Every morning, 78-year-old Richard Novak hears a passing train from his apartment in Bedford, N.S., and thinks of his late brother, Kenny.
Kenny, 15, was one of three Cape Breton youth who inexplicably ended up in Maine in July 1970 after deviating from a planned camping trip in Cape Breton Highlands National Park.
Kenny, David Burrows, 17, and Terry Burt, 20, were in sleeping bags on a rail track west of the border town of Houlton, Maine, when they were struck by a train early on the morning of July 10.
Novak, who has Parkinson’s disease and is in failing health, has the same thought every morning as he lies in bed and hears the train.
“The first person I think of [is] Kenny, Terry and David, and what it would be like under that train and why would you choose the tracks?” said Novak.
The deaths were ruled accidental, with the Sydney-area youth believed to be asleep at the time of the collision.
Novak would like to see the case reopened, even though documentation from the time is sparse.
“What I’m trying to do is unite with the people from Maine and clear this up once and for all, so we can put it to rest and have some peace,” he said.
At the time of the incident, Novak was living in Ontario.
“I’ve never felt so much pain in my life,” he said of learning of the deaths.
Novak said Kenny was the youngest of six boys and one girl in the family. The 5-7, 145-pound teen with black hair collected comic books, loved music, skating and swimming, and had been studying Latin for three years.
Novak believes the group may have been going to a concert in the U.S.
It’s a case with many unanswered questions, but here’s what’s known.
On Friday, July 3, 1970, Kenny Novak and Burt were driven to the Highlands by Novak’s mother, she told the Bangor Daily News, according to a July 19, 1970, article. She told the paper she believed Burrows joined them on July 5.
The three were last seen in Ingonish, N.S., on July 6, the newspaper reported, citing the RCMP.
It’s believed they hitchhiked to the U.S. and entered illegally on Thursday, July 9, from Woodstock, N.B., which Houlton borders. There was no record of youths matching their description crossing officially that date, the Bangor paper reported in its July 11-12 edition.
The newspaper also reported that a border patrolman tried to stop three hitchhiking youth in Houlton, but they fled. The patrolman also tried to find the youths later using an unmarked vehicle, but was unsuccessful.
It was around 11:30 p.m. ET when 20-year-old college student Royden Hunt was at a dairy bar in Houlton, around a mile from the border. The business was closed and he was hanging around outside with some friends.
“Those three come along and were walking, and they stopped and talked to us and they asked us how they could get to [Interstate] 95,” Hunt told CBC News.
Interstate 95 is a highway that runs from Maine to Florida.
Hunt said he didn’t usually pick up hitchhikers, but the trio seemed pleasant. And while the original plan was to drop them off a few kilometres away at the nearest spot on the interstate, Hunt let it slip that they were going to be travelling to his hometown of Island Falls, Maine, almost 50 kilometres from Houlton.
The trio asked if they could be taken there, but Hunt and his friend, Mike York, said that wouldn’t make sense as there wouldn’t be much traffic for hitchhiking options.
“Well, is there any place we can get on the railroad tracks?” asked one of the Cape Breton youth.
Hunt knew of a place called Smyrna Mills about halfway between Island Falls and Houlton that fit the bill.
“So that’s what we did. We stopped, let them out … and it was only like 50 feet to the railroad tracks and they went to the railroad tracks and we left,” said Hunt.
He believes they wanted to walk the tracks so they could stay out of sight.
Besides the circumstances, the timing stands out for Hunt because he had to drop off his friend York for a midnight shift at the gas station where he worked.
Hunt later learned that after they left the dairy bar, a border patrol agent showed up asking the people who remained outside whether they had seen the three youth. The people who were still there were friends of his and relayed that detail to him. (It’s unclear if this was separate from the second effort made by the border patrol agent to find the youth, as referenced in the July 11-12 Bangor Daily News.)
Hunt and York, who is no longer alive, were the last people known to have spoken with the trio.
The following day around 7 a.m., a 19-car train weighing about 725 tonnes was headed toward Houlton when it rounded a sharp turn. The engineer spotted what he thought was a rubber raft on the tracks, the July 11-12 edition of the Bangor Daily News reported.
“They’re sleeping bags!” said the train’s fireman, with the trio about 50 metres away.
The engineer tried to stop the train, but it was too late.
The trio did not move before being struck by the train, the engineer said.
Newspaper accounts report that Canadian cigarettes, canned goods, and maps of the Atlantic provinces, Maine, New England, Pennsylvania and New Jersey were among the possessions found on the trio.
