Police say a forensic excavation in Bowmanville on Thursday connected to the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl more than 55 years ago yielded no evidence
Noreen Greenley vanished on Sept. 14, 1963 and has not been seen or heard from since.
At the time of her disappearance, the then Bowmanville Police Department launched an extensive investigation and conducted several searches for the teen but the case eventually went cold.
In 2005, homicide investigators with Durham Regional Police revisited the case but were unable to bring it to a resolution.
In a news release issued on Thursday morning, Durham Regional Police confirmed that investigators are conducting an excavation in the area of Highway 57 and Concession Road 8 after receiving “new information.”
Police did not specify what that information was, though a criminologist at Western University who runs a cold case society at the school told CTV News that a field scan at the site by a leading forensic anthropologist suggests that there is an object consistent with the size and shape of a car buried underground.
According to a previous report in the Toronto Sun, a tipster previously came forward in 2016 to report that his father confessed on his death bed to abducting and murdering Greenley.
The tipster reportedly said that his father, who was a part-time school bus driver and construction worker at the time, disposed of the girl’s body by putting it in the trunk of his vehicle and then dumping that vehicle in an open pit at a construction site, where Highway 57 was being rerouted.
By Thursday afternoon, police said the dig had not yielded any evidence.
Detectives say they dug two trenches, one 150 feet long and another 100 feet long. The trenches were seven feet deep and metal detectors were run around their paths.
