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- [00:02]
A
What is. What do you want me to say?
- [00:05]
B
You have found Chameleon Season three Wild Boys, a production of Campside Media.
- [00:12]
A
Oh.
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C
A heads up.
- [00:16]
A
This show contains discussions of an eating disorder.
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C
If you or someone you know is.
- [00:21]
A
Struggling with eating disorders, please listen with care. Sam. I'm Sam Mullins and from Campside Media. This is Chameleon Wild Boys, Part 2. The Skeptic the more I've learned about this story, the more I've realized that my hometown was the perfect setting for two boys with something to hide. Vernon's not just a generous town, a place where a hockey mom and then a whole community would take them under their wings. It's also the perfect town to hide a secret. Vernon is the neighbor who smiles and says hello, but kind of wants to keep it to just the hello. A town where it would be easy to keep conversations on the surface level. A place where it wouldn't even cross a person's mind that you weren't telling the truth, because why would anyone even do that? It's a town that, especially back then, felt a little innocent. I was talking about this with Shaun Harvey. He was the young mayor of Vernon when the boys showed up. This is totally off topic, but you just reminded me, did it feel like Vernon had AM radio stations a lot longer than anywhere else in North America?
- [01:36]
D
I think that's a really good analogy for the state of Vernon. When I decided to run for mayor was that Vernon was all AM radio all the time. The rest of the world had moved on to fm.
- [01:46]
A
That's so funny. I assumed that everyone had mostly AM stations until I left. Left Vernon music sounds so much better.
- [01:52]
D
When you have a left channel and a right channel.
- [01:55]
A
It's always felt like we're playing a bit of catch up in Vernon. I talked to the archivist at the Vernon Museum and I asked her what the biggest news story to ever come from Vernon was. She said, the first thing that comes to mind is that a girl who grew up in Vernon went on to become Winston Churchill's secretary during World War II, which I think we can all agree is very cool, but it's underwhelming in the context of a century plus of township. So the boys lucked out by finding an innocent place where not much happens, but also because the story they told felt so within the realm of possibility here. Like being bush boys raised off the grid deep in the wilderness outside of Vernon, that story scanned. If you leave Vernon in certain directions not very far away, there are literally just mountain ranges and forests and glaciers and and untamed, rugged wilderness for hundreds of kilometers. For American listeners, a kilometer is like if a mile made more sense. And the British Columbian wilderness has always been a haven for people pursuing an alternative lifestyle. There's always been hippie communes and cults and polygamous groups. There's this one commune on Vancouver island where you can work for a wage paid entirely in magic mushrooms. So when people like Daryl Stinson started getting calls about bush boys, I said.
- [03:24]
E
Well, you know, don't discount it. I said, you know, like, there's all kinds of people living off the grid here. We got people that were from the Vietnam War in the mountains. So, yeah, there's a possibility of it.
- [03:38]
A
Darryl was a very popular politician in Vernon, and he's something of a legend in Canadian politics for an incident that happened on the House of Commons floor. He was mid speech in the chamber when someone across the floor started heckling him, calling him a racist, which he took exception to. Do you have the fortitude or the gonads to stand up and come across here and say that to me, you son of a bitch? Come on. That's our man. Anyway, Darryl's opinion mattered because he's something of an authority on living off the grid. The dude has scars on his hands from mink bites to prove it, because when he was a teenager, he was already making a fortune as a fur trapper.
- [04:22]
E
And I was doing that when I was 16, 17, 18.
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A
Wow.
- [04:25]
E
And it was a good life, actually.
- [04:29]
A
During his trapping years, Darrell met a guy named Stad, who, rumor had it, fled to Canada after he allegedly killed a guy in England. Stad said that he hadn't been out of the bush in decades, but this one time, he got really sick. So Darryl had to take Stad out of the bush and take him to the hospital. On the drive, Daryl remembers Stad flipping out, seeing cars and stoplights for the first time. All of which is to say that people living in the bush, outside the bounds of society, Daryl had seen it himself. But for the boys, luckier than telling the right story to the right group of people who weren't prone to dig further was that they landed in a town with Tammy Ryder.
- [05:14]
E
I mean, they were lucky. They ran into some good people here. You know, if it had been somewhere else, they may not have been so bloody lucky. And so they can thank their lucky stars on that one.
- [05:25]
A
Tammy found them a place to stay, got them clothes, got them some cash, and she just continued to show up. How are you guys today? How about today? What do you guys Need. Can I get you anything?
- [05:37]
C
Yes. I was going by there every couple days and making sure they had food.
- [05:41]
A
And then, yeah, she'd bring food, shampoo, soap, encourage them to use said shampoo and soap.
- [05:49]
C
Sort of took on that mother thing, like, you gotta clean yourself up here, things like that.
- [05:54]
A
It was all pretty standard mother teenage son stuff. But for every Tammy Ryder in the world, there's usually also a Henry Proce.
- [06:02]
B
Basically, I consider their story to be BS right from the start.
- [06:05]
A
Meet Corporal Henry Proce. Henry's the father of six kids, so his BS detector runs hot. He was a corporal in the Vernon rcmp. That's the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, basically the FBI of Canada. If everyone else in the town was like, yeah, sure, bush boys, that could happen. Pro se was the opposite.
- [06:28]
B
I mean, this whole notion of being, you know, raised in the wilds of rebels through British Columbia and never having contact with their people was total nonsense.
- [06:37]
A
Henry was the media relations officer for the RCMP in Vernon, a perfect role for him because before becoming a cop, he tried a career in media. As a young guy, he was working for a small TV station in Ontario. One night, someone asked him to cover the night shift where all he had to do was play a movie on the reel to reel projector.
- [06:58]
B
And you had to put the reels on the projectors and get them going. Anyway, long story short is I didn't put the last reel on and then I went home. The brown stuff hit the fan the next morning. You didn't play the last reel. Everybody wants to know what happened in the movie.
- [07:16]
A
So he applied to become a cop. Shortly thereafter and a couple of postings and decades later, he found himself in Vernon when two disheveled boys showed up on his beat. Almost immediately, the RCMP started getting calls about strange boys doing strange things around town. It was a weird case, though, because no one was reporting them doing anything illegal or nefarious. People weren't like, two boys stole my car. Callers would just say, I saw two.
- [07:45]
B
Boys and they're kind of odd.
- [07:49]
A
Being odd, thankfully, is still legal in Canada, but there were enough calls coming in. It felt weird to do nothing. So the RCMP decided to check them out just in case, and the file went to pro se because his boss suspected, correctly, that it would probably become a media relations issue at some point.
- [08:09]
B
I met with them probably within a day or two of getting the file. I would have tried to interview them.
- [08:15]
A
Like Tammy Proce is also a get it done kind of person. Unfortunately for Tammy, what he wanted and what she wanted were now at odds. He would have been really skeptical. And you were sort of like defending the boys.
- [08:28]
C
Yeah, absolutely.
- [08:30]
A
The boys have been put up in the big yellow hostel on East Hill. The building is this charming old character home. Its exterior is covered in art. It's like if a quilt that your grandma made you was a building. It's welcoming energy. Almost the perfect antithesis to Proce's police cruiser pulling in the driveway.
- [08:50]
B
Yeah, it's a large building, three stories, kind of rough around the edges. You walked in and there was a bit of a communal kitchen.
- [08:57]
C
We were in the kitchen of the hostel and Henry banged on the door and I remember opening it and it was him. And he's like, oh, you're here.
- [09:06]
D
And.
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C
And I'm like, yeah, yeah, you know I am.
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A
He says, where are the boys? I need to talk to them. The boys were about to encounter something they hadn't seen in Vernon yet. Doubt.
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C
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- [09:58]
D
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A
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D
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- [10:26]
C
Experian.
- [10:30]
A
The boys demeanor changed immediately when they saw Pro Se in his uniform. Wherever they were from, you could tell that they knew well about cops. Since it's mostly a communal setup, a hostel is a challenging place to have a private conversation. So the four of them settled on the common area off the kitchen. And it was there that the boys faced off with their first real skeptic. First time being asked who are you? Not so much out of curiosity or concern, but suspicion. And right away Pro se could sense something was off.
- [11:03]
B
They were nervous around me and they did not like my questions. They had no id. They didn't provide me with any id.
