Suspended Justice: Mystery of drowned fishermen reinvestigated in Tyendinaga

Hamilton Spectator

14-05-2025

In 2015, two young men went out to spearfish on the Bay of Quinte. On their return, they planned to teach a younger nephew the Mohawk way of preparing the fish. Instead, they disappeared.
Matthew Fairman was 26 and Tyler Maracle just 21 when they drowned under mysterious circumstances. On May 5, 2025, the Toronto Police Service agreed to reinvestigate the 2015 drowning deaths of the two fishermen from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, a decision reached thanks to a two-year investigation by Kenneth Jackson, a journalist from Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) Ottawa, and a pair of families who refused to give up on their young men.
Jackson has over 20 years of experience in the journalism industry, and his work covers topics from politics and corruption to social justice and human rights. He is known for digging in. After the deaths of four First Nation teen girls in care, Jackson spent the next five years reporting on the child welfare system in Ontario, uncovering systemic issues and injustices affecting Indigenous children and families. The investigative work earned multiple awards, including the 2020
Michener Award
for public service journalism, which he received with Cullen Crozier.
Jackson's documentary APTN Investigates: Secrets of the Bay delves into the mysterious deaths of the two fishermen. The accepted police theory at the time was that the two men were out at night stealing fish from gill nets and that they overloaded their boat, swamped, and drowned.
Their family and friends disagree.
'Police were saying, 'It's a drowning, it's a drowning. They were stealing fish,'' says Matty Fairman's mother in the documentary, 'and we were saying 'No, it's not. Those boys wouldn't have been doing that, and they both knew how to swim.'' Family and friends suspect foul play.
Maracle and Fairman disappeared on April 26, 2015, after setting out to spear fish in their favourite spot at a lighthouse at the end of Telegraph Narrows on the Bay of Quinte. They said goodbye to Maracle's dad, Robin, around 1:30 a.m.
The boat ride, with an eight-horsepower motor, should have taken approximately half an hour. No one knows if they made it to the lighthouse, but their cellphones disconnected from a nearby cell tower at 3:09 a.m.
Their families reported them missing by 9 a.m.
According to the documentary, the truck the boys drove to the Bay was left where it would reasonably have been parked. Their shoes were neatly left on the ground next to the truck, which made sense because that was where they would have put on their chest waders.
That day, searchers found Tyler's jacket and phone almost directly across the Bay from where the men launched. Mitts belonging to Matty were spotted. Their chest waders were located just west of the Skyway Bridge on the south shore.
Tyendinaga Police controlled the land-based investigation. The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) searched the depths of the Bay using side-scan sonar, which detects and creates images of objects on the floor of a body of water. Police divers were also deployed, and a military helicopter looked down from above.
A boat was found, but it was covered in zebra mussels, and police research determined it had been there for 17 years. A bike and a tire were also pulled from the depths. Volunteers dragged the bottom with hooks —- but still nothing.
Jackson says in the film, 'Police records show that several days into the search, the OPP made a promise to the families [that] neither the boys nor their boat were in the water.'
Then, after 13 days of searching, the men's bodies were found on Friday, May 8, 2015. Jackie Perry, then-media relations officer with the Napanee OPP, said in news reports at the time that around 2:30 p.m., members of the OPP marine unit responded to a VHF radio alert about a man in the water between the Skyway Bridge and Lighthouse Island. After recovering the first body and returning to shore, they were approached by another boater around 3:15 p.m., who reported finding a second body in the same area.
Both bodies were floating in the narrows despite it having been heavily searched for 13 days, and despite the OPP's promise that the men weren't in the Bay.
The following day, Mohawk Fire Department volunteers used a simple underwater camera to find the boat submerged near where the bodies were found in about 15 feet of water.
Inside the boat were all the things the men had taken with them for spear fishing. There was also a net of rotting fish belonging to another man, who owns land along the water. Without weighing or counting the fish, Tyendinaga Police and the OPP quickly concluded that the fishermen stole the net, which overloaded their boat and caused them to drown.
The families were devastated. They did not believe their sons were thieves, and they knew both could swim.
Jackson says that in 2018, a friend contacted him who wondered if he could help the Maracle and Fairman families, but he was too busy digging deep into his child welfare investigation to do so.
'Then fast forward to May 2023, two years ago. I had finished the work that I wanted to do on child welfare, exposed sexual predators up north, and got all these things done that I felt I needed to do, and was ready for the next chapter,' he shares.
'I remember sitting on my front porch, reflecting… what's next? And Tyler [Maracle]'s mom, Tammy, popped into my head.'
So Jackson reached out to the friend who had asked him to help in 2018, asking if anything had changed in the past five years and if the case had perhaps been solved.
'And they go, 'No, it's gone pretty quiet.' I go, 'Oh, has the mom gone quiet too?' And actually that's kind of funny, because if you know Tammy Maracle, you know that she would never go quiet,' Jackson says.
According to the documentary, Tammy Maracle and others have been protesting for the case to be reopened since it was closed. As a result, the OPP reinvestigated in 2020. They estimated that the boat had been carrying approximately 600 pounds of fish; they did not change their opinion that it had been swamped (filled with water, but remaining upright).
When Jackson contacted the families, he promised to investigate the story, but to do so with his eyes open. He says he told them, 'I don't have an opinion either way. I know you guys are all convinced, but I will look at everything you have. We're going to look there, we're going to talk to everyone we can, and I'll keep an open mind —- but the police theory is probably right.'
Jackson has nothing against police work, saying, 'More often than not, they get it right.' But he was convinced by the persistence of the families who insisted that the men were not thieves and that they didn't just swamp their boat and drown.
'So I started peeling back the layers of it all, and we started looking at things. We did our first two chapters of Secrets of the Bay in the fall of 2023, and I was starting to see the holes in the case. I saw a lot of sloppy police work. It was unfortunate.'
He says he told the families, 'This was done so sloppily that you may never get the evidence that you need... anything forensics [could detect is] gone, right?'
'Like the truck the boys drove to the water —- It was left outside for a week; people climbed all over it. Things were left. Things weren't done,' Jackson says.
'Tyendinaga Police were in charge of the overall investigation... The OPP helped because water was their jurisdiction. Still, it was Tyendinaga's lead… Long story short, they didn't respond, in my opinion, quickly enough to certain things. They didn't take it seriously enough at first.'
So he started to test the police theory. The family said police didn't understand gill netting, so Jackson decided he would go and pull a gill net in to see what would happen.
He also says the families and others have provided information that he can't put on the record yet, for legal reasons.
In chapter two of the documentary, which was filmed in fall 2023, Jackson and the team 'decided to dig up the boat boys used the night that they supposedly drowned.'
'It was buried because some people convinced the families that it was a Mohawk tradition to bury the boat to protect others from ever drowning the same way in the boat. They're thinking it was cursed, almost, right?' says Jackson.
And is that a legitimate tradition?
'Not really,' says Jackson. 'A lot of people dispute that. Tyler's father, who is Mohawk, disputes that.'
'I just had a gut feeling that that boat had to come up,' Jackson says, noting he is very grateful to BuildAll Contractors in Shannonville for providing employees, backhoes, and gas to unearth the boat. 'It was all done for free, right? Which is pretty cool.'
'We dug it up. It was still intact,' Jackson says.
Everything was still there, including about 600 feet of fishing net, according to Jackson, 'But then over the winter, it sat outside Tyler, Robin, and Tammy's home.'
After some conversations, the suggestion emerged that they should take the boat out on the water, he says.
Jackson explains the thinking: 'Let's see how it reacts. Let's test the police theory. Can we get enough weight to go down? Because the police theory is that the boat had too much weight (600 pounds) of stolen fish in the netting that was found in it.'
That would be a heck of a lot of fish.
Jackson agrees, 'Yeah, it's proved to be an insane theory: [that] the boat got weighed down so much that water just slowly came over the sides, filling it, which is called swamping, and it slowly sank flat to the bottom, [while the boys did] nothing to stop it from happening.'
On a calm night. When both of them could swim.
'The families think [the boys and the nets] were taken out, put back later, to make it look like they were stealing fish or had drowned then. And to be honest, there's no evidence to disprove that theory. It's a plausible theory,' the reporter says.
He points out that the boat was found about 15 feet underwater. When he's flown drones over it, as can be seen in the documentary, the water is pretty transparent, and you can see things on the bottom at that depth. Furthermore, the old zebra mussel-covered boat was found with sonar in much deeper water.
'And they had not only sonar but also an underwater camera from the fire department that they were using going through it, which is clear as day when you see [the boat],' says Jackson.
'One of the things I never said on camera is that I had a conversation with Tammy before we put the boat on the water... 'Tammy, if this boat goes down, we're done. I can't do anything more. I've run out of options. If it goes down, the police are right.''
But they weren't, and APTN Investigates proved it.
Jackson describes rigorous testing: 'We almost set it up to sink because we put all the weight in [1,500 pounds, not the 600 pounds police estimated] and then back into the water. So at one point, I think, 'It's gonna go right to the bottom; it won't even float.''
'But it not only went in,' he says, 'I couldn't get it down. I mean, there's no way. There's no way for two young men weighing 140 pounds each. I was 230 [pounds] then, and the guy who helped me was 230 pounds; he and I alone can't get it down. The boat had way more weight than the boys would have had.'
He marvels, 'There are so many things the police didn't do, and one of them is they didn't confirm with the manufacturer what boat it was. So I went online, looking through historical advertising for Smoker Crafts.'
Jackson says he found the boat the men used, a 1970s-era model. It 'says it has a wider flare of its bow, making it a wider, sturdier boat in dangerous water.'
A series of videos shows them filling the boat with 820 pounds of bagged sand and mounting the same inoperable eight-horsepower motor used by the fishermen for additional weight in the first test. With Jackson inside the boat, the total weight was 1,100 pounds.
For the second test, they used a working eight-horsepower motor to manoeuvre across the Bay, beginning at 1,100 pounds and increasing to over 1,500. They made quick starts and stops, zig-zagging and making sharp turns. At the end of the test, after the boat didn't sink, they lowered the weight back to 1,100 pounds, and three men pushed on the side to swamp and sink it. It was the only way the boat would go down.
Jackson's conclusion: 'Someone purposely did it.'
Between 2013 and 2015, there was a net war in Tyendinaga. Jackson says that netting can be very territorial: 'Where people have nets in certain spots, they consider it their territory.' Net buoys have clips with numbers that indicate who owns them, and people were cutting each other's nets or stealing them.
He can't be sure whether Maracle and Fairman were involved in that, but he doesn't believe they were because their families don't believe they were. The fact remains: 'There was tension on that water.' Did the boys run afoul of an angry gill netting group?
Or perhaps they stumbled onto an organized crime operation in the act. The Bay of Quinte has a long history of smuggling, courtesy of its winding shape, sheltered coves, and proximity to the U.S. border. 'You can basically go anywhere in the world from there,' Jackson points out.
Notoriously, during American Prohibition (1920–1933), the Bay became a key launching point for smuggling alcohol into the U.S. Rum-runners used fast boats to dodge the authorities in nighttime runs. Smuggling has never vanished entirely from the area, more recently involving contraband cigarettes, drugs and even human smuggling. It remains a possibility that the boys found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Finally, the young men's behaviour that night just doesn't support the idea that they were planning to steal fish nets.
