The strange mystery of the Smiths Falls missing men

Robbie Thomson was barely out of toddlerhood when his parents noticed he dragged his left leg on the ice.

The Thomsons were a hockey family — dad George played with the Smiths Falls Bears back in the day — and all three kids, Jed, Tabatha and Robbie, were pretty much born with skates on.

When he complained of pain, George and Mary Helen took their son to every doctor in the region.

But it was only when they arrived at Montreal’s Shriners Hospital for Children that they got a diagnosis: Legg-Calvé-Perthes, a serious disease that cuts blood from the ball of the hip joint.

“He was never supposed to walk again,“ says his sister Tabatha.

But Robbie turned that prognosis on its head, becoming a force on the ice just like his dad.

He was a big man, 6-foot-3, 265 pounds, and he went on to play for small-town teams across Eastern Ontario, the Gananoque Islanders and the Cornwall River Kings among them.

Robbie sure could scrap if he needed — there’s a page of his on-ice bouts available at hockeyfights.com — but off the ice he was a joker with a zany, face-cracking grin.

His hockey prowess meant a lot in a town where the arena is as central to local life as pubs like Rob Roy’s and Matty O’Shea’s.

But Robbie’s last years were marked by another reality of Smiths Falls life: a struggle with addiction.

Now his name is inseparable from the way his life ended.

Robbie Thomson is one of four men to have mysteriously vanished or been found deceased in and around Smiths Falls in recent years.

The sequence began in 2018, when Robert Lambert, then 75, disappeared.

Police said they were initially told Lambert had returned to the U.S., where he was born. Investigators can find no record of that travel.

Lawrence Bertrim, 42, disappeared in the autumn of 2022. A familiar figure around downtown Smiths Falls, he was last seen there late on the night of Sept. 30, police say.

The Thomsons reported Robbie as missing in October 2023. He was 34.

Steven Tate, also 34 and known to work the occasional handyman job with Robbie, was last seen alive on Nov. 4 2023 in Smiths Falls.

His body turned up five days later at the side of Highway 15 northwest of town, in Montague Township.

Police have said they believe Tate was the victim of a hit and run and have released images and video of a car they believe may have been involved.

But many in Smiths Falls have long insisted Tate’s death was no accident, and that it and the disappearances of the other three men are linked.

Investigators won’t go that far. “While we do not believe they are directly connected,“ OPP spokesman Bill Dickson told the Ottawa Citizen, “we know some of the individuals may have known each other or shared social circles.“

Authorities have offered $50,000 rewards in each of the four cases and have erected billboards seeking information from the public.

Late last year, those who hold to the theory that the four cases form part of a single narrative got a boost.

On Oct. 29, despite the absence of a body, the OPP laid first-degree murder charges against three people in connection to Robbie Thomson’s homicide.

Charged are Christopher Philip Fenton, 48, and Erin Lynn Mackie, 40, both identified as living at the same address outside of Smiths Falls, and Joshua Joseph Belfiori, 34, of Bath, Ont.

Robbie’s is the only case among the four to lead to criminal charges.

The day after the arrests, investigators executed a search warrant on the wooded property where Chris Fenton and Erin Mackie live, and of which Fenton is co-owner.

But there is one other name on the title: Robert Lambert, the first of the men to go missing.

The search uncovered human remains. Then came the confirmation.

It was Robbie.

Police have not said that Robert Lambert’s disappearance is connected to Robbie Thomson’s homicide, and no charges have been laid in that case.

And yet Robbie’s remains turned up on Lambert’s land. And property records tied to that land raise questions about powers of attorney and vulnerability in old age.

So what, exactly, has been happening in Smiths Falls?

***

Smiths Falls, a railroad town about halfway between Ottawa and Kingston with a population of just over 9,000 people, has long had a tough reputation.

Back in the 1920s, when the Ontario Temperance Act generally outlawed liquor sales in the province, trains from Montreal ferried bootleggers in alongside the regular commercial freight.

