Suspicion - S3 40 Years Cold | E2 The Science

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

A scientific breakthrough helped catch a notorious American serial killer. Could that same technology be used to catch Susan Tice and Erin Gilmour’s killer? It helps but the Toronto Police are looking for a needle in a haystack. As they get closer, a shocking turn of events upends their plan. The following episode discusses sexual assault and murder. If you’re impacted by any of our themes, you can reach out to the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres at casac.ca to help you find a centre close to where you live. Toronto Star subscribers will also get exclusive early access to all episodes on June 17. Non subscribers will get new episodes each Monday. If you are not a Star subscriber, please visit thestar.com/subscribe. Suspicion seasons 1 and 2, ”Death in a Small Town” and “The Billionaire Murders: The hunt for the killers of Honey and Barry Sherman,” were hosted by Kevin Donovan and are available in this feed.  Audio sources: CBS Philadelphia, CBC Fifth Estate

The Billionaire Murders is brought to you by Havelock Metal, the only roof and siding you'll ever need. The following episode discusses sexual assault and murder. If you're impacted by the themes of this episode, we have resources in our show notes. Sacramento County District Attorney Anne-Marie Schubert led a team of investigators to track down the suspect, a 72-year-old ex-police officer arrested on Tuesday. I thought it was crazy. I mean, you know, them finding like a guy like 40 years later. I'm pretty glad that they were able to ascertain who it was.

Turns out investigators created a genetic profile from decades-old crime scene data. In 2018, a man with thinning white hair was pushed into a Sacramento courtroom in a wheelchair, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. More than 40 years after he began terrorizing communities across California in a string of rapes and murders, Joseph James DeAngelo, the so-called Golden State Killer, had been caught at last. DeAngelo, a 72-year-old retired cop, had committed at least 13 murders and 50 rapes throughout the 70s and 80s. The arrest was a stunning feat,

the long arm of the law reaching back through four decades to solve a seemingly unsolvable case. And it hadn't happened through some lucky break. D'Angelo was caught using a game-changing police technique. One that would pave the way for detectives around the world to crack open their own murder investigations. Including those that had long since gone cold. From the Toronto Star, this is 40 Years Cold. Episode 2, The Science. News of the Golden State killer's arrest and the novel police technique that caught him quickly spread through tons of media coverage.

Investigators took note. So did families of victims, including Sean McCowan, Aaron Gilmore's brother. You know, I just remember watching that show and being like, oh my God, this is it. This is the technology that is going to get us to the answer. This is the golden ticket. I think that Toronto Police was sort of very optimistic about the technology and had started to sort of look at it, but didn't want to get my hopes up too much yet and sort of said, oh, we're looking at it,

but we don't know if it's going to be able to be used in Aaron's case. You know, we'll keep you posted. Detectives had caught D'Angelo using what's called investigative genetic genealogy, a combination of traditional police work and the science behind those popular ancestry sites. You've probably seen the ads for these services, like 23andMe. You mail in your own DNA, usually by spitting into a test tube. Then they develop your DNA profile and compare it to their huge ancestry databases, which they've built out from all of the DNA samples customers send in.

The results can tell you your ethnic makeup, connect you to distant relatives, or help adopted children find birth parents. Police investigating the Golden State Killer wondered if they could identify their mystery perpetrator the same way Because all those years ago, he'd left behind a major clue His DNA It had been seized from a semen sample left on one of his many rape victims They uploaded his DNA profile to a free public genealogy site, as though they were conducting an ancestry search. And they got back a match to a distant relative of the killer.

It was a brand new investigative lead that eventually led police to D'Angelo. And it spawned a whole new cold case technique. Suddenly, any investigation where police had a perpetrator's DNA on file had a new chance of being solved. And sure enough, within a year of the arrest, more than two dozen historic cases in the United States were solved through genetic genealogy. By 2019, the lead detective in the Golden State Killer case was in Ottawa,

sharing the gospel of investigative genetic genealogy to a room full of Canadian cops. In the audience was Toronto Police Detective Steve Smith. And as he listened, two cases immediately came to mind. This sounds great. And obviously Tyson Gilmore and Jessup were the first two cases I thought to mind. This sounds great and obviously Tice and Gilmore and Jessup were the first two cases I thought of for this. Three people listed there but two cases since the Tice and Gilmore killer had now been confirmed as the same person.

A veteran investigator and in the homicide cop tradition always wearing a suit Detective Smith has an approachable family man vibe. In 2017, he joined the Toronto Police Cold Case Squad, just as the unit was under a new direction to focus on cases involving vulnerable victims, including unsolved murders of women and children. It was one of the reasons why, as he learned about investigative genetic genealogy, the murders of Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore and Christine Jessup came to mind. Jessup, a nine-year-old girl, was abducted from a small town north of Toronto in October 1984.

For three frantic months, her gap-toothed grin was on every TV screen, until her body was found in a wooded area 50 kilometers away. She'd been raped and stabbed to death. The high-profile murder garnered even more attention when it produced a notorious wrongful conviction. Jessup's neighbor, Guy Pomerant, was found guilty of first-degree murder in her death. Police first made him a suspect based mainly on the belief that he was, quote, a weird guy. In 1995, he was exonerated thanks to DNA. By then, DNA analysis had advanced enough

to compare Moran's genetics to the semen sample police had collected from Jessup's underwear. It eliminated him as the killer. Guy Paul Morin, pursued by the media in 1985 as a suspect in the sadistic murder of a little girl, subject of relentless public attention through two murder trials, found guilty by a jury two and a half years ago. Never doubted that this moment would come, the unambiguous acknowledgement of his innocence. I know. I didn't do it. I did not kill Christine Jessup. Now, Detective Smith wondered if DNA technology had advanced enough to identify the real killer.

And he had the same hope for the Tyson Gilmore case. So by August 2019, it was decided the Tyson Gilmore case, alongside the Jessup case, would be Toronto's first foray into investigative genetic genealogy. But how exactly do you send a perpetrator's DNA to an ancestry site? Because you can't just mail a decades-old DNA sample to 23andMe. Smith realized he needed the help of a specialized lab. As luck would have it, just as investigative genetic genealogy was taking off, a Texas-based lab had reached out to Smith, on LinkedIn no less. They clocked that he worked on historical homicides and wanted to let him in on their work.

David Middleman, CEO of Authrum, explains why his lab specializes in forensic testing. So Othram is a company that we created to build technology to bring certainty to investigations. So if we look at criminal justice as a whole, there's a disparity between what's happened at a crime scene, what's happened at any kind of scene, even just the identification of human remains, what's happened in the past, and then what is argued in court. And inherently, it's hard to know exactly what may have happened at some point in the past. But when you go to court, you have to argue with certainty, whether you're the defense or the prosecutor. And so this disparity opens up the opportunity for delays in justice and miscarriages in justice. Labs like Othram sequence the DNA from crime scenes.

It's a technical and high-stakes task. When you send in your DNA to an ancestry site, your spit sample produces tons of fresh, high-quality DNA. But crime scene DNA, when it's found at all, is often in trace amounts. And in cold cases, it can be degraded from the passage of time. That makes it really hard to get the genetic information needed to create an ancestry profile and find relatives. Plus, it's finite. Whatever is found on the scene, that's all you got. And you may only get one shot to use it, because the very process of testing DNA destroys it. This meant that in both the Tyson Gilmore and Jessup cases, police were taking a risk, knowing there was a chance they could use up all the DNA that was left,

destroying that chance of solving the murders. In the Christine Jessup case and in the case of the Tyson Gilmore murders, both very old crimes, decades old, with DNA that had been tested many times prior and so little left that you don't really get a chance. In one of those cases, there was really only one chance left to do the test, and so you don't want to do it wrong. And then to add complication to that, the DNA is obviously very old. So it's degraded, which means that the big pieces of DNA are broken into tinier and tinier pieces. Often when you have tiny pieces of DNA, they're hard to measure. And there's chemical damage, cases involving sex assault, and even some homicides might have multiple contributors. So for all those reasons, you have to be very careful. You don't want to generate a profile

that has no value to investigators and then find you don't have DNA to do another test. Toronto police had sent down the DNA for both cases, Tyson Gilmore and Jessup, in the fall of 2019. Today, Smith and his team have streamlined this process, which involves sending a neat, small package with genetic material down to Othram. But this was the first time for Toronto Police, and they were, well, feeling their way through it. It was a huge event off the bat.

