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In June's Journey, you have the chance to solve a captivating murder mystery and reveal deep-seated family secrets. Use your keen eye and detective skills to guide June Parker through this thrilling hidden object mystery game. June's Journey is a mobile game that follows June Parker, a New York socialite living in London. Play as June Parker and investigate beautifully detailed scenes of the 1920s

while uncovering the mystery of her sister's murder. There are twists, turns, and catchy tunes, all leading you deeper into the thrilling storyline. This is your chance to test your detective skills. And if you play well enough, you could make it to the detective club. There, you'll chat with other players and compete with or against them. June needs your help, but watch out.

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Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. That's June's Journey. Download the game for free on iOS and Android.

I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime. And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them. Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes. And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st century lens. Some are solved and some are cold, very cold. This is Buried Bones. ♪♪

Hey, Kate. Hey, Paul. How are you? I'm doing good. I know we've kind of gone on this topic before, but I'm constantly in search for new music. You are. New old music or new, new, like new bands?

Well, it could be new bands, but I ran across a couple of new bands. I think one I brought up before, the 6AM, Nikki Sixx, who's the bassist of Motley Crue that I've been binging for the last few months, but also another band that I thought was brand new, the Shaman's Harvest. And then I was looking at the Wikipedia page and they formed back in 1996. And I was like, how did I miss them? But loving their music so far. Have you had anything new music come into your life? No, I pretty much only listen to old music. Yeah.

You know, I drive. I drive before. Every time we tape, I drive before and listen to music. And my children and I drive all over the place. So I'm trying to think of what we were just on. We did some Cher. Cher was great. And some Tina Turner. I usually, to get ready for our show, I try to be a little meditative with some Pointer Sisters my mom got me into. I go pretty, for me, pretty old. So...

something perky, but that I really calmed down to because there's so much information in my little head that I have to keep straight to feed you this information that has a lot of detail. And also these stories can be pretty stressful. So I'm trying to keep everything straight. So I need a little bit of peace.

and driving around in my car is the way to do it. So I tell my students all the time, go take a bath. If you need to think about a story idea, go drive in your car. Just do whatever it takes to sort of unplug and feed your soul and then come back and you can accomplish whatever you need to accomplish.

Yeah, you use whatever technique works for you. And I think, you know, our listeners may not realize this, but you don't work off of a script. You've got notes. I do. And that's one of the things that has amazed me about you is your ability to tell these stories just relying on the handwritten notes that you've got in front of you. You definitely have a gift on that front.

Well, I appreciate that. I think that's from my TV news days where I had to be able to take notes down and just make sure I can feed it to the reporter kind of bullet points. What that means is you just have to know the story pretty well. I can't read a script. I'll have to read some details. So you'll hear me like when you ask me all those tricky questions about autopsies.

you'll hear me say five-inch knife, 12 inches down, whatever it is, whatever the details are, because I want to make sure I get those right. But really, I just have to know the narrative really well. And that's why I pick stories that I enjoy, because I'm never going to present a story to you that I don't think...

is relevant or interesting or something that I really want to dig into. We don't do stories just for the sake of quote-unquote good crime stories. I really feel like they're meaningful. So I'm always excited to talk to you and get your perspective on them. Well, yeah, and obviously you have a passion for these cases, and I'm looking forward to hearing this one. Well, this one comes from Canada, and I actually have quite

few people who listen in Canada to Tenfold More Wicked, and they email me ideas all the time from their family. And so this actually came from a listener, and it's been called The Babes in the Woods. And that's what this story is about. So I think you're going to find this interesting because I'm not going to ruin it, but it does involve one of your favorite forensic techniques. And it has a, I think, a fairly satisfying ending. So let me go ahead and set the scene.

This is a story that people in Canada may have heard of before because it's actually fairly famous. It's almost 70 years old, and it's, as I said, called The Babe in the Woods, Babes in the Woods. And it's a case that has just plagued Canadian investigators for decades.

It is supposedly Vancouver's most infamous cold case from 1953. For me, 1953 is a pretty special time. That's when my first book was set in London in 1953, post-war. And it's just a really interesting time period. And in this case, we're going to talk about clothing today.

which I'll be interested to know how much you know about children's clothing and what the trends were. I knew nothing from the 50s, but apparently in this case, it's important to have some context. And also about the weapons, the evidence in this case really does date the case because a lot of it comes from that specific time period and it's significant. So this will be interesting. Have you been to Vancouver before? I was actually up there.

