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of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com youm're listening to DNAID brought to you by ABJAC Entertainment. Be sure to check out some of the other great true crime podcasts from this network, including the Murder in My Family, Missing Persons, Scene of the Crime, Zodiac Speaking Beyond Bizarre True Crime, Campus Killings, Below the Surface, and Killer Communications. All of these podcasts are available for you to binge on right now. Wherever you listen to podcasts, subscribe where you're listening to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. Sam. On January 15, 1953, yes, 1953, at 10:30 in the morning, seasoned Vancouver, British Columbia Forestry and Park worker Albert Tong was working with a crew clearing dense brush from an overgrown area in Stanley Park. Stanley park is Vancouver's largest urban park, covering 400 hectares. A hectare is about 2.5 acres and it offers trails, a seawall, an aquarium, restaurants, and lots of recreational space. As the crew hacked their way through the brush about 100 yards from the main roadway through Stanley park, not far from the Lionsgate Bridge, Albert Tong paused and then stopped. A small human skull with an old leather cap on it lay under the leaves and brushed. As Albert had cleared the area, human bones and very weathered personal items were suddenly exposed. Although still covered with a lot of dirt and leaves, it appeared to be two small human bodies lying in close proximity to each other. It was shocking, unthinkable, confounding. Two human bodies right in the popular teeming urban park, and based on their generally looking weathered and faded, they had apparently been there for years. The work crew called the police. Responding law enforcement personnel found the two bodies lying in a shallow impression covered with a woman's oil cloth, rain poncho or cape. The bodies were just bones, small ones, leading to initial theories that they were a woman and child. They were covered in layer upon layer of moldy damp leaves that had clearly accumulated over quite some time. Animals had also moved around some of the bones. A strange assortment of items lay nearby. A woman's low heeled shoe. A child's rusted and flaking blue tin lunchbox. A small rusty roofing hatchet, quite worn, its handle broken in two places. Two identical pairs of white soled brown oxford shoes, one larger than the other. Two identical child size belts and a metal plate bracelet etched with two dogs and a rabbit, the kind a child would wear. The bodies were carefully collected and taken to the city morgue for examination by Dr. T.R. harman, the coroner's pathologist. Vancouver detectives and the coroner, Dr. John Whitbread, observed both bodies had small leather aviator type helmets on the skulls and one even wore a pair of goggles. Police scoured missing persons reports from several years earlier for a missing woman and child. But they quickly gave up on that effort when they learned from the coroner's office that the bodies were actually both children, A boy and a girl, likely brother and sister. Their ages were estimated at 10 and 12 respectively, although this estimate would be changed very quickly to younger six or seven and eight or nine, with the boy being younger. The boy wore a zippered cardigan and the girl wore an overcoat, suggesting it was cold when they entered the woods. Her coat had a gray green lining and drawstring waist. Dr. Harman determined that both children had light brown hair and that wasn't all. It seemed possible that both children were the victims of homicide. Holes were found in both skulls. In one, the hole was consistent with the blade of a hatchet that was found right near the bodies. In the other, the hole was consistent with the handle end of the implementation. It was initially estimated that the bodies could have been in the park for about two years. But the coroner, Dr. Whitbread said they could have been there as long as six years. This from the Vancouver sun quote from successive seasons, layers of leaves which were found on the bones. They deduced the children died in the winter or early spring. Three years ago the paper reported that three distinct seasons growth of leaves and needles lay on top of the bodies and roots and weeds had grown up through the bones. This was all based on estimates of police. No botanist or deciduous tree expert was consulted with this information and his own analysis. Dr. Harman eventually settled on the two children having been in the park since 1948 or 1949. Police went back seven years looking for missing children's reports about a brother and sister. They did locate a report about a mother and two children who had rented a boat at Kitsilano boat rentals in 1950. Apparently, the boat sank and the mother's body had been located, but the children were never found. But how the children could have ended up lying side by side, nowhere near the water raised questions about this theory. Vancouver police issued a request from police agencies throughout Canada for information on any missing children. The children quickly became known as the babes in the woods. Somewhat shockingly, two local reporters went snooping around after the scene was cleared by police, and they retrieved two buttons, a broken safety pin and another chunk of bone. These were turned over to police, as was a small fire shovel found by the park keeper, Albert Tong, about 15 yards from the gravesite. In the third week of January, Chief Constable Mulligan made a so called coast to coast appeal to the public to report anything at all about the babes in the woods. The theory was that since the children were not missing from Vancouver, they must have come to the area from somewhere else. On January 17, the Vancouver sun offered a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for the deaths of the babes in the woods. A Sun article dated January 19, 1953 says, quote, a most important clue today came from a Vancouver family who remembered the sudden disappearance of two children. A young son of the informants made friends with the two youngsters and then never saw them again. The lad inquired about the whereabouts of his playmates when he saw their mother on the street sometime later. The woman brushed past him without answering, end quote. The boy whose friends were missing remembered at least one of them, often wearing an aviator helmet. Many tips were called in. Over 100 witnesses reported seeing a boy and a girl in the park sometime around 1947. The police reportedly followed up on 10 duos of missing children called in throughout Canada and beyond, even as far away as Venezuela. For example, according to the Vancouver sun, one English naval officer contacted police in Vancouver saying he thought the children might be his own. His wife had absconded to Canada with the kids after a separation several years earlier. Police were able to track down all the pairs of supposedly missing children and confirm that they were not the babes in the woods. Around January 19th was when the first reporting that both children might be boys surfaced. But this was only in one paper. The rest continued to report that they were a boy and a girl. It's unclear whether this was misreporting or whether there was some doubt as to the sex of the babes. Police went so far as to find the factory where the Oxford shoes the children were wearing were made. They commissioned two new pairs in an effort to create images of what the shoes the children wore looked like when new. The 1953 detectives learned that the loafers were imported from Asia after World War II. They also had a clothing specialist try to reconstruct the clothing items. The fur cloak or coat that was draped over the bodies was not expensive and was fitted to a short, stout woman. By early February, three detectives were still working around the clock on the Babes in the woods case. They continued following up scores of leads about the possible identities of the children. In July, police accepted the offer of assistance from Vienna native Erna von Engel Beiersdorf. She was an anthropologist from the Vienna Museum of Natural History who had modeled animals based on skeletal structure and who had some experience creating sketches of faces with based on their skulls. Based on the Babes in the woods skull structure, she felt that the children likely were of Nordic descent. She worked with Vancouver police in an attempt to capture images of the babes in the woods, making plaster Paris casts of the skulls so she could recreate their faces. It was noted that both children had strong jaws and their facial structures were very similar. They looked alike. Forensic anthropologists had concluded that the older child, the girl, had brown hair, cavities and a slender build. The younger child, the boy, had darker hair and a more sturdy build. These reconstructions took months to prepare, with the result being clay busts of the children that police photographed and shared with the public. The Vancouver sun reported on August 29, 1953, that the police were operating under the theory that a, quote, mentally deranged mother or guardian took the children into the park and murdered them with a shingler's hammer about six years ago. End quote. Police did not reveal this until later, but they had obtained a very significant piece of information from a witness that gave rise to this theory. A female Vancouver resident had been in the park on October 5, 1947, with a friend when she saw a woman walking with two children. They walked into the overgrown bush area where the bodies were later found. The woman was carrying a small hatchet in her hand when she saw her observers. She started using the hatchet to cut the brush so they could move forward. According to the Province newspaper, the watcher suspected nothing at the time, nor even 45 minutes later when she and her companion saw the woman walking near the bear cages without her coat and wearing only one shoe. Remember that when police found the skeletons of the children, they were wrapped in a fur coat and a woman's shoe was lying nearby. When police asked the woman to show them where she saw the children, she led them to a spot only 50ft from where the skeletons had been found. The witness had written