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UPDATE: MEETING WITH MEDFORD GUPTILL
My sincere apologies at the outset in terms of the length of this post. However, given the nature of this case, it is my belief that it’s better to provide every detail that emerges with the public in hopes that someone might see something or make a new connection that helps move the investigation forward. I will have some recommendations at the very end as to what still needs to be done by investigators, and a way for us to hold them accountable (and also provide new leads).
To begin, one of the nagging loose ends for me in the Kenley Matheson case has always been Medford Guptill. His name (as well as the name Stanely Hiltz) was among those found in Kenley’s dorm room on 10 October 1992 (it should be noted that the piece of paper on which Guptill’s and Hiltz’s names were written was either never taken into evidence or was removed from the case file, for it seems to have disappeared, which is unfortunate because it prevents us from analyzing the handwriting). The typewritten Wolfville Police Timeline, which was created from the handwritten Continuation and Supplementary Reports, lists two names under the category of Other (O) on 8 April 1993 (some six months after Kenley went missing): Medford Guptill, from Hantsborder, Nova Scotia (“Name found in Kenley’s room.”); and Stanley E. Hiltz, from West Halls Harbour, Nova Scotia (“Name found in Kenley’s room.”). For the Guptill entry that’s all that is there. For Hiltz one, however, there is a little more information: “CPIC check on Hiltz. Noted in file. Drug related? No contact with Hiltz.” It has always been unclear to me whether or not the Wolfville police constables associated with this entry, Keith McKillop and John Goss, actually met or spoke with either man. Did “no contact with Hiltz” mean that they had been unsuccessful in contacting him? Or did it mean that they spoke with Hiltz and that he told them he’d had no contact with Kenley? And were McKillop and Goss successful in contacting Guptill? The timeline entry gives no indication.
When I interviewed RCMP constable Kerry Campbell in 2014, who was the lead investigator on the case at that time—and remained so until he was replaced by Troy Allen in 2016, when Allen’s double second cousin Erin Smith, formerly Jason Kenny, became a new person of interest following a Crime Stoppers tip—I was told that there was nothing in the case files linking either of these two individuals to Kenley’s disappearance. No one else I ever interviewed for Missing Kenley had any knowledge of them either, including the two former Wolfville constables who were directly involved with those specific entries, both of whom could not remember anything further about that cryptic note in the WPD timeline. Whatever the case, for years and years I wondered about these two names, and why Kenley had them in his dorm room. And for many years I tried to find both men but to no avail (Hiltz now lives in Ontario, I believe, and I have tried to contact him several times over the years, and also through his sister, and have never received a reply). When it came time for the docuseries to be released in September 2022, I very purposely and prominently juxtaposed the WPD timeline entry that showed these two names as B-roll over my interview with former Wolfville police constable Stephen VanHerk, when he mentioned jotting down some names found in Kenley’s room. It was my hope that someone, someday, might see that image and contact me via the Missing Kenley tipline.
My first tip on Medford Guptill, via an anonymous email, came in a month later, in October 2022. I was given a phone number for Guptill that turned out to be no longer in service. That was then followed up by an actual home address a couple months later, provided to me by this same anonymous tipster. On my next trip up to Nova Scotia (for the cadaver dog search of Melanson Mountain in May 2023), I went to the Hantsport address but was told that Medford Guptill no longer lived there. None of his neighbors I spoke with knew where he was currently living. It appeared to be another dead end, but then I received an anonymous email a few months later that gave me a new address in nearby Aylesford, presumably where he had moved to after leaving Hantsport. Life got in the way for quite a while, and I had to sit on that new lead until last summer, when I returned to Nova Scotia for the first time since the Melanson search (an important story in its own right, much of it documented in other posts). The first day I went to this new address, no one was home. But there were some indications that someone was living there. I also noticed, as I got back into my car, several security cameras mounted on the house and property. And so I assumed whoever lived there would soon see video of me and my vehicle (and its MA plates), perhaps wondering who it was, perhaps even figuring it out. In any case, the following morning, after thirteen long years of trying to find him, I finally stood face to face with the one and only Medford Guptill, now 79-year-old, the man whose name was found in Kenley’s dorm room thirty-three years earlier.