I gave a presentation to Canadian law enforcement on the Golden State Killer case, and it was hosted by Victoria Pee Dee.

So at least I have a sense of the environment. You know, we drove around a little bit, but that really is the only time I've been there. Well, I love Canada, and I think Vancouver is incredibly beautiful. And my interpretation, every time I've been there, it's been rainy and cold, which is my favorite kind of weather, frankly, is rainy and cold. So this story takes place in that environment, which is

not good news forensically, but we'll get into that in a second. So the story takes place in a place called Stanley Park, which is Vancouver's largest urban park, at least at the time in 1953. And it encompasses nearly 1,000 acres of West Coast rainforest in Vancouver. And I can already tell what you're thinking about a wet environment. Wet environment plus crime can equal stress for a forensic investigator. Oh, you know...

The crime scenes I've gone out on where it's raining, those are the worst because you just literally watch the evidence wash away, whether it be a tire impression, a shoe impression, trace evidence off the body, trying to take notes in the rain on wet paper. You know, you just, you can't do it. Your photographs with flash photography, the rain droplets reflect back into the photograph.

You know, so it is just so hard to adequately recover the evidence and adequately document the scene. You lose so much. Rain is the worst. I was just thinking about this. You can't think of one instance where rain or a wet environment is helpful. Maybe after a rain where there are foot impressions or is there any circumstance where you're thinking, hey, rain, fantastic. So that's a no. No.

When you get into, when you start talking about, yes, you know, you have soft ground that can record, you know, your shoe impressions, tire impressions. You can start to reconstruct movements, right?

of the offender or how the body may have been disposed in the location. In that instance, yes, in terms of a moist environment. But if it's actively raining, that sucks. And then that moist environment has a tendency, particularly with the biological evidence, because now you've got the microbes like to grow and they start to degrade your DNA, the valuable DNA evidence.

Really, it's just not a good situation all around. Well, we're going to need to talk about decomposition in about 45 seconds. So we are in January of 1953. There is a groundskeeping team in the park that is clearing brush near this old fish hatchery, and they make a grisly discovery in the middle of the park.

Buried underneath several layers of leaves and pine needles is a cheap fur coat, which has been degraded to a point where it's almost down to its lining. And underneath the coat are the skeletons of two small people. They don't know if it's children yet or what, but two separate skeletons.

and it's been raining, it's been cold, there might have been snow. So already, I think they're at a disadvantage. I know the answer to this, but how quickly does it take for a body to decompose, perhaps in cold environments and wet environments like this? It just varies, I guess.

It does vary. Cold will slow down the decompositional process. The first question that I have, are these fully skeletal remains? Was there any tissue remaining at all? Do you know? It doesn't look like there's any tissue. Full skeletal remains.

Okay. And they're not buried under the ground. These skeletons are surface deposits and they've just been hidden with the leaves and brush, right? Right. And there's some clothing that's also present that I'll tell you about that gives us a few clues. But right, it sounds like skeletons, cheap fur coat on top, women's fur coat on top, and then leaves and pine needles from the trees and the naturally occurring dropping over the past however many months. Right.

Sure. So with the surface deposits, that would indicate that the flies, the insects had access to the bodies in order to lay the eggs. And then now you get the maggots that are going to start consuming the tissue. So that's where you can see a body skeletonized faster with a surface deposit than a body that's been buried under the ground and the insects don't have ready access to it.

They're clearing brush. Of course, now it's how long have these bodies been out there? Because just from them being completely skeletal tells me, oh, they could have been out there for quite some time. And the fur coat, if it's related and was something that belonged to the victims and not something that had been laying in the forest for a long time that had just been put on top of the victims.

When you start to see clothing degrade like that, it's been out there for a while, but you can't really get a good window of time. There's no way to say, oh, it's been a year, it's been three years, it's been five years. Now I start wanting to know, okay, tell me about...

Tell me about the plants, the trees. Do we have roots growing up through the skeletons? Do we have weeds growing up or other plants? Is there something that I could take to an expert and say, hey, this is what I've got. How long would this occur with the types of plants that are in the area? Let me show you a shot of the area where they were found.

So this is the scene, and it is a big old mess. To me, it looks very full of all kinds of brush underneath trees, and I am not even remotely surprised after seeing this scene that they had not been found for Lord knows how many years or months they had been there. Right. And in looking at this, of course, you could see where there's the base of trees, but I'm also seeing a lot of ferns.

This really underscores, okay, this is kind of more of a shaded, moist environment, and then all the leaves and brush in the area. And this is for a body that is in this location. This is why these bodies, even if they're just surface deposits,

can go years, if not decades, right off of a hiking trail and never be seen. But when a body is seen, oftentimes what's seen first is the skull because the skull stands out. The long bones blend in with the branches and the smaller bones with the brush and everything else. But the skull looks like a boulder that catches people's eyes. We have a saying when we're dealing with skeletal remains is sometimes what you only find initially is the skull.

and you go, well, heads roll. Once they completely disarticulate, the skull, if it's on, let's say, a slope, possibly will roll downhill. And so if you only find a skull, then you start looking uphill. Wow. Or you start looking at, do I have evidence of animal activity? Let's say you have a carnivorous animal that has picked

up parts of the body over time and distributed the body within the area. And what's interesting about that is what else was found there? And we talked about clothing. I mentioned clothing. And maybe that will help investigators figure out exactly how long these skeletons have been there. Because number one, they can't tell how long they've been there. And number two, they don't know if they are male or female. That's how little information they have.

But the clothing and the shoes that they were wearing gives us at least a little bit of a clue of the kind of environment they came from. So they were wearing matching brown shoes that had cheap rubber soles, as well as matching buckles on their leather belts.

And there were some other items of matching clothing. So they are making the assumption that maybe if these are children, which now I think they're assuming they are, that they are siblings because you're buying twice for kids who could be around the same age. Is that a good assumption? Yeah.

Well, that was the first thing that popped into my head. But I'm also wondering about, you know, are they attending, let's say, a private school, you know, where there is a uniform? You know, would this type of clothing be something that could be associated with they have a common activity they do together and they're unrelated, they're not siblings?

These are kids? Is that what we're saying right now? That's what they're suspecting because of just the size of the skeletons they're assuming. Now, we should talk about that. How would you decide based on the length of the bones? Is that how you would decide whether or not these were children or what would the alternative be? You know, anthropologists, there's so many features on the skeleton that an anthropologist can use to narrow the age range of the person. Now, if they're children...

You know, of course, you know, the size, but also, you know, the presence of the growth plates. Dental analysis, you know, what teeth? Do they still have their milk teeth? As we humans grow, the things that change with our skeleton, with our dentition, that's what an anthropologist can look at from these skeletal remains and

And particularly with kids, really narrow down the age range. It actually gets a little bit harder as we get older. So they have to have a little bit broader age range when you're dealing with older skeletons. But with the kids, there's so many distinguishing features that change age.

at certain points during the growth process that an anthropologist can use. Well, later on, we have a doctor who was not a forensic pathologist who came out and concluded that the bodies belonged to a boy and a girl. One was between five and seven, and the other one was between seven and nine years old. And he suspected that they had been there for around five years, 1947 and 1948, based on the condition of the bones, but also...

Some of the clothing that I'll talk to you about in a second, which is why I said clothing can really date this crime scene. So being able to know based on what we just talked about, the type of bone and length of bone and everything, this seems reasonable that they could look at these skeletons and say around this time frame, you know, they went missing and they were found and they've been there since then.

for over the past five years. But the sex, can you really determine the sex based on skeletons? You know, right now I'm racking my brain. When we're talking about prepubescent age children and all we've got are skeletal remains, I'm not aware of a feature that would differentiate the gender at that point.

I'm wondering if this doctor is relying more on the clothing that was present versus doing a true medical evaluation of the remains. I would need to talk to a forensic anthropologist to determine whether or not they could differentiate genders in that age range. My understanding is that generally after puberty and after the skeletal changes, most notably, you know, the pelvis changes.

But also, they will differentiate the bones either as being gracile versus robust. And we generally will see males have more robust features in their skeleton, but not necessarily. You know, there's actually quite a spectrum that overlaps between males and females in terms of those types of features.

The pelvis is usually the big indicator as to gender. Yeah. But that doesn't change until puberty. Yeah. And now you see the frustration of the investigators at the time. They can't determine. We have a doctor who says, based on some things that we're going to talk about now, we think that this is a boy or a girl. Here's the age range. They're trying to profile these two kids.

to figure out where they might have come from. And then they can go and canvas and talk to witnesses who were around this public park over whatever time period and say, we're missing a boy and a girl. Somebody has to know that there are two missing kids out there. Right. And right now, we have these two skeletal remains found in 1953 in Stanley Park,

you've talked about the two remains share the same belt buckle and the same shoes. Right. Okay. And there's other clothing items present besides the fur coat. Right. So this is where part of the dating came from, how they were trying to figure out how long these kids had been there. One of the skeletons was wearing a Canadian-made red tartan jacket and corduroy pants. I have a photo because...

