The man between the ages of 50 and 60 had almost no teeth, prominent eyebrows with a nose crooked to the right due to an old injury.
He was dead, found near the CN tracks at Young Road wearing a light-brown striped wool coat, red and black checked jacket, blue-and-white checked shirt, brown and white suspenders attached to navy blue pants. He wore size 10 black shoes with the label: “Bilt-rite oil proof.”
That was 53 years ago on March 14, 1966.
The case is one of dozens of unsolved cases involving unidentified human remains across B.C. now listed on an interactive app launch by the BC Coroners Service called the Unidentified Human Remains Interactive Viewer.
The vast majority of those human remains were found in the Lower Mainland, and there are four from the Chilliwack area.
In the above case, the file was with the Agassiz RCMP and the post-mortem interval (PMI) – the time elapsed since a person died and was found – is listed as a huge range, from between six months and 10 years.
A second Chilliwack case involved a male between the ages of 30 and 50 found at a location on Vedder Road south of Promontory/Watson on Oct. 12, 2011. There are no other physical descriptions and the PMI is listed as between 50 and 60 years, so a time of death between 1951 and 1961.
The BC Coroners Service created the database with as many markers as possible to spark someone’s memory to help solve the cases. Some cases have more detail than others, from apparent injuries to clothing worn to items found inside the person’s pockets.
Another local case involves a male found on an island in the Fraser River off McSween Road on Sept. 18, 1972. He is described as between 18 and 35 years old, between 5’3″ and 5’7″ tall with brown eyes, brown hair wearing size 10 grey runners. He had died from between one month and six months prior.
The last local case is also the only one that comes with a photo. It’s a grey and white running shoe connected to a male found on May 13, 2012 in the hills east of the Columbia Valley south of Cultus Lake near the U.S. border.
That case is of a man aged between 30 and 50, with a PMI listed between 10 and 50 years prior. The only other detail is that isotopic testing showed the unidentified male was born after 1950.
The coroners service works with police and the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains to input various cases into a federal database. Roughly 200 investigations of this kind are unsolved in B.C.
The public is asked to forward information or questions about any investigations on the interactive app to the Special Investigations Unit of the B.C. Coroner Service. Further details are available using the app.
View the map here:
• READ MORE: Map charts unsolved human remains cases from Port Hardy to Terrace
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