‘We got him’: How a DNA investigation cracked the cold cases of two 1980s Toronto murders

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Erin Gilmour lived in a modest apartment on Hazelton Avenue in Toronto, in the heart of Yorkville. By 1983, when Erin moved in, the neighbourhood was shedding its past as a bohemian enclave and becoming a thriving stretch of restaurants, galleries and boutiques. It was an ideal place for someone like her. She was 22 years old, the kind of person others were drawn to. That winter, she threw a surprise party for a friend at her place and chose “pink” as the theme. Her guests obliged by dressing in varying shades of the colour.

Erin hadn’t necessarily planned to be in Toronto in 1983. She had asked her father if she could spend the year in Fiji, where they often vacationed, and work as a teacher. He said she should finish her education first. So she settled into an apartment perched above a clothing store where she worked.

On Dec. 20, she finished her shift around nine o’clock and left the shop. Her friend, Anthony Munk, was supposed to pick her up. He stopped at a bank first to withdraw cash and arrived at Erin’s some 20 minutes later. As he approached her place, he saw the door leading to her apartment was slightly ajar. Anthony went upstairs and called Erin’s name, but he couldn’t find her. He then noticed a shape under the duvet on her bed. When he pulled back the cover, he found Erin’s body.

Someone had sexually assaulted and stabbed her to death, then fled into the night. Police swarmed the area to hunt for evidence and comb her apartment, while news crews converged outside to film a crimson body bag carried out the door. Erin’s murder created a flurry of media interest over the ensuing days, the details as intriguing as they were disturbing. She was, after all, a young woman murdered in a wealthy area of the city. And then there was her background. Her father, David Gilmour, was a successful entrepreneur who started many ventures, including mining company Barrick Gold, with Peter Munk. Her friend, Anthony, was Peter’s son.

The search for her murderer was intense. Detectives interviewed hundreds of people, collected blood samples from countless suspects and amassed reams of notes, all to figure out what happened during those 20 or so minutes after Erin left work and before her friend arrived. It would be nearly four decades before they got an answer.

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In December, 1983, Gary Ellis was a 25-year-old with the Toronto Police Service assigned to patrol downtown Yonge Street. Part of his beat covered Yorkville, and shortly after Erin’s murder, he was tapped to assist with the investigation. He had to buy a suit for the assignment (he had never needed one before) and was dispatched to interview anyone who attended the party Erin had thrown at her place not long before she was murdered. As the days and weeks passed, the circle of witnesses widened from friends, relatives and acquaintances until eventually Mr. Ellis was talking to people who never knew Erin at all.

In that time, investigators put together a picture of Erin’s life. Her mother, Anna McCowan-Johnson, trained in ballet and opened a dance school in 1983 that she ran for decades. She was married three times, and had Erin with her first husband, David. Together with Peter Munk, David started a stereo equipment maker and a hotel chain in the South Pacific. David also purchased an island in Fiji called Wakaya, where he built a resort.

Erin lived with her mother after her parents split up. David later wrote in his memoir that he must have seemed like more of a wayfarer than a parent in those days, but he vacationed with Erin around the world, often on Wakaya, a place she grew enamoured with. To David, she was thoughtful and perceptive; she was the one to suggest he marry his third wife, with whom he is still together.

Her life with her mother was no less adventurous. Anna had two sons, Sean and Kaelin, with her second husband. When they separated, Anna packed up all three kids and moved to Greece for a few years. Erin and her mother were the kind of people to take in strays, folks who seemed a bit lost. One of Erin’s closest friends was a boarder at a private school whose parents wouldn’t allow her to come home on the weekends, and she was welcomed into the family.

Erin liked to sketch and take photos with her Nikon, and she was close with her younger siblings, too. Sean struggled to fit in during his first year at Upper Canada College and his mom considered pulling him out. Erin invited him to her apartment one day and encouraged him to give it more time. For Kaelin, she bought a green Swiss army knife that he treasured.

