The Pair

And the case I'm going to tell you about today has been unsolved from more than 70 years.

“It's one of British Columbia's most notorious cold cases, with events and updates stretching”

between 1953 and 2022. For decades, the press referred to this crime as "The Baves in the Woods case," a nickname that cast a sort of haunting folkloric shadow over the incident. But by the time the investigation entered the 21st century, police were more determined than ever to get to the bottom of what for so long so many people had considered for lack of

a better expression, ancient history. The story takes place in Stanley Park, British Columbia, Vancouver's first and largest urban park. According to the city of Vancouver's website, the park holds nearly 1,000 acres of coastal temperate rain forest, almost 70 miles of trails and mountain to see views that are spectacular.

The park is surrounded by water and shares a peninsula with downtown Vancouver.

“Looking at the area from above, there's a stark contrast between Stanley Park's deep-green”

forest and the city skyline.

The park is filled with over half a million trees, including centuries-old Western Red Seeders,

big leaf maples, and Douglas Furs, which have stood as tall as 164 feet. Woods is the dominant terrain throughout the park with fewer open-green spaces than what you'd see in St. New York Central Park, for example. Some of the best viewpoints to take insights at the park can be found north of an area known as Beaver Lake, and it was in this area that the discovery of two children's remains

became one of the most notorious crimes in British Columbia that still needs closure. This is Park Predators. at On Tuesday morning, January 13th, 1953, a park worker named Albert Tang was clearing

“brush to plant trees north of Beaver Lake in Stanley Park when he heard something crack beneath”

his foot. He lifted his shoe he noticed he'd stepped onto a pile of leaves that were somewhat deep. It seems that because of the way the pile crunched when he stepped on it, Albert suspected that something might be buried beneath it, and he even turned to his co-workers and told them that.

But then, for some reason, he'd just went back to work and put it out of his mind. Two days later, though, he found himself thinking about it again and couldn't shake a nagging suspicion that something was hidden beneath the surface of the area he'd been working at, so in the morning on Thursday the 15th, he went back, and for reference, the location where he'd been working wasn't very far off the beaten path.

Only about 50 yards south of a trail in the park, known as Reservoir Trail, which is about 150 yards from a road called Stanley Park Drive. When Albert arrived, he raked at the leaves and quickly unearthed a dark fur coat that had badly deteriorated. I mean, this thing was in such a bad shape that it had actually worn down to the line.

Beneath it, where skeletal remains of two small bodies. According to coverage by the province, the two sets of remains were lying side by side and positioned in opposite directions, meaning the feet for one set was near the head of the other, and vice versa.

Upon first glance, Albert noted that one of the skeletons was a bit larger and longer

than the other, and the head and shoulders of that larger skeleton were draped over the feet of the smaller one, which was lying face down. The skulls for each body had holes in them, and it was clear that one of them had been broken by Albert's foot the first time he'd been there, which makes sense why he heard that cracking sound.

As Albert looked around and studied the remains closer, I imagine he got a pit in his stomach, because still sitting on the smaller of the two skulls was what appeared to be a child's leather aviator helmet, and just a stone's throw away near the right hand of the larger set of remains was another leather helmet that had goggles attached to it. These skeletons also had matching oxford shoes and two different sizes, as well as identical

leather belts. Reporting by Jim Smith for the Vancouver News Harald stated that both of them had on either a zipper jacket or sweater, and the larger skeleton dawned on an overcoat style jacket. Among all those items was a woman's penny loafer, size five and a half, or some sources say seven and a half, and that was lodged under the shoulder of the larger skeleton.

quickly made their way out to the park to process the scene and collect the skeletons.

