Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘I Will Find You‘ begins with a man named David getting convicted for the murder of his three-year-old son, Matthew. Five years later, David discovers that there is a chance that Matthew might still be alive, which leads him down a path of shocking revelations. While Matthew’s disappearance is the primary mystery, there is another child who goes missing but has no one looking for him with the same intensity as David is looking for Matthew. The child is Martin Bischof, who disappeared around the same time as Matthew and was never seen again. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Martin is a Key Clue in Matthew’s Case
In the fifth episode of ‘I Will Find You,’ it is revealed that a child named Martin Bischof went missing from an orphanage in Geneva and was never heard from again. A Fedpol agent named Detective Muller has been on the case, hoping to find any clue that explains what happened to little Martin. For five years, he waits for something to show up, and then, an inquiry from an FBI agent named Sarah Greer leads him to Boston. She has been chasing David Burroughs, who escaped from prison, to prove his innocence. Looking into his case, she realizes that there are some discrepancies.
As part of her due diligence, she looks into the cases of missing children who resemble Matthew and disappeared around the same time as his murder. When Muller gets the inquiry, he is intrigued because Matthew does, in fact, look a lot like Martin. When Muller comes to Boston, he fills Greer in on several other details of the case, including the discovery that the orphanage from which the boy disappeared is funded by the Paynes, as in Gertrude Payne, who is Hayden’s mother. This connection is too coincidental, and Greer decides to dig further by looking into the people who were paying Ted.
By this time, Ted is already dead, but his finances confirm that when he was working as a prison guard, he was paid a thousand dollars every month from a shell company. Muller’s contacts help him discover that the shell company is actually connected to the Paynes and is named after Gertrude’s father’s name. Once it is confirmed that they were the ones paying Ted and ordered him to kill David in prison, Muller confronts them. He is convinced that they went through all this trouble to prevent themselves from being outed about their connection with whatever happened to Matthew and Martin.
Martin is the True Victim of I Will Find You
It turns out Detective Muller was right all along. The Paynes did, in fact, stir all this trouble, just because Hayden had a misunderstanding. At the time, David and Cheryl were trying for kids, and they decided to give artificial insemination a chance. Cheryl had been seeing a doctor in her hospital for her this, but by the time she came around to getting inseminated, she was already pregnant with David’s baby. Because she was a bit scared to do it, she used her sister Rachel’s name. Incidentally, Hayden, who wanted to get back together with Rachel, found Rachel’s name on the list.
Hayden thought that if Rachel were inseminated with his baby, then they would have a chance to get back together, which is what he wanted all along. What he didn’t know was that it was actually Cheryl getting the treatment, and even then, she was already pregnant with David’s baby. Years later, when Hayden saw the boy at a party, he mistook him for his son and decided to kidnap him. And this is where things went really wrong. Hayden couldn’t simply claim the boy for herself, which meant Matthew had to be abducted from his house.
But then, if the child were abducted, the cops would keep looking for him. His absence would also mean that the cops would always be on the lookout for the missing child, which would mean Hayden would never be able to keep Matthew as his son without fearing exposure. So, a plan was concocted to make it look like Matthew was dead so no one would come looking for him. Still, they needed a dead boy, and that’s where Martin came in. The poor, orphan boy was entirely alone in the world. If he went missing, no one would come looking for her. This is why he was abducted from the orphanage.
Poor little Martin was chosen because of his resemblance to Matthew, but at the same time, he also had a rare genetic disorder. This likely made him the perfect proxy for Matthew. So, the boy was killed, his face was smashed, and his body was put right in place for David to find. No one ever looked for Martin, so they never knew what became of him. He was buried as Matthew and grieved as such. But eventually, the truth catches on. Martin’s killers are brought to justice, bringing his sad story to an end.
Read More: I Will Find You Episode 1 and 2 Recap: David Burroughs Goes on the Run
