GRANBY — Closure for Matthew Dale meant giving his mother her name back — and he did just that on Thursday in a quiet ceremony at the West Street Cemetery.

In 1978, Dale’s mother went missing when he was 5 years old. His family reported her disappearance to police and the FBI, but the case went unsolved for 44 years.

In that time, she became known simply as “Granby Girl,” and her grave in the West Street Cemetery for a long time was marked with a simple wooden cross. Community members eventually set up a fund to pay for a proper gravestone, which was put in place in September 1998 with the inscription “Unknown, In God’s Care,” and the date of her burial.

Then in the spring of 2023, authorities using recent advances in DNA technology broke the case open.

Dale recalled pulling into his driveway one day to find two detectives from his hometown in North Carolina on his porch, telling him to call Capt. Jeff Cahill of the Massachusetts State Police.

Cahill had been investigating the identity of the “Granby Girl,” a decomposed body found in the woods off Amherst Road in November 1978. He was calling to tell Dale that authorities might have identified his missing mother, Patricia Ann Tucker. Further testing confirmed that to be the case.

Even after the Northwestern district attorney and State Police announced their findings on March 6, 2023, the headstone in West Street Cemetery still referred to her as “unknown.” That didn’t sit right with Dale.

“I wanted her to have her name back,” he said. “I wanted everyone to know what her name was, not ‘unknown.’”

On Thursday, Dale got the closure he longed for. He drove 14 hours from North Carolina to attend a gravestone dedication ceremony at the cemetery, unveiling a marker engraved with Tucker’s full name, with “Granby Girl” inscribed below.

District Attorney David Sullivan and Cahill, State Police Detective Unit members, board members from the nonprofit Private Investigations for the Missing, and Granby Police Chief Kevin O’Grady attended the ceremony to commemorate the historic moment.

“These are the folks that kept her alive,” Dale said, noting that women from the Church of Christ would “go to her gravestone, clean it, put flowers down.” The thought of his mother’s whereabouts had always been on his mind. It feels great, he said, to finally have answers.

George Randall, former assistant fire chief in Granby, opened the ceremony by recounting his experience at the scene where the then-unidentified body was found.

Randall was on call as a volunteer firefighter at the time and responded to the scene. Despite the body’s degraded state, Randell recognized that Tucker had been shot in the left temple, and would later learn that she’d been dragged by a belt around her neck.

“The reality of the scene was disturbing to many of us, and the memory has stayed with me all of these years,” he said during the ceremony. “I have carried it for 46 years. I can finally put it to rest.”

Randall added that the original marble marker titled “unknown” now lives in the Granby Historical Association with a binder telling Tucker’s story to museum visitors.

Private Investigations for the Missing, which connects families with private investigators to solve old missing person cases, raised $2,800 in 24 hours for Tucker’s tombstone, the dedication ceremony and short reception afterward. Retired Police Chief Lou Barry was not involved directly in the case, but his knowledge of the “Granby Girl” and current work as a case manager and board member for Private Investigations for the Missing inspired him to help out.

Cahill said cracking this case has been “one of the best things that has ever happened in my career. You get to tell a guy what happened to his mom who’s been missing since he was 5 years old.”

This was the first case where Cahill used genetic genealogy to identify relatives of a deceased person. He sent Tucker’s DNA sample to Othram, a forensic laboratory in Houston, to identify possible family members through DNA matches.

“Now we need to figure out a family tree, where people are from, who are their parents,” said Michael Vogen, Othram’s director of account management. “We delivered that information to [state detectives], and they do what they do best and go investigate that.”

The DNA results led Cahill, First Assistant District Attorney Steve Gagne and Detective James White to Dale’s cousin in Maryland, who ultimately redirected them to Dale.

“Matt had already done a consumer DNA test, so we already had data available, so we provided instructions for him to download that data, and then it could be emailed over to us,” Vogen said. “We’re able to confirm out the relationship. It took about an hour.”

Cahill said he plans to continue investigating who killed Tucker. Her husband at the time of her death, Gerald Coleman, remains a person of interest in the case. Coleman died of natural causes in 1996 while in prison for rape and armed assault in Hampden County.

“We were saying, if we could just figure out who she is, that’s a win. But the next day, it doesn’t feel like a win anymore,” Cahill said. “Our job is to figure out what happened. So we’re pressing on.”

Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com.