Woman murdered in 1936 buried under building finally identified: “One of Toronto’s oldest mysteries”
The remains of a woman who was murdered nearly a century ago and buried under a building have finally been identified thanks to modern tests.
The woman has been identified as Mary McLeod Moffat (née Davidson), a native of Scotland who immigrated to Canada with her family in 1913, according to police and the laboratory that tested it.
The outcome of the case closes “one of Toronto’s oldest mysteries,” Detective Michael Kelly, of the Toronto Police Service, told Canadian website CTV News Toronto on Monday.
The case would not have been solved without investigative genealogy, a technique that uses advanced DNA profiling to create a “family tree” that could eventually help identify a stranger, Kelly said.
Although police believe the woman was murdered around April 1936, her remains were not found until May 18, 1995, when workers uncovered them at a Toronto demolition site, according to Toronto police. At the time, forensic tests determined the woman had been “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 might have happened to her, but collecting a proper DNA sample from the remains was difficult because so much time had passed and their condition had deteriorated.
Police began reviewing the case in 2022, submitting new DNA samples for testing at a lab that specializes in DNA investigations and unsolved murders. Scientists faced major challenges as they tried to recover “only a small amount of highly degraded human DNA” from the remains, but they eventually collected enough to create a forensic profile, according to the lab.
After generating clues and, subsequently, follow-up investigations, investigators were able to locate Moffat’s relatives, collect genetic samples from them and compare those samples with those extracted from his remains, which allowed them to identify him.
Investigators later determined that Moffatt’s husband, Andrew Lloyd Moffat, probably killed her. After his wife’s death, he continued to live in Vancouver and the United States under the alias Drake Lloyd Cummings, police said. He died in 1985.
Moffatt’s case is one of two long-standing unsolved murders in Toronto that have been closed thanks to investigative DNA, police said. The second pointed to the charred remains of a woman who died in the passenger seat of a car that burst into flames on April 22, 2004, after deliberately hitting a tractor trailer. Her name was Patsy Flora Lagarde.
“These clues represent the major impact that genealogical investigations can have in the long-term investigation of unidentified human remains,” said homicide detective Stephen Smith, of the Toronto police’s missing persons and cold cases unit, in a statement. “After decades without answers, we were able to recover the identities of Mary Davidson and Patsy Lagarde, provide information to their families, and reveal important facts about the circumstances surrounding their deaths.”
