After 87 Years, Identity of Woman Murdered and Buried Beneath Toronto Building Is Revealed
Nearly a century after she was killed and secretly buried beneath a Toronto building, the remains of a woman have finally been identified, thanks to advances in forensic DNA technology.
Police announced this week that the victim is Mary McLeod Moffat (née Davidson), a Scottish immigrant who moved to Canada with her family in 1913. The identification was made possible through investigative genetic genealogy, a technique that reconstructs family trees from degraded DNA samples to identify unknown individuals.
Detective Michael Kelly of the Toronto Police Service called the resolution “one of Toronto’s oldest mysteries” in an interview with CTV News Toronto on Monday. “For decades, we had no idea who she was. Now her name is known, and her story can be told,” he said.
Investigators believe Moffat was killed around April 1936, though her remains weren't discovered until May 18, 1995, when construction workers unearthed them at a demolition site in Toronto. Autopsy findings at the time showed she had been struck at least six times with a hammer-like weapon and was “intentionally buried,” police said. A homicide investigation was opened, but initial attempts to extract a usable DNA sample failed due to the advanced decomposition of the remains.
The case was reopened in 2022 when police submitted new samples to a lab specializing in cold cases and genetic genealogy. Scientists there described the challenge of recovering “only small amounts of severely-degraded human DNA,” but ultimately succeeded in building a forensic profile. That profile led investigators to Moffat’s living relatives, whose DNA confirmed the match.
Police now believe Moffat’s husband, Andrew Lloyd Moffat, was responsible for her murder. After her death, he moved to Vancouver and later to the United States under the alias Drake Lloyd Cummings. He died in 1985.
The Moffat case is one of two long-unsolved Toronto murders recently closed using genetic genealogy. The second was that of Patsy Flora Lagarde, whose badly burned remains were found in a vehicle that intentionally crashed into a tractor-trailer and caught fire on April 22, 2004. Her identification was also announced this week.
“These identifications represent the significant impact that investigative genetic genealogy can have on long-term unidentified human remains investigations,” said Detective Stephen Smith of the Toronto Police Service’s missing persons and cold case unit. “After decades without answers, we have been able to restore the identities of Mary Davidson and Patsy Lagarde, provide information to their families, and uncover important facts about the circumstances surrounding their deaths.”
The breakthrough highlights how cutting-edge forensic techniques are now giving law enforcement a powerful tool to solve historic crimes that once seemed unsolvable. For the families involved, the closure, though bittersweet, has been a long time coming.