Locals say similar distribution lines continue to funnel contraband through Smiths Falls today.

After several large employers exited town in the late oughts — the Hershey chocolate factory and Stanley Tools among them — Smiths Falls continued what by then had become a steady decline.

In 2017, when Canopy Growth Corp., then the darling of the fledgling legal cannabis industry, acquired the 700,000 square-foot Hershey complex, everyone hoped the town would be saved.

But a little over five years later, Canopy sold that property back to Hershey. It’s remained largely dormant since.

While Canopy’s nearby Tweed plant still turns out cannabis products, local jobs remain few.

In 2024, Mayor Shawn Pankow told Lanark County Council that 14 per cent of the population of Smiths Falls was getting Ontario Disability Support Program payments — “certainly far higher than the provincial average,“ said Pankow in an interview, “and I don’t think it has probably changed much.“

Combine all of this with another reality of Smiths Falls — the one Robbie lived — and you get something common to a lot of small Ontario towns: the way rust-belt despair intertwines with the opioid crisis.

Townsfolk say that an active illicit-drugs trade connects Smiths Falls to a network of traffickers throughout the region and that it also links Robbie Thomson and the other three men.

Asked about this insistence that the cases are related, Pankow said the police must be allowed to do their work, before adding:

“There’s a degree of hope that if they are connected then there’s going to be more bodies discovered on this property and we will end up seeing more closure for families. But again, at this stage, it’s too preliminary to even speculate.“

At the centre of the police probe is that property: a densely treed 40 acres owned (as it happens) by a retired high-end kitchen appliances salesman from Brooklyn, N.Y. who fell in love online.

That man has vanished. His name remains on title. It’s the same land where police found Robbie.

***

Robbie Thomson started using in his late teens or early 20s, says his sister Tabatha, who is also in recovery following her own challenges with prescription medications.

He’d been diagnosed as a young man with a number of mental-health conditions, ADHD among them, and his hockey career also led to injuries.

The Thomsons believe he was self-medicating.

“He was very wiry at times. He never really had a doctor once he grew up,“ Tabatha says. “I know it’s not the right choice but he was clearly having a hard time.

“I think it was maybe a way to shut off.“

His addiction would help lead him to a couple of serious scrapes with the law. But it was during a stint in rehab that Robbie met his longtime partner Melissa Reid, who was also in recovery.

She had two children already, and Robbie became an important part of their lives. The couple married in Jamaica in 2015, about the time that Robbie was playing for the Cornwall River Kings.

For work he often helped out his father, George, a railroader who did small drywalling and painting jobs on the side. Robbie could pick up a refrigerator all on his own and walk it into your house.

As time went on he began doing odd jobs with friends like Steven Tate, who everyone just called “Tate.“

Robbie and Melissa had a lot of good years, with one often keeping the other from straying back into drugs. But Tabatha and George say they could also be each other’s weakest links.

The couple were living with Tabatha in downtown Smiths Falls when the relationship fell apart.

Tabatha says Robbie didn’t want to tempt Tabatha and Melissa by using at home. And so he kept away, more and more as time went by.

“He was on a dark path,“ Tabatha says. “The addiction was pretty heavy at that time. He was going from house to house. He was still in contact with Melissa, still in contact with us.

“But obviously I know Robbie — I know his history. I had to look for him many of times before.“

George says it was a shattering period for the family: “We went through hell. You couldn’t sleep at night thinking he wasn’t going to be alive tomorrow.“

Tabatha says she and her brother had a deal.

“I had sat down, we had a conversation, I said, ‘Listen, I can’t do this, I can’t wonder, I can’t not know.’ So we had a plan that he would be in contact with me every couple of days.“

That plan stuck. Until Robbie went missing.

***

Elsewhere in the Smiths Falls area, meanwhile, two of those who would later be charged in Robbie’s homicide were living out their own lives.

They were having money troubles.

In early 2014, Chris Fenton had taken a mortgage out with CIBC to purchase a home at 516 Blinkhorn Ln., a clapboard bungalow at the end of a gravel road on the northeast outskirts of Smiths Falls.

The previous autumn, that property had been advertised in the Carleton Place-Almonte Canadian Gazette for $184,900.

Not outside the average for a single-family home in Smiths Falls at the time, but paying it off would become a problem.

Ironically, Chris’s mortgage woes were unfolding while he himself was busy building a life with a real estate agent.

Though it’s not clear when their relationship began, Chris is identified as Erin Mackie’s partner in an obituary published at the time of Erin’s maternal grandfather’s death in 2015.

Chris spent at least part of his childhood in the 1980s growing up in Ottawa’s Mechanicsville neighbourhood, just west of the downtown core.

A 1990 Citizen story covering an Ottawa Board of Education teachers strike describes a 12-year-old Chris Fenton at Connaught School on Gladstone Avenue “shrieking“ of the picketing teachers:

“They look like nerds!“

A Smiths Falls man who knows Chris well, and who asked to remain anonymous because of the stigma attached to speaking publicly, calls him “awkward“ but “streetwise,“ with an interest in cars and snowmobiles.

Erin, on the other hand, is chatty and outgoing. She grew up south of Ottawa.

Her brother Brent, also a competitive hockey player, owns Mackie Homes, a building firm based in Arnprior that in its promotional literature refers to the Mackies as carpenters “going back three generations.“

(Contacted through his business, Brent declined to comment for this story.)

Erin attended Osgoode Township High School and, in November 2002, was awarded the Metcalfe Women’s Institute Award “for the most deserving Grade 11 student in family studies.“

In a photograph published in The Winchester Press she is 17, smiling alongside her classmates.

By 2015, Erin and Chris had a daughter. Community members say they now have two children.

Erin’s real estate work was based mainly in Manotick, where she also waited tables for many years at the Black Dog Bistro.

Two business websites advertising her real estate services referred to Coldwell Banker First Ottawa Realty. She registered one of those sites, erinlmackie.com (now defunct), in late 2015.

The following year, in October 2016, Chris defaulted on the Blinkhorn mortgage.

Four months after that, a representative of a foreclosure-management firm arrived at the home to find tenants living there, according to court documents filed at the Kingston courthouse.

By June, having obtained a writ of seizure and sale on the property, CIBC had lined up a buyer and was poised to sell the place.

But soon after, Chris’s tenants on Blinkhorn presented the listing agent on the home with what CIBC later referred to in court documents as a “purported lease.“

That “lease“ identified Chris as the landlord, his tenants as a couple with four sons.

It also laid out a series of confusing dates.

As the CIBC mortgage specialist overseeing the matter for the bank later pointed out in an affidavit, Chris’s lease for the Blinkhorn home ran for a fixed term of 60 months “but also states that it commences April 1, 2016 and ends April 1, 2022, a period of 72 months.“

The bank’s sale of the Blinkhorn property fell through, likely as a result of these complications.

Indeed, according to an argument advanced in a CIBC affidavit, that was by design: “the lease was entered into in contemplation of default under the mortgage with the object of encumbering the property long-term, thereby discouraging CIBC from taking possession of the property.“

The following month, in July 2017, CIBC sued Chris and his tenants.

It was Erin who was served the legal documents on Chris’s behalf, at the couple’s home at 821 Carroll Rd., which had been purchased in 2015 by Erin’s own parents, Peter and Lynn Mackie.

A year later, Robert Lambert, a 75-year-old Brooklyn transplant to Canada, vanished from his home outside Smiths Falls.

By then, Chris’s name had been added as a co-owner of that property.

***

The Friday in September 2022 when he disappeared, Lawrence Bertrim “had made the statement that he didn’t feel safe,“ Lawrence’s roommate told his mother, Linda Mindle, 65.

Lawrence had revealed this to his roommate on the phone from the house on Church Street West in downtown Smiths Falls where he was last seen. He said he was afraid to leave the property.

