CANADA George Norman Heys, 22,Toronto, 28 November 1978 *fresh initiative*

[Nate_Bro]

2022 rbbm

HUNTER: Bureaucratic brick wall in identifying missing man

George Heys vanished into the ether on a cold November day in 1978.

torontosun.com

''Heys was a loner, who didn’t have a girlfriend, maybe there was a drug problem. He did a 90-day stint in rehab at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, the predecessor to CAMH. The Queen St. W. institution would be one of the last places George Heys would be seen.

“He was playing volleyball at the institute and one of the nurses came in and said ‘George, you can’t be in here. You’re not a patient anymore,” Jones told the News Now. “And then Nov. 28, gone, just gone.”

“My grandparents died without knowing what happened,” Kimberly Heys said in 2020.

As to what happened that November day, no one is really sure about that either. Maybe it was suicide. Maybe it was murder.

“Maybe he was murdered because he owed someone money. My dad didn’t know. Was he gay?” Heys said. “We did not know any of that.”

On Tuesday, an exhausted Kimberly Heys once more emailed the Oswego DA Oakes.

“To this date, my Aunt Dolores (Jones) [and other family members] and I continue to wait day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, YEAR-TO-YEAR without answers,” Heys wrote.

“Yet we all believe that the remains of the person who washed up on the Syracuse side of Lake Ontario four months after ‘Georgie’s’ disappearance are, in fact, that of my Uncle. Here we are approaching 2023 …”

She added: “When people watch TV/movies they are/we are led to believe that it is important to law enforcement and others in the mix to solve missing persons cases. We are certainly not seeing ANY amount of urgency being given to this situation, Sir.”

We spend hours doing research into these cases on Websleuths, and do so looking for no recognition or reward. Just googling George Heys name would have brought up these threads. For a journalist to blatantly claim credit for this and imply he made the discovery is disappointing. If the John Doe is George, I hope the family can find peace in knowing the search is over, and that he has been resting the entire time.

 

[Aurora90]

bump.

 

[dotr]

IDENTIFIED! lengthy article..
Brad Hunter Feb 08, 2026

EXCLUSIVE: Man who vanished from Toronto in 1978 finally identified and home

On Nov. 28, 1978, George Norman Heys, 22, disappeared from Toronto. Earlier this year, he was finally identified. Read more.

torontosun.com

“I kept my word to my dad. I promised him I would not quit until my uncle George was home,” Heys told The Toronto Sun.

What happened to George?​

On Nov. 28, 1978, George Norman Heys, 22, disappeared from Toronto. When his brother John couldn’t contact him, he called Toronto cops to report the young man missing. There were no answers.
Was he voluntarily dropping out? Was it drugs? Was it suicide? Was it foul play?''

''The Oswego John Doe remained unidentified and was laid to rest in the cold case files. But sometimes, a simple mistake can send an investigation off the rails — or breathe new life into it.
Currents in the Niagara River and then Lake Ontario are unpredictable. A body can end up anywhere.
“Toronto did exhaustive work trying to find out what happened,” TPS Det. Sheena Cannon said, but added that the era in which Heys vanished had roadblocks.''

The cops who brought George Heys home: Det. Const. Sara Mummery, NRP, Lieut. Lori Burger, and Sgt. John Chodubski, Oswego P.D., Investigator Rob Obrist of Oswego County Sheriff’s Office and Det. Sheena Cannon, TPS. BRAD HUNTER/ TORONTO SUN
''On Jan. 8, 2026, the unidentified remains of “John Doe” were positively identified via DNA comparison by the RCMP National DNA Databank as being George Norman Heys.''

 

[Nate_Bro]

We spend hours doing research into these cases on Websleuths, and do so looking for no recognition or reward. Just googling George Heys name would have brought up these threads. For a journalist to blatantly claim credit for this and imply he made the discovery is disappointing. If the John Doe is George, I hope the family can find peace in knowing the search is over, and that he has been resting the entire time.

I want to correct something I said earlier. I said that Brad Hunter from the Toronto Sun sort of “stole” the scoop. I’ve spoken with him briefly, and that isn’t really what happened. What seems to have happened is that after the connection was made, George’s niece, Kimberley Heys, chose to frame the story as a kind of “I promised my dad I’d find my uncle and I kept that promise” narrative before approaching the journalist. From her own posts, it appears this story has also been used as a form of moral leverage over certain estranged family members, which may explain the motivation to do such a thing.

As for Brad, he did tell me that had he known the original connection was made here, he would have give Websleuths a shout out. He later published additional articles and didn’t follow through on that. I suppose journalists are a bit like politicians in that regard: the truth often comes second to a good story.

In the end, what matters most is that George has been found. It’s just deeply sad and unsettling that even in death, someone can still be used as a means for personal gain.

 

[Aurora90]

As a Canadian, I just want to say we sometimes have really good PR.

Hearing he had the opportunity to rectify/update the details in later articles but chose not to, well let’s just say that hit a little close to home for me.

I’m sorry that experience happened for you.

But I’m so glad that he is now confirmed to be identified and for what it’s worth, here on Websleuths we know you were the first on record to have made the connection.

 

[Nate_Bro]

As a Canadian, I just want to say we sometimes have really good PR.

Hearing he had the opportunity to rectify/update the details in later articles but chose not to, well let’s just say that hit a little close to home for me.

I’m sorry that experience happened for you.

But I’m so glad that he is now confirmed to be identified and for what it’s worth, here on Websleuths we know you were the first on record to have made the connection.

It’s just so foreign to me. I’ve made hundreds of anonymous tips worldwide, and I’ve only ever seen anything like this happen once before, and never to this extent. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t change the final outcome, but it’s still striking. Being on the other side of the world makes it nearly impossible to track cases after submitting information, aside from whatever gets posted publicly. And we all know official responses to submissions are almost non-existent, so nothing really comes back through official channels either. I’m not sure if this is a Canadian thing, perhaps the RCMP has specific policies or guidance around this? As a Canadian, what’s your take on the Rocco Arthur Recchia case that I tried to link to a Canadian John Doe?

 

[dotr]

I fear I may have some bitter sweet news for Georges family. If he was last seen in Toronto central, it seems plausible to me that he entered the Lake... I'm not familiar with the North American seasons but by the sounds of it it was winter, so it would have been freezing cold.
If that is the case, there is a John Doe that was found on the American side of the lake a few months later, same descriptors, dressed for winter, and also sporting a 'Devil' tattoo on the upper right arm.

It's been 40+ years, I hope this is the break they are looking for.

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs)

You were absolutely right Nate_Bro!