Like, we were sending down a giant box full of dry ice for this little swab of DNA, because we didn't know what we were, like, preserve it, preserve it. So the samples arrived in Texas, and within two months, Othram had sequenced the DNA in both the Tyson-Gilmore and Jessup case. Police could now, hopefully, start homing in on their killers. And here's where it's worth clearing up one of the biggest misconceptions

about investigative genetic genealogy. Because it's not like police send down crime scene DNA to a lab and then, boom, out comes the name of the killer. Instead, the lab produces a profile, which can then be uploaded to ancestry sites. This step in the process usually produces a list of relatives. And yeah, sometimes very distant relatives. But these are completely new leads. Genealogists then map out a family tree by scouring obituaries, digging up birth and marriage certificates, and snooping social media. And from that, they figure out who could be a suspect based on factors like who was even alive at the time of the crime or lived nearby. It's also worth noting cops can't just use any ancestry service. When investigative genetic

genealogy took off, privacy groups sounded the alarm, warning about the dangers of police access to personal information, including the risk that hobby genealogists were inadvertently handing over their family's DNA to the cops. Today, some ancestry sites even ban police access, without a warrant. Others let people opt in to allow their DNA to be shared with police. Toronto Police use two databases, FamilyTree and GEDmatch, which allows detectives to access these sites only for certain crimes. GEDmatch and FamilyTree DNA allow you to upload for homicide, sexual assault, unidentified human remains, nothing else. Once Toronto Police uploaded the profiles, the databases started to

spit out hits. And good hits. They were promising leads. In the Jessup case, the results pointed detectives to distant relatives of a man who'd been a family friend, Calvin Hoover. Hoover had died by suicide in 2015, and there'd been an autopsy, meaning his DNA sample was on file with Ontario's Centre of Forensic Sciences, the lab that conducts scientific investigations for police. Nearly certain he was their killer, Toronto Police got a warrant for his DNA. Then they ran a direct comparison to the DNA taken from the Jessup crime scene. They matched. In October 2020, at a press conference at their downtown headquarters, Toronto police announced that they'd found Christine Jessup's killer. It was their first solve using investigative genetic genealogy.

Police bet that solving the Tyson Gilmore case was not far behind. With that DNA, the Ancestry databases returned reams of possible relatives, who, on first glance, appeared to be closely related to their suspect. Initially, this seemed like great news. But it wasn't that simple. We'll be right back. This is Kevin Donovan.

I've been around building and renovation projects my entire life, so I can tell you it's important to make your next roof the last one your house, cottage, or building will ever need. Do it once, do it right. Do it now. Have luck, metal. Request your quote today. We're doing business differently here in Manitoba at the Stu Clark Graduate School. It's an energy, a feeling, a buzz. You feel it in our professional services,

on our work placements, in the connections you make with business leaders. It's unique, something you won't find anywhere else. This is the graduate experience at we got a lot of matches, and they were very high centimorgan numbers, which is how closely related you are to everybody. At first, when we looked at it and saw the high centimorgan matches, we thought we'd be done in 24 hours.

A centimorgan., we thought we'd be done in 24 hours. A centimorgan. What's that, right? David Middleman from Othram explains. So centimorgans are a unit of measure that can help you understand how closely related you are to someone. Basically, the more DNA you share between two people, the more likely you have a common ancestor that is recent. For example, you and your sibling would share a lot of DNA because you have the exact same parents.

