'His friends buried him': Mounties discover truth about dead officer

Mounties get their man on Heather Lands It's a mystery that was talked about within the RCMP for decades: The ashes of a Mountie buried near the former barracks.

Legend has it that on a dark evening in 1988, friends of Supt. Joe Atherton quietly buried his body on the site of the old provincial RCMP headquarters in Vancouver.

The act was not malicious. Instead, they knew that Supt. Atherton had no children, that he considered the Mounties his family, and that he loved the grounds known as Fairmont Barracks.

For decades, the tale of a fellow member being buried by a flagpole was shared at parties and over pints of beer, but nobody really knew whether it was true.

The RCMP has since vacated the property on the corner of 33rd Avenue and Heather Street, and it’s now slated to be dug-up and developed.

“I believe that when his friends buried him there, that it never occurred to them that time marches on and that that building would not always be our home,” said Insp. Veronica Fox.

To ensure that Supt. Atherton and his burial were not a legend lost in time – and that he would not be left behind – Fox spent two years trying to uncover the truth.

“I did a lot of interviews of people who had heard the legend, in order to try and glean, you know, some of the facts that I could fact check against certain documents,” she told CTV News.

She also examined stacks of old blueprints of the property that were found in a dusty old attic.

Based on her research, on a blisteringly hot day on June 25, a team of 20 specialists returned to the property for a closer look.

“Our commanding officer said a few words, and then we started digging. Shovels went in the ground, and the backhoe came out,” Fox recounted.

Within 45 minutes, the team found Atherton’s remains. The legend was true.

“I was relieved,” she said. “I strongly believed he was there, but I was worried that we might just not find him, just because he might have been lost to time.”

Exactly where Atherton will rest now has yet to be determined.

But Mounties believe he is home once again.