apple.news Open in urlscan Pro
2a02:26f0:3500:58f::3277  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

FINDING HIS LOST FATHER WAS AN OTTAWA EX-DETECTIVE’S CASE OF A LIFETIME



Richard Brzozowski grew up in an adoptive home and wouldn’t learn his biological
father’s name until the 1980s. Finding him would take decades of persistence,
luck and unusual physical evidence – but now, at last, he’s solved it

ROY MACGREGOR

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It is a promising spring morning in Orleans, a suburban community east of
Ottawa. Richard Brzozowski – tall, ramrod straight and fit at age 76 – is
ambling along in a park that’s exploding with leaves and blossoms.

A career policeman and detective in Ottawa and, previously, in Nottingham,
England, this expert in forensic investigations has just solved the mystery of a
lifetime.

His life.

It took decades of diligence, a smattering of luck and, at the very end, it all
came down to … toothpicks.

But finally, he knows who his father was and what became of him.

He stops beneath a greening maple and spreads his long arms wide.

“I would have been happy just to know who he was.”

But, as it turned out, it was what he was that has made for such a happy ending.

These items, including the three toothpicks at bottom right, would be important
clues in Mr. Brzozowski's search for information about his father.

DAVE CHAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Mr. Brzozowski was born in Nottingham in midsummer 1945. The Second World War
was winding down, as was his mother’s unhappy marriage. Shortly after his birth,
Elsie Rowland, the now-divorced mother, placed her baby in a foster home, where
he stayed for seven long years. Elsie eventually remarried and her new husband,
Tadeus Brzozowski, a Polish airman who had stayed on in England after the war,
adopted Richard and gave the child his surname.

When Mr. Brzozowski reached his teens he learned there was a brother, Graham,
who was nine years older. They had never met.

His was an unhappy childhood but he grew tall and strong and joined the
Nottingham police force, spending two of his five years there as a detective
considered particularly adept at solving complicated cases.

In 1970, Brzozowski and his then wife and two children came to Montreal on the
Empress of Canada. They arrived with $240. Brzozowski lined up police work in
Ottawa, where recruiting Staff Sergeant Kingsley (King) Ackland lent money to
carry the family through until he could begin work.

Mr. Brzozowski moved quickly through the ranks. From beat cop he soon joined the
forensic unit for more than a decade, later returning as staff sergeant in
charge of the unit. He completed a master’s degree in criminology at the
University of Ottawa.

He and his first wife divorced. When he became interested in writing mysteries,
he attended a workshop given by Ottawa writer Anne Stephenson. They married in
2000, the same year Mr. Brzozowski retired with the rank of detective inspector.

“You couldn’t tell he was a cop out of uniform,” says Ian MacLeod, who covered
the police beat for the Ottawa Citizen for many years.

And yet, out of uniform Mr. Brzozowski was still very much the detective, trying
to solve a mystery that at times seemed unsolvable. His mother had died in 1967,
taking whatever secrets she held to the grave.

After living in Canada for more than a decade, Mr. Brzozowski returned to
England and met older brother Graham in Nottingham. It was not a pleasant visit.
There was anger in the air. The older man handed the visitor from Canada a
photograph of their mother with a man wearing the uniform of an American
soldier.

“This is your father,” a terse Graham told his younger sibling. “‘Uncle’ Richard
visited mother before you were born. You’re the bastard son of a chicken farmer
from Florida!”

“I will never forget those words,” says Mr. Brzozowski. “I was gobsmacked. I had
always thought that Graham and I shared the same father.”

There were other photographs and some further information. Their mother’s
divorce, Graham said, was the result of her affair with this man in the
photograph. Mr. Brzozowski was left wondering if his father really was a chicken
farmer who had fought in the Second World War.

The following day, he went to the Nottingham registry office and was given a
copy of his original birth certificate. His mother had registered his given
names as “Richard William.” But much to his surprise, the surname listed was one
he’d never heard before: “Daugherty.”

He had a name for his father. He had a face. But he still had no story.

“I had spent my whole life in policing,” Richard Brzozowski says toward the end
of his morning walk in the park. “I had to know the rest of it.”

It was the early 1980s. No DNA records. No internet. He began, methodically, to
collect addresses of Richard and William Daughertys in Florida, where the
“chicken farmer” had supposedly lived. He found 76 variations, wrote snail-mail
letters to every one of them, and waited. Many letters were returned unopened. A
few replied, ‘You’ve got the wrong guy,’ but not a single hopeful response.

Mr. Brzozowski kept this research up for two decades until DNA testing became
widely available to the public. He moved quickly on the new development, sending
a sample of his own DNA to Ancestry.com and, later, to 23andMe.com. He received
reports of possible second, third and fourth cousins, then of a possible first
cousin, once removed. The younger man was not a Daugherty – the DNA link was
through his mother – and did not live in Florida. Mr. Brzozowski tried multiple
times to contact him in Texas, even writing to the man’s parents, but to no
avail. He received no answers.

The two DNA websites provided family trees and Brzozowski eventually tracked his
heritage back to John Jack Daugherty, born in 1847 and father of 12 children,
seven of them boys. He found one of the sons of John Jack, James Oscar
Daugherty, born in 1884 in Alabama. Could this be his grandfather?

Researching meticulously – family members might say obsessively – Mr. Brzozowski
found Second World War enlistment records for the sons of James Oscar, but no
details on where the soldiers had been stationed. He needed one who had been in
Nottingham over the fall and winter of 1944-45.

Then he got lucky. A letter in the flurry of correspondence he had sent out to
possible Daugherty connections brought a response. Sara Kirchner, a young woman
and distant cousin in Texas, informed him that her own family history showed
that James Oscar had four children, a girl and three boys, and she thought that
one of the boys, William Ray Daugherty, was “the most likely candidate to be my
father.”

Unfortunately, William Ray Daugherty’s name had never turned up in the thousands
of searches of family trees that Mr. Brzozowski conducted. One of the three sons
had been too young for the war, the other much shorter than the soldier in the
photograph with Mr. Brzozowski’s mother. William Ray Daugherty was a
possibility.

Kirchner knew that William Ray had become an optometrist in Muskogee, Okla., and
that he flew a plane. He had been known by various names – “William,” “Willie,”
“Bill,” “Willie Ray” – and a 1942 enlistment was found for a young optometrist
who had been born in Gause, Tex., in 1909. The age would be about right.

“Not a chicken farmer from Florida,” Mr. Brzozowski says, “although he may well
have told my mother that he was. …”

Now convinced his father might indeed be William Ray Daugherty, Mr. Brzozowski
turned to Google last summer and found an optometry practice in the Oklahoma
city that had a website with an “About Us” section. The practice had been
purchased in 1979 from “long-time Muskogee optometrist Dr. Bill Daugherty.”

Eureka! ... Almost.

Piecing together William Daugherty's war record would become an important part
of Mr. Brzozowski's research.

DAVE CHAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

In early September, Mr. Brzozowski put together a detailed package containing
what he knew so far, as well as the photograph of his mother and the soldier,
and mailed it off to the current operators of the optometry office. Ten days
later, he received a response from Dr. Jerry Coburn, the owner.

Greetings Richard, I must say your correspondence, which I received today, took
me by surprise! Let me not beat around the bush. Bill Daugherty is definitely
your father! You look a great deal like him from the picture you sent. I know he
was in the Air Force during WW2 and was actually a glider pilot!

Further correspondence convinced Mr. Brzozowski that finally, at the age of 76,
he could say, “I know who my father was.” But he still had no absolute proof.

He then turned his forensic talents to reviewing available military documents.
In November of 1943, several of the American glider units were transported from
the European theatre to “the Nottingham forest area of England.”

He connected with an office of the National WWII Glider Pilots Association,
which was located in the Silent Wings Museum in Lubbock, Tex. The office
confirmed flight officer William R. Daugherty’s membership in the 53rd Troop
Carrier Squadron. They had a photograph of the pilot, as well as dates of his
missions and decorations.

Mr. Brzozowski now knew for certain his father had been stationed at Barkston
Heath Field in Grantham, close by Nottingham. He found a memoir by Major Steven
C. Franklin, which said the men stationed there were well treated. “When not
flying,” Franklin wrote, “the men kept their spirits up with movies at the base
theatre, weekly Red Cross dances with the local girls.”

Brzozowski presumed his mother had been a regular at the Palais de Danse in
Nottingham. His birthdate suggested she would have become pregnant around
November, 1944. His father got his transfer orders in March, 1945, and left
Nottingham in May.

“They knew each other for months,” he says. “It was not a one-night stand.

“He must have known.”

An archival photo shows William Daugherty (in detail, and eighth from left in
the back row) with his squadron at Barkston Heath.