all this down in her diary, which she was able to show police. Holy crap. This woman was almost witness to the slaughter of two children. They walked into the brush under their own power, alive and with a woman, and only the woman came out. All the leads and tips and clues and eyewitness statements went nowhere. Vancouver detective Don McKay, who invested thousands of hours into the case, developed a theory that the children were the offspring of Madeleine Fortier, who hailed from Quebec. Her children had disappeared, and McKay believed that the babes in the woods might have been hers. Disposed of her in Stanley park, according to reporting in the province. Fortier reportedly told Quebec police that she had given up her children, who were a boy and a girl, for adoption in Vancouver, but police were not able to confirm that. A 13th year biology teacher named Lawrence Smith wrote police that he saw something in Stanley park on January 3rd or 4th, 1947. The memory had stayed with him because it was so odd. He was in the park when he saw a woman and two small children walking along the seawall toward Brockton Point. One of the children was carrying a small hatchet and was clanging the blade along a pipe rail along the path. An odd sight for sure. Later that same day, still in the park, this same witness saw a disheveled, hysterical woman sitting on a bench at the lakeside, a man pacing near her. Smith reported that the woman wore no coat, although it was cold. She had one shoe on and one bare leg, and she had blood spattered on her leg. Smith stopped and asked if everyone was okay, and the man brusquely told him that the woman had slipped and fallen, losing her shoe and scratching her leg. Smith offered to find her shoe, and the man said he had discarded it because it was torn. Of course, police now had no way of locating the man and woman Smith saw years earlier. Another report was made by a man from East Vancouver who reported that his neighbors, a couple in a rooming house, had two little boys. And then they didn't. The boys disappeared in 1947. The size of the missing boys was consistent with the younger skeleton found in the park, but no one recalled the family's name. Eventually, the children's remains, the hatchet believed to be the murder weapon and the plaster of Paris reconstructions were all placed on display in the Vancouver Police Museum when it opened in 1986. The Babes in the woods case came to be considered Vancouver's most notorious and oldest unsolved crime. Isn't it crazy that in this era of instant gratification, with AI, smartphones and the Internet satisfying all of our needs almost instantly, that we have to wait for our paychecks? You show up to work every day and your employer pays you only once every two weeks for work you've already done. It doesn't make much sense and it can be frustrating and stressful not to have access to money that is yours. But it doesn't have to be that way. And that's where Earn in comes in. Earn in is the original earned wage access app that lets you access your pay as you work instead of waiting days or even weeks for a paycheck. This is not a payday loan. This is access to your money. That's why there's no interest, no credit checks and no mandatory fees. Access up to $150 a day of money you've already earned up to $1,000 between paychecks. Tips are optional and standard transfers take one to two business days with no mandatory fees. Expedited transfers start at 399 and cap at 599. This is not about emergencies, it's just a better way to exist financially day to day. Five million people are already on Earn in and honestly, we all should be. Download Earnin in the App Store or Google Play spelled like Earning money without the G type in DNA ID under Podcast when you sign up. It'll really help the show. Earn in is a financial technology company, not a bank. Access limits are based on your earnings and risk factors. Standard cash outs take one to two business days with no mandatory fees. Expedited transfers available for a fee. Tips are voluntary and don't affect the service. Available in select states. Terms and restrictions apply. Visit Earnin.com for full details.
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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.
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More than 40 years passed in 1996. Behind the scenes, Sergeant Brian Honeyborn of the Joint Vancouver Police and RCMP British Columbia Provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit took up the case, having spent his entire life in Vancouver and being aware of the case for the duration of his career as a sergeant. He did not have his own caseload, but he decided to pick up the case anyway. He was disturbed to realize that the babes in the woods skulls were on display in the Vancouver Police Museum and to learn the rest of their bones were sitting in boxes in a police warehouse. He seized the skulls from the museum, feeling that their being on display was inappropriate, and decided it was time to use modern DNA technology to learn more about the babes in the woods. He delivered the skulls of the babes in THE