At 10.20pm on 22 January 2015, a black Mercedes C-Class collided with a heavyset, middle-aged man at the intersection of two busy roads in Walthamstow, northeast London. An ambulance took the man to the Royal London hospital where he later died from his injuries. In the following days, a cluster of brief news stories appeared across the local press detailing a tragic, if straightforward, accident. The driver had quickly been arrested and charged with suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving. As for the victim, officers from the Metropolitan police were satisfied he was a well-known local builder who had lived on nearby Chingford Road for the best part of two decades. This initial confidence was soon blunted. There was a problem: the man could not be formally identified.
The mystery deepened after a police search of the man’s address turned up nothing in the way of identifying documents or next-of-kin details. Residents remembered a courteous, private figure who rarely, if ever, spoke of his personal life. Some even recalled a name. Brian Wallace was a reliable handyman who spoke with a slight northern accent. He might have mentioned family in Sheffield, though no one was exactly sure. The phone he had been carrying on the night of the accident had only work numbers saved in the contacts. His flatmate was of little use. The two men had barely ever exchanged more than pleasantries, though there had been a vague reference to a sister in Neasden, a few miles across north London. As the weeks turned into months, even these faint leads drifted into silence. It began to appear that Brian Wallace – if that was the man’s name – had lived his life as a ghost.
Uncertainty around cases like this presents a series of dilemmas. For one, practically, certain posthumous tasks need completing. And there’s the potential family or loved ones who might be left behind in the slipstream, searching for answers. This kind of not knowing can be a terrible burden. I spent several years writing about my own relationship with the missing, specifically my 20-year estrangement from my Spanish father, Christobal. In early 2021, I was contacted by a family in Andalucía, who informed me of his passing. This knowledge brought about its own strange kind of comfort.
Brian Wallace’s fate was not unique. The UK Missing Persons Unit database, run by the National Crime Agency, holds over 13,000 names, a figure that has risen steeply over the past decade, and fresh cases are added every week. Today there are well over 500 files for unidentified bodies available to read online in the hope that someone might hold the key to their mysteries.
Taken together, the effect is bewildering. Like staring at a vast mosaic, its ill-fitting pieces collected at random over the decades from rural Scotland to the Channel Islands. The level of detail varies wildly. Some carry photographs of the deceased, while others display a likeness pieced together by forensic artists. Others mention distinctive tattoos or clothing: a faded panther on a forearm, or lurid knockoff designer jumper. Some leave more coherent clues, like the man discovered in the water near Tower Bridge in May 2003. “My name is Patrick Jones”, read the note discovered in his trouser pockets. “I have no relatives.” The oldest case is from October 1966. A decomposed body had been found in a derelict house in east London. “He was possibly a vagrant” is the only judgment offered in the otherwise barren file.
From the beginning, Brian Wallace was unusual. Not only did the authorities believe they had a name, there were photos, too. One, scraped from a CCTV camera on a bus, shows a lightly stubbled middle-aged man in a checked overshirt. In another, the same man stares into the lens of a camera in a vivid yellow anorak, hood pulled up tightly over his head. A printed-out image of Wallace standing on a canal boat, wearing the same outfit, had been discovered inside his flat. If the raw material was there, it is plausible that the manpower wasn’t. Often an unidentified body needs professional experience and tenacity to bring to resolution the sort of intangibles ever more difficult to draw on in understaffed and underfunded police forces across the country.
Detective Chief Superintendent Mark Greenhalgh is Locate International’s current CEO. “It’s the Swiss cheese model, where little issues add up to a larger problem. Police forces often just don’t have the time and resources to investigate these cold cases. They’re so tied up with day-to-day demand and fire fighting… that’s where we can help fill in the gaps.”
Freya Couzens is a London-based digital marketing manager in her early 30s. In the spring of 2021, she had begun volunteering at Locate International, a charity dedicated to unsolved missing persons cases. Co-founded two years before by Dave Grimstead, a retired detective inspector with decades of experience investigating child homicide and serious organised crime cases, their mission is simple: providing resolution for the families of the long-term missing, as well as reuniting the unknown dead with their names. Today, the charity has well over 300 specialist volunteers: from people with backgrounds in genealogy and forensic imaging, to media professionals shaping social media output and appeals. Their ingenuity and persistence – the charity have partnered with several universities to develop new investigative tools, including geoforensic searches for clandestine graves by the University of Winchester – has achieved some eye-catching results. In 2024, they reviewed 254 cases, with significant breakthroughs in several. Their website lists currently active investigations, grouped under distinctive individual monikers. Bromley Woman, her body discovered April 2004. Ballast Quay Man, January 2011. Dave the Busker, April 2002.
Brian Wallace stuck out to Couzens, seemingly the only figure with what appeared to be a confidently stated first and second name, as well as an address and photographs. That he remained unaccounted for seemed incredible to her. For many, the fact that hundreds of people die unidentified in the UK each year is incomprehensible. In an increasingly interconnected world, we are liable to consider this strain of ambiguity as a slowly vanishing concern.
But the country is full of the lonely and marginal, the people just about in sight. People like the man known as Brian Wallace, who stand unobtrusively in the corner of a crowded pub, or are passed by unnoticed on a busy building site: a blurred figure whose outline might only flit across our peripheral vision. All of the available evidence points to a man who wanted nothing to do with the strictures of the modern world. He had worked cash in hand. There was no proof of a bank account, or presence on the electoral roll. No social media or smartphone, not even the faintest trace of a digital footprint. He lived precisely the kind of life we are encouraged to consider an impossibility. “There are people that are off the grid in our bigger metropolitan areas. Living transient lifestyles. They might be homeless, possibly. It makes the investigation harder,” explained Greenhalgh.
What had begun for Couzens as a passing interest soon calcified into obsession. She took to displaying the photos in her own home. The team studied the photo of Wallace on the canal boat. By blowing up the image, they could identify a serial number, which led them to the boat’s owner, who had met Wallace at the William the Fourth, an unremarkable pub a mile south of where Brian Wallace had lived and died. Canvassing its regulars revealed that the man had been a reasonably frequent drinker there. If they remembered him, memories were vague. The local community could only take Couzens and the Locate team so far. “They knew as much as we did… we were really looking for his family. And we knew nothing about them.”
The UK’s missing persons crisis is well documented. Every year, more than 170,000 people are reported missing across the country, at a rate of roughly one every 90 seconds. According to the charity Missing People, these figures are very likely to be a significant underestimate. The true number is unclear, as many of the missing are simply never recorded. Those we know of can be split into discrete groups. Children absconding from care and elderly dementia patients wandering from their homes or hospital wards form their own subcategories. Mental health issues, diagnosed or otherwise, are a factor in 80% of adult missing episodes. Unidentified bodies form their own distinct class.
Locate International is not the only organisation trying to provide dignity in death for those who have fallen out of sight. Every year, local authorities across the country conduct funerals for hundreds of people who have died without next of kin, or any other clues as to their identity. The number of these public funerals, known as Section 46 funerals, rose by 23% between 2018 and 2023. In nearby Enfield, the increase is more than 200% during the same period. Some local authorities will do everything they can to trace next of kin, wherever resources permit. There is a practical element to this, quite as much as a moral one. Perhaps a loved one might be inclined to pick up the bill, rather than leaving it to the council.
At the end of 2022, detailed appeals placed in the local northeast London and Sheffield press initially yielded only disappointment. What happened next, Couzens concedes, carried more than an element of good fortune. The charity received a message at the start of 2024, after a new batch of appeals had been released in the media.
