Finding Cleo: Canadian podcast brings answers to Columbia man who wondered for decades how sister died (2024)

It’s a small rectangle of granite, slightly bowed at the top, planted in the earth just a few feet from a wrought-iron fence, a residential street, houses.

“Beloved daughter,” it reads. “Cleo L. Madonia.”

It’s one marker among many that look just like it in Park View Cemetery in suburban Medford, New Jersey.

There’s a large tree nearby, shading adjacent gravesites. Small American flags and arrangements of artificial flowers often mark the scattered headstones.

It’s here that Cleo Madonia, just 13 years old when she died, waited since 1978 for her siblings to find her.

Her oldest brother, Johnny Semaganis, was just 100 miles away, in Lancaster County.

The siblings weren’t told that fate had dropped them so near to each other, a continent from where they’d started.

“Apparently, my first (adoptive) family knew where she was, and her family knew where I was,” Semaganis says today. But “they never communicated.”

Sixties Scoop

Johnny, Cleo and the rest of their siblings had been caught up in the Sixties Scoop, a Canadian program that removed indigenous children from their families and put them up for adoption elsewhere.

Some of the Semaganis kids were so young when they were taken that they didn’t know they had any siblings. Others, like Cleo and Johnny, remembered their siblings but had no way to find them.

Tumultuous childhoods segued into rough teen years and, for some of the Semaganises, bouts with school troubles, alcohol abuse and anger issues. As a young adult, Johnny managed to track down his mother, Lillian, in Canada. Longtime friend Elizabeth Harvey remembers that Lillian Semaganis sent her son a recipe for bannock, a flat bread.

He also made contact with sister Christine Cameron, who still lived in Canada. He remembers hearing that Cleo had died. An aunt heard Cleo had been in Arkansas, though no one could prove that was true.

But how exactly did her death happen?

No one in the family knew where Cleo was buried, or what had happened to her. Every inquiry they made with officials in both Canada and America hit a roadblock. Everyone insisted the case was someone else’s jurisdiction, someone else’s responsibility.

And then reporter Connie Walker, of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., came calling.

Months of work by Walker resulted in “Finding Cleo,” a 10-part CBC podcast in which she and Christine, along with Johnny, work to uncover the story — the final days of Cleo.

Adoption

The signature at the bottom of the legal document is tiny, almost as small as the type on the page. “Johnny” is written in the cramped cursive of a child; a middle name, Samson, is printed carefully to fill out the line.

It was Sept. 5, 1974. Twelve-year-old Johnny Semaganis, a Little Pine First Nation boy from a reservation in Saskatchewan, just over the border from Montana, was being asked to sign his consent to adoption.

It had been about seven years since Johnny and his siblings first had come to the attention of the Canadian province’s social service workers. Their mother, Lillian, was “a very friendly, open person,” court papers from the time read, “... sensitive to the problems of others” and generous with her help.

But life on the reservation was rife with hardship, Semaganis says. “It’s in the middle of nowhere, where (the Canadian government) put us,” he says. “If you want to work, you have to go off the reservation.”

And Lillian was an alcoholic. Johnny was sent to live with his grandmother for extended periods of time, and he often assumed responsibility for caring for his younger siblings when Lillian could not.

In the Canadian government’s eyes, that made Lillian’s children prime candidates for a program that removed First Nation children from their homes and reservations and put them up for fostering and adoption — often by white, middle-class families. Known now as the Sixties Scoop, it’s estimated that as many as 20,000 children were taken from their families. Siblings often were split apart, and the target was assimilation: to remove the children from their indigenous culture and teach them how to fit in with whites.

Removed from their mother’s care in the early 1970s, the Semaganis siblings were pulled into this program.

Some remained near home. Others, such as Johnny and Cleo, were sent to America, to separate families. By the time Lillian was able to fight to reunite her family, it was too late.

Johnny, the oldest Semaganis brother, ended up being adopted at age 12 by a Lancaster County couple.

“I remember (Canadian officials) saying, ‘Do you wanna go?’ ” Semaganis says. “And I wanted to get out of that situation. It was bad memories.

“They said, ‘Do you want anything?’ And I remember saying hockey school — I really liked playing hockey — and a new bicycle. And sure enough, they did. It even says in the paperwork I have: Johnny went to hockey school and he enjoyed his new bicycle.

“And there was a paper I signed. I didn’t know what I was signing. So I was (given) a guardian” and put up for adoption.

In the end, there would be no definite, final counting of how many Sixties Scoop children were taken from their parents and adopted out to other families.

Childhood

His adoption to a new family and his move to the Millersville area were not, Semaganis says, easy adjustments.

“They adopted two other Indians also, Yakima from Washington state” who were a little older, Semaganis says of his new family in Lancaster County. But the three didn’t have access to the main house, he says, and they often ended up sleeping in the barn or in a tent.

The other two adopted siblings soon left, Semaganis says.

“I think (the couple) had good ... I think everybody had good intentions,” Semaganis says now. But conditions and relations with his new parents didn’t improve. He ran away.

Semaganis, at about 13, ended up assigned to a foster family. And it was with them, Bill and Kay Henry, that he began to put down roots.

He shared the Henrys’ home with a long succession of other foster children — more than 100 official placements in their 30 years as foster parents for Lancaster County Children & Youth, Bill Henry estimates; probably more like 130 kids once you add in unofficial placements and other teens their own kids brought home when they had nowhere else to go.

