CBC News: the fifth estate - Just Another Missing Kid

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Originally Aired
April 7, 1981
on CBC-TV

WATCH the fifth estate ONLINE:

Watch Part 1 of this story online.

Runs 47:29
Watch Part 2 of this story online.

Runs 38:50
Watch an update of the story. Aired in 1995.

Runs 8:54

REPORTER: Ian Parker
PRODUCER: John Zaritsky
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER: Brian Vallee

Video available in
Windows Media Player.

AWARDS LIST

This film won several national and international awards including:

Gold Medal at the 1981 International TV and Film Festival in New York
Best Documentary at the 1981 Banff Television Festival
Blue Ribbon at the 1982 American Film Festival
Achievement of Merit Award at the 1982 Ohio State Awards
Best Television Program 1982 ACTRA Award

OSCAR AWARD WINNER: JUST ANOTHER MISSING KID

On July 10, 1978, 19-year-old Eric Wilson left his Ottawa home in Rockcliffe Park for a planned five-day drive to Boulder, Colorado, where he planned to attend a summer course. Four days later, he called home from Nebraska and told his brother, Peter, that he'd had trouble with the Volkswagen minibus he was traveling in. He promised to call the next day at five o'clock. That was the last the Wilson family ever heard from Eric.

POLICE REFUSE TO ACT

When Eric's mother, Marilyn Wilson and her eldest son, Peter went to report Eric's disappearance, the OPP refused to enter the information about Eric and his van into an international crime computer that would have alerted police forces across North America to the boy's disappearance. Their reasoning was that the computer "… would be absolutely jammed with missing cars and vehicles and people if they listened to every mother who came in and said: 'My son has gone away on a trip and he hasn't called me when he said he was going to call me.' "

It would be weeks before Eric Wilson's camper van was found - driven by Raymond Hatch.

The Wilson's cold reception at the OPP headquarters was not the first they would get from law enforcement agencies in both Canada and across the United States. As Peter Wilson told fifth estate reporter Ian Parker: "Children are brought up to believe if they get in trouble they go to the police and I can tell you they certainly were not compassionate. They didn't help at all."

When the Wilson family realized that the police weren't going to search for Eric, they decided to take matters into their own hands. Peter and his father, Dr. William Wilson, traveled to Nebraska and started searching, stopping at every police detachment along the way.

Peter Wilson recalled that everywhere, the response was the same. "Well, maybe he ran away," or "If you don't hear from him in 30 days, get back to us." Neither the state police, nor, initially, the FBI could be persuaded to help search for Eric.

TRACKING ERIC WILSON'S KILLERS

Finally, the Wilson family decided to hire their own one-man police force, a private detective by the name of Jim Conway, a street-wise Irishman, an ex-cop who worked the toughest beat in New York City's South Bronx – the precinct the police called 'Fort Apache'.

Private detective Jim Conway spent years tracking Eric Wilson's killer.

It was through Conway's dogged and meticulous tracking over a period of two months that finally netted a predatory drifter named Raymond 'Butch' Hatch as Eric's kidnapper and murderer. Only then, would the Wilson family finally discover what really happened to Eric.

The documentary Just Another Missing Kid, which was first broadcast on the fifth estate on CBC-TV on April 7, 1981, is an indictment of the apathy and bureaucracy of the legal system on both sides of the border.

The film won several national and international awards (see right) and in April 1983, it won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Read more about the story behind the documentary.

^TOP