On Jan. 6, 1956, John Robinson, a 77-year-old Irish immigrant with dementia and diabetes, wandered away from his home at 7151 Halifax St. in Burnaby and vanished without a trace.
“He just wandered off one day,” his grandson Jim Chesworth told the NOW. “He thought he was back in his childhood in Ireland, my mom said. He used to go out and tend the sheep, and he figured he was going up Burnaby Mountain looking for his missing sheep. He’d done it several times but had always come back.”
Chesworth, who was five when his grandpa went missing, doesn’t remember much about him, just that he sometimes sent him across the street with a dime to buy cherries from a farmer.
“It was all farms back in those days in the mid-’50s in Burnaby,” Chesworth said.
He and his siblings and many cousins are still confounded that they’re grandfather was never found, even after police searched the area for days.
So, when they read that human remains had been found on Burnaby Mountain last week, they thought their questions might finally be answered.
“Everybody was all excited and just ‘This has to be him. How many bodies can there be up there?’ We’ve been trying to put this to rest for a long time,” Chesworth said.
But it was not to be.
Chesworth got a call from Burnaby RCMP Wednesday morning, telling him police had made a tentative identification, and they believed the remains belonged to a person who went missing in 2015.
“Now they’re going to do DNA to verify it,” Chesworth said.
Burnaby RCMP has since confirmed they are investigating a possible link between the remains found last week and a man who went missing in March 2015.
“His partial remains were found later that year near Forest Grove Park in Burnaby,” stated a police news release Wednesday.
That man’s death was not deemed suspicious, police said.
“Through forensic analysis, police are currently investigating as to whether the remains located last weekend are linked to this same case,” states the release.
The B.C. Coroners Service is also conducting its own fact-finding investigation related to the new remains to determine how, where, when and by what means that individual died.
Every time human remains are found in the city, local police get calls from relatives of missing people looking for closure, according to Burnaby RCMP.
There are currently 25 unsolved historical missing persons files dating back to 1965 on the Burnaby RCMP’s books, police said.
Chesworth said he appreciated how quickly local police responded to his inquiry and informed him the found remains were not likely those of his grandfather.
“They didn’t want to leave our family hanging,” he said.
Follow Cornelia Naylor on Twitter @CorNaylor
Email [email protected]
