2009

19 October 2009 Fate of Hunters Still a Mystery, 50 Years Later   Merle Newcombe, left, and George Weeden disappeared in the northern Ontario bush on 23 Oct 1959. The investigating officer at the time and others believe the pair were murdered.     Chapleau Ontario - Half a century ago, Merle Newcombe and George Weeden set out for a weekend of moose hunting in the northern Ontario bush.   They were never seen again.   The unsolved disappearance continues to captivate residents of Chapleau, where the men lived, and family members are still seeking answers as to what happened on 23 Oct 1959.   "There's a lot of suggestions as to what might have happened up there, but it's all just assumptions," said Chapleau Mayor Earl Freeborn, who was involved in the search in 1959.   "I think something happened to those two people that's still an unsolved mystery, but it cannot just be people being lost."   One theory is that the men could have fallen into a lake, drowned, and their bodies were swept away by the current.   Others are adamant the pair were murdered.   The Ontario Provincial Police missing persons web site has marked the anniversary by making it their feature case, posting pictures of the men and details of the fateful day in question and the search that followed.   Weeden, 63, was an unmarried yard engineer with Canadian Pacific Railway. Newcombe, 50, was a married CPR trainman.   Before setting out in search of moose, the men ate breakfast at the camp owned by Newcombe's family at Friendly Lake, near Amyot, some 180 kilometres west of Chapleau. They were reported missing by Newcombe's wife, Jean, and his 11-year-old stepdaughter, Harriet, on 29 Oct 1959.   Remnants of the men's breakfast of toast, bacon, and eggs were still in the frying pan found in the cabin, said Freeborn, who had worked with Weeden at the railway.   "There were over 100 people at the search," said Freeborn.   "They searched the bush and the railroad for a couple of weeks... They had nets across the river to see if the bodies were in the water. And they dragged the lake up at Summit Lake.   "We searched the bush every morning in groups and came up with actually nothing."   Weeden's leg and back had been badly injured in a 1941 head-on steam train collision, meaning he would not be able to walk far, Freeborn said.   "He would have stayed on the track. They were hunting."   The search was postponed 6 Nov 1959 after a storm blew in, bringing with it 30 centimetres of snow. A search the next spring failed to find any sign of the men.   Author William E. McLeod, who devoted a section of his 2004 book "The Chapleau Game Preserve:  History, Murder, and Other Tales" to the case, said he believes they were murdered.   "They didn't find any trace of their bodies. No clothing, no signs of a scuffle, no spent shells, nobody blabbed, they just disappeared off the face of the Earth," McLeod said in an interview from Sudbury, Ont.   The former Cambrian College business professor, who was 13 and living in Chapleau when the men disappeared, had been asked to take part in the search but his father wouldn't let him.   McLeod, who said he hopes the anniversary will spark a renewed interest in solving the case, noted the remote area where the men vanished remains only accessible by train or plane.   Police had said two aboriginal trappers, Clem Nabigon and his 17-year-old son Herb, told them they had spoken to the hunters briefly the day they disappeared but when they walked back along the track soon after, the hunters had vanished.   Herb Nabigon, now 67, a published author and a professor at Laurentian University in Sudbury, said he doesn't remember much about that day, but does recall the searches that were conducted afterward.   In a telephone interview, Nabigon said he and his father, who died in 1982, both took part in the search.   Nabigon said the tracks by the lake didn't have a guardrail, and if the men fell in the lake, they could have been swept away by currents. He also said the forest is very dense in the area and the men could have become lost.   A.R. (Bob) King, the Ontario Provincial Police constable who investigated the case, had only been on the job for two years in nearby White River when he got the call about the missing railway men.   King, in an interview from his home in Bedford, said he suspects foul play and pointed to Weeden's injury.   "He had told people before he'd left Chapleau he'd do his hunting from the railway tracks."   King, who said it was unlikely animals got the men, added he could not see them getting lost given Newcombe's familiarity with the area.   His superiors insisted he treat it as a missing person's case, he said, and he couldn't find evidence to bump it up to a homicide investigation.   Harriet, now 61, said she doesn't understand why the case was never escalated to a criminal investigation. She also wonders why it wasn't reopened after her stepfather's wallet turned up in a mattress in the camp in 1969.   Harriet, whose surname is now Bouillon, said she believes the wallet was planted.   "After all these years my hopes are that somebody who knows something contacts the OPP, even anonymously, so that we can find their remains and bring them home and give them a proper burial and put them to rest," Bouillon said.   "We've always felt that they had met foul play and there is somebody who knows something."   Pat Hewett.

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