The Cape Breton Post reported one of the sleeping bags had the name and address of one of the three youth, while other newspapers said the words “Sydney, N.S.” were marked.
The Biddeford-Saco Journal reported a wallet found on one body contained a small sum of money but none of the individuals had identification. The article doesn’t state how much money was found.
One of Hunt’s memories of the trio is that one of them had a roll of cash, perhaps around $100 to $150 worth.
On the day of the crash, 18-year-old David Sjoberg of Houlton was working at a local funeral home doing odd jobs such as property maintenance, washing hearses and helping with visitations. It was his second year there as a summer job and he was off to college in the fall.
He recalls his boss telling him the bodies of the trio would be arriving.
“I remember they arrived in the morning because before I went to lunch that day, he said, ‘When you come back, I’d like you to go down and help them out in the morgue,’ sort of tending to what they needed to do with those bodies,” said Sjoberg, who later became a pastor.
Besides the circumstances surrounding the deaths, the day stands out to Sjoberg because a cousin of his got married that night.
Autopsies by Aroostook County’s medical examiner found the trio died from severe head and body injuries. Testing later conducted at a state lab found no alcohol or drugs in the bodies.
Sjoberg said he was not present in the morgue for the autopsies, but his boss had a request for him: Would he transport the bodies back to Cape Breton?
“As an 18-year-old kid, I think that sounded like a pretty exciting adventure,” said Sjoberg. “Thousand-mile round trip, be gone two or three days, so I didn’t hesitate to say yes.”
By Sunday the 12th, according to newspaper accounts, the fathers of the three youth were in Houlton to confirm the identity of the bodies.
“[Frank] Novak, middle aged and with a crew cut, and Gordon Burt of Sydney and James Burrows of Sydney River agreed that their visit to the funeral home and personal belongings they were shown had convinced them their sons had been killed by the train,” reporter Dean Rhodes wrote in the July 13 Bangor Daily News.
“I couldn’t ask for nicer people,” Frank Novak told the reporter. “Everybody made everything as nice as possible for us.”
He didn’t have an answer for why the trio ended up in Maine.
“We haven’t got a clue,” he said.
With the identities confirmed, Sjoberg started driving to Cape Breton on Sunday, overnighting at a motel along the way. He arrived in Cape Breton on Monday the 13th and brought the bodies to a funeral home. After a quick stop there, Sjoberg returned home.
He doesn’t remember the incident being the talk of the town.
“I thought the story had died decades ago,” said Sjoberg, who learned in recent years about a Facebook page dedicated to the case and concerns from family members about the investigation. There’s also a petition calling for the case to be reopened.
One of Richard Novak’s criticisms of the investigation is that it wasn’t thorough enough. He believes the deaths involved foul play, with the bodies placed on the rail track to cover up for murder.
Aroostook County Sheriff Darrell Crandall, who oversaw the investigation, died in 1996, but newspaper accounts from 1970 provide some insight into the investigation and his thinking.
The July 17, 1970, Cape Breton Post noted Crandall had not closed the investigation as he was still awaiting an autopsy from the state lab in Augusta, Maine.
Crandall, a former railroad brakeman, believed the incident was an unfortunate mishap with one fundamental question.
“Why did they lay down on the railway tracks?” he told the newspaper.
The sheriff said he had 70 men at his disposal in the surrounding area and “if there’s anything we’ll know about it.”
Less than a week later, Crandall ruled the deaths did not involve foul play.
It had rained on the day of the crash, meaning the ground was damp, “which may have led them to decide on the rail bed as a dry sleeping area,” according to the July 23, 1970, Cape Breton Post.
The Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department did not respond to interview requests for this story.
In an email shared with CBC News, an Aroostook County official told Novak the department was “not in possession of … case reports, statements, forensic findings, evidence, case files, or any other records dating back to 1970.”
Hunt said he’s hunted in the area and you can hear the train from miles away.
“Where we let ’em out, that’s in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “I can’t imagine that they run into anybody that would have brought any harm to ’em, a mile and a half up that track at 11:30, 12 o’clock at night. There’d be nobody out there. And to lay across that track, with their head on the track, and not hear that train coming … I don’t know.”
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At the time, the rail line was lightly used, the Cape Breton Post reported, with an average of one train moving in each direction per day.
Hunt said he was interviewed twice by police officials, including once at a golf course.
Richard Novak said his late brother Lorne led the charge to get answers, but died last year. As a result, Novak has now been thrust into the role.
“Justice has not been served,” he said. “They did not die accidentally.”
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