“To authorities, it looked like the bones and clothing had been there for at least a few”

years. That estimation seemed to be based on the fact that they were skeletonized. The fact that the bones had settled into the earth enough for small tree roots to grow through them, and that there were distinct layers of leaves on top of the bodies. That detail about the leaves suggested that several seasons had passed since the bodies were

first deposited there. Near the remains investigators also found a blue lunchbox with white trim, and a small rusty lating hatchet that had a broken handle. Full disclosure, I had no idea what a lating hatchet was, so I had to Google it. The results I found explained that these kinds of hatchets are tools that are used for

trimming and nailing thin strips of wood known as lades to a building's framework, as a foundation

for things like plaster or tiles. One side is a hammer, the other side is a thin sharp blade. Around noon on the 15th, police remove the items of evidence they'd found in the woods

“and transported the skeletons to the city's more, where a corner pathologist was scheduled”

to examine them and conduct tests. Within days of the discovery becoming public knowledge, the press dubbed the pair of skeletons the baves in the woods case. The phrase was in reference to a traditional English fairy tale that tells of two orphaned children who become lost and dying the woods.

In the story, a Robin scatters leaves over their bodies. News reporting about the actual ages and sexes of the deceased pair was all over the place. For example, the province initially described the skeletons as those of a boy and a girl, ages 10 and 12. But the Vancouver sun described the bodies with no specific ages, but stated that they

were either two children or potentially a woman and a child. There was yet another article by the Vancouver news herald, which stated that the children were a boy and a girl, ages 10 and 7, respectively. Later reporting by A&E's cold case files stated the victims were a boy and girl ages 6 to 10 years old.

“So, yeah, like I said, all over the map.”

Thankfully though, by January 19th, four days after the bodies were found, the corner pathologist put an end to the speculation. He concluded that one set of skeletal remains belonged to a boy who was around the age of 6 or 7, and the other belonged to a girl who was either 8 or 9 years old when she died. He said that the girl had light brown hair and a slender build, while the boy had dark hair.

The pathologist also described the boy as on the sturdy side. The doctor estimated that the children had been murdered in either 1948 or 1949. So about five or six years before they were discovered. Now that investigators had some basic identifiers for the two children, they began combing through missing person's records for any boy's or girls who'd gone missing who

were around the ages of the pair that had been found. Vancouver Detective Don McKay led the investigation and one missing person's case in particular caught his team's attention within the first week or so of working the case. In 1950 a woman with two children who'd rented a small boat at Kitsolano Beach, just west of downtown Vancouver, had disappeared.

Her body was later found in a nearby inland, but the boat and the children were never

recovered. So it made sense for Don and his team to at least consider if the two Stanley Park skeletons could be connected to that case. However just as quickly as that scene like it could be a good lead, Don and his colleagues couldn't find anything that connected the missing children from the boat incident to the Stanley

Park remains. After that the case languished. In the first three months detectives reviewed 41 pairs of children who were unaccounted for that they thought could maybe be the two kids, but nothing paned out. That effort wasn't a total loss though, in the grand scheme of things, because in the

process of combing through those cases and tracking down leads. Investigators ended up locating more than half of the children on that list. Somewhere as far away from Canada as Scotland and South America. And at least 26 of them were miners who were about to just pat and made it back to their family members who were looking for them.

Anyway, by the end of April Vancouver investigators had worked through dozens of tips and put a lot of time and resources into the case, but they still weren't any closer to identifying who the two kids were who'd been left in the park. To shake things up detective McCann his team worked directly with news outlets like the Vancouver Sun.

In what I imagine a lot of people might have viewed as an unprecedented public-private partnership between the police and the media. Detective McCann laid out and detail his official theory about the case. He explained that he was convinced the children were victims of a double homicide that had taken place either sometime in the winter of 1947 to 1948 or 1948 to 1949.

them through the park and into the woods, then used the leading hatchet to kill them, striking

them both in the head.

“McCann stated that the boy had two clefts in his skull that fit the proportions of the hatchet's”

blade and the girl had one cleft that also fit the blade. Later coverage by the province and producers of Killer Crime reported that the damage inflicted to one or both of the skulls included fracture wounds as well, which were suspected as having come from the hammer end of the hatchet. In his remarks to the Vancouver Sun, Detective McCann described the wounds the victims had

suffered as "lightblows" to the head, which he surmised would have been made by a woman, not a man.