'They had the spears, and they were wearing their chest waders because their shoes were neatly next to the truck. You would remove them, put your chest waders on, and get into your boat,' Jackson explains, pointing out that experienced fishermen would know that wearing chest waders when attempting to steal gill nets would be foolhardy —- bending over the water brings with it the chance of falling in, which would cause the waders to fill and pull you under.
'They purposely sat in Tyler's garage fixing a spotlight to spear fish,' Jackson says. 'They have five car batteries in there [to operate the light]. They had a trolling motor.'
'Actually, earlier that day, they were out with Matty's nephew, Madison, and they wanted to spear and show him, 'This is how you clean a fish. This is how we do this as Mohawk.'... The next morning they were going to show the little boy how to do it,' he says. 'It's heartbreaking.'
But now, thanks to his documentary and the tests with the boat, the case is reopened, giving Jackson hope.
'This is the first time that dedicated homicide detectives will be investigating the deaths of Matty and Tyler, and I think that's incredible, and I think that's amazing for the families,' he expresses.
'I think that's always been needed here because it's never been treated as a crime, right? Even when it originally happened, the case was always a missing persons case. It was never a criminal investigation.'
Now, a full decade since the men's deaths, Ontario's chief coroner agrees that the police theory of how the boat went down was incorrect. Dr. Dirk Huyer visited the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory to meet privately with the families. APTN Investigates' findings prompted Huyer to bring his own experts to run tests last summer. The families finally heard the results of those tests on March 3, 2025, and OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique requested that the Toronto Police Service Homicide Unit reinvestigate the case.
On Monday, May 12, 2025, Huyer discussed his role in the investigation: changing the cause of death from 'accidental' drowning to 'undetermined' drowning.
While he is prohibited from discussing specifics, even though many details have been discussed publicly, Huyer talked about his role as chief coroner, which is to investigate deaths that are not known to be natural and which are generally sudden and unexpected.
'When we investigate those [deaths], we're trying to find answers to five questions,' he explained. 'Who passed? When did they pass? What was the location where they passed? What was the medical cause of death?'
The fifth question comes after making these determinations, when the coroner must then classify the death as natural, accidental, a suicide, a homicide —- or 'sometimes the cause is undetermined, where we can't fully answer the questions as to what might have happened.'
Huyer credits Jackson, APTN, and the men's families for doing their tests on the boat, calling into question the mechanism of how it sank, and bringing it to his attention.
'In any death investigation, when we hear questions, we look at them and consider them within the investigation. In this particular circumstance, there were questions about how the boat sank. How did the men get in the water?' he said.
He brought in his own team of experts who understand how boats work to review the boat itself and provide their thoughts. After their analysis, they could not agree with the OPP's original determination.
'The boat didn't sink in the way that the OPP thought it did,' said Huyer.
Because the mechanism of how the boys ended up in the water could no longer be differentiated, the chief coroner had to change the classification from accidental to undetermined, he shared.
'Then I also contacted the Ontario Provincial Police to let them know that we have this new information, and they decided to ask another police service to take the next steps, so they reached out to the Toronto Police Service. That's the whole journey.'
On Saturday, May 3, 2025, the
cold case section
of the Toronto Police Homicide Unit agreed to lead the investigation.
Thanks to APTN and Jackson, the families may finally find peace.
Anyone with information is asked to call Toronto Police at 416-808-7400 or email
[e-mail]
.
'Suspended Justice' is an in-depth column written by reporter Michelle Dorey Forestell, which examines cold cases in the Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington (KFL&A) region. Launched in January 2024, the column is published monthly in an attempt to keep cold cases on the minds of those living in the area, with the hope that anyone whose memory is jogged might reach out to police with information.
The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) can be reached at 1-888-310-1122. Tips about any crime can be submitted anonymously to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477), or online
here
.
If there is a case that's gone cold in the KFL&A region that you would like Kingstonist to look into, please contact Editor Tori Stafford via email at
[e-mail]
.