What flight officer William Ray Daugherty did, exactly, in the war remains
somewhat of a mystery. He flew his glider – no engine, no protection, no way
back – behind enemy lines, delivering troops and equipment for missions in
Holland and Germany. Gliders were used, as well, during the Normandy invasion.

Official records say that for “…meritorious achievement…exceptional airmanship
and resolution in the execution of missions” he was awarded the Air Medal. His
unit also received three Presidential Citations for “extraordinary heroism
against the enemy.”

He returned to Muskogee, opened his optometry practice and ran it until selling
in 1979. He died in 1997 and is buried in the Memorial Park Cemetery in Tulsa,
Okla. Mr. Brzozowski plans to visit his grave.

The “chicken farmer from Florida” might very well have been a ruse, as Mr.
Brzozowski suspected. There had been a wife, Lena Mae Daugherty, back in
America.

Further research produced real first cousins, Helen Peden and Eula Matthews,
both alive and well in their 90s and living in Texas. They sent photographs and
Mr. Brzozowski was stunned to find one of his father when they were exactly the
same age – the two could pass for twins.

When the Muskogee optometrist passed away, his beloved golf putter was given to
a family member, who decided to pass it on to Mr. Brzozowski. The putter is now
at Mr. Brzozowski’s home in Orleans, standing in a special place of honour.

A note from 92-year-old cousin Eula arrived, telling Mr. Brzozowski that “the
word that was missing in your life is ‘belong’. Now you know exactly where you
fit in the family, in life, and in the world. You ‘belong!’ ”

There was still more surprise to come. The Silent Wings research group told him
that the members of the 53rd Troop Carrier Squadron who were engaged in
Operation Market Garden were awarded Holland’s highest military honour, the
Orange Lanyard. Could it be found?

Still on the hunt, Mr. Brzozowski was able to contact the trustee of his
father’s second wife, Verlyn, who died in 2009. The trustee said she still had
various documents and photographs as well as “some other things that look like
medals or things he wore on his uniform.”

Mr. Brzozowski sent photographs of the aged decorations, some unidentifiable, to
the Silent Wings research group. The information that returned surprised Mr.
Brzozowski:

An expert-level marksmanship badge.

Air medal.

Good conduct medal.

And then this…”The second column contains one Purple Heart ribbon with one
bronze oak leaf – meaning two awards of the medal.” To receive such a
commendation Daugherty would have had to be wounded twice in action.

The father he had never known may have been a chicken farmer at some point in
his mysterious life, but, it turns out, he may also have been a bona fide war
hero.

William Daugherty's Purple Heart and air medal are some of the items Mr.
Brzozowski got in a box from the trustee of his father's wife's estate.

DAVE CHAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

The box also came with a broken tooth and toothpicks.

DAVE CHAN/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

On Feb. 17, 2022, a package arrived from the estate trustee. It contained a
jewelry box, which held the old ribbons and medals. Rings and cuff links and tie
clips. A broken tooth. And three toothpicks.

Mr. Brzozowski contacted the Paleo-DNA Laboratory at Lakehead University in
Thunder Bay. He shipped the broken tooth, the toothpicks, nail clippers and a
small brush that had arrived in the package.

On March 29, he received a report back from the laboratory.

“A partial profile was obtained from the toothpicks. From the data generated
from this investigation of these samples, the results are CONSISTENT with the
individual belonging to the source of DNA on the toothpicks (Sample 1, Alleged
Father) being the biological father of Richard Brzozowski (Sample 2, Child).

“The calculated probability of paternity (assuming a prior probability of 0.5)
is 99.9999% from the genetic data obtained.”

99.9999 per cent probability…make that a certainty.

“So there you have it,” Richard Brzozowski says at the end of his long walk.
“This 40-year investigation comes to a close.

“It has been by far the longest case – certainly the one I never gave up on.”

Nor has he given up yet.

There still remains the mystery of the two Purple Hearts.




This Apple News web site may contain proprietary content, information, and
material that is owned by Apple or its licensors, and may be protected by
applicable intellectual property and other laws, including but not limited to
copyright.

Use of content on this site is limited solely to personal, noncommercial use,
does not transfer any ownership interest to you in the content, and specifically
excludes, without limitation, any commercial or promotional use rights in such
content. You agree not to use this site or any content contained herein in
violation of any applicable terms or of any rights of a third party or Apple.
Use of the Site constitutes acceptance of terms; see
apple.news/legal/terms/newsweb.html.

Learn more About News on the Web and Privacy.

Copyright © 2022 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved.