Paul Embury: The CSC investigator who never stopped searching

Long before Paul Embury was tracking escape plots at one of Canada’s toughest prisons and finding people who had gone missing for decades, there was one mystery he could never quite solve: his own.

Paul always knew he was adopted. Growing up, he remembers his father introducing him with an unusual phrase: “This is Paul; he was named before we got him.” While he never referred to Paul as his adopted son, the questions were always there.

That curiosity would eventually lead him to search for his biological parents, but it also seems fitting for a man who spent much of his professional life looking beyond the obvious, following fragments of information and figuring out what other people could not.

Over a 38-year career in corrections, including 20 years as an investigator at Millhaven Institution, Paul gathered intelligence on murders, drugs, assaults and escape plots, relying on sources that included police officers, electronic surveillance, correctional staff and some of Canada’s most notorious offenders. After retiring, he became a private investigator and developed a remarkable sideline finding missing family members.

Yet his career began almost entirely by accident.

In 1958, his father was an unemployed carpenter looking for construction work, and the family travelled to Brantford, Ont., where Paul’s grandparents lived. His grandmother happened to notice an advertisement for a clerical job at the former Burtch Correctional Centre south of the city.

Paul applied for the job and began working that summer as an assistant sentence administrator, responsible for calculating how much time an inmate would actually serve based on sentences, legislation and remission.

The work could become complicated, particularly with repeat offenders, and accuracy mattered enormously. He was later promoted to the position of sentence administrator and transferred to the Monteith Correctional Complex in northern Ontario, and then to Warkworth Institution near his hometown of Belleville.

As the years passed, another interest was developing. He went back to school at night, studying criminology and social sciences because he was fascinated by police work.

“I was a big fan of some cop shows on television and how they solved crimes,” he says. “Little did I know that not too far into the future I would be changing vocations in corrections.”

That opportunity came in 1976, when CSC decided to introduce investigators into institutions across the country. Paul and many others immediately applied; he was subsequently selected and posted to Millhaven Institution, where he would spend the next 20 years as an Institutional Preventive Security Officer.

He landed in one of the most challenging environments in Canadian corrections. Millhaven was still dealing with the aftermath of the 1971 Kingston Penitentiary riot and tensions between inmates and staff ran deep.

On the job, his new mandate sounded deceptively simple: “Get all possible information from all possible sources.”

Those sources could include inmates, staff, visitors, police, members of the public and electronic surveillance. Paul would collect the information, assess its reliability, compare it against other intelligence and present his findings to senior management.

In practice, it meant trying to discover what was happening inside a population of roughly 450 inmates who knew exactly who he was and what he did.

One older inmate offered Paul a compliment he has never forgotten.

“You know the inmates don’t like you and the staff don’t like you,” the man told him. “And that tells me you are doing a good job.”

Information could arrive almost anywhere. Inmates sometimes sent him a “kite,” prison vernacular for a note passed through the institutional mail system. Other intelligence came from conversations, telephone calls, visitors, staff, police contacts or people outside the institution.

Sometimes an inmate could provide false information to settle a score, so Paul would always try to find another source who could independently confirm it. With hundreds of inmates and only one of him, cultivating sources became essential.

The stakes could be extraordinarily high. During his 20 years at Millhaven, 32 inmates were murdered. Drugs were another constant problem, with inmates and their associates continually devising ways to get contraband through the gates. Paul estimates he arrested approximately 150 visitors and three staff members for bringing drugs into the institution.

After 38 years, Paul retired from corrections, but his instincts were far from extinguished. He became a licensed private investigator and opened an agency with a childhood friend, Gord Marriott, who was a retired Ontario Provincial Police officer. They took on everything from suspected infidelity and child-custody disputes to missing persons and theft.

But the cases that most closely connected his investigative career with his own life involved people searching for family.

Paul fell into missing-person investigations almost accidentally after reading a newspaper article about a woman who had spent considerable money and many years unsuccessfully searching for her biological father. He contacted her and offered to try.

“I said, ‘Let me give it a shot. I’ve got an idea of what to do here.’”

He found the man in eight hours, living on a boat in Oshawa.

Paul developed a flawless record of finding 21 people out of 21 searches. His most remarkable case involved a man who had left Belleville for Western Canada and had been missing from his family for 48 years.

The man’s mother wanted to see her first-born son again. It took Paul about a day and a half to find him living in a Winnipeg hotel and help reunite him with family again.

Paul understood better than most why someone would keep looking after 48 years. He had started searching for his own birth mother in 1958, the same year he entered corrections. At the time, adoption records offered little help beyond non-identifying information. He eventually discovered her identity in 1982, only to learn that she had died a decade earlier.

His biological father remained a mystery much longer.

After taking a DNA test through Ancestry in 2016, Paul connected with people in his family tree and eventually received help from an experienced genetic genealogy researcher. The trail finally led to his biological father, who had been born in Toronto and died in Trenton, barely 10 miles from Belleville.

Long after leaving paid investigative work, Paul still spends time helping strangers answer the same questions that followed him for so much of his life.

He belongs to several adoption-related groups and regularly encounters posts from people searching for biological relatives. Sometimes the detective work is surprisingly simple. A few weeks ago, someone was looking for a person connected to Timmins, so he searched the area’s cemetery records online.

“Sure enough, there they were,” he says, and he sent the person a photograph of the headstone.

Now 86, Paul keeps busy with his projects and walks about four kilometres a day with his dog. “New days bring new people, so no lack of challenges,” he says.

Recently he celebrated his 46^th anniversary with his wife, Celia.  Their days are filled with short car excursions, local theatres, having lunch with friends and looking forward to their grandchildren’s visits several times a year.

After spending 38 years working in corrections, Paul says he has another goal to enjoy: 38 years of retirement. He only has another six to go. “It’s like an inmate marking the days off the calendar until his release date,” he says with a laugh.

It’s a fitting milestone after a lifetime spent searching for answers for other people, and eventually finding some of the most important ones for himself.