Tips pour in after detectives name Jessop’s presumed killer
Break in 36-year-old case raises new questions about why man wasn’t suspected in girl’s murder
Toronto police Det. Sgt. Steve Smith was in his office at police headquarters when the call came in early this month. It was from Ontario’s Centre of Forensic Sciences, clinching the recent conclusion by an unlikely team of police investigators and genetic genealogists.
Thirty-six years after Christine Jessop was murdered, they had at last found the man they believe killed her.
“Going through cold cases, there are a lot of times that you think you’re onto something, and then your hopes are crushed,” said Smith, a cold-case homicide detective who has been working on the Jessop killing since late 2017.
“We were confident but tentative at the same time. Until you actually get that ‘yes, this is it,’ there’s still moments of doubt.”
Last week, Toronto police made the stunning announcement that they’d used an emerging investigative technique that combines DNA and genetic genealogy to identify Calvin Hoover, a now-dead family acquaintance of the Jessops, as the presumed killer in one of Ontario’s highest-profile cold cases.
Since then, about 60 tips from the public have flooded in to Toronto police about Hoover.
Interim chief James Ramer asked the public last week to examine a 1996 mug shot photo of Hoover and help investigators piece together his movements around the time of Jessop’s death, as well as details of his life leading up to his suicide in 2015.
Although there is no evidence to date linking Hoover to any other unsolved crimes, “obviously we’re going to keep an open mind and look at everything that we can,” Smith said Thursday.
Ramer told reporters last week that Hoover had a previous, unrelated criminal record.
Court records from Oshawa show he was convicted of driving under the influence in 1996.
The identification of the likely killer has brought praise to both police and the genetic genealogy technique that cracked the case, and raised new questions about why Hoover — a family acquaintance — was never before on the radar during past investigations by Durham Regional Police and, later, a task force set up by Toronto police in the mid-1990s.
Hoover, who was 28 at the time of Jessop’s death, was never interviewed by police, although they questioned his wife at the time, Smith said.
Instead, Jessop’s murder led to one of Canada’s most notorious wrongful convictions when investigators from Durham Regional Police narrowed in on Guy Paul Morin, who lived next door to the Jessops. Found not guilty at a first trial, convicted at asecond and sent to prison, Morin was finally cleared through DNA evidence in 1995 when his DNA did not match a semen stain found on Jessop’s underwear.
The wrongful conviction spawned a public inquiry led by commissioner Fred Kaufman, who concluded in a scathing 1998 report that Morin was failed by police, forensic scientists, prosecutors and a judge.
“It really all comes down to ‘tunnel vision,’ ” Kaufman said in an interview with the Star on Thursday.
The police prematurely determined Morin was guilty and “then they stopped looking for anybody else, stopped checking it out.” Since learning about Hoover, Kaufman said his mind has turned to police being dismissive of additional tips coming in from the public — saying, “thank you very much, very nice of you to come forward, but we really don’t need it.”
“It makes me think, if all of these inquiries had been followed up, if they wouldn’t have come to Mr. Hoover sooner,” Kaufman said.
Jessop’s mother, Janet, was friends with Hoover’s now exwife, Heather. When their kids were young, the two families used to enjoy barbecues and play dates, she said last week. But that had become a faded memory; she said she couldn’t immediately call Hoover to mind when police told her he was the presumed killer.
Kenney Jessop, Christine’s brother, says Hoover may have been among a select few who knew Jessop would be alone at the family’s home in Queensville, north of Toronto, on Oct. 3, 1984. On the day Christine disappeared, he and Janet were visiting the Jessop children’s father, who was in jail on charges of misappropriating funds.
Jessop’s body was found three months later, an hour’s drive away in Sunderland, in Durham Region.
Asked if Durham Regional Police had plans to re-examine any aspects of the original investigation, given Hoover’s identification, police spokesperson Dave Selby said: “I’m not aware of any such plans, because the people who were involved with the original investigation are either deceased or long-retired.”
