In 1984, nine-year-old Christine Jessop was murdered. It took 36 years, three police forces and a revolution in DNA testing to finally crack the case
n 1984, Queensville, Ontario, was a handful of homes clustered around a general store, a church, a cemetery and a playground. It was the kind of idyllic rural outpost where most faces were familiar and most front doors were left unlocked. Parents shooed their kids out of the house to play with toys, dig in the dirt and plummet down slides, so long as they were back before the streetlights came on.
Janet tried to suppress panic. She could be hard, with her sharp green eyes, pursed lips and salty vocabulary, but Christine brought out her tender side. The pair were close, did everything together. And despite giving her kids the illusion of freedom, Janet almost always knew where they were. She had left Christine unsupervised for just 20 minutes—a nanosecond in the vast sweep of a child’s life—and suddenly every parent’s nightmare was coming true.
The day after the disappearance, Calvin’s wife, Heather Hoover, rushed to Queensville to console Janet and help where she could. Sergeant Raymond Bunce of the York police interviewed her. Heather explained that she had been at work on the day of Christine’s disappearance. She assumed her husband had been working too, and told Bunce as much.
At work, he developed a friendship with Bob, and the two families—Hoovers, Jessops—gathered for barbecues and birthdays. The moms became particularly close. Janet jokingly called Heather “the Goofy Newfie.” Heather sometimes babysat Christine, who referred to her as “Auntie Heather.” Though they lived more than 50 kilometres apart, Janet and Heather would meet often to share a pot of tea and watch the kids play.
Christine’s parents, Bob and Janet, supplied police with the names of anyone who was allowed to enter the home without a family member present. One of those names was Calvin Hoover.When the Jessops heard the news, they were shattered. The torturous waiting and wondering were over, but now a lifetime of mourning lay ahead. They drew the blinds and hunkered inside.
Why, the detectives asked, hadn’t he helped with the search for Christine on the night she went missing? Morin said that had the Jessops asked him, of course he would have pitched in. But he and his father were installing weeping tile around the home’s foundation, and it seemed like the entire town was already involved. One more person wouldn’t add much. To a man whose north star was rationality, his explanation made all the sense in the world. To Fitz and Shep, it smacked of guilt.
Hair analysis was fashionable at the time, and often used in criminal proceedings, yet its usefulness was limited: it was a reliable way tosuspects—for example, if a blond hair was found but the suspect had brown hair. It was unreliable, though, forsuspects: that is, proving a definitive match. That’s because characteristics of hairs from one person’s head vary from hair to hair, and even the characteristics of a single hair may differ from tip to bulb.
Durham police officers John Shephard and Bernie Fitzpatrick zeroed in on the Jessops’ neighbour, 25-year-old Guy Paul Morin.They brought him to their headquarters, where, on his way to the interrogation room, Morin spotted a face that broke his heart: the woman who had plucked his hair at band practice. Until that moment, he’d assumed it had all been an honest mistake. Now, the reality of his situation was stark: he was about to take the fall for a crime he didn’t commit.
At trial, flimsy evidence was brazenly torqued to present Morin as the sadistic killer the Crown needed him to be. A cigarette butt found at the scene was collected as evidence, until police realized Morin wasn’t a smoker—at which point the cigarette butt was conveniently lost. . Mysterious red fibres found on Christine’s body and in Morin’s car were presented to the court as evidence that the little girl had been inside the car.
In the wake of the acquittal, the police and the Crown were embarrassed, their failings on full display. But there were no suspects they liked any better than Morin. So in May of 1990, a new trial commenced on a technicality related to instructions the original judge had given to the jury regarding the meaning of reasonable doubt. This time, little had changed. The evidence was still paper thin.
By the time Morin was put away for life, Calvin, Heather and their four boys lived in a two-storey suburban home in Oshawa on a pleasant tree-lined street. By all appearances, they were living a blessed existence, but the truth was the Hoovers were slowly drowning in debt. In 1991, Hoover had declared bankruptcy, owing $28,000 against assets of just $11,000. He battled various afflictions, including undiagnosed bipolar disorder, depression and periods of anxiety.
As Lockyer and his team pored over the previous trials’ twists and turns, they became aware of significant breakthroughs in DNA typing which allowed testing on samples that were previously too deteriorated to be reliable. The Crown, so convinced Morin was the killer, proposed they test again. For Lockyer, the risk, of course, was that the DNA evidence would prove that Morin was the killer. Morin practically begged his team to proceed.
Finally, it was his turn to grieve, but his pain was negligible in the face of the vast torment he had created. In the span of a few hours, he had destroyed Christine’s family, devastated a small town, shattered an innocent man’s life, and set in motion events that would envelop two ambitious, misguided detectives in a case that would bring them disgrace and ultimately terrify parents and kids across the province and country.
“A lot of cases, you put it out there and it might generate one or two tips,” says Smith. “But when we put the Jessop case out there, hundreds of tips would come in.” Officers would investigate each one, either cross-referencing the name against the list of 300 people they’d already eliminated via DNA testing, or pursuing the lead further. By the time Smith joined the cold case unit, they had brought on an extra staff member to sort through Jessop leads.
Smith submitted the DNA from Christine’s underwear to Othram, which generated a profile and uploaded it to a database called GEDmatch. Smith waited patiently, hoping for what he termed “the golden goose”—a parent, sibling or child of the unknown killer. The results would be expressed in terms of centimorgans, the unit by which familial proximity is measured. A sibling, for instance, might share 1,200 centimorgans. From there, it would be a quick one-two to find the culprit.
When the Christine Jessop case came across his desk, he was of course familiar with it. He enlisted two volunteers as research assistants. Both retired, they were as exacting and tireless as he was, and eager to lend their skills to a noble cause. Using burial records, birth records, town registers, social media and more, the team—plus an in-house genealogist from Othram—got to work.
It was a name Smith had never heard, and it had never come up in the thousands of tips that had flooded in since 1984. Today, the Toronto police use a file management server called Power Case that allows them to electronically search all files from a major case. The Jessop paperwork filled four skids, accumulated from the York, Durham and Toronto police. Smith punched in Hoover’s various addresses over the years into the system. To his surprise, he got a hit.
Once again, Smith could do nothing but wait. “I was anxious and excited, but I wasn’t obsessing about it,” says Smith, a master of understated cop-speak. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years, so I can compartmentalize, but I kept my phone at my side.” He devoted his off hours to his three girls, who were 13, nine and seven, but it didn’t take much for the Jessop case to come to mind. “My kids play hockey, so I’m around teams of young girls all the time,” he says.
Smith delivered the news personally to Janet Jessop at her residence in the Niagara region. They ordered in some food and watched the press conference as interim police chief James Ramer gave the update. Janet couldn’t quite place Calvin Hoover, but she remembered he was a colleague of Bob’s and that they might have gotten together for barbecues back in the day. She remembered Heather as a good friend and a “funny duck.
The Morins moved to the country, bought a few acres of land, and Guy Paul took a course in piano technology and found work that suited him perfectly: repairing pianos, some of them priceless. He tunes each string by ear, a task that requires the touch of a true artist, someone who knows music intimately and has the patience and focus to tighten each string just so.
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