Yeardley: Hey, Small Town Fam, it’s Yeardley. How are you guys? I hope you’re all well. We have a great case for you today and a wonderful new guest on the microphone, Detective Sergeant Steve. We don’t do very many cold cases on this podcast, but we do when they come to us in a roundabout way, thanks to our own Paul Holes. So, before we sit down and record with a new guest, I go through a short list of tips and tricks with that guest to help them feel at ease and tell them what we need on the back end in terms of putting an episode together for this podcast.

So, for instance, I remind them to breathe, to use first names instead of pronouns, so it’s easier to keep track of the players in the story and basically to just relax and tell the story like we’re all sitting around the dinner table. I also tell them that nobody is just listening to your podcast. They’re all doing something else while they listen to your podcast. So, you’re walking the dog, you’re in the gym, you’re cooking, driving, commuting, anything and everything. But today, Small Town Fam, I encourage you to stop what you’re doing and pay attention. The case Steve brings us today is tragic, gripping, full of near misses and steep learning curves. And spoiler alert, it is a cold case, no more. Here is Square One.

[music]

Hi, there. I’m Yeardley.

Dan: I’m Dan.

Dave: I’m Dave.

Paul: And I’m Paul.

Yeardley: And this is Small Town Dicks.

Dan: Dave and I are identical twins-

Dave: -And retired detectives from Small Town, USA.

Paul: And I’m a veteran cold case investigator who helped catch the Golden State Killer using a revolutionary DNA tool.

Dan: Between the three of us, we’ve investigated thousands of crimes, from petty theft to sexual assault, child abuse to murder.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Dave: Each case we cover is told by the detective who investigated it, offering a rare, personal account of how they solved the crime.

Paul: Names, places, and certain details have been changed to protect the privacy of victims and their families.

Dan: And although we’re aware that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we ask you to please join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved-

Dave: -out of respect for what they’ve been through.

Unison: Thank you.

Yeardley: Today, on Small Town Dicks, we have the usual suspects. We have Detective Dan.

Dan: Good morning.

Yeardley: Good morning. We have Detective Dave.

Dave: Good day.

Yeardley: Good day, sir. And we have the one and only Paul Holes.

Paul: Oh, almost good afternoon here in Colorado.

Yeardley: [laughs] Perfect. How I look forward to the day when we’re all in the same time zone again. Technology is great, but there’s nothing like being at the same table and Small Town Fam, we are very excited to welcome a new guest to the podcast today. His name is Detective Sergeant Steve, and he comes to us, thanks to Paul Holes. So, Steve, before you give us a little thumbnail of your career, tell us how you and Paul met up.

Steve: Absolutely. We were both in Nashville at a conference held by Othram, Inc. out of Texas. It’s one of the genealogy labs. We were both down there for the conference and we met up and spent a little bit of time together during the conference and in the evenings. And then I left and I think Paul stayed for CrimeCon and he was a big celebrity there so.

[laughter]

Yeardley: So, he’s the mayor of CrimeCon. He is a big celeb. We ride his coattails at that conference.

Paul: No, not at all. Not at all. [Yeardley laughs] I actually got to see Steve present at the Othram Conference, which is called ForTech, and he’s got amazing stories. So, I’m looking forward to this episode.

Yeardley: Me too. And Steve, today you’re bringing us a cold case. And so, I’m fascinated by this, just the whole journey, when something has to percolate for that long, what it does to the players, what it does to the agency, what it’s like when it’s finally resolved. I’m getting ahead of myself. Tell us a little bit about your law enforcement career.

Steve: Okay. During university, I was working at the Canada Border Services in Niagara Falls. So, I was working the bridge and I was actually playing hockey and baseball with the Niagara Regional Police. And I decided to apply to some of the police services. And I was hired in Toronto within a couple of weeks. So, I went through our training and I was assigned immediately to 51 Division, which is the Regent Park area, Toronto. It was at the time probably one of the toughest divisions. It was the rough area town. So, I stayed there for about three years. I worked uniform for a little bit and then went to the detective office. From there, I went to the drug squad for about five years, did street level drugs and then major projects importation.

I was promoted and I was sent back to 51 Division again as a sergeant, and then I went as a detective to major crime. I went to the holdup squad and did bank robberies for four years. From there, I went over to homicide cold case. I was sent over there on a special project and just fit right in with the cold case section there. It was really when IGG was starting out and I’ve been there ever since.

Yeardley: I have two questions first, what’s IGG?

Steve: Investigative genetic genealogy. So, it’s using DNA basically in a different form than we’ve used before to solve cases, to use genealogy to help us narrow down offenders.

Yeardley: Right. That’s amazing. I’m excited to hear about that. And I was curious when you said, because I feel like we hear this a lot. When people first get into law enforcement, they’re often assigned to the worst part of their community, like the hardest hit in crime. And I wonder if that’s by design to separate the wheat from the chaff and decide like, “Look, dude, this is the real, real and if it’s not for you, it’s better that you know now.” What do you guys think about that?

Dave: There is an aspect of law enforcement early on where I got to see a new officer in some tough circumstances. I got to see if they can fight. I want to see how they speak to people because for me, I’m assessing whether or not this person can resolve problems efficiently and stay safe and keep me from having to come rescue or overcome damage that they do on a call before I arrive. So, there’s a lot of this evaluating that is going on by all the veteran officers who are watching. Can this person handle themselves? And certainly, when you put in a challenging district or a tough beat, you’re going to figure that out sooner than later.

