THE MISSING BOYS OF CALEDON: What Happened to Eric Larsfolk & John McCormick Jr.?
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Canada Unsolved Investigates:
What happened to Eric Larsfolk and John McCormick Jr.?
This story is the first in a series and podcast investigating the disappearance of Eric Larsfolk, 14, and John McCormick Jr., 15, who vanished from the McCormick farm in Caledon, Ontario, on August 24, 1981.
Canada Unsolved: The Missing Boys of Caledon
40 years of Silence and Screams
Podcast coming soon.If you have any information about this case, please contact Canada Unsolved using one of the methods below.
The main path leading from the McCormick farm to the gravel pit in July 2021. (Photo: Canada Unsolved)
Part I: August 24, 1981
In the waning days of summer in 1981, 14-year-old Eric Larsfolk was no different than many kids his age. As he ate supper with his parents on Aug. 24, he might have been thinking about the new friends he’d make when he started Grade 10 at Mayfield Secondary School in a few days, or of how he’d celebrate his birthday soon after. He might have been thinking about his friends in Fort Erie, Ont. It had been only weeks since the Larsfolks relocated to an affordable white farmhouse on Horseshoe Hill Road in Caledon, with views of the fields and rolling hills.
After supper, as Eric pedalled his new bike down the dusty gravel driveway, he was likely thinking about his blossoming relationship with his 13-year-old neighbour, Kim McCormick.
Eric’s father, Lloyd, watched his son disappear in the direction of the McCormick farm, less than one kilometre away. It was sometime after 6 p.m.
Eric didn’t know that Kim would be going to babysit for Paul and Maureen Lalonde, who lived up the road. Eric barely knew Kim’s 15-year-old brother, John Jr., and he had no way of knowing he would never come home.
Nearly 40 years later, there is no consistent version of what happened during the next five hours.
Eric Larsfolk outside of a Dairy Queen after winning a new red 10 speed bike (c. 1981).
The Larsfolks hadn’t been in the area long enough to know John McCormick Sr.’s reputation as a volatile, paranoid alcoholic who loved guns, and that the OPP had reportedly been called out to the property on a number of occasions.
Jen Paddon – a forensic case consultant, medicolegal death investigator and expert in the psychology of death investigations – was working as a private investigator in Ontario in 2008, when she heard about Eric and John Jr. from a GPR technician in the U.S. During her pro bono investigation, she interviewed Kim McCormick.
McCormick told Paddon that her father kept a mini fridge beside his bed and drank from morning until night. His drinking fuelled his violent temper—which was most frequently directed at John, who “irritated” him.
“[Kim said] John Jr. loved to drive the one farm car around the property, and her dad would get so mad at him, that he was ripping up the grass and stuff,” said Paddon.
By all accounts, John Jr. was a troublemaker.
“Eric's personality didn't jive with John Jr.'s personality. I was two years older, and somehow mine did,” says Eric’s older brother, Dave Larsfolk.
Dave can’t remember the exact moment the McCormicks came into their lives, but he knows it was his and Eric’s younger sister who’d befriended 13-year-old Kim McCormick at some point during the summer of 1981. And it was Dave – not Eric – who would eventually become friends with John Jr., sometime in mid-August, after 17-year-old Dave joined his family in Caledon and John Jr. came home from Virginia, when Kim brought him over to the Larsfolks’ home. By then, Eric and Kim had already been acquainted.
John Jr. had also spent most of the summer away. Earlier that summer, he’d had an explosive fight with his father, which some sources say resulted in John Jr.’s arm being broken. John Jr. had been sent to Virginia to recover with relatives for most of that summer. He returned on August 14, a few weeks after Dave came to Caledon.
During those 10 days John Jr. was home, he and Dave hung out. Dave remembers sneaking inside the house with him to steal a beer from John Sr.’s mini fridge. He remembers how the room was carpeted – walls and ceiling – and he remembers driving the black Chevy field car with John Jr. He remembers, vividly, John Sr. standing on the balcony of the house, yelling at John Jr., and he remembers how John Jr. “flipped him off.”
According to John Jr.’s friend and neighbour, Dwayne Speers, he and John Jr. had been out late in Orangeville the night before. He says he was in “shit” for not doing his chores. So on August 24, 1981, he wasn’t allowed to go over to the McCormick property, as had originally been the plan. Speers refused to say anything else about his childhood friend.
