Hunted By Evil Part 1: The story of Nathan O'Brien and his grandparents |1
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Hey, it's Nancy. Before we begin today, I just wanted to let you know that you can listen to Crime Beat early and ad-free on Amazon Music, included with Prime. A listener's note. The following episode contains coarse language, adult themes, and content of a violent and disturbing nature and may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.

In 2014, on the first long weekend of the summer, a Calgary mother went to her parents' home to pick up her five-year-old son following a sleepover. When she got there, her son and her parents were missing. An Amber Alert has been issued for the abduction of a five-year-old male from southwest Calgary today. That was the starting point of one of the most horrific cases in Canadian history.

I covered this story from start to finish, and it still weighs heavily on me. Stay strong, Nathan. Stay strong. We know you are a superhero, and I just need you to stay strong. And we are going to see you. We're going to see you. And we love you so much. I'm Nancy Hixt, a crime reporter for Global News. Today on Crime Beat, I'll share part one of the story of Nathan O'Brien and his grandparents Alvin and Kathy Lickness.

This is Hunted by Evil. Alvin Lickness was 66 years old. He was born in a small town in East Central Alberta. His family considered him an original thinker. He loved to invent new things. He was adventurous and known for taking risks. But most of all, he loved to go for long walks with his wife, Catherine, who most people knew as Kathy.

She was 53 years old and born and raised in Calgary. Sherry Hodgins was Kathy's best friend. She said that from the moment Alvin and Kathy met, they had an instant connection.

30 years ago, he was working at an oil company and she was working for social services. And they met on an elevator one day and they became best friends after that. Alvin was a true gentleman and Kathy looked up to him. She loved spending time with him. They were inseparable since the day they met. Kathy was just full on amazing. Everybody would be lucky to have a friend like Kathy. Alvin and Kathy were dedicated, loving parents and grandparents.

Here's veteran prosecutor Vicki Faulkner. They were a blended family. So Alvin and Catherine had been married, gosh, over 20 years. And Alvin had a son, and Catherine, of course, had a daughter, and that's Jennifer. They also had a child together, Jeffrey. In 2014, the couple was excited to begin a new chapter and enjoy their retirement.

They planned to live in the rural community of Evansburg in west central Alberta, about a four-hour drive north from Calgary. And they also had a condo in Mexico. And so they were going to spend winters in Mexico playing golf and summer times in Evansburg closer to his brother.

The couple put their inner-city Calgary home on the market and planned to sell items they no longer needed in an estate sale at the end of June. They posted eight ads on Kijiji, advertising everything from furniture to silk plants. Hundreds of people came and went from their house over the course of a few days.

On June 29th, 2014, their daughter, Jennifer O'Brien, took her two youngest boys, Max and Nathan, to help with the sale. This was the last day of the estate sale, the 29th. She attended with Max, who was one, and Nathan, who was five and had just finished kindergarten. He liked, in particular, superhero costumes that had the padding so that they had the muscles.

And on this day, he brought the cape with him to his Superman outfit. And so he had found a little bamboo purse or bag, and he put his Superman cape and a pack of gum in there.

It was a fun day. At one point, Sherry convinced Kathy to take a break from the sale and enjoy some ice cream. We ran out to the Dickie D just because it was fun. It was like when we were kids running out to the Dickie D truck. Kathy's favorite ice cream was the strawberry shortcake, and that's what she wanted that day.

Alvin and Kathy also took their two grandsons to a nearby playground. And Alvin very quickly closed the doors to the garage, and it was more important for him to go and play in the playground than to do the garage sale. So, and that's who Alvin was with his grandchildren. Like when those grandbabies, when they talked about them or they came over, I mean, the both of them just lit up. When the sale ended, they ordered food and watched a movie together on a pull-out sofa bed in the basement.

Nathan didn't want the day to end. He asked if they could all sleep over. Here again is prosecutor Vicki Faulkner. Jennifer put Max to bed in the upstairs bedroom and she went with him into the upstairs guest bedroom, which actually used to be her old bedroom. And her intention was actually to stay overnight herself.

