of the newspaper in the cockpit is close to the date when a Canadian businessman named Arthur Wildon disappeared.’
The name seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him. It was left to Epstein to place it for me.
‘The Wildon twins, Natasha and Elizabeth, eight years old, were kidnapped in 1999,’ he told me. ‘A ransom was demanded, and secretly paid: a simple drop-off on a remote road, the driver instructed not to stop or the girls would be killed. The location of the twins was subsequently communicated by way of a note left by the shore of the Quebec river, its position marked with a rock painted black and white. The note claimed that the girls were being kept at a cabin outside Saint-Sophie, but when the rescue team got to the cabin it was empty, or appeared to be. Five minutes after they arrived, Arthur Wildon received a telephone call. The caller, who was male, gave him a single instruction: “Dig.”
‘And so they dug. The cabin had a dirt floor. The girls had been bound and gagged, then buried alive together in a hole three feet deep. The medical examiner estimated that they had been dead for days, probably killed within hours of their abduction.’
I held the phone away from my ear for a moment, as though its proximity were somehow causing me pain. I recalled closing a trapdoor on a young girl in an underground cell so that her cries would not alert the man who had put her there, and I heard again the terror in her voice as she had begged me not to leave her in the dark. She had been fortunate, though, because she had been found. Most of them were never found, or not alive.
But the man involved in that case had been a serial abuser and killer of young women, with no intention of ever releasing them. Kidnappers were different. Through Louis, I had once met a man named Steven Tolles, who was a hostage negotiator employed by a leading private security firm. Tolles was a ‘sign of life’ expert, called in to consult on cases of which not even the FBI or the police ever had any awareness. His primary concern was to ensure the safe return of the victim, and he was very good at his job. It was for others to catch the perpetrators, although Tolles, in his debriefing of victims, often drew from them crucial clues as to the identities of those involved: stray smells and sounds could be as useful as momentary glimpses of houses, woods and fields, sometimes even more so. From Tolles I learned that the instances of murder in kidnapping cases were comparatively rare. Kidnapping was a crime of greed: those who committed it wanted to pick up the ransom and vanish. Murder upped the ante, and ensured that the victim’s relatives would involve law enforcement in the aftermath. There was a very good reason why most instances of kidnapping never made the news: it was because terms were negotiated and ransoms paid without anyone beyond the family and the private negotiators employed by them ever learning anything about what had occurred, and that frequently included the police and the feds.
But if what Epstein was telling me was true, then the people responsible for abducting Arthur Wildon’s daughters – and there must have been more than one kidnapper, for two young girls would be difficult for one person to handle – had deliberately set out to extort money when there was no hope of the victims ever being returned alive. Indeed, it appeared that there had never been any intention to release them unharmed, given that they were killed so soon after their abduction. It was possible that something might have gone wrong, of course: one or both of the girls might have seen the faces of those involved, or caught sight of something guaranteed to give away the identity of a captor, in which case their kidnappers could have felt that they had no option but to kill them in order to protect themselves.
But to bury them alive? That was an appalling death to visit on two children, regardless of the ruthlessness of the kidnappers. There was sadism involved here, which suggested that the money was almost an afterthought, or a secondary motivation, and I wondered if Arthur Wildon or someone close to him was being punished for some unspecified offense through the dark suffocation of two little girls.