After almost 39 years, Toronto Police homicide detectives have arrested a suspect in the shocking 1983 murders of career girl Erin Gilmour and single mother Susan Tice.
Cops made the announcement at a news conference Monday at police headquarters.
The arrest marks the end of an investigation that has vexed generations of detectives and spanned decades.
But as in hundreds of other cold-case murders — including the 1984 murder of nine-year-old Christine Jessop — modern technology is providing a helping hand to investigators.
“This guy was never on our radar,” cold case boss Det. Sgt. Steve Smith told the Toronto Sun. “He had no criminal record and without the technology, frankly, finding him would have been like finding a needle in a haystack.”
Smith added: “He is a nobody.”
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Joseph George Sutherland, 61, of Moosonee — nearly 20 hours north of Toronto on James Bay, was arrested Friday by OPP investigators and is charged with first-degree murder.
As in the Jessop investigation, detectives used DNA for genetic genealogy that can — at the very least — identify family members of an accused killer. Once the family has been identified, detectives begin work there, eliminating tens of millions of possible suspects.
“It was still a lot of shoe leather,” Smith said. “But once the results came back we started eliminating possibilities and zeroed in on the suspect.”
Cops have long been on the cusp of solving the Gilmour-Tice murders. The two disparate slayings were linked in 2011 by DNA that revealed both women were killed by the same man.
The killer struck first on Aug. 17, 1983.
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Tice, a social worker and mother of four, had recently moved from Calgary. She was found dead in her ransacked home on Grace St., near College and Bathurst Sts.
Her body was in her upstairs bedroom. She had been raped and stabbed numerous times. Tice was a social worker working with disadvantaged kids and cops believed she had been dead for several days.
Four months later, on Dec. 20, 1983, career girl Gilmour, 22, was found murdered in her Yorkville apartment — just 4km from Tice’s downtown home. She too had been sexually assaulted and stabbed to death.
After that, cops hit a brick wall. Investigators eyed almost 5,000 suspects in the murders until in 2011, DNA connected to the two killings. But for detectives, it was a matter of so close and yet so far.
Police believed the killer had some sort of link to the area. In 2011, they said the killer was between 18 and 35 years old at the time of the crimes, making him in his mid-50s or early-70s today.
“This is the most complicated case I’ve worked on in my career,” Smith told the Sun in 2021.
“There’s nothing even close to it, the twists and turns we’ve had in this.”
Law enforcement sources say they don’t believe the alleged killer murdered before or after the 1983 homicides in Toronto but suspect there’s a possibility he may have struck outside the city.
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