“That doesn’t sound like Lawrence,“ explains Linda, something that she says even Smiths Falls police, who knew her son well, told her they agreed with her about.

Lawrence was the oldest of four siblings and the father of two daughters.

A music lover, he had a knack for winning tickets to big live shows in Ottawa from radio contests.

Like Robbie, he suffered from ADHD and had struggled with addiction since being involved in a serious car accident at the age of 21. He would later be diagnosed with PTSD.

“That accident was a major contributing factor in his mental health,“ says Lawrence’s sister, Bridget Manahan, 36.

Linda wouldn’t expect to hear from Lawrence over the weekends after his disability got paid out.

A beer drinker and weed smoker, he would also use whatever happened to be available, though Linda says never intravenous drugs.

“Whatever you had would be his choice for the next cycle,“ Linda says.

Lawrence shared a home across the Rideau River from downtown Smiths Falls with three other addicts.

When Linda visited after Lawrence’s roommate called and said he hadn’t come home — that he’d felt unsafe — she found his pain and PTSD medications in his bedroom waiting for him.

“He wasn’t planning on not coming home,“ says Bridget.

After the family went to report him missing with the Smiths Falls Police Service, the first thing police did was send out his photograph. To Linda’s dismay, they used Lawrence’s mugshot.

It would not be the last time the police — first the Smiths Falls service, then the OPP once the provincial force took the lead on the investigation — disappointed Lawrence’s family.

Linda refers to “that sour taste of ‘they don’t care’ ” when she talks of how investigators waited several months after Lawrence’s disappearance to interview his immediate family members.

She worries the authorities look down on Lawrence as “lower class,“ and adds: “He’s a son, a brother, an uncle, a father. He’s a human.“

The family knows as much about his disappearance now as they did the day he vanished.

“The rat thing is big,“ Linda says of Smiths Falls. “‘You’re not a rat’ is instilled as hard as that wall.“

But Linda also understands she’ll never learn what happened unless someone talks.

Lawrence, Robbie and Steve all knew each other.

“They’re all interconnected,“ Linda says.

***

At the heart of the OPP’s Smiths Falls investigation is a set of human remains unearthed on a rural 40-acre property that continues to be laced round today with yellow police tape.

This is how it became a crime scene.

Robert Lambert met Kathryn Ann Botham playing an arcade version of eight-ball pool on Yahoo! Games, part of the Yahoo! website that also allowed gamers to chat with each other during play.

Kathy was living in Brockville, Ont. then — this was 25 years ago — and had recently undergone back surgery, says Tina Sutton, who got to know both Kathy and Bob on the same gaming site.

Bob was around 60 at the time, and according to Tina made a living selling high-end appliances at an exclusive store in Manhattan, even handling kitchen upgrades for celebrities.

He was tall — six-foot-three — mild mannered, and spoke with a strong New York accent.

Bob had taken a liking to Kathy, and knew she was struggling in the summer heat after her operation left her in a cumbersome back brace.

Could he buy her an air-conditioning unit? It would make her more comfortable.

Tina remembers Kathy getting in touch with her and asking if she should accept Bob’s offer.

Why not, asked Tina.

Before long, Bob and Kathy were getting married.

It all happened so fast. Tina says Bob flew her in from her home in southern California to be a witness at the wedding in New York.

All the time Tina knew Bob and Kathy, travelling to New York or Brockville to see them, Tina never paid. Bob seemed to have the money.

And yet he lived in a modest one-room apartment directly across from the Brooklyn Museum and Prospect Park.

At about the time she and Bob wed, Kathy went looking for a house up in Canada.

Her elderly parents still lived in the Smiths Falls area, and Kathy found the perfect property not far away from them, northwest of the town, in Montague Township.

Property records show that Bob bought 572 Kelly-Jordan Rd. in late 2004. He paid $233,000, with no mortgage registered against title.