I had no clue what any of that meant. So this is the outfit, and this is a model wearing it, but this is the clothing that was found by one of the kids with one of the kids. It had been almost entirely deteriorated. You could see he's got these aviator glasses. This was very popular in the 20s and 30s, kind of in the 40s, not at all in the 50s.

So they're thinking this is one of the things that helps date this from late 1940s when they were deposited here. Yeah, you know, what I'm seeing is on this mannequin, I see the aviator glasses that are up there on the mannequin's forehead. And then you called it a tartan coat? Yes, that's what this is. Okay. And it's a

Very popular style. From my perspective, I'm very ignorant of fashion verbiage. But, you know, that tartan coat looks to me to have like a pattern of like flannel. It's a little bit different than flannel, but it's kind of checkered. And the sleeves, I'm seeing a solid sleeve, but having white dots in an arrangement. It's visually very unique, if you will, in that it would be really,

Readily identifiable. It seems like if there had been reports of missing children in the past and they were last seen wearing this style tartan coat, Bells would be going off going, oh, here are those kids. Is there anything within the clothing, you know, the brand, something that you said was common in the 20s and 30s, but is there anything to indicate that this particular garment was made during a certain date range?

No. So this outfit, it looks unique to me also. But I will say in doing research, I know that this outfit and saying there's a child missing wearing this outfit is akin to saying there's a child missing wearing a jean jacket. It's that common. It's nothing special about this outfit in this time period.

So it was not helpful at all to investigators because this story, once they discovered these skeletons, was printed everywhere and not a word was spoken by anybody about any family member missing children.

One of the things I will say that's interesting about this is that they have these cheap shoes. One of the kids was wearing a pair of underwear that was almost completely deteriorated that had a safety pin on it that was something like three sizes too big, we presume, when this person was alive.

So this is a profile that the investigators are building of someone who came from a family with very little money. They examined the jaws of both kids. Both kids had cavities in their teeth.

And they knew they had a little bit of light brown hair that was out in the skulls. But other than that, they had no other clues. But they are looking at the clothes and the time period and trying to put it together that these are two kids that we presume are siblings that are coming from a family with very little means. And hopefully that was going to lead them towards this discovery of whose family they came from. Right. You know, it is noteworthy.

that once this is receiving so much publicity that nobody is coming forward and saying, "Our kids went missing. They were abducted." Obviously, you know, any family that cares about their kids and their kids are gone, you know, would come forward.

So now it's looking at the possibility that maybe the parents killed these two kids or maybe the entire family, because we've had case examples of this where an entire family is abducted and then, you know, the kids are killed, parents are killed somewhere else. And

And there is nobody around to come forward, at least within the immediate family. But I start going, huh, you know, is this a parental situation where they've gotten rid of their kids? Maybe they couldn't financially support them anymore or something else is going on. Well, let's talk about the cause of death because that might give us some more clues.

When the investigators looked at the children's skulls, they noted that there were blows, very lethal blows. They said that even though they were lethal, they were lighter than they would have expected from an adult man. This is, I think, a very risky road to go down. So they were determined that they were killed by a nearby Lathers hatchet.

which I had never heard of before. And I tried to look it up and I just got confused. Did you figure out what that kind of hatchet, what was its purpose? Yeah, this was the one homework assignment that you gave me for this episode. I try to make things easy on him sometimes.

So, no, the Lather's hatchet, this is a hatchet that is used by roofers. And so on one end of the hatchet, it's shaped like an axe. It's kind of got a very sharp edge. And the other is more akin to the working surface of a hammer.

And roofers use this to be able to use the sharp edge to cut the shingles that they're going to be, you know, for the size they need to put on the roof. And then the other end is to drive the nails through the shingles in order to actually build the roof, put the shingles on the roof.

So it's got different shapes than your standard hatchet or hammer. It's like a weird combination of both. This would cause some damage, I'm assuming. If you wanted to kill someone, this would crack a skull pretty easily. This type of tool could devastate a human skull.

This could completely crush in the skull if the blows are strong enough and if there's repeated blows to the skull. It has a lot of mass at one end. You know, and once the integrity of the skull is compromised, you create fractures in it, let's say from a first blow, then subsequent blows, you just start seeing the skull get crushed in. So yes, it would be a devastating weapon.

