On a cold January day in 1953, deep inside Vancouver’s Stanley Park, a man walking his dog stumbled upon a strange mound of earth. Beneath a thin layer of soil and leaves lay two small boys curled up against each other as if they had fallen asleep. No one knew their names. No one knew where they had come from or why they had died here.

For nearly 70 years, the city lived with this haunting mystery until science decades later gave them back their identities. Derek and David De Alton, the children the press would forever call the babes in the woods. Before we begin this journey into a decades old mystery, if you love uncovering forgotten stories and chilling truths, please like this video, subscribe to the channel, and share your thoughts in the comments below.

Vancouver in 1953. A quiet city on the edge of the wild. In 1953, Vancouver was a very different city from the bustling metropolis it would one day become. Nestled between the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean and the towering snowcapped mountains of British Columbia. It was a place where urban life met untamed wilderness.

Streets were lined with modest houses. Street cars rattled down the main avenues, and just minutes away from downtown, you could find yourself in dense forests, where the only sounds were the wind in the trees, and the distant cry of seabirds. At the heart of the city sat Stanley Park, 1,000 acres of towering evergreens, winding trails, and secluded beaches.

To many locals, it was a sanctuary. Parents brought their children here for weekend picnics. Couples strolled hand in hand along the seaw wall. Joggers and cyclists cut through the treeline paths. Yet for all its beauty, the park had an untamed, almost mysterious presence. Its thick underbrush and quiet clearance could hide almost anything.

On the morning of January 14th, 1953, a man set out to walk his dog along one of the lesserknown trails deep inside the park. The weather was chilly. The air damp with the lingering mist of winter rain. His dog, sniffing eagerly at the earth, suddenly darted off the path, barking furiously. The man followed, pushing through low branches until he saw his dog pouring at a small mound of dirt covered in the scattering of leaves.

At first, it might have looked like a pile of yard waste, someone’s discarded clippings from pruning a garden. But the dog’s behavior made it clear there was more here. The man knelt down and brushed aside the leaves. Beneath them, he saw a piece of fabric and then something pale and small. He froze. It was a child’s hand. His breath caught in his throat as he pulled away more debris.

What emerged from the earth was the partial form of a small body. Shock and dread gripped him. He stumbled backward, then ran toward the main path, heartpounding, until he found another park visitor and shouted for them to call the police. When officers arrived, they cordoned off the area and began carefully unearthing what lay beneath the mound.

The scene they uncovered would remain etched in the minds of every man and woman who worked it. Not one, but two small children lay there. boys, their arms bent gently toward each other as if in an eternal embrace. They were dressed in winter clothes, sweaters, coats, caps pulled low over their foreheads. Time and weather had already begun to take their toll on the bodies.

But even so, the boys looked heartbreakingly peaceful, as if they had simply lain down to sleep in the woods and never woken up. The officers exchanged grim looks. Who were they? How had they ended up here? And perhaps most pressing of all, where was their family? The discovery that shook a city.

News traveled fast in Vancouver, even in the 1950s. By that evening, whispers of the grizzly discovery had spread across the city. In an era before social media information traveled by word of mouth, radio bulletins, and the next day’s headlines, and when those headlines appeared, they were stark and unforgettable. Two boys found dead in Stanley Park.

The details, as far as the public knew, were sparse, but chilling. The children appeared to be between 6 and 10 years old. They were dressed warmly, but their clothing was worn and mismatched. One boy wore a red corduroy jacket. The other had a cap pulled snugly over his head. Near the bodies, investigators found a few personal items.

a small glass milk bottle, a crumbling biscuit, and a scrap of a woolen blanket. Nothing that offered an obvious clue about who they were or where they had come from. The medical examiner estimated that the boys had been dead for several months, possibly since the previous autumn. Cold weather had preserved the remains to some degree, but decomposition had still erased certain identifying features.

There were no obvious signs of gunshot wounds or stabbing. Still, their positioning and the deliberate covering with soil and leaves suggested that someone had placed them there intentionally. This was not a tragic accident in which two boys had simply wandered into the park and succumbed to the elements. Someone had hidden them.

Detectives began canvasing neighborhoods, visiting schools, and checking missing person’s reports from across the province. To their surprise, no report matched the descriptions of the boys. No distraught parents had come forward to say their children had failed to return home. This was a red flag and a mystery in itself.

If no one had reported them missing, did that mean the person responsible for them was also the one who ended their lives? The case was soon given a name by local journalists, the Babes in the Woods. It was a phrase borrowed from an old English folktale about two orphan children left to die in a forest.

The name captured the public’s imagination, but also their sympathy. In cafes, barberhops, in church gatherings, people speculated endlessly. Were the boys the children of a drifter? Immigrants who had fallen through the cracks? Or had they been hidden away deliberately to protect someone’s dark secret? Even as the city buzzed with theories, the police investigations struggled to advance.

The postwar years in Canada had brought waves of new residents from across the country and beyond, making it possible that the boys weren’t from Vancouver at all. Without fingerprints, photographs, or relatives to identify them, the case was already showing signs of going cold, even in its earliest days. theories and dead ends.

In the weeks following the discovery, Vancouver police pursued every lead they could find. Officers traveled to neighboring towns, knocking on doors and showing photographs of the boy’s clothing and belongings. They asked dock workers, shopkeepers, and teachers if they recognized the faces or even the small knitted caps found at the scene.

But the answer was always the same. No one knew them. The lack of identification fueled rumors. One theory suggested the boys were the children of transient workers, perhaps loggers or fishermen who had moved on before anyone noticed the children were gone. Another theory pointed toward the darker side of family life, that a parent or guardian unable to care for the boys had made a tragic and criminal choice.

Some even speculated the boys could have been brought from far away, their bodies left in the park because it was isolated and quiet. Investigators turned their attention to orphanages, foster homes, and church missions, hoping to find records of two missing boys who might match the description. But even those searches proved fruitless.

No names, no matches, no paperwork that pointed toward an answer. Meanwhile, forensic work in the 1950s was limited. Without DNA analysis, detectives relied on dental records, which were only useful if they had a name to match them against. Hair samples could be examined under a microscope, but yielded little useful information.

The boy’s cause of death remained elusive. There were no bullet wounds, no deep cuts, no blunt force fractures that could be seen. Yet the fact that they were buried and buried together suggested that their deaths were not natural. The mystery weighed heavily on the investigators. Many of them had children of their own.

The thought of two small boys meeting such an end, and no one stepping forward to claim them was something that stayed with them long after they went home each night. Over time, the trail began to grow cold. Leads dried up. The city moved forward as cities always do. But the memory of the babes in the woods lingered.

Their burial site in Stanley Park became a quiet, almost sacred space, not marked by an official monument, but known to locals who would pass by and remember the story. By the 1960s, the case file had been reduced to a dusty box of photographs, clothing samples, and handwritten notes. Detectives retired. New officers joined the force.

The mystery remained unsolved. And somewhere in Vancouver, there were likely people who knew more than they had ever said. But the decades rolled on in silence, and the boys remained without names. A breakthrough after 69 years, nearly 7 decades later in 2022. The story of the Babes in the Woods was almost a forgotten relic of Vancouver’s past.

A mystery known mainly to true crime enthusiasts and older residents who remembered the headlines. But within the Vancouver Police Department’s cold case unit, the case was never truly closed. The remains had been preserved, carefully stored for the day when science might provide answers. That day came with the arrival of advanced DNA testing and forensic genealogy tools that would have been unimaginable to the detectives of 1953.

These methods didn’t just examine DNA. They compared it to massive databases, building family trees, and identifying relatives through shared genetic markers. Investigators extracted DNA from the boy’s remains and submitted it for genealological analysis. From there, specialists began the painstaking work of tracing family connections, often starting with distant cousins or great aunts who had never even heard of the case.

Slowly, the branches of the family tree took shape, leading the team toward a surprising conclusion. The two boys were brothers. Further research revealed their identities. At last, Derek and David Dealtton. At the time of their deaths, Derek was 9 years old, David just seven. They had lived in the Vancouver area, and according to surviving family members, their lives had been marked by instability.

Their mother, a single parent, struggled to provide for them, and the boys were known to spend time wandering near the park. The revelation was bittersweet. On one hand, the boys were no longer nameless, their identities restored, their photographs returned to the public eye. On the other hand, the full truth of what happened to them remained shrouded in uncertainty.

Investigators suspected that their deaths had not been accidental. Evidence suggested poisoning or smothering methods that would leave little visible trace decades later. And though no living witnesses could confirm it, records hinted at a possible suspect, a family acquaintance who had been in the boy’s lives at the time and who had died long before DNA testing could implicate or clear them.

The news in 2022 stirred memories among Vancouver’s older residents. For those who had grown up hearing about the babes in the woods, the announcement brought a strange mix of closure and sadness. They finally had names for the children whose faces had haunted the city. But they also knew that justice in the legal sense would never be served.

Closure without justice. When the identities of Derek and David Dealtton were made public, the reaction was immediate. Messages of sympathy poured in from across Canada. People who had never met the boys felt connected to their story. Moved by the thought of two young brothers who had been lost to history for nearly 70 years.

The police arranged for the boys to be buried together under their real names side by side just as they had been found. The ceremony was small and private, attended by surviving family members and a few representatives from the Vancouver Police Department. For some in attendance, it was the first time they had ever been able to stand before a gravestone and say the boy’s names aloud.

But the truth remained frustratingly incomplete. Without a living suspect to question, investigators could not say definitively how or why the brothers had died. All they could confirm was that their bodies had been deliberately hidden in Stanley Park. Their deaths not the result of some tragic accident, but of human intent.

For the cold case unit, the identification represented a victory in the fight to restore names to the nameless. For the public, it was a reminder that some mysteries can linger for a lifetime only to be answered in fragments. And for the families involved, it was a mix of relief and renewed grief. Relief in finally knowing grief in knowing too late.

In interviews, detectives who had worked the case over the years spoke of how the babes in the woods had stayed with them. You don’t forget something like that. One retired officer said, “Two little boys taken before they had a chance to live their lives. We owed it to them to keep looking no matter how long it took.

In the end, the identification of Derek and David was as much about compassion as it was about investigation. They had been strangers to the city for nearly 70 years, buried in an unmarked grave of leaves in soil. But now their names would be remembered not as an unsolved headline, but as two real children who had once laughed, played, and lived among the people of Vancouver.

For nearly 70 years, the babes in the woods were riddled without an answer. Two small boys hidden away in the shadows of Stang Park. Now they have names and a place in the history of the city they once called home. Yet questions remain. Who took their lives? And why? Perhaps we will never know. But their story reminds us that the past is never truly gone and that even the coldest cases can speak again.

What do you think really happened to Derek and David? Share your thoughts in the comments. And if you’d like to uncover more true stories from the shadows of history, please like this video and subscribe for the next investigation. If this story moved you, if you believe that even the smallest lives deserve to be remembered, then help keep Derek and David’s memory alive.