had a good life, then begged me to get her somewhere in Vermont." I didn't know who to believe.

Connie: So Marlene, who's your mom's sister, said that Cleo wrote her a letter.

Johnny: Yeah, I know but I never, I didn't believe her, either, because I didn't know what to believe.

Connie: She said, [reading] telling me she had a good life. And then begging me to get her--I want to go and get her. Then shortly after that I was told she had left for the spirit world. It was devastating."

Johnny: Yeah.

Connie: So their aunt Marlene got a letter from Cleo after she was adopted. Did she know where Cleo was living when she sent it? Does she still have the letter? Maybe it has a return address that could help narrow our search.

Connie: Did she give you advice about how to get information about Cleo?

Johnny: No she didn't.

Connie: What did she say are in containers... Just below that..

Johnny: Photographs.

Connie: Oh...

Connie: I put Marlene on our list of people to talk to. But first, Johnny wants to call the government of New Jersey again. He’s hoping he’ll have more luck than Christine.

[phone ringing]

[woman answers phone]

Johnny: Yes I’m hoping you can help me out

Woman: Okay.

Johnny: I'm trying to find out information about a deceased relative back in 1975. And I was given information from Saskatchewan that she was adopted in New Jersey...

[conversation fades, phone rings]

Automated Voice: Your party is not answering. Please try your call later. Your call will now be disconnected. [dial tone]

Man: Yeah, I was just calling to clarify that you're looking for your birth sister's original birth certificate?

Johnny: Yes.

Man: Yeah, and I think we've already explained that we can only look for that record based on their current legal birth certificate, so if you knew what her name was post-adoption, we could find it very readily that way. However, with only a birth name, we have no way of checking for that record.

Johnny: Okay, so like I said, I guess I gotta call Saskatchewan and try again?

Man: Yes.

Connie: Another dead end. Without knowing Cleo’s adoptive name, we’re no closer to getting answers from New Jersey social services. Johnny plans to ask the government of Saskatchewan for a copy of his ward file. A ward file is a record kept by Social Services and is supposed to contain information about every interaction a child has with child welfare. Apparently they are not easy to access.

But if Johnny gets his, it could shed some more light on why social services became involved with his family and maybe even information about his mother Lillian and Cleo.

Johnny: You guys leaving tonight, then?

Connie: We say goodbye to Johnny…

Johnny: Have a safe trip.

Connie: and head back to Toronto. I leave feeling unsettled. With each interview, I feel like I’m getting closer and closer to uncovering Cleo’s story. But there are still so many questions. And the more I learn about what I don’t know, the more I want to find the answers. But the reality is, I’m not sure exactly where to go next.

We trying every official channel that we can think of, and we’ve hit so many brick walls. Everybody we’ve talked to says they’ve never encountered a situation like this before. Is finding Cleo even possible? I thought there would be a more straightforward process. I thought it would be easier. I didn’t realize that if we were going to find Cleo, what we really need is a little luck.

[eerie music]

Connie: That very same night my producer Marnie is up late on her computer.

Marnie: So I was just going through a bunch of different databases within New Jersey that you can search.

Connie: Obituaries, newspaper clippings, any kind of public record she can access.

Connie: What were you searching? Like, were you searching Cleo? Were you searching girl?

Marnie: So I used first name “Cleo” and birth year “1965”.

Connie: 1965: the year that Cleo was born. That crucial bit of information from April’s social services file.

Marnie: It was getting late, it was like midnight at this point. And up came this hit.

Connie: With a click of a button, she finds a needle in a haystack.

Marnie: And there was this headstone. A picture came up and it just looked like someone snapped it in the cemetery. And it was grey, sort of two-tone stone and it looks a little bit old, but it had the name Cleo and the birth year 1965.

Connie: What was your reaction when you saw a headstone with the first name Cleo?

Marnie: My heart skipped a beat, for sure. And I looked closer and it said 1965 to 1978.

Connie: So if this was Cleo, she died when she was 13, not 11 like Christine thought in her story.

Marnie: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Connie: A girl named Cleo died in a small town in New Jersey in 1978. Is this Cleo?

Did we find her? We need to go to New Jersey to find out.

Connie: Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo is hosted and written by me, Connie Walker. It’s produced by Marnie Luke & Jennifer Fowler. Mieke Anderson is our audio producer and Heather Evans is our senior producer. To see photos of Johnny -- and the painting he spoke about in this episode “The Scream” by Kent Monkman -- go to our website cbc.ca/findingcleo. Subscribe for free to get the next batch of episodes. Search Missing and Murdered: finding Cleo on Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast app.

[theme fades]

TRANSCRIPT: Missing & Murdered - Season 2, EP 3

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