And Max becomes her son, another son, becomes very restless. And she decides, okay, I'm going to go home and I'll come back in the morning. I'll take Max home or back to his familiar circumstances. That's James Hardy. He's retired now, but he was a police officer for nearly 40 years. In the summer of 2014, he was a superintendent with the Calgary Police Service and was in charge of major crimes.

Jennifer told police that on June 29th, she left her parents' home with her baby at about 11 p.m. and locked the door behind her. Her father, Alvin, was asleep in the main bedroom. Her mother, Kathy, and Nathan were on the pullout in the basement. But at some point after Jennifer left, they moved upstairs to the spare room down the hall from Alvin.

The next morning, Jennifer tried calling her mother. There was no answer, so she drove over. When she got there, she was surprised to find the door ajar, especially since she remembered locking it the night before. She walked through the door, and what she saw will haunt her for the rest of her life. She gets into the house, and then she finds a horrific crime scene. Something very bad has happened to her mom and dad.

and to her son. So you put yourself as a mom, right? What's the worst possible thing could happen to you? Is that your five-year-old boy's missing. And this neighborhood, for all intents and purposes, is a safe neighborhood in the city of Calgary. Vicki Faulkner and James Hardy said there was no sign of Jennifer's five-year-old son or her parents. And she was frantic. She walked through the house and called me.

for her mom, for her dad, for Nathan, left the house. She called her husband Rod. He said to call 911. She called 911 and they told her to wait in her car in case somebody was still in the home. And police arrived about five minutes later. So the dispatch knows that there's something very bad that's happened here and they dispatch our uniformed members, our uniformed members go in there and the first thing they would do is go look

You know, I can see right away I have a crime scene here, so our job in policing is preservation of life. That's number one. They would do a sweep through the house to see if anybody was injured, find, and that means closets, any place that anybody could possibly be. There would be outbuildings, you know, outside in the immediate area of the yard.

That's their job. And then they realize, patrol goes, we've got a big problem here. They contact the central general investigation section. They dispatch a couple detectives. They're there in a short period of time. And they go, yeah, we have a big problem here. One of the first things that you have to look at, of course, is those footprints of life. So when we looked at the Licknesses and Nathan, their footprints of life stopped.

So there was no more use of bank cards. There was no use of credit cards. The cell phones were still there. One of the cell phones was found by one of the first responders, and I think it was Catherine's phone because Jennifer was still outside trying to call it and they could hear the phone. Alvin's phone was found in the bedroom in a box. Investigators also found the purse Nathan claimed in the estate sale before he disappeared.

Inside was his pack of gum and his beloved Superman cape. Both vehicles were there. One was parked in front, locked up. The keys, I believe, were at the residence. The other vehicle was in the back in a detached garage.

Police said it didn't make sense that a couple looking to enjoy their retirement years would suddenly disappear with their grandson. Solid background, hardworking individuals, no criminal background, no known criminal contacts. And if it was a robbery, why would Kathy's purse and Alvin's wallet be left behind?

Was there an item of value, something that caught someone's eye during the estate sale? An object they would come back for later? And remember what Jennifer was talking about too. She said there had been some characters that had shown up there, some individuals that she had bad feelings about that they were looking, you know, they were looking to check out the sale, perhaps, you know, able to come back, do some theft, those kind of things.

But if that were the case, why would anyone interested in a robbery kidnap a child and his grandparents? I think that was probably one of the more bewildering pieces of this investigation at the front end. Because often you have some inclination on a motive. This is the worst possible thing that could ever happen to a family, right? And as a parent or an uncle and aunt, you know, you would never...

You would never get over this. It'd be something for the rest of your life. I think at that point they're going, it's the randomness of what's occurred here. On June 30, 2014, by 5 p.m., an Amber Alert was issued. An Amber Alert has been issued for the abduction of a five-year-old male from southwest Calgary today. Nathan O'Brien is a white male, three feet tall.

Police scoured the neighborhood.

They knocked on every door, hoping to find surveillance video that might provide answers, any information that could lead them to Nathan and his grandparents. At the same time, officers were also trying to identify possible suspects.

So we would be looking for anyone that's, you know, that's doing break-and-enters, that has a history of break-and-enters at night. You would look at sex offenders. You're going to look at...

