Paramount+ ‘Wild Boys’ Doc Depicts How Two Brothers Fooled a Town

Wild Boys: Strangers in Town, a new Paramount+ documentary premiering on Wednesday, February 18, combines two of American TV viewers’ biggest fascinations: off-the-grid survivalism and long-running hoaxes.

Paramount+ says the two-part doc “chronicles the astonishing true story of two young brothers who emerged from the forests of British Columbia in the summer of 2003, claiming they had been raised entirely off the grid — without schools, doctors or any record of their existence.”

That story, however, turned out to be a tall tale…

The townsfolk of Vernon, British Columbia, actually supported the boys they knew as Tom and Will Green.

The story of the two brothers played out in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle over just a few days in April 2004. On April 1, the Chronicle reported that two boys had been discovered living in the woods near Vernon, British Columbia, the previous summer and had since been living off government welfare and support from volunteer agencies and local families.

The boys had offered their names and birthdays — Thomas Michael Green was 23, and William Anthony Green was 16 — but had refused to provide details about their parents beyond the names Mary and Joseph Green. They claimed their parents were living on land that wasn’t theirs and identifying them further would put their parents’ existences at risk.

Tom and Will claimed they were raised in the bush outside Revelstoke, a British Columbia town 100 miles to the northeast of Vernon, where they lived off the land and received homeschooling, according to Tami Ryder, a local who assisted the boys.

But the boys’ lack of documentation meant they couldn’t get identification, and without identification, they couldn’t work or continue to receive government benefits.

The boys did say their family was from the Bay Area, so the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had asked the San Francisco police and local media for help.

At the time of that first Chronicle story, Tom was working at a Vernon hostel in exchange for accommodations, while Will was in the pediatric ward of a hospital after the 6-foot-1 teen dropped to 84 pounds on a restrictive diet.

Tom and Will were actually Kyle and Roen Horn, the latter of whom had run away from home.

By the time of a Chronicle report two days later, the boys’ story had started to unravel. Police in the Sacramento-area town of Roseville, California, identified “Will” as a missing teenager named Roen Horn and “Tom” as Roen’s older brother, Kyle Horn. The names they’d provided were false; their stated birthdays, on the other hand, were real.

Roen had run away the previous June after local police and child protective services came to the Horn house to ask about his low weight and his “fruitarian” diet, authorities said. And their parents — whose actual names were Diana and Rodger Horn — had spent the intervening months looking for him.

Diana said she’d taken Roen to a medical center, where advisers recommended that he be placed in a mental institution after efforts to increase his weight failed. Later, when a child protective services officer and a police officer arrived at the Horn household, Kyle “slipped out the back door,” according to his brother Chad.

And Diana said that about a month after that, Kyle departed on a trip to Canada. Diana suspected that he knew where Roen was, but Kyle pleaded ignorance. “He would call us once a month and say, ‘I’m in Canada, I’m doing fine, I don’t know where Roen is, but don’t worry, I betcha he’s OK,’” she said.

A news report helped investigators crack the case.

Finally, a breakthrough in the case came when Sacramento TV station KOVR aired the Chronicle’s reporting. A family friend of the Horns saw the story and contacted Diane and Rodger, and a few hours later, the parents were in touch with their boys.

Diane and Rodger flew to Canada, and Kyle met them at the airport, the newspaper reported the next day. They went straight to the hospital where Roen was being treated, and that’s where they had a brief run-in with Ryder.

“They said, ‘Thank you for saving our sons’ lives. We don’t know what we would have done without your help,’” Ryder revealed.

As the Horn family readied to return to California, Rodger told the Chronicle that Canadian immigration authorities would be waiving extradition proceedings.

And Ryder said at the time she was shocked by Kyle and Roen’s ruse. “They’ve been in my life for seven months now,” she told the newspaper. “I’ve seen them every day, trying to help those guys I thought were bush boys with no social skills. But now I know they’ve done a lot. More than me, actually.”

Even though the boys had fooled her and other good Samaritans in Vernon, Ryder didn’t have regrets. “Will, who is Roen, was dying,” she said. “He needed help, and I would help him still. I wouldn’t change a thing. I think everyone in Vernon would agree.”

Now Wild Boys: Strangers in Town revisits the bizarre saga, more than two decades later.

The Campside Media podcast Chameleon: Wild Boys covered the Horn brothers’ story in 2022, and now Campside is one of the production companies behind the Paramount+ doc Wild Boys: Strangers in Town, directed and executive-produced by Jeremiah Hammerling and Rita Baghdadi.

“When a local mother takes them in, hoping to help the brothers build a new life, a small-town obsession is ignited with journalists and authorities digging deeper and raising unsettling questions about how far people are willing to go to believe a story they want to be true,” Paramount+ adds in a press release.

The documentary appears to have Kyle and Roen not just recounting their time in Canada in interviews but also playing themselves in reenactments. “It’s not my job to tell you the truth,” Kyle says, laughing, in the trailer.

Wild Boys: Strangers in Town, Wednesday, February 18, Paramount+