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Babes in the Woods

Still Unsolved: Babes in the Woods, 70 Years Later

by Eve Lazarus on January 12, 2023
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Seventy years ago this week, two tiny skeletons were found in Stanley Park and quickly became known as the Babes in the Woods. Last February, they were identified through genetic genealogy as Derek and David D’Alton aged 7 and 6 when they were murdered in 1947.

This is an excerpt from my new book Cold Case BC: The Stories Behind the Province’s Most Intriguing Murder and Missing Person Cases

By the second week of February 2022, I was able to confirm with two different sources that the VPD had the names of the Babes in the Woods. This was huge, but it was all I had—the police weren’t releasing any more information at that point. Then a young lady named Ally contacted me and said that a Vancouver Police detective had been to see her mother, Cindy. The detective had given Cindy the devastating news that her uncles, Derek and David D’Alton, were murdered probably in 1947 and that they were the infamous Babes in the Woods.

Derek and David D'Alton
David and Derek Reimagined by Kat Thorsen, 2022 from Cold Case BC
Babes in the Woods:

Neither Ally nor her mother had heard the story of the Babes in the Woods. When Ally went online to do some research, she came across my podcast. Ally sent me photos that she’d scanned from the family album. It was incredible to put faces to these two little boys. There was a school photo from Henry Hudson Elementary in Kitsilano taken around 1946 or 1947 showing Derek, the older brother, a smiling little blond boy. There were a few photos of David, who had dark hair and features, with his older sister, Diane, and there were some with David and his mother, Eileen, and her twin sister, Doreen. There are houses in the background, one of them probably being the address the family lived at in Kitsilano during that period. Over that weekend, I worked with Ally to put together a story for my blog Every Place Has a Story.

The babes in the woods have their names back
Henry Hudson Elementary, ca.1947. Derek D’Alton top row, second from left
Missing:

Ally’s mother, Cindy, was in her early twenties when she first heard that she had two missing uncles. It was back in the early 1980s, and she was looking at photos in the family album of her mother with two boys—probably the same photos Ally had sent to me. Cindy asked her mother, Diane, what had happened to her brothers, but she refused to talk about it. she would just cry.

Eventually Cindy was told that the family had been very poor, and Derek and David had been taken away by child protection services because their mother couldn’t provide for them. Diane had remained with her mother. Later, she told Cindy stories of having to jump out of the windows of places where they were living when the landlord came looking for his rent.

Arbutus Street Babes in the Woods
1535 Arbutus Street where Eileen lived with Diane, Derek and David in 1946. Mark Dunn photo, 2022
Genetic Genealogy:

Shortly before Diane died in 2020, Cindy wanted to find out more about her ancestry, so she took a swab from her mother and sent it off to MyHeritage. She discovered that Eileen’s father was Métis. Cindy’s daughter, Ally, then decided to search for her great-uncles, hoping to find them still alive or, if not, their children or grandchildren. She sent her own DNA to 23andMe.

When detectives paid Cindy a visit earlier this year, they told her that they couldn’t find any records to indicate that the boys were taken into the custody of child protection services, as she had been told. They said they would keep looking.

Kat Thorsen
Kat Thorsen at the site where the Babes in the Woods skeletons were discovered in Stanley Park. Eve Lazarus photo, 2016

Police have always believed that the boys were killed by their mother, who covered them up with her coat. The problem that I have with this is that there were other family members who would have known the boys, or at least have been aware of their existence and of Eileen’s precarious financial situation. Why didn’t they help? And what about the fathers? Eileen’s children had at least two, possibly three fathers, who at the time of writing still hadn’t been identified. When asked at a media conference this February if the mother was still the prime suspect, Inspector Dale Weidman said, “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.”

Derek and David D'Alton
Derek and David D’Alton, 1940s (with thanks to Darlene Ruckle for the photo composition)

But Cindy doesn’t believe that for a second. She says her grandmother, Eileen, was a lovely, gentle woman who babysat the kids, loved animals, and often seemed sad.

Eileen died in 1996 at age 78.

Related:

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Meet Olivia McCarter

by Eve Lazarus on April 2, 2022
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In February, we learned that the Babes in the Woods, the two little boys who were murdered in Stanley Park 75 years ago—were Derek D’Alton aged seven and his brother David, six. Genetic genealogy—the latest crime fighting tool was able to do what seven decades of police work could not—identify the little boys through familial DNA.

