Chapter 42

Transcript of “The Farley Files Podcast Season Two:

Dead Man’s Hollow—The Disappearance of Heather Ryan”

Episode 3: Heather Ryan Returns

As you may have noted from the title, this week’s episode will, as my mama would say, butter your biscuit. We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s jump in.

After Episode 1 aired two weeks ago, the Farley Files received an anonymous tip that Heather Ryan had been talking to a boy from Allderdice, one of the Pittsburgh city high schools. Also according to our tipster, later that night, as the party broke up, a fight erupted between several of the boys from Heather’s school and the Allderdice boys.

Producer Jordana Morgan and I checked. There was not a single mention of either the boy or the fight in any of the witness statements given by students who were in Dead Man’s Hollow the night Heather vanished. So I spoke to Amy Ryan Marino, who confirmed that Heather had been flirting with a boy Amy didn’t recognize.

MAISY: Tell me about him.

AMY: There’s nothing to tell. He didn’t go to our school. I’d never seen him before. I decided to take a walk. They were flirting, and I didn’t want to be a third wheel.

MAISY: It was mutual?

AMY: It seemed mutual. That’s why I walked away. If he’d been hitting on her and she wasn’t into it, I never would have left. I’d have stayed and told him to beat it.

MAISY: I’ve reviewed every witness statement your friends and classmates who were in the woods that night gave to the police. Why do you think not a single person mentioned this boy?

AMY: I don’t know.

MAISY: Why didn’t you.

AMY (clears throat): You have to understand how things were back then. If I’d have told the police or my parents that Heather was flirting with a Black guy before she disappeared, they’d have jumped to conclusions. I thought … I guess I thought that information would distract them from finding her because they’d have an easy scapegoat.

Amy insisted she knew nothing about a fight but volunteered to ask her husband, who was one of the last to leave the woods that night.

Our next stop was Allderdice High School. As an alumna of the school and a former yearbook staff member, producer Jordana was able to obtain a copy of the 1994 yearbook. In addition to the yearbook, long-time yearbook advisor Shannon Marshall gave Jordana a crucial piece of information: The same weekend Heather went missing, Allderdice student Andre Newport also vanished. Unlike Heather’s disappearance, Andre’s did not receive significant media attention. But like Heather, he was never found.

When shown Andre’s yearbook picture, Amy confirmed he was the boy Heather had been flirting with. Amy also confirmed that there had been a fight. According to her husband, the fight had been unrelated to Heather and was quote no big deal end quote. As you’ll hear later, this was not entirely true.

Our investigation was heating up. We interviewed Kristy Ryan Kaminski and began to look into Andre’s disappearance to determine if it was connected to Heather’s.

After episode two aired a week later, we received an even more significant tip from a French-Canadian living in Quebec City. Bastian Tremblay is a devoted listener to the Farley Files as it helps him practice his English. When he heard Kristy’s description of the pink plastic pager her sister carried, he reached out.

This is a portion of the voice message Bastian left in our secure message box:

BASTIAN: I’m calling because I—we—my wife and I, listened to episode two, and you mentioned a pink plastic pager. As impossible as it seems, my wife Chloe has a pink plastic pager with a glittery capital letter C sticker in the lower left corner. She does not know Heather Ryan and does not have any information about the girl’s sad disappearance, but she does have this pager. We thought it might be important.

Listener, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Mr. Tremblay sent along a photograph of the pager, which Chloe Tremblay has held on to for all these years. Kristy confirmed that it was Heather’s pager, and we were off in pursuit of the biggest lead yet.

Rich Marino accompanied me to Quebec City to meet with the Tremblays. The situation was sensitive because Chloe Tremblay turned up in Montreal in 1994 as an abandoned teenager. She entered the social welfare system and lived in foster care until aging out. She didn’t remember anything before Montreal, including how or why she came to have Heather’s pager.

You’re about to hear from Chloe’s neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Sofia Marchand, whom I interviewed via telephone.

DR. MARCHAND: Chloe’s condition is a rare type of amnesia called dissociative amnesia or, less commonly, psychogenic amnesia. It can be triggered by severe trauma or stress. A person with dissociative amnesia will remember how to function in the world but will have no sense of who they are.

MAISY: So, the reason Chloe didn’t know who she was when she walked into a Montreal police station in 1994 is that she was suffering from this type of amnesia?

DR. MARCHAND: I can’t say definitively. She wasn’t diagnosed at that time, and I didn’t begin treating her until 2010, after she ran from her home and was found days later at the Winter Carnival by her husband. At that point, she didn’t know her name and didn’t recognize her husband or her child.

MAISY: What happened in 2010 to trigger this?

DR. MARCHAND: Her baby, Emilie, was about eight months old. She tipped out of an infant swing and fell onto the hardwood floor. Chloe panicked and ran from the house. After Bastian had attended to his daughter’s needs, he realized his wife was missing. I believed then that Chloe was under significant postpartum stress and the experience of seeing her daughter fall was too much for her to handle.

MAISY: Bastian tells me that Emilie fell face down, in a prone position. Is it possible that Chloe was triggered because that fall reminded her of an experience in her distant past?

DR. MARCHAND: Yes.

Because Chloe didn’t remember anything before 1994, I thought the pager might turn out to be a dead end. Then, in a last-ditch effort to spark a memory, I showed Chloe a photograph of Heather taken shortly before she vanished. Chloe and her husband were astonished. Heather Ryan looked exactly like their fourteen-year-old daughter. We’ve posted side-by-side photographs of sixteen-year-old Heather Ryan and fourteen-year-old Chloe Tremblay on the Farley Files website so you can judge for yourself. But the resemblance is so strong that the Tremblays and I were convinced Chloe was Heather. And, as it happens, we were correct.

That’s right, Heather Ryan is alive and well. She’s been living in Canada for the past thirty years, unaware that she’s a missing person from McKeesport, Pennsylvania.

If the story ended here, it would have a satisfying ending—a far happier one than anyone involved could have hoped for. But it doesn’t end here. On the next episode, you learn why Heather Ryan vanished on May 27, 1994, and what happened to Andre Newport.

When I say you don’t want to miss the next episode, I mean it. It’s got more twists than a country road after a tornado. So be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.