Babes in the Woods: Unidentified Children Identified After 70 Years

The story of the "Babes in the Woods" here in Vancouver's Stanley Park was a mystery for nearly 70 years. The skeletal remains of two murdered boys were discovered here back in 1953, but it wasn't until recently, thanks to DNA technology, that they were finally identified.

On Tuesday, February 15, 2022, Vancouver police revealed the boys are believed to be six-year-old David and seven-year-old Derek D’Alton. They were half-brothers, and police think they were killed by a close family member, likely their mother, who died about 25 years ago. A relative lived near the entrance to Stanley Park at the time of the murders.

The police believe the homicides likely happened in 1948, five years before a groundskeeper found the boys' remains near Beaver Lake. They were hidden by thick brush and covered with a woman's coat. The boys were bludgeoned to death with a hatchet.

The D'Alton brothers appear to have been descended from Russian immigrants who arrived in Canada around the beginning of the 20th century. They lived in poverty and attended Henry Hudson Elementary School in Kitsilano. They were never reported missing. The family changed their last name to Bousquet sometime in the 1950s after the boys were killed.

The identification came after a portion of the older boy's DNA was sequenced and uploaded to a genetic database. A team of genetic genealogists tracked down surviving family members and identified one of the boys' maternal grandparents.

It took a couple of tries to extract DNA from the bone samples because they were decades old and had been handled by many people during their time on display at the Vancouver Police Museum. However, a team at Lakehead University's Paleo-DNA Laboratory in Thunder Bay, Ontario, was able to extract a substantial amount of genetic material, and scientists in Alabama sequenced the older boy's DNA.