After Toronto police began reinvestigating the case in the 1990s, investigators obtained samples from scores of men to cross-reference against the semen stain. Toronto police confirmed Hoover was not a suspect in the original investigation and his DNA was not collected.
“To comment on why would be purely speculative,” Toronto police spokesperson Meaghan Gray said.
Smith said Hoover was not previously identified as a “person of interest” — meaning someone who might have a connection to the case. Ramer told a news conference last week that Hoover was in the investigative file as someone who had access to Jessop.
Asked how Hoover never became a person of interest, Smith said he can “only speak to how we do things now.”
“It’s just very different. I mean, we interview anybody and everybody that had anything to do with anything — even if they have nothing to say, we still interview them,” he said.
Smith began working on the Jessop file after landing in the Toronto police homicide cold case unit in late 2017. Her death was one of 700 unsolved murders probed by the team. “You’re touching some here, you’re touching some there, you’re doing your best with all of them,” he said.
Having grown up in the GTA, he knew about Jessop’s case; one of his first steps as an investigator was reading the 1,400-page Kaufman report.
Smith later pursued tips that had come in to police after a fresh public appeal for information, but they went nowhere. Then, in 2018, police in California used a combination of DNA and a genetic genealogy website to crack a decades-old cold case and catch the so-called Golden State killer — an arrest that has spawned a new cold-case investigative technique across the U.S. and now, Canada.
Det. Sgt. Stacey Gallant, who has since retired, took immediate notice and detectives on the team started to read up on genetic genealogy. The technique allows investigators to take a DNA sample collected from the scene — a drop of blood on clothing or, as in the Jessop case, a semen stain — and compare it to the scores of DNA samples that have been compiled by genetic genealogy websites, to which people curious about their ancestry have submitted their genetic information.
At the time, Smith didn’t know whether the sample in the Jessop case had degraded to the point that it was not usable for the technique. The team later teamed up with Texas-based Othram Inc., which is accredited with law enforcement agencies, and determined it was viable.
A small group of genetic genealogists were then brought on board, and with the help of the results built out two “family trees” — a long list of possible connections to the DNA sample from Jessup’s underwear. Smith said it was a turning point when the genealogists came back “with confidence” that they were creating the proper family tree, although it still provided “a huge number of possible people,” Smith said.
“We were like, ‘You know what? We might actually get there.’ ”
Hoover’s name didn’t immediately stand out, but Smith said investigators then found an old address in the case files, attached to his ex-wife. The Hoover name had come from the genealogists “organically,” and now they could tie him to the Jessop family.
“We started to really dig into him, and that’s when we kind of were able to make that connection,” Smith said.
Aroadblock came when police learned Hoover died by suicide in 2015 — a challenge because they needed a sample of his DNA to compare it to the semen sample. In what Smith called a “Hail Mary” move, detectives reached out to Ontario’s Centre of Forensic Sciences to ask it had retained any DNA after an autopsy.
When the lab confirmed the DNA was on file, it was a break — police had been prepared to exhume Hoover’s body, Smith said.
After obtaining the court’s permission to access Hoover’s DNA late last month, investigators were able to compare his DNA directly to the semen stain, which clinched Hoover’s identification as the presumed killer. The news was “bittersweet,” Smith said. His mind went immediately to telling the Jessop family.
Like many other families in the cases he works on, Smith had spoken with Janet Jessop multiple times over the phone. He makes an effort to maintain contact between police and the families of cold case victims, walking a “very fine line” between assuring them someone’s still working on the case, and giving them “false hope.”
It was satisfying to finally give the Jessop family answers — “she was thankful and happy that we provided a closure on it,” Smith said.
Though he did not want to provide details about its use in other cases, Smith said he has “taken to” genetic genealogy.
“We’re going to look at other cases, obviously. I don’t want to say too much about what we’re doing in certain investigations, but we’re looking at everything we possibly can to get these cases solved,” he said.
“It makes me think, if all of these inquiries had been followed up, if they wouldn’t have come to Mr. Hoover sooner.”
FRED KAUFMAN
PUBLIC INQUIRY COMMISSIONER