‘Your father’s not there’: WWII veteran’s remains missing from Winnipeg grave

The remains of Second World War veteran Sgt. Gordon Patrick may be somewhere, but one place they are not is where they were expected to be.

In his grave in a Winnipeg cemetery.

His daughter Elizabeth’s decade-long odyssey to find him has turned into a mission to find out what happened to him and to receive compensation from the funeral industry conglomerate, which now owns the cemetery where he was supposed to have been buried in 1973.

“I’m angry,” Elizabeth said.

“I’m disappointed too, but I shouldn’t be. SCI (Service Corporation International) has a history of litigation in America. For them to say they are not responsible is on them at the end of the day.

“There is no body in the grave — who knows what happened to him?”

Patrick was a glider pilot with the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.

He married Elizabeth’s mother in the United Kingdom, but when she was a young child, the couple divorced and she never saw her dad again.

“He would phone occasionally, and my mother said ‘your daddy’s on the phone’, but I didn’t really know him,” Elizabeth said.

“He was just a voice I heard on the phone.”

Elizabeth began looking for her father about 10 years ago, but it wasn’t until last year, two years after her son died, himself a Canadian military veteran, on Dec. 24, 2022, that she discovered her dad had died and was buried in Green Acres. He is buried in a grave without a marker because no family could be found at the time.

She said she has learned an autopsy was done so likely her father was buried by the Chief Medical Examiner’s office at the time.

Elizabeth began the process of having her father’s remains exhumed and reburied next to her son in an Ontario cemetery’s Field of Honour.

Her 47-year-old son, Patrick Moulden, a decorated Royal Canadian Navy clearance diver, received a medal for bravery for his actions in Afghanistan. He defused an improvised explosive device with his bare hands and limited safety equipment, before the counter-IED team arrived, so a helicopter could land to evacuate a wounded comrade in Afghanistan.

But when a team of funeral home staff, all dressed in Hazmat type suits, began digging where Patrick was buried, they found nothing but dirt and clay.

“When the manager of the cemetery called me he said ‘I don’t know what to tell you, but your father’s not there’.”

Elizabeth said Oakbank RCMP have twice sent a team with ground penetrating radar to the site and also didn’t find any sign a person had been buried there. A RCMP spokesperson said the detachment has closed the file.

Since then, she hired a lawyer and is negotiating a settlement with the funeral company.

On the SCI website, the company says it is North America’s “leading provider of funeral, cremation and cemetery services” and is in eight provinces and 44 U.S. states.

A SCI spokeswoman said on Thursday the company would send a statement to the Free Press on Friday, but no response was received.

Elizabeth said after the divorce, her father came to Canada in 1956, and she and her mother moved to Canada in 1965.

“I didn’t know where he was or if he married and had any children,” she said. “Life gets in the way and I didn’t look for him for years.”

A short obituary in the Free Press at the time stated Patrick had died in the St. Boniface Hospital, aged 48 years, on Jan. 30, 1973.

Patrick, who lived at Apt. 332D-118 Broadway, was to be buried at the Green Acres Memorial Gardens on Feb. 2, at 3 p.m., with Rev. S Foreman officiating.

Even though her father’s remains won’t be there, Elizabeth will still put a headstone marking his military service in the plot beside her son.

“A monument with no remains, thanks to Green Acres,” she said.

“This means he is no longer eligible for a Last Post headstone. That means I have to pay for it myself.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca