▶ Watch Video: Inside the genetic genealogy being used to solve crimes
The remains of a woman murdered nearly a century ago and buried beneath a building have finally been identified thanks to modern forensic testing.
The woman was identified as Mary McLeod Moffat (née Davidson), a Scottish national who immigrated to Canada with her family in 1913, according to police and the laboratory that performed the testing.
The culmination of the case brings closure to “one of Toronto’s oldest mysteries,” detective Michael Kelly, of the Toronto Police Service, told Canadian news site CTV News Toronto on Monday.
The case couldn’t have been solved without investigative genetic genealogy, a technique that uses advanced DNA profiling to build a “family tree” that can eventually help identify an unknown individual, said Kelly.
Although police believe the woman’s murder took place around April 1936, her remains weren’t discovered until May 18, 1995, when workers uncovered them at a demolition site in Toronto, according to the Toronto Police Service. At the time, forensic exams determined that the woman was “intentionally buried,” after being struck at least six times with “a hammer-like weapon,” police said.
A homicide investigation was opened to learn more about what may have happened to her, but collecting a suitable DNA sample from the remains was difficult because so much time had passed and their condition deteriorated.
Police began to review the case in 2022, submitting new DNA samples for testing to a lab that specializes in investigative genetic genealogy and unsolved murder cases. Scientists faced substantial challenges as they attempted to recover “only small amounts of severely-degraded human DNA” from the remains, but they did ultimately collect enough to build a forensic profile, according to the lab.
After generating leads and, subsequently, a follow-up investigation, investigators were able to find Moffat’s relatives, collect DNA samples from them and compare those samples to the ones pulled from her remains, which allowed them to identify her.
Investigators later determined Moffatt’s husband, Andrew Lloyd Moffat, likely killed her. After his wife’s death, he went on to live in Vancouver and the United States under the alias Drake Lloyd Cummings, police said. He died in 1985.
Moffatt’s case was one of two longstanding unsolved murders in Toronto that have now been closed because of investigative genetic genealogy, police said. The second identified the badly burned remains of a woman who died in the passenger’s seat of a vehicle that went up in flames on April 22, 2004, after intentionally crashing into a tractor-trailer. Her name was Patsy Flora Lagarde.
“These identifications represent the significant impact that investigative genetic genealogy can have on long-term unidentified human remains investigations,” said homicide detective Stephen Smith, of the Toronto Police Force’s missing persons and cold case unit, in a statement. “After decades without answers, we have been able to restore the identities of Mary Davidson and Patsy Lagarde, provide information to their families, and uncover important facts about the circumstances surrounding their deaths.”
