Toronto Police Identify Woman Murdered and Buried Under Building in 1936

The 1995 Discovery at Danforth Avenue and the 1936 Timeline

The remains surfaced on May 18, 1995, when demolition crews working at an automotive garage at 1515 Danforth Avenue uncovered a skeleton buried in the soil beneath the concrete floor in the area of Danforth and Coxwell avenues. Forensic exams performed at the time established that the victim had been intentionally buried after suffering at least six blunt-force injuries to the head from a hammer-like weapon.

Police opened a homicide investigation, but investigators could not establish an identity. Authorities created a composite image and released it to the public in 1995, prompting numerous tips from families searching for missing relatives from the 1940s, though none of those leads panned out.

Historical records, family interviews, and evidence recovered from the burial site eventually enabled investigators to establish that the woman had likely been murdered in approximately April 1936. She was born Mary McLeod Davidson in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1905 and immigrated to Canada with her family in 1913.

How Investigative Genetic Genealogy Broke the Cold Case

The decades-old investigation stalled until 2022, when the Toronto Police Service submitted evidence to Othram, a laboratory specializing in forensic genetic genealogy based in The Woodlands, Texas. Scientists initially struggled to recover usable DNA due to the extreme degradation of the remains and bacterial contamination stemming from decades in the ground.

Scientists performed multiple additional extractions, eventually obtaining a segment of bone resistant to bacterial degradation that yielded a fully robust DNA profile. Using Forensic-Grade Genome Sequencing and genealogical research, analysts built a family tree that led investigators to potential relatives.

Investigators collected DNA samples from living relatives and compared them to the profile extracted from the remains using KinSNP Rapid Relationship Testing. That comparison confirmed the identity of the victim as Mary McLeod Moffat.

These identifications represent the significant impact that investigative genetic genealogy can have on long-term unidentified human remains investigations, homicide detective Stephen Smith of the Toronto Police Force’s missing persons and cold case unit said in a statement.

Husband Named as Primary Suspect in the Mystery

Following the identification, investigators turned their attention to the victim’s husband, Andrew Lloyd Moffat. Police determined that Andrew operated a tire business located adjacent to the property where his wife’s remains were ultimately discovered.

Authorities established that after his wife’s disappearance, Andrew abandoned her, entered into multiple additional marriages, and eventually moved to Vancouver and the United States under the alias Drake Lloyd Cummings. He died in 1985, a full decade before construction workers uncovered his first wife’s body beneath the building floor.

Because the primary suspect is deceased, no criminal prosecution can go forward, but detectives formally named him as the individual responsible for his wife’s death.

Parallel Breakthroughs in Toronto Cold Cases

The Moffat investigation concluded alongside a second major cold case identification announced by Toronto police on the same day. That second inquiry utilized genetic genealogy to identify the badly burned remains of Patsy Flora Lagarde, whose body was pulled from a vehicle fire on Highway 401 on April 22, 2004.

Investigators determined that Lagarde’s vehicle had deliberately collided with a tractor-trailer and that an arson investigation by the Office of the Fire Marshal showed the fire was set with gasoline to conceal a prior death. The driver, Suimi Kilflu Simon Habteab, was convicted of arson and indignity to a human body in 2006, serving an eight-year sentence before his deportation in 2012.