Chrissy

November 6, 2024·35 min·3 clips

Host Ridgen reveals a local man confessed at a 2004 party to killing Christine Herron — a detail hidden from her family for years inside Attorney General documents.

The river comes first. On a clear, darkening springtime evening in Hanover, Ontario, the host records the Saugeen River: the debris, the shoreline, the gazebo, the swing set, the old gate. The microphone is part of the scene too, a familiar thing to hold while standing near so much unknown. Then Mary Ann starts talking. She remembers trying to organize a search and being told there would be consequences if the family went near the park that first weekend. The antique car show was still happening nearby. According to Mary Ann, police worried about public panic and about disturbing the Victoria Day event in the park. A search did happen later. On May 23, 1993, five days after Christine disappeared, Hanover Police and Fire Department coordinated volunteers through Hanover Park, the south shore of the Saugeen River, and the town water tower. They found nothing. The episode sits with what a small town was willing to believe. Runaway was the easy answer. Mary Ann says people repeated it, pulled posters down, and called the family to tell them to stop making a fuss. Suspicion did not land cleanly anywhere. The narrator says Mary Ann and Sean had no suspects, but later they had to be ruled out themselves. The polygraphs added another hurt. Mary Ann says she agreed because clearing herself might help investigators move on to the person who did it. She took two tests. The first felt basic. The second came at a tense point in her life, adding more pressure to a process already full of grief. What is left is a family pressing against disbelief, civic discomfort, and a search that started after days had already slipped away.

As heard by us

A missing-person case told through testimony, hesitation, and the stubborn weight of a small town.

A spring evening on the Saugeen River sets the scene for a disappearance that Hanover keeps trying to explain away as a runaway case. The episode moves from that riverbank calm into the first search, the family’s irritation with police caution, and the uneasy detail that the…

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Why you'd press play

For a slow, exacting missing-person case set beside the Saugine River in Hanover, Ontario.

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