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This is a CBC podcast. The following episode contains references to suicide and depression. Please take care. Clifford's unexpected and tragic death hit the Avery family hard, but Clarence Hines was still on the edge of it all.

Craig came and told me when the funeral was. I didn't go to the funeral. After the funeral, he brought me there. That little pamphlet for Clifford, right? I still got it.

From the service?

From the service. And then that just caught me with me on where I was again.

With Clifford gone, the Averys, still grieving for their brother, were more determined to make in touch with Clarence than they had ever been before. To see if there was anything to the idea that he might be related to them, they even sent Clarence pictures of Clifford to drive home the resemblance that was so striking.

I looked at photos, family pictures, over and over and over by myself. I couldn't see myself in none of them. None of them didn't look like me.

Even after all these cases of their mistaken identities over the years, Clarence didn't think he looked like Clifford at all. And even though the DNA tests had shown that Clifford and Craig did not have the same parents, Clarence wasn't convinced that the results of that test had anything to do with him. Then the Averys heard a rumor.

Somebody told us that he was living in Hillview.

Clare's in Hillview. And we thought, wow.

Suddenly, the man they believed might be the key to unraveling the mystery of their family was living right on their doorstep. I'm Luke Quintin, and from CBC, this has Come By Chance. Episode 4, The Truth. Clarence Hines is relaxing one evening at his home in Hillview.

Just sitting having a beer, getting supper and stuff.

The phone rings, and one of the Abre's encourages Clarence. It's a fine line, isn't it? It is. They didn't exactly invite themselves over, but they were-Yeah, they were pushing.

They're pushing it. Yeah, they did push herself, no doubt. So I said, Yeah, I can come out over in a while. So they just dropped in. Yeah. Me, my wife, my sister, went over to see him.

Craig's older brother, Wayne Avery, his wife Pam, and their sister Lorraine, drive over to Clarence's small rental house. Lorraine didn't feel emotionally up to talking to us, but Pam Avery remembers it well.

She was determined. She had to go and see him. She said, I've got to see this guy. We knocked on the door, and the door had glass in it.

When Lorraine Avery saw Clarence standing behind the glass, she couldn't believe her eyes.

Oh, my Jesus. That's what she said. And she almost fell to her knees. She said, Oh, my God, Pam, that's Clifford. And then when he opened the door, she just clung into him.

For Lorraine Avery in that moment, it must have felt like all the questions had been answered. No DNA tests or investigations were necessary. She was standing in a small house, hugging a man she'd never met before in her life.

She was just so anxious to see him, and when she see him, she knew, This is my brother.

Wayne also saw the striking similarities to Clifford.

I couldn't stop looking at him. Keep still on him. That was good. Couldn't stop, down at him.

After this awkward, Emotional greeting. Clarence shows the visitors in and fixes some drinks. While he and Wayne stand at the counter drinking beers, Clarence begins to notice something, too.

Wayne's actions and my actions seem like everything was almost identical. Just like he put one leg one way and then I'll lean on the other hand, or we lean up against the cabinet, and he leaned up against the cabinet. Same way we stood up and same way we drank was I'm not identical. We're almost like twins.

They stood the same, him and Wayne. And just to watch his demeanor, how he was moving and how he was talking, and his teeth are even the same. It was unbelievable.

Suddenly, Clifford's desperation to meet Clarence became clear to all the siblings. Clarence Hyens wasn't just a spooky doppelganger who looked weirdly like their brother. They now were convinced, just as Clifford had been convinced, that he actually was their brother. Clarence, on the other hand, after a politely agreeing to this meeting, and in spite of the striking similarities, still wanted out as fast as he could. It wasn't long after this surprising visit that Clarence decided to pack up and find a different house to rent away from Hillview altogether.

Why'd you move? I just didn't want everybody to bother me. I just want to get away from it. I still didn't want to believe it.

After the visit to Clarence Hines' rental in Hillview, the Averys still had many burning questions. Was it really possible that Clarence could be part of their family living in another bay just a few hours away for decades? If so, how did they lose him all those years ago? For Clarence, these questions and wild theories about his own identity that a group of strangers had essentially brought into his life were just too big.

