The spring of 2017 is not going to feature as Pat Baker’s favourite. On March 8, her third husband, Duff Scott, an 80-year-old investment banker, died of a heart attack. They’d been married 12 years.
Two weeks later, on March 21, still in the grip of burying and missing him, Ms. Baker received an e-mail from Jeremiah Sommer. She and her husband had hired Mr. Sommer the previous January to add a new patio to the back of their summer house on the shore of Lake Huron in Goderich, Ont.
The contractor explained that he’d “run into a bit of a situation”: A human skull, or part of one, had turned up in the backfill around the patio. As the law requires, he immediately called the Ontario Provincial Police.
Within two days, the OPP’s forensic anthropologist had cleared Ms. Baker as a suspect and concluded the skull was vintage – probably from the 1880s – and therefore not worthy of criminal investigation.
Ms. Baker thought the story might die there.
But she had overlooked Ontario’s seldom-mentioned but extremely fussy Funeral, Burial and Cremation Services Act (2002), which has been law since 2012 and insists that human remains found on private property be examined for anthropological potential. As of this month, a year and a half and many tons of dirt later, Ms. Baker was still trying to bury the damn skull.
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Goderich (pop. 8,000 on a busy day) is a small town. News travels at whirlwind speed. The OPP arrived at the Baker residence to investigate the skull at dinner time. Officers hadn’t started stringing yellow tape across the property – a sturdy Edwardian brick pile where Ms. Baker has spent her summers since first grade – when Jim Donnelly, an 88-year-old retired lawyer and judge, spotted cruiser lights in his neighbour’s driveway. “Coppers across the street,” he remembered thinking. “I’ve been interested in coppers all my life.” His son-in-law is the former Crown attorney for nearby Perth County; his daughter has the same job in Huron County, the seat of Goderich (and also Alice Munro’s territory). All of the officers knew the judge. By morning, the skull was news on Global.
Ms. Baker had retreated to her winter house in Vero Beach, Fla., after her husband’s funeral and didn’t make it up to Goderich until April 3. By then, Mr. Donnelly had done some digging of his own. An amateur historian, he discovered that the properties on their stretch of St. George’s Crescent had originally been part of the churchyard of St. George’s Anglican Church. The church had burned to the ground in 1879 and was rebuilt closer to town. Early accounts claimed the original building had a graveyard, but there was no map of where the graves might be and no record of bodies being disinterred and moved to a new graveyard.
Mr. Donnelly advised Ms. Baker to talk to the local Anglican minister, who urged her to call the head office at the Anglican archdiocese in London – maybe it had records of burials. Ms. Baker telephoned twice, but no one returned her calls. Certainly there was no mention of remains or graves in any deed of sale since the church started selling off squares of its property in the 1850s. Maybe, Mr. Donnelly suggested, there was no need for further investigation. But he urged Ms. Baker to call the Ontario government – just to be sure.
That was the call that changed everything.
Source: https://tgam.ca/2LEIZLj