Yeardley: Right. I mean, it makes sense. But it did start to seem like more than a coincidence. Steve, do you think it was by design in order to see, like, are you up to the task?

Steve: Yeah, I don’t know how they assess people coming out of college. I mean, I actually asked for that area. So, they said, “Well, you want to go, here you go.” But I really think it gives you a chance to either decide whether you like that aspect or you don’t like it, right.” Because you really don’t have any options. I mean, you’re down there with some of the people that are the toughest of the tough and they have nothing to lose. So, if you can’t deescalate situations, you’re going to have a problem constantly. And just the volume of work, I mean, you don’t get a break in those divisions. It’s just back to back to back. So, you become mentally exhausted, but you have to be able to still be sharp and go through that. And some people enjoy that in policing and others want nothing to do with it. I think it gives ability to separate that.

Yeardley: Sure, sure, that makes sense. Well, Steve, please tell us how this case came to you.

Steve: Yeah. So, I mean, when I started in the cold case unit, this was one of the biggest cases in Canadian history. I mean, everybody knew about it. So, to actually get to dig in and look at the case and start reinvestigating it, it was really a great honor. So, Christine Jessop was actually a nine-year-old girl. She was living up in what we consider as York region. It was about an hour north of Toronto, and it was really a farming community at the time. And it was October 3re, 1984. Christine went to school that day. Her father Ken was in jail down in Toronto for some fraud-related activities. And her mother had went down to visit him that day. So, Christine was going to come home on the school bus.

Basically, they knew everyone in town, everyone knew each other, the kids all played together. Mom knew she was going to be an hour or so later than Christine was going to arrive home and she expected her just to play around and hang out with neighbors. But when mom arrived home, she couldn’t find her. And a search of the town revealed that Christine wasn’t around. So, unfortunately, at this time, officers didn’t get called till a couple hours later because nobody was sure that she was actually missing.

Yeardley: And what’s Christine’s mom’s name?

Steve: Janet. Janet Jessop. She actually just died recently, unfortunately. But I mean, she was one of the strongest people that I’ve ever met with everything she went through in this case.

Paul: Steve, I’ve had to work multiple child abduction cold cases, and part of digging into these cases was getting a feel for the neighborhood where the victim was abducted out of. Could you describe Christine’s, you know, the house? You said it’s a farming community. Are these residences pretty spread out or she living like in town with houses that are right next door to each other, off of a busy street, etc.

Steve: It’s Queensville, Ontario. So back at the time, I mean, it was literally a one stop sign town. So, the Jessop farm, it was set back from the road. So, you had the long driveway that came up. It was your typical wraparound porch, old white picket house, very nice. They had a couple acres around them as well. So, the nearest neighbors, even though you call them the nearest neighbors, it’s not like you would think in a tight town. I mean, you’re talking a couple of acres away is the next house. Then there may have been 40 or 50 houses in scattered, a store, a park, but you’re talking two roadways. And even though it’s covering a large area, there’s not a lot of people that would have been in that town or had any reason to be in that town.

Yeardley: So, how many hours actually pass before police are called to say, “We think Christine is missing?”

Steve: It was about three hours until officers arrived. And then it was really just one uniform officer that arrived at first, because, as I said, in 1984, we didn’t really have, especially in those small towns, a lot of child abductions. So, they were figuring that she was somewhere. They just didn’t know where she was. But once they started looking around and searching, they realized that Christine was actually missing. She had been abducted. She was gone.

Paul: And, Steve, I imagine back in the early 80s or mid-80s, there was no formal child abduction protocol that was being followed by law enforcement. It was more of a typical response. Patrol rolls out and then time just passes.

Steve: Absolutely. And, I mean, that’s one of the things that lead us down the road astray a bit. Here was the original officer on scene actually did a great job. What he did when he got there, he went to talk to the neighbors, and the closest neighbor was Guy Paul Morin. So, he went over, and Guy Paul was the only one home, came out and talked to him on the back porch. And the original officer actually said to him, “The little girl over here is missing. Have you seen anything?” And he said, “No,” and went back inside. But that leads us a little later to when the detectives show up. Then they go over and have a conversation with Guy Paul’s dad. They don’t tell him what’s going on. They say, “Something’s happened in the area. Have you seen anything?”

Guy Paul’s dad says, “No, I haven’t seen anything.” The detectives walk away. Guy Paul comes up from downstairs, leans to his dad on the patio, and says, “I bet the little girl over there is missing.” Well, the officers hadn’t told dad that, but Guy Paul had been told that from the original officer on scene. Guy Paul’s dad calls the detectives back and says, my son came up and said, “We believe that the little girl’s missing. Is she missing?” And that obviously immediately tweaked the officers to think, “How did Guy Paul know that?” Because they didn’t have the conversation between the original officer on scene and the detectives that arrived later.

Paul: How old is Guy Paul?

Steve: He was in his 20s at the time.

Yeardley: I’m curious that Guy Paul didn’t say, “Yeah, I talked to an officer four hours ago.” He asked me if I’d seen the little girl next door who seems to be missing. This seems like an easy fix.

Steve: Exactly. I don’t think that Guy Paul even knew that his dad had probably talked to the detectives afterwards. I don’t think he saw it as that big of a deal. He wasn’t a very social person. He struggled. He was probably on the autism spectrum, and he struggled with conversations and meetings with people. So, he probably didn’t put two and two together at the time. And you look back now and you think how easily this could have been fixed, but it wasn’t.

Yeardley: And also back then, I’m guessing in the early mid-80s, we didn’t have nearly as much information about autism as we do now or mental health challenges.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely.

Yeardley: So, Steve, do you know what Guy Paul was doing at the time of Christine’s abduction?

Steve: He was working. The timeframes for him to get there would have been very tight, but it was doable for him to get from work when he used his punch card and to make it back to the farm before Janet arrived home. But it would have been a very tight window for him to actually abduct Christine and abscond with her and then still be back at home for when the officer showed up.

Yeardley: So, it would have been tight. But it wasn’t impossible for Guy Paul to be involved in Christine’s abduction.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, there was some other circumstances. Such as Guy Paul didn’t go and search for Christine. When the whole town went to search for Christine, he didn’t attend her funeral. Back then, we saw those as red flags. So, turns out the offender in this actually did go and search for Christine, and he did actually attend the funeral.

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[Break 1]

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Dave: So, you have a miscommunication now that has the radar pointing at Guy Paul. How does the investigation evolve in the days after Christine Jessop goes missing?

Steve: So, in the days after she goes missing, I mean, the whole town was out searching for. They spent countless hours searching all the farming community around where she lived looking for to no avail. They didn’t find anything. Unfortunately, on December 31st, 1984, Christine’s body was found, but it’s found a ways away, a place called Sunderland, Ontario, which is actually a different policing district. So, York Regional Police policed where she was abducted from, and the Durham Regional Police policed the area she was found in. It appears that the offender tried to dig a grave, but obviously, with it being December, the ground was just too hard. Even though she could have been left there earlier, we don’t really know. She was very skeletal by the time we recovered her.

Really, the only reason they were able to find her body was someone was out walking his dog and he ran into a thicket and he went in looking for his dog after that and found her skeletal body in there. And that’s when the Durham Regional Police obviously came up and very quickly put it together that it was Christine’s body. But now you’re dealing with two different police services. And you’ve got to get the coordination. And the abductions in York region, the body now is in Durham region, so it’s the Durham region homicide. They were going to lead it, but they had to work together to try to solve this.

Dave: What’s the distance between these two jurisdictions?

Steve: They border onto each other, but the distance from where Christine was taken to where her body was found would have been about 25 or 30 kilometers. So, it was a fair distance.

Dave: Were they able to determine the cause of death for Christine?

Steve: Yeah, they were. So, she was stabbed to death. You could see hesitation marks at the autopsy. So, there were hesitation marks on her breastbone. There was also defensive wounds on her arms. So, she was still alive at the time. And there was one massive knife plunge that went through her body and actually separated her spine.

Yeardley: Jesus.

Paul: Did she still have clothing on? Was the clothing found next to the body? Were there any other items of evidence?

Steve: Yeah. So, she had clothing that was still on. There were a number of things that we were able to observe. And I mean, I’m saying, us as in the detectives in 1984, but when they spoke to Janet, Christine’s mother, they were able to determine that the clothes she had on weren’t actually her clothes. So, we believe that the offender actually brought clothes to dress her up in, which was very strange.

Paul: Was there anything that stood out about the clothes that the offender put on Christine?

Steve: Not really. It was a blouse and pants, two pairs of socks. For some unknown reason, her watch was missing, never to be recovered.

Paul: And the clothing was age appropriate for Christine?

Steve: It was, yeah. Yeah.

Yeardley: Was Christine sexually assaulted?

Steve: She was. She was sexually assaulted. Obviously, at the time, DNA didn’t exist, so there was nothing they could do with it. But they found the presence of semen on her underpants. One of the other things is you could see the internal injuries and there was a lot of blood on her clothes, but there was no blood at the actual grave site. So, we believe that she was killed somewhere else, sexually assaulted, and then placed where her body lay.

Yeardley: And so, I was curious, in a small town like that, if there’s nothing really to go on, if nobody has seen Christine on the day that she disappears, how does the investigation progress? Like, the detectives take over and they go house to house and say, “What do you know, what does that sort of stage of it look like?”

Steve: Yeah, and that’s tough for us to remember. I mean, we have the luxury these days of so much tracking. There’s electronic tracking, there’s video, there’s cell phones, you name it. And you can track somebody basically anywhere they’ve been. Back at the time, they would attend houses, they would talk to people, they would look at the sex offenders in the area, any sort of the usual suspects because there’s always the one town guy who’s always in trouble. So, they would look at all these different people. And it was very labor intensive to have to try to backtrack and figure out if the stories are being told are truthful or not to whether these people have an alibi or they don’t have an alibi. So, there was a lot of footwork that went into this.

Yeardley: So, basically, good old fashioned detective work. Beating the pavement, knocking on doors. And yet I have a sinking feeling that you’re going to tell me that none of those efforts drew attention away from Guy Paul.

Steve: Yeah. So, they focused in on him early on because of some of the information they were given. And he went through a lot. So, he was actually charged in 1985 for abducting and killing Christine. And then in 1986, Guy Paul is actually acquitted of the charges. But in 8197, the Crown appeals and pushes for a new trial. In 1992, he’s actually convicted of abducting and killing Christine. Guy Paul goes to prison. And it’s not until 1995 when his lawyer pushes to have the DNA tested that he’s actually exonerated. So, what happened there was our government, the Provincial Government, actually stepped in and took the case off of Durham and York Region and they did a review with a justice. It’s called the Kaufman Report, if anyone’s interested in. It’s 1,800 pages. It goes over all the failings of the justice system, not only police, but police, defense, Crowns, our CFS, which is our center of forensic science, which does our testing, everybody.

Yeardley: Is it just for this case, it’s 1,800 pages?

Steve: Yeah.

Yeardley: Seriously?

Steve: Yeah. All the procedures that we utilize now, a lot of them come from the review of this case and things that we didn’t do right at the time and that we’ve now fixed and actually do correct now. And a lot of it comes from that Kaufman Report. But at that time, what they did was they brought it to the Toronto police and put us in charge of this case, and they gave us money for a task force. Because how Guy Paul was exonerated was they were able to actually test the DNA and get an STR or short tandem repeat profile to prove that it wasn’t Guy Paul’s DNA on Christine’s underpants. I mean, you can just imagine what that was like, not only for Guy Paul, but for Janet and the rest of the Jessop family too. It was a complete roller coaster.

When we ended up talking to Janet, she said to us, “I hated Guy Paul Morin. And then I didn’t know if I hated him. And then I thought I hated him because I thought he had killed my daughter. And now I realize he didn’t.” You can’t even imagine the ride that these families were on for them.

Dave: Especially, in that small of a community. Everyone’s talking, everyone’s looking. Every time you go to the store, everyone’s whispering. I can’t imagine.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. It’s just a horrific event all around.

Yeardley: I’m curious, because there’s this report that’s 1,800 pages long that says everything that was done incorrectly. What were some of the major missteps? Do you know?

Steve: I don’t want to get too far into it because, we aren’t policing in the 80s, so we don’t have to deal with what they had to deal with. But the biggest misstep was tunnel vision. They more made the evidence fit Guy Paul, than following the evidence to lead you to the offender. I think that was probably the biggest issue.

Paul: This is where really understanding how to conduct a proper investigation is so critical. When you have somebody that you focus in on as a suspect, you end up making the evidence fit that person as a suspect. Like in Christine’s case, you have offender DNA, but they didn’t have that back in the day.

Yeardley: Paul, you mean they couldn’t really analyze the DNA they found on Christine back then?

Paul: Yeah. So, this is where Dr. Kim Rossmo, who’s best known as a geographic profiler out of RCMP back in the day. He’s got an amazing article that when I talk to law enforcement, I tell all these investigators, you must read this article. It is called Criminal Investigative Failures. He really points out in this article this failing mindset of developing a suspect through circumstances and then making the evidence fit. And I fell into that trap multiple times with the Golden State Killer investigation. And then when I read that article, it was that mindset difference where now you go, “I’ve got to go 180. I have to let the evidence drive my investigation.” And so, to Steve’s point, those investigators focused in on Guy Paul very early on. And then eventually the evidence showed “Whoops, that wasn’t right.”

Yeardley: I mean, Dave and Dan have always spoken about their worst fear is taking away somebody’s freedom who didn’t actually commit the crime. It’s an enormous responsibility. And yet, of course, it happens. I can only imagine. So, Steve, you’re on this cold case task force now. How do you begin? How do you start to reinvestigate something that presumably already has a conclusion, actually?

Dave: And when did you pick it up? When does this case actually land on your desk?

Steve: Yeah, so, I don’t get it till years later. The task force is created in 1996. They actually do a great job. They go out and get over 300 male DNA samples. They collected DNA from anyone that lived in the town, anyone that had any business to be in the town, anybody that was even identified as a person of interest in the case. And still we had nothing.

[Break 2]

Steve: So, the task force ends up disbanded a couple years later. We actually blow through money that was supposed to last five years. It lasted us about two. Not surprising. But I don’t pick it up again until I come to homicide in 2018. So, that’s when I actually pick up the case.

We had four skids of boxes, so that’s how much paper we had from the 80s that had to be moved around by a tow motor. So, we were in the process of trying to digitize the case so we could look at it properly. But that was a task unto itself. At the end, it took two people, two years of work to digitize this case for us. So, we were working on it, but we didn’t have the full picture.

Dave: Where do you start?

Steve: So, as I’ve said before, like this is a huge emotional case for people in Canada. People just latched onto it. So, what we were doing was we were putting out media releases. And as you guys know, what does that do? Well, it gets you $1,000 or $2,000 tips. So now it’s a fulltime job as some of our investigators, just to sift through these tips to see if there’s any validity to them. And if there is, then we have to find out where the people are and try to collect DNA. So, we were chasing our own tail at that point. We were creating more work for ourselves, but we really had nothing else. We had went through the POI list, the person of interest list, and we still didn’t know who this was. So, we were running blind at the time. We had the offender’s DNA, but it was a needle in a haystack.

Dave: How many people are working with you on this, Steve?

Steve: I mean, we had about six people in our office, but really it was myself and my partner working on this case. We really took to some of these higher profile cases and he got stuck with filtering all the leads that were coming in and he was just throwing up his hands. He’s like, “Can we stop doing media? because I can’t keep up with everything that we’re doing. “

[laughter]

Yeardley: Yeah, it was my brother, it was my ex-boyfriend. It was this guy down the street. He looked shady to me. Oh, my God.

Dan: I think it’s a double-edged sword. You send out these media releases hoping for a reliable tip and hopefully you get one. But at the same time, I think a lot of people look and call in that really don’t have anything useful. But at the same time, we want them to call in. We want all the information.

Yeardley: Right. So, we have massive advances in DNA now, when do you get to Othram and to Paul and to say, like, “Help, we need the next big phase of DNA to help us close this case finally.”

Steve: Yeah, it was actually June of 2019. We went up to the very first unsolved historical homicide case at the Canadian Police College in Ottawa. And while we were there, we had a full day presentation on the Golden State Killer.

Yeardley: By Paul Holes.

Steve: [laughs] No, Paul wasn’t there at that time.

Yeardley: [laughs] Oh. So, Steve, you go to this conference and you start to hear about how this revolutionary DNA technique, this genealogy, building family trees has finally led to the identity of the Golden State Killer, which is extraordinary because certainly one of the biggest cases in the United States that had gone unsolved for decades. And does a light bulb go off in your head? You’re like, “Oh, wait a second,”

Steve: Sort of and I’m going to be honest, I had no basis in genealogy and I really had no idea what they were talking about. I was getting lost during it, but it seemed very doable. It’s just we had to actually educate ourselves in this. So, we were more adept at knowing what we were talking about. But there were two cases that came to our minds immediately and the Jessop case was one of them.

Yeardley: And what were the pieces that you hoped you would find? I’m sort of like you, it’s technically way above my pay grade. And Paul’s explained it so many times to me, but there’s something about the DNA you need to have or how much or see I already don’t know. [Steve laughs] But you were probably wondering, do we have enough and can we conduct this test and somebody will build us a great family tree? I’m guessing.

Steve: That’s exactly it. And before we even got to that stage, we went back and spent the entire summer educating ourselves on genealogy and genetic genealogy and DNA and the different forms of DNA because we didn’t want to approach somebody and not know what we were talking about, to have them look at us and go, well, do you guys even know what you’re doing here? Because we had to pitch this to our command, right? We had to go into our command and say, “Listen, we want to do this magical new investigative genetic genealogy.” And they’re going to have zero idea what we’re talking about, right? They’re going to look at us and basically just ask, well, how much is this going to cost us? But we have to be able to explain that to get the funding to go ahead with this.

This is when we actually first met with Othram and they walked us through their procedure and how they did things and we had to figure out, did we have enough DNA, was it degraded, was it a mixture, was it sole sourced? All the little pieces that when you first come back from hearing the lecture, you don’t think about.

Yeardley: That’s pretty impressive though. I feel certain that people at Othram oftentimes get law enforcement that are not nearly as educated in what they may or may not have. So, it’s really impressive that you guys went down the rabbit hole.

Steve: Yeah. And I’ll be honest, our command was great with it. We went up and explained exactly what we wanted to do and why we wanted to do it. And we told them the cases were looking at. And as they were probably the most high-profile cases, we explained that the money that you were going to utilize to use this new technology, just in officer salaries alone, you’re blowing that in a week. So, why not try this new technique and maybe we can solve what we haven’t in 40 years, in the next year, and it’s going to actually save you money in the long run. Whether they believed us or not, I don’t know, but they gave us some money.

[laughter]

Yeardley: That’s a darn good pitch. I like it. [laughs]

Dave: And so, Steve, what was the process for you?

Steve: The process when we started, it was awful. Now it’s completely seamless. We put in a request. We get the lab to send a shipping label. Our center of forensic science dries the DNA and off it goes. They ship it off. We don’t ever even have touch it. But I’ll tell you a little story about the first time that we went down to do this. So, we had made the agreement and we got the shipping label sent to us, which was the first mistake. It should have been sent to our Center of Forensic Science. But we decided we are going to go pick up the DNA and ship it down to Othram ourselves. So, we have no idea what we’re doing or how we’re going to do this. So, we go and buy ourselves 5 pounds of dry ice. So, now we’re carting 5 pounds  of dry ice.

We go to our Center of Forensic Science. They were a little apprehensive about giving us the DNA. One, they weren’t sold on IGG to begin with. And second, they never shipped this down to the US overnight. Like, they’re like, “How is this going to work?” So, we arrived there, they’ve packed the DNA themselves in. Do you remember those old Styrofoam white coolers?

Yeardley: Sure.

Steve: So, we’re carting 5 pounds of dry ice. We pick up this big Styrofoam cooler that’s sealed and taped and it’s all done up. So, now we’re carting this giant cooler, 5 pounds of dry ice. So, we drive up to by the airport and we walk in there and we say, “We need to ship this overnight down to Texas.” So, they give us like a refrigerator box. So, now we’ve got this giant refrigerator box. We’re putting this big cooler inside. We’re packing dry ice on it. Now we’re taping it. We’re taping it all around. I, of course, cut my partner with the tape gun. So, now he’s bleeding. He’s over in the corner. We’re taping this thing up. [Yeardley laughs] And with our usual talent, we of course write on the US Shipping label, DNA.

Yeardley: Oh no.

Steve: So, we put that on the shipping label and proceed to ship it overnight to the U.S. Well, of course, at 3:00 AM we get a call from U.S. Customs saying, “Are you guys shipping us body parts?” Like, what’s going on here?

[laughter]

Yeardley: Oh, my gosh.

Paul: And also, what this DNA is in is a little plastic tube that is maybe an inch.

Steve: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Paul: And now we got this refrigerator box with all this dry ice for this tiny little tube.

Steve: [laughs] And now it goes down just like you said in like a tiny little box. They seal it up and ship it and it’s gone. We don’t touch it. It’s amazing. But, yeah, the very first time we did it was a bit of a fiasco. [Dave laughs]

Yeardley: That is funny.

Dave: I’m just wondering what the turnaround time is on Othram receiving the evidence from you guys to the time that you get a report or you have an idea of where you guys need to be looking.

Steve: So for us, I mean, we shipped it in December 2019, and about six weeks later, so February 2020, we received our match lists from GEDmatch. That’s who we uploaded to first. It was still free at the time to upload to GEDmatch. But of course, our problem was this was just after the change in the terms of service for GEDmatch, so everyone automatically went to an opt out from an opt in for police involvement. So, our match list from GEDmatch consisted of two people.

Dave: Oh.

Yeardley: Oh, wow.

Steve: For better or for worse, it actually worked out. Were lucky enough that we had an officer that worked with us that was deeply into genealogy, so he offered his services to help us with this.

Yeardley: And Steve, when you say you got two matches on GEDmatch, you mean that you got two DNA profile hits who were related to the DNA found on Christine’s body?

Steve: Yeah, they were both out about fourth cousins, our two matches. One was on the maternal side, one was on the paternal side. And he was able to trace both their families to a small town in Ontario called Belleville. They’d both emigrated from the UK. It wasn’t great, but it did give us something to work with.

Yeardley: Wow. So, you’ve narrowed it down to this small town. It’s not the town that Christine was living in when she was abducted, is it?

Steve: No, it isn’t. It’s where the offender’s relatives would have arrived when they emigrated here. And basically, when you’re that far out and Paul knows, you’re basically including almost the entire town in your family tree. I think we had about 36,000 people to start with in our family tree, so it was a bit crazy.

Yeardley: So, how do you narrow that down?

Steve: Target testing. So, we bought up some testing kits and we were able to send them out. We targeted professionals that were in our tree and we really targeted corners of the genealogy tree. So, we were able to either include or eliminate huge sections of our tree being able to use these target tests. But again, you’re talking delays, right? Because you’re talking every time you send out one of these tests four to six weeks before you even get the test back. So that was really our delay to begin with.

Yeardley: And why did you choose to target professionals?

Steve: We just figured, we didn’t know whether our offender was going to be alive or deceased. So, we didn’t know if we were going to have to go through a trial. So, the last thing we wanted to do was bring someone in and they’re like, yeah, the police talked to me about this genealogy stuff, but I had no idea what they were talking about, so I just did it. And I didn’t really give my consent. So, we wanted people that we could explain it to that we believed would understand it and would actually give us an informed decision that, “Yes, they would help us out with this.”

Yeardley: Wow, that’s smart. And then how long before you narrow it down to, say, “A branch of one family?” You know, like you have these distant cousins. How do you start to narrow the field?

Steve: Yeah, so through the target testing, it really narrowed our genealogist in. So, we were able to take it from, I think about 36,000 people down to about 5,000 people in our tree, which is still a lot.

Yeardley: [laughs] It’s a lot.

Steve: That’s when we made the decision to upload to Family Tree DNA. And when we uploaded to Family Tree DNA, we got over 100 matches. And from there, honestly, it flew by. We were down to two sets of first cousins almost immediately once we did that upload.

Dave: So, from that point, I want to know how you and your partner dig into this case.

Steve: Yeah. So, we look at both the sets of first cousins and we immediately gravitated to the one side of the family. There was about seven sons. The dad had left his wife and had a baby with a 14-year-old girl. Basically, everyone had been convicted of sexual offenses, but all as minors. So, they weren’t uploaded to our national DNA data bank. But there was a lot of sexual deviance in this family. And one of the brothers had actually walked out onto one of our highways right in front of a transport truck and killed himself. So, we’re thinking this is probably going to be our guy.

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[Break 3]

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Yeardley: So, Steve, you’ve narrowed your suspects down to this family where a lot of them have criminal past of a sexually violent nature. And so, if you’re right that this guy who walked in front of a transport truck and killed himself as the offender, can you test that by testing the DNA of someone else in his family?

Steve: Yeah, we actually collect DNA from one of the brothers and that family wasn’t a forensic match. The Y-STR didn’t match, so we knew it wasn’t a male relative from their family, so we had to reverse course and look at their first cousins.

Yeardley: That’s incredible. I mean, it’s incredible that no one in this family full of sex offenders matched the DNA sample. You had, just wow.

Steve: Correct. Yeah. Not an STR match or a Y-STR match. So, it absolutely wasn’t any of those males in that family.

Yeardley: Wow. So, now what?

Steve: Yeah. So, we immediately look at the other side of the family, and there were two brothers. One brother, we didn’t believe he was involved at all. He was a government worker through his whole life, and he had retired at the time. We were looking at this, and we just didn’t see any nexus between him and the family. So, we started looking at the other brother, and we thought let’s take a look and see what we can do here. But our problem is he’s deceased, so how do we get his DNA. In the meantime? What we did was we took all of his addresses, we ran them through all the computer systems that we have, and we were able to come up with an address that he was using at the time on his driver’s license that matched up with an interview in the Jessop case.

And when we looked, it was actually his wife that was interviewed in the Jessop case. So, at that point, it was kind of our aha moment of, well, I think we’re onto something here.

Yeardley: Wow. And what was the suspect’s name?

Steve: Calvin Hoover. So, Calvin turns out to actually be an acquaintance of Christine’s parents.

Yeardley: Oh, wow.

Steve: So, he actually worked with Christine’s dad. They had had social events at Christine’s house numerous times.

Yeardley: And, Steve, you said earlier that the offender had actually helped search for Christine before her body was found, and now we know that was Calvin.

Steve: Yeah, he was shoulder to shoulder with Christine’s dad doing a search everyday.

Paul: Calvin is inserting himself into the investigation. This is something an offender will do. And part of it is to gather intel as to, what law enforcement knows, where law enforcement is directing their resources. But it is also to portray themselves as the Good Samaritan helping out to lessen suspicion, at least in their mind, but we’re savvy to that. We know these guys insert themselves into the investigation. So, when you get somebody who seems to just be diligent at always being present for the searches or going to the funeral or whatever else, you go, “You know what? I better dig into that guy a little bit more.”

Steve: Yeah, he knew that the body was nowhere near where they were searching, so he had no jeopardy at the time. But I guess he was just probably there to make sure that they didn’t morph and decide to go to another area to search. I don’t know or was he just trying to throw the trail off or was he that much of a psychopath? I don’t really know.

Yeardley: Steve, you said Calvin was dead by the time you ID’d him as Christine’s killer. Do you know how he died?

Steve: Calvin had ended up committing suicide in 2015. He was living with his son at the time. So, Calvin ended up divorcing his wife, Heather, who was his wife, during these events where Christine went missing and he married somebody else and they actually went down to Vegas and blew all their money. His second wife ended up dying. We looked into that. It was natural causes, but he was living with his son at the time, and his son went to a wedding. And Calvin started the car in the garage, put the pipe into the window, poured himself a glass of wine and carbon monoxide, poisoned himself to death.

Dave: Any note left behind?

Steve: Yep, there was a note, but all it said was, “Have a great life.”

Dave: Interesting. So, what can you tell us about the day that Christine Jessop goes missing? What can you surmise about Calvin’s movements that day?

Steve: So, one of the problems was Calvin and Heather had four kids. So, two were Heather’s from a previous relationship, two were their children together. In Heather’s interview, what she basically said to us was, Calvin didn’t come home a lot. She said he worked a lot, which meant he just basically didn’t come home. But she said at the time she didn’t really care as long as he was paying bills. So, we didn’t really know where he was or what he was doing at the time. But going back over things, we believe that he may have picked Christine up at her school that day. Christine would have known him because the family socialized together. And when we interviewed Janet and made her aware of who the offender was, she said Heather and Calvin were at our house a lot for parties.

But Calvin never came in the house. He always stayed out in the barn with the kids. So, Christine, I don’t know how much she would have felt comfortable, but she would have known him enough to probably go with him. Some of the interesting things are just north of where Christine was abducted, Calvin’s family had a cabin. So, we believe that’s probably where she was sexually assaulted and murdered. And where her body was left was where Calvin went kayaking. Kayaked up and down the river, and she was placed right beside the river.

Paul: Calvin is using his own anchor points. Everybody has anchor points where you live, where you work, where you go and recreate. And so, he as an offender, is going to places that he’s familiar with because he knows, let’s say, this cabin. He knows I can take Christine there and do what I want with her because I know I will be uninterrupted. And then I know where I can put her body because he’s familiar with that location. Steve, did Calvin have any criminal history outside of Christine’s case?

Steve: Nothing. Well, nothing that he was caught for until 2007. Then he’s convicted of drunk driving, but other than that, nothing.

Paul: So, Calvin sounds like what we’re now terming a one off offender. If I’m digging into Christine Jessop’s case, I’m thinking, well, this might be a predator who’s possibly committing other similar type crimes based on the set of circumstances. And what the genealogy tool is showing is that when these types of cases are being solved, the guys that are responsible turn out, well, they did this horrific crime once, and for whatever reason, they didn’t continue to commit those types of crimes. And this is a type of offender that needs to be studied. And I know the FBI’s behavioral analysts have said the same thing. We need to study why do these guys commit the crimes in the first place, what leads up to that, and then why do they not continue?

Yeardley: Steve, didn’t you say that when there were social gatherings at either Christine’s house or Calvin’s house, Calvin was in the barn with the kids?

Steve: Yeah, he was. That’s what Janet told us.

Yeardley: So, that’s fishy to me. Why are you doing that? Why aren’t you hanging out with your own age group?

Steve: Yeah, we thought the exact same thing. So, we don’t know if there was any other abuse that had been going on. There was going to be a number of kids that would have been in the barn together, but nothing was ever said about that. We don’t know if that was part of this. And on this date, Calvin may have set out to just sexually assault Christine and ended up having to kill her because of what happened, or did he set out to actually sexually assault her and kill her? We don’t really know that.

Yeardley: Right.

Dan: So, Steve, once you narrow it down to Calvin, you probably just have this name in front of you. And of course, you go to your computer and you start doing a little background on him and you find out that he’s deceased. And I’m sure that was a huge letdown for you. I would want to have the conversation with the guy. What was that like for you when you found out where Calvin currently was?

Steve: Yeah, that was tough because, as you know, you want to see these guys have to go through court and have to either admit or be convicted of what they did. That’s part of what we do. So, when we found out Calvin was deceased, it was doubly upsetting because we weren’t able to prosecute him. And because now we’re in a quandary of how do we prove this beyond a reasonable doubt if we can’t get his DNA? We didn’t know whether he was buried, whether he was cremated. We had no idea if we were going to be able to get any of his DNA. We thought maybe off one of his sons, but is that going to be enough?

Dan: I would hope that when Calvin was discovered after he committed suicide, that hopefully they did an autopsy.

Steve: Yeah. And that was our Hail Mary. And this actually precipitated a law change in Ontario. So, any autopsy now, they actually keep a DNA portion of the autopsy. So, when we called it in to our center of forensic science, we said, “Do you have anything from the autopsy?” They searched their records and they still had two vials of Calvin’s blood in the freezer. So, they had taken three vials of blood, they only needed one to prove that he died by carbon monoxide poisoning. So, we had to write a warrant to literally walk that blood from toxicology to biology to test it against the DNA from Christine’s crime scene.

Yeardley: And obviously you get a hit.

Steve: Yeah, we tested the DNA and it came back to a trillion times more likely that it’s Calvin than any other offender. So, we know that at that point, he’s the only one in the world that could have deposited that DNA on Christine’s underpants.

Yeardley: That has to be such a double-edged sword because as you say now you’ve actually solved the crime and the right person is being held accountable, but that person is dead themselves. So, there is no actual accountability. You can’t look them in the eye. Steve, was Christine’s mother still alive by the time you actually solved the crime?

Steve: She is, yeah, she’s still alive.

Yeardley: And. And when Janet finds out the identity of Christine’s killer, she knew him, she knew Calvin socially. What’s her reaction?

Steve: Yeah, so my partner and I actually went down because we had spent a lot of time with Janet over the years. We talked to her. She called us once a month. We had met up with her a number of times. So, we actually went down to where she lives. We had lunch with her. We went back. We were sitting in her apartment. We got the go ahead from our corporate communications section to actually let everybody know, because the press conference was about ready to start. And we turned to Janet and we gave her the information. And she literally didn’t even flinch. She just looked at us, and then she said, I thought I was going to die before I found out this information. That’s what she said to us. And then we made her aware of who it was.

And she didn’t really remember Calvin at the time. She remembered Heather. She remembered she’d spent a lot of time with Heather. But that’s when things started to come back, and she started to give us information on Calvin and the fact he never would come in the house, but he was at their house a lot for parties and those sort of things. But there wasn’t the emotional reaction you probably would have thought. She was very stoic, like I said. I mean, I think she was probably one of the toughest people I’ve ever met because she’s been through this for so long. She just thought that this was never actually going to be solved.

Paul: Often what is overlooked, and this is underscored in Christine Jessop’s case, is Steve, through his efforts, proved who Christine’s killer was, and it’s Calvin. But at the same time, removed all the suspicion that I’m sure was still hanging over Guy Paul’s head. So, now he has got this physical evidence that absolutely proves he was not responsible. It gives Guy Paul his life back.

Yeardley: That’s so true. And it’s interesting, Paul, that this case and Guy Paul being exonerated is not unlike the cold case that you gave us about Carla Walker. And when you guys solved that with genealogy and DNA, you got to exonerate Carla Walker’s high school boyfriend, who was the prime suspect for 50 years.

Paul: Yeah.

Steve: So, when we chose this case, this was on our mind, that not only are we going to convict the guilty, but were going to exonerate the not guilty that were accused of being guilty at the time. And to us, that was a really big portion of this.

Dave: Yeah. Those would be the victories for me, is that Guy Paul has a certificate that says, I didn’t do this, so believe what you want to believe, but I didn’t do this. And the other thing is, Janet gets some answers, at least some finality.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, obviously, after we knew that it was Calvin, there was still a lot of coordination to go on because we had to go out and make everyone aware of what happened. There was a lot of players in this. There was Guy Paul Morin. There was Janet Jessop. There was Heather Hoover and her children. There was Justice Kaufman that did the Kaufman Report. And we wanted to personally speak to every single one of these people and let them know what had occurred. So, we sent officers to each one of their addresses. But nowadays, anything gets out, it’s one tweet away and the whole world knows. So, we had to really keep this kind of close.

Our chief wanted to do a press conference on it, and we had to align all these personal notifications to happen immediately before the chief was going to go on TV and speak. So, the officers that spoke to Guy Paul Morin, they went up and explained what had been done and what had happened. And his response to them was, “I told you guys I didn’t do it.”

Dave: How can you blame him?

Yeardley: And how old was Guy Paul by the time. He’s absolutely 100% exonerated.

Steve: I believe he was in his 50s at that time.

Yeardley: But so interesting and really, I think a sign of the times with the massive advances in DNA and investigative genealogy, I think it’s such a game changer. That’s a really good work, Steve. Thank you.

Steve: Oh, thank you. Thank you for letting me talk about it.

Dave: I imagine it was nice to let command staff know who had been approving all these expenditures. Hey, it paid off.

Steve: Absolutely.

Dan: Great job, Steve.

Paul: Yeah, Steve, I think you’re an example that I hope other investigators follow and start paying attention to the advancement in DNA technology and stay on top of your cases and persistence will pay off. Good job.

[music]

Steve: Thank you.

Yeardley: Small Town Dicks was created by Detectives Dan and Dave. The podcast is produced by Jessica Halstead and me, Yeardley Smith. Our senior editor is Soren Begin and our editors are Christina Bracamontes and Erin Phelps. Our associate producers are the Real Nick Smitty and Erin Gaynor. Gary Scott is our executive producer, and Logan Heftel is our production manager. Our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell. And our social media maven is Monika Scott. It would make our day if you became a member of our Small Town Fam by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at @smalltowndicks, we love hearing from you.

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