CHAPTER
5
The blackened ground crunched underfoot as a lone man walked where a forest fire had scorched the land. Suddenly, he stopped. There at his feet lay a tiny red rubber boot, half-charred by the flames. He stooped and picked it up, then raised his eyes to the heavens as if communicating with God.
In the hours that followed, teams of professionals found a few scattered bones of a child nearby. But it wasn’t just any man who’d discovered the little red boot. This was a father who’d found the earthly remains of his own son. And for him to have made his find on this precise day was incredible. His was one of the most amazing stories ever to lead to such a revelation and discovery.
The scorched ground was in a remote area deep in the foothills of the Rockies on the Sunchild First Nation Reserve northwest of Rocky Mountain House, and more than 220 kilometres west of Edmonton. Rodger Rinker and his wife, Karen, were missionaries on the reserve, where they lived with their five children. The Rinkers had enjoyed a long association with the Sunchild Reserve, first moving there in 1975. They moved away five years later, travelling north to Old Crow in the Yukon Territory inside the Arctic Circle. They returned in 1986, after hearing that the Sunchild Reserve had been without a missionary for several years. At first they lived in a tent, until the worst flood in the area’s history forced them to relocate to higher ground, which was where they built their church and their home. The family moved into their new house over Christmas 1986.
On May 6, 1987, Rodger was away on a trip to the United States, and little Jesse, his son, was playing by himself near the house. The two-and-a-half-year-old, flaxen-haired child often played there contentedly for hours. But when his mother went looking for him on this Monday afternoon, she couldn’t find him anywhere. It didn’t worry her for the first few minutes. The reserve wasn’t like a big city with cars and people rushing by—people who might snatch a kid off the street. This was a very remote spot hewn out of dense forest. Days could pass without the Rinkers seeing anyone. If they did have a visitor, it was usually someone they knew from the reserve. At that moment, there probably wasn’t another person other than Karen, her children and a few reserve residents within miles of their home.
Karen searched in the house, under the house, around the yard and in all Jesse’s favourite play areas. Earlier that afternoon, one of Jesse’s older brothers had walked away from the house along a lane through the heavy forest near the Baptiste River, which runs through the reserve. Someone thought they’d seen Jesse walking the same lane by himself. Perhaps he’d decided to follow his brother. They searched the lane, but he was nowhere to be found. Now Karen did start to worry. She called for help, and by 4:30 p.m. around 25 people from the reserve were beating the bush and calling Jesse’s name. It wasn’t easy. This was dense forest with thick scrubland and tall bushes. By nightfall they had found no trace of the toddler.
When he was informed that Jesse was missing, Rodger cut short his trip to Iowa and flew back immediately. By the next day he was home and the search party had increased to 100 people. Members of the Sunchild and O’Chiese Bands turned out, together with Alberta forestry workers, provincial park rangers, Alberta Fish and Wildlife personnel and nine members of the RCMP. Rocky Mountain House RCMP constable Richard Smith was searchmaster and led the entire group. Many of these people were professionally trained searchers, and it was an intensive hunt.
One searcher, Fred Dumais, who had been among the first to start looking on Monday, collapsed on Tuesday after searching non-stop for 24 hours. Fred had nine children at home and took the loss of anyone’s child as a devastating blow. He was carried home to his place on the reserve, where a prayer meeting was held for little Jesse at Fred’s bedside.
On the first full day of the search, teams covered two and a half square kilometres. The next day they intended to widen the search and tackle the Baptiste River and Coyote Creek, in case Jesse had fallen in the water. When the search for Jesse hit the media, it prompted an amazing public response. Volunteers flocked to the reserve to help, until more than 140 people were out looking for him. Soldiers in the British Army who were based at Nordegg, south of Rocky Mountain House, had been on military exercises nearby and were ordered into the search area to assist. The police brought in tracker dogs, and officers used infrared camera equipment from a police helicopter. Other officers dragged the Baptiste River from inflatable dinghies while scuba divers searched in the water, but no sign of the toddler was found.
On the third day of the search, a black pickup truck screeched to a halt at the command centre. A burly, heavily bearded man jumped out and sought out the search leader. He quickly explained that he was a licensed bear hunter and had just shot dead a black bear right in the heart of the area where Jesse had disappeared. He feared the bear may have eaten the little boy, and he’d brought it to the command centre to be opened up and examined. Such a suggestion had to be taken seriously, but needed to be handled with some delicacy. Rodger was near the command post at the time, but luckily hadn’t heard yet what was happening. The RCMP searchmaster directed the truck to an area behind the command centre, out of the view of searchers and, more importantly, away from Jesse’s father. Carefully, the bear was opened up. To the relief of everyone there, no human remains were found inside the animal.
The British soldiers brought a special expertise that the search organizers thought could help find Jesse. Very near the spot where he was last seen, several medium-sized lakes spread across the landscape. These had been formed over the years by beavers damming the nearby Baptiste River. It would be a huge operation to search every part of each lake, but there was one quicker way to solve the problem. If the army could blow up the beaver dams, the water would drain away. Strict safety precautions were taken and searchers were kept away from the dams. Sticks of dynamite were placed and the army blew the dams to pieces. The water drained off as predicted, but Jesse wasn’t there.
Then one of the British soldiers finally found tangible evidence, something everyone had been seeking. What he had stumbled on had serious implications—it looked very much like a freshly dug shallow grave, exactly the right size for the body of a toddler. Jesse must have met with violence. His killer must have buried him, and now the army’s diligent searching was about to reveal the crime.
With heavy hearts, a small group of RCMP officers and senior British army officers followed the soldier into a clearing in the forest where they were about to investigate the gravesite. Suddenly, the group was confronted by one of the O’Chiese elders, who intercepted them. They couldn’t go there, he told them. What the soldier had discovered was indeed the fresh grave of a child, but it wasn’t Jesse. This was the sacred burial ground of the O’Chiese tribe, and this was the grave of one of their children who had died recently.
Every day for a week the volunteers came with unflagging hope and determination. They came from the nearby communities of Rocky Mountain House and Leslieville, and from halfway across Alberta—Calgary, Edmonton, Ponoka, Stettler, Red Deer and Olds. A large group from the Mennonite church in Stettler swelled the search parties. Most searchers were parents who said if their child were missing, they would appreciate others helping them to search. The whole team experienced a massive outpouring of emotion as they joined together to look for the toddler. It was all coordinated by the professionals, who made sure that the critical zone, within two kilometres of where Jesse was last seen, was scoured four times in that first week.
After several days, and for the first time, Jesse’s parents voiced a different theory on the toddler’s disappearance. Perhaps he wasn’t out there in the bush. Perhaps, after all, there had been some stranger on the reserve the day Jesse went missing. “A kid just doesn’t disappear. If he’s not out in the bush then I think he may very well be alive with someone else,” said Karen.
Jesse possibly abducted? It might explain why no trace of him had been found despite the intense hunt by hundreds of people. But it also might just be the last desperate expression of hope for the couple. Jesse’s parents were surviving their ordeal purely on the power of prayer, with their unwavering faith pulling them through.
Nearly two weeks into the search, Rodger Rinker came to the conclusion that a stranger had definitely snatched Jesse. He made an emotional appeal for the kidnapper to return the boy and relieve family members of their agony. In his eyes, the search area was now one huge crime scene. Rodger revealed new information. On the day Jesse disappeared, several people remembered they had seen a strange vehicle on the reserve. Rodger’s experience told him that only three kinds of people ever ventured onto the reserve—band members who lived there, people working in the forestlands, or strangers. And strangers were so rare, he said, that his family never saw more than one vehicle a week. Yet, coincidentally, a strange vehicle was seen in the area on the very day Jesse disappeared. Rodger’s theory was gaining strength with the police as well. Corporal Glen Trites said the Mounties were becoming more and more convinced it was possible that Jesse had been snatched, since the ground searches for him had produced absolutely no clues.
Finally, after more than two weeks, the search was called off on May 19. But the police investigation carried on. Officers from Rocky Mountain House were joined by others from Red Deer as they interviewed numerous people. Still, Rodger Rinker was unhappy because he felt the police had let things slip. Halfway through June he complained to the media that RCMP weren’t working hard enough to find the stranger who may have snatched Jesse. Sergeant Ron Wesner defended his team’s effort. He revealed that they had discovered quite a bit about the strange vehicle on the reserve that day. It was a small, red, foreign-made model with a white camper. The driver, who’d been seen collecting bottles, was around 45 to 50 years old.
Now, nothing could shake the Rinkers’ belief that someone had taken Jesse, and they appealed to the kidnappers to have a change of heart and return the boy to them. The family extended their search outside the province. Rodger travelled to Saskatchewan to the east, British Columbia to the west and several American states to the south, distributing posters showing Jesse’s smiling face and tousled hair. He hoped that someone would recognize his boy. The Calgary-based Missing Children Society of Canada distributed 5,000 posters of Jesse throughout Alberta.
Five months later, on November 14, 1987, an incredible phone call turned their lives upside down. Police in Edmonton had an abandoned toddler at the station. He looked a lot like Jesse, and all the circumstances led to the optimistic assumption that it was Jesse who had been handed over to authorities. After all, no one else had reported a little boy missing.
Even before the Rinkers left Rocky Mountain House to race to Edmonton, they were given details about the toddler over the phone that confirmed, in their minds, that Jesse had been found. Every detail matched what they knew about Jesse. They could tell the police that Jesse had a burn scar on his back from when he bumped against the stove in their home. Police checked and confirmed the mark was there. The foundling needed to wear diapers, despite being nearly three years old, the same age as Jesse. The Rinkers said that Jesse had suffered a viral infection as a baby that had delayed his toilet training. In addition, the illness had held back his physical development as well as his emotional progress—another exact fit.
Edmonton city police officers said the little boy in their custody could only articulate the word “ice-cream.” This was the strongest clincher of all for the Rinkers. Jesse had his own little language and certainly couldn’t explain to anyone who he was or where he came from. But they knew he could say “ice-cream.”
Police explained the odd circumstances around the discovery of the little boy. Two Native women had knocked on the door of a house in Edmonton and asked the woman inside, a complete stranger, if she could look after this little non-Native boy for 20 minutes. The woman took him inside while she waited for the two women, but they never returned. A few days later, the woman took the boy to the police, where one officer noticed the resemblance to Jesse. All along, it had been thought that if Jesse had been snatched off the reserve and was being held, perhaps by Native people, one of them might have a change of heart and turn him in anonymously. That’s exactly what happened—well, almost.
A shattering disappointment awaited the Rinkers in Edmonton. The boy wasn’t Jesse. By an amazing coincidence, he was the same age as Jesse, looked a lot like him and had a birthmark on his back where Jesse had a burn scar. Like Jesse, he couldn’t communicate with words and was not toilet trained. Days later, police investigations revealed the other toddler was a two-and-a-half-year-old boy called Gary Moses.
Such an appalling disappointment might have destroyed other families in the Rinkers’ situation, but their unshakeable faith in God sustained them. And a month later Karen and Rodger were blessed with twin girls, who helped a little to fill the void left by Jesse’s disappearance. Rodger spoke to God daily and eventually came to understand that God had set a date by when his family would know for certain what happened to Jesse. God told Rodger he had set the date at a year and one month after the toddler disappeared. If the Lord was as good as his word, the Rinkers would have their answer on Sunday, June 4, 1988.
Something major happened on the Sunchild Reserve as that date approached. Two weeks before the Rinkers’ crucial Sunday, an enormous forest fire erupted not far from their home. Soon the wind-driven inferno was exploding through the tops of the fir trees and roaring through the dense, dry brush. The blaze blackened 8,000 hectares of land before a small army of firefighters brought it under control. Luckily, the wind had blown the flames away from the Rinkers’ home, which had been spared. Fire officials believed it was deliberately set, but they never found a culprit.
Sunday, June 4, 1988, came and still the family had no word of Jesse. Karen ended the day in tears, devastated that their hopes had been dashed again. Rodger knew there was only one thing left for him to do. He went out from their home to walk along the scorched earth blackened by the fire and to talk to God. “I remonstrated with God,” he said. “I complained bitterly to him about letting us down.”
What happened in the next few seconds was utterly miraculous. As Rodger walked, still berating God, he saw a moose antler showing starkly white against the blackened earth. The antler seemed to be pointing in a direction, so Rodger followed. A little further along the black trail he saw a second antler, this one pointing in a new direction. Following the direction of the second antler, he saw a third. When he picked up the third moose antler and walked a few paces farther, he saw in the blackened soil a tiny red rubber boot, half-charred by the flames. Inside the boot was a faded white sock. Thus, exactly one year and one month after Jesse had disappeared, Rodger discovered his son’s remains. “I was led there by the hand of God,” he said.
Rodger raced home with the boot, and an hour later the RCMP had assembled a 25-man search team. Near where Rodger had found the boot, searchers found other pieces of clothing. A tracker dog soon discovered human bone fragments. After several days of forensic tests, the province’s chief medical examiner in Edmonton, Dr. John Butt, confirmed what Rodger knew in his heart. The bone fragments and clothing were all that remained of Jesse.
As tragic and heartbreaking as it was, it was a relief for the Rinkers to know what had happened. Fearing their son had been alive in the hands of a kidnapper for 13 months was something they couldn’t handle. Knowing Jesse was dead gave them “an incredible sense of loss and great suffering,” but it was still a relief to have that knowledge.
The Rinker family held a funeral service on their beloved Sunchild Reserve, conducted by an Aboriginal minister from the Stoney Band. Then they buried Jesse in a small cemetery overlooking Moberly Lake on a remote Native settlement, 110 kilometres west of Dawson Creek, British Columbia, and about 600 kilometres northwest of Edmonton. Jesse had spent the first year of his life in the Moberly Lake settlement, and he was buried there alongside his brother James, who had been stillborn in January 1987.
Since then the Rinkers, from their base at Three Hills in central Alberta, have continued their calling. Their missionary work has provided the spiritual foundation for residents on two reserves, one at Rocky Mountain House in Alberta and the other at Old Crow in the Arctic.
All these years later one question remains. How could Jesse have been missed in the very heart of an area that had been searched by professional search teams at least four times? Rodger had found Jesse’s boot about 15 metres from the bank of Coyote Creek, and his few remains had been located a further 80 metres away.
Rodger surmises that Jesse had probably fallen into the creek, and his body had become submerged up under the bank. Thick foliage and undergrowth would have hidden his body from anyone walking along the creek bank, as well as from those searching the creek itself. After the searches were called off, it’s entirely possible that Jesse’s body surfaced naturally and animals dispersed his bones far and wide in the undergrowth. The vital factor was the forest fire that was so fortuitous for the Rinkers. The blazing inferno ravaged the area, cleared the foliage and exposed the blackened ground—finally enabling Jesse’s remains to be found on the very day that God foretold his fate would be revealed.