Missing Cape Bretoner inspires filmmaker who wants to make documentary
SYDNEY — Twenty-one years ago, a Cape Breton man disappeared without a trace. Now, a documentary filmmaker wants to unravel the mystery of what happened to him.
Filmmaker Ron Lamothe of Terra Incognita Films, based in Concord, Mass., has launched a campaign via the crowdsourcing website Kickstarter. He’s looking to raise $78,000 for a documentary delving into the mystery of Kenley Matheson’s disappearance.
The Inverness County native and graduate of the Strait Area Education Recreation Centre in Port Hawkesbury disappeared from Wolfville just two weeks after he began attending classes there at Acadia University.
Matheson, the then 20-year-old Glendale native, was reportedly last seen the morning of Sept. 21, 1992, walking west out of Wolfville on Main Street. His bank account was never touched, his body was never found and his family never heard from him again.
“He’s there, in his dorm room, seen by the resident assistant at around 10 o’clock … and then the next day he’s gone, and we have nothing,” Lamothe said. “It’s a mystery and you can imagine the toll that’s taken on the past two decades on his family.”
In 2005, Kings County District RCMP used a helicopter and experienced searchers to pick through a heavily wooded area in the town, but they reported that no new evidence was found.
Lamothe said he first learned of the Matheson case about two years ago, when he was contacted by someone who worked as part of a team re-examining the matter.
“The story stayed with him, so much so that he told me that it kept him up sleepless at night thinking about this and he was still, in a sense, unofficially working the case.”
A previous Lamothe project looked into Christopher McCandless, the subject of the book “Into The Wild.”
The investigator who contacted Lamothe suggested he might want to look into whether there was any possibility that Matheson had crossed paths with McCandless sometime in spring 1992, as McCandless was travelling through Canada to Alaska and as Matheson was heading to British Columbia to work as a tree planter.
McCandless was an American hiker who ventured into the Alaskan wilderness in 1992 planning to live for a time in solitude, but his body was found four months later, after he starved to death.
“He wanted to see if there was any possibility in part because there is something of a coincidence in that right around where Kenley disappears is right around the time that Chris McCandless’s body is found … and they are sort of kindred spirits in a sense and he wanted to see what I thought about that as a possibility,” Lamothe said.
That planted a seed in Lamothe’s head, he said, and convinced him that Matheson’s story needed to be told and a film might help to lead to new evidence and some long-awaited answers for Matheson’s family.
Lamothe has already made a few trips to Nova Scotia and shot some preliminary research footage in Cape Breton. He has met Matheson’s family, in particular spending time earlier this year with Matheson’s mother Sarah MacDonald and sister Kayrene Willis.
The planned “Missing Kenley” documentary presents some challenges, from a fundraising perspective, Lamothe said, hence the Kickstarter campaign.
“This is a really difficult piece to raise money for, it’s not a humanities project or on a political or social issue, it’s on a 21year-old cold case that few people outside of Nova Scotia have ever heard of, so that’s a tough one,” he said. “Thankfully, with this new platform, this crowdsourcing site Kickstarter, we can raise money through private donations and that gives us the potential perhaps if we’re successful in entering production and hopefully telling the story and perhaps uncovering some new evidence and new answers that might ultimately solve the mystery as to his disappearance.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, the campaign had raised just over $9,000. It will come to an end Dec. 4.
Lamothe will receive no money from those offering to back the project until the goal of $78,000 is met. If the goal is met, production could begin immediately, and it would allow Lamothe’s crew to follow the footsteps Matheson took in his travels. The film could possibly be released in September 2015.
Kickstarter campaigns offer backers various rewards for different levels of financial support.
The campaign’s Kickstarter page can be found at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lamothe/missing-kenley.