He was proud of the place and its 40 acres. The trees alongside Kelly-Jordan Road afforded privacy, there was a large outbuilding in back, and a deep swathe of thick wood beyond the yard.

A gem of an in-ground pool was immediately behind the house.

At the same time, Bob and Kathy travelled the world — including the Caribbean and the U.K., where they visited Stonehenge.

Age soon started to take its toll on Bob and he was using a cane. He bought a riding lawn mower to cut the grass on his property and tour the grounds.

Bob himself had no family, those who know him say: Kathy’s family became his family.

So it was in that spirit that, in the summer of 2012, Bob co-purchased the house next door to his home on Kelly-Jordan Road.

The second house was for Kathy’s son Jonathan Botham and his partner Jennifer.

Both Bob and Jennifer’s names were on title and on an associated Royal Bank of Canada mortgage for $180,934.63, property records show.

Before long, Kathy had grandchildren living right next door.

***

Bob was in his early 70s now. Within the next few years his life would be upended. Then he’d disappear entirely.

Those events included changes to the control Bob maintained over his own home — developments that would take on new import once police began probing the land some years later.

The turning point came in February 2016, when Kathy died of cancer.

Tina says Kathy had already confided in her that Bob was not doing well.

Apart from his mobility issues, he was growing forgetful and paranoid — worried about the people around him stealing his money, Tina says.

While visiting Bob after Kathy’s death, Tina found him overwhelmed, confused and erratic.

He would give money and valuables to the caretakers tasked with looking in on him.

And he became unable to manage his affairs on his own, often asking Tina to help him log into important websites.

He depended on medication, was increasingly reliant on a wheelchair, and had difficulty getting out of the house to run errands and pick up groceries.

It did not help that Bob never really learned how to drive confidently.

Kathy’s son Jon and his partner Jenn supported Bob as much as they could, says Tina.

Neighbours would see Bob bringing the garbage out using his wheelchair, or mowing the lawn, or sitting at the bottom of his driveway to watch as the odd car drove by.

But then, little by little, Chris Fenton and Erin Mackie began making themselves available to Bob.

The home where Erin and Chris were living at 821 Carroll Rd. was a two-minute drive from Bob’s at 572 Kelly-Jordan Rd.

Erin and Chris brought groceries in for Bob and otherwise supported him.

Soon, Chris was spending a lot of his time over at Bob’s house.

On March 27 2018, Bob signed a document, in the presence of a lawyer and clerk from a Smiths Falls firm, naming Chris and Erin as his powers of attorney for property.

That document, obtained by the Ottawa Citizen, is filed with the Ontario land registry.

Bob’s signature is a barely legible scrawl. Chris’s address is listed as “care of“ Kelly-Jordan Road but omits the street number.

A week after it was signed, on April 4 2018, Chris’s name was added to the title of Bob’s property — the one where he and Kathy had lived, and where Bob was living still.

Land registry documents indicate Chris transferred $313,500 to Bob as part of the deal, with Bob retaining “life estate“ rights and Chris in line to own the property outright upon Bob‘s death.

The document says the transfer occurred without recourse to the power of attorney.

A few days after that, Jon, Kathy’s son, wrote on Facebook:

“Looking for contact numbers for any senior buildings in town …must be wheelchair accessible…thanks in advance.”

A statement Jon provided in response to a series of queries directed at both Jon and Jenn by the Citizen reads in part:

“Bob was very much a part of our family and helped us greatly over the years both taking care of my mother, looking after grandkids and even co-signing for the purchase of our home.“

The statement adds: “there was even a path worn in the woods between the homes from frequent travel back and forth which has since mostly grown over.“

Now, as Bob grieved the loss of his wife, he made it clear to Jon and Jenn that they needn’t come over to his place any longer.

According to Jon’s statement, after Kathy’s death and other personal losses, “Bob struggled immensely and wasn‘t himself as we had known him to be. This period of time led to a wedge in our personal relationship compared to what had once been.“

Bob was last seen in early July 2018, police say. He was 75 years old.

