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🗓️ 24 March 2022
⏱️ 95 minutes
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Detective Steve Smith of the Toronto Police Services Cold Case Unit led the solving of the 36-year old cold case of Christine Jessop, age 9, who disappeared after school on October 3, 1984. A local man was originally convicted of first-degree murder, but DNA evidence later cleared him of any involvement and the case went cold again. After attending a two-week training course where the techniques used to catch the Golden State Killer were taught, Detective Smith quickly came up to speed on the intricacies of Familial DNA and Genetic Genealogy to eventually identify Christine’s killer - a killer who had been hiding in plain sight.
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0:00.0 | So, I mean, we, one of the good things is we were able to look at both the, uh, the profiles |
0:25.7 | that we received and we were able to tell that they had emigrated from the United Kingdom to a small |
0:30.9 | town in Ontario called Belleville, Ontario. Um, so it's not a massive town. You're not talking like the |
0:36.2 | city of Toronto. Um, there may be 40, 50,000 people, which, you know, still a good amount of people, |
0:43.7 | but you're able to find familiar lineage within that small community. Um, our big break was when we |
0:50.0 | actually, um, uploaded to Family Tree DNA because we received over a hundred matches on Family Tree DNA, |
0:56.6 | which really brought us down from about 30,000 people in our tree down to about 5,000. Welcome to Game of |
1:04.2 | Crimes. Have you ever done any geographic profiling where you look at where the crimes are |
1:27.1 | committed like the Green River Killer, you know, and the Golden State Killer where they |
1:31.2 | geographically look at where they are, draw relationships between them. No, I haven't. I mean, we, |
1:35.8 | we don't have a whole lot that are connected through DNA. Um, and we definitely don't have any that are, |
1:41.6 | are really connected across Canada as of yet. I mean, hopefully in the future, if there are those |
1:47.0 | people out there that had been going across Canada, I mean, I know in the US, you guys have people that |
1:51.4 | travel all over the place and, and leave bodies throughout all your states. Dude, it's, it's not that |
1:57.4 | bad. Now, but let me tell you, the incidence of serial offenders and serial killers, for example, |
2:05.7 | has really gone down like in the 80s, uh, and 90s, it was really at a peak, but it's gone down since then. |
2:11.8 | And I think some of that involved is because of the ability to use things like DNA, uh, the advances |
2:18.6 | in fingerprints, advances in serology, whatever it is, we're out now able to link them together |
2:23.5 | and solve cases because you know, too, one of the challenges has always been is you cross, |
2:27.8 | for us, you cross a state line or you want to share information with the feds, |
2:31.5 | you know, information sharing was a huge issue because not everything got shared and not everybody |
2:35.8 | knew what the other guy knew. Yeah. And I mean, I, I see that happening up here. I mean, we've |
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