DNA SOLVES 1984 COLD CASE
Police ID man who killed 9-year-old
The final chapter in one of Canada's most enduring and horrific mysteries was finally written Thursday when Toronto police investigators announced they had found the man who murdered nine-year-old Christine Jessop in 1984.
Jessop was abducted from her home outside Toronto on a school day afternoon in early October. When her parents came home, they found her backpack on the kitchen counter, but their daughter was gone. Jessop's body wasn't found until months later, on New Year's Eve, more than 50 kilometres from her home.
In those missing months, her school picture, showing a beaming child in blue overalls with bangs and shaggy brown hair, was everywhere in Ontario. Toronto police showed that picture again Thursday. You could see her in the press conference online, flashing up on a screen behind Toronto's acting chief of police, Jim Ramer. Jessop had been stabbed to death.
Investigators found traces of semen in her underwear. It was the DNA from that semen that was used to exonerate the man first charged and wrongly convicted of Jessop's murder, Guy Paul Morin. And it was that DNA that eventually led police to find the real killer, identified Thursday as Calvin Hoover of Toronto.
“If he were alive today, the Toronto Police Service would arrest Calvin Hoover for the murder of Christine Jessop,” Ramer said.
“There are no winners in this announcement,” he added, “there is no reason to celebrate. It does, however, allow us to take a major step forward in our efforts to bring justice to Christine's family.”
CBC reported Thursday that Hoover, who was 28 in 1984, committed suicide in 2015. Toronto police did not confirm that account. Hoover, they said, knew the Jessop family. He was a neighbour, and his wife may have worked with Jessop's father. He was identified by cold case homicide detectives using a relatively new technique known as genetic genealogy.
Toronto police sent the DNA sample from Jessop's underwear to an American lab. The results they got back allowed investigators to build two separate genetic family trees of possible suspects. Eventually, detectives were able to narrow that broad list down to a single name. “It's not that we start with Calvin Hoover,” said Staff Supt. Peter Code. “What we do is we start with an unidentified semen stain that has a DNA profile to it. This is submitted to a lab and from that profile they build out a potential familial lineage. And it's from that lineage that the investigators then work downwards to be able to try to identify potential persons of interest.”
Hoover had a criminal record, Ramer said, but it wasn't relevant to this investigation. Ontario's Centre of Forensic Sciences did, however, have a sample of Hoover's blood. Once detectives had identified him as a suspect, they were able to match the DNA sample to that blood and conclude their investigation.
“I'm probably one of the few around that was still here when that murder was being investigated,” Ramer said. “I can assure you that there is a great sense of relief, and it's not just in the policing profession. I mean, this has impacted the entire judiciary and the legal system … I think we are all genuinely relieved that the person actually responsible for this has finally been identified.”
Detectives met with Jessop's mother Thursday morning and told her the news. They also informed Morin, who spent 18 years in prison and a decade under a cloud before DNA evidence cleared him of the crime in 1995.
I AM RELIEVED FOR CHRISTINE'S MOTHER, JANET, AND HER FAMILY, AND HOPE THIS WILL GIVE THEM SOME PIECE OF MIND.
“I am relieved for Christine's mother, Janet, and her family, and hope this will give them some piece of mind,” Morin said in a statement issued through his lawyer Thursday. “They have been through a dreadful ordeal since they lost Christine in 1984. I am grateful that the Toronto police stayed on the case and have now finally solved it. When DNA exonerated me in January, 1995, I was sure that one day DNA would reveal the real killer and now it has.”
Morin's conviction remains one of t he most famous miscarriages of justice in Canadian history. A public inquiry into his two trials (he was acquitted in the first; the Crown appealed) found that investigators and prosecutors had relied on dodgy science, lying jailhouse informants and the results of a subpar police investigation to railroad an innocent man.