Anybody that's high risk in that particular area, and that is a wide area, right? You start bringing your analysts in, you start working those back. And as we progressed, we did find some individuals in the areas, in that area, right, that had potential that could have committed this crime.

Investigators put together a list of people to talk to.

And you go, okay, James, it doesn't sound like a lot, but each one of those has to be meticulously gone through. And the reason for that is we want to, it's so critical. Think of the emotion on this file. Think of the emotion. We want to solve this file. But we also, with the integrity investigations, what you need to do is ensure that we exonerate the innocent and we convict the guilty.

Within hours of Jennifer O'Brien calling 911, forensic investigators began examining Alvin and Kathy Lickness' home.

They photographed and documented all evidence inside and outside of the house. They saw what they thought were drag marks. So you had blood, but it looked like something had been pulled across the driveway and perhaps loaded into another vehicle, right? That was beside. So there was one vehicle in the driveway and beside that looked like a vehicle had been pulled in, right? And that...

Individuals had been loaded up into this vehicle. Calgary Police Senior Constable Ian Oxton became the primary crime scene investigator assigned to this case. We had fingerprints in the house. We are finding fingerprints. We are finding hairs and fibers. It's just we don't know who they are at the initial stages. That particular day they had an estate sale. We had a number of unknown persons go through the house during the estate sale. So for collecting hairs and fibers, we could have an exponential amount of evidence that we don't know the origins.

We were examining the house and we couldn't find a point of entry that you typically have in crime scenes, whether it's a forced door or a broken window or something. Nothing was damaged that we could see an issue. So we were wondering, did the person, is it a friend or associate of the family who came in, was invited in or was already in the house when this happened, rather than a stranger coming in?

Investigators also called in several experts, including Sergeant Jody Arns. I received a phone call that night, and then they asked if I could attend first thing in the morning on the 1st of July. There was a significant amount of blood within the residence, and they were asking if I could attend as the bloodstain pattern expert and document and give an opinion on it.

Sergeant Arns has been a police officer for 15 years and spent more than 11 years as a member of the Forensic Crime Scenes Unit. You'll remember her from our Season 3 episode titled, The Evidence Tells a Story. On July 1st, 2014, Arns arrived at the Lickness home. And there were several times that I would hear a creak or a noise or something like that. And I would be like...

He's probably hiding. And I would go and search through a closet because that's what I thought. You know what? Maybe he got away and he was hiding. And I would run and check and see just because I heard a noise or something like that, right? And I still had hope that he was somewhere alive.

Over the next 12 hours, Arns meticulously examined and documented each of the bloodstains. It was a multi-level house, so there were quite a few levels in the residence. And the bloodstains were contained on the main floor, the second level, and then the first lower level, where the garage and family room area were.

In this particular case, we used LCV. It's leukocrystal violet, and it's a chemical that we spray in areas that we believe there is blood stain or if there's been a cleanup, and we'll spray this chemical, and it reacts with the hemi in the blood, and it'll turn like a dark purplish-blue color if there is blood present. ♪

It is just a presumptive test, but it will give us a blue visual. So once it was sprayed within the kitchen, there was footwear impressions that became more evident, as well as there were swipe marks consistent with a mop or like a cleanup in the area. Here again is the primary crime scenes investigator, Ian Oxton. We submitted that to...

It's called SAICAR, the Shoe Image Capture and Retrieval Database. And they were then able to tell us what kind of make and model of shoe that was. It's a system owned by the RCMP in Ottawa. So we knew fairly early on what kind of footwear we were looking for at the crime scene. Arne said it was clear someone was injured, but who and how bad was difficult to determine.

The unfortunate thing about doing bloodstain is you still have to analyze the blood to get a profile so I know whose blood it is.

So upon my initial attendance, I couldn't tell you if there was, if the three individuals that they were looking for were all bleeding. I couldn't tell you how many people were involved in regards to who the offenders could have been. There might have been one, there could have been two, there could have been six. And who knows, they could have all been bleeding.

So at that point, all I could say is, yes, you do have several areas of impact, but I can't tell you if all three have been injured, if one has been injured, or if there's multiple offenders. The Amber Alert was still active, and police had no solid leads. They looked to Arns for any insight that could help move the case forward. They were still trying to determine if anybody was still alive or if people would have died.