Olivia visits the grave of a baby she helped to identify in 2020. Courtesy University of South Alabama
Genetic Genealogy:

And, while the Vancouver Police Department and the BC Coroner’s Service deserve credit for all the work that they’ve done, our thanks should also be going to Olivia McCarter, a 20-year-old university student from South Alabama. Her passion is genealogy and her specialty is identifying the remains of missing children and bringing closure to their families.

David and Derek D’Alton, ca.1945. VPD handout, courtesy John Mackie, Vancouver Sun
Doe Network:

Olivia had just turned 19 in 2020 when she read about the Babes in the Woods case in the Doe Network—the international centre for unidentified and missing persons. As the head (unpaid) intern for Boston-based Redgrave Research, she thought she could help to identify the two boys. She contacted Dr David Sweet at the University of BC who extracted DNA from the boy’s teeth in the late 1990s, and put her in touch with the detective who was handling the case.

Derek D’Alton, ca.1946 VPD handout, courtesy John Mackie Vancouver Sun

“When I contacted the VPD about doing the case, I had no idea how big it was. I’ve never been to Vancouver. I’ve never been out of the southern United States. I just wanted to work on it because who does that to two little boys?” Detective Rodriguez was very receptive to the idea of using genetic genealogy to find their identities, says Olivia. “She knew that they were not going to get a conviction, she just wanted to give these babies their names back.”

This year Olivia took over the cold case unit for the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office in Alabama. She says while she didn’t get to work on the genetic genealogy for the two boys, she’s proud of the interns who did and for her initial involvement in getting the case for Redgrave.

David D’Alton with sister Diane, ca. 1946. VPD handout, courtesy John Mackie, Vancouver Sun
Giving children their names back:

Now Olivia’s team is working to solve around a hundred open cases. “Working on kids cases is my main priority so having any sort of involvement with Derek and David’s case was just awesome and I absolutely loved it,” she says. “I really like where I am right now. I get about two to three new cases each week from different agencies across the state of Alabama and being able to solve murders and identify missing people in your home is some of the most important work ever. I want to knock out Alabama’s cold cases altogether.”

© Eve Lazarus, 2022

 

The Babes in the Woods have their names back

by Eve Lazarus on February 14, 2022
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Since I write about history and cold cases, it’s not often I’ve get to break an actual news story. But thanks to a young woman named Ally who went searching for her Great Uncles—I can now tell you the names of the Babes in the Woods—the little boys whose skeletons were found in Stanley Park in 1953. Meet Derek and David D’Alton. 

This episode is based on a chapter in my book Cold Case BC: the stories behind the province’s most sensational murders and missing persons cases

Doreen, Eileen’s fraternal twin is shown with David and possibly Derek, ca.1943

When Ally spit into a tube in 2020, she had no idea that her DNA would help to solve one of Vancouver’s oldest and coldest murder mysteries.

Ally was flicking through the family album one day when she discovered that she had two great uncles who she had never met. The older boy had blonde hair and blue eyes, and the younger had darker features. When Ally asked her grandmother Diane who they were, she found out they were Diane’s younger brothers David and Derek.

Taken by social services:

Twenty-six year old Ally, says the story handed down in the family was that the two little boys were taken away by social services because their mother Eileen who was of Metis heritage, was too poor to look after them. Diane remained with her mother. “I remember my mother sharing stories with me about her mother’s  poverty and how they used to jump out of windows at places they were renting in Vancouver to avoid having to pay because they were just so poor,” says Ally.

But when Ally’s Mum Cindy pressed her mother Diane for more information, Diane would tell her: “we don’t talk about that” or “that’s in the past.”

Photos of Derek and David with the family. Diane holding David at right
Genetic Genealogy:

Cindy wanted to find out her mother’s genetic mix, so she took a swab from Diane, who was by then suffering from dementia, and sent it off to MyHeritage. Then Ally spit in a tube and sent it to 23AndMe—a genealogy database where people go to learn about their ancestry and locate lost relatives. She hoped to find her great uncles still alive, or at least trace their children or grandchildren.

Ally didn’t have the boy’s birth certificates or know the year they disappeared, but she knew that Diane was born in July 1937 and was the oldest and then came Derek and David. All three children attended Henry Hudson Elementary in Kitsilano.

Derek pictured top row, second from left at Henry Hudson Elementary in Kitsilano

Ally uploaded her DNA to Ancestry, MyHeritage and several other genealogy platforms. She hoped her DNA would lead her to her great  uncles, instead, what she found was devastating.

Identified:

Last May, the Vancouver Police Department partnered with the BC Coroners Service and a Massachusetts-based forensic research firm, to try and identify the Babes in the Woods. Most of their remains had been cremated in the 1990s and only a few fragments were left. These tiny, very old and fragile bone fragments were sent to Lakehead University’s Paleo-DNA lab in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The lab successfully extracted DNA from the bone fragment of the older boy and sent that to a lab in Alabama for DNA genome sequencing. His DNA kit was uploaded to GEDmatch, and a team of forensic genetic genealogists began searching for living relatives.

Derek on the right, with his cousin

Then, earlier this month, Cindy was approached by a VPD detective who told her that her uncles were the two skeletons that had been found in Stanley Park in 1953 and who were known for the next seven decades as the Babes in the Woods.

Their mother, Eileen Bousquet was born in Alberta, and as far as Cindy is aware all three of her children—Diane, Derek and David were born in Vancouver. Detectives told Cindy that they hadn’t found any records to indicate that the boys were taken into the custody of child protection services as she had been told, but they  would continue searching.

Diane with Derek.
Killed by mother?

Police have always believed that the boys were killed by their mother, who covered them up with her coat. But Cindy doesn’t believe that for a second. She says her grandmother was a lovely, gentle woman. “She was a huge animal lover, she babysat little kids. She was very sad because something had happened and I don’t know what it was because nobody wanted to talk about it.”

Eileen died in 1996 at age 78.

Ally says her grandmother Diane didn’t know who her father was or who the fathers were of her half-brothers. “That’s something I’ve been trying to trace with Ancestry, but so far no luck,” she says. “Even though it came to a devastating resolution, at least we know what happened.”

  • The VPD have released the boys names as Derek (born Feb 27, 1940) and David D’Alton (born June 24, 1941). The police believe they were murdered in 1947 so Derek would have been 7 and David 6 when they were killed.
  • All photos courtesy Ally
Show Notes

Sponsors: Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours and Erin Hakin Jewellery

Music:   Andreas Schuld ‘Waiting for You’

Intro :   Mark Dunn

Buy me a coffee promo: McBride Communications and Media

Sources:

News report courtesy CTV Vancouver

Huge thanks to Miles Steininger, Darlene Ruckle, and The History Five for all their help with the research

Promo: Vancouver Police Museum and Archives

Related stories:

© Eve Lazarus, 2022

 

 

 

The Babes in the Woods Part 2

by Eve Lazarus on December 18, 2020
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The Babes in the Woods is the story of two tiny skeletons found in Stanley Park in 1953, and is based on a story in Cold Case Vancouver: The city’s most Baffling unsolved murders

This episode is sponsored by Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours.

The Babes in the Woods is the story of two tiny skeletons found in Stanley Park in 1953. The case is still unsolved, but the investigation continues, and in part two I visit the site where the boys were found with the researcher who worked on a Babes in the Woods task force in the early 2000s. I talk with the VPD Inspector who moved the investigation forward in 2015, and we hear about the latest development from the coroner who is currently revisiting Vancouver’s most famous cold case.

The strongest lead in recent years has come from a former VPD officer named Ron Amiel. Ron, now 90, believes the boys were born in England between 1937 and 1939 and were killed because their mother wanted a new beginning by marrying an American soldier. A son born in 1941 and who died in 1974 was exhumed in 2015 so his DNA could be tested against that of the Babes in the woods.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this first series of Cold Case Canada half as much as I’ve enjoyed making it. All of the episodes are based on original research and interviews from my book Cold Case Vancouver: the city’s most baffling unsolved murders.

If you’d like to join in the conversation about this and other murders, please check out my Facebook group page Cold Case Canada.

