THE CASE OF UNCLAIMED BODY A-123076
For 20 years, the Arnauds yearned for answers about their son. Little did they know his body had been located two months after they reported him missing to Montreal police in 1998. Why did it take so long to identify him? Jesse Feith investigates.
Reports referred to him as the ‘unknown man from Verchères.’ Then a Sûreté du Québec sergeant in the special investigations unit pieced together the puzzle of a missing person and an unmarked grave. And the call was made to the Arnauds, one they had been waiting two decades to receive, Jesse Feith reports.
Crewmen on a Canadian Coast Guard boat were the first to notice it: what looked like a body floating in the St-Lawrence River off the shores of Varennes, about 30 kilometres northeast of Montreal.
Reacting swiftly, they brought it to the nearest access point along the river, another dozen kilometres downstream to a small dock in the town of Verchères.
Two officers from the local police force, called the Sûreté municipale de Ste-Julie at the time, were called in to meet them.
Using a yellow rope the Coast Guard crewmen had fastened around the body, they carefully pulled it from the water and turned it over onto a backboard borrowed from local ambulance technicians.
Thirty or so people had now gathered by the water, so the officers moved the body farther along the dock to avoid them. There, shielded from the crowd, they began to inspect it.
It was a man, about 30 years old, with dark hair and no ID on him.
He wore a grey and black longsleeved sweater under a dark Levi’s jean jacket, faded jeans, grey socks and black steel-toed hiking boots.
They found a silver key in his right pocket, but nothing else. There were no obvious signs of violence.
Unsure of what more to do, the officers draped a yellow first-aid blanket over the man and waited nearly 90 minutes for staff from the local morgue to arrive and take over. It was early in the afternoon on April 22, 1998.
For the next two decades, the identity of what became known as unclaimed body A-123076 — reports refer to him as the “unknown man from Verchères” — would remain unsolved.
During that same time, less than an hour’s drive away in Montreal’s Rosemont neighbourhood, a family was living through its own unknown: the anguish and torment of not knowing what happened to their missing child.
Céline Gravel and Claude Arnaud had reported their 21-year-old son Pierre-Martin missing to the Montreal police three days after Valentine’s Day in 1998.
For 19 years, the Arnauds waited for news about PierreMartin. With no note left behind, they believed he had either tried to distance himself from the family or vanished for reasons that were hard to fathom.
They always hoped he would return. They kept the same address and phone number in case he did. Even family vacations were marked by a fear of missing his return.
But they heard nothing. Until September of last year, when a veteran Sûreté du Québec sergeant tasked with trying to match unidentified bodies to unsolved disappearances left a message on their answering machine: they needed to meet; it was about Pierre-Martin.
Gravel, 61, takes a deep breath, wipes fresh tears from her eyes and begins. The last year has been a whirlwind of emotions. But before the surprise phone call from the police, before the ensuing questions and grief, Pierre-Martin’s story, she says, needs to start from the beginning.
“He was an adopted child,” she says, “and it wasn’t always easy for him.”
Abandoned as an infant, the Arnauds took Pierre-Martin in as a foster family when he was 21/2 years old. At the age of five, they legally adopted him — a month after Gravel gave birth to her first son Jean-Michel.
Not wanting it to come as a surprise, they told Pierre-Martin he was adopted as soon as he was old enough to understand. Still, the sense of abandonment nagged at him from an early age.
As a teen, he didn’t take well to authority relationships and could become confrontational.
“He was missing something; I can’t explain it,” Gravel says. “He lived his life, had his friends, had everything. But he felt this profound pain about life. A sadness we couldn’t do anything about.”
After graduating from high school in Outremont, Pierre-Martin dropped out of CÉGEP. Unsure what he wanted to do, he left for Europe for six months, mailing photos back home from France and Germany.
In early 1998, he was back in Montreal, living in a second-floor apartment next to his childhood home. He would visit his parents next door on most days, call when he didn’t.