So they asked me if I could basically give them a preliminary report. And on the 2nd of July, I actually attended with the medical examiner as well, with Dr. Brooks-Lim. And they wanted both of us to basically provide some information and say whether we thought the people were still alive or if they've actually been killed based on what we were seeing. There's one bloodstain in particular that both haunted investigators and gave them hope.

On the stairwell from the main level up to the second floor, there was a linen closet kind of at the top of the stairs. And on the wall, there were four little finger marks that were visible. And they were about 60 centimeters above the floor. So for me, I'm 5'8", and they were about my knee height is where this little handprint was.

And I did put the scale against it and it was, I think, probably about eight centimeters in width in total. So it would indicate at that point that it was a small person or a child that would have left that handprint there. I guess the only bit of hope that that gave me was that the child was up and moving.

Because in order for the handprint to be on the location that it was, would mean that the child was stood up and was going down over the stairs and using the wall to actually, I guess, hold themselves up as they were going down. So to me, that was the only positive thing about it was that, okay, the child was moving. So it's a good possibility he's still alive.

News of the missing family gripped the nation. Neighbors and complete strangers who wanted to show their support for Nathan, Alvin, and Kathy placed flowers, cards, balloons, and teddy bears on the front lawn of the Lickness home. Others tied green ribbons around trees and lampposts as a sign of hope for their safe return. On July 2nd, 2014, surrounded by their extended family,

Nathan's parents, Jennifer and Rod O'Brien, made a heartbreaking plea for help. Nathan, God is taking care of your soul, and mom and dad need you to be brave right now. To whoever has Nathan, please find it in your heart to drop off our little angel, Nathan, to which he can be rescued and reunited with his brothers and his family. To the public, our son and family could be anywhere right now.

If you have any information, anything at all, please contact the police. We are grateful for all the support from everyone we have received online, our family and friends. Nathan, we love you big. We will see you soon. I'm Nathan's mother, Jennifer O'Brien, and I'm the daughter of Alvin and Kathy Lickness.

I appreciate you guys being here because I need Nathan to hear our voices and I really, I am grateful for you guys to allow this to happen. And I just, Nathan, I need you to hear my voice right now and I need you to know that mommy and daddy love you more than anything in this world. And we can't be with you right now

But the best people that can be with you other than us is your grandparents. And I know that I know grandma's holding you so tightly right now and taking care of you. And they are doing everything in their power to keep you safe. So I need you to know that. Stay strong, Nathan. Stay strong. We know you are a superhero and I just need you to stay strong. And we are going to see you. We're going to see you. And we love you so much.

Rod O'Brien held a paper butterfly Nathan made for him. Jennifer gripped one of his t-shirts in her hands. Nathan, we love you so much. Daddy loves you big. Your brother, Luke. Mom. And Maximus love you. Alvin, just stay strong. Keep everybody safe. I know you are. Love you all so much. Everybody. Everybody's here for you guys. Everybody.

the emotion at police headquarters that day was overwhelming.

Nathan was the most loving human being throughout that whole sale. And I went there on Sunday with my son and he was there and people would buy stuff and my mom was being herself, being a sales lady and she was just so friendly to everybody and Nathan kept saying, "Grandma, grandma, you have to make sure that you tell them thank you." My mom would say, "No, no, I know I did." And he's like, "Okay." And he would greet them and I guarantee you,

that if Nathan's out there, he's talking to everybody. He is so friendly, he is so strong. He left, he went everywhere forever in costumes. I think that he actually thinks he is Superman. And we didn't even buy him clothes, we bought him costumes 'cause he loved to dress up and that's why we referred to him as our superhero. - Nathan is the only person I, he's the glue in our family. And he's the glue between the brothers and us.

He was our firstborn with Jennifer and I. And he's the only person I've ever known that as he gets older, he gets kinder and more open to all the kids and all of his friends in our bay. He's the glue of our neighborhood. Yeah, he's friendly. He's very smart. He's very religious. He loves God. He knows God's watching out for him right now.

Both the family and police hoped that plea would spur someone to come forward. Someone who could help find Nathan, Alvin and Kathy.

Staff Sergeant Doug Andrus of the Calgary Police Homicide Unit spoke about the case. We don't know the motive behind this. Right now, we have three individuals who have disappeared under suspicious circumstances. I think that right now we're very positive that we're going to find these individuals. We're hoping we're going to find them alive. Just a day later, on July 3rd, 2014, Jennifer O'Brien returned to her parents' home.

We walked the family members through the home to try and identify any items that may be missing that we don't already know about. It was estimated that upwards of 200 people passed through the house on the weekend of the estate sale. And investigators had to consider one of those people could have been involved in their suspicious disappearance.

Police are trying to find out if any items from the Lickness home are still unaccounted for and that's why they're interviewing all of these people. Basically they're looking for just any single piece of information that could help them find Nathan O'Brien and his grandparents.

We don't know if this is a random situation or not. Again, we're keeping an open mind and looking at all possibilities. We don't know the motive at this point. And that's one of the answers that we want to get during the course of our investigation. What was the motive of this? Police received tips from all over North America that led to sweeping searches of neighborhoods and area landfills.

Here's former Calgary Police Superintendent James Hardy. All the tips were pouring in. So by the end of the third day, we had 17,000 files, right, in our data set.

So that becomes almost unmanageable. So you're running hard, you're running really hard. The first 48 hours, they always talk about, you've seen the show 48 hours, that's very true. But then what happens is fatigue starts to set in and with fatigue you start to have difficulty focusing, keeping your priorities straight. My job is to make sure there's enough resources in there that we can keep the pressure

Keep the pressure up professionally again, right? Because we want to make sure we're going in the right direction. And when you get fatigued and tired, you can make errors, you can miss things, right? And we can't afford to do that. Police tell us that less than half of the estimated 200 people who attended the Lickness estate sale on the weekend have come forward to speak to investigators. They're looking for more of those people to come forward in the next few days. The Amber Alert remains in effect right now.

Then, four days after Nathan and his grandparents disappeared, on July 4th, the first real break in the case. Police released a photo of a truck, a green Ford F-150. The vehicle was seen in the area the night of the incident, driving in the area several times. And we believe that the person in that vehicle may have information that will assist us in our investigation.

Well, that turned out to be the catalyst because what happens is that truck, when it's released, right, in the color, and then one of the family members phones the lead detective. The Ford F-150 was associated with a person of interest who police already had on their list. He was on the list. So often in the outset of your investigation, we'd always talk about this, is that often,

The individual that turns out has perpetrated the crime is in that initial look.

On the day Nathan and his grandparents went missing, police interviewed the family. And that's when Alvin's son, Alan, mentioned that his father had a possible enemy. If you've got an individual that has actually committed murders or done abductions, they don't want to be caught. And how far are they prepared to go in even dealing with police officers to try and escape and get away? Those are on the back of your mind. So let's say those individuals are alive, right?

and he's holding them hostage. And you tip him off, and you're not prepared then to do an intervention, right? Is there a possibility he could kill your hostages? Yeah, absolutely, right? Could he escape? Absolutely. Could he set an ambush out for the officers? Absolutely. The person of interest lived on a rural property near Airdrie, about 30 minutes northeast of Calgary. We put surveillance resources on him,

on the farm to see what's going on. The RCMP is contacting that we found the farm in RCMP jurisdiction. We're looking at doing a tactical intervention with their emergency response team because we believe we still may have somebody alive. The issue you have is the larger your property is, the harder it is to secure. So when we're in Calgary and we have a residence, one residence, we can set patrol cars up, we can set multiple perimeters up.

It's not foolproof, but it's easier in a city urban environment. When you're out in the rural area and you need a lot of officers to be able to set your perimeters and then be able to ingress safely. We want to arrest the suspect, all right, safely. We want our officers to be safe and we want the public to be safe.

So there's all those considerations when you're working in, you have a large rural area and Nancy I've done that because of ex-Maoiti emergency response team. It is not a simple process, right? You don't know where your suspect is. So as you're making your approach in, there's a lot of potential danger. An RCMP emergency response team was assembled, which included snipers and a police dog.

Just after 6 p.m. on July 4th, 2014, a green truck was seen leaving the farm. It matched the description of the one caught on video driving around the Lickness home the night they disappeared. Officers pulled the truck over. The driver was arrested at gunpoint and surrendered peacefully without incident. He was read his rights, searched for weapons, handcuffed, and taken to a police station in Calgary.