Nik Dodsworth is Neighbourhood Policing Team Inspector for South Yorkshire police. A lightly bearded, softly spoken man in his mid-40s, he had been moved to action after coming across a piece on Brian Wallace in the Sheffield Star. In a message to Locate International, Dodsworth offered up his services to the charity, promising to help in any way he could. On contacting the Met, they sent Dodsworth their collection of files. Buried in the paperwork was a startling discovery, a partial DNA hit for the man apparently named Brian Wallace. When Dodsworth consulted the Police National Computer database, it came back with another name: Bryan Alwyn Woolis.
An internet search led to an obituary. Alwyn Woolis had died peacefully at home in Ripley, Derbyshire, in early 2016, aged 93. He had three children, including Bryan. Dodsworth’s inquiries led to Bryan Woolis’s surviving relatives, who confirmed much of what had been half known. Bryan had moved to London in the early 2000s and his sister had once lived in north London. The three siblings were not close, though there had been periods of sporadic contact over the years. Bryan had been a gregarious, popular figure in his youth, though prone to low moods and frequent periods of isolation. He had liked the casual camaraderie of the pub. The rest was spotty. A rumour had reached them that Bryan had died, which explained the aside in the obituary. Despite their estrangement, confirmation of his fate was still painful.
In one sense, Bryan Woolis was never really missing at all. The physical fact of his body was never in doubt: he had been killed by a reckless driver, yards from his front door. He was not, it seems, being actively searched for. This is not so rare: there is nothing unusual about estrangement. Despite the resolution, important questions remain. After a near decade of mystery, the case was solved by the combined efforts of a crusading charity and a lone police officer who came across it by chance. For all of his empathy and dedication, Dodsworth’s investigation was not particularly complicated. The fact of the partial DNA hit had sat hidden in the case file for years. It seemed strange that no one from the Met had thought to follow up in the previous decade.
For Professor Karen Shalev, founder of the Missing Persons Research Group at the University of Portsmouth, such lapses in communication are frustratingly common. It isn’t about the failures or omissions of this or that specific force, she stressed when we spoke over the phone. The problems are far broader. “Missing has not been prioritised at government level for decades.” Despite the illusion of a cohesive, nationwide approach to the crisis presented by the National Crime Agency’s database of unidentified bodies, no such framework exists for missing at large. “People ask why police forces don’t communicate with each other,” said Shalev. “It’s because there isn’t a system to do so.” It seems unlikely that the Bryan Woolis mystery would have remained unsolved for so long if such a framework had been in place.
On an overcast midweek morning last November, I travelled to Manor Park, out in the unpretentious suburbs of northeast London. Dark clouds bunched together as I made my way from the station to the local cemetery and crematorium where Roland Hughes, Locate International’s head of press, had suggested we meet. It is where Bryan Woolis is buried in a common grave along with three other men.
My morning in Manor Park brought to mind a visit to West Norwood Cemetery in 2019, when I was the only mourner for a man who had died alone at his flat in Lambeth. The celebrants spoke in comforting tones as a steady rain poured outside. I wondered what sort of service Bryan Woolis would have received.
After the cemetery, Hughes and I caught the train to Leyton. The William the Fourth has been revamped since Bryan Woolis would have known it, though the spacious, wooden-floored Victorian corner pub would not be totally unfamiliar to him, give or take a few licks of paint. It was empty during our visit, save for a lone elderly drinker at the bar, who sipped steadily at a pint of ale, making occasional small talk with the woman on shift.
Freya Couzens will never forget receiving the news. On a picturesque summer day last year, she clocked off work to meet a friend for a drink. A notification illuminated her phone screen. The email’s subject line was breezily empathetic. The Brian Wallace case had been solved. “I really felt like I knew this person. I cried. We toasted Bryan. It felt like the end of an era, which it was.” If there was much that remained unknown, they had succeeded in reuniting Woolis with his identity. Sometimes you could only take things so far. Closure is a word much invoked when it comes to the missing. It can take many forms. At the cemetery in Manor Park, I noticed that the headstone still carried the name Brian Wallace. It is something the charity is trying to have changed.