Per the police is theory, after killing the children, the woman then laid her fur coat over

their bodies, in either an active compassion, concealment, or, in my opinion, possibly even both. And because the fur coat was a women's size that was rather small, authorities suspected that she was probably around 5 feet three inches tall and weighed between 125 and 135 pounds. Investigators also theorize that at some point while laying one of the bodies down, the

“woman had gotten her shoe stuck beneath one of the children, and that's why a woman's”

penny loafer was found alongside the bodies. As far as where the perpetrator went after that, McCay had his own theory about that, too. He told the newspaper in part "I think she then carried on down to the inlet and jumped in," end quote.

Now, when I first read that quote, I was like, "Wait, what inlet?"

Well, according to the source material, about 200 yards away from the wooded area where the bones were found is a body of water known as "Burard inlet." It surrounds the peninsula Stanley Park is located on. So that's where McCay got that detail in his theory. But what's odd to me is that up until this point investigators hadn't pointed to any specific

physical evidence that proved their female perpetrator theory. For example, there had been no reports of a woman's body being found in Barard inlet in the timeframe McCay and his team believed the crime had occurred. The only situation like that, which happened, was the case from 1950 that I mentioned earlier, where the woman who went boating with her two kids was found at Kitsalano Beach.

However, that had happened further south of Stanley Park. And it almost seemed like McCay's theory was inspired by that case, but he and his team had already investigated that incident and seemingly ruled it out. In the Vancouver Sun's piece about police's theory, they ran images that were aimed at reconstructing the outfit the boy victim had been wearing on the day he was killed.

The picture showed reproductions of the coat, pants, shoes, and aviator helmet he'd been dawning. Authorities also shared reproduction photos of what the fur coat, the abandoned penny loafer, the hatchet, and the lunchbox might have looked like before they were exposed to the elements. Now, try not to get too mad about this next part. But according to the Vancouver Sun, because the actual clothing evidence was so badly deteriorated

when it was found, police decided to wash some of the items so that they could get a better idea of what color they were. I know, just hearing the words "police washed the clothing evidence" there is to send me into a full rage. But to be fair, this was 1953 we're talking about. Anyway, the end result of washing some of the clothing was that investigators were able to determine that the boy's zipper jacket was red from a Canadian manufacturer and had a

phrasor tartan pattern on it. His pants were described to be either cream or fond colored. In July, nearly six months into the investigation, the police hired an Austrian anthropologist and sculptor to create life-like recreations of the victim's facial features, based on their skulls. Obviously, some tweaking had to be done in order for the sculptor to do her thing. So, as part of the process, she cast plaster models and filled the missing areas with material

in order to build layers of skin and muscle that could be shaped into the facial features of the kids based on their bone structures and so forth. By December of 1953, the reconstructive work appeared to have paid off because it was then that authorities received what probably felt like their strongest lead yet. Maybe some of you listening are like me. You're a parent or a guardian to a child and when you think

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needed to meet with detective McKay to tell him about an unusual sight she'd witnessed while in Stanley Park on October 5, 1947. Nearly six years before the bones were found. This witness claimed that while she'd been walking in the park with a guy at around 2.30 pm, she'd seen a woman wearing a fur coat, enter the woods with a boy and a girl, and overheard the woman referred to the boy as either Ronnie or Rodney. The witness said that

at the time the woman had been carrying a small hatchet. In additional coverage about this tip, the witness also said that when the woman in the fur coat noticed her and her companion staring, she'd started cutting branches with the hatchet. About 45 minutes later, as the witness and her companion were leaving the park, she said they saw the same woman walking briskly past the park's bear cages, talking to herself. When they spotted her, she was no longer wearing her fur coat,

and the two kids that had previously been with her were nowhere to be found. The witness said the woman was also missing a shoe. Now, I was a bit curious about what the heck this witness meant when she referred to bear cages in the park. So, I looked it up, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Turns out, starting in 1888, Stanley Park had its own pound, which became a zoo,

and the first animal to live there was a young black bear. However, over the years the zoo

developed and not so good reputation for its questionable living conditions and mistreatment of animals, so it closed in 1997. But apparently some of the bears that were housed there were still around in the 1940s and 50s, and their cages were near where the witness claimed the mystery woman had been walking by herself. At the time this happened, the witness and her significant other hadn't thought much of the encounter, because it wasn't uncommon for people visiting Stanley

