While working on an episode of my series The Secret Sasquatch Files, I decided to delve into some of the unsolved disappearances chronicled in the writings of a certain well-known American author who specializes in that subject. Specifically, I was interested in Canadian cases involving berry picking, which the author identified as one of his “profile points”, or elements which he observed are common to the most baffling missing persons cases. I have done thorough research into this author’s work before, most notably while working on my 2021 series on the British Columbia Triangle, and discovered that he has a bad habit of either willingly or unwittingly leaving pertinent information out of his reports which would shear them of much of their mystery. The most striking example of this which I came across was the author’s attempt to render uncanny the story of a fun-loving 27-year-old Irishman who drowned in a creek in Whistler, BC, after having imbibed one pint too many on St. Patrick’s Day, 2012.
I recently came across another case which the author misrepresented, namely the death of 2-year-old Yehudi Prior, which is worth recounting here. Yehudi is supposed to have vanished in a berry patch on Vancouver Island on September 23rd, 1974 – incidentally, around the same time that Canadian Sasquatch researcher Rene Dahinden was conducting a wildman hunt north of Stave Lake, on the mainland. Far more fascinating than the aura of vague mystery in which the author attempted to enshroud the toddler’s death is the truth which underpins it – a real-life detective story with a twist ending which shines some light on one of Vancouver Island’s most interesting and mysterious subcultures. A better-researched take on the story than that which appears in the author’s work was related in a 2023 video on the YouTube channel ‘Missing Void’, but the full story of Yehudi’s death has not been retold until now.
In one of his books, the aforementioned author states that 2-year-old Yehudi Prior vanished in the woods north of a place called Wild Duck Lake, Vancouver Island, while on a berry-picking excursion with his father, William Prior. The author described that particular stretch of wilderness as “an old tribal area”.
“As the father was picking the berries,” the author wrote, “the boy suddenly disappeared. William immediately started to call out the boy’s name, but there was no answer. He frantically searched the entire area but couldn’t find the boy. It was at this time that William contacted authorities.”
The author went on to describe the search and rescue operation which ensued, which involved tracking dogs, helicopters, and sixty SAR personnel.
“Six days later…” the author wrote, “searchers found Yehudi in rugged brushland four miles north of Wild Duck Lake. The boy had died.” The author then quoted Hal Orrick, the leader of the search party, whose statement appeared in the September 30th, 1974 issue of the Edmonton Journal. “The boy’s body was found near Hope Creek in the next valley north of Wild Duck Valley where he had spent most of his life,” Orrick told the press. “It was a fantastic long distance… It seemed so impossible that he could go that far.”
The author concluded his report by stating that it was determined that Yehudi had died of exposure, and that there was no further investigation into his case.
The mystery surrounding Yehudi’s death, in the context of the premise of the author’s work, seems to stem from the fact that the toddler vanished in a berry patch – one of the author’s profile points – and that he was found at too great a distance from the place of his disappearance to have reasonably travelled himself. As we will discover at the end of this piece, both of these presumptions are inaccurate.
Before we examine the particulars surrounding Yehudi’s death, it is essential that we form some conception of his unconventional family and their unique lifestyle. Although the author’s description of the country in which Yehudi disappeared as “an old tribal area” imparts vague connotations of indigenous heritage, the Priors were not Vancouver Island natives but rather back-to-nature hippies who lived off the land, subsisting on wild fruit and vegetables they grew in their garden. Yehudi’s father, William Prior, was a bearded, long-haired 25-year-old vegetarian who called himself River, who spoke, as one article put it, “in a whispered monotone, in a kind of 1960s Flower Power patois interspersed with country westernisms.” An article in the Victoria Times indicated that he was formerly a successful art director who had immigrated from the county of Surrey in the United Kingdom to Toronto, Ontario four or five years earlier. Yehudi’s mother and William’s wife, Ann, was a 24-year-old Frenchwoman from the Pyrenees who called herself Rainbow. In addition to 2-year-old Yehudi, the couple also had a two-month-old son whom they decided to name Pollen, for the reason that, as William put it, “flowers are about the neatest things there are.” Together with a draft dodger named John Tinsley, who went by the name ‘Coyote’, and an illegal American immigrant named Jason Zion, the Priors lived in a primitive cedar lean-to under a massive maple tree about nine miles west of the village of Shawnigan Lake, which lies on the northern shores of the body of water for which it was named, south of the city of Duncan, BC.