The truck was seized and so were his shoes. Meanwhile, police were working on getting a warrant to search the property, but they didn't have one yet. At this point, Hardy said police had an extremely difficult decision to make.

They either had to go ahead and enter without a search warrant, given the hope that the victims could still be alive, or they wait to enter until a search warrant was authorized. So the only way that we could get onto that property at this point was to do a hostage rescue, believing that the Licknesses and Nathan O'Brien were still alive, which gave us authorization to get onto the property. Under Canadian law,

Your property is your right. It's a castle. We need a search warrant to come onto the property. But if I believe that for the preservation of life, I have to make an emergency decision

onto your property. I'm going to enter your property to do a rescue, to save someone's life. I can do that. That's exigent circumstances. That's emergency circumstances that authorizes us to go onto the property, bearing in mind that down the line, I'm going to have to justify my actions in court. The RCMP emergency response team went onto the property. They were instructed to search only for living or dead bodies, not to gather evidence.

The search lasted about two hours, from 6.40 p.m. to just before 9 p.m. on July 4th, 2014. But there was no sign of Nathan or his grandparents. ♪

Neighbor, chuck wagon driver Jimmy Nevada, was shocked by the growing police presence. Police officer told my wife that they were going to be using the yard for a RCMP guy for staging a raid and go back to your house. So there was three or four vehicles in here ready to go.

Nevada told Global News that for decades, an elderly couple lived on the property. He also said their adult son still lived with them on the farm. He's got to be in his, probably around 50. You know, he still lives at home and there's, and I don't know much about him. The following day, on July 5th, 2014, investigators began a more thorough search of the farm. This time, they had a warrant.

Here's Senior Constable Ian Oxton. I knew the previous night that the farm had been searched by the entry teams, the RCMP emergency response team had entered. And they did a hasty cursory search just looking for people to make sure that no one was injured or hurt or held. And then they backed off and the warrant was in process. So I knew that the residents had been cleared of obvious persons. There was no one that they could find in their property. So we were going in hoping to find someone.

an indication of where they could have been taken if there was somewhere else, another location that they could have been transported to. When I heard that it was a rural property of 40 acres, just from my background with search and rescue and evidence gathering on that aspect of it, I knew the 40 acre site was going to be difficult to search and process effectively because it's so large, just the vastness of that property.

The police presence that converged on the property was unprecedented. It was the largest search Calgary police had ever been a part of, and the magnitude was overwhelming. They went through the home room by room and also searched the garage that was packed to the rafters. Forensic teams had to explore every inch of the 40-acre property.

That included a multitude of outbuildings. They carefully combed through the grass and walked shoulder to shoulder through surrounding fields. Dive teams were brought in to check bodies of water that scattered the countryside.

K-9 units from both city police and the RCMP were deployed. I'll walk the edge here and then space out, maybe, you know, stagger out. Every resource that could be used was made available as officers raced against the clock hoping to find Nathan, Alvin and Kathy.

or at least some clue that could reveal what happened to them. The search will continue until no stone has been left unturned. While the search continued at the farm, police spent 24 hours with their primary suspect. But they didn't have enough evidence to charge him in connection with the Amber Alert. Instead, he was charged with unrelated fraud offenses and remained in custody.

That's when we first learned the suspect's name, Douglas Garland. Garland's been charged with a new case of identity theft, but it's the same identity Garland stole back in the 90s, that of Matthew Hartley, a 14-year-old Alberta boy killed in a southern Alberta car crash in 1980. At that time, on the same rural property by Airdrie that's being searched now, there was a drug bust.

Garland was charged with drug trafficking and possession of stolen property after he was caught making amphetamines on his parents' acreage. But he fled and took on Hartley's name, living in B.C. with that identity for seven years before finally being convicted of the drug charges in 2000. He was sentenced to 39 months in jail. For now, police have only laid the identity theft charge, but with the search continuing at his parents' acreage, Garland remains a person of interest.