Park to keep hatchets on them in case they wanted to chop firewood. Also, when this was all going on, the witness and her companion were reportedly having a pretty big fight and ended up breaking up. So, I kind of see why they're sighting of the woman in the fur coat didn't really stick out to them at that point in time. They had their own issues they were dealing with. When investigators asked the witness to lead them to the spot in the woods where she remembered

seeing the woman in the fur coat take the children, she led authorities to a spot in the park that was within 50 feet of where the remains had been found. According to the Vancouver Sun,

“it was believed this tip might be the key to solving the case. The woman that the witness had”

described seeing seemed to check a lot of boxes for authorities' female perpetrator theory, but it wasn't like that theory was the only one they were seriously considering. Investigators explored other avenues of investigation too. For example, I found one instance where detectives looked into the disappearance of a father and his sons from T-neck New Jersey that they suspected could possibly be connected.

his department had received a tip about a guy named George Peffel, who had vanished while

“reportedly taking a trip to Canada with his two young sons in July 1949. George had gotten permission”

from his ex-wife to take his kids there, but the trio had never been seen again.

George then became a fugitive wanted for parental kidnapping. McCay told Smith that authorities became more aware about the 1949 case while reading a June 1951 issue of an American magazine called Coronet, and it seems that's when McCay decided to look into whether there could be a possible connection. According to Jim Smith's piece, after receiving a tip about a possible sighting of George in Vancouver, McCay showed up at a hotel room where the father was suspected of

staying. However, the man McCay and his team found inside that room turned out not to be George. In the end, authorities ultimately ruled out George's boys as the Stanley Park victims, mostly because George's two boys were three and five years old when they vanished in 1949.

“And like I mentioned earlier in the episode, the estimated ages of the Stanley Park skeletons were”

believed to be slightly older than that. And by 1960, nearly three years into the investigation, the police had hit a wall. In that time, they looked into a total of 72 pairs of missing children using information from immigration officials and trans oceanic travel logs, as well as tips from divorce court judges. But nothing had panned out. Detective McCay himself had dedicated a lot of time and energy to the case, but,

unfortunately, he'd been required to move on to new cases during that time. By April 1960, McCay straight-up told journalist Bob Porter that he didn't have much hope that they'd ever identified the two children or their killer. After that, 43 long years would pass before a cold case detective revisited the case. And his approach was simple, apply new science to old evidence.

Like I mentioned earlier, when Albert Tang first found the children's remains,

they were sent to Vancouver City morgue for testing. For at least seven years after they were found, the bones were kept there. But by 1991, the morgue had moved locations and was actually operating out of a hospital. Somehow, when the transition occurred, the victim's bones stayed behind with the building, and that structure eventually became home to the Vancouver Police Museum and archives. Coverage by cold case files and the province explained that by 1991, some of the bones and

physical evidence were actually on display at the museum in an exhibit. The rest of the evidence had remained boxed up, but unsealed in storage. In 1996, a sergeant with British Columbia's unsolved homicide unit named Brian Honeyborn began investigating the case and officially reopened it in 1997. One of the first things he did was remove the skulls from the police museum and send them off for DNA testing. The expert he sent them to was a friend of his name Dr. David Sweet,

who was a forensic dentistry expert at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Sweet suspected authorities best shot at getting usable DNA was going to come from the children's skulls. So he extracted some of the teeth that were still in place, froze them, and tested the pulp inside for DNA. While he waited for the results, sergeant Honeyborn cremated some of the other bones and held a small service for the children on a police boat at Kitselano Point near Stanley Park. He told

reporter Gordon Clark that seeing the nameless young victims remains on display at the museum

had never sat right with him, and he believed that they needed some kind of memorial to honor them.

About a year later, by March 20th, 1998, sergeant Honeyborn and Dr. Sweet got the DNA results back and discovered what I imagined felt like bombshell information. The babes in the woods were actually a pair of boys, not a girl, and a boy. They were estimated to be between six and 10 years old, and they shared the same mother, but different fathers, so half-brothers. This discovery meant that during all those years police had been trying to find a missing boy in girl. They'd been looking

for their wrong type of missing children's cases. Also, that prior witness report about a woman in a fur coat who had been walking past the bear cages without her supposed son and daughter,

“was no longer super important. Sergeant Honeyborn told the province, quote,”

"had we known at the time that they were both boys, it might have made a world of difference. The whole file must be reviewed, and any involving a male and a female can probably be eliminated," end quote. When Honeyborn and his team went back through the case file looking for reports or tips that had been submitted for pairs of missing boys or two children in general, just not sex-specific, they found something interesting. In 1953, a high school biology teacher

walking along the Stanley Park Sea Wall in 1947. At the time, Lawrence was visiting from several

“hours away, and he said that the only reason he'd really noticed the two kids was because he'd”

heard children's voices, and a distinct ringing sound like something repeatedly striking a metal railing that was along the Sea Wall path. He claimed that when he saw the pair of children in the woman who was with them, one of the kids was holding what appeared to be a hatchet, and hitting it against the railing. Lawrence told authorities that later that same day, while at an overlooked near-beaver lake, he'd seen the same woman sitting on a bench looking to

straw. A next to her was a man who was pacing back and forth and seemed to be acting nervously. Lawrence said he immediately noticed that the woman had no coat on, was missing a shoe, and her barefoot and leg were spattered with a red substance that appeared to be blood. Concerned by this side, Lawrence had asked her if she was all right, but the man who was pacing next to her and erupted, and said that she just tripped while crossing a ditch and scratched her leg.

“Lawrence said he then offered to help the couple locate the woman's missing shoe, but the guy”

interjected once again and told him they didn't need any help because the shoe was torn, and had already been thrown away. Unfortunately for Sergeant Honeyborn, Lawrence Smith had died by the time this prior tip was reviewed. So Honeyborn wasn't able to interview Lawrence or learn anything further than what he'd already provided in his statement. But, ever the dog and investigator, Honeyborn put out a call for help in

the province, asking anyone who was related to or friends with Lawrence over the years to reach out if they discussed these events with him prior to his death. After that, Sergeant Honeyborn sort of had to win the case down. He just kept running into dead end after dead end. He was also chasing leads that were by that point almost half a century old. He reviewed many tips about people allegedly seeing a woman with two boys in the park at various times in the 1940s. But none of them

“led him to a name or any specific suspects. It seems that after discovering one of the victim's”

sexes had been labeled incorrectly by initial investigators, Sergeant Honeyborn wasn't sure what he could trust in the case file. He told the press that he wasn't even confident 1947 was the earliest the bodies could have been left in the park. One of the reasons he felt this way was because police back in 1953 didn't have help from a forensic botanist to learn more about the layers of leaves that were on top of the remains. Honeyborn said that had the

bones been found in his era that would have been a resource he felt was absolutely necessary.

By the start of the 2000s, the case was basically back to square one, but the exception that

authorities knew the victims were half-brothers. Without further information though, it looked as if the case would go cold forever. But the universe had other plans. Nearly two decades later, it would be science and a long-lost relative's curiosity that would nearly have the final word on British Columbia's infamous "Faibs in the Woods" case. Hi everyone, it's Delia Diambra here, and I want to tell you about a podcast that's one of

my personal favorites that I know you're going to love, too. Dark Down East, hosted by my friend and fellow investigative journalist Kylie Lowe, Dark Down East, dives into New England's most haunting true crime cases. From unsolved mysteries to stories where justice has been served, Kylie brings her meticulous research and heartfelt storytelling to uncover the truth behind these cases. If you love the way I take you deep into the details of a case, then I know you'll appreciate