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And if you play well enough, you could make it to the detective club. There, you'll chat with other players and compete with or against them. June needs your help, but watch out. You never know which character might be a villain. Shocking family secrets will be revealed, but will you crack this case? Find out as you escape this world

and dive into June's world of mystery, murder, and romance. Can you crack the case? Download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. That's June's Journey. Download the game for free on iOS and Android.

This is what they think happened. The investigators examined the kids' skulls, and there were very clearly gashes to their skulls. It looked like from this particular hatchet. But the investigators noted that the gashes were not as severe

deep as they would have expected if the killer were a man. They were sort of light blows, obviously, because they were children. They didn't have to be, I suppose, very heavy blows to kill them. But they were working under the assumption that the killer was a woman and not a man. Does that sound right? It's a little sexist, but does that sound, it seems a little dangerous to me to limit 50% of the population. Is that profiling gone amok? Yeah.

That is where now trying to reconstruct aspects based on these injuries is overreaching. This type of weapon, it would not take a very strong person to inflict devastating wounds to young children's skulls. I would say more, if this is truly the murder weapon...

is that whoever is yielding it is striking the kids in the head. I, of course, would want to see the photos. Are we talking about, is it the edge side? Is it the blunt side of this lather's hatchet that was used? I've seen cases where hammers are used and you get these literally disc-shaped punctures through the skull. And as long as that hammer doesn't hit in the same spot, you know, the skull itself just doesn't cave in on itself as you have repeated blows.

But I would not draw any conclusion as to the gender or the strength of the person inflicting the blows. What we don't know is we're dealing with skeletal remains. Just because they have blows to their skull doesn't mean that they hadn't been strangled at some point.

So the distribution of the blows becomes significant. Does it appear that the offender, while inflicting the blows, is able to strike in the multiple sides of the skull, indicating that there's some movement either by the victim or the offender is moving the victim?

But right now, I would just say if they're just because it's found nearby and these two kids were bludgeoned, I wouldn't say, well, that is obviously the murder weapon. I would want more. Sometimes you'll get hair adhering to the surface of a bludgeoning weapon, tissue, bone matter, blood spatter, you know, something else that would tie this as the murder weapon or unique features that are left in the bone that could be physically matched to this type of lather's hatchet.

It's interesting, it's a lather's hatchet that might be indicative of possibly an occupation that the offender worked in, but not necessarily. I've got all sorts of tools because I'm a DIY guy that a lot of carpenters and other individuals in construction have. Just because I have them doesn't mean I've worked in that occupation.

I think they were also thinking about the woman aspect of this because of some of the other items that were left behind. There was a female penny loafer that was there. And of course, we've talked about the fur coat. It was mass produced, a very cheap fur coat that was mass produced as another clue that this would be a woman who killed this boy and this girl. That

being said, this seems like, if we look at this crime scene, very haphazard. If this is the murder weapon, this hatchet, it's just left there. These children are just covered up by a fur coat, and that's it. Yes, it's an isolated spot, but this doesn't seem particularly well covered up, except it's

that no one found them for four or five years. So what you know now, we don't know if this is a male or female. We know very little about the kids. We know very little about the circumstances though. What can you surmise of what you think is the most likely thing that happened so far?

Do you know, was that, let's say, placed over the children's upper bodies and head, like the first thing placed on them before they were hidden by the leaves and branches and everything else? I don't know where the coat was placed. I know that the skeletons were completely covered by the coat, from my understanding. They were very small. I'm going to make an assumption. Okay. If the coat had

been laid over these two kids' bodies to, in essence, kind of hide them. This is where I start going, okay, this might be an indication that the offender is showing a level of remorse. I have a case in which a body had been covered.

after she had been killed. It turns out it was a friend that had killed her. This is a behavioral thing that offenders who have an emotional connection to their victims do, is they will cover the victims. They don't want to see what they've done. They're ashamed of what they've done, but they have an emotional connection that they're trying to hide just from them continuing to look at what they've done. So this fur coat could have been placed by that offender,

I wouldn't go to the extent that it's necessarily their mother or even if it's a female, but it was potentially something that was used to go, you know, almost in a way, I'm sorry and is remorseful, but then they move on. Now, if we get into where the fur coat is a woman's fur coat and it's actually the killer's, that's interesting. Well, moving forward, this turns into very mysterious and a very, very cold case of

And it's incredibly frustrating to investigators because it has now been dubbed Babes in the Woods. There's a reward. Of course, lots and lots of tips come in. It goes nowhere. The investigators, and I think you're going to be very happy about this, Paul, stored a lot of evidence, including bone fragments and the jaws and the teeth. Oh, that's excellent. And that comes into play. So we find out a whole lot more information, but it's going to take an additional 40 years. Okay.