WOODS To Dr. David Sweet, the head of the University of British Columbia Bureau of Legal dentistry lab in March 1998. His lab extracted teeth from each of the skulls and ground down the teeth, enabling him to extract DNA from the resultant powder. The DNA testing showed that both children were males, not a boy and a girl. After all, they were likely half brothers. The whole first 40 years of the investigation were almost for naught. Police had conducted an international search for a missing boy and girl. Now they learned that the two missing children were brothers. Sergeant Honeyborn pointed out that now the investigators nearly needed to start over. The Fortier suspect from decades earlier was ruled out, of course. But the two missing little boys reported by the neighbor became more interesting, as did the lead reported by Lawrence Smith of seeing the boy with the hatchet and the woman with one shoe and a bloody leg. Sergeant Honeyborn knew that if he could locate relatives of the babes in the woods, he could definitely identify them using DNA. And he had one tip that he hoped might lead him to the parents of the babes in the woods. This was a tip that was reported in 1953 when the Babes were first found. A man who worked at a logging camp and his buddy had picked up a woman and two boys hitchhiking toward Vancouver. Honeyborn told the Vancouver Sun, Quote, we got a letter in 1953 from a guy who said he had given a woman a ride from Mission. He described her as redheaded and she had two boys about four and six. The boys, he believed, had on leather, flying helmets, end quote. He went on to explain that the woman told the men, conveying her and the children that she lived on Cherry Street. Admission, the woman was quite talkative and said she'd been in trouble with the police. Admission on vagrancy charges, which was why she was headed to Vancouver. The men drove the woman and kids around Stanley park and let them off in Vancouver. This tip had never been followed up on because the forensic pathologist in 1953 determined that the murdered children were a boy and a girl. Now that Honeybourne had learned that they were in fact brothers, he revisited the letter about the woman and the two boys from Mission. He went so far as to track down the guy from the logging camp who had driven the woman and kids. And then he interviewed a man who delivered papers to Cherry street in Mission who remembered a couple with two young boys, last name Grant. This was how Honeyborn learned about Gordon and Harriet Grant. He told the Vancouver sun that Gordon Grant was a grave digger at the Hatsack Cemetery. The grants separated in 1948, and Harriet moved to Vancouver with the children. But Honeyborn was unable to find the two Grant brothers in Strathcona school records, and in 1998, he issued a plea for anyone who knew the Grants to come forward. And someone did and was able to shed some light on the situation, Honeybord told the province, quote, I located the descendants of the woman because she was deceased and all five of her children are alive. It was not the woman from Mission, end quote. That last promising lead was dead in the water. After Honeyborn and the lab obtained DNA profiles for the babes in the woods, the remainder of the bones were cremated and a simple religious service was held for the children. On May 28, 1997, the cremains were scattered in the water at Kitsilano Point. In 2003, it was the 50th anniversary of the finding of the babes in the woods. Articles at the time termed it one of Vancouver's most famous unsolved murders. Detective Honeyborn had retired in 2000, but he decided to keep the case alive by giving talks on it. Keeping abreast of developments and granting interviews, he kept his ear to the ground for tips and leads that might lead to the name of the woman seen in the park with the two little boys. He told the Vancouver sun, quote, if we could get a name, if she died in the Vancouver area, the mortuary records are fairly accurate. It would just be a matter of digging her up and getting a DNA sample. In 2011, in an article in the Vancouver sun about the unsolved case, Chris Matheson, the executive director of the Vancouver Police Museum, voiced the questions that everybody had. Wouldn't somebody have noticed two siblings go missing? Wouldn't a school have noticed a family member, even if it was one of the parents that killed them, which is a likely scenario, why didn't somebody step forward? Why, indeed? Sergeant Honeyborn would not let it go. In 2014, he was still working on the case. In his air quote retirement, he made further study of the shoes the boys were wearing and learned that information at the time had been erroneous. The shoes were actually available in Canada prior to the end of World War II, whereas previously it was thought they were only imported after the war ended. Because the approximate date of death of the boys had been based on the manufacture and import of the shoes, as well as possible witness statements, this meant that the boys could actually have been killed earlier. Honeyborn recalled a witness statement from 1944 at Stanley Park a sailor who was walking