Christine Jessop’s likely killer never questioned
Twenty-four hours after Christine Jessop vanished from her small-town home in Queensville in October 1984, a York Regional Police investigator questioned family friend Heather Hoover about the child’s sudden disappearance, but did not interview her husband, Calvin Hoover.
A month later, as the search continued for the nine-year-old girl, her mother Janet Jessop told the same officer that Calvin Hoover was among several friends who would be allowed to enter her home without a family member being in the house.
But the now-deceased Hoover was not once questioned over the decades police probed Jessop’s murder.
“Based on my review of the cold case file, it does not appear that Calvin Hoover was ever interviewed with respect to Christine Jessop’s disappearance or murder,” wrote Det.Sgt. Steve Smith in a police document released by the court this week following an application by the Toronto Star.
After 36 years and a notorious wrongful conviction, Toronto police last month announced Calvin Hoover had been identified as the likely culprit in the kidnapping and slaying of Jessop — a revelation made possible through genetic genealogy, an emerging investigative technique increasingly employed in cold cases.
The development has made international headlines, further vindicated Guy Paul Morin — the man twice put on trial for Jessop’s death before his 1995 exoneration — and brought both relief and new questions for Jessop’s relatives, who have called for a review of how Hoover was never before in police sights.
It has also spawned further investigation into Hoover’s past. In the weeks since he was named as Jessop’s likely killer, Toronto police have received scores of tips from the public and are probing potential links to other unsolved crimes, though none have been found to date.
At the Oct. 15 press conference where Hoover was named as the culprit, acting Toronto police chief James Ramer told reporters Hoover was in the investigative file as someone who had access to Jessop.
A search warrant document prepared by Toronto police investigators in September and recently unsealed by Ontario court judge David Porter provides new details about the investigative techniques used to identify Hoover and past police investigations into Jessop’s murder.
The document was filed in court on Sept. 30, 2020, with Ontario court judge James Chaffe granting access to two samples of Hoover’s blood that had been kept on file at Toronto’s Centre of Forensic Science from an autopsy following his 2015 suicide.
According to the document,
Hoover’s now ex-wife Heather told Sgt. Raymond Bunce on Oct. 4, 1984, that Christine had visited the Scarborough home she shared with Calvin Hoover only a few days before, on Oct. 1, alongside her mother Janet and brother Kenney.
“Heather Hoover advised that Christine was in good spirits but was upset about her father being in jail. Christine was looking forward to visiting her father on Thanksgiving weekend,” according to a summary written by Smith.
Heather Hoover, then 27, told Bunce both she and Calvin worked at Markham’s Eastern Telecom with Christine’s father, Robert.
“At this point, Heather Hoover advised that Calvin was with their children, and she had nothing to add to her statement,” reads the summary.
Smith said in an interview that police investigators have since spoken with Heather Hoover and she is being “completely cooperative.” (Heather Hoover has declined to speak to the Star).
On Nov. 22, 1984 — about six weeks after Jessop’s disappearance, and a month before her body was discovered in a field near Sunderland, in Durham Region — Janet Jessop spoke to Bunce.
She told him about “friends who would be allowed to enter their residence without a family member being in the house,” according to a summary of the interview.
“Several names were mentioned, one of those names being Calvin Hoover,” Smith wrote in the summary.
Hoover was never identified as a person of interest by either the Durham Regional Police investigators — who conducted the initial probe into Jessop’s murder that led to Morin’s arrest in April 1985 — or by a Toronto police task force that took over the investigation after Morin’s wrongful conviction.
Innocence Canada, a nonprofit that advocates for the wrongly convicted, has in recent weeks called for a “targeted review” of police handling of the case, saying Hoover should have been “identified early on as someone else deserving of close police scrutiny,” the group said.
In his warrant application, Smith wrote that investigators assigned to the task force and, later, officers assigned to Toronto police cold case squad “have followed hundreds of leads over the years in an attempt to identify the suspect.”
“Since the exoneration of Guy Paul Morin, no one has been arrested or charged for the murder of Christine Jessop. This remains a cold case,” Smith wrote.
That changed earlier this year when investigators sought to identify Jessop’s killer via a semen sample left on her underwear, the same stain that exonerated Morin through DNA testing.
Investigators sent the DNA to a Texas-based lab to extract a sample that could be plugged into an open-source database to compare against the DNA submitted by the hundreds of thousands of people who have sent personal data to public sites, such as GEDmatch, to obtain genealogical information.
“Genetic genealogy uses a technique called long range familial searching and allows investigators to identify offenders from their distant genetic relatives,” police said in the document.
After narrowing in on Calvin Hoover, Smith and fellow cold case investigators learned he died by suicide, a sudden death that prompted an investigation by the Northumberland OPP Crime Unit. Hoover’s son had discovered his father’s body at their Port Hope home on Aug. 16, 2015, after returning from a wedding.
Hoover had left a message on a yellow sticky note on his bathroom mirror: “Hope you all have a good life,” it read.
“The deceased Calvin Hoover has reportedly been depressed for over 30 years,” reads a police occurrence report that summarized the death and noted it was Hoover’s second suicide attempt in less than a year.
A post-mortem examination was later conducted by a coroner, confirming the death was by suicide.
Upon learning of Hoover’s suicide, Toronto police detectives reached out to Ontario’s Centre of Forensic Sciences and were told the lab had retained blood samples after the autopsy, allowing police to compare Hoover’s DNA directly against the semen sample from Jessop’s underwear.
In his search warrant application, Smith asks Chaffe to grant access to the blood samples, saying he believes it will provide “evidence with respect to the commission of the murder.”