Advances in genetic genealogy are quietly transforming one of the hardest tasks in policing, putting names to the unidentified dead. In Toronto, a program called Project 31, named for the number of unidentified people the police service had on file, is bringing closure to families faster than ever, sometimes to relatives who did not even know they had lost someone.
The cases often begin with an unsettling discovery. In one instance, a worker walking through a brushy area spotted what appeared to be a human skull, and when crews cut back the brush, they found the skeletal remains of a person lying on their side. Such calls, investigators say, are not uncommon and are not always criminal in nature, but they leave behind a body with no name and no identification.
Identifying those remains can be painstaking. Without any ID on the person, and depending on the state of decomposition, investigators say it can take repeated rounds of testing, with some cases requiring them to test and retest again and again before a result finally emerges. Increasingly, the breakthrough comes from DNA rather than from traditional police work alone.
The technique at the heart of Project 31 relies on what scientists call SNP analysis, short for single nucleotide polymorphisms. Investigators described them as the small genetic hiccups in a person's DNA, inherited from their ancestors, that help make each person unique. By searching those markers against genealogical databases, the team can work out not just who someone is, but who they are related to.
One of the program's recent successes is the case of Willard Duvall, whose remains had sat as a forensic file on a shelf for five years after they were discovered in 2021. Through the genealogical work, he was finally reunited, in name, with long-lost family, including a niece, Michelle Dent, who had built an ancestral DNA profile of her own precisely because she had been searching for relatives.
For Dent, the identification reopened a family history shattered generations earlier. She said her family had been ripped apart when her father was just five years old, fractured by the residential school system, after which the two brothers were adopted by different families and never met again. Learning of her uncle, investigators said, opened up an entire side of the family she had never known existed.
Dent arranged for Willard Duvall to be buried alongside her father and invited the genealogists and investigators who had worked on the case, including Detective Mike Kelly, to the memorial. Project 31 began with 31 unidentified cases on file, and with Duvall the team has now resolved 11 of them, each one, they say, restoring not just an identity but a measure of dignity to someone who had been lost.