In 1972 Donald Paul Buckley put an ad in a Sydney paper asking if anyone had information on the whereabouts of his father – Donald Gordon Buckley.
Almost 20 years earlier, when Donald Paul was four, his then 24-year-old father had walked out on his wife and three children.
After the ad Donald Paul received a call, his daughter, Donna Truscott, says.
“[The caller] said that his father was found dead on a riverbank in Moree, and had been buried there under a different name,” she says. “This man, however, knew my grandfather’s real name was Donald Gordon Buckley.”
It remains unclear whether the caller was correct.
It’s one of the many threads that 44-year-old Truscott has been pulling over the past few years to fulfil her father’s wish: to unravel the mystery of what happened to his father and her grandfather.
Her father has now died and so far there have been few leads. But in June she received an email from the Queensland police. Truscott had uploaded her DNA profile to GEDmatch, which helps people build their family tree, in an attempt to find a lead on her grandfather. She had clicked a box that allowed police to access the data.
The site matched her DNA with the remains of a woman found in Brisbane, and helped unravel part of another mystery on her mother’s side of the family. But she was still left with the question: what happened to Donald Gordon Buckley?
A mysterious grandfather
Truscott had grown up being told her grandfather, who would now be in his 90s, was dead.
Then, in 2016, shortly after her grandmother had died and after her father had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, her father revealed he did not know whether his father was dead.
Buckley had made a couple of child support payments in 1954, the year after he left, after a court order. But then the payments stopped.
Truscott began trawling through archives. She found the divorce file her grandmother had lodged after her grandfather went missing, which revealed that Buckley was often violent. She found Buckley’s father had killed himself the same year he went missing.
She found out her grandfather – who had worked as a labourer in the Sydney suburb of Warwick Farm until he disappeared – sometimes went under the alias Donald Butler.
Then she had a match on Ancestry from a cousin she had never met who shared a photo of Donald Gordon Buckley that appeared to have been taken several years after he was last seen alive by his family.
“Did he change his name somehow? I don’t know,” she says. “Is this Moree story true? I don’t know.”
Truscott decided it was time to take the next step. Last year she rang Blacktown police station and reported her grandfather missing, 70 years after he was last seen.
Police are now appealing to the public for information and believe one of three things has happened: he took his own life, changed his identity to avoid paying child support, or met foul play.
A grim twist
When Truscott was contacted by Queensland police in June, her first thought was they had found her grandfather somewhere in the state.
“But then they said there was a female found under a unit block and my head just started spinning,” she says.
Truscott had uploaded her DNA profile and her mother’s to GEDMatch and it had matched with a woman whose remains were found in December last year by cleaners. The woman had been buried in a locked area behind the wall of a Brisbane unit complex for about 13 years.
Truscott provided police with her family tree. Two months later they identified the woman as 38-year-old Tanya Lee Glover, a distant cousin who Truscott never met.
“The next piece of this investigative jigsaw puzzle is to try to establish who knew Ms Glover so that we can build a victim profile of her and try to identify any persons who may have wished to harm her or who had motive to do so,” Det Supt Andrew Massingham said in August when Glover’s identity was revealed.
Guardian Australia has contacted Queensland police for comment.
The mystery of what happened to Truscott’s grandfather also continues.
Insp Jason Pietruszka, the crime manager of Blacktown police area command, says police have made inquiries through a number of agencies, including border force, the defence force and the courts, but so far there has been no recorded trace of Buckley since 1954.
They are also trying to confirm the validity of the tip that Buckley had been found dead on the riverbank in Moree, and whether or not he was buried under a different name.
“For us at the moment, it’s an old school-type investigation,” Pietruszka says. “We’re dealing with a time where everything was paper-based.”
“It would be nice to know if it wasn’t suicide and that person has gone on to have a different life,” he says. “Life back then was pretty tough for a lot of people, so taking on a new identity to start afresh might not be beyond the realm of possibility.”
Even if Truscott never finds out what happened to her grandfather, she says having her search help police identify the remains as Glover will mean it was not all for nothing.
“[Police] were able to find out who she was and tell her mum and dad, who had no idea she was dead,” she says.
“Giving back someone their identity, giving them a name, and hopefully helping her find justice is one of the most bittersweet rewards you can ever do in your life.”