Show notes

Intro:       Mark Dunn

Music:      Don’t die on me by Myuu, The Dark Piano

PSA:   Vancouver Police Museum and Archives

Promo:      Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance

SOURCES:

Lazarus, Eve. Cold Case Vancouver: the city’s most baffling unsolved murders. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015

BC Coroners Service Unidentified Human Remains Map 

The Vancouver Police Museum and Archives

Vital Statistics – death certificates

 

The Babes in the Woods Part 1

by Eve Lazarus on December 4, 2020
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The Babes in the Woods case is the story of two tiny skeletons found in Stanley Park. It is one of Vancouver’s oldest unsolved murder mysteries. This episode is based on a story in Cold Case Vancouver: The city’s most Baffling unsolved murders

This episode is sponsored by Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours. Enter the code ColdCase for 15% off your tickets.

While the murders happened sometime in the 1940s, the story starts in January 1953 when a Vancouver Parks Board employee stepped on a skull in a remote area of Stanley Park. When he scraped back the leaves, he found bones covered by a woman’s coat, two children’s flying helmets, shoes, a lunch box, and the murder weapon—a hatchet.

The hatchet at the Vancouver Police Museum. Eve Lazarus photo

No one had reported missing children.

The Babes in the Woods is Vancouver’s own Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, a dark edge to the city’s beloved Stanley Park, but with an unsatisfying, inconclusive ending.

It’s also one of the most botched.

1953 crime scene photo. Courtesy Vancouver Police Museum and Archives

Before DNA profiling it was extremely difficult to determine sex from skeletal remains, and even though the clothes suggested otherwise, a pathologist determined that the bones belonged to a boy and a girl. For the next half century police searched school records and followed up on tips in an attempt to identify a missing brother and sister.

Police theorized that the children were taken to the park for a picnic by their mother, who then smashed in their heads with an axe, and now unencumbered, went off to have a good time.

There are more than a few problems with this theory. The children were covered with a woman’s coat, more an act of compassion than one of cold-blooded murder. And post-war Vancouver was a brutal place. There was rampant homelessness, transients and violence—especially against women. Women lost their jobs when the men came back from the war. There was no safety net and those post-war years saw a number of cases where desperate women killed their children and then committed suicide.

In 1996, when DNA profiling became part of the forensics toolkit, investigators reopened the file. A UBC scientist extracted DNA from the teeth and soon realized that he was dealing with two boys—not a brother and a sister. This information changed the course of the investigation.

In the next episode: Babes in the Woods Part 2: Kat Thorsen and I take a walk out to the secret spot in Stanley Park where the skeletons of the Babes in the Woods were first discovered. I talk to the VPD Inspector who was in charge of the file in 2015 about how he furthered the investigation, and I talk to the coroner, who reveals an exciting new development.

Show Notes

Intro:       Mark Dunn

Music:      Lament by Myuu, The Dark Piano

Sponsor:   Forbidden Vancouver Walking Tours

Promo:      Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance

Guest:        Retired VPD Detective Sergeant Brian Honeybourn

Graphic:    Courtesy Kat Thorsen

Sources:

Lazarus, Eve. Cold Case Vancouver: the city’s most baffling unsolved murders. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015

The Vancouver Police Museum and Archives

Vancouver Police Department annual reports 1940s and ’50s

Retired VPD officer Ron Amiel

Vital Statistics – death certificates

Georgia Straight

Globe and Mail

Ottawa Citizen

Province

Vancouver Sun

West Ender

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Murder, Investigation, and a Dash of Forensics

by Eve Lazarus on April 8, 2017
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Laura Yazedjian, coroner with the Police Museum’s Rozz Shipp

The first time I went to the Vancouver Police Museum was in the late 1980s. It was a breakfast meeting for a tourist organization called Vancouver AM, and we ate in the autopsy room. I fell in love with the place then in all its macabre glory, and nearly three decades later I still love going there.

Last night I was at a reception to launch the new true crime exhibit. I talked to plain clothes detectives, museum curators, librarians, a criminologist, a forensic anthropologist and a GIS specialist from the coroner’s office who have the grim, but rewarding job of matching remains to missing people—sometimes decades later.

Rosslyn Shipp by part of the new true crime exhibit

Museum director, Rosslyn Shipp has spearheaded the changes, mostly on a shoestring budget, and transformed the old morgue in the process. The musty old wooden cases are gone, replaced by stories, case files, trace evidence and photographs from some of the most fascinating murders of last century. Rather than focus on the murder, the exhibits now tell the stories of the victims, putting them front and centre where they belong.

Sandra Boutilier and Carolyn Soltau, whose impending loss from the Sun/Province library will be keenly felt

The Babes in the Woods, the Pauls and the Kosberg murders have been updated and joined by three more. There’s a skull of a farmer found in the 1970s. He’d been shot in the head and buried along the edge of a river. The remains were matched to a missing person’s report by the coroner’s office. There’s the story of Viano Alto, a night watchman who was shot and killed while on the job in 1959. And there’s the 1994 murder of David Curnick, stabbed 146 times with his own kitchen knife.

The axe used in the Kosberg murders

Proper attention is now given to the work that went on in the building and its place in the evolution of forensics in Canada. John F.C.B. Vance, a city analyst and scientist (and the subject of my next book Blood, Sweat and Fear) has his place in the exhibit and much more emphasis is placed on the building’s history as the VPD crime lab (1932 to 1996).

Rozz is also the force behind the  speaker series now in its 5th year. The series kicks off next Wednesday (April 12) with a talk by Heidi Currie on the Kosberg murders. I’ll be looking at the unsolved murder of 24-year-old Jennie Conroy in 1944, former homicide sergeant Kevin McLaren will walk us through the murder investigation of four members of the Etibako family and Ashley Singh in 2006, former VPD sergeant Brian Honeybourn talks about his time in the Provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit, and staff Sergeant Lindsey Houghton will address how the VPD investigates and prosecutes organized crime.

Book your tickets: https://vancouverpolicemuseum.ca/speaker-series/

The skull of a murdered farmer found in the 1970s

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders

by Eve Lazarus on October 9, 2015
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Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders

Cold Case Vancouver

Jennie Eldon Conroy:

A few days after Cold Case Vancouver was finished and sent off for editing; I received an email from Daien Ide at the North Vancouver Museum and Archives. Daien had come into the possession of a family album with the owner’s name, Miss J. Conroy, inscribed in the inside front cover. Daien was intrigued and found out that 24-year-old Jennie Conroy was murdered in 1944, and that her murder remained unsolved.

I wrote up a blog post about Daien and the album, and got another email, this time from Jennie’s niece. She told me that Jennie had given birth to a daughter a few months before she was murdered, and that Mary was alive and well and living in New Zealand. Mary has spent years trying to fill in the details of her mother and of her adoption, of her father and of her mother’s murder, and she generously shared that information with me.

Thanks to my understanding editor, Susan Safyan, Jennie is now part of my book, and one of the hundreds of murders that remain unsolved in Metro Vancouver, some dating back several decades.

Jennie Conroy photo album
The photo album came via the West Vancouver Archives. Eve Lazarus photo
The Babes in the Woods:

I’ve included the story of the Babes in the Woods—the two small skeletons discovered in Stanley Park in 1953. The story has taken on almost mythical proportions, and the case offers a fascinating insight into how investigative techniques have evolved and how the development of DNA analysis changed the face of the investigation.

 

Province photo, March 20, 1998 - Babes in the Woods
Province photo, March 20, 1998 – Babes in the Woods

The other stories likely won’t be as familiar. The women, children and men that I’ve written about are essentially invisible, forgotten by everyone except their family and friends. I wanted to write a book that would help to change that, to tell the stories of their lives, not just of their murders, and I wanted to look at their murders through a historical filter.

Part history, part true crime:

I think of Cold Case Vancouver as part history book, part crime story, because the events that happened between 1944 and 1996 are often intertwined with the times. For instance, in the process of writing this book, a lot of people told me how much safer Vancouver was in the good old days. It’s not true. Vancouver had a violent streak and a string of sexual predators. The city could be a dangerous place, particularly for women, children, immigrants and gay men.

I picked up my first copies of Cold Case Vancouver from my publisher Arsenal Pulp Press on Wednesday, and copies are gradually make their way into bookstores over the next week or so.

I’ve also just launched a FB Page called Cold Case Canada. I’m hoping that it will be a place that people will drop by to discuss these and other cases, maybe add more detail, and perhaps even remember some piece of information that could help the police solve these murders.

 

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