Global News spoke with Alan Lickness, the son of Alvin Lickness and the brother-in-law of Douglas Garland, the person of interest in this case. He tells us that Douglas and Alvin had business dealings until the work ran out. And as far as the family was concerned, the two hadn't had contact in about seven years. So it came as a surprise to the family when a truck matching the description of Douglas Garland was seen in the area of the Lickness home the night they disappeared.

Alvin's son, Alan, was in a common-law relationship with Garland's sister. She was the one who recognized the green truck on the news, which shifted the focus to Garland's farm, where the exhaustive search continued. Another full day of searching this rural property northeast of Airdrie. Investigators have also been going door-to-door, checking with the property owners out here, asking them to check out buildings, check anything that might seem out of the ordinary.

You know your property better than anybody else. You can see if anything's missing, if anything's been disturbed, if there's anything odd, tire tracks, absolutely anything. Today, the RCMP bomb truck with the explosive disposal unit also converged on the Garland property.

But they determined that the items of concern were standard farm chemicals. As well, today in Calgary, the search of three city landfills continues. They're still trying to determine if any of the items that have been seized so far have any relevance in this case, but there's a lot to sift through at this point. Police are exhausting every avenue they have, but they are still remaining hopeful they will find Nathan O'Brien and his grandparents. They're going through everything.

And anything that might be suspicious, we're taking as part of the investigation. We're having it checked and we don't know whether it has any relevance to the file or not. I'm not going to speculate. I'm just saying that we are hopeful that we will find them alive and there's nothing to indicate otherwise. So we will remain hopeful and we'll continue to work on this. Ten days after Nathan's disappearance, the Amber Alert was still active.

A vigil was held at a park near the Lickness home. Nathan's parents, Jennifer and Rod O'Brien, spoke to supporters. I thank you dearly from the bottom of our hearts for being a part of this. This is what's helping get us through as a family. It's your prayers. It's the kind messages that you're sending. It's the food that you're sending. It's coming over to our house and spending time with us.

That's what keeps our family strong. Alvin and Kathy's son, Jeff, also spoke at the vigil. I like to think of this whole thing kind of like as a flame to just keep the flame going. And I don't want to think of this as like a funeral because I know it's not.

I hope to see them again. Family, friends, and hundreds of strangers held candles and wore green ribbons. All maintaining faith Nathan and his grandparents would be found safe. We're very hopeful that they're out there. There's no doubt in our mind. We just got to find them, and the police are doing everything that they can do. And I know that they're on a lead, and I truly believe that...

They'll figure it out. And so I hope this ends out to be a happy story. In the meantime, Garland made several court appearances on the fraud charges. Nathan's father attended each one.

It's been 12 days since the disappearance of five-year-old Nathan O'Brien and his grandparents. And as the search to find them continues, today the one man police consider a person of interest has been released from jail. Bail for Douglas Garland was set at $750. Global's Nancy Hickst was in court today and Nancy Garland has strict conditions to follow.

That's right. And just to make it clear, so far, Douglas Garland has only been charged with fraud-related offences, and that's what he was granted bail on. Once he is released, he will have a curfew to follow from 9 p.m. till 7 a.m. daily. He expressed some concern over that curfew, telling the court he lives on a farm and sometimes works past 9 p.m.,

But the judge was quick to clarify he's not being released to go back to the farm. Instead, he's being released to transitional housing. That could include a hotel or motel or the city homeless shelters.

Obviously, the farm is not a place that Garland can go to live right now as police continue to search his parents' acreage northeast of Airdrie. He will be back in court at the beginning of August on this matter. In the meantime, the investigation continues into the disappearance of Nathan O'Brien and Alvin and Catherine Lickness. Douglas Garland remained the primary suspect. He was under constant surveillance while out on bail.

Police hoped he would lead them to Nathan and his grandparents. What happened next was an unexpected twist and the turning point of the investigation. We were going in pretty much blind. We didn't have anything. We didn't know anything of what happened. There was no witnesses. There was no idea of what to expect. No question. He has got something on that farm he does not want us to see. That's next time on Crime Beat.

Crime Beat is written and produced by me, Nancy Hixt, with producer Dila Velasquez. Audio editing and sound design is by Rob Johnston. Special thanks to photographer-editor Danny Lantella for his work on this episode. And thanks to Chris Bassett, the acting VP of National and Network News for Global News.

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