Last Thursday, Brian Howe got a phone call that he said “put to rest 40 years of uncertainty.”
In 1975, his younger brother Roy Lynn Howe disappeared from his Vancouver home at the age of 26.
As years turned into decades and Roy was still missing, the Howe family came to accept, Brian said, “probably that Roy had died or something happened — but we just didn’t know.”
But then last week, through the diligent work of a dedicated team with the B.C. Coroners Service, Roy Howe’s death was confirmed, his missing person investigation closed, and his next of kin notified.
Even after all those years, the notification was important to the family, said Howe, who called it “a sort of closure.”
In recent years, B.C.’s Identification and Disaster Response Unit (IDRU) has attracted attention from agencies outside the province looking to emulate its recent success with missing persons cases and unidentified bodies.
Cases like Howe’s inspire the IDRU to toil away in the lab and in the field, working to close those files, both old and new.
The unit’s manager, Bill Inkster, leads a team of investigators who examine and catalogue unidentified human remains in B.C., often matching them up with missing person files, such as Howe’s.
When a coroner is crouched in the woods brushing dirt off a human femur, Inkster says: “That’s not just a bone, it’s a person, we don’t lose track of that.
“They had brothers, sisters, they had a life. That’s a person, and there’s no name attached to it. So we never give up trying to identify those.”
Recently B.C. investigators have been closing more cases quickly — and closing more old, cold cases, too — says Inkster, who’s quick to credit that success to the innovative and award-winning IDRU program set up by his predecessor, Stephen Fonseca.
Described as the only unit of its kind in Canada, the IDRU was formed within the B.C. Coroners Service in 2006 under the direction of Fonseca, who Inkster calls “the most brilliant guy I’ve ever met.”
A key element of their success has been effectively “closing the gap” between coroners and cops, according to sources on both sides.
Cpl. Kelly Risling of the RCMP’s Unidentified Human Remains Unit said that before the IDRU’s formation in 2006, “the coroner’s office (and) the RCMP had somewhat struggled with missing person and unidentified body investigations.
“There just wasn’t any sort of collaborative effort in attacking these types of files. Even though we both had different resources, we kind of needed each other to be able to do the job.”
Risling said the increased collaboration between his RCMP unit and the IDRU got results.
“We were the only province in Canada that actually showed a marked decline in the instances of unidentified human remains, because we were actually starting to move forward and identify some of these bodies,” he said.
Risling said he’s been contacted by agencies in other provinces interested in following B.C.’s “cutting edge” missing person investigation model and success.
On a national level, the RCMP launched the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains (NCMPUR), a website and database launched in 2013.
Risling said, adding that RCMP headquarters in Ottawa consulted with him, as well as the IDRU’s Inkster and Fonseca, on the NCMPUR’s development, adding “everything that they’re doing on their end is basically modelled after what we’ve accomplished here in B.C.”
“Ottawa did take note of the successes we were having as a collaborative team here,” said Risling.
The IDRU’s work has also aided the police in criminal cases. As a recent example, Vancouver detectives were investigating a missing person who they believed had been murdered.
They had a suspect. But they didn’t have a body, making the prospect of an arrest and criminal charges much more difficult.
The detectives tapped the IDRU, which quickly identified the body of the alleged murder victim, matching it with previously unidentified remains.
VPD homicide Detective Const. Paul Woodcock said: “As soon as we had that body, there was no uncertainty. We were going to lay that charge ... when we had that call from Steve Fonseca, saying ‘Hey guys, I’ve got a match,’ we were doing the happy dance.”
Probably the IDRU’s best known case was the detached feet in sneakers washing up repeatedly on B.C. shorelines in recent years. Inkster, Fonseca and their team identified 10 feet, belonging to six different people.
But one pair — Foot #8 and Foot #10 — belonging to the same man, remain unidentified.
Like Brian Howe, Brenda Dauncey praised the work of the IDRU after she got a phone call that ended years of uncertainty about her brother’s disappearance.
Her brother Brian Carman Law disappeared suddenly in 1989 from his hometown of Prince George, and was missing for more than 20 years, until the IDRU closed the case in 2013.
“Those 23 and three-quarters years, it was hell,” Dauncey said. “So, to find that you have some closure and you know where your loved one is ... We can try and go on and start to heal.”
While it was painful, Dauncey said, to know her brother had died, it was “absolutely” better than the agony of not knowing. That uncertainty, she said, was like “an open wound (that) never gets to heal.”
After the IDRU identified Brian Law’s body, his grave was marked with a stone.
The engraving reads: “Once was lost, now he’s found. Always Loved, Never Forgotten.”
Monday 26 January 2015
http://www.theprovince.com/news/That+just+bone+person+lose+track+that+team+excels+giving+names+back+unidentified+bodies/10759564/story.html
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