Toronto police have made an arrest in the grisly killings of two women in the city nearly four decades ago, a source told CBC News Monday.
Chief James Ramer is providing details of the development at a morning news conference. He is joined by Deputy Chief Pauline Gray of the specialized operations command and Det.-Sgt. Steve Smith of the force’s homicide and missing persons unit cold case section.
Susan Tice, 45, and Erin Gilmour, 22, were both sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in their beds in August and December 1983, respectively. They lived just kilometres apart in the city core — Tice in the Bickford Park neighbourhood and Gilmour in a Yorkville apartment.
Gilmour was an aspiring fashion designer and the daughter of mining tycoon David Gilmour and Tice was a family therapist and mother of four teenagers.
News of the arrest in the cases was first reported by the Toronto Sun.
In 2021, Toronto police told CBC’s The Fifth Estate that they were close to identifying the killer responsible for the women’s deaths. The investigation was featured in The Fifth Estate‘s report The Gene Hunters.
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The crimes were “absolute overkill,” Smith told The Fifth Estate. They were “overly violent … it was almost like it was gratuitous.”
In 2000, through DNA tests, police determined the same man killed both women.
Then in recent years, detectives entered DNA from semen left at one of the crime scenes into the popular family tree database GEDmatch. It uses raw DNA data submitted voluntarily by members who use companies like 23andMe or Ancestry.ca to do family history research.
In November 2020, police researchers successfully identified the unknown suspect’s great-grandparents. Since then, family tree researchers have been working their way down from that set of great-grandparents to try to ascertain the identity of the unknown great-grandson they believe is the killer.
“We’ve narrowed it down to basically two families,” Smith said last year.