A still from Ron Lamothe's documentary showing Kenley Matheson's passport photo.
In 1992, a 20-year-old Canadian college student named Kenley Matheson disappeared without a trace. Almost 20 years later, a mysterious email would launch Associate Professor Ron Lamothe on a decade-long search for answers that would take more twists and turns than an Agatha Christie novel.
The result is “Missing Kenley,” a five-episode, ten-part docuseries now available to stream on Amazon Prime and at least a dozen other services.
Lamothe, who teaches history and documentary filmmaking at Lesley, had always wanted to produce a true-crime documentary, and Matheson’s story intrigued him.
“It had all the kinds of detective-story elements you would want in a film like this — a number of intriguing persons of interest, some crazy synchronicities, a few potentially good red herrings.”
Unexplored territory
Lamothe became enamored with film when, on a whim, he took a 16mm filmmaking course at UMass Amherst in the late ’90s. Instead of heading to Hollywood, he began to work on his first documentary while earning a master’s in history.
Although his specialty in African history hasn’t overlapped with his documentaries so far, Lamothe says that both interests require meticulous attention to detail and sound research. They’re both also looking for “terra incognita” — unexplored territory — the name Lamothe chose for his production company.
Terra Incognita’s first documentary, “The Political Dr. Seuss,” explored the famous children’s book author’s WWII left-wing cartoons and his other “political” works, broadly defined. The film opened the 2004 season of PBS’s “Independent Lens.”
With his second film, “The Call of the Wild,” Lamothe traced the steps of Chris McCandless, who died in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992, raising new questions about the story immortalized in investigative reporter Jon Krakauer’s bestseller “Into the Wild.”
Searching for Kenley
That documentary led a private investigator calling himself Mike M. to Lamothe’s inbox with the story of another young man. Mike M. thought there might be a correlation between McCandless and Matheson.
Lamothe couldn’t find any links, but he wanted to know more about Matheson, who disappeared in his second week of classes at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Matheson’s sister, Kayrene Willis, gave Lamothe more of the story, and in 2012 he made his first trip to Canada.
He soon raised $82,000 through a Kickstarter campaign to begin principal photography. When filming began in 2014, he never expected it to take eight years.
“If you're an independent producer, there are a lot of crises of faith that take place over time, and various obstacles that you have to figure out how to surmount to move forward with a project. And this one was laden with them,” says Lamothe.
Police had few credible leads and no body. They also weren’t interested in sharing information with the filmmaker.
Lamothe set out to find his own answers, contacting anyone who might have information about Matheson’s disappearance — family members, friends, and even a potential serial killer. The image that emerged was a likeable young man full of wanderlust who, when drunk, could get himself into trouble.
Lamothe found that most people were willing to talk, suspects included.
“I think there's a little bit of pressure on people to participate in the film because if they don't agree to participate and don't agree to an interview, it might look a little suspicious,” Lamothe says.
Some of those people, believing they could “control the narrative,” inadvertently gave away new details relating to the case and contradicting their previous statements to police. For example, two of Matheson’s peers had trouble answering some simple questions and dodged others while divulging that they entered their friend’s dorm room after he went missing. They alleged they saw the backpack that Matheson was rarely without, but when Willis later visited her brother’s room looking for clues, the backpack was missing.
Memory is tricky, says one private investigator interviewed for the documentary, and sometimes people forget which secrets they were supposed to keep.
A new suspect
But halfway through Lamothe’s filming, a new suspect came to the forefront along with details that may reveal to the location of Matheson’s remains on a mountain near his university in Nova Scotia. The suspect, a trans woman who identified as a man in 1992, allegedly told several family members that she had killed and disposed of Matheson’s body.
So far, says Lamothe, the local police have done little to respond to the claim, despite pleas from Matheson’s sister and mother.
“The RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) to this day has never stepped foot on that mountain looking for Kenley,” he says.
With the release of “Missing Kenley,” the case is getting new attention that Lamothe hopes will put pressure on the police and encourage people with information to come forward.
The film premiered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Sept. 16 and 17, followed by a two-night run in Wolfville, 30 years to the date that Matheson went missing.
“We're looking for that last puzzle piece that that will really bring resolution, and perhaps bring Kenley’s remains back to Cape Breton to his family,” says Lamothe.