Until the night they vanished, Eric and John Jr. had never hung out alone together before.
“John came to the house to look for me, because I told him I was going to be home…” says Dave, who’d left Caledon on Friday to spend the weekend with his friends in Fort Erie, and had decided on August 24, 1981, to stay an extra night.
“So, he came to get me. And then I wasn't there, so then Eric went…” says Dave. “Lonely kids on a country road, basically, is all it was.”
Eric’s presence at the McCormick farm that night, his unfamiliarity with John Jr., and John Jr.’s contentious relationship with his father are among the few facts agreed upon by each of their families.
At around 11 p.m., Lloyd Larsfolk was jolted by a frantic pounding on the door. It was Joyce McCormick - John and Kim’s mother - who informed him the boys were missing.
Part II: The Field Car + The McCormick Farm
There was no trace of Eric and John Jr. anywhere. The only clue was John Jr.’s beat-up black Chevy farm car. It was discovered skidded to a stop—its hood and door open—inside the gate to a gravel pathway, at the edge of the field behind the McCormicks’ house, which leads to the gravel pit behind it. The boys’ bikes were found at the top of the driveway, leaning against the house.
When Dave returned home from Fort Erie the next day and joined the search at the McCormick farm, he immediately noticed the car. He says John Jr. took pride in his cars; he had six or eight of them, which he always kept neatly parked in a clearing between the field and the gravel pit. The car was out of place, and Dave knew exactly why the hood was open. He’d been the one to help John Jr. figure out how to start it.
“That was his favourite because it did run, but he didn't have the keys for it. They'd been missing,” says Dave. “I had a dune buggy before when I lived in Fort Erie. And the only way to start that was by jump starting it, because there was no ignition in the thing. So, you just attach the wires, and then you put a screwdriver between the two terminals of the starter and started it… it made the starter work, and then the engine would run.”
Starting the Chevy farm car was a two-person job.
When Dave saw it, the wires had been placed neatly on the driver’s seat.
The exact spot where John Jr.’s field car was discovered abandoned. (Photo: Canada Unsolved)
John McCormick Jr. Date unknown.
Lloyd
In 2011, former journalist Andrew Livingstone wrote a series about the case in the Caledon Enterprise. He also spent time getting to know Eric’s father, Lloyd, who is now in his 90s and at present is unable to confirm certain information.
Lloyd told Livingstone about Eric’s willingness to help at the family’s greenhouse business in Fort Erie, before Larsfolk lost it and had to move the family to Caledon. He talked about Eric’s love of hockey, Scouts Canada, fishing on the Niagara River, and his eagerness to start school that fall.
Lloyd also shared his vivid memories of Aug. 24, 1981—crawling in the dirt and heavy blackness, looking for broken branches in the pine saplings that lined the gravel pit, consumed by fear that someone had carried his boy away through the dense forests on the McCormicks’ 100-acre property. As chaos unfolded on that warm and cloudy August night, Larsfolk remembered how John McCormick Sr. sat inside the house, on the couch, drinking a beer.
“John Sr. told Lloyd that he had a friend over, and maybe the boys stowed away in the back of his pickup, and the friend was headed out west,” says Paddon.
By all known accounts, McCormick’s comment was his most significant contribution to the search, which was called off by police shortly after midnight. Later, the Larsfolks and investigators would learn the name of McCormick’s friend with the truck: George McCullough.
A decade after he wrote about the case, Livingstone says he’s still consumed by the “major gaps and red flags” he thinks he “overlooked.”
“I really wanted to solve it,” says Livingstone. “Wanting so badly to figure it out for Lloyd before he passes on is detrimental at times. But I often wonder if I let my own biases get in the way.”
***
Investigators initially dismissed the boys’ disappearance as a case of two runaway teens, suggesting they had gone to the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. Nobody knows where the theory came from. According to Dave, Eric had certainly never mentioned the Exhibition.
Neither boy had a change of clothes. Eric’s new backpack was found in his closet, and John’s wallet on top of his dresser. In early newspaper reports, the Larsfolks were steadfast in their assertion that Eric had never hitchhiked and would never run away. Dave says his family didn’t even have a phone.
“So, Eric would not have had a phone number to call,” says Dave.
The McCormicks refused to speak to reporters. Those close to the case described the family’s unwillingness to raise alarm for the boys, and their silence was noted by Snelgrove OPP in a brief Toronto Star article published Oct. 29, 1981.
As days turned to weeks and months, lead investigator Cst. Bill Currie of the Snelgrove OPP said the “routine teenage runaway” case was looking “more ominous.”
In early November, the OPP conducted a six-hour search of the swamps, woods and gravel pit on the McCormick farm using a helicopter and an infrared heat detecting camera capable of locating “decomposed matter or disturbed ground.” No physical evidence was found, and the ground search was abandoned. Four officers were kept on the case.
“It was an awful time I remember well,” says Heather Broadbent, a volunteer with Caledon Village Heritage in 1981. “Like the staff, I was instructed to keep my eyes open while touring about the town—even if we were not sure why or for what.”
As the Larsfolks prepared for their first Christmas without Eric, the McCormicks remained silent.
“It was such a horror for our community that boys could go missing. And it was just unthinkable. I mean we all had kids, you know, how does this happen? All of us carry that scar, all of us who lived in the neighborhood at the time. ”
Part III: 9 p.m.
It was still light out when Paul Lalonde drove Kim McCormick home at 9 p.m. on Aug. 24, 1981. Joyce was still at work.
According to Paddon, Kim said she was immediately concerned when she saw one of John’s old vans leaking oil on the driveway – it would piss off their dad if he saw – so she immediately set out to warn her brother. But Kim said she couldn’t find John Jr. anywhere.
“Kim insists there was absolutely no one else at the house, except her father, when she arrived home,” says Paddon.
The Lalondes remember differently. Although Paul Lalonde died in 2008, Maureen recalls exactly what happened that evening.
“Kim was babysitting the two kids at our house. When Paul got back from wherever he was, he packed the kids and Kim into the car and drove her home to her house. And that's when he saw the boys,” says Maureen. “They had their bicycles.”
Paul drove a large beige Lincoln, and “was being very cautious about turning around, because of the kids in the driveway.”
“Kim got out of the car and went over to the boys,” says Maureen. “And then he left and went home.”
Maureen says Paul had never met Eric or John Jr., but he described the boys in detail.
“He described what they were wearing, their bicycles…. he saw them very clearly in the driveway,” says Maureen.
It’s the same story the Lalondes tried to tell investigators in 1981, and it’s the same story they told Paddon in 2008.
“Maureen remembers that [Paul] had said he saw two boys,” wrote Paddon in her notes from her interview with Maureen in 2008. According to Paddon’s notes, one of them had blonde hair and a pageboy haircut.
Children’s bikes in front of the barn at the top of the McCormick driveway, where Paul Lalonde says he saw Eric Larsfolk and John McCormick Jr. on the night the boys disappeared.. The concrete floor was the subject of several GPR searches. (Photo: Canada Unsolved)
“It was like they knew he wasn’t coming back.”
Part IIII: 40 years of Silence and Screams
John and Joyce separated in 1986. John McCormick Sr. died of cirrhosis of the liver on October 15, 1987. Joyce McCormick remarried, to a neighbour named John Nelson. In 1991, Kim sold the farm to Ronald Graham and his wife, Sarah.
Both Kim and Joyce moved away from the area soon after.
Neither Kim nor Joyce responded to repeated requests to be interviewed, and surviving family members could not be reached.
***
In 1981, the Larsfolks’ search for Eric and the truth about that night had just begun. After Beverly Larsfolk died of breast cancer in May 2000, Lloyd moved to a basement apartment in Brampton. For years, he would frequently return to the McCormick farm and surrounding area, looking for any sign of Eric. According to Sarah Graham, Lloyd would come walk the property every month.
Now in his nineties, he was last there on a cold, wet day in the late fall of 2020, looking for his son.
Throughout the years, Lloyd also worked with Child Find to keep Eric’s photo circulating in newspapers. Psychics from across Canada, the U.S., and as far as Australia came to the family with ideas about what happened. Nothing led to Eric.
“There’s nothing more important in my life than finding my son,” Larsfolk said in a 2010 Caledon Citizen article, nearly 30 years after he watched his son ride his bike down the street to an unknown fate.
John Jr.’s immediate family would never speak to the media or cooperate with the Larsfolks.
The McCormicks packed up his room the first week he was gone. Sometime after that, they put up a headstone.
