The mystery of one of Toronto’s oldest unsolved murders,
Unanswered questions behind one of the oldest cold-case mysteries
The body of a smallish woman appeared when demolition workers tore up the floor of Robertson Motors at Danforth and Coxwell Avenues on May 19, 1995. She had been hidden from sight for decades entombed in concrete.
How she got there was a mystery. An autopsy showed she died from a severe beating, after suffering massive head injuries.
“She actually has been kind of mummified,” Det.-Sgt. Jim Crowley said at the time. “The air would never have gotten to her.”
Soon, Crowley found himself oddly bonded to the anonymous woman found under the auto dealership, which had been converted into the Robertson Parkette.
Ideally, he wanted to catch her killer, but he knew this was unlikely, given the passage of time.
Concrete for the floor of the auto dealership was poured in 1949, which meant she was likely dead for at least 46 years.
Even if the killer was already dead, Crowley hoped to at least identify her so that her family could pay their respects to her and gain some closure.
“Obviously, she deserves a proper burial,” Crowley told the Star shortly after her remains were found.
Her autopsy also determined that she was white, of medium build with strawberry blond or auburn-coloured hair and she had likely given birth.
Of particular interest to Crowley was the upper dental plate that was found with her bones.
A poor woman couldn’t have afforded such expensive dental work, which meant the victim “was at least middle-class,” Crowley said.
Computer searches weren’t as easy in 1995 as they are today, and so Crowley poured over old files and newspaper articles and city directories. He also spoke with family members of missing women.
Crowley heard plenty of sad stories of domestic strife in the GTA after the Second World War, as men tried to reintegrate into their families after being at war overseas, surrounded by death and loss. Some women were physically abused. Others just walked away.
Crowley had no shortage of names of GTA women who vanished around the time the concrete was poured at Robertson Motors. “This case has opened a lot of old wounds,” Crowley told the Star in 1995. “What is amazing to me is the number of ladies that went missing in the 1940s. I’m just fascinated by it. I had no idea.”
A particularly poignant story was that of Wilma Bunker, 25, who vanished on June 7, 1949, after leaving home for her job at a Wellington Street office.
At the time she disappeared, Bunker rented an apartment at 269 Chaplin Cres., on a leafy street in Forest Hill.
Despite her comfortable address, Bunker had led a turbulent life. In 1931, when Wilma was just nine, her father Wilbur drowned her two-and-a-halfyear-old brother Ronnie in the bathtub of their home on Armadale Avenue, near Jane and Bloor Streets.
Then, Wilma’s dad slashed his own throat, although he was saved by an elderly neighbour who used a ladder to climb up to the second-floor bathroom.
Wilbur, a tenor in the thenAvenue Road United Church, just snapped, neighbours said.
Ronnie was his favourite child and Wilbur said he wanted to take him to heaven.
“I wanted to die and I wanted my boy to go with me,” he told police at the time.
Wilbur had lost money in the stock market crash of 1929 and was never able to catch up.
Worse yet, he lost money that he had swindled from his boss, which got him fired.
“Bunker is said to have admitted taking $200 of the firm’s money and lost it investing,” the Globe reported. “To try and make it up he used more, until he finally found his shortage amounting to $1,000.”
Court heard that Wilbur Bunker returned from the First World War with severe shellshock. He had never fully recovered from having his horse shot out from under him and from being gassed on the battlefield.
His trial for killing his favourite child only lasted a day before he was sent to a psychiatric hospital.
Crowley’s research meant he also learned of Rose DeLong, 30, who vanished from the city on Dec. 15, 1947. DeLong had studied nursing, but was a restaurant cashier at the time of her disappearance. DeLong had plans of starting a business in London, Ont., and just vanished after heading to New York to buy equipment. She lived on Seymour Avenue, not far from where the semi-mummified remains were discovered.
Another sad case to reach Crowley was that of June Lacomb, who disappeared without a trace sometime in the 1940s, leaving her son a veritable orphan. Then there was Sarah Marie Weatherill, 42, of Napier Street, who seemed to drop off the face of the earth in September 1949. Weatherill left behind her husband William and three children — Bobby, 11, George, 13, and Anna, 16, who suffered from arthritis.
Of particular interest to Crowley was the plight of Dorothy (Dottie) Cox, who was about 40 when she vanished in February or March of 1943. Years before Crowley began his search, Dottie’s parents hired a private investigator, with no success.
Her family was excited when Crowley released a police composite photo prepared by forensic expert Betty Clark.
Clark used skull measurements to create a computergenerated image of the woman found under the concrete, which Crowley considered to be “almost identical” to a headshot he obtained of Dottie.
Dottie left home to visit her mother in Cooksville and just disappeared. Dottie sounded a lot like the woman found under the concrete. She was 5 feet tall, 110 lbs., pale, with reddish hair. When last seen, she was wearing a blue dress and dark, furtrimmed coat and black Tam hat.
Crowley heard that she had lived with her husband Henry Victor Cox at 29 Queensdale Ave. in the Danforth VillageEast York area, just a couple of blocks from the car dealership where the body was found.
Her husband was an Englishborn blacksmith’s helper who worked for the Canadian National Railways.
He was about 10 years older than Dottie, who gave birth to two sons with Henry and also looked after his three sons from a previous marriage. Crowley heard that the couple often ar- gued. They also often drank at the nearby Linsmore Hotel on the Danforth and Crowley determined that was likely where she was last seen alive. Henry died of natural causes in 1946. After Dottie’s disappearance, her 19-year-old stepson joined the Army and another stepson went into the care of relatives. Her own children, aged seven and five, were placed in foster homes.
At first, Crowley sounded hopeful as he said he thought he had finally learned the identity of the woman from under the concrete floor.
“There are just too many things,” he said at the time. “She had reddish hair, partial dental plate and lived in the area. The pathologist also thought she had given birth to children.”
Then material from the mummified body found under Robertson Motors was compared with blood samples from Dottie’s children for a DNA match.
“DNA comparison have revealed that the body is NOT Dorothy Cox,” Toronto police spokesperson Connie Osborne said in an email. “This case is still being investigated, but at this time the identity of the victim is still unknown.”
Crowley died in 2010 at the age of 62 in a farming accident, after he retired from the force.
The case remains unsolved.