Elizabeth Patrick was hoping this Remembrance Day would bring closure after a nearly decade-long search for her estranged father’s grave led her to a cemetery outside of Winnipeg.
Instead, she’s trying to work with Service Corporation International, a multibillion-dollar U.S. funeral homes and services company, to find an amicable agreement after her father’s grave was found to be empty during disinterment at Green Acres Cemetery earlier this year.
Sgt. Gordon Patrick was a glider pilot for the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force during the Second World War.
He spent his final years in Winnipeg and died in 1973. He was buried without a headstone, since he had no family in Canada.
“No veteran should be left in a grave with no headstone and no marker, no memorial, no nothing,” his daughter, Elizabeth Patrick, said via Zoom on Thursday.
In May, wanting to have her father’s remains relocated to a cemetery in Ontario where her son is buried, Patrick — who lives in England — had the grave excavated. That’s when it was found to be empty.
She said she initially had a positive and reciprocal relationship with Service Corporation International leading up to the excavation, and the company even agreed to waive its estimated $9,000 cost.
But she says communication with SCI, which owns Green Acres, has slowed since early June, after the RCMP forensics unit carried out the first of two ground-penetrating radar searches in an effort to find any trace of her father.
Patrick hired legal help and received a letter on July 30 from SCI’s legal counsel.
The letter stated that “given the length of time that has passed since Sgt. Patrick’s interment, and the limited information contained in the records of the former owner of Green Acres Funeral Home and Cemetery,” the company believes that “locating Sgt. Patrick’s remains on their property is unlikely.”
SCI offered to pay for a custom headstone, according to Patrick.
She planned to move her father to the Field of Honour at the Woodland Cemetery in Burlington, Ont., where he would be buried beside his grandson, Patrick Moulden, a clearance diver with the Royal Canadian Navy before his death in 2022.
“Their position was, ‘We’ll pay for the headstone, but we’ll install it in one of our cemeteries,’ which obviously defeats the purpose of me going to this effort of finding my father, paying to have him disinterred, paying to have him reinterred so that he could be beside my son,” Patrick said.
In their letter, SCI “offered to pay me $2,500 for damages and upset, and however you want to frame that,” according to Patrick.
She made a counter-offer for an amount she did not wish to disclose to CBC, though she said she asked for enough to cover the cost of moving her father, damages, and legal fees. Patrick said the amount she was requesting was significantly less than a supposed previous settlement amount of $12 million US paid by SCI to a family after a funeral home it owns lost a family member’s ashes.
But SCI’s legal counsel emailed Patrick on Wednesday to say the company isn’t liable for the missing body, because he was buried before it took ownership of the cemetery.
Green Acres was owned by Alderwoods Group until the company was sold to SCI in 2006.
Given “the changes in ownership and organizational history of the prior owners,” the company believes “that Green Acres holds no liability,” the email said.
“Ms. Patrick’s demand is excessive, and my clients do not feel that it is worthwhile to respond,” it said.
“While this is not where Green Acres wanted to end up, especially given the compassionate nature of those in the funeral industry, there is simply no productive conversation to be had at that settlement figure.”
SCI did not respond to CBC’s request for comment prior to publication.
Veteran’s daughter dismayed to learn of empty gravesite
But one Winnipeg lawyer says SCI’s liability for the missing body could depend on the details of the sale.
“Did you buy the company? If you bought all the shares of the company, then you are the company, and you are liable for the wrongs of the company,” Troy Harwood-Jones of PKF Lawyers said Friday.
He believes the Manitoba Cemeteries Act could also make SCI liable.
“The cemetery company will not be able to show that it’s met the requirements of the act by failing to keep proper records,” Harwood-Jones said.
Patrick remains hopeful SCI will make her what she considers a reasonable offer to assist in offsetting the cost of the replica headstone in Ontario, and help give her father a veteran’s burial.
“I’m just hoping that we can get past this last hurdle because it is Remembrance Day,” she said.
“He was never remembered. He was never honoured. He volunteered from the time he was 14. And he just needs to be recognized and honoured like every veteran.”