Kylie's dedication to honoring the victims and uncovering their stories. There are so many episodes of Dark Down East already waiting for you and new episodes every Thursday. Find Dark Down East now, wherever you listen to podcasts. In early February 2022, a woman named Cindy Brady got a knock-out or door where she lived in the suburbs of Vancouver. When she answered, she saw a police detective standing in front of her,

and they had some shocking news. They told her that after years and years of investigating, they determined that her uncles, Derek and David Dalton, were the infamous babes in the woods victims, who'd been found in Stanley Park in 1953. I can't even begin to imagine how this news shook Cindy. Because you see, several years prior to that moment, Cindy had started a quest to learn more about a murky chapter in her family's history. One that was filled with mystery and endless

questions about a pair of boys that no one seemed to know much about. Back when Cindy was in her early 20s, she'd been flipping through a family photo album and seen a picture of two boys that she didn't

immediately recognize. The first was Derek, who'd been born in 1940, and the other was David,

born in 1941. Derek had straight-cropped light here, while David dawned a full head of

family records and other photos, both of the boys had attended Henry Hudson Elementary School in Kitselano, and were raised by their mother, Eileen, as well as Cindy's own mother, Diane,

“who was the boy's half-sister. For as long as Cindy could remember, the story about what happened”

to Derek and David was that social services had taken them from Eileen, after she'd become too impoverished to care for them. Cindy's mom, Diane, had told her that growing up in poverty in the city had been extremely difficult. And there were often times when she, Eileen, in the boys, had experienced homelessness. Whenever Cindy had pressed her mother further on where Derek and David ended up, Diane would become emotional and shut down. Cindy told Vancouver journalist Eve Lazarus

that whenever she tried to broach the subject, all her mom would say about the boys was "that's in the past," or "we don't talk about that," end quote. Leading up to her eventual death in 2020, Diane suffered from dementia, but before she passed, Cindy got a saliva sample from her to submit to a direct consumer genealogy company called my heritage. Cindy's adult daughter had done the

“same thing with her DNA too, because the women wanted to know if they had long lost relatives,”

like Derek and David, still out there somewhere. But unbeknownst to Cindy and her daughter, Vancouver police had also developed a strong interest in genealogy databases. Authorities were curious to know if they could use investigative genetic genealogy to identify unidentified remains in cold cases. According to a news release from the Vancouver Police Department, in 2021 about a year after Cindy sent her mother sample to my heritage, a detective constable

named, Ida Rodriguez, got in contact with a group of investigative genetic genealogists at a company called Redgrave Research Forensic Services. And she wanted them to conduct genealogical analysis from one of the Stanley Park schools. With help from a DNA lab which specialized in handling really old-degraded DNA, the Redgrave genealogists were able to retrieve a profile and they submitted it to a public genetic genealogy database known as Jedmatch. Jedmatch allows its users to give

police and IGG practitioners permission to view their uploaded DNA data. And from there, the researchers built a family tree for the boy's DNA matches and looked for potential candidates that he could be

related to. The end result was nothing short of amazing. Following the identification of maternal

grandparents of the older of the two Stanley Park victims, genealogists discovered there was a living family member and after speaking with them, found out that they had uploaded their DNA to a direct to consumer database and eventually uploaded it to Jedmatch. The comparison results between that relative in the Stanley Park sample confirmed that one of the previously unknown boys was direct to Alton. Further testing identified the other victim as David. Because they'd been born

in 1940 and 1941, the duo would have been seven and six years old respectively in 1947, which was the year police originally estimated they'd been killed. On February 15, 2022, the Vancouver Police publicly announced the identifications and stated that they believed the boys were killed by a close relative who died some time in the late 1990s. They also shared that the boys had a family member who lived near the entrance of Stanley Park around the time they

may have been killed. When press by reporters on whether police maintain their original theory that the boys were killed by their mother and inspector for the department remarked, quote,

