For 30 years, Edgar Latulip didn’t remember his own name or realize he was living 80 miles from home, where there were competing theories about how and where he had most likely died.
No one had seen him since September 1986 when, according to local news accounts, Latulip disappeared from a Canadian group home, jumped on a bus bound for the south side of Lake Ontario and forgot almost everything.
He assumed a new identity. He settled in a new city. He built a new life.
But a recent recollection has led Latulip back to the world he left behind.
Police this week announced that Latulip, 50, had been found in St. Catharines, Ontario, not far from where he had vanished decades earlier.
And — most shockingly — it was Latulip himself who solved his own cold case.
Authorities had once said Latulip was “developmentally delayed” and had “mental- health challenges.” His mother had said her adult son — who was 21 when he disappeared — functioned at the level of a child.
The last time his mother saw him, Latulip was in the hospital, recovering from a suicide attempt, according to the Waterloo Region Record.
Latulip abandoned the group home in Kitchener and, police say, headed for Niagara Falls — “a common suicide site,” the Region Record noted. In an especially troubling sign, he had left the residence without his medication.
Soon after, police say, Latulip suffered a head injury and lost his memory.
But police said he started having flashbacks last month and remembered his real name: Edgar Latulip.
He told a social worker, who discovered that he was a missing person and contacted local authorities.
After a voluntary DNA exam, police were able to confirm his identity. Latulip is now preparing to reunite with his family.
In 1986, Latulip was a 21-year-old man with a 12-year-old’s mind, according to local news reports and missing-persons listings from that time. He was staying in a group home near Kitchener and living at least partly on a disability pension, according to a 2014 series in the Waterloo Region Record.
It was a Tuesday that September when he skipped town.
His mother, identified by local news media as either Silvia or Sylvia Wilson, told the Region Record that she feared her son had been killed and buried.
“This is always at the back of my mind,” Wilson told the newspaper in 2014. “Having an answer would mean closure. When Edgar disappeared, I became quite sick. I had to take a leave of absence from work. I was near a nervous breakdown.”
Latulip’s missing-persons poster showed a young man with wire-frame glasses and a toothy grin — a computerized image to show people what he might look like. It said he had a thin build, a scar above one eyebrow and troubling mental issues.
For years, investigators tried to find Latulip, pushing paper and going door to door — and, later on, re-publicizing his cold case, along with several others, in hopes of solving the decades-long mysteries.
Sgt. Richard Dorling, a homicide detective with Waterloo Regional Police, began encouraging local media and members of the community to spread the word.
“Pass the information on,” Dorling told the Region Record in 2014. “If you see a poster, a picture or an article, post it on Facebook, send it out on Twitter. I’m hoping somewhere out there, someone will remember something.”
In fact, it was Latulip who would remember — and crack his own cold case.
Police would not comment this week on Latulip’s life before his disappearance or the accident that caused him to forget it. It’s also unclear what kind of life he built for himself after vanishing — whether he had a job, a home or a family.
But they did acknowledge that Latulip recently started working with the Niagara Regional Police Service to find out his true identity. Gavin, the police spokesman, said investigators took a DNA sample from Latulip and contacted Waterloo Regional Police Service, which helped them compare it to a sample taken from a family member.
Last week, authorities learned it was a match. Then police phoned Latulip’s mother, who now lives in Ottawa.
“She was excited, happy, overjoyed,” Gavin, the Niagara Regional Police spokesman, told the Washington Post. “After 30 years of not knowing where her son is — knowing that he’s alive, she’s pretty excited about that.”
The Washington Post