- [11:11]
A
Tammy didn't love the idea of a police officer questioning the boys either. But still, even she was struck by how brazenly uncooperative the boys were being. Proce would ask a question, Tom would shrug. So then he'd ask Will, and Tom would give him a look, and then they'd both shrug.
- [11:28]
B
I wasn't getting anywhere as to trying to determine where they were really from or who they actually were.
- [11:35]
A
After asking dozens of questions, all Henry walked out of there with was their names, Tom and Will Greene. And their hometown, the wilderness nearish Revelstoke. So I drove back to the station where he ran the boys names.
- [11:49]
B
Yeah, I ran it every which way I could through our systems, and nothing came up.
- [11:54]
A
No Tom or Will Green that matched their age in the system. So he turned to the one other piece of information they gave him, that they're from Revelstoke. Henry picked up the phone and called his colleagues two hours down the road.
- [12:06]
B
Got in touch with Revelstoke detachment, spoke to them a number of times, and they said, no, this is bs. These boys did not grow up in the wild, in the bush here in Revelstoke, or we would know about it.
- [12:19]
A
So they're like Bigfoot. Either the boys and their folks had been extremely good at staying hidden, avoiding contact with humans altogether for decades, or they're made up.
- [12:31]
B
I mean, they would have been birth records, they would have been hospital records, they would have been tax records, they would have been, you know, schoolworks. It would have been something. I mean, a hospital visit. Yeah, a hospital visit, anything. And there was absolutely nothing.
- [12:44]
A
So Proce goes back to the hostel a few days later and starts pushing a little harder. Hi, Tom and Will Green, why don't you show up in any of our systems? Tom and Will Green, why does no one in Revelstoke know who you are? And from the boy's perspective, these are easy questions to answer. Obviously, we don't show up in the computer. That's what happens when you have zero contact with civilization, pro se. This is proof that we're telling the truth.
- [13:11]
B
I mean, I was getting a little frustrated because they were not forthcoming and they were. They were somewhat anti police, anti authority. So I wasn't getting. I wasn't getting very far with them. I was not their best friend.
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A
So Proce wandered around the hostel to try and find someone who maybe the boys opened up to, you know, see.
- [13:32]
B
If I could get any information from them as to who these folks actually were.
- [13:36]
E
Mm.
- [13:37]
A
And here again, another in a series of strokes of luck for the boys, because it turns out snitches don't stay in hostels they didn't like the idea.
- [13:47]
B
Of uniformed police coming in there, not just the boys, but yeah, I guess it just sort of made, you know, the people nervous that were in there for whatever reason.
- [13:57]
A
You're killing the hostel vibes.
- [13:59]
B
Yeah, you're killing the hostel vibes.
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A
The core group at the hostel had been living together for a while and they were a real motley crew. There were tenants from Australia, the uk, Argentina, Italy and Paraguay. Before agreeing to admit the boys, the owner ran the situation past the tenants to make sure that everyone was cool with the idea of two feral boys from whereabouts unknown joining the house. After discussing, they agreed unanimously to open their home to the boys. And now it appeared they were acting unanimously to protect them.
- [14:34]
B
They, they weren't very cooperative either.
- [14:37]
A
It seemed like everyone surrounding the boys were closing ranks around them. As Henry became a frequent and unwelcome guest at the hostel. He'd often run into Tammy and when he'd get her alone for a minute, he'd start in.
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C
Why are you doing this? Like, why are you putting in all this energy? Like, why don't you just let us take, like, help them.
- [14:57]
A
Tammy was worried that if pro se didn't back off, he'd scare the boys away before they could help them.
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C
So I was protective of them, thinking, like, what are the police gonna do here? I just thought he was just putting his nose where it shouldn't be because it's, you know, in my mind he was just going to harm the situation.
- [15:13]
A
So Proce tried knocking on a different door. He'd heard that the biggest law firm in town had become involved with the boys. Proce figured they'd understand. He just wanted to help them too. So he gave their lawyer a call.
- [15:28]
B
If you know who these guys are, can you at least let us know who they are so we can let you know? Parents, relatives, friends, know that they're okay and. But lawyers, you know, they were not bending over backwards to help me.
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A
Dale Kermode, one of the boy's attorneys.
- [15:45]
D
I didn't see it serving the boy's interest.
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A
Tammy and Dale were a united front. They're both like, back off, we have a plan here.
- [15:53]
D
The medium term plan, I would say, was to see that they got whatever assistance, including medical assistance for Will that might be, remember, required to get them on their way to wherever that might be.
- [16:07]
A
What they needed was social service, not cops. Besides, Dale didn't totally trust the RCMP.
- [16:14]
D
Because my perception of the police's. The RCMP's interest at that time was that it was Public relations as opposed to necessarily keeping the peace and good government.
- [16:25]
A
With a story this weird, a media frenzy was kind of inevitable. So it was no surprise that as word about Tommy Will Green was working its way through town, reporters were starting to sniff around the story. No one is really sure what to make of the so called Bush boys. Everyone says their behavior was strange. The first article about the boys showed up on November 2, 2003 in the province, one of the big papers in Vancouver. And it really set the tone. Two half starved brothers who emerged from the bush two weeks ago were telling an astonishing tale of growing up in complete, complete isolation in the remote backwoods of BC's interior. They say that they've never been to school, seen a doctor, watched TV or made a childhood friend reading the article now the boys stories seem destined to capture the public's imagination. It's part of a larger tradition. It's like one of those viral stories you see every few years where someone snaps a photo of an uncontacted tribe from the Amazon. As a culture we seem to have this fantasy about taking a person from another time or place uncorrupted by technology or capitalism, and then bringing them up to speed in the modern world. Encino Man, Bill and Ted, Ella, Enchanted Elf, Harry and the Hendersons. All stories that ask questions like what would a caveman think of an Eggo? What would Napoleon think of Amalgama? At one point the Province even likened the brothers stories to Swiss family Robinson. They were flung ashore on a strange lost island that teemed with a thousand perilous dangers. Yet together with a quiet kind of daring and a proud kind of courage, the Swiss family Robinson transformed this island jungle into an exciting tropical paradise. Even their lawyer said he took the case pro bono because in his words, there was a sliver of legal issues and a plank of curiosity. After that first Province article, the story of the brothers exploded into an international media phenomenon literally overnight. Well, you could file this next story under hard to believe. They were first noticed in August on.
- [18:46]
C
The streets of Vernon, bc.
- [18:48]
A
What's so mysterious isn't where they were living in Vernon, it's where they came from.
- [18:53]
F
They were born and raised in the bush, so they had no identification.
- [18:57]
A
Within the week, cnn, ABC News, even the News of the World from Britain were calling everyone quoted in the Province story Tammy, the police, the employees of Calstor, the mayor, Sean Harvey.
- [19:10]
D
We couldn't get national media to pay attention to Vernon on its best day. But these two wild children from the.
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A
Forests around Revelstoke appear in our Community.
- [19:18]
D
And suddenly everybody wants to talk to us.
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A
As the report showing up in Vernon, Tammy starts to wonder, what have I got myself into?
- [19:27]
C
Oh my God. This is actually crazy now. This is, this is different now. Like this is turning a corner.
- [19:34]
A
This was no longer just an odd thing that happened behind Cal. This was an internationally viral story or whatever the 2003 equivalent of that is. And as the world started to hear about the all caps wild Bush boys of Vernon, the residents of Vernon started to divide into camps, split evenly between the sort of tammies of the town and the Henry Proces.
- [20:00]
C
Their story is the talk of the town, but not everyone is buying it.
- [20:04]
A
Scammer. Yeah, they're a scammer. Yeah.
- [20:07]
C
It seems a bit suspicious to me. I don't know how come they haven't been seen by other people.
- [20:13]
B
And it's a lot of. Bit suspicious maybe, maybe.
- [20:17]
A
But on the other hand, maybe it's true. It's kind of hard to believe, but.
- [20:21]
C
I guess anything can happen nowadays.
- [20:23]
A
A group of concerned citizens has put them up at a hotel.
- [20:27]
C
It won't say where to protect their identity.
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A
They don't want any kind of celebrity, nor do they. They want to be made into some kind of a circus act. They're not. Everyone was talking about the boys, but no one was talking to them pro se saw the press as a way to get the boys out into the world where someone might recognize them. Tammy and their lawyer Dale saw the press as a threat. Just one more thing like the police sniffing around that might spook them and cause them to leave because the boys were scared the press might track down their parents and compromise their way of life. So Dale, the gang at the hostel and the boys themselves, they all took the same stance with the media as they did with the cops. No comment. Except for the odd one from Tammy who became their sort of de facto spokesperson. One day at the height of the media frenzy, Dale was at his desk.
- [21:23]
D
We were having a meeting at our office.
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A
Word had gotten out that the elusive Bush boys were inside meeting with their attorney. So Dale looks out the window and there's reporters camped out there. One in particular he knew was chasing the story hard all week.
- [21:39]
D
It was quite a well known reporter from Vancouver standing in front of our office.
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A
I was told all this secrecy had just made the media even more interested. Thus the reporter camped out in front of Dale's office. So Dale sees the reporter and he calls his assistant and says, can you go check something out?
- [21:59]
D
We sent people down the back stairs to see if there was anybody In Hallelujah. Surprisingly, there wasn't, because there was. There was more than one press person that was out front.
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A
So Dale ushers the boys through the office to the stairwell, went down the.
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D
Back stairs, and they were able to leave without being contacted by the press.
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A
Much to this reporter's audible chagrin. This story raises far more questions than it offers answers. Perhaps that's because the community has squirreled away these two boys. They're being kept well away from the media. That is perhaps slowing any positive identification of who they might be. And it's raising all kinds of speculation about the truthfulness of their story. But despite the media hype, behind closed doors, those crazy Bush boys were doing, well, nothing. All the people around them were working to protect the boys from scrutiny. They wanted to insulate them, to give them space to figure out what they wanted to do, figure out what kind of life they were going to forge for themselves in this new world. But the boys didn't seem interested in that.
- [23:06]
C
They didn't do anything. They sat in a room and did nothing.
- [23:12]
A
So Tammy was like, you guys could go to school. She even got them assessed to see what grade they were in. Tom, the older one, scored quite well, but Will, the younger one, was a little behind. But beyond the assessment, they didn't want to follow through.
- [23:27]
C
No, they were more like. They didn't see the need for it, I'm sure.
- [23:31]
A
Yeah, Tammy was like, okay, then go make friends, go to a Vernon Vipers game, learn how to skateboard, do literally anything.
- [23:39]
C
Just trying to encourage them to get out and do things.
- [23:42]
A
But no, they didn't want to get out. Not even inside the hostel.
- [23:46]
C
No, I'd never show up. And they were, like, hanging out or chilling with anyone. And that was the other strange thing. A hostel is sort of a social place to be and you meet people from all over and no, they would never connect with that, with people like that. You know, you could show up at that hostel and they were sitting in a room all by themselves and the whole room would smell like fruit.
- [24:06]
A
That was the one thing people did know about them. They liked fruit. Exclusively fruit and nutrition. The floors of their room were lined with library books about nutrition and the place you're most likely to find them, if they weren't holed up in that room with their fruit, was buying fruit at the farmer's market. And if you did manage to get them talking, it would somehow always come back to nutrition. For two boys as skinny as they were, they were seemingly obsessed with food. But beyond that, the boys were as much a mystery inside the hostel as they were outside, it made sense to Tammy on some level. This is the boys first foray into civilization. So she and Dale tried to chill out and just ease them in more slowly. Instead of pushing the boys into society at large, they brought them into their own families. Tammy brought them to her kids hockey game and she got them some Christmas gifts and Dale's son taught them what basketball was. Dale owned some property on a lake, so he called the boys one day and said, come on, let's get you guys out of the hostel for a bit.
- [25:18]
D
We took them out to our recreational property, which at that point was fairly rural.
- [25:23]
A
They thought it was probably similar surroundings to where the boys grew up, a place where they might feel comfortable. It was rural enough that there were log cabin type chores to do. Will of course, was too weak to do much, so Dale recruited Tom to help him with some things around the property.
- [25:41]
D
I asked Tom for some help lifting some wood that I was going to chop and he struggled with it and didn't really know what to do with it.