As far as I was concerned, my family was in Saint Bruno's. I did know no other family, you know me? So taking this on then and try to get me hit around it. It really drained me emotionally. It did. I just didn't have nothing to do with none of them.

But that wasn't an option. He couldn't avoid the Averys completely. After all, he was still working working at the Bullarm Fabrication Site with Craig Avery and his wife, Tracy.

I see them come up one way, I'll go the opposite way. I didn't even talk to him. I just didn't even talk to him.

This went on for months. And then unfolded into years of Clarence doing his best to avoid any of the Averys and pretend like this complicated scenario wasn't happening at all. Even when Craig calls.

There's times I wouldn't even ask for the phone. I just didn't want to talk to anybody.

And calls. How often would he be trying to get in touch?

Craig is Craig, and he'll keep calling.

You got a mischievous grin on your face. Yeah, right. Yeah. He was persistent. Yeah, persistent. But in the end, it wasn't funny.

Every day was a struggle going to work. Every day to get out of bed, it was a struggle because I know people are going to come at me talking about it and ask me questions about it.

While Clarence tried to avoid Craig at work, it was proving harder for him to avoid this situation altogether because pretty soon, word got around.

All the people outside knew the story. All my friends coming up to me and saying, Well, Craig looks just like Durham, my brother.

For years, it had seemed almost obvious for Clarence to be connected to Clifford. They looked so much alike. But now for the first time, there were connections that people were seeing on the other side, that Clarence Hines' own brother Dermot looked like Craig Avery.

And I said, No, it's impossible. It's not. Then after that, one of the brothers came to work there also, Darren.

Darren Avery, Craig's brother.

He's a joker. I was joking around.

One of Darren Avery's jokes was to go up to Clarence at work and call out to him.

Hey, then, brother.

How are you doing, brother?

Oh, he'd be carrying on. He would be, but I was serious. And I used to really It hurt me because like I said, I wasn't ready for it. I didn't want to deal with it.

Hurt you how?

Insight. Her up racing, hot. I just didn't want to believe that I was an Avery.

The absolute last place Clarence wanted to be was at work, where everyone seemed to know the story. Eventually, he stopped going to work. Snow would pile up in his driveway.

I just couldn't get things off of mind about the Averys and that. Then I was starting to worry about stuff that didn't mean nothing, stuff that I didn't need to worry about, like money problems and all that, which I had no problems before, but things started to play on me, and I started worrying about everything, worrying about my children, worrying about the wife, worrying about everything.

At the root of all these worries playing on Clarence's mind, seemed to be the prospect of finding out the truth about his family.

I was thinking about it all day long. I'm a mind. I couldn't think about nothing else, only that. And I guess thinking I understand that, Should I go and do the DNA? Should I not? Should I do it? And I guess it just got to the point everything just bottled up.

Things got pretty bad, especially in the winter of 2019.

We were hiding everything. The keys to the car and everything away on me.Who did this?My wife did.

Okay.

Afraid I'd take the car and commit suicide or whatever. I was left for gone. And me, my wife and sisters and brothers helped me, and children helped me big time.

In particular, Clarence's younger brother Ches, who lived close by, became a support for him.

I used to call him three or four o'clock in the morning. He come down and get me, pick me up.

When they called me, he said, Are you home? I said, I'm going to come up. So he came up and he broke down at that point and started to cry. Everything had taken a toll on him at that point. He just had to let it all out.

There are 16 years between Clarence and Ches. When Ches senior died, Clarence became a father to his younger brother. And now, the roles are reversed, right?

Yeah. It was weird being on the other side of it.

Ches was witnessing a side of his brother Clarence he'd never seen before.

He was always the strong one. Somebody that I always idolized and seemed so strong to me to be so upset and so hurt. Tired to see him like that.

This was a dark time for Clarence and his family. His wife, Sheryl, used to hide medicine in the house for fear of what Clarence might do. I know this is hard to talk about and take your time and say what you're comfortable saying, but I know there was a concern that he wasn't okay. It seems like his wife was concerned that he was talking about suicide.

Yeah, I think his mind was all over the place, so it brought out a whole different side of him. Maybe in the back of his mind, he was thinking, Oh, they're going to shun me at the family and take Craig in now as their brother. And you don't know, there's so many things that could go through your head at that point. I guess he just wanted to be reassured that everything was going to be okay, that he was still a part of our family, and nothing was ever going to change there. If it is true, I always reassured Claire, I was like, this will never change anything. You'll always be my brother.

This went on for more than a year until finally, Clarence was convinced by his wife and his sisters to go see a doctor who diagnosed him with clinical depression, and he was given medication to help.

When I was starting to feel bitter, I thought about it, talked to my wife about it, and I said, I can go to your life not knowing. And it's probably bitter for me not knowing. But I said, I got three children.

It became clear that this was an issue that went beyond just himself, that it was important for the entire family to find out if he was a Hind or an Avery. And what that might mean for the health and safety of his kids.

Easy enough that one of my children could have married a sister's or brother, believe it or not. So I said, No, we got to tell her. We got to go do it. We got to call everybody to get her and let everyone know what's on the goal.

He knew the depression could be passed on in your genes. So this, along with a bizarre possibility that Clifford Avery might have been brother, was enough to spark Clarence at last to get a DNA test.

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In January 2019, four years since they discovered they were not biologically related, and nearly three years since Craig Avery's brother Clifford's tragic death. Craig is on his way home from a hockey game with his wife, Tracy, when out of the blue, he gets a phone call. It's Clarence.

He said, You might want to pull over. I said, No, I'm okay. So I kept driving, and he said, I got my DNA results back. He said, It's all a bunch of numbers. He said, What do you mean? So I said, I'll send you mine in Clifford's.

As soon as he got home, Craig St. Claren's a copy of his and Clifford's results and the rows of numbers which reveal a person's DNA profile.

I looked at the first couple and they matched, the Clifford's. I just looked right down to the last ones that they matched.

He said, We checked the first number and we checked the last number. He said, Two of them matched. He said, And we couldn't look at no more. He said, We went in, sat down, looked at each other and said, Oh, my God.

And when I looked, when I turned all the match, right? So I knew it in.

I knew it was coming.

You knew?

I knew. Once me and Clifford got our DNA back and ours wouldn't match, I knew then.

Just to be 100% certain, Craig and Clarence also got their DNA checked against Clarence's brother Derm.

And he matched Craig's. It came back, we were no match. And then I found out for sure that my DNA didn't match my brothers that I grew up with, but it matched the Avery's.

It had taken five years to confirm it, five years since the discovery that they shared a birthday. That when Craig Avery and Clarence Hines were born at the Come by Chance College Hospital on the same day in December of 1962, they had somehow been switched at birth. When a pregnant Rita Hines had traveled in a snowstorm for hours over rough gravel roads, holding her belly all those years ago. Craig was the baby she was carrying. And when she left the hospital and traveled on those same roads, home to St. Bernard's, in her arms was baby Clarence. And the two men may never have found out any of it if it weren't for a twist of fate that brought them together all those decades later. Craig and Clarence could have gone to work on opposite ends of the country, even on different continents. Clarence could have ridden the rails out West for another decade and settled in Alberta instead. And yet somehow, their lives became tangled up in each other's, working together in the same place at the same time, just 15 minutes down the road from the Come By Chance College Hospital.

Although Craig had felt it in his gut for years, the enormity of the truth was only now beginning to really sink in.

That's when things became real. The first thing you think about is, I'm not who I thought I was, right? I'm not where I should have been all my life. No, there's this part of you that was taken away. All of you was taken away. No, this is not the life that I should have lived.

I was hoping it was going to come back, that that I was a Heinz. I'll be honest, I was hoping to come back that I wasn't an Avery. I was who I am. But then when I was seeing it and looked at it, I guess I accepted it for what it was, and that's it. Try to make the best of it.

Now that the DNA results were in, when Clarence looked at the pictures of himself and Clifford, he saw something different.

