Police detail public call for family DNA in six-decade search for missing Stratford men

It was nearly 60 years ago that two Southwestern Ontario men set off on a fishing expedition from Goderich and were never seen again.

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Police later recovered the men’s boat from Lake Huron, but the bodies of Neil Wormsbecker, 29, and Hank Englebertus Halff, 30, have never been found.

“They were observed south of Goderich by other boaters. There was a storm coming in,” Huron County OPP Const. Craig Soldan said of the last reported sighting of the pair on Oct. 22, 1967. “In the following days of the disappearance, their vessel was located.”

Now, police are hoping advances in DNA technology will help them close the case nearly six decades later.

But investigators haven’t been able to track down any relatives of the missing boaters, both Stratford residents, and are making a public appeal for them to come forward.

“We’ve tried to contact the next-of-kin from both of these individuals that we had on file. We can’t find any information on them,” Soldan said, adding police efforts to search social media and open-source intelligence came up empty. “And to be honest, we don’t even know if they’re still alive.”

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The men left for a Sunday cruise at 8 am and were expected back by 1 pm, the Stratford Beacon Herald reported at the time. The boat, registered to Wormsbecker, was found 3.2 kilometers from shore that evening. The newspaper referenced the men’s wives as saying they were both good swimmers and had life-jackets.

Police are asking the missing men’s relative to come forward and provide a DNA sample so investigators can search for a possible match with other samples stored in the police database that also includes samples of human remains found in Lake Huron, the fourth-largest fresh-water lake in the world.

“With the innovation with DNA, the progress that’s been made over the years, we didn’t have the capability to do this in 1967,” Soldan said. “But we do now. . . . Either we can solve this case and provide a little bit of closure. . . otherwise the files stay open. These cases remain unsolved and they’re both deemed missing until we can rule otherwise.”

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Police are working on the case with the Ontario Center for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains, a national organization that provides law enforcement, medical examiners and chief coroners with specialized investigative services to support missing persons and unidentified remains investigations.

The requested DNA sample could be provided by performing a simple mouth swab, Soldan said. “It’s not very invasive.”

Relatives of the missing men, or anyone with information about the case, should contact Huron OPP at 519-482-1677 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.

The OPP’s appeal comes weeks after the force announced it had identified a man whose body was found on the beach at Port Albert, north of Goderich, on Oct. 15, 2016. The man’s identity had remained a mystery, despite police releasing a photograph of him walking along a highway southwest of Sudbury and asking the public for help.

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Investigators used DNA to identify the deceased man as Garnet Michael Nelson, 56, a drifter who was walking, cycling and canoeing across Ontario.

The police use of DNA in sexual assault cases, homicides and to identify human remains – a process known as Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG) – was first adopted by the OPP in 2019.

DNA comparison has become a tool used to solve crimes, and it’s a popular commercial product for ancestry exploration through companies such as Ancesory.com or 23AndMe. The use of DNA comparison is only permitted for police use following extensive consultation with the attorney-general, the Center for Forensic Sciences, the chief coroner and forensic pathology services.

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