On a rusted gravestone plaque in Moree cemetery lies the answer to an almost 70-year-long family mystery that has consumed Donna Truscott: what happened to her grandfather, Donald Gordon Buckley?
“Donald G. Buckley known by many as Arthur Johnson,” the gravestone reads. “Passed into God’s care 16-1-1980 age 49 years.”
It closes off a peculiar case that fell into police hands last year after Truscott lodged Buckley as a missing person seven decades after he was last seen by his family in Sydney. In 1953, at age 24, Buckley had walked out on his wife, two young sons and baby daughter.
“Inquiries have subsequently established that the man changed his identity and died from natural causes in 1980 at Moree,” NSW police said in a statement on Tuesday.
For Truscott, it brings a sense of closure that a tip her father, Buckley’s son, had received in 1972, after he put an ad in a Sydney paper searching for his father, was partially true. He was told his father had died in Moree and had been buried under a different name.
But the death certificate – which shows Buckley died of natural causes 27 years after he walked out on his family – has raised even more questions for Truscott on the life he lived during that time.
The death certificate shows Buckley had changed his name several times, from Arthur Johnson to Arthur Harold Alfred Johnson to Donald Gordon Johnson and Arthur Gordon Buckley. It says he was 49 years old when he died.
“My grandfather was not 49 in 1980,” says Truscott. “My grandfather was 50.”
She also wonders who placed the plaque at the cemetery that reads “In loving memory of our Father”, and lists her father and aunt and uncle as Buckley’s three children.
Finding where Buckley was buried and how he died rules out two of the police’s initial suspicions – that Buckley met with foul play or he took his own life. This leaves their remaining theory that Buckley had changed his identity to avoid paying child support as a likely catalyst for his disappearance.
Buckley had made a couple of child support payments in 1954, the year after he left, after a court order, but then they stopped.
Truscott began looking for her grandad shortly before her father died in 2018.
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 also found Buckley’s father had killed himself the same year he went missing.
After Truscott reported her grandad missing, her search faced another grim twist.
She received a call from Queensland police who said her DNA profile, which she had uploaded to GEDmatch – which helps people build their family tree – had matched her 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. Two months later, after Truscott provided police with her family tree, the police identified the woman as 38-year-old Tanya Lee Glover, a distant cousin who Truscott never met.
Truscott says she will continue to search for answers on the life her grandfather in the 27 years after he left his family, this time trawling through archives provided by the local council.
“It has been a wild goose chase,” says Truscott. “But I’ve still got questions I’d like to get answered.”