What follows is a strictly factual account of our meeting and what was said, and I will leave it to readers of this post to make their own inferences and draw their own conclusions (the description below is based on detailed notes I took in its immediate aftermath; some extraneous parts of the conversation have been left out for brevity’s sake):
When I arrived at Medford Guptill’s Aylesford Lake home on 1 August 2025, I parked on the road and walked up the driveway rather than driving straight in as I’d done the day before. When I knocked on the door, Medford Guptill opened it with a big smile and said, “HELLO!” I asked him, “Are you Medford?” He replied, “Yes, I am. Come on in!” He did not wait for me to introduce myself before inviting me into his house, and he did not ask me who I was before doing so. Once inside, I told him my name and said I was working on a missing persons case from the 1990s and trying to speak with anyone I could find who might know something. As we began discussing the case, he never once asked, “Why are you coming to me?” As will be demonstrated below, he already knew.
I began by asking him if he’d heard of Kenley Matheson or was familiar with his disappearance.
He said, “I’ve seen the posters, but that’s all I know about it.”
I then asked him if he knew a guy named Jason Kenny.
After a long pause, he said, “Jason Kenny…not that I can recall right now.”
I asked if he knew Jason’s father, Bill Kenny, who was a little better known in Wolfville.
He told me that he knew Kennys who were farmers, who had a farm at the end of Maple Avenue in Wolfville.
I asked him if he knew that family.
He said he knew of them, but not personally.
I asked him about where he lived and worked back in 1992.
He said that he lived in “Hantsport, Hants Border” and worked at “Keith’s Fiber” for many years and then in 1992 got a job working at the youth correctional center in Waterville as a guard. He said that he worked there for 11 years.
He then brought the conversation back to the Kennys, and said again, “I can’t say I do know any more Kennys.” Medford’s partner, Linda, in trying to figure out if her son may have known Jason Kenny, began wondering where he went to high school, at which point Medford asked her in a familiar tone, “Jason?” I then clarified that Jason did indeed go to Horton High School.
I then asked Medford if he owned any other properties besides his former residence in Hantsport.
He told me that he had owned some vacant land in West Brooklyn.
I asked him what he did with that land, and if he ever farmed or cultivated anything on that property. He told me his father did back about 75 years ago.
I then asked if he knew anybody up on Melanson Mountain back in the 1990s.
He said, “Yeah, all my relatives are up on Melanson.”
I asked him if they were Guptills, to which he replied that they were Atwells.
I then asked him if he was related to Melissa Atwell [one of Jason Kenny’s girlfriends back in the 1990s; see separate posts about Jason Kenny’s assault charges against Melissa Atwell], and Guptill said she was probably one of his cousin’s daughters.
[As an aside here, and with an assist from a “Finding Kenley” FB member, I was able to confirm that Medford Guptill is related to Melissa Atwell. Medford’s mother Cora was an Atwell, and her brother Donald Atwell’s son, Darroll Atwell (aka “Big Darroll”), Medford’s cousin, is Melissa Atwell’s father. Also interesting is that Melissa’s brother is also named Darroll (aka “Little Darroll”). Several years ago, during the production of Missing Kenley, both Suzanne Saunders, Jason Kenny’s mother, and Toby Mae Saunders, Jason Kenny’s sister, told me about a friend Jason had back at the time of Kenley’s disappearance, someone named Darroll. In fact, they both joked on occasion about there being a Newhart-like “Daryl and Daryl” situation when it came to this person and some other friend(s) of Jason at that time. Toby Mae told me more than once that she always got a terrible feeling whenever this particular person was around, as did the Kenny family dog evidently. When I recently tried to find out if this “Daryl” was in fact Darroll Murray Atwell, Melissa Atwell’s brother, Toby Mae could not confirm it. It should be mentioned here as well that Darroll Murray Atwell has a long criminal record and is currently in prison, serving a 4.5-year sentence for his association with a West Hants homicide, where he was charged with, among other things, interfering with human remains and arson. Last summer, when I returned from Nova Scotia, I was able to pass along an idea I had regarding this situation to the current RCMP lead investigator on Kenley’s case, Ariel Hynes, where I suggested that they might want to consider approaching Darroll Atwell in prison and seeing if he had any credible information on Kenley Matheson’s disappearance, and if so, with the possibility of reducing his sentence if he shared it with investigators. As far as I know, this has not been attempted or considered, and to my knowledge this new investigator has done nothing with this new lead since receiving it back in August 2025.]
Now, back to the Medford Guptill meeting:
I then asked Medford if he ever knew someone named Stanley Hiltz.
He coughed, and then said that he knew a lot of Hiltzes, that there were a lot of Hiltzes up on West Brooklyn Mountain, but that he didn’t know a Stanley Hiltz.
I then returned to his comment regarding the missing posters, to confirm that this was the only thing he knew or remembered about the Kenley Matheson case. This was now about ten minutes into our meeting. He said yes, that was it, that was all he knew, but then quickly deflected the question by asking where Kenley was seen last, whether he had a habit of going anywhere, whether he went out swimming, whether he was someone who went biking, etc. And then he asked where Kenley grew up. I answered these questions, and then he asked, probing further to find out what else I knew, whether I checked out his friends, and whether “he was into drugs or anything like that.” I said, yes, he was, and that this was an interesting question, and then asked him directly if he ever dealt drugs. Medford said, rather faintly, “No.” Linda added, “I don’t think so. He was a security guard.” He then added that he’d never even had a beer in his whole life.
I turned to the issue at hand and asked him if the Wolfville police or the RCMP had ever talked to him in the 33 years since Kenley’s disappearance. He said no, and then quickly deflected by saying that he worked at the correctional center, and that they had a lot of drug dealers in there. And then he added that he did not remember Kenley’s name coming up while working there.
I then told him that one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to him was that his name was in the case file—that his name was found in Kenley’s room after he disappeared. As I said this he murmured “yeah” twice under his breath. I then asked, “How did that happen?” His first response was that he had a daughter who went to Acadia [Angela Guptill, who graduated in 1992]. After we established that she wasn’t there at the same time as Kenley, he said, “For the life of me, I don’t know why my name would be in the files.”
I then said that it was very odd that a twenty-year-old from Cape Breton, only two weeks into his time in Wolfville, would have the name Medford Guptill in his dorm room. And I asked him again: “How on earth did he end up with your name in his room?”
Before Medford could answer, Linda jumped in and mentioned that there was another name found in Kenley’s room, that she’d “read the story on that,” and asked if she was right in saying it was “Chad Hiltz.” I corrected her and told it was a Stanley Hiltz, and that the Wolfville police wondered if his name being in Kenley’s room was drug related, and then I told Medford that his name was right next to Stanley Hiltz’s in the Wolfville police notes and timeline.
Medford asked when this all took place, and I told him 1992. He then added that 1992 was when he went to work at the correctional center in Waterville, and asked if Kenley had ever been in there, “in the adult one.” I said that he hadn’t as far as I knew.
I then briefly described the September 1992 timeline and again mentioned that during the October 10th room search the Wolfville police found some hash, which interested them, and also found a few names, one of which was his. As I finished this sentence, he again said, “yeah,” and then deflected, asking why they let weeks go by before they did the room search. I explained that there had been an initial look around the room a few days after his disappearance. Medford added that given Kenley was in Wolfville only a couple weeks, “It didn’t give him much time to make a lot of friends.”
I told him about Kenley’s closest friends that semester and asked him if the name Tomilson meant anything to him. [Kirsten Tomilson was one of these friends; her father was Ralph Tomilson, host of the Corkums Island weekend that Kenley attended, and who also had a conviction record for marijuana cultivation.] In response, Medford whispered, “No.” I followed up, “Have you ever heard of Ralph Tomilson?” He looked down and whispered, “No.” I said, “Okay…” And then he looked up at me and said more firmly, “No.” I said, a bit dubiously, “Huh.” Medford perked up and said, “It’s a cold trail, isn’t it?”
Medford then asked if I was related to Kenley. I said that I was not, but that this part of the story had been itching at me for years, and that I had always wanted to meet him and ask him about it. He joked, “Well, you should have come here sooner.” I told him that he was a hard man to find, to which he replied that he’s moved around a lot, including a stint from 2005 to 2017 in New Brunswick (the reason I never found him in Nova Scotia during the years that I was producing the docuseries, although I do vaguely remember once placing a few calls to an M. Guptill in New Brunswick that were never picked up).
Linda then wondered aloud as to why the RCMP never interviewed Medford. And then Medford, after almost 20 minutes of stating that his only knowledge of Kenley was “from the posters,” finally said, “You know, someone, somewhere told me my name was connected to him…but I can’t remember who it was?” Linda then responded, “I did. I saw it on TV. Your name was on TV.” Medford acknowledged this as true, but then disingenuously asked, “How was it on TV?” Linda answered, “They did a program on it. They did a documentary on it.”
I then attempted to show Medford a copy on my phone of the actual Wolfville police timeline where his name is mentioned. He did not seem interested and barely glanced at it. I said, “You don’t remember that?” He said, “No, nobody talked to me. No police ever talked to me about it.” I said, okay, that it was kind of a head scratcher, to which Medford agreed, that it was weird.
[From what information I have been able to gather, and as inexplicable as it may seem, it may indeed be true that no one in law enforcement over the past 33 years has ever spoken to Medford Guptill about his name being found in Kenley’s room. Recently, Kenley’s sister Kayrene and I were trying to get information on the actual handwritten Supplementary Report pages that generated the 8 April 1993 entry in the WPD timeline. These Supplementary Report entries were either redacted or not provided when the RCMP released several thousand pages of case file documents to Kenley’s family in 2019. We put in a request to the current lead investigator, Ariel Hynes, for these specific pages, or at least a description of what was contained in them, in order to see if anyone on the Wolfville police force actually spoke to Medford Guptill in April 1993—or indeed if any WPD or RCMP investigator ever spoke with him then or otherwise. According to Hynes, these missing or redacted pages do not relate to either Medford Guptill or Stanley Hiltz, and after her review of the entire case file she states that there is no indication that anyone has ever spoken to either of them. What this means in real terms is that, if true, not a single investigator in the 33-year history of the Kenley Matheson case has ever thought to locate and interview Medford Guptill, who was a middle-aged local man and prison guard in 1992, and whose name somehow Kenley—having just arrived in Wolfville—had in his dorm room. It is truly mind boggling if this is indeed the case.]
I then brought up Medford’s age at the time of Kenley’s disappearance, which I told him never made sense to me. I said it was one thing for Kenley to have the name of some 20-year-old Wolfville local that he met during those first couple weeks, but that he, Medford, was nearing 50-years-old at the time [Medford Guptill was either 46 or 47 in September of 1992]. And I asked pointedly, “Why would a 20-year-old kid just arrived from Cape Breton have a 50-year-old guy from Hantsport’s name in his room?” He had no answer. He said that he didn’t “have the faintest idea” how his name got there, and that he wished he did.
Circling back to Stanley Hiltz, I asked what Hiltzes he knew. He said he knew a Dale Hiltz, a Gerald Hiltz, and a Randy Hiltz. He stopped the list there, but then Linda asked, “Isn’t there a Howie Hiltz?” Medford then reluctantly conceded that there was a Howard Hiltz, who was his neighbor in West Brooklyn [there are actually a couple of West Brooklyn real estate transactions between the two of them that can be found in the Land Registration Office in Kentville, Nova Scotia; one can also find in this same office a 1990 record of the above mentioned Cora (née Atwell) Guptill as granting a lot of land to Medford Guptill, “situate at Horton on the Mountain Road, near Avonport,” a property that Medford’s cousin Darroll Atwell likely knew about].
Medford made an explicit point of asking me if I had spoken to all the persons of interest, such as Jason Kenny. And I said yes. At this point Linda asked for my phone number, which I gave her, as well as my name, and told them that I was the creator the program they had mentioned earlier.
I then brought up the belief that Kenley had been killed and buried up on Melanson Mountain. Medford said, “Yeah, I heard that.” And then seeing the surprised look on my face—given what he’d said earlier about the posters being the only thing he knew about Kenley’s disappearance—he quickly added, “I can’t remember where.”
I then asked him if he’d ever heard of something called the “Bear Caves.” He coughed for only the second time in the interview (the first time being when I asked him if he knew Stanley Hiltz). He paused, and then, barely audible and under his breath, said, “No.”
