���߲ݴ�ý

Jay’s sister Amanda Boyle came across a file on the OPP Missing Persons Unidentified Remains online database regarding a pair of pants containing human remains that were found in Niagara Region in 1998. The pants and belt look similar to the red Levi’s jeans and belt Jay was wearing when he disappeared in 1995.

It is believed six teens took an ill-fated ride onto Lake Ontario after stealing a boat and a water tricycle from a Pickering marina on March 17. The vessels nor the bodies were ever recovered.

As extracting DNA from the small sample of remains has proven difficult, the remains are still unidentified.

“As far as we’re concerned they’re trying,” says Jay’s other sister Siobhan Boyle.

Private investigator Bruce Ricketts questions the entire case surrounding the pants. He has been pressing both the Niagara Regional Police Service (NRPS) and the Office of the Chief Coroner to get to the bottom of identifying the remains and clearing up questions he has.

In fact, he’s taking his issues with NRPS to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

Ricketts has started a in order to do so. He’s investigated the case for free thus far, but with the high costs to take this on, he hopes to raise $4,500.

Ricketts’s campaign explains one of two sets of bones found on April 10, 1998 in Niagara was encased in a pair of, what the police report at the time called, “red denim Jeans from Levi Strauss.”

In 2014 the unidentified remains were sent to the Ontario coroner in Toronto for DNA testing. Through the Ontario Ombudsman, Ricketts and the Boyle family were granted a meeting with the coroner’s office. Ricketts learned the pants studied by the forensic anthropologist had a waterproof coating and cannot be a red Levi’s pair of jeans from the 1990s.

“Why the contradiction in descriptions?” he says. ” Who is right? Who is wrong? Are the remains recovered in 1998 the same remains viewed by the anthropologist in 2014?”

He also says he has reasons to believe the remains were misplaced at one point, and questions the continuity of evidence.

“They won’t give me access to any autopsy information,” he says. “They won’t give me access to viewing the evidence they have.”

Ricketts asked the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD) to step in but his request was turned down by the office, stating it was not in the public’s interest.

Niagara police inspector Jim Leigh explains police were called in 1998 to the Sir Adam Beck Hydroelectric Generating Station in Queenston, which is next to the Niagara River, after staff came across two sets of human remains when they were cleaning out grates in the forebay. This was the first time they were cleaned in seven years.

He says the pants could have simply looked red when they were initially found, but more orange at the autopsy stage.

“Is that red or is that orange?” he says in an in-person interview, pointing to the photo. “Are they red when they’re wet and as they dry out they go orange? Here they’re wet.”

He explains the remains were carefully put into an evidence bag and sent to Hamilton General Hospital for an autopsy.

“I have no questions whatsoever about the continuity of the items we recovered from Sir Adam Beck in 1998 to the items that were examined by the coroner,” Leigh says.

The inspector says it is highly unlikely a body that went missing in Lake Ontario would end up at the station.

“It’s impossible for the remains to have come from Lake Ontario because Queenston is approximately 14 kilometres from Lake Ontario,” he says. “The Niagara River flows into Lake Ontario. So somebody would have to travel up the Niagara River and then they’d have to physically climb the escarpment, walk around and then enter here.”

To Ricketts, a positive ID on Jay Boyle would open a “whole new can of fish.

“How does Jay’s body end up in the Niagara River if he was lost in Lake Ontario?” he says. “The physics just aren’t there.”

Police are also anxious to learn the identity of the remains.

“I can’t say that that is not the remains of Jay Boyle but it is highly unlikely, but we’re still moving forward to 100 per cent exclude him if that information is correct coming from the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto.”

For the Boyle family, if the remains turn out to belong to Jay, there would be some closure.

“They’re currently trying to get DNA again from those remains they say,” Siobhan says.

When asked for confirmation, forensic anthropologist Kathy Gruspier wrote in an email, “We are unable to publicly release information about any of our death investigations in accordance with the privacy provisions of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.”

Leigh says hypothetically, if the remains do belong to Jay, NRPS would conduct an investigation. He did note “When they examined the bones at the forensic autopsy there were no obvious signs of foul play.”

Siobhan says Jay has been ruled out of the second set of remains found in Niagara. Her mother submitted a piece of his umbilical cord in order to create his DNA profile. Siobhan hopes the other families that haven’t yet, will submit their DNA as well. She says new legislation known as Lindsey’s Law, which has created a new DNA-based national missing persons database, may now provide a chance that one of the boys will one day be identified.

“It would be nice for at least one of us to have that,” she says.