along the seawall with his fiance in May of that year when they saw a woman come crashing out of the brush in front of them. She was wearing just one shoe and no coat and was uttering guttural noises. She ran away when she saw the couple. Was this the boy's killer? Had they been dead nine years, not five or six when they were found in 1953? So much unknown, so many facts called into question. Eve Lazarus is a Vancouver based journalist and author who has a passion for local history and a focus on historical crime. She also produces the Cold Case Canada True Crime podcast. This is from her blog Every Place Has a story. Quote In 2015, a former Vancouver Police detective born in 1930 told police that the mother of the missing children may have lived with his grandmother in her West End rooming house. An investigation found that she had another son who died in the 1970s, was buried at Mountain View Cemetery and could be a half brother to the babes in the woods. His body was exhumed and tested for mitochondrial DNA DNA passed directly from the mother, but the remains were so degraded that the results were inconclusive. End quote. Once again, a solid dead end. How to solve a case like this? I'm Hannah. I've lost 75 pounds in 20 months with GLP1s/ diet and exercise on RO. I've gone from struggling to run a mile to running farther every day. You can Access FDA approved GLP1s online, get the support you need to reach your weight loss goals. Go to Roe Co Weight to see if you qualify. I'm a paid ROE partner. 20% average weight loss in one year in non diabetics with obesity or overweight with a weight related medical condition versus 3.1% in placebo arm Rx only to stay informed about serious side effects. Go to RO CO Safety. Olivia McCarter, the young genealogist who is a co founder of Moxie Forensic Investigations, was at one time an intern for Redgrave Research Forensic Services outside Boston. She was interested in the Babes in the woods case and contacted Dr. David Sweet, the University of British Columbia scientist who had originally extracted the the babe's DNA from their teeth. According to Ms. Lazarus, Dr. Sweet put Ms. McCarter in touch with the detective who was handling the case, Detective Rodriguez, and proposed IGG analysis on the case. The detective was receptive and Redgrave Research Forensic Services took on the case. Redgrave Research was founded by Dr. Anthony Redgrave and Lee Bingham Redgrave. This from their website quote Lee and Anthony Redgrave are forensic genetic genealogists who solve cases of unidentified John and Jane does as well as perpetrators of crimes using DNA and genealogy. They also run a training course for forensic genealogy training for law enforcement. Lee and Anthony also co founded the Trans DOE Task Force which is working to research and educate regarding cases involving unidentified transgender victims and get them identified via forensic genealogy. I interviewed Dr. Redgrave for this episode. He told me that their organization has a strong interest in historic cases and they were eager to work the Babes in the woods case. They knew the DNA would be very degraded given it was so old. The remains were outdoors for years, were on display in the Vancouver Police Museum and had been handled by countless people over the decades. The Redgraves had a lab in mind to propose doing the DNA work. The Vancouver Police contracted with Redgrave Research, whose announcement stated, VPD has contracted Redgrave Research Forensic Services, a Massachusetts based forensic genetic genealogist company, to study DNA recently extracted from the victim's bones. Using public DNA databases such as GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA, Redgrave Research hopes to identify living relatives who share the same DNA as the murder victims. In May 2021, the Vancouver Police Department announced via a press release by Sergeant Steve Addison, quote, Now advancements in science, combined with people's interest in learning about their own ancestry has created an exciting new opportunity for BPD to finally get some ANSWERS, end quote Dr. Redgrave recommended that the VPD submit bone samples to Lakehead University's Paleo DNA lab in Thunder Bay, Ontario, which was experienced in extracting DNA from old remains. Even so, it was a complex and drawn out process. Here is an update published by Redgrave Research on October 27, 2021. The first attempt to sequence DNA was not successful, so the decision was made to go back to perform another extraction. Our team was notified today that Lakehead University's Paleo DNA lab was able to get a more substantial second extraction and we are feeling optimistic about making another attempt at sequencing. End quote. Incredibly, the second Attempt at extraction from the bones of the older of the two babes in the woods was successful. Knowing that the boys were half brothers from the STR analysis done by Dr. Sweet back in the 1990s, the genealogists needed a SNP profile of only one of them, presuming that if they identified one brother, that would lead to the identity of the other. Lakehead University then shipped the DNA extract to Hudson Alpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama. The resulting file was sent to Kevin Lord of Sabre Investigations for BioInformatics, and on January 17, 2022, the kit was ready for upload. Dr. Redgrave uploaded the kit to GEDmatch that day, January 17, 2022. The upload takes a day to process, and when they got the results, the DNA indicated the boy's admixture was largely Norwegian, which turned out to be incorrect and derailed the analysis for a short time. Dr. Redgrave explained to me this can happen in Gedmatch. With samples from an underrepresented population, the boy turned out to have Metis and Russian heritage. Dr. Redgrave got the match list on January 19, 2022. The top match was under 100 centimorgans and the next highest supporting matches were about the 60 to 80 range. Even with these low numbers, Redgrave research was able to identify the first most recent common ancestor or mrca that day. This was a Russian couple to whom the boy and the top match were both related. Other matches indicated Matis heritage. Over the next several days, Dr. Redgrave continued building out the trees of the matches, greatest to smallest, attempting to find triangulation. He was working around the likely great grandparent or great great grandparent level at this point and located more MRCAs. Next, he started building trees down from the MRCAs, and although some trees were straightforward, he did encounter some adoptions and change surnames. To overcome these hurdles, he researched the families and their movements, intermarriages and correct admixtures. On January 31, Dr. Regray was able to give the VPD a name not of the little boy whose SNP he had uploaded, but to a probable mother of the child. Her name was Eileen Bousquet. The VPD immediately contacted a living family member of Eileen. The genealogist had not been able to locate any missing young sons of Eileen. It was up to the investigators to determine whether the theory was accurate and if so, obtain a sample for confirmatory testing. The woman the investigators contacted, named Cindy, was a granddaughter of Eileen Bousquet. Her mother, Diane, was Eileen's daughter and presumably the Sister of the still unidentified Babes in the Woods. Diane had died, but when alive, she had tested her DNA on a commercial testing site. Cindy worked with the investigators to upload her mother Diane's kit to GEDmatch so they could assess the genetic relationship. The results showed that Diane shared DNA with the boy whose SNP profile was used, consistent with the half sibling. Redgrave Research issued a statement reading in part on February 9, 2022. Family members were able to follow our instructions on how to download the raw data and upload that DNA test to GEDmatch so we could perform a one to one direct comparison between that family's submitted DNA data and the DNA sample from the child. When we compared the tests, it was 100% conclusive that our hypothesis was correct. So they now knew that Diane was the half sister of the Babes in the Woods. Her daughter Cindy, the living relative contacted by the vpd, was the babe's niece. She was devastated to learn that the infamous Babes in the woods were her uncles and they had been brutally murdered circa 1947. A lot of what we know about Diane, Cindy and their family is thanks to Eve Lazarus, the journalist I mentioned earlier. Cindy's daughter, whom Ms. Lazarus gave the pseudonym Allie, approached her with a story about her grandmother Diane's brothers, the Babes in the Woods. Diane had never talked about having a couple of missing brothers, but she did maintain some photo albums that contained pictures. I'm paraphrasing here from Eve Lazarus's blog. Allie's mom Cindy, Learned in her 20s that she had two missing uncles. She was looking through some family photo albums and saw photos of her mother Diane, with two little boys. Cindy asked Diane what had happened to her brothers, but she just cried and refused to talk about it. But she did find out that the boys were named Derek and David Dalton. Allie's great grandmother, Eileen Bousquet, was born in 1917. Her own mother died when she was just eight years old. She and her twin Doreen and their three other siblings were sent to a Catholic orphanage. Eileen and Doreen were arrested at age 18 for setting off five fire alarms throughout Kitsilano. They told the judge they were just looking for a little fun. Eileen appears in Vancouver city directories in 1936 working as a domestic maid. There are records of her giving birth to Diane, Derek and David, but her name was not Eileen Bousquet. It was Eileen Dalton. Eileen was listed as Eileen Dalton, widow at the time of the birth of the younger son. No marriages exist with this name, and investigators believe Eileen made it up. Eileen and her children lived at various apartments in Kitsilano and she worked as a waitress. However, there was no listing for her and the kids in the city in 1947 or 1948. Eileen's daughter Diane was 10 years old when her brothers disappeared. Her mother refused to address where they had gone or what had become of them. Diane did not talk about her missing brothers much to her own family. Her daughter