But say your children and your siblings' children will share DNA, but a little bit less because now essentially your parents' DNA has been mixed in with your DNA, plus your spouse's DNA, plus your sibling spouse's DNA. So the more DNA you share, the more likely you have a recent common ancestor. And the less DNA you share, you're still related, but there's probably a further back in time intersection point. And so centimorgans basically just measure that. And so that value of the number is really big. That means you share a lot of pieces of DNA and you probably have a parent or grandparent in common. And if they're very tiny, you may be a distant cousin. When the results for the Tyson-Gilmore killer came back,

there were more than 100 close matches, most with high centimorgan numbers. It was a good start that suggested they'd found a bunch of very close relatives, like cousins. They now had to build the perpetrator's family tree and figure out who might actually be a viable suspect. As luck would have it, Toronto Police had a genealogy hobbyist in its ranks. Now in his 60s,

Detective Constable James Atkinson had gotten into ancestry research because he was curious about his own lineage. The same week the Golden State Killer was arrested, Atkinson began volunteering with the DNA Doe Project, a non-profit that solves cases of unidentified human remains through genealogy. Eventually, he informed senior officers of his budding skills. I ran into a couple of people, higher-ups, so I cornered them and said, listen, I know how to do this. Can you use me? And then Stephen Smith found me and said, where have you been?

Today, Toronto police have a small team of in-house genealogists, including Detective Constable Atkinson. But at the time, the system was more informal. I was in records. I came off the road when I turned 60, and I was working as a records specialist upstairs. I was getting the cases ready for bail hearings in the morning. So the detectives would call us at night and say, I've got this guy ready to go to a bail hearing, and push it all through to court. And if the detectives didn't call, I was opening up my screens and working on Tice and Gilmore. On those screens, Atkinson was using Ancestry software that visualizes familial relationships.

To kind of explain to me how it's done, on the day we spoke, he pulled up a color-coded spreadsheet of his own family, which showed these small clusters of relationships between a few dozen people. His family tree is large, but the family reunion, it wouldn't be that big of a party. This is a cluster here. You can see that these all represent little groups of my cousins

that are all related to each other and related to me. So I just have to find out how these two people are related or these five people are all related to each other. So that is not too bad. Then Atkinson pulls up a chart similar to what he'd been working on for the Tyson-Gilmore killer. The screen shows hundreds of overlapping relationships. This family reunion would need a stadium.

This is what this looked like. Wow. And this is when we had a little cry. There was, as he tells me, a ton of work to do to sort out exactly how everyone was related. It was really daunting, but the genetic results had provided a major clue. The killer had Cree heritage, and his ancestors were clustered in the remote areas of James Bay, bordering northern Ontario and Quebec. This explained why it appeared at first glance that he had scores of close relatives. Here's Steve Smith again.

Unfortunately, endogamy came into play. So basically, and especially in small, isolated communities where there's only a certain number of families, if you have an isolated community where 600 people live, well, obviously people are going to find their mates within that community. And over 100 or 200 years, families are going to have children amongst themselves probably six or seven times. So your relationship is, it's kind of intertwined. Basically, this phenomenon,

which exists across cultures in other isolated communities, like island nations or certain small religious sects, simply means the gene pool is smaller. On the surface, a DNA result can make it look like two people are, say, cousins. But actually, their genetic connection is more distant and goes further back in time, weaving a complicated web that makes it hard to figure out the real familial relationship. Put simply, the genealogists couldn't really trust those high scores from the ancestry search. They needed to do a lot more digging to figure out who was related to who in the James Bay.

To do that, they gambled on a risky move. If Atkinson found someone he thought could be a relative of their killer, he reached out with an unusual ask. Would they be willing to upload their DNA to a genetic genealogy site? He did this to essentially collect more puzzle pieces. Having more DNA from this area could either show police they were on the right track, or it could eliminate a whole branch of the family tree. As it turned out, most of those they asked knew all about ancestry sites.

Many had already sent in their DNA. This was no coincidence, considering Canada's shameful history of separating Indigenous families. Detective Smith, alongside Detective Stella Karras, a fellow cold case unit investigator, explained. What we found out from our research in this was a lot of indigenous people are putting their dna on these sites because they're trying to figure out who their blood relatives are who their families are because a lot of the families a had been separated b had had their names changed by the uh the churches that were up in the northern communities those sort of things so

residential school yeah scandal basically, right? There's so much in the Indigenous community that has separated these families. They're very, very interested as a community to find their ancestry and their roots. And their culture is actually based a lot on your ancestry. In cases where someone had already submitted their DNA to, say, 23andMe, police could ask them to simply transfer over their genetic profile to one of the databases they were allowed to use. If they hadn't already used an ancestry service, Atkinson personally mailed those who agreed a fresh