“It was like they knew he wasn't coming back,” says Livingstone.
The drastic juxtaposition of one family’s silence and another’s screams compounds the horror of the boys’ disappearance.
When Livingstone showed up at Darlene McCormick’s doorstep in 2011, it would be the only time a member of John Jr.’s family spoke to the media.
Darlene was married to John Sr.’s brother, Michael. They lived next door to the McCormick farm. Though Michael did not participate in Paddon’s and Livingstone’s investigations, Darlene agreed to talk. Darlene said she and Michael kept the same phone number in case John Jr. ever called. She said they called him “little John,” and that he doted on Sarah, their infant daughter.
Livingstone remembers Darlene as a “lovely” and “comforting type of person.”
“She talked about her experience with John [Jr.] and how much time he spent at their house – particularly because home life at his house with [John Sr.] was obviously untenable at times, because of his alcoholism, and the abuse that was going on, and sort of the chaos,” said Livingstone. “So, [John Jr.] would spend a lot of time there. And I know she said her husband and him were quite close… she would bake for him and cook.”
According to Paddon’s notes, Darlene said John Jr. “adored his mother and tried to get his father’s love but never succeeded.”
Darlene died in 2012.
Livingstone also remembers how his conversation with Darlene took a turn when it came to discussing the night the boys vanished.
“I started asking questions about when they – when he went missing, and it got dark… it just got cold for her,” he says. “She wouldn't say a whole lot about that night, it was more about what came after… I questioned how much she actually knew.”
“I think she was actually just scared,” he says.
Robert Lewis
Unlike some high-profile cases of missing children in Ontario in the 1980s, Eric and John Jr.’s disappearance failed to sustain the interest of mainstream news media. In the absence of credible information, rumours spread online and in the Caledon community.
According to one source, the McCormicks refused to provide a photo of John Jr. to the police or the media in the early days of the disappearance, and the OPP eventually obtained one from a relative.
“When two kids are missing like that, every rumour and every lead gets followed up on,” said one retired Shelburne OPP homicide detective who knew the original investigators in the case and agreed to speak for this story on the condition of anonymity.
“There was a lot of people going missing in those days—all over Ontario—but there was some foul play with those boys.”
Robert Lewis leaving Orangeville Court in May 2014
(Photo: Bill Sandford, My Kawartha)
By the time Eric and John Jr. vanished, the community of Caledon had already been shaken by fear and tragedy.
In May 1970, two nurses were found murdered in their rural Caledon homes. Nearly 30 years later, in 1999, DNA led investigators to Ronald West—a former Toronto police officer.
West wasn’t the only law enforcement officer who committed horrific crimes in Caledon.
Robert George “Bob” Lewis was a Caledon OPP officer whose 30-year career in the force ended with his retirement in 1997. In 2006, In 2006, several victims came forward with claims of sexual abuse by Lewis that had occurred when they were young teenage boys in Caledon in the 70s and 80s.
Following two Caledon OPP investigations, Lewis was charged with 25 sex-related offences involving 10 young teenage boys. He was convicted of 19 of those charges.
Lewis had attacked his victims while on-duty, often using his cruiser. His victims described in court how they’d been intimidated by Lewis’ uniform and stature; he was well over six feet tall.
Lewis had also befriended many of his victims’ families.
The area where Eric and John Jr. disappeared was Lewis’ “regular hunting ground,” said Paddon, adding Kim had mentioned Lewis’ name, but later denied knowing who he was.
George McCullough
The Hockley Valley is littered with sinkholes, creeks, abandoned wells, horse farms, railroad tracks and industrial mills. If you drive 20 km north of Horseshoe Hill Road and make a few turns, you’ll eventually reach the brown, dilapidated shack where George McCullough lived in 1981. Nearby – and throughout Caledon – are gullies of distinct, bright red Queenston shale.
Little is known about McCullough; he was a mechanic who worked odd jobs around the McCormick farm and at John Sr.’s autobody shop on Hockley Road.
“He was an awful guy, yeah, but a drunk. But so was John McCormick though, too,” says Sarah Graham. “John [Sr.’s] dad was a drunk, but he was a nice drunk. Everybody liked him at the dances, but not [John Sr.] his son, no.”
In 1981, McCullough would have been about 27 years old. He had three daughters with blonde hair and may have been in a relationship with a woman named Isabelle Stokes.
“He was always around,” says Livingstone. “He was, you know, a bit rough. And sort of scared a lot of people. He was very intimidating.”
Everyone close to the case knows McCullough’s name, and two stories: the first is he burned down a house, killing his wife or girlfriend inside, and the other is the story about the dog.
In July 1999, 46-year-old McCullough used a chain to tie his one-year-old Rottweiler, Nikita, to the back of his truck. For over 1.3 km, McCullough drove fast, dragging Nikita on the road. According to witnesses, when Nikita collapsed, McCullough got out of his truck, made her stand, and kept driving.
During the highly publicized animal cruelty trial that followed, McCullough was verbally and physically confronted by an “angry mob” of two dozen people at the courthouse in Cobourg. The last report of the trial was in August of that year. Less than a year later, in March 2000, McCullough died of lung and throat cancer.
According to Paddon’s notes, Kim, John Jr. and Joyce hated McCullough. They nicknamed him “the weasel.”
On August 25, 1981, Lloyd Larsfolk stood with Snelgrove OPP officers in the gravel pit, dragging the water in search of the boys’ bodies, while tracking dogs from Canadian Forces Base Borden followed the boys’ scent to an electrical shed at the gravel pit’s west edge – the exact spot where Dave tells me he’d walked with Eric, John Jr. and Kim just days prior, before turning around.
Lloyd also noticed a white truck on the property. It was parked near the barn, covered in red clay. McCullough was there, his coveralls caked in red clay too.
There were also the phone calls.
Darlene McCormick said “some time” after Eric and John disappeared, she received anonymous calls from someone who told her to “watch out for Sarah,” her only daughter. She said she thought the voice sounded like McCullough’s.
Lloyd also received anonymous calls. In one instance, a few weeks after the boys disappeared, Beverly picked up the phone. The person on the line said Eric and John were being kept alive in the basement of a home in Caledon.
Beverly and Lloyd waited until dark, then drove to the house with flashlights. Lloyd broke in, made his way to the basement, and shouted Eric’s name. The homeowner chased him out with a gun, shooting at him as he fled.
***
What happened?
In 2011, Livingstone had a brief “parameter-based” interview with the OPP. He also had a conversation with Currie.
“They wouldn't even really reveal a lot about who maybe was or wasn't investigated,” says Livingstone of his conversation with the OPP. “But I remember [Currie] saying [McCullough and McCormick Sr.] were suspects at a point.”
In October 2010, Det. Insp. Andy Karski of the OPP criminal investigation bureau officially re-opened the case. That month, six locations on the McCormick property were searched using ground penetrating radar (GPR), which can detect soil disruptions up to three metres below the surface. One of those areas was the McCormicks’ barn, which had been searched once before in May 2000.
Several sources say a new cement floor in the tack room of the barn was poured in the week after the boys disappeared. It’s unclear if McCullough’s property was ever searched.
The OPP refuses to confirm details about the search and investigation, or comment on the status of the case, citing an “active investigation” and “privacy” concerns.
Sarah Graham says it’s been a decade since anyone from the OPP has called or searched the former McCormick property.
The former Shelburne OPP detective says he often thinks about Eric and John Jr.
“Where those bodies are, I haven’t got a clue,” he says. “If I did, I’d be trying to help find them. The longer these people are missing, the harder it is to find them.”
Livingstone said his recent discussions with Dave Larsfolk have made him reconsider the narrative he pursued in his series: that John McCormick Sr. lost his temper with John Jr. and both boys were killed as a result.
“I don't know if that theory stands today,” says Livingstone.
No trace of Eric or John Jr. has ever been found, giving life to the possibility of a different ending to this story.
Map of area: Horseshoe Hill Road
DO YOU HAVE INFORMATION ABOUT ERIC LARSFOLK OR JOHN MCCORMICK JR.?
No tip or detail is too small.
If you know anything about Eric Larsfolk or John McCormick Jr. or their disappearance, know anyone involved, or have a tip, please get in touch using the form below or email canadaunsolved.contact@gmail.com
Podcast coming fall 2021.
NOTES
Special thanks to Dave Larsfolk, Sarah Graham, Jen Paddon (Paddon Consulting), Andrew Livingstone, Karen Johnson and Maureen Lalonde.
This story is dedicated to Lloyd Larsfolk.
