News Release

The Toronto Police Service has identified a man who was found deceased in September 1992 through Investigative Genetic Genealogy. 

On September 15, 1992, police, fire, and ambulance responded to a call for an unresponsive male found lying on the lawn of a church in the Queen Street East and Church Street area.

Crews were unable to revive him. His cause of death was not suspicious.

The man did not have any identification with him and attempts to identify him through conventional investigative techniques proved unsuccessful.

In 2025, this case was selected for investigation using investigative genetic genealogy (IGG). A DNA profile of the unidentified man was obtained and uploaded to public-facing databases on January 8, 2026. 

The man’s closest matches were very distant, but they suggested he was from the United Kingdom. Months of work by the Toronto Police Service genealogy team and TPS investigators determined that the man was likely a man named Derek.  

Derek moved to Toronto from the UK in the 1970’s. In December 1993, nearly 15 months after the unidentified man was located, Derek was reported missing by his lawyer. The connection between the two cases was not made at the time.

The missing person case was closed years later when investigators were informed that Derek had died on a specific date. This proved to be a miscommunication - Derek had been declared legally dead on that date, after years of not replying to correspondence. No official record accounting for where or when he died existed.

Members of the Toronto Police Service located Derek’s fingerprints in another country. Those fingerprints were compared to the man who was found in 1992. They confirmed that the unknown man was Derek.

Derek’s family in the UK was contacted and notified of his identification by members of the Toronto Police Service.

This investigation was made possible through a grant provided by the Ontario Solicitor General, and the collaborative efforts of the Ontario Forensic Pathology Service, the Office of the Chief Coroner, the Toronto Police Service, Othram Labs, and the Centre of Forensic Sciences. 

This is the 14th person identified in the Toronto Police Service’s humanitarian initiative ‘Project 31’.

Project 31 began in the summer of 2022. It was named for the 31 open Toronto Police Service cases involving long-term unidentified deceased people for whom DNA material is readily available. 

The goal of Project 31 is to identify all 31 people through the vigorous use of DNA-based investigative techniques, including investigative genetic genealogy.