“If it wasn’t for them, you know, I don’t know where I’d be,” Semaganis says now. “In jail or dead.”

He played soccer and ice hockey, and graduated from McCaskey High School, Kay Henry says, despite often skipping class to sit in the quiet library and read.

“He’s one of the most intelligent people I know,” Kay Henry says now, adding that she and Bill “absolutely” consider Semaganis one of their kids. “And he’s a wonderful son.”

But as the years passed, Johnny Semaganis still lived with that question with seemingly no answer: What had happened to Cleo?

The podcast

Journalist Connie Walker is Cree, a member of the Okanese First Nation in Canada. In recent years, she has turned her attention to unsolved cases of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.

The media, she felt, often focuses on the salacious details of the tragedies, or the killers: What about the women and girls who were being targeted?

A 2016 podcast project with producer Marnie Luke, “Missing & Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams?” won numerous awards — and the attention of Christine Cameron, Johnny Semaganis’ sister.

Cameron contacted Walker and shared her family’s experience, and her unsuccessful search to find out more about Cleo.

“The only proof Christine had that her sister even existed was a tiny photograph, which she sent me,” Walker told Columbia Journalism Review in July.

“Christine told us how she and her family had been separated, and that their sister was stolen, then murdered, and was missing. I felt there had to be more to this story,” Walker said. “My producer, Marnie, was immediately captivated, too.”

The search for Cleo would become Season 2 of “Missing & Murdered.”

For a year, Walker worked on the story. She visited Little Pine First Nation in Saskatchewan, talked to social welfare workers who had been involved with Sixties Scoop policies, met with Cameron.

In April 2017, Walker visited Silver Spring to interview Semaganis.

“I had my little sister Erika (who also is part of the Henrys’ family) there for moral support,” he says. “The second time they came down they met my mother (Kay) and everything.”

And during these visits East, Walker was able to find some of the answers the Semaganis siblings had waited so long to hear.

Cleo

Adopted into the Madonia family in Medford, New Jersey, Cleo was, by her teachers’ accounts, an excellent student in the Evesham Township school system.

In a statement at the time of Cleo’s death, teacher Louise Musetti told police that Cleo “had a high IQ; in fact, she was doing so well we had advanced her to the top-level math group in the building.”

In her bedroom, police found notes shared among Cleo and her friends. She wrote about how much she liked singer Andy Gibb, about a teacher she didn’t like, about what name she and a friend should give the band they would form someday.

But, contemporary interviews with police show, Cleo was struggling and had been for some time.

“I know that she was adopted by the Madonias and she was unhappy about having to leave her family in Canada,” teacher Ruth Ellen Horn told police. “She felt she wanted to get back to them and see if they were all right.

“... She was very worried about her family, her original family, her brothers and sisters, what happened to them, where they were, who adopted them, were they OK,” Horn told police.

Cleo already had attempted to get back to her family on her own, interviews with police show, only to be returned to the Madonias’ house each time.

On Dec. 22, 1978, the day before Christmas break, Cleo was winding up a weeklong school suspension. She’d been caught with some girls who had taken liquor into the school cafeteria.

Her mother, Leonore Madonia, checked in by phone with her several times that morning. Both Horn and Musetti called her that day around lunchtime to thank her for holiday gifts she’d sent to school with a friend. Soon after, the Madonias' son, Louis, arrived home from school.

And upstairs, Cleo Madonia, dressed in a checkered shirt, jeans and socks, took out her father’s pistol and ended her life by shooting herself in the head.

Johnny

It’s a disquieting thing to be grateful to know where your sister is because you’ve found her gravesite.

But that’s what the Semaganis siblings have of her now.

The search, though, has brought Johnny and Christine closer together. The podcast, which gripped Canadian audiences and social media, has linked Johnny with other relatives he never knew. That, in turn, has given him more of his own story.

“Some of the stories which have come to light, like when we were taken, my aunt and my cousins were the ones who (told me my mother, Lillian) was handcuffed to a door. ... Just, wow! No wonder she wasn’t there (to prevent it). But I didn’t know.”

And through years of struggling to understand, Semaganis says, he’s finally found some peace.

“We deal with things in different ways,” he says. “Me, I work,” putting in long hours as a driver for Lancaster General Health.

“I know where I come from,” he says, “but I’d talk about it (for a long time), and nobody cared. But at this time in my life I have a good group of friends. It’s like, that’s all I ever wanted: to have someone to listen.”

He has visited Cleo’s grave once with a friend. “In New Jersey, of all places. I’ve always hated New Jersey for some reason,” he says, laughing slightly.

An imposing man who loves skateboarding and being outdoors, Semaganis says he hopes the podcast sheds light not only on his family’s story, but also on the continuing trend of indigenous women going missing and being killed.

It’s taught him about his own history, too, since it’s the first time he’s heard all the various voices of his family’s experience all in one place.

“I’ve listened to several parts again, thinking, did I hear that right? I’ve still got to stop it sometimes. Like one of my sisters tried to kill herself numerous times. I didn’t know that. I knew she was abused, but ... I never knew the scope.”

And he hopes greater awareness of the Sixties Scoop helps “more people start conversations which should have started a long time ago.

“I mean ... I told my sister, I don’t remember Cleo no more. All I had was a picture, and the memory started to fade. I thought I’d die not knowing.”