Linda then began asking Medford about a cave down “by the falls” on West Brooklyn Mountain. He said, yes, there was a big cave down by the falls inside the big bank, but he quickly added that no one has been to that location—that he knew of—for forty years. I inquired further about the exact location of “The Cave,” as they used to call it, and Medford said that it was really hard to get at and that he didn’t think there would be anything there, and that again he hadn’t been down there for 40 or 50 years. He gave me a few more specifics but then emphasized, “You’ll never find it now.”
[The next day I hiked out to this location on West Brooklyn Mountain. It was not very hard to get to and I found it fairly easily. Medford was right, though, in terms of what was there. Indeed, I found multiple “caves” in the banks of Curry Brook, some of which are more cave-like than anything I’ve ever seen on Melanson Mountain.]
I then asked him about what the drug scene was like up on Melanson Mountain back in the 1990s. I said that I knew people were cultivating drugs up on Melanson in the fields, to which he agreed, but said it was probably the same as anywhere. He said that he was not in the drug scene, so he wouldn’t have any inside information, but added, unless it was at the correctional center. Medford said he knew that a lot of drug-related guys came in there, and he mentioned the name “Grant Lockard” as a big drug dealer that he dealt with a lot.
I asked him to speculate on what he thought may have happened to Kenley. Medford said that if Kenley was associated with drugs, he may have owed some drug dealer money or something, and that “they just got rid of him, and hid his body.”
I ended the meeting by saying that it was unfortunate, even after talking to him, that we still didn’t have an answer as to why his name was in Kenley’s room. And I added how bizarre it was that the Wolfville police had his name in the timeline as someone they were going to contact, but that apparently they never did. He repeated, “No, they didn't,” and added, “I wish they did.” It should be noted that during this last part of this meeting, while discussing the drugs and through to the end, Medford’s body language began to change. His jaw tensed up. His eyes became reddish and a little watery. His arms were crossed, and he began moving slightly backward and away from me.
I thanked Medford and Linda for their time and returned to Wolfville.
Now, in terms of what still needs to be done by investigators:
1. Investigators (Ariel Hynes, lead RCMP investigator, ariel.hynes@rcmp-grc.gc.ca) should try to get to the bottom of why Medford Guptill’s and Stanley Hiltz’s names were in Kenley’s room. Investigators should interview both men and consider polygraphing them.
2. Investigators—or people who know him, if investigators are unwilling to do it—should talk to Darroll Murray Atwell and see what, if anything, he knows about Kenley’s disappearance, perhaps incentivizing him with a potential reduction in his sentence if the information is legitimate and helps advance the case.
3. Investigators—or people who know them, if investigators are unwilling to do it—should interview associates of Jason Kenny circa 1992 and others affiliated with Melanson Mountain during that time, individuals who might have information to advance the case. The below list includes some of the names given to me over the years as people who might potentially know something (and this list by no means suggests that any one of these individuals had anything at all to do with Kenley’s disappearance, or has any knowledge that they are withholding; it is simply a suggestion list of potential interview subjects for investigators):
Melissa Atwell (Jason Kenny’s ex-girlfriend)
Sharleen Smith (Jason Kenny’s ex-wife)
the so-called “Mountain Boys” (associated names that sources have provided: Joe Keddy, Cory Smith, Mike Wallace, Robbie Peters, Sean Gurtridge, and someone known as “Rooster” or “Chicken”)
Brian Saunders (friend of Jason Kenny in 1992, who according to one source lived secretly in Jason’s room at one point)
Ross Forrest (Jason Kenny “drug friend” according to one source)
Mike MacDonald (close friend of Jason Kenny in the fall of 1992, who was an Acadia engineering student)
F. Chris Giles (a source told me that Giles once told a story about a huge fight Jason had over a girl)
Adam Munroe (aka Adam Collicutt, a Melanson friend of Jason Kenny according to one source)
All individuals affiliated with the garage referred to by Jason Kenny’s uncle in the MISSING KENLEY docuseries, when he said that Jason “would be out in a garage, maybe on the mountain somewhere and they'd be taking a motor out of a vehicle.” Whose garage on Melanson Mountain is he talking about? Those associates should be interviewed.
As always, any tips are welcome: ron@missingkenley.com



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