An idea of the Prior’s unconventional lifestyle can be gleaned from an article in the September 27th, 1974 issue of the Victoria Times. “The group is cultish…” the article contended. “They are so into the ‘nature trip’ they disdain anything artificial. They live off the land, live in it and on it. Anything else would be sacrilege. They don’t work – they live off welfare from Duncan instead.”
The article went on to explain how William met Ann in Toronto, and decided to abandon his affluent career in order to pursue a more liberating lifestyle, which the couple kicked off with a hitchhiking tour of Canada and the U.S.A. In 1971, their travels brought them to Vancouver Island, a Mecca for free spirits the world over. Their first Island home was a boat, which they used to transport themselves to an island near Campbell River, on Vancouver Island’s northeastern shore. There, they squatted for some time, before being driven away by locals, who feared they might be the vanguard of an invading hippie colony. William then found work as a fisherman in Deep Bay, between Nanaimo and Courtney, which ended with a terrible accident that left him with burns covering a third of his body.
On July 26th, 1972 – a day on which William recalled there was a partial lunar eclipse – Ann gave birth to Yehudi. A year later, the family took up residence in their lean-to west of Shawnigan Lake, where they pursued a wild lifestyle. They raised Yehudi with the intention of making him a tough and hardy child with the ability to survive in the bush. They never bought him any shoes, forcing him to develop thick callouses on his feet by the tender age of two. They deliberately dressed him in scanty clothes in order to inure him to the cold, prompting at least a few well-meaning passersby to express concerns to the local RCMP that the Priors might be neglecting their child.
On September 23th, 1974, just before midnight, William Prior appeared at the Shawnigan Lake RCMP station and reported that his two-year-old son, Yehudi, had disappeared at about 3:00 in the afternoon near their home, about four miles north of Wild Deer Lake – the small body of water which the aforementioned author erroneously called Wild Duck Lake. He explained that his son, clad only in a long white shirt and a bead necklace, had wandered away from him while he was picking blackberries on the side of a logging road near their home, the toddler having expressed what William interpreted as a desire to return to the lean-to. “I thought he’d just follow me up the trail,” William later told reporters of the incident, “but he turned around and come back on the road. A few minutes later I heard him cry on the road, halfway between where I live, so I figured he was on his way home… It was more of a whine than a cry. It wasn’t scared, it wasn’t angry or frightened. It was just a tired, middle of the day, very hot, walking alone, cry…
“I didn’t return home for about an hour and, when I got there, he wasn’t there. I went straight out and looked for him. I couldn’t find him so I went out and reported it to the police.”
When Mountie Corporal Herbert Schmidt proposed to launch a search for the child, the father asked him to wait, telling him that he still thought he would be able to find his son himself. “That, to me,” said the narrator of the ‘Missing Void’ YouTube channel of this detail, “seems like an absolutely awful decision, that they would hold off calling the authorities until over nine hours after the initial disappearance. It’s difficult to understand how that even happened.”
When no sign of the missing toddler had been found by noon the following day, Prior returned to the police station to break the troubling news, and the proposed search and rescue operation finally got underway.
While the search for Yehudi progressed, reporters descended on the Prior’s wilderness home in an attempt to make sense of the incident. One journalist described William as cryptic and evasive, hearing him remark that his son’s disappearance was karmic retribution for the sins of his past.
During his interview, one reporter gleaned a different story from William. According to this alternate version of events, Yehudi had wandered away from his father in order to get a better look at the four horses the family kept, which were grazing in a pasture near the lean-to, about seventy-five yards from the logging road. “Horses,” was the last word the child muttered as he tottered off in their direction.
As the days progressed, search and rescue personnel began to speculate as to the child’s fate. Some feared that he might have fallen prey to a cougar or a bear. A Mountie spokesperson articulated the possibility that the child might have been accidentally struck by a motorist, his body afterwards dragged into the woods. William himself expressed concerns that Yehudi had been picked up by one of the concerned citizens who took issue with his unconventional parenting style.
“And if he’s wandered into the bush,” the father told reporters, “he’s still alive out there where the berries are. He’ll never die because he’s only lived in the bush, he’s never lived in a city…
“He could have walked out of the area on account of he is really a lot stronger than most people think a two-year-old is. I spent two years bringing him up to be the strongest two-year-old I ever met… He’s the strongest kid I ever did see… He’s totally together. He could live on berries, he lives on food from the woods. He don’t live on store-bought food…
“If he’s out there, he’s probably exploring. He’d never freak out. He’d make a camp for himself somewhere. He’s the most put together little dude I’ve ever seen.”
On the afternoon of Sunday, September 29th, 1974, six days after Yehudi’s disappearance, a 14-year-old volunteer searcher named Peter Hetherington discovered the toddler’s naked body lying face down in a shallow pool beside Holt Creek, about four miles (six kilometres) northeast of his home. A coroner later pronounced that his body was “well-nourished and well-built,” but covered in light scratches indicative of travel through dense underbrush. Retracing his tiny steps with tracking dogs, Mounties theorized that the two-year-old had walked for an astounding four miles along the logging road following his separation from his father, before cutting into the bush and collapsing in the pool in which his body was found. Despite his astonishment that the child had walked so far, search leader Hal Orrick stated that the evidence indicated that Yehudi had died on his first night in the bush. “There’s no doubt in my mind that he reached there the first night,” he told reporters. “He’d be getting tired and have heard the creek and that might have indicated home to him because he had lived near a creek.” Orrick made it clear that he was unsure of the cause of the toddler’s death, but suspected that exposure, compounded by overfatigue, was a likely culprit, as the temperature had dipped to 40oF, or 4oC, on the day of his disappearance. It was also possible, the search leader remarked, that the two-year-old had slipped off a log while trying to cross Holt Creek and struck his head.
For all intents and purposes, it seemed that the mystery of Yehudi’s disappearance had been solved. It seems likely that the toddler, tired and frustrated, became disoriented while returning from the berry patch, overshot the turnoff to his home, and continued walking for as long as his little legs would carry him. The extraordinary distance he covered can perhaps be attributed to hardy character, forged by his physically demanding upbringing which formed him into what his father characterized as “the strongest two-year-old I ever met. The only questions that remained were the cause of William Prior’s delay in contacting the police and requesting a search for his son, which the reader could be forgiven for attributing to his independent nature and aversion to society, which his reclusive lifestyle plainly evidenced. What appears to have been the true reason for his tardiness surfaced during a trial held for the purpose of determining whether he and his wife were to blame for his son’s death.
According to an article published in the October 24th, 1974 issue of the Vancouver Sun, William Prior, while taking a lie-detector test, confessed to the RCMP that he was not picking berries at the time of his son’s disappearance, but rather walking with his American friend, Coyote, to water a secret marijuana crop they had planted in the woods. His initial testimony that Yehudi had wandered away from him during a berry-picking excursion was an attempt to conceal the true purpose for his trip up the logging road. Before William alerted the authorities, Coyote destroyed the illicit crop so that it would not be discovered by the police. Despite these amendments to their official statements, the article stated that “fears of exposing the illegal marijuana cultivation – or of exposing the whereabouts of an illegal immigrant sharing a backwoods shelter with the Prior family – did not contribute to the delay.”
Sources
Missing 411: Canada (2019), by David Paulides
“Sasquatch Hunter Tries Again,” by Frank Curtin, in the September 25th, 1974 issue of the Vancouver Province
“Brush Combed for Child,” in the September 25th, 1974 issue of the Province
“Brush Searched for Boy, 2,” in the September 26th, 1974 issue of the Province
“‘He’s Still Alive,’ Says ‘Father,” by Dave Stockand in the September 28th, 1974 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Lost Baby’s Body Found in Creek,” in the September 30th, 1974 issue of the Victoria Times
“4-Mile Hike: Lost Tot Found Dead in Creek,” in the September 30th, 1974 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Shock of Invasion by Alien Society Compounds Fading Hopes for Lost Son,” by Derek Sinedius in the September 27th, 1974 issue of the Victoria Times
“Fear in the Forest for Yehudi,” by Nat Cole in the September 27th, 1974 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Boy’s Body Found – ‘Died on First Night’,” from the September 30th, 1974 issue of the Province
“Lost Tot Found Dead in B.C. Bush Country,” in the September 30th, 1974 issue of the Edmonton Journal
“Yehudi Buried at Duncan,” in the October 7th, 1974 issue of the Times Colonist
“Father Destroyed Plants: Yehudi Strayed on Trip to Pot Patch,” by Dave Stockand in the October 24th, 1974 issue of the Vancouver Sun
“Yehudi Prior Well Nourished, Jury Lays No Blame in Death,” in the October 24th, 1974 issue of the Victoria Times
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