DNA test kit. At this point you might be asking, why would someone agree to just hand over their DNA to police? It may not be surprising to you that several Indigenous women agreed to participate, Smith said, when they learned it could help solve the homicide of a woman, of any race, and bring closure to a family whose loved one's death was still unsolved. Amid Canada's ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, it's been estimated that 4,000 women and girls have disappeared or been killed since the 1950s, though a lack of comprehensive national data means this number could be higher. Because we would say, you know, we know that the offender is somebody from

your community. We aren't going to tell you exactly what it is, but it involves, you know, a homicide. And they would, they would, most of them, because most of the people we spoke to were women that had their DNA up and they would say, is it a female victim? It would be like, yes. Throughout 2021, investigators were trying to find this needle in a haystack. Eventually, Atkinson tapped into a valuable resource. Locals from northern communities who, like him, had a keen interest in genealogy. I really want to make a point that we had the assistance of hobby genealogists from that area that were

invaluable to us because they were able to get information that we couldn't. Some of the churches aren't online, their baptism records aren't online, but we had one genealogist in particular that she was able to walk over to the church and do physical searches for us. We couldn't have done it without their help. As police kept going, Sean McCowan, Aaron Gilmore's brother, was trying to resist a constant urge to phone up Detective Smith and ask him if he'd gotten any closer.

He knew they'd sent the killer's DNA to Othram, the Texas lab, and he just had a feeling that investigators were closing in. Trying not to get your hopes up, and then I think, you know, as time goes by, the word comes down that Steve sort of says, you know, we've got the DNA, we've got a usable piece of DNA and we're following leads. And I guess you're kind of then in just waiting mode, right?

And I used to literally call Steve and I'd be like, okay. And he'd be like, I need more time. I need more time. You know, like I think that he wanted almost to get me a t-shirt that said, I need more time. Because it was literally, I'm sensing that I'm at the end of a 40-year journey. And I'm trying not to be too eager. But at the same time, it's like the biggest event that's shaped me. We'll be right back.

This is Kevin Donovan. I've been around building and renovation projects my entire life, so I can tell you it's important to make your next roof the last one your house, cottage, or building will ever need. Do it once. Do it right. do it now. Have luck metal. Request your quote today. We're doing business differently here in Manitoba

at the Stu Clark Graduate School. It's an energy, a feeling, a buzz. You feel it in our professional services, on our work placements, in the connections you make with business leaders. It's unique, something you won't find anywhere else. This is the graduate experience at the Asper School of Business, where you can master your business career. by late 2021 thanks to science shoe leather detective work and the help of northern communities toronto police were in a remarkable position nearly 40 years after the murders of susan tice and aaron gilmore they'd narrowed their search down to one family of five brothers. The Sutherlands. The research was settling down to a particular family.

And the family consisted of five brothers that we had to start weeding through to figure out which one. But it's very exciting, right? Because it was a needle in a haystack and now it's just one of five. Now it seemed it was only a matter of time. The work of elimination was on. They started running background checks. And we took guesses. We were like, you're looking at the background. At first thing you were like, oh, it's got to be this one. And why would you say it's got to be this one? Some of the brothers were known to police.

They were known to police and had a background that would lead you to believe that, yeah, they could have. All of the brothers had been alive at the time of the killings, but two had since died. That includes a brother with a serious criminal record that had made police suspect him first. But because Canada collects DNA from offenders who commit serious crimes, this brother's DNA had been in Canada's national databank for years. The Tyson Gilmore killer's DNA had also been in there for years. Meaning, if they had been a match, the database would have automatically detected it. Brother one was eliminated. Another brother had been the victim of a homicide in Northern Ontario. And because it's common for a murder victim's DNA to be taken during an investigation,

police suspected his DNA might also be on file. And it was. And this wasn't a match either. Another brother crossed off the list. They were left with three brothers, all living in small communities around the James Bay. Okay, and so you're left with three brothers. Yep. What happens next?

So we decided to try to get the brother in the biggest community. Okay. But even the largest community was still problematic in terms of getting in a sort of following them kind of surreptitious way. As you've no doubt seen on TV, investigators sometimes secretly tail suspects. It can be classic surveillance, cops wanting to know where their target is going or who they're meeting with.

