Alumnus builds casket for King Richard III

By Patricia Treble

When King Richard III is celebrated and reinterred this week in Leicester Cathedral in England with the ritual and ceremony denied him 530 years ago, Michael Ibsen, BMus'79, his 17th-generation nephew from Canada, will be there. This past winter, the cabinetmaker handcrafted the wooden coffin holding King Richard’s bones in his workshop in London, England.

“To see him lowered into the vault and know he’s under that stone, in a coffin that I made, I’m still struggling to come to terms with what it means to me,” says Ibsen. To call their relationship uncommon is the epitome of understatement: Ibsen is one of four people in the world who shares the same mitochondrial DNA as that of the last English king slain in battle.

“It’s just weird,” exclaims Turi King, the geneticist (by happenstance, another Canadian) who linked Ibsen to the 15th-century monarch. “The chances are crazy.” It’s a tale that can only be described as a detective story, one with myriad coincidences, dead ends and false hopes.