- [25:50]
A
Huh, Dale thought, that's odd. For two boys who grew up as survivalists in the bush, gathering wood's like the most basic outdoor chore there is.
- [26:02]
D
There were certain events that made me aware that there was much more to the story than what they were telling. Foreign.
- [26:19]
F
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- [27:21]
A
More and more as Dale and Tammy spent time with the boys, they were noticing things that felt off. And not off in a well, they're bush boys kind of way, but off in a this doesn't seem like something a bush boy would do or say kind of way. Like, they'd listen to the boys talk sometimes and be like, huh, These boys sure have a big vocabulary for two boys who said they've never gone to school before.
- [27:46]
D
They were clearly well read and they were clearly well educated.
- [27:49]
A
The boys had these tiny signifiers of domestication that made people go, wait, these aren't outside cats. These are inside cats.
- [27:58]
D
What was the name of the sunglasses that were kind of cool?
- [28:01]
A
Ray Ban or.
- [28:01]
D
Yeah, surfers wore them.
- [28:03]
A
Right, right.
- [28:04]
D
Tom wore Ray Ban sunglasses on his forehead in a casual way that was fashionable.
- [28:10]
A
Right.
- [28:12]
D
Not consistent with somebody who lived in the cave.
- [28:15]
B
Right.
- [28:15]
A
And every time Tammy saw Proce, he'd point out another inconsistency in their story. He'd say, hey, I was at the hostel the other day and where do I find them? At the computer.
- [28:26]
B
You know, Tom was totally comfortable on a laptop. Like, you're flying away at this thing. I mean, he told me he couldn't read or write growing up in the bush. But he. You put a laptop or a PC in front of him. He was at home.
- [28:40]
A
He'd be like, explain that, Tammy. Tammy would probe in a more gentle way, like, tell me about your childhood again. And she'd listen more closely to the details.
- [28:51]
C
You know, they'd start to. Slowly, the story would change slightly.
- [28:55]
B
Right.
- [28:55]
C
It went from we haven't seen anything and we weren't privy to anything that's going on in modern day culture to, oh, yeah, we did have this, or we'd rent videos, or we did come out, you know, in the town.
- [29:09]
A
Yeah. As the cracks in their stories started to show, Proce was getting annoyed with the media coverage he was reading. Every time he opened the paper, there'd be another piece about how capital B Bush they were. So he called a press conference to basically say, everyone calm down. The children of the bush are using the Internet at the hostel. Okay.
- [29:31]
B
It should be stressed, though, that they were not completely isolated. There was access to books, magazines, televisions. They told me that they went into town, they bought movies, they had a vcr, and, you know, they're well acquainted with modern society.
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A
Nothing pours cold water on a story about wild, uncorrupted bush children. Quite like the revelation that they had a vcr as the crazy Bush boys version of the story kind of turned into them being mysterious. But not so from the Bush kids. The media started to lose interest. There were no more reporters sitting outside of Dale's office. No more sneaking down the back stairs. Even the police had mostly stopped pestering them.
- [30:16]
B
Well, we were totally stymied. You know, if someone refuses to cooperate, refuses to give you their name, address, phone number, whatever, that's sort of the end of the road.
- [30:26]
A
The case started making its way down pro se's list of priorities. A few months passed. Every so often his boss would pop his head in and be like, hey, proceed.
- [30:36]
B
You find out who they are yet? You know, as the months we go back, no, I don't have a clue.
- [30:44]
A
That's so good. And even Tammy started losing her patience with the boys a little bit. She started pushing Tom harder. Now, her visits to the hostel included arguments in the common room.
- [30:57]
C
And I would just say, you have to like, you have to like, we can't just keep giving you everything.
- [31:04]
A
Like, I'm trying to help you. Give me something to work with here.
- [31:07]
C
I remember getting like being so mad at him because I was doing so much to help. But he wasn't doing anything to help the situation or help himself or his brother.
- [31:17]
A
She'd been spending all this time away from her family trying to help the boys who, it was clear to her now were not telling her the whole truth and who were giving her no avenues to discover the actual truth. So Tammy starts worrying, what have I gotten myself into? Who exactly am I helping?
- [31:38]
C
Yeah, I definitely remember it being a lot of anxiety around my kids and, you know, how is this gonna affect them? And also, you know, you really don't know the end of this story. Like, are these people from bad people? Are they bad themselves?
- [31:52]
A
She wanted to step away, but she didn't feel like she could. Because in the midst of everything, as the investigation lit up and then cooled, as the media circus came and went, one thing remained constant. The younger boy, Will, desperately needed help. Will was already gaunt when he arrived in town, and he'd only continued to lose weight. He looked skeletal in a life threatening kind of way. He was down to just 85 pounds on a six foot frame. And there was nothing that anyone could do. How do you force someone to eat? There's only one final card to play. And it was pro se holding the card.
- [32:33]
B
We've got to do something about this because this kid is not in good shape.
- [32:39]
A
Proce tried talking to Will about his diet, told him that he should work with the doctors, how what he was doing was dangerous. But no one could talk Will into anything. Well, perhaps there was one person, Tom.
- [32:53]
B
I tried to reason with the older ones, saying, your brother is. His health is deteriorating. You know, we've got to get him and we've got to get him Fed, we got to get him eating. We might have to get him to a hospital. And he used to just shrug his shoulders and say, you know, he's fine, he's fine, he's okay, you know, sort of thing. He didn't seem overly concerned that his brother was in this state. And it remained like that right to the very end.
- [33:15]
A
So with no other options, Proce goes into his supervisor's office and asks, is this something that we should use the Mental Health act for?
- [33:24]
B
For us to apprehend someone under the Mental Health act here in British Columbia, they have to be a danger to themselves or others. And it was becoming apparent that he was a danger to himself and that he's, you know, his diet was so restrictive that he was getting weaker and weaker.
- [33:37]
A
His supervisor said, do it, take him in. Prosaid mentioned to Tammy that he was considering apprehending Will. And by this point, Tammy was fully on board. So on board, in fact, that it might have been she who mentioned to Proce when she thought a good time to pick up Will by himself would be. One afternoon in March, Will came down the steps of the hostel into the biting cold. Being so thin, he had to put on nearly every stitch of clothing he owned to keep warm. It's about 15 minutes door to door from the hostel on East Hill to the health food store downtown. For the past six months. A lot of the calls to the police reporting an extremely skinny youth were while Will was making this trek down Main street and while he'd grown so thin that he was weak and totally withdrawn by this point, once he got to Nature's Fair, that's the one time that he really came alive. When he was walking the aisles reading the labels of the supplements, he was suddenly like any other 16 year old in record shop or a comic book store, or for me, the hockey shop. This was his favorite place. So Will buys his usual amount of fruit, likely paying with a credit card that a Good Samaritan had given him. And as he leaves his happy place and steps back out into the cold, there's Proce waiting for him. He approaches Will.
- [35:10]
B
You're being apprehended. You're being taken out of the community because you are a danger to yourself.
- [35:15]
A
Will, perhaps sensing he had no choice, put up no fight.
- [35:19]
B
He was cooperative. He was very weak.
- [35:21]
A
Proce opens the door to his police.
- [35:23]
B
Car and put him on my back of my police car and drove him.
- [35:28]
A
Right to emergency, where Will is checked into the hospital. And by the time Will is finally released from the hospital, a couple months later he will have a different name and he will be in a different country. Chameleon is a production of Campside Media with Sony Music. Wild Boys was reported and written by me, Sam Mullins. It's produced by Aboukar Adan and our editor is Karen Duffin. Our senior producer is Ashley Ann Krigbom. Sound design and mixing by Hannis Brown and Garrett Tiedemann. Original music by Hannis Brown, Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Our fact checker is Alex Yablon. Additional production support on this episode by Lydia Smith. Special thanks to our operations team, Doug Slaywin, Alia Papes and Allison Haney. The executive producers at Campside Media are Matt Sher, Vanessa Gregoriadis, Josh Dean and Adam Hoff. If you or someone you know is struggling with your relationship with food, please know you're not alone. There are free, confidential helplines with people just waiting to help. In the US you can call or text the National Eating disorder association at 1-800-931. That's 1-800-931-2237. In Canada, the National Eating Disorder Information center hotline is 1-866-633-4220. That's 1-866-633-4220. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.