Other times, it's to get, as Detective Karras explains, a DNA discard. No matter what kind of surveillance, the easier police can fade into the background, the better. So in a larger community, you can sort of blend in. So if you've got an undercover officer that's trying to get a DNA discard from someone, it can work better because you're just somebody walking down the street type of thing, or you're just somebody sitting in a car.

You can blend. The smaller the community gets, the more people are aware of who's a stranger and who actually belongs here. So it makes that very difficult. And getting a DNA discard, that can be something like? It could be something as you're spitting on the sidewalk, actually, or you're smoking a cigarette and you throw that away or, you know, you blow your nose.

We actually discard DNA quite a bit. You just have to be there at the right time, watching closely, and then being able to grab that sample and show for continuity purposes that it wasn't contaminated before you got it and that it belongs to that individual. It has to be a conscious discarding of the DNA. So you're not running up and snatching something out of someone's hand and taking it off, right? It has to be a conscious discard that they are, they're done with that. Yeah. In the end, Toronto Police recruited the Ontario Provincial Police, or the OPP, the force that patrols parts of northern Ontario.

They did what's called a garbage pull for brother number three's outdoor trash. They surreptitiously removed a face mask and two pop cans, which were then sent to a lab for testing. When this brother's DNA was compared to the suspect profile, it also wasn't a match. He was eliminated. So that comes back. And is it disappointing when it's a negative?

Or how do you feel? No, it's actually quite good. Yeah, this one, because we've seized it, now we can do further testing on it. So we didn't get the, so obviously he wasn't a match, but we got them to do the YSTR, which is a male lineage. So that tells us now that he is not the offender, but his male lineage is the actual offender.

So we know from that point, all their kids were too young. The dad was deceased prior to these- Incidents. Incidents happening, that it's one of his brothers. And now we've excluded three. We suspected that, now we had the actual scientific proof of it.

Yeah, this would be the first time that we used, that we were able to use a traditional scientific technique to confirm that we are on the right track. Well, now we're excited. Yeah. So now we're like, okay, now we have two brothers left. These two remaining brothers lived in very remote Ontario communities. There would be no secret surveillance or even any garbage pulls here, since a stranger would stick out instantly. So police ended up pulling the fourth brother in to be interviewed for what they called an unrelated investigation.

The documents that we got revealing this part of the investigation don't go into detail here, so it's not clear what this unrelated investigation was exactly. But we do know that before this brother arrived to be questioned, police disinfected the table and offered this brother a disposable cup of water. After he took a sip, officers swiped the cup once it was discarded and obtained his DNA. It wasn't a match, and that could only mean one thing. And so June of 2022 is when we got the result back and it further confirmed that it's not this brother, but it is a close male relative. And so that,

that really left us with the last brother. Joseph George Sutherland lived in Moosonee, a remote northern Ontario community of just 1,500 people. There, Sutherland, tall, with a broad nose and long black hair, was living a quiet life. He was in his early 60s, had been working in IT, and could often be found outdoors with a fishing rod in his hand. He'd never been a suspect in the murders.

It happened nearly a thousand kilometers and seemingly a world away. George, to be quite honest, was squeaky clean. Police-wise, he's never been arrested, never been fingerprinted, not even picked up for drunken disorderly. Like, he's just completely off anyone's radar. Which is to say that if we did not do this technology, he would never have been caught.

Toronto police were now certain they had their killer. But the only way to arrest him was to obtain his DNA and match it with their perpetrators. And they knew it would be impossible to get a DNA discard. Local OPP had said surveillance around his home just wasn't doable because there weren't any buildings to set up behind, and it was so isolated. Plus, the community would immediately clock any outsider. So instead, police decided to get a warrant. That is, a court order.

But instead of the more typical reasons to get a warrant, to search someone's home or cell phone, for instance, police would be demanding Sutherland's DNA. It was a really tough call because they'd have to wait a few days to get the results. And in the meantime, they'd be tipping off their suspect that they were onto him. And they didn't know how he would respond. So is this guy going to harm himself? Is he going to harm anyone else?

