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I feel like some type of foul play happened. I don't think he was mixed up in the wrong crowd. He was not a big drinker.

He's not into drugs. He barely liked taking his prescribed sleeping or antidepressant medication.

I feel like there's foul play, but it could have been like wrong place, wrong time. Maybe he was sticking up for someone and you know those stories about someone getting hit once and then knocking the lights out of them.

I just feel like there were some type of foul play involved. The lack of resources and it just doesn't seem as important as a missing child.

I will say that's the one positive I said out of all this. After my brother died, I became a huge advocate for suicide prevention.

And I'm like, there needs to be someone who's out there advocating for missing adults and the lack of resources and the lack of seriousness.

59-year-old Mark Brunel disappeared from Bellingham, Massachusetts on February 23rd, 2021.

Mark left his home to go do laundry and never returned. Nearly three months later, a group of kayakers found Mark's body in the Blackstone River in the nearby town of Uxbridge, about seven miles west of Mark's home.

But finding Mark wasn't the end of this mystery because the injuries to Mark's body have left his family with more questions than answers.

We've followed Mark's story from the time he went missing until now and has only become more and more bizarre each step of the way.

Amarissa and from Wondery, this is episode 324 of The Vanished, Mark Brunel's story.

Today's story is a bit different than most of our stories because there is a conclusion, though it remains unresolved.

However, in order to understand what happened to Mark Brunel, we have to tell you who he was and what his life was like.

We started working on Mark's story in March of 2021, several weeks after he had vanished.

At that time, we spoke with his sister, Helena, who gave us an idea of what Mark's life was like growing up and what she remembers about their family.

When Mark was born, my mother was 16 years old and my grandmother took him away.

He was in a forced home for the first two years of his life until my mother got him back. Obviously, he doesn't remember that, but he's heard the stories and he's felt that in some way, even though he doesn't remember it.

There were three of us, three teenagers, and then my youngest sister was nine years apart.

But as three teenagers, we hung out all the time with the same friends. We fought all the time with amongst each other. You know, I'm all sibling stuff.

Mark was a little thing. He was short and skinny and not sure when he went up to like an old boy school. I'm not sure what each he was, but he did do some, like it wasn't like a training school.

It was just an old boy school that he stayed at for a while up in New Hampshire.

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