Latest news with #BrianWallace
Daily Mirror
19-05-2025
- Daily Mirror
Man's body identified 10 years after he was hit by car yards from own front door
Bryan Woolis, who was thought to have been named Brian Wallace, died in 2015 after being knocked down by a car just a few metres from his home in Walthamstow, London, but could not be identified A man who died after being knocked down by a car close to his home has finally been identified more than 10 years later. Bryan Woolis, who was thought to have been named Brian Wallace, was near to where he lived in Walthamstow, London, when he was struck and killed by a Mercedes on January 22, 2015. Police, though, were unable to find records of him while the driver of the car was given a suspended sentence. The case remained open while South Yorkshire Police Inspector Nik Dodsworth began to investigate after an appeal from Locate International, a charity seeking to find or identify people, due to possible connections with Sheffield. Locate International stated on its website: "The police soon identified where he lived: a small shared flat above shops on Chingford Road. But he had few possessions, and nothing to identify him. A phone had only a small handful of contacts, and, intriguingly, a few printed photos gave some clues as to his life: they showed the man aboard a canal boat, exploring with curiosity. "A few people said they had encountered him. His name may have been Brian Wallace, they said. He worked cash-in-hand as a builder. He had a northern accent - Sheffield, perhaps - and he may have had a sister who lived in north London. Beyond that, little was known. "Details remained public on the UK Missing Persons Unit - Case 16-001186, unknown male - but brought no leads and the case of 'Brian Wallace' went cold." And Insp Dodsworth told the BBC: 'They had two good quality photos of the victim, but despite this, he had still not been identified. I found that quite sad. It was by digging through case files that he found a partial DNA match, followed by a search via the Police National Computer database, that his identity was revealed as Bryan Alwyn Woolis. A further investigation led the police to Mr Woolis' estranged family after an obituary for his late father Alwyn Woolis was found online. He died in Derbyshire in 2016 and had two other children along with Bryan. It is understood that Bryan had not seen his sister since the 2000s after she had moved away from London to look after their father and so Mr Woolis was not registered missing when he died in 2015. "Despite not being close, she experienced grief at Bryan's death," said Insp Dodsworth. "She had heard a rumour that Bryan had died of natural causes but could not find anything to corroborate this." He also pointed out that people dying without being formally identified is 'not as uncommon as you might expect'. Locate International is now seeking to have a new headstone for Mr Woolis' grave at Manor Park Cemetery in London with the correct spelling of his name. And Insp Dodsworth added: "I got a sense of satisfaction from getting to the bottom of this mystery, putting a name to the victim of a tragic road traffic collision from 10 years ago. I am glad that they [the family] finally have some closure on this tragic incident and can begin to rebuild."
The Guardian
12-04-2025
- The Guardian
The invisible man: Bryan died in an accident in 2015. Why did it take 10 years to identify him?
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.
Yahoo
20-02-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
The C8 Corvette ZR1 Just Keeps Winning
Read the full story on Backfire News The new C8 Corvette ZR1 is quite the machine that just keeps on winning, despite the shrieks of Europeans and diehard Blue Oval fans. It's a legitimate supercar from America that can hit 233 mph while also carving through some of the fastest tracks in this country, setting record times. This has been done over and over without professional racecar drivers behind the wheel, which is even more total, the C8 ZR1 has racked up five lap records at four separate facilities with four different GM employees behind the wheel and the ZTK Performance Package installed. More records might be coming, but for now this is an excellent start, proving the newest Corvette model should be taken seriously as a track weapon. The ZR1's first record lap was set at Watkins Glen in Upstate New York on the Watkins Glen Long Course. Behind the wheel was Lead Performance Engineer for Chassis Controls, Bill Wise. Even though he's not a NASCAR or IndyCar driver, he smoked the previous record at a scorching 1:52.7. Watch his run for yourself. Next up is Road America in Wisconsin, where Lead Vehicle Dynamics Engineer Brian Wallace carved through the turns and blasted down the straightaways to set a new record of 2:08.6. Road Atlanta was the venue for the third track record. Lead Development Engineer Chris Barber, who again isn't a professional racer, was behind the wheel, crossing the finish line in 1:22.8. That's fast. Finally, Global Vehicle Performance Manager Aaron Link went to Viriginia International Raceway and set two lap records. The first one was for the Full Course at a scorching 1:47.7. Then he whipped through the Grand Course in 2:32.3. Anticipation for the C8 Corvette ZR1 has been high, but these lap records speak volumes about how worth the wait the American supercar has been. We wonder what kinds of times professional drivers could set on the same tracks with a ZR1 running the ZTK Performance Package. Maybe some new records will be set when they do? Image via Chevrolet