Sean was 13 and Kaelin only 11 back in 1983. They slept over at Erin’s apartment on Dec. 19, the day before she was killed, and passed the time watching movies, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Perhaps it was the movie working on him, but Kaelin felt that Erin needed to be kept safe and that she should have a weapon at her place. The previous year, the family had received threatening phone calls at Anna’s house. One day, Sean left on a bike ride when the phone rang. Erin picked up and a man told her he’d hit Sean with his car, though nothing of the sort occurred.

The night at Erin’s apartment turned to morning and Sean left to do some Christmas shopping. Erin and Kaelin hopped into her Jeep and she returned him to their mom’s place before driving away.

Sometime later, her father David was awakened at his home in the Bahamas by a call from Anna. Erin had been murdered, she told him. David got out of bed and collapsed to the floor. There followed a period when he was indifferent to whether he lived or died, he wrote in his memoir. Once he was a passenger on an airplane that hit the runway so violently the tires blew out and it slid off the tarmac. His friend, sitting next to him, told him in disbelief that David had been smiling. He was thinking about Erin.

The Toronto police, meanwhile, were stymied. There were many times that Gary Ellis, assigned to investigate the murder, became certain they were zeroing in on the right suspect, only to have the individual ruled out. After six months or so, he was put back on foot patrol, frustrated to leave with the case unsolved. Even a year later, he lingered along Hazelton Avenue while walking his beat and eyed passersby, hoping some new insight would strike and lead to a breakthrough, one that never came.

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Susan Tice’s marriage broke up sometime in 1983. She and her husband, Fred, had moved around a lot as Fred took on different jobs in the investment industry – Montreal, Saint John, Toronto. Susan, who had worked as a nurse and later earned a master’s in social work, found her own career was somewhat secondary. She was just getting a family counselling practice off the ground in Toronto when Fred was shuffled into a new position in Calgary. They took their four kids and headed west, and Susan had to start again.

In many ways, though, she was the centre of the family. She painted, played guitar and found ways to bond with each of her children. She took one of her sons canoeing in Yukon, another on a ski trip and, with her third, drove the whole way from Toronto to Calgary when the family relocated. Her only daughter, Christian, was shy (her nickname was Mouse) and Susan gently nudged her into the world. She signed Christian up for summer camps, and whenever her daughter mentioned other kids from school or the neighbourhood, she encouraged her to invite them over. Susan taught Christian to drive stick, staying calm whenever her daughter stalled in the middle of an intersection. Often they’d just go to lunch and talk.

When Susan and Fred separated in 1983, they returned to Toronto and moved into different houses. Susan settled on Grace Street and Christian, then 16, spent the summer at a camp in Alberta. Her mother wrote to her that August and recounted all she was doing to set up her new place and the joy of wearing clothes chilled in the freezer amid the summer heat. To Christian, she sounded optimistic, ready for a new phase of her life at 45 years old.

A few days after she wrote the letter, Susan was supposed to have dinner with her sister and brother-in-law. She never showed up.

Around that time, Christian felt a strong urge to call her mother from camp. A man answered the phone at Susan’s house, but before Christian could speak, he hung up. She later learned it was her uncle. He had grown concerned when Susan never arrived for dinner and went to check on her, finding mail piling up at the house. He went into the bedroom when Christian phoned that day, and only hung up because of what he saw when he turned around: Susan was dead. Police later determined she had been sexually assaulted and fatally stabbed.

Christian returned to Toronto for the funeral, furious with everyone who kept telling her to let them know if there was anything they could do for her, simply because she knew there was nothing they could do. She felt herself splintering from her brothers. Her dad didn’t even have a bed for her at his place. Christian asked her father to send her back to camp, and she spent one more week that summer hiking through the Kananaskis mountain range.

Six detectives were assigned to Susan’s case at first. Her husband was immediately a suspect, but police later ruled him out. Eventually, the leads evaporated.

In the weeks after her mother died, Christian let herself into the house on Grace Street, walking through its rooms trying to figure out what happened and only leaving when the sun went down. She went away to university at 19 and never returned. Her father was struggling, and disagreements and misunderstandings festered between her and her brothers. They stopped speaking. “Sometimes families are brought closer,” she says. “It blew us apart.”

Twenty years later, Gary Ellis, who had assisted with the initial investigation into Erin Gilmour’s murder, was head of homicide with the Toronto Police Service. The case had never left him. Out of curiosity one day in 2003, he asked the cold-case unit what, if anything, was going on with Erin’s file. What he learned floored him. DNA found in her apartment had matched a sample collected from another unsolved murder committed just four months before Erin was killed: Susan Tice.

The discovery that the two murders were the act of one man was made possible after the creation of a data bank in 2000 maintained by the RCMP to store and match genetic material from convicted offenders to unsolved crimes. Detectives were already working the case, Mr. Ellis learned, trying to flush out new leads.

The DNA link reignited hope that the perpetrator would be found. As media interest picked up, Sean McCowan, one of Erin’s brothers, fell into the role of spokesperson for his family. He had a job in the investment industry and kids of his own by then, and whenever a reporter called, Sean would talk. He would tell them about the person Erin was, the unanswered questions he was left with and how, when his mother shook him awake one morning to tell him his sister had been killed, he punched a hole through his bedroom wall.

When Christian Tice learned about the connection, she was disappointed that police hadn’t put it together sooner. To her, there were similarities: Susan and Erin lived alone, not far from one another, and had recently moved into their homes.

As the years passed without any developments in the case, Christian settled in Guelph, Ont., and started a commercial painting business. There are certain aspects of her mother’s death she keeps at a distance. “If I really focus too much on it, then it would break me,” she says. Christian has been marked by it in many ways. Even 39 years later, she sleeps with a baseball bat.

Sean, meanwhile, developed an interest in shows like Law & Order and CSI, where, more often than not, cases are solved. He was watching a true crime program a few years ago when he heard a new term: genetic genealogy. The episode detailed how this new research method led to the arrest in 2018 of Joseph DeAngelo, a man known as the Golden State killer, who had long eluded authorities after a string of murders starting in the 1970s. For Sean, it was a revelation. He called a Toronto police detective he knew (he’d developed a list of contacts over the years) and asked whether genetic genealogy could be used in Erin’s case. The force had never tried it before, but that was about to change.

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Detective Sergeant Stephen Smith joined the Toronto police some 25 years ago, with stints in the drug squad and a spell nabbing bank robbers. He transferred to the homicide cold-case unit in 2017, intrigued by the possibility of bringing closure to families who have gone years, even decades, without answers.

In 2019, he attended a course at the Ontario Police College about unsolved historical homicides, which featured a lecture on genetic genealogy with some of the investigators who cracked the Golden State killer case. It was the first time the method was taught in Canada. The technique combines modern DNA analysis, old-school genealogical research and classic detective work. Public genealogy databases, where people willingly upload their DNA profiles to find relatives and chart family history, have become an important tool in solving historical crimes. In particular, an online service called GEDmatch is a go-to for investigators. Once police upload a DNA sample, GEDmatch returns profiles that bear some genetic similarity to the original sample, which is enough to start building family trees and zero in on a suspect.

Det. Sgt. Smith immediately saw the potential. Toronto police first used the technique to solve the murder of Christine Jessop, who was killed in 1984 when she was nine years old. In 2020, police determined that Calvin Hoover, a family friend, had killed Christine. It was a remarkable development, but there would be no justice. He was gone by then, having died by suicide in 2015.

While investigating Christine’s death, the cold-case unit was simultaneously trying to solve the murders of Erin and Susan. In 2019, they sent a DNA sample from one of the crime scenes to a lab owned by a company in Texas. Othram Inc. performed what’s called a single-nucleotide polymorphism test, which measures for minute genetic variations that are passed from one generation to the next. By comparing the results for two different individuals, a researcher can gauge their relatedness – whether they’re likely to be first or second cousins, for example.

The lab uploaded the results to GEDmatch and, back in Toronto, Det. Sgt. Smith could view the profiles that had some genetic similarity to the culprit’s DNA. It was not a promising start: The profiles belonged to people whose genetics suggested they could be fifth and sixth cousins of the culprit, not close enough to identify him any time soon.

A small team, including an in-house genealogist on the force, started tracking down family members of the matches. Investigators asked whether they had already tested their DNA with a private service, such as 23andme, and could port the results to GEDmatch. Sometimes, they had to ask individuals whether they were willing to have their DNA analyzed from scratch as part of a historical homicide investigation. From those original profiles on GEDmatch, police built a sprawling map of eight families consisting of more than 3,000 names.

The process led them to families with roots in rural Canada, which presented entirely new challenges. For one, family lineages were muddled and people appeared more closely related than they were. Two people whose genetics suggested they were first cousins could actually be fourth cousins. Sorting through the generations proved complex. Parents had large broods – brothers and sisters were many years apart in age, with uncles and aunts younger than their nieces and nephews.

But by 2021, Det. Sgt. Smith was confident they were getting close. Sean allowed himself to feel more optimistic than ever before that his sister’s killer would be found. When he spoke with The Globe and Mail late that year, he did not want to say that knowing the identity would provide closure. “It provides a bit of an answer to a question we haven’t been able to answer,” he said. His brother, Kaelin, felt much the same way. “I don’t think I’ll ever have peace from finding out,” he said.

Christian has long been unsettled by the notion that the person responsible for her mother’s death could still be out in the world, without facing justice. “I don’t know if you have peace when you die or not, but to me it’s heartbreaking that this hasn’t been solved,” she said. “I worry about her soul.”

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Last Thursday evening, Sean McCowan received a call while out having a drink with friends. The number showed up as “No Caller ID,” as it always does when Det. Sgt. Smith rings him. When he picked up, the detective said the words he had waited decades to hear: “Sean, we got him.” He doesn’t remember the rest of the conversation, only stepping outside amid a wave of joy, sadness, laughter and tears.

Earlier that day, Ontario Provincial Police arrested 61-year-old Joseph George Sutherland in the small northern community of Moosonee, Ont. Police served him with a DNA warrant the previous week, allowing them to collect a blood sample. He was brought back to Toronto and charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Mr. Sutherland, according to police, was living in Toronto at the time of the murders and would have been about 22 years old, the same age as Erin Gilmour. A Facebook page that appears to belong to him is filled with photos of snowy wilderness, Canada geese and selfies in hunting gear. Somehow, his name evaded police all this time. He was never a suspect, never questioned by investigators, never known.

Toronto police broke the news at a news conference a few days later, on Monday. “This case is probably the most complex case I’ve ever worked in my 25 years,” Det. Sgt. Smith said. Sean stood nearby, next to his brother, Kaelin. In front of the TV cameras, Sean spoke about his gratitude for the investigators who pursued the case until the end – “It finally puts a name and a face to someone who, for all of us, has been a ghost,” he said – and how their mother, who died in 2020, would have been relieved at the outcome that day.

Kaelin had moved to New Zealand years ago and was in Toronto for work purely by chance when the news came in. On the day Sean called to tell him, he had been sorting through a storage facility filled with his mother’s belongings. Some of Erin’s possessions were in there, even her bed. Neither Kaelin nor Sean intend to keep it. But there was also a box of glassware that belonged to her, a more fitting way to remember their sister.

Christian watched the news conference at home in Guelph with a friend. One of her brothers called the day before to let her know that a suspect had been found. It was their first time speaking in years. They didn’t talk about the past or their differences, only about what was ahead and about the woman who had once bonded their family. That night, Christian had a drink with a friend, a kind of toast to her mother. The fear she had most of her life knowing that a killer was still out there faded. She felt relief, remorse, happiness, the tragedy of it all. It was impossible to articulate. But just then, having a name and an arrest was enough.