Toronto police identify Danforth Lady murdered nearly 90 years ago

Toronto police identified Mary McLeod Moffat and a second cold-case victim in the same announcement, closing one of the city’s oldest homicide mysteries. The woman long known as the Danforth Lady has now been named nearly 90 years after investigators believe she was killed.

Moffat’s remains were found on May 18, 1995, when demolition workers uncovered skeletal remains buried under a building near Danforth and Coxwell avenues in Toronto’s east end. The discovery turned into a case that stalled for decades, with the unidentified woman becoming part of the city’s unresolved criminal history.

Investigators believe Mary McLeod Moffat, nee Davidson, was murdered around April 1936. Toronto police used Investigative Genetic Genealogy, or IGG, to make the identification, and Othram Inc. assisted the Toronto Police Service in the work. The identification came more than 30 years after the remains were found and roughly 90 years after the presumed killing.

The Danforth Lady case had become one of Toronto’s oldest mysteries, and it now ranks among the oldest homicide identifications ever solved through forensic genetic genealogy. That matters because the case combined a buried set of remains, a nearly erased paper trail and a time gap long enough to outlast witnesses, suspects and most records that might once have pointed investigators to a name.

Toronto police said the same announcement also identified a second cold-case victim in a separate investigation. The double breakthrough showed how DNA technology and archival work can still restore identity after a case has gone dormant for generations, even when the people who might have answered the original questions are long gone.