Someone told authorities he’d returned to the U.S. But the OPP says they have no record of his crossing the border.

Chris and Erin moved into 572 Kelly-Jordan Rd. after Bob was no longer present there.

Then, in late October 2018, Bob’s name was removed from title on the house where Jon and Jenn still live, next door to Bob’s.

Jenn became the sole owner, buying Bob out for $2 (a token sum that is not out of the ordinary in property transfers between family members, for example).

The transfer in this case did invoke the power of attorney, naming Chris. To put it another way, Chris sold the home to Jenn on Bob’s behalf.

In response to a question from the Citizen about this transfer, Jon wrote on behalf of himself and Jenn: “At the time for us to remortgage we were under the impression he had gone to the U.S.“

Bob was reported missing one month after the transfer, in November 2018.

Since then Jon has been added as co-owner alongside his wife Jenn on the property.

In August, 2018, Erin’s parents Peter and Lynn sold the home at 821 Carroll Rd. where Erin and Chris lived prior to their arrival at 572 Kelly-Jordan Rd.

In March 2019, Erin voluntarily terminated her real estate registration, according to an entry in her name with the Real Estate Council of Ontario.

Meanwhile, people in the community say the home at 572 Kelly-Jordan Road began taking in boarders.

***

On Oct. 8, 2023, someone with a Facebook account under the name of Josh Belfiori published a post entitled “3 SIMPLE RULES.“

It is an illustration of three skeletons acting out three familiar dictums:

“See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing.“

Josh, who grew up in Smiths Falls but has lived throughout eastern Ontario, has a long history of brushes with the police.

The most important of these took place in January 2020, when, while living in Carleton Place, he was arrested as part of a probe of wholesale drug traffickers.

***

Police allege in a charge sheet issued after the arrests of Christopher Fenton, Erin Mackie and Joshua Belfiori that each of them “did commit first degree murder“ on or about Oct. 12, 2023.

The day after their arrests, police located Robbie’s body on the property Bob bought for Kathy.

Authorities have never said that Bob and Robbie’s cases are linked beyond the fact of Robbie’s body having been found on the property where Bob was last known to live.

Nor have police linked Bob and Robbie’s cases to Lawrence’s disappearance or to the death of Steve Tate.

Steve’s family said via intermediaries they would not speak to the Citizen for this story.

Much about all four cases remains unanswered.

In the years after he vanished Robbie’s sister Tabatha received many communications, often unnecessarily graphic and perhaps deliberately false, detailing Robbie’s whereabouts.

Lawrence Bertrim’s family has also received messages online about where he is now.

One Facebook account even contacted his sister Bridget claiming to be her brother: he’d been hit on the head, the messages recounted, and had later regained consciousness deep in the forest, where he was now a prisoner.

Lawrence’s family did not always find the communications they received credible.

But they were always deeply unsettling.

So was the ongoing lack of new, meaningful information about what had happened to Lawrence, not to mention the other men.

Many in Smiths Falls say that absence is connected to what they describe as a murky drug trade in the region.

What allows that trade to operate in a place where everyone knows everyone’s business?

Fear.

The townsfolk say Smiths Falls is governed by “the rat thing,“ as Lawrence’s mother Linda puts it, a commitment to silence that keeps the authorities out and pushes the truth underground.

Few people talk openly about what their neighbours might be up to.

In late January, the OPP released a statement saying it was pausing the search operation at the Lambert-Fenton property in Montague Township, citing the challenges of working in the cold.

After the winter hiatus the OPP said it would resume its investigation.

Meanwhile, the tragedy of this story stretches beyond that wooded swathe of land in Montague Township.

Melissa Reid, Robbie’s estranged wife, who George and Tabatha say was with Robbie earlier on the last day he was seen alive, died suddenly in 2025.

Her obituary said there would be no funeral and invited loved ones to make donations to Ontario Mental Health.

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