What's our liability? How are we going to do this? And in the end, we really, we hated to do it. We really did hate to do it, but we knew that he was our killer. We had to get his DNA and we had no choice. To get a judge's sign off, Detective Karras would first have to prepare a detailed report, making the case for why they needed the DNA warrant. And then that's when I started up the task of writing the warrant, which is the first

of its kind. In Canada, where you're part of your grounds, you're incorporating the genealogical research. So in order to write a proper warrant, you have to make sure the case is properly organized. And each homicide had about 10 to 12 case boxes full of documents. We had to order them in here. We had to start going through them, scanning them, making sure that everything is digitized and properly preserved. And then I had to track, you know, continuity. Okay, who was at the scene? What did they find at the scene? How did we transport the body? Who was monitoring that? Who did the swab? Who did the autopsy? Like all of this stuff had to be flushed out. All I'm thinking about is it's for the family. The poor family, they need some

peace. We are on the verge of solving this and they've waited long enough. So let's get this done. In November 2022, Karis sent her report to the judge. It was a Friday. By Monday, it was signed. They had the go-ahead to show up at Sutherland's door and demand his DNA. They quickly arranged logistics. They would fly in an OPP plane out of nearby Orillia. Karras and Smith were among a small team going up that included a forensics officer tasked with taking the DNA sample. As they flew over northern Ontario, Karras's mind buzzed with

worry. Would he even be home? What if he was out hunting? Has he somehow heard they were coming? After they landed, Karis went to a local OPP detachment, setting up to take Sutherland's DNA. And Smith went straight to Sutherland's door. Yeah, I mean, we went up to knock on the door. We looked, where he lived, he couldn't run out back. Just, I mean, we're obviously covering our bases um so he wouldn't have had anywhere to go because there was fences so we're comfortable with knocking on the door he literally answered the door and said george he's like yeah and you could just see him kind of like as anyone would be if police showed up at your door and said hey

we're here to take your dna you'd kind of be like, oh, like a little discombobulated by it. And he basically said to us, well, do I have to come? I'm like, yeah, we have a warrant. You have to come. He's like, all right, let me get my stuff on. Put his boots on and came in with us. And it was myself and the detective inspector from the OPP, Martin Graham, that actually drove him back. And I sat in the back with him and we were heading back and I could see he was pretty nervous.

And he looked at me at one point and just said, where are you from? And I said, Toronto. And he kind of gulped. And I was like, that's a little odd. And then he says, when did this happen? And I said, a long time ago. And his breathing just went immediately to like labored. He was just like struggling for breath. And both Martin and I are sitting there and independently, we're both thinking, yeah, this is our guy.

Police brought Sutherland back to the station. They made small talk, Sutherland telling them that he liked winters up north more than summers. Then they got what they came for, pricking his finger, taking a blood sample, and placing the all-important DNA

safely in a vial. Then they drove him back home. He didn't say much. Now, all police could do was wait for the lab to come back with the results. They'd arranged for a rush, but it could still take a few days. As soon as science clinched Sutherland as their killer, they would fly back and arrest him. Then came a twist no one saw coming.

I get a call from Sean Glassford. That's an OPP detective inspector who was also working on the case. He's like, listen, man, your guy has called an ex-OPP guy over to his house and he's admitted to both murders to him. And he's like, I think we have to arrest this guy. And I'm like, I agree, we have to. If he's admitted to the murders, we have to arrest him for everyone's safety. Then they're worried, you know, we're all'm like, I agree, we have to, if he's admitted to the murders, we have to arrest him for everyone's safety. Then they're worried, you know, we're all talking like, do we need to fly a true team up and take him out at gunpoint?

One of the things he had asked the ex-OPP officers, can they convict people on DNA? And the OPP is like, yeah, yeah, they absolutely can. It was sitting with him all night. And the next day he just, he just, he knew it was, he was done. Who really was Joseph George Sutherland? What exactly had he been doing with his life for the last 40 years? After committing two horrific crimes, and then just walking away.

And why? Why did he do it? This episode of 40 Years Cold was written by me, your host, Wendy Gillis, and Julia DeLaurentis Johnston. Julia produced this series along with Sean Pattenden. Sean also wrote our theme music and mixed the show. Our executive producer is JP Fozzo. Thank you. Schneider.