The Hollow Thump of Justice

"If he were alive today, the Toronto Police Service would arrest Calvin Hoover for the murder of Christine Jessop."

"There are no winners in this announcement. There is no reason to celebrate. It does, however, allow us to take a major step forward in our efforts to bring justice to Christine's family."

"I'm probably one of the few around that was still here when that murder was being investigated. I can assure you that there is a great sense of relief, and it's not just in the policing profession."

"I mean, this has impacted the entire judiciary and the legal system ... I think we are all genuinely relieved that the person actually responsible for this has finally been identified."

Acting Chief of Police Jim Ramer, Toronto

Christine Jessop in an undated photo provided to police by her family. (Submitted by Toronto Police Service)

"It's not that we start with Calvin Hoover. What we do is we start with an unidentified semen stain that has a DNA profile to it. This is submitted to a lab and from that profile they build out a potential familial lineage."

"And It's from that lineage that the investigators then work downwards to be able to try to identify potential persons of interest."

Superintendent Peter Code, Toronto Police Service

Morin tried twice, convicted, later acquitted. Moe Doiron/CP

 

"I am relieved for Christine's mother, Janet, and her family, and hope this will give them some peace of mind. They have been through a dreadful ordeal since they lost Christine in 1984. I am grateful that the Toronto police stayed on the case and have now finally solved it."

"When DNA exonerated me in January, 1995, I was sure that one day DNA would reveal the real killer and now it has."

Wrongly convicted, Guy Paul Morin

One of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in Canadian history occurred when Guy Paul Morin was found guilty of murder of nine-year-old Christine Jessop. Long after the fact, a public inquiry into his two trials discovered that both investigators and prosecutors relied on specious science, fabricating jailhouse informants and a subpar police investigation. In their determined zeal to name a suspect a murderer and 'solve' the horrendous murder, they sent an innocent man to prison for 18 months.

Christine Jessop

On an afternoon in early October of 1984, Christine Jessop returned home from school, she left her backpack on the kitchen counter, and this is what her mother and brother found when they arrived home from a dental appointment, expecting to see an absent Christine. Photographs of the child were posted everywhere in the province. Eventually her body was discovered on New Year's Eve, 50 kilometres from her home. The little girl had been stabbed to death. Traces of semen were discovered in her underwear.

It took many years, but finally DNA extracted from that semen proved that Guy Paul Morin, languishing in prison was not the murderer, and he was exonerated as having been wrongly convicted. He was compensated for the loss of a year-and-a-half of his life and loss of dignity to the tune of $1.2M.

This is as good an example as any why Canada long ago abolished the death penalty. On Thursday, that same DNA evidence taken from the semen sample from the little girl's underwear, led the Toronto Police Service to the real killer. And on Thursday, at an online press conference, the identity of the man  was revealed; Calvin Hoover of Toronto.

 

In 1984, Hoover was 28 years of age when he murdered the nine-year-old Christine. A known linkage has not yet been revealed, but police indicate that Hoover's wife may have worked alongside Christine's father. Cold case homicide detectives identified him with the use of a relatively new technique called genetic genealogy. He will never face justice for abducting, raping and stabbing a child to death, due to the fact that in 2015 he committed suicide. 

 

The DNA sample in the possession of Toronto police was sent to an American laboratory and received results that gave investigators the opportunity to build two genetic family trees of potential suspects. Eventually the search was narrowed to a single name. And the murderer's identity was revealed. A man with a previous criminal record not of relevance to the investigation, but as it happened the province's Centre of Forensic Sciences possessed a sample of Hoover's blood enabling detectives to match the DNA sample to the blood, concluding the investigation.

Detectives next met with Christine Jessop's mother to inform her of their findings, and that information was also given to Guy Paul Morin whom DNA evidence cleared in 1995 after he had spent 18 months in prison for a crime he did not commit and for which he claimed innocence.

Calvin Hoover