Cindy was told that the family was very poor and Derek and David had been taken away by Child Protective Services because their mother, Eileen, couldn't provide for them. No one really understood at the time why Diane had remained with her mother when her brothers were supposedly removed from the home. Diane told Cindy stories of being so poor they sometimes had to escape out the windows of places where they were living when the landlord came looking for his rent. The photo albums maintained by Diane included photos of her brothers. A photo from Henry Hudson elementary in Kitsilano taken around 1946 or 1947 showed Derek, the older brother, a smiling little blonde boy. Other photos showed David playing, and then they disappeared off the face of the earth. Vancouver police held a press conference announcing the resolution of the Babes in the woods case on February 15, 2022. Retired detective Brian Honeyburn and Dr. David Sweet were present. VPD inspector Dale Widman said, this horrific case has haunted Vancouver investigators for nearly 70 years. It gives me great satisfaction today to give the boys back their names. I Although significant folklore has surrounded this case for years, we must not forget that these were real children who died a tragic and heartbreaking death, he continued. Last week we met with distant family members and informed them of our findings. They decided not to be here today. The lead investigator who finally cracked the case was Detective Constable Ada Rodriguez. She got the case in 2020. Quote, I decided to continue the passion of my predecessor, Brian Honeyburn, and see if I could be the one to give them a name. With all the help that was given to me prior, I knew we had the boy's bones. The hurdle was that the DNA was very degraded. I was very fortunate to make contact with Redgrave. We knew there were good odds of finding a living family member out there somewhere, but once we discovered that DNA match, we still had a significant amount of work to do to locate family members, check school records and confirm specific details about the victims so we could be absolutely certain about their identities. Detective Constable Rodriguez continued, one can only imagine what it feels like to have a homicide detective call you and say, we think he might be related to a couple of victims. In a historical file. When we spoke to the family member, obviously they were at first surprised, but immediately asked if it was in reference to one of their parents brothers. We were able to confirm Derek Dalton, born on February 27, 1940, and David Dalton, born on June 24, 1941, were in fact the babes in the woods. The story that had been handed down to them was that the boys had been removed from the residence by the Ministry. Even though this family did their best to talk about the boys and try to get the story, the only response they got from family was silence. The absence of the boys was never discussed. Detective Constable Rodriguez talked about how the confirmation was obtained. This family member decided it was important to try to find the boys, so they made the decision to upload their DNA to MyHeritage.com. this is not the website that Dr. Redgrave uses, the constable specified, but the family member was very willing to upload their DNA to GEDmatch. Dr. Redgrave was able to confirm without a doubt that the boys were related to this family. The VPD believes the Dalton brothers were descended from Russian immigrants who arrived in Canada sometime around the beginning of the 20th century. Detective Constable Rodriguez said in true fashion. She did not announce the names of Derek and David's parents. Thanks to Eve Lazarus, we know the mother was Eileen Bousquet, using the surname Dalton that appears to be manufactured. And surprisingly, no one knows the names of the two boys, fathers who were different men. The genealogical analysis conducted by Redgrave Research did not identify the father of the older boy, and the family does not know the name of either man. Okay, so what do we know about the fate of Derek and David? The family was very poor, said Major Crime Section Commanding Officer Dale Wiedman at the news conference. The half brothers attended Henry Hudson Elementary School in Kitsilano. Inspector Wiedman said they were likely slain in 1947, when Derek Dalton was 7 and his brother David was 6. They were never reported missing. So who killed them? One of the original investigators, Detective Don McKay, told the Vancouver sun that he believed the killer was a woman. The skulls had clefts from the hatchet, but they were light blows that barely made a depression in the skull. I believe a man would have struck harder. The woman then spread her cheap fur coat over the little bodies and fled in terror from the grisly scene, losing one of her shoes. What about the story told to the family that Derek and David were taken away by Child Protection Service? Police have been unable to find any records of that, and reportedly they believe that story was made up. And everyone knew the stories told by the 1947 witnesses at the park of the woman with two boys and a hatchet, of the hysterical woman with blood on her leg and one shoe. Of the woman erupting from the brush with no coat and one shoe running away from witnesses. VPD's Inspector Wiedman addressed the elephant in the room at the press conference. He said, while I stand here today to tell you that we have identified the victims, I must acknowledge that no arrests have been made. After seven decades as a cold case, we presumed that the person who killed Derek and David had likely passed away. Because no charges can be laid, I cannot reveal the name. I can tell you with confidence that it was likely a close family member. But at this stage in the investigation, it was never about seeing someone charged for these crimes. It was always about giving these boys a name and finally telling their story. I'm proud to be part of. Of the team that has done that. But when pressed by a reporter at the news conference whether the boy's mother was the prime suspect, Inspector Weedman said, quote, I think we have to make that assumption. Yes, she would definitely be a person of interest if this case had occurred today. Naturally, we would be looking at the mother. Yes. Police revealed that a relative of Eileen's lived near the entrance to Stanley park at the time, Likely one of her siblings, all of whom had settled in Vancouver by that time. Eileen Bousquet died in 1996 at age 78. Any secrets she carried, she took with her to her grave. And of course, we have no proof that she was the one who killed Derek and David. It's horrible to even contemplate a mother making this choice and carrying it out. But all signs indeed point to a female culprit. The witness statements, the light blows with the hatchet, the woman's cloak and shoe at the scene. Eileen was a single mother of three children that we know of, all of whom had different fathers. As we heard, money was extremely tight and life had to have been very hard for her. I could not help but wonder if she indeed took the lives of her sons. She felt pressured into doing so by a male influence. Not that I don't believe the women are capable of murdering their children. Unfortunately, we see that every day. But remember that witness, Lawrence Smith, saw a disheveled, hysterical woman wearing no coat and one shoe, her legs spattered with blood at the park that day. What's significant about his statement was that a man was with this woman. He was pacing near her and brusquely brushed off Smith's inquiries by saying the woman had slipped and fallen, losing her shoe and scratching her leg. When Smith offered to help find her shoe, the man said he'd discarded it because it was ripped. If indeed this woman was Eileen, then there is no question that she was with a man and he was in the know about whatever was going on that caused her to lose a shoe and her coat and blood to spatter her. Did he kill the boys or had he coerced her into doing it? Eve Lazarus reported in her blog that Cindy, the boy's niece, did not believe her grandmother Eileen capable of murdering her children. She told Ms. Lazarus that her grandmother Eileen was a lovely, gentle woman who babysat the kids, loved animals, and often seemed sad. Of course, we never really know what our loved ones are capable of when their backs are against the wall, and so once again, we are frustratingly without answers. But police are not looking for a suspect at this point. Derek and David have their names back and that will have to be enough thanks for listening to this episode of dnaid. Before you leave, please let me tell you about some important things related to the show. If you'd like to support this podcast and in the process get access to early and ad free episodes as well as bonus content like crime scene photos, you can sign up for a Patreon subscription for only $5 a month by heading over to patreon.com dnaid. Of course, you're welcome to contribute more than $5 a month. We rely on Patreon funds to pay for the original source materials I use to research each episode. If Patreon isn't your thing, you can also show your support with an AbJack Insider subscription through Apple Podcasts. It costs just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. Your Abjak Insider subscription will give you the same benefits for not only only dnaid but for all of the shows on the ABJAC Network like Killer Communications and Campus Killings. Head over to Apple Podcasts and find the DNAID page or look for the ABJAC Network to get started. If you're on social media, we'd love to interact with you there. DNAID is on every major social media platform. Search your favorite platforms for DNAID Podcasts to find us. We also have a YouTube channel and our website is DNAID podcast.com youm can find links to all of these anytime in our show Notes. If you need to reach the show, contact us by emailing dnaid podcastmail.com finally, if you want to pick up some fun DNAID merch and represent the show, visit the store at www.customizedgirl.coms DNAIDpodcast. DNAID is researched, written and hosted by me, Jessica Bettencourt. It's produced by me and Mike Morford of Abjack Entertainment Music by Connor Bettencourt.
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