Now, looking at him, we all look at him and go, We do look like, I'm almost like twins. Yeah.

On a chilly February day in 2019, Craig and Tracey Avery invited Clarence and the Heinz family over for a meet and greet at their house in Hillview. But even with heaps of food steaming on countertops, Craig couldn't calm his nerves. What were you expecting that meeting to be like?

Meeting family for the first time was pretty nerve-wracking. You don't know how they're going to take to you. I think it was just a bundle of nerves.

And for Clarence, the Averys who had more or less charged their way into his house in Hillview, people he'd been avoiding for years, were now suddenly his brothers and sisters.

We all came in, and they were a bit nervous about meeting everybody, I guess.

What are you supposed to say? Will you go in? They go, I'm your sister, I'm your brother. It's not easy. It's not.

And Clarence's own little brother, Ches, was now suddenly Craig's brother, too.

It was just weird going in this big bunch of people and knowing that this guy is your brother. I'd met Craig before because We worked in the same place, but I never knew that he was my brother at that point. Just another guy working together. And then you're going in as he's your brother.

It was emotional. I think it was a stepping stone and getting to know him.It.

Was a good start.It was, yeah.

There was a lot of hugs and handshakes, but it was so good to finally get to meet some of your family.

Before long in the summer, Clarence organized another family reunion, and Craig and Tracey made their way to the place where Clarence grew up, the little airport of St. Bernard's on the Buren Peninsula.

I had like a I say, sickly feeling in my stomach, really nervous.

The couple parked and approached the small white bungalow on the edge of the cove and saw a huddle of people outside chatting, cooking cod tongues and lobster. Tracy was nervous because she knew her husband, Craig, better than anyone. And although he was usually pretty bold and confident, this was unknown territory. Eventually, after standing, chatting outside for a while.

I build up nerve to go into the house. Walked through the door where you should have grown up. And once you walked through the door, and then it took the good right out of me. It was just mixed emotions going through me, knowing that this is where I should have grew up, right?

Five decades after Rita Hines had brought Clarence home to this house from Come by Chance Hospital, and after years of living his own life, just a few hours away, Craig was finally home. But it wasn't home.

You go into the house where you should have grown up knowing that this is where your family lived and your parents lived, that you should have been there, too. It takes the heart right out of you knowing that they grew up there and you didn't, and you should have. This is not a good feeling. It was a bit gut-wrenching gone in there.

Walking into the hallway of the house must have been like staring into a different dimension. Everything was so foreign. Except for an excruciating twist of fate. This would have been the most familiar place in the world. After these two reunions and the prospect of more to come, the Averys and Hinds has now shared a single burning question. What exactly happened all those years ago at the Come by Chance Cognage Hospital?

You wonder if it was done intentionally.

Could someone really have done this on purpose? And what they discovered next, nobody was expecting because they were not alone. I said to Mom, Mommy, do I look like my baby? We'd like to dedicate this episode in memory of Wayne Avery. Born September 27th, 1954, died September 19th, 2023. While we were making this series, Pam and Wayne Avery generously invited us into their home and shared their stories with us. Despite the fact that Wayne was recovering from a stroke. Our condolences to Pam and to the entire Avery family. You've been listening to Come by Chance, produced by Novel for CBC. The series is written and produced by me, Luke Quintin, and produced and edited by Joe Wheeler. Our Assistant Producer is Madalyn Parr. Our field producer is Rebecca Nolan. Sound Design and Scoring by Daniel Kemson. Rochnie Nier is our digital coordinating producer. Original music by Adam Forin. Music Supervision by Joe Wheeler and Nicolas Alexander. Our senior producers are Veronica Simmons, Willow Smith, and Damon Fairlist. Our production managers are Charlotte Wolf, Cherie Houston, and Sara Tobin. The series was developed by Madelyne Parr. Creative Director of Development and Novel is Willard Foxton. The fact checker is Valerio Rocca.

Our executive producers are Max O'Brien, Cecil Fernandez, and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is our Senior Manager, and Arif Narani is the Director of CBC Podcasts. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.

Ca/podcasts.