“"I think we have to make that assumption, yes, she would definitely be a person of interest”

if this case had occurred today." End quote. That same inspector later wrote in news release, quote, "After seven decades as a cold case, we presume that the person who killed Derek and David had likely passed away. But at this stage in the investigation, it was never about seeing someone

charged for these crimes. It was always about giving these boys a name and finally telling their

story." End quote. Journalist Eve Lazarus spoke at length with Cindy Brady and her daughter for her podcast "Cowcase Canada." And in that coverage, Cindy told Eve that she doesn't believe her grandmother Eileen, who she described as a lovely and gentle woman, would have been capable of murdering her two sons. The podcast goes into a lot more detail than I can cover here, so give it a listen if you want all the finer points. But Eve reported that Eileen was born in 1917 and Edmonton Alberta.

However, when she was just eight years old, her mother died. After that, Eileen and her two sisters and two brothers were raised in a Catholic orphanage. After she turned 18, Eileen moved to Vancouver

and worked various jobs to make ends meet. The first record of her in the city's directory was

in 1936 and then again in 1941. Alongside her name in that entry from 1941 is the word widow.

confirming that Eileen had ever gotten married or illegally changed her surname to Dalton.

“According to producers for Killer Crime, there are records from the 1950s that confirm Eileen”

eventually changed her last name to Bosque. But why she did that remains unclear. She died in 1996 at the age of 78. We could speculate for days on whether Eileen is or isn't responsible for her son's deaths, but I don't think that's appropriate. The program Killer Crime that I mentioned earlier and Eve Lazarus's podcast go into deeper historical context about the time period in which Eileen's boys were allegedly taken by social services. And it was really interesting to learn just how

challenging post-World War II life was for some women whose partners had died and left them

without financial support. For example, murders for the city in the year 1948 included at least three murder suicides of kids by their mothers. However, we simply do not know if this applies to Derek and David's case. Obviously, their deaths were horrible and senseless,

“but I think it would be unfair to make any conclusions about their mom without concrete”

evidence to support those conclusions. It appears that just getting the identifications was super important to the boys' relatives. Cindy Brady's daughter, Ali, told Eve Lazarus that

getting some kind of answer to the huge question mark that it always lingered around David and

Derek's fate was nice. She said, "Even though it came to a devastating resolution, at least we know what happened," end quote. I wish we could learn more about who David and Derek were before their short lives were taken. But there just isn't much there, at least not much that is known definitively. As a mom myself to a spirited, curious, carefree little boy who was about the same age, Derek and David would have been when they were killed.

I can imagine them being a lot like him. In the photos that are available of them, they're doing handstands, going on outings and making cute faces at the camera operator. They probably found all sorts of ways to be both loving and mischievous at the same time. Above all, they were innocent and deserved so much more than what happened to them. It may seem like a long shot, but if this case has proven anything wrong, it's that time,

advances in science and human curiosity can move an investigation forward that previously seemed destined to languish. If you know anything about the unsolved murders of David and Derek Dalton, please contact the Vancouver Police Department at 604-717-3321. You can also leave a tip anonymously at the Vancouver Crime Stoppers tip line 1-800-222-8477. Park Predators is an audio check production. You can do a list of all the source material

for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram

“@ParkPredators. I think Chuck would approve.”

Hey Park enthusiasts, it's Delia. And if you enjoy unraveling the haunting tales that we explore here on Park Predators, there's another podcast that dives deep into all things mysterious and bizarre that I think you'll enjoy. It's called "So Supernatural." Hosted by my friends, Russia and Yvette, so supernatural explores some of the most puzzling and eerie cases, ones that often leave investigators and witnesses wondering if the truth lies beyond

the realm of the explainable. From mysterious disappearances to legends and lore steeped in history, Russia and Yvette break down every possibility no matter how strange it gets. So after you're all cut up on episodes here, be sure to listen to so supernatural wherever you listen to podcasts.