He Said He Passed the Polygraph—But No One Saw the Results | Lilly and Jack Sullivan
You said they’re flying in someone to do a polygraph test.
Is that on you?
That’s not just on me, but on everyone. That’s what I asked for. I asked for that so early on, and there’s not many places that do it in Canada, so they’re flying somebody in.

Why do you think you need to do that? Do you think they don’t believe you?
I think their side of the family doesn’t believe me, and I just want to clear it up for everyone.
Clear it up for everyone — not just the people online making crazy accusations.

Todd, the stepfather, tells me that despite Major Crimes being involved, he’s been told that this investigation is still being treated as a missing person’s case. He also insists that he’s been cooperating with the police — including providing a polygraph test, which he says he did, and he says he passed.

The man was Daniel Martel, the stepfather of two missing children whose names were echoing across Nova Scotia: Lily and Jack Sullivan.
And in a case already drowning in confusion, fear, and inconsistencies, this small admission should have brought clarity — but instead, it only deepened the shadows.

He claimed the test exonerated him — that he had nothing to hide.
But there was no paper, no signature, no agency standing behind his words.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police — who had been combing through forests, draining bogs, and analyzing digital footprints — said nothing.
No confirmation.
No denial.
Just silence.

And in this silence, suspicion grew louder.
Because in high-stakes disappearances like this — where the public watches every move and every word — polygraph results are rarely kept private.
When they clear someone, they are broadcast, underscored, held up like a shield.
Yet here, there was nothing.
Just one man’s word floating above a sea of doubt.
Was it truth — or a carefully timed distraction?

Tucked deep within the wooded stillness of Landsdowne Station, Nova Scotia, stood a house few paid attention to — until two children vanished without a trace.
Inside lived Daniel Robert Martel, 33 years old.
A man with no criminal record, no spotlight, and strangely — no full-time job.
He worked just one day a week at a local lumber yard, yet managed to support a household — a household that included his partner, her two young children, Lily and Jack Sullivan, and their infant daughter.

But when Lily and Jack disappeared, the quiet questions about Daniel’s life grew louder.

Today, we go beyond the headlines and into the heart of suspicion.
We’ll examine every inconsistency, every calculated response, every red flag.
Because sometimes the answers don’t lie in what people scream — they hide in what they quietly control.
And the truth about Daniel Martel may be buried deeper than anyone imagined.

“I urge you probably to come out as fast — if you have anything, come out as fast as possible and get it to any detachment or any police service that you have available to get to talk to.”

“Jack just absolutely loves bugs, dinosaurs, and anything like that. But Lily — Lily loves girly things, but she also loved doing everything with Jack — bugs. They’re like best friends, not just brother and sister.”

From the beginning, Daniel’s behavior wasn’t what people expected.
His interviews didn’t unfold like those of a frantic stepfather devastated by the disappearance of the children he helped raise.
They came across rehearsed, mechanical, almost clinical.
Word for word. Sentence for sentence.
His phrasing remained eerily consistent across different interviews — like a monologue practiced in a mirror, not a plea for help.

There was no stumbling over memories, no hesitation — just clean, deliberate lines delivered in a flat, emotionless cadence.
It was as if he wasn’t speaking from grief, but from a script.

Even more unsettling was his choice of tense.
Speaking about Lily — the six-year-old girl who was still missing — Daniel used the past tense:

“She loved girly things,” he said.

Like her story had already ended.
That may sound minor, but in forensic linguistics, it’s a red flag.
Innocent parents almost always cling to the present tense.
It’s subconscious — they believe, or want to believe, their child is still alive.
The switch to past tense suggests a different belief entirely — one he wasn’t even aware he was revealing.

Perhaps the most haunting part was the absence of raw emotion.
Daniel spoke in complete thoughts.
His voice never broke.
His words never stumbled.
He didn’t cry. He didn’t pause.
There was no grasping for language — no evidence of a mind struggling to process unbearable loss.

Instead, there was composure.
Perfect, practiced composure.
Too perfect for a man who claimed to be unraveling.

When he did show emotion, it was strangely misdirected.
At one point, he referred to the children as being too trusting —
Instead of focusing on the terror of their disappearance, he framed the problem as a trait the children possessed.
It wasn’t what someone did to them — it was their own trusting nature that made them vulnerable.

That kind of phrasing isn’t just unsettling — it suggests psychological distance from the victims.
And potentially, an unconscious attempt to shift blame onto them.

The deeper investigators looked, the more inconsistencies they uncovered.

According to Daniel, that morning began with Lily walking in and out of their room multiple times.
He claimed he asked her to be quiet, not to wake the baby.
Meanwhile, Maleah, the children’s mother, gave a different version entirely.
She said she was dozing in and out of sleep, and only noticed the children were missing when the house suddenly felt too quiet.

That’s not a minor contradiction.
If Daniel was actively interacting with the children, how did the mother not notice any of it?
And if she didn’t — was it because it didn’t happen at all?

There were also gaps in the timeline that raised more questions than answers.
Daniel told reporters that the children went missing around 9:00 a.m.
But the official 911 call wasn’t placed until 10:00 a.m.
And in some conflicting reports, the disappearance is recorded as early as 8:00 a.m.

That leaves a window of 60 to 120 minutes completely unaccounted for.
In a case where every second matters, that missing time becomes more than a mystery — it becomes a shadow.

Then there was Daniel’s public messaging.
From the very beginning, he pushed the idea that the children had been abducted.
He speculated they might have been lured with snacks or sweets.
But the RCMP refused to confirm that theory.
In fact, they never even issued an Amber Alert — something that would normally be automatic in a suspected child abduction case.