- Donna shares how a deathbed promise to her dad led her on a search to uncover a decades-old family mystery
- She reveals her grandfather had vanished without a trace, sparking decades of unanswered questions
- Donna says she bought four DNA test kits in the hope a genealogy search might reveal new clues
- Here, Donna Truscott, 44, from Sydney, NSW, shares her shocking real-life story of how a cold case was solved with a DNA test
My father, Donald, wheezed.
“I wish I’d found out what happened to my dad,” he said sadly.
I took his hand.
“I’ll keep looking for you,” I promised him.
It was 2016, and Dad had been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.
His own father, Donald Gordon Buckley, had walked out on the family when Dad was four.
No-one knew whether he was alive or dead.
Read more: I was swapped at birth!
In 1972, Dad had put an ad in a Sydney paper asking for information on the whereabouts of his father.
Afterwards, he received a call from someone who said Donald Senior was found dead on a riverbank in Moree, NSW, and had been buried there under a different name. We didn’t know if that was true.
Dad died, aged 69, still yearning for answers.
Meanwhile, my mum’s side of the family had started researching their family history, too.
I lived with my mother Margaret, 70, and her sister Jennie, 57, had already discovered our first ancestor in Australia was a German man called Henry.
One day, in 2017, I saw that the online genealogy platform My Heritage was having a sale.
“We should do a DNA test,” I told Mum. “It might throw up some more answers for our family tree.”
“Great idea, let’s see if Jennie would like to do it, too,” she said.
Aunty Jennie was keen, as was my sister Joanne, so I ordered four DNA test kits.
We did the saliva swab and sent them off to the lab.
Six weeks later, we received our raw data.
I’d found out about a website called GEDmatch, which helps people build their family tree so I uploaded the data there.
The site provided an option to allow police to access it, too.
I ticked the box, hoping it might even shed some light, finally, on what happened to my grandad.
The site threw up hundreds of names of close DNA matches so Aunty Jennie and I visited the state archives to try to piece it all together.
At the same time, I kept up the search into what happened to Donald Senior.
Dad had told me his father had been very disconnected from his family, so I presumed no-one had ever tried looking for him before Dad had.
In 2022, I rang Blacktown police station and reported my grandfather missing, 70 years after he was last seen.
“He’d be about 94 by now, if he’s alive,” I told an officer.
Police opened an appeal for information, saying one of three things likely happened to him: he took his own life, changed his identity or met with foul play.
In June last year, I was sitting on my couch when I received an email from Queensland police regarding a suspected homicide.
“What should I do?” I asked Mum, suddenly nervous.
“Call them!” she urged.
I thought it had something to do with my grandad, but when I phoned, the detective told me it wasn’t about that.
“It’s in relation to the body of a female,” she said, explaining human remains had been found in 2022 hidden behind a wall in the basement of an apartment block in Alderley, Qld.
I went cold. It was the last thing I’d been expecting.
“How’s that connected to us?” I asked, confused.
She told me that DNA from the body had matched with Aunt Jennie’s DNA.
“We don’t have the deceased woman’s identity yet,” the detective continued. “Are there other members of your family whose DNA we could use to confirm?”
I told her I’d call back.
I spoke to Aunt Jennie who was as shocked as I was.
We asked Mum’s other sister Peggy, 61, if she’d provide her DNA to police and she agreed.
Later, it was confirmed by the police genealogist that there was a maternal link to the skeleton they’d found, through my mum, aunts, sister and me.
The woman was a very distant fourth or fifth cousin but there was enough DNA to undeniably narrow it down to our family.
Weeks later, Aunt Jennie called me in shock.
“They’ve just named the body on the news,” she said. “They say she’s called Tanya Lee Glover.”
I went online and found articles.
The Australian Federal Police’s national DNA program – that box I’d ticked on GEDmatch – had used our DNA to identify her.
I emailed the detective to say congratulations and she thanked us for our help. Now they knew who she was, they could investigate thoroughly and hopefully catch her alleged killer.
Tanya Glover had died approximately 12 years before, when she was 38, her body tightly wrapped and covered in layers of bedding and concealed in that spot for roughly a decade.
I read she had hearing and sight impairment, something that runs in our family, too.
She’d moved to Queensland from NSW in 2006 and hadn’t been in touch with her relatives for a long time.
That made me sad.
We don’t yet know what happened to her or who killed her. The investigation is ongoing. Police believe she was likely killed in 2010 and have put up a $500,000 reward for any information leading to a prosecution.
My family is glad we helped identify her so she could be given back to her loved ones.
“Being a part of this is the proudest moment of my life,” Aunt Jennie said.
When I uploaded our DNA, I never imagined a cold case would be solved with DNA test.
I encourage other people who’ve done DNA testing to upload their data onto GEDmatch. There are about 750 unidentified human remains in Australia, and it’s important these people are returned to
their families.
As for my grandfather, we tracked down his death certificate, which shockingly has seven different names on it. We don’t know if the aliases were to avoid child support payments or for more sinister reasons.
We now know he died of renal failure in 1980 but his life leading up to that remains a mystery.
I think it’s fascinating how the evolution in science and technology can give us the forensic ability to solve mysteries like this.
I hope it brings closure to many other families searching for answers, including our own.
