Evil Walked Through the Door

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Speaker 10 Tonight on Dateline, I say goodbye to her outside her house.

Speaker 11 I walked across the street.

Speaker 9 I was the last of my car.

Speaker 12 Emergency. Emergency.
They're coming.

Speaker 15 Aaron had been stabbed multiple times.

Speaker 16 Anthony was seeing Aaron.

Speaker 17 He's the prime suspect at that point. After him, it's basically everybody.

Speaker 19 She'd thrown a party. Suddenly all these people showed up.

Speaker 21 People that weren't invited. No.

Speaker 17 The investigation just keeps ballooning, but it's not really leading us anywhere.

Speaker 16 Years of waiting.

Speaker 18 It was like this person was a ghost.

Speaker 23 All of a sudden, the police were, we've got another case.

Speaker 16 There was much more of a fight with Susan.

Speaker 25 I was convinced there's going to be a connection between these two victims.

Speaker 26 This is technology that is cutting edge.

Speaker 27 We're down to one family, five brothers.

Speaker 29 It was very eye-opening how remote we can get up there.

Speaker 17 Somebody that's cornered, they become the most dangerous.

Speaker 4 They said, you don't need helicopters, you don't need tactical teams.

Speaker 30 You say, I'm what? I'll do it.

Speaker 8 Yeah,

Speaker 8 I'll get them.

Speaker 31 An ice-cold case takes investigators to the frozen north to catch a killer.

Speaker 32 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 9 Here's Josh Mankiewicz with Evil Walk Through the Door.

Speaker 35 This much we know.

Speaker 36 It doesn't matter where you live.

Speaker 38 It doesn't matter if you're well-to-do or barely making it.

Speaker 43 Whether you're cozied up in a nice part of town, starting over someplace simple,

Speaker 45 or holed up in a far-off place.

Speaker 46 Evil can come through any door.

Speaker 34 On one awful night, a long time ago, it found its way here.

Speaker 17 Yorkville is one of the top neighborhoods in Toronto. There's high-end hotels, high-end boutiques, high-end restaurants, bars.

Speaker 48 Steve Smith is a homicide detective with the Toronto Police Service.

Speaker 51 He doesn't get a lot of calls to this part of town.

Speaker 17 It's where people with money gravitate to when the film festival comes to Toronto. Most of the stars stay in that area.

Speaker 53 Not a lot of violent crime there.

Speaker 22 Not a lot of violent crime.

Speaker 37 Not now and not then.

Speaker 12 Emergency. Emergency, please, please come as soon as possible.

Speaker 57 It was just a few days before Christmas 1983 when this Lux neighborhood became an epicenter of police activity, news cameras, and fear because of what happened to 22-year-old Aaron Gilmore.

Speaker 12 Okay, stay on the line with me.

Speaker 37 The caller was Aaron's boyfriend, Anthony Monk.

Speaker 60 When police arrived at the scene, they knew right away it was anything but suicide.

Speaker 17 They find out that she was bound and gagged. She had been stabbed multiple times in the front, up in her upper torso, as well as in the back.

Speaker 17 And it was believed right away that she was most likely sexually assaulted.

Speaker 46 Andrew Doyle is also a homicide detective in Toronto, Canada's biggest city.

Speaker 62 There was a significant fight before she died.

Speaker 16 There was definitely a fight before she died. Unfortunately, it was one that she couldn't win.

Speaker 40 Detectives Smith and Doyle weren't the original detectives, but they know the case well, beginning with the forensic sweep of the crime scene.

Speaker 16 Obviously, they would collect any and all specimens.

Speaker 16 Hair, fingerprints, blood, you know, saliva, any other liquid that they could get.

Speaker 32 You found blood in the apartment that wasn't hers.

Speaker 64 Yes.

Speaker 62 Because

Speaker 66 during stabbings, frequently you're going to end up cutting yourself.

Speaker 16 Absolutely. It happens all the time.

Speaker 48 Back then, DNA analysis was years away.

Speaker 49 Investigators could still tell a lot by determining what blood types were at the scene.

Speaker 16 You know, they did a lot of blood grouping. So they could, at the time in 1983, they would eliminate people through blood grouping.
So So obviously, looking back, it just wasn't that advanced.

Speaker 52 But they collect it and you guys hang on to it.

Speaker 12 Correct.

Speaker 50 They held on to all of it.

Speaker 48 Once police realized the victim was Erin Gilmore, they knew this would be a high-pressure case.

Speaker 43 This was the kind of story the papers write about and the chief calls about.

Speaker 16 Erin came from a well-known family in the Toronto area. She had a pretty large family.