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
New Chevy Corvette ZR1 Can't Stop Breaking Records
Read the full story on Modern Car Collector Chevrolet's upcoming C8 Corvette ZR1 has raised the performance bar yet again, setting lap records at five different race tracks across the United States. The supercharged sports car, the most powerful Corvette ever built, continues to redefine American performance standards. The automaker confirmed that a pre-production ZR1, equipped with the ZTK Performance Package, conquered top-tier circuits with new record times, showcasing its blistering speed and precision engineering. Four Chevrolet engineers piloted the vehicle across the five courses, each securing a new fastest lap. Bill Wise, Chevy's lead performance engineer, kicked off the record spree at Watkins Glen International in New York, where he completed the long course in 1:52.6. Brian Wallace, lead vehicle dynamics engineer, followed with a 2:08.6 run at Wisconsin's Road America. Development engineer Chris Barber then made headlines with a 1:22.8 lap at Road Atlanta. The final two records were set by global vehicle performance manager Aaron Link, who conquered Virginia International Raceway's full course in 1:47.7 and the grand course in 2:32.3. 'We knew the car had the capability, but breaking these records confirmed just how far we've pushed the C8 ZR1,' Barber said. 'It wasn't just about beating the times—it was about obliterating them.' Powered by a 5.5-liter twin-turbocharged flat-plane-crank V-8, the ZR1 boasts an astounding 1,064 horsepower and a top speed of 233 mph, making it the fastest production Corvette ever. The ZTK package further enhances performance with a high-downforce rear wing and advanced aerodynamic elements. Production of the C8 ZR1 is set to begin this spring, with deliveries expected later this year. The model will start at $174,995, cementing its place as a premier supercar contender. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
C8 Corvette ZR1 Flexes Its Highly Capable Track Muscles
Read the full story on The Auto Wire There's no debating the C8 Corvette ZR1 is a modern American supercar. After all, the thing can hit 233 mph, blowing away other performance models from this country. But what's equally or perhaps even more impressive is the new ZR1 setting five lap records at American recently announced the accomplishment of the enviable feat accomplished by four different drivers. Each one was behind the wheel of a pre-production Corvette ZR1 with the optional ZTK Performance Package installed. One of those tracks was Watkins Glen Long Course at Watkins Glen International in Schuyler County New York, often referred to as 'The Glen.' Bill Wise, Lead Performance Engineer for Chassis Controls, was behind the wheel, clocking an impressive 1:52.7. Brian Wallace, Led Vehicle Dynamics Engineer, piloted the C8 ZR1 Corvette around Road America in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin. He set a lap record at a scorching 2:08.6. The American supercar also ran Road Atlanta, which is situated in Hall County, Georgia just north of Braselton, clocking a red hot lap record of 1:22.8. Chris Barber, Lead Development Engineer, was the driver. Aaron Link, Global Vehicle Performance Manager, was able to set two lap records at Virginia International Raceway in Alton, Virginia. One was the Full Course at 1:47.7. The second was for the Grand Course at 2:32.3. This development reminds us of back in 2015 when the Dodge Viper ACR set lap records at 13 different racetracks. While Mopar fans will eagerly point out their super snake racked up more records, perhaps the Corvette ZR1's victory run isn't over yet? Either way, we love seeing American performance cars strut their stuff like this, especially on home turf. The name of the game with the ZTK Performance Package is aero. The package includes that tall rear wing for increased downforce, front drive planes, hood gurney lip, plus underbody strakes. All pieces are made of carbon fiber. Plus, the suspension is tuned with stiffer springs and Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2R ZP tires are added. Image via Chevrolet Join our Newsletter, subscribe to our YouTube page, and follow us on Facebook.
