Police in Toronto have identified the remains of a man who was found dead in 1992 as part of a project using investigative genetic genealogy.
First responders were called to the area of Queen and Church streets on Sept. 15, 1992 to a report of an unresponsive man on the lawn of a church.
According to Toronto police, crews were unable to revive him and his cause of death was not considered suspicious.
However, the man did not have any identification and investigators at the time were unable to identify him.
More than three decades later, his case was selected for investigation using genetic genealogy, and a DNA profile for him was uploaded to public-facing databases on Jan. 8, 2026.
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“The man’s closest matches were very distant, but they suggested he was from the United Kingdom,” police said in a release.
“Months of work by the Toronto Police Service genealogy team and TPS investigators determined that the man was likely a man named Derek.”
It was learned that Derek had moved to Toronto from the UK in the 1970s.
He was reported missing by his lawyer in December 1993 — nearly 15 months after the unidentified man had died — but the connection wasn’t made between the two cases at the time.
Toronto police were able to find a copy of Derek’s fingerprints in another country, according to the release. When compared, they matched those of the unidentified man found in 1992.
“They confirmed that the unknown man was Derek,” police said.
“Derek’s family in the UK was contacted and notified of his identification by members of the Toronto Police Service.”
Derek is the 14th person identified through an initiative called ‘Project 31,’ which began in the summer of 2022. It was named after the 31 open Toronto Police Service cases involving long-term unidentified deceased people for whom DNA material is readily available.
Last year, a man from Portugal named Alcides was identified as the unknown deceased man in a 2008 case.
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