Painstakingly pulled from cold, hard ground, the remains of a teenage boy may breathe new life into the murder investigation of his older sister and could raise questions about his own death more than two decades after an apparent suicide.
In a rare step Tuesday, Toronto Police took more than seven hours to exhume the body of 15-year-old Dwayne Biddersingh, who in 1992 fell from the 22nd storey balcony of the Jamaican family’s Parkdale apartment in what was deemed a suicide at the time.
The coroner’s office — who enacted their authority to unearth the state burial plot where no plaque marks Biddersingh’s name — set up with investigators from homicide squad’s cold case unit in Beechwood Cemetery, as snow swirled around marble tombstones and settled on synthetic flowers.
Though unearthing remains is an uncommon investigative step, police now say they want to make sure nothing was missed after the body of Biddersingh’s 17-year-old sister Melonie was found inside a burnt-out suitcase in 1994, with signs of torture.
Waterlogged and with the grave’s sides caving in, crews were delayed for several hours while they were forced to reinforce the sides with concrete slabs and metal planks.
After 4 p.m., a decision was made to open the casket — too damaged to be lifted from its final resting place. Biddersingh’s remains were placed in a container and loaded into a black coroner’s van to be transported to the Toronto morgue.
That’s where Kathy Gruspier comes in, a forensic anthropologist who specializes in bones.