But that February, he hit a rough stretch. In the span of a week, he went through an emotional breakup, lost his job at a chocolate shop and nearly burned down his apartment — he had fallen asleep with eggs cooking in a frying pan.
His mother worried about him. She knew he was fragile and feared it was all too much at once.
When he didn’t come by on Feb. 14, 1998, she called and went to check on his apartment. She couldn’t find him. When two more days went by without hearing from him, they reported him missing on Feb. 17.
Police interviewed his friends and newspapers reported the disappearance. At first, everyone thought he might have fled back to Europe. Perhaps he just needed some space. At one point, the family wasn’t sure what to think anymore.
As years went by and investigators made little progress, it seemed increasingly likely they might never know what happened. Had Pierre-Martin died? The idea crossed their minds, but his parents always assumed they would have somehow found out if that was the case.
So they stayed put, hoping their son would return.
“I needed to know that if he ever came back, he knew where to find us,” Gravel says. “That’s what I would tell myself. It was my safety net — he’s far away, he’s not ready to come back, one day he will and he’ll explain himself and we’ll understand.”
With little else to hold on to, Arnaud, 68, kept replaying the last conversation he had with his son Pierre-Martin.
“Céline was at work and I spoke to him on the phone,” he says.
Whatever happened after Pierre-Martin hung up, he says he’ll never know for sure. But he’s come to cherish those last words from his son: “Salut, Papa.”
Jean-François Veillette was a year into his new role as co-ordinating sergeant with the Sûreté du Québec’s special investigations unit when he came across the case of the “unknown man from Verchères” in April 2017.
The unit handles unsolved cases, including active missing person cases and kidnappings. It’s also mandated to look through unidentified bodies or bones from the provincial coroner’s office to try to match them to disappearances.
Veillette, a 15-year veteran of the force, approached the case the way he does any other one: he started with where the body was found and built the possibilities outward.
No DNA sampling or analysis was conducted during the autopsy
in 1998. But compared to other unidentified remains, Veillette was working with a fair amount of information: he knew the body had been underwater for some time before being found and had the person’s height, weight, approximate age and a detailed description of the clothing.
Found downstream from the Jacques Cartier Bridge, there were chances the body belonged to someone from Montreal, but he knew it wasn’t a given.
For two months on and off, Veillette sifted through missing person reports one by one until he noticed “striking similarities” and came to a possible match: Pierre-Martin Arnaud, 21, reported missing in Montreal two months before the body was found.
But he needed more information to be sure.
Since the body was never identified, it was never claimed by a family member, either. Officially designated as unclaimed, the province of Quebec took charge of it. In September 1998, about six months after it was retrieved, it was sent to the Laval Cemetery to be buried in a communal grave.
Working with the coroner’s office 19 years later, Veillette traced the remains to Laval. He hoped to retrieve either DNA or dental evidence that would allow him to confirm his findings by matching it to DNA gathered from PierreMartin’s biological father.
But three separate attempts to exhume the body proved fruitless. Maps had been drawn of which body was buried where in the lot, but too much time had passed to find it. Today, roughly 1,500 unclaimed bodies are buried in that same plot of land.
At that point, Veillette knew what he needed to do. The risk was there — what if his match wasn’t right? — but he was confident in his work.
With little other choices left, he decided to track down the Arnauds.
“It’s often what we don’t want to do: confront a family after 20 years,” Veillette said recently. “But I was sure of the match … and the good it could do for them.”
It was a late Friday afternoon in September 2017 when the Arnauds returned home from running errands to find Veillette’s message waiting for them on their answering machine.
Gravel’s insides clenched as she listened to it.
She hesitated at first, wanting some time to ready herself, but returned Veillette’s call that evening.
I needed to know that if he ever came back, he knew where to find us. That’s what I would tell myself. It was my safety net.
They Found Him Two Months Later And It Took 20 years for Me To Know? Twenty Years Of Waiting. Waiting For Something You Want So Badly.
He had good news and bad news, he told her, but didn’t want to say more until they could meet in person. They agreed to a meeting at the family’s Rosemont home the next Tuesday.
Gravel and Arnaud were emotional wrecks the whole weekend, unsure how to pass time or stop their minds from wandering. They cleaned the entire house to keep busy, then scrubbed it all over again. One moment they would look at each other and break down crying. The next they would burst out in laughter, near delirium.
When Tuesday came, Gravel asked her brother and sister-inlaw, both social workers, to attend the meeting in support. She put a pot of coffee on and set out muffins. They all sat around the dining room table and Veillette began to explain how he believed he had tracked down their missing son.
To be sure, he slid a paper folded in three across the table.
He unfolded the first third: photos of a sweater, pants and boots from the autopsy. Gravel confirmed they could be PierreMartin’s. She then asked Veillette to unfold the paper completely. He warned it would not be easy to see.
“It’s been 20 years that I’ve been waiting,” she told him, sternly. “I think I need to really see it.”
Veillette unfolded the paper once more, revealing a photo of Pierre-Martin’s face from when his body was discovered.
It was slightly distended, but Gravel could recognize her son’s jawline and chin. The cold river water in the winter, a coroner later noted, had helped preserve the body.
Then Veillette turned over the paper to show one last photo — Pierre-Martin’s body laid out on a table. There was no longer any doubt about it. All four identified the man looking up at them.
Over the next two hours, Veillette recounted to the family what he believed happened. It was likely Pierre-Martin had jumped from the Jacques Cartier Bridge, he told them.
He also tried to explain what had gone wrong, breaking the news that police had actually found their son’s body in 1998, but failed to identify him.
Gravel remembers the news washing over her in a wave of “complete incomprehension.”
“They found him two months later and it took 20 years for me to know?” she says. “Twenty years of waiting. Waiting for something you want so badly. Twenty years of not knowing what happened.”
Why it took so long to make the connection — and how the error occurred in the first place — remains hard to trace.
Until last year, the municipal police force still considered the case open. The police file on the case, obtained by the Montreal Gazette, contains more than 20 pages of handwritten police notes and correspondence.
The documents detail a fraught search to try to identify the body and several failed attempts at matching it to missing person reports from Montreal.
There were possibilities: a young man who disappeared from Vaudreuil and two men reported missing from Montreal, both having gone through relationship troubles before vanishing. But the leads never amounted to a match.
“After verifications,” says one police note dated April 27, 1998, “I’m informed the case has been solved and the missing person was found alive. So not our body, obviously.”
Another from that August: “According to the officer who answered my call at Station 11, the case hadn’t been solved. I was transferred to the investigator. He confirmed to me that the case was closed.”
The police force wanted to have the body’s dental records published with a note in Quebec’s dentists’ journal, but, as was noted in early 1999, the coroner told officers: “It won’t help at all because dentists never follow up to this kind of approach.”
The Sûreté municipale de SteJulie disbanded in 2004 after an agreement between several nearby municipalities to create a new police force, the Régie intermunicipale de police Richelieu St-Laurent.
Though technology wasn’t what it is today and officers aren’t immune to mistakes, the force’s chief inspector Yanic Parent said in an interview that he remains convinced officers did all they could on their end to try to identify the body in 1998.
“Unfortunately,” Parent said, “there was a link that wasn’t made. But it wasn’t at our level.”
The same day the body was retrieved, the Ste-Julie police forwarded the information to all police forces within an 80-kilometre radius. That included the Montreal police (then called the Montreal Urban Community Police).
In an interview, the Montreal police could not explain why the force failed to make the match at that point.
According to spokesperson Emmanuel Anglade, investigators verified three missing person cases in Montreal to see if the information it received about the body corresponded, but to no avail.
“We understand it was 20 long years for the family,” Anglade said. “At the time of the disappearance, we took all the steps technology and investigative techniques allowed us to take 20 years ago.
“Unfortunately, our searches weren’t conclusive.”
As a last resort, the St-Julie police decided to send the information to the Journal de Montréal in hopes a family might recognize the details. The resulting article, kept in the police file all these years, was published on June 6, 1998.
“Four unclaimed bodies,” the headline reads.
The fourth body described the one found in Verchères, listing the same weight, height and clothes Gravel had given investigators about Pierre-Martin when she reported him missing.
Only two months before that article, details about Pierre-Martin’s disappearance — and a precise description — had run in two other newspapers, the Montreal Gazette and La Presse, with photos of Pierre-Martin and a plea from Montreal police for anyone who had seen him to contact investigators.
With the benefit of retrospect, it is hard to consider — had anyone, from readers to police officers, noticed the similarities, the Arnauds could have been spared 20 years of strife. But it wasn’t the case.
After Veillette made the connection last year, both police forces involved were advised and officially closed the two cases. A death certificate was issued for PierreMartin and 19 years after an initial one a second coroner’s report was completed.
After so many ups and downs, Gravel says today, she has “no room left for resentment or anger” toward anyone for failing to match the two cases together. Her only wish, she adds, is that it never happens to another family again.
Veillette seems to have been able to give her that comfort.
For nearly 10 years now, he explained, a protocol in place ensures that when a person is reported missing in Quebec, police immediately gather dental records or personal belongings that would allow them to obtain DNA.
The information is entered into a provincial bank within 60 days and if a body is ever found, the match will be made automatically.
“What’s for sure,” Veillette said, “is that if this case were to take place today, the error wouldn’t happen again.”
On a sunny day this summer, Gravel and Arnaud, now married 43 years, made the drive out to Laval to visit the communal grave where their son is buried.
After hearing about PierreMartin’s story, the funeral home planted a metal stake in the ground above the grave. Affixed to the pole is a golden marker bearing his name.
For Gravel and Arnaud, the gesture was enough. It isn’t retrieving Pierre-Martin’s remains that matter, Gravel says, but rather the peace of mind that comes with knowing where he is and what the plaque signifies: that two decades later, he is no longer anonymous. As Claude puts it, “that he is someone.”
Sitting on a bench overlooking the grave, Gravel spoke with a great lightness.
As time went by and the prospect of never having answers seemed more and more likely, Pierre-Martin became a taboo subject within the family.
His disappearance nearly tore the family apart. The parents blamed each other. There were screaming matches and bitterness and accusations.
Long ago, Gravel collected any photos she had of him and stored them away in a box. The mere sight of him stirred too many emotions.
Their other son, Jean-Michel, harboured resentment toward Pierre-Martin. Thinking he had simply left the family behind, he grew angry as he watched the toll it took on his parents.
Jean-Michel’s children — ages 16, 10 and eight — were never told their uncle existed. The family didn’t know what to say about him and even less how to explain the lingering wounds his disappearance caused.
That’s why last November his mother insisted Pierre-Martin receive a proper funeral. She wanted the whole family there — a moment to heal together and for everyone to make peace, to end the tension and finally speak about what happened in an intimate setting.
At the service, Gravel held back tears as she read from a letter.
“We never forgot about you,” she said. “We know you did what you did to stop suffering and without thinking for one second that you were leaving an entire family disoriented, shaken and weakened.
“Your departure dates back to almost 20 years and 20 years without knowing is too long,” she said in closing. “We just want to say this to you: We love you, but above all, rest in peace.”
The funeral home had arranged to have a photo of Pierre-Martin displayed in the chapel, the same photo that circulated when he was reported missing: a wide smile, bangs falling over his left eye.
When all was settled, Gravel asked if she could have it.
Back at home, she placed it against the china cabinet in her dining room, on display for all to see. There were no more secrets, no more questions. To her, it finally felt like Pierre-Martin could be part of the family again.