So this is where we are right now. Cold case, nothing's happening. But there's a police sergeant in 1996. So now we're fast-forwarding 43 years after they were discovered and maybe 50 years after they actually went missing. And he was assigned in Vancouver to this case, which I think is just incredible. Surely there were lower-hanging fruit than the Babes in the Wood case from 1953 for this guy, Sergeant Brian Honeyborn. But...

He was chosen to work on this case. He began his investigation by examining the evidence with new technology, of course. And he connected with a professor at the University of British Columbia. It was a guy named David Sweet, Dr. David Sweet. And I'm saying this because

I believe these people who work on these cases all deserve an incredible amount of recognition. And this is where things get technical, and you can help me with this. So Dr. David Sweet took some of the extracts from the remains, which would be the skeleton, and he made several attempts to extract a DNA sample from the remains. This was...

Almost impossible because the bones were very old and they had been handled, of course, by all sorts of people over the past 40 years. But he managed to get a sample from the kids' teeth. Is that common for forensic genealogy? Is that a good source, teeth? Teeth are awesome. Okay. Okay.

Good to know. It is not unusual for a body to decompose. All this bacteria inside the body, the blood goes bad. So when we would get blood samples from a decomposed body, there's no DNA from the victim left.

We'd often turn to long bones or ribs, and we could get DNA from those, but a body can decompose to a point where the DNA is not good there. Or if the body has been burned or been floating in the river, the decomposition just gets too far gone. And the DNA, at least with the technology from the era we're talking about, 1996, 1997, you just couldn't recover it.

But the teeth, inside the teeth, you have this dentin, this area, high levels of cells. There's a ton of nuclear DNA in there, and it's surrounded by the hardest substance in the body.

So when we do have floaters, when we do have the crispy critters, when we do have those decomp bodies, those corpses, and there's no DNA anywhere else, the teeth often save our butts. And so, yes, it's absolutely a must is when you have bodies like that, pull the molars, you know, get the...

get those teeth out for DNA down the road. I had no idea. You know, I know not that much about DNA. And so that's really good information. And thank goodness that this police sergeant, you know, was savvy enough to think, well, this really could be a good clue. So this is what they figured out. Now, I'm going to take you back in time to 1953. The Vancouver police are canvassing the whole area. The Vancouver newspapers are printing stories, sightings,

saying that we are looking for a woman who is with a boy and a girl between five and seven and seven and nine. And she goes into the park and maybe she looks distraught. She comes out by herself. This is who you should be on the lookout for. And this doctor who was not a pathologist had reported and looked at the skeletons and said, boy and girl, this was not a boy and girl, two boys.

And they were half-brothers, according to the DNA that was pulled by Dr. Sweet, based on these teeth, in 1996. So that is what we know up till now. And there is, of course, a lot more information for you. But up until 1996, they discover two boys, not a girl and a boy, half-brothers, different fathers, same mother. Okay.

Well, I'm not surprised that they missed on the gender identification. Yeah. 96, 97 timeframe with the state of the DNA technology. You know, at that point, we could sex the source of the DNA unequivocally. You know, it was very straightforward. We're just looking at a milogenin, looking basically, is there an X and Y chromosome? If we see Y, we know it's a biological male. And that's what he would have seen.

What's frustrating to this police sergeant and to Dr. Sweet is that they realize this too, and they realize that the entire investigation was misguided in 1953. And of course, you're right. There's just very little they could have done at that point. I don't know if a pathologist, a real pathologist...

Yeah.

But, you know, you still, whether, you know, back in the day, brother, sister, or now in the mid-90s, it's two half-brothers. You still have a family who has two missing young kids.

and nobody has come forward. That is still noteworthy. Incredible, incredible. And the story gets even more incredible. This police sergeant goes on a wild goose chase. Poor guy. I mean, this is what you do as an investigator, but boy, he stuck with it for years and years and years.

He went back and looked at all sorts of police reports and interviews that were taken in the newspapers of all kinds of deranged women who went into the park and came out with one shoe on because there was a penny loaf belonging to a woman left behind and distraught women. So he went on a wild goose chase, much of like what you and I do because of the limitations of what he had.

until he finally put it aside. He retired. And one year he was watching the news and there was a news report that covered a United States-based cold case that was solved with enhanced forensic technology. It doesn't say what it was. I suspect it must have been the Golden State Killer case. And he said, ding, ding, ding, I bet we can do something. We still have samples. So what do you think happened next?

knowing your background and how you can see, I'm very excited about talking to you about this. No, you know, this is where the genealogy tool that we used in Golden State Killer is huge.

huge for this type of case in particular, where you have recovered remains, obvious homicide, but you have no idea who the remains are from. You can't even really start a true investigation until you identify the victims. With this genealogy tool, with that DNA that they recovered,

It's a matter of now going through the process and identifying those individuals in the database that are related through DNA. And pretty soon, by utilizing that tool, you can drill down on the branch of the family and potentially the parent of the kids, whether it be on the paternal side with the two different fathers, so you have two different paternal lineages you're dealing with, or the maternal side.

Now you are 100 steps closer to solving the case. Well, this is a really incredible story. Let me tell you. So in 2021, he approaches the Vancouver police, maybe even a little bit earlier, and says, let's revisit this case. Now you've got this thing called forensic genealogy that I think would be a great tool for us. People are still concerned about what happened with these boys.

So the Vancouver police got in contact with a Massachusetts Bay company called Redgrave Research Forensic Services. Do you know them, Paul? Have you ever done anything with them? I've heard of them. Hold on a second. You disappeared.

Oh, you got some. He left for a second. What did you get? No, I got this plaque. When I gave a presentation up there in Vancouver, they gave me this plaque and I was trying to think when we gave that presentation, I wonder if this investigator was in the audience. My role in that is talking about the genealogy and how we did it to solve the Golden State Killer. And I'm wondering if him possibly attending that

helped further his pursuit of this genealogy tool. And that's why we do these stories because I don't know who listens to it. Well, actually, I know a lot of you because I hear from a lot of you who listen to this podcast. But we don't know what professionals listen to the podcast who could use your expertise and some of the things that you've mentioned to their benefit. So that's definitely a possibility. He reached out to the police and the police reached out to Redgrave Research Forensic Services.

to help with this investigation. Again, let's go back to the bones were old and they had been handled by a lot of people since the 50s. But now we're in 2021 when there are even better tools than in 1996. And it took scientists multiple tries to extract a DNA sample and then, of course, use even more updated technology. And they were successful. After they sequenced the DNA, they compared it in a database and

And they got a match. And here's the best part to me. They got a match on a family member who specifically uploaded their profile because they knew there were two little boys from their family who went missing in the 40s, and they wanted to figure out what happened to them. Wow. And they got a hit.

So here are their names, David and Derek Day-Alton, and they went missing in the 40s. So the police actually got quite a bit right here. This is where I think the police, with the exception of male versus female, this is where the police actually did nail some things down here.

So let me tell you about David and Derek. They were half-brothers. David was six and Derek was seven. And of course, shared a mother, just like the DNA in 96 told them. And we don't really know what happened to precipitate all of this, but it sounds like the relatives say that the boys were removed from the residence by the ministry. They were never reported missing. Something happened.

with the mom, and the ministry removed them. So that, I think, would be the equivalent of state, like CPS, would have removed them. Okay. And then they disappeared. So the suspect now that the police have settled on is the mom. Yeah. And the mom died in the 1990s.

And it sounded like had a pretty troubled time in general. But overall, the case was difficult, I think, for relatives because the boys just sort of disappeared. And I don't know if they went into foster care and then the mother retrieved them or perhaps there was a foster parent involved. But the most likely suspect is the biological mother.

So police, again, were right. I mean, they assumed that this was a woman who did it and maybe for right or wrong, but there were really no solid witnesses seeing her go into the woods or come out of the woods. But they were able to, thank goodness, successfully identify them based on this relative. So again, singing the praises of forensic genealogy.

No, you know, it's a revolutionary tool and it sounds like it's given another family sort of an answer. You know, they now know what happened to their two little children from the past. You know, I'm not sure how they're related to the person who uploaded their DNA. I'm kind of curious, you know, of course, it sounds like there's been, if you want to call it a family secret, that's been talked about over the last couple generations.

Was it ever truly verified that these kids were removed by the ministry? Or is mom just coming up with a reason why the two kids are gone? I agree. She changed her surname after they disappeared, after the family stopped seeing them. And also, I don't know if this says anything, but this is a family of Russian immigrants. Yes.

And I wonder if that maybe played into why this had become such a sort of buried secret. Because 1940s, that's not that far back. I mean, I knew of events that happened in my family from the 1940s, certainly because of the war. So...

I'm a little surprised. I'm not surprised when people have hidden family secrets from the 1800s or the 1700s. I get a little more surprised in the 1900s, though, because it's just not that far back, and it's not that hard to find information through newspapers.com. So I wonder if it was something culturally that stopped them from talking about it, or you're right, maybe she just lied and said that the mystery took them and she doesn't know where they are. Regardless, they ended up dead,

And they finally were able to identify them. And, you know, now finally, you know, 70 years later, they have names. Do we know each boy's father was either father in the boys' lives at all? It doesn't sound like it, no. Okay. And again, they were never reported missing. Yeah, well, that's what I'm trying to figure out is if she has two sons with two different fathers, so it doesn't sound like...

of either son's wasn't actively involved in their life. No paternal grandparents, people that would be really concerned if these two kids had been removed by the ministry. Correct. Right now, absent more information, I think mom just made up

they were taken by the ministry. That was just an excuse to why she no longer has them. Well, no, she went out into the forest and killed her two kids and then just came back and told the family, well, the ministry took them. I don't have them anymore. Well, and let's think about this time period. 1940s is when they went missing. So this is a time period where a single woman...

who might have been troubled, we're assuming, to have killed two kids with a hatchet or some violent weapon, the family probably wasn't all that surprised. And maybe they thought that David and Derek were better off. Maybe they thought that they were better off in the care of the ministry, which probably would have ended up being foster care. So I don't know. But regardless, this had been a family secret, and this was revealed specifically because

forensic genealogy, which I know you and I wish we could have in every single one of these cases. But thank goodness, the Vancouver Police Department in the 1950s thought to preserve this. And yes, it wasn't preserved particularly well, but it was there and they were able to use it in 2021 to solve a case that was more than 70 years old.

Yeah. It is, in my experience, unusual for many agencies to have preserved evidence out of the 1950s. Incredible. We typically start to see agencies, you know, get on the ball with evidence in the late 60s.

And even then, it's spotty. So, you know, kudos to the original investigators and basically, you know, the property room out there over the years to not have gotten rid of that from such an old case. And I want to give big props to this detective, Honeyborn, who had never given up on this case, who had never given up on a case that was 40 years old when he got it.

And to stay with it and think about it, I know that as an investigator, there must be cases that just stick with you. And I know the Golden State Killer was one of them. And I bet you have a much longer list than that. So this is how things get solved. It was not just...

uploading DNA. It was a detective who did not need to do any of this because he had retired. He felt compelled because he had humanized these two kids and wanted justice for them. And I just thought that it was amazing. There's no people knocking on this guy's door saying, you've got to get this solved. There's no family members, none of that. So I couldn't be any more proud of the

This man in the Vancouver Police Department, I think it's amazing. You know, these cases do become personal. Even if there is no family that's calling you, it's looking at the photos of these two kids and what happened to them and the fact that he stayed on it and recognized that the new technology could be used in this case. Sometimes it's just persistence and it's constantly thinking.

What can I do different in order to get this case over the hump? And he did an amazing job on that. Well, this is certainly not a happy ending, but it's a satisfying ending to know that there are two kids we know very little about who had great lives ahead of them. And now, at least finally, we know who they are. I always learned something from you. I did not know that teeth would be an excellent source of DNA. I had suspected it would be hard DNA.

to put a sex on skeletons that were prepubescent, but my suspicions were confirmed by you. So yet again, I've learned something and I'm very happy about that because boy, this case felt very important to me. It even shows, I mean, here you have a family member who uploaded their DNA specifically because

They had two missing boys in their past, and now the family got an answer. Yep. That's what we in law enforcement can do, is we can work these cases to get the family an answer. And again, kudos to the sergeant who did that for that family. Well, here's to hoping you and I can get answers for our episode next week, which I think you'll find very, very compelling. All right. I'm looking forward to it, as always. ♪

This has been an Exactly Right production. For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com slash buriedbones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Amorosi. Research by Maren McClashen and Kate Winkler-Dawson. Our mixing engineer is Ryo Baum. Our theme song is by Tom Breifogle. Our art

work is by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer. You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod. Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the race to decode the criminal mind, is available now. And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.