Speaker 41 Erin's family was wealthy and influential.

Speaker 57 She had enjoyed a privileged upbringing, good schools, world travel. Her mother, Anna, the woman with the dark hair, was a former model and dancer.

Speaker 55 Her dad was pretty well known back then.

Speaker 72 He was. He was the first guy to market Fiji water.

Speaker 73 That's correct.

Speaker 72 From which I gather he made some money.

Speaker 65 She'd be correct.

Speaker 75 And in a matter of hours, That family was getting the call that changes families forever.

Speaker 35 Aaron's brother, Sean McCallan, was 13 at the time.

Speaker 43 He had been with Aaron just the day before.

Speaker 9 I just remember waking up the morning of the 21st and my mom was sitting on my bed. Took a look around.
There was a few people in the room.

Speaker 9 And my mom leaned over and said, you know, there's been an accident with Aaron. And she then proceeded to tell me that, you know, Aaron had been murdered

Speaker 9 the best that she could.

Speaker 22 And then I literally leaned over and put a hole through my wall.

Speaker 52 You punched the wall. Yeah.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 9 I think the quote my mom used was that Aaron had been had been killed by a bad person. You're 13 years old.

Speaker 22 It's a couple days before Christmas and you're trying to figure out

Speaker 9 number one how that happens to

Speaker 8 Aaron.

Speaker 41 Police found no evidence of forced entry or robbery.

Speaker 35 They quickly developed theories as to how Aaron's killer got inside.

Speaker 17 So if you see the rooftops behind us, they're all connected. So he could have got up on the rooftop anywhere on this row of houses and walked straight across until he saw somebody that was in there.

Speaker 17 Was it somebody that had been stalking her? Was it somebody that just happened to be in there doing a break and enter? Was it somebody that she knew?

Speaker 49 They paid close attention to the boyfriend's version of events. Anthony Monk told police he was supposed to pick up Aaron at 9 p.m.

Speaker 61 for a date. but stopped at an ATM on the way over.

Speaker 16 Now, Mr. Monk was running a little bit late, and he didn't arrive there until 9.20.
When he approached the door, he noticed that the door was a little bit open, ajar.

Speaker 16 So, knowing that he was going to be picking her up, he thought she may have left the door a little bit open for him.

Speaker 17 So, he's not sure exactly what's going on because usually her apartment is fairly neat, kept very well. So, he's seeing that there's a bit of disarray.

Speaker 32 By now, he's calling her name and not getting an answer.

Speaker 16 Calling her name very loudly, yeah, absolutely. Went back into the bedroom, noticed the duvet was completely

Speaker 16 covering the entire bed, but thought maybe she could be underneath there.

Speaker 16 So he went up to the bed, pulled the duvet down just to her shoulders, and found Erin there laying in the bed.

Speaker 16 And he noticed there was something around her neck, something black as he's described it, and there was blood everywhere.

Speaker 16 So he went back downstairs, got on the phone, called the operator, asked for an ambulance, asked for police.

Speaker 36 It's the kind of event that cuts the timeline of your life in two: the part before and the part after.

Speaker 77 Aaron's brother Sean would never be the same.

Speaker 76 He was still just a kid.

Speaker 50 But from that moment on, he would be driven by the question:

Speaker 60 who did this to his sister?

Speaker 83 Sean was on a mission.

Speaker 68 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 16 Like 40 years of

Speaker 16 waiting.

Speaker 41 Police wanted the same answers.

Speaker 30 He's getting away.

Speaker 25 Just disappointment after disappointment.

Speaker 36 Finding the killer would take detectives to the limits of their patience and to the ends of the earth.

Speaker 4 Oh, he says I did some really, really bad things.

Speaker 4 So I just shut up and listened.

Speaker 17 I often wonder: did he try to put this out of his mind and forget about it?

Speaker 22 Or was he thinking about it every night when he went to bed?

Speaker 17 Were you just waiting for that knock on the door?

Speaker 69 Five days before Christmas, someone had murdered 22-year-old Erin Gilmore in her apartment in a fashionable section of Toronto.

Speaker 37 The story made headlines.

Speaker 48 Police felt the heat.

Speaker 17 This was obviously a big deal in Toronto. I mean, every homicide, every murder is a big deal.

Speaker 17 But when it's a prominent family and a prominent young female that's murdered, it kind of stays in the forefront for longer.

Speaker 17 And I'm sure, I have no doubt that there was pressure as to we need to solve this.

Speaker 35 Sean remembers vividly the visit from some serious men in trench coats.

Speaker 9 The two original detectives on the case, I remember sitting in my mom's kitchen

Speaker 9 with them, and I think they were sort of on either side of me and taking statements or taking notes on what I was saying.

Speaker 78 What'd they ask you?

Speaker 22 Well, we had been there the night before.

Speaker 9 So they wanted to sort of, you know, was anything unusual and, you know, was anything strange happening? How is Erin acting?

Speaker 37 It seemed Erin was happy, looking forward to her evening and the holidays ahead.

Speaker 17 She was just starting out in life. She had a lot of friends, was very social.
She had a lot of things going for her, and her future was endless. She could have done anything that she had wanted.

Speaker 9 Erin would come into a room and the whole atmosphere would change because she was just this, you know, beautiful, dynamic woman who everybody wanted to be friends with.

Speaker 52 What was she up to at that point in her life?

Speaker 16 She'd gone to university, she'd graduated,

Speaker 16 she had recently traveled to Australia and had returned back to Toronto.

Speaker 17 She was working at a clothing store and she was living above that clothing store.

Speaker 85 Her dad had rented her that apartment.

Speaker 87 Correct.

Speaker 19 She loved it.

Speaker 88 Erin's cousin, Kristen Basso.

Speaker 19 And she was working right downstairs at Robin's Knits in her, you know, during her part-time whatever. She loved it.

Speaker 66 What could be better? Exactly.

Speaker 10 No commute.

Speaker 71 Her parents were divorced, but the Klan remained close.

Speaker 36 Her mother had remarried and had two boys, including Sean.

Speaker 9 My mom was busy starting up a ballet school in a business, and Erin would sort of fill the gaps a lot of the time. She had a Jeep, an old-grade Jeep YJ that she used to drive us around everywhere.

Speaker 9 And it it was, you know, adventure time, effectively.

Speaker 22 It was great.

Speaker 48 One of those adventures was a sleepover at Erin's the night before she was killed.

Speaker 22 We went over and had dinner and crawled in her bed, watched a movie, and then we all sort of crashed out relatively early.

Speaker 50 Kristen saw Erin walking with her brothers earlier that day.

Speaker 19 The two little boys were hanging off her because they just adored her. They just would hang off her.
And as I watched her, I thought, you look,

Speaker 19 you're so beautiful and you're so fragile. I hope nothing awful ever happens.

Speaker 83 Everyone loved her. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Vanessa Vancetart, another of Erin's cousins.

Speaker 83 Just a really nice, caring,

Speaker 89 sweet person.

Speaker 45 For the people who loved her, Erin's loss was overwhelming.

Speaker 37 All the money and care in the world.

Speaker 7 hadn't kept her safe.

Speaker 15 This is

Speaker 14 a hole that we'd never will be able to sort of fill in or fix, basically.

Speaker 35 Aaron's father, David, could not be consoled.

Speaker 61 Maybe because he had encouraged his daughter to live in that apartment.

Speaker 19 David practically committed suicide. He literally was on the verge of it because

Speaker 19 he was taking drugs just to try and keep

Speaker 90 himself, right?

Speaker 52 Oh, yeah, he did.

Speaker 83 Sending her back here.

Speaker 53 What did this do to Aaron's mom?

Speaker 19 Oh, it tore her apart.

Speaker 78 Totally. It tore her apart.

Speaker 68 Well, it's a horror movie that is your life.

Speaker 53 It never goes away.

Speaker 83 Never goes away.

Speaker 35 The notoriety of the murder put a family's private grief on public display.

Speaker 19 Well, the funeral felt like a mafia funeral, just from the point of view of all the press that were there photographing and the police photographing everybody, you know, going in and out.

Speaker 84 800 people packed the church.

Speaker 19 Everybody looked ghost-like. There was just such a feeling of silence since the choir was the only thing that had any kind of feeling of humanity in it.
It was just broken hearts everywhere.

Speaker 9 And I remember at the end,

Speaker 9 my mom asked us to go up to Aaron's coffin and go and touch it and say goodbye.

Speaker 4 And that was

Speaker 11 a hard one.

Speaker 92 You did that. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Yeah. Yeah, we did that.

Speaker 56 That's 13-year-old Sean in the red coat walking behind his sister's casket.

Speaker 52 Her funeral.

Speaker 52 A lot of people there.

Speaker 2 Oh yeah.

Speaker 21 Your guys among them.

Speaker 16 Correct.

Speaker 93 What are you looking for at the funeral?

Speaker 16 Is there anybody that's not invited that shows up to the funeral? And then also who doesn't show up for the funeral?

Speaker 17 You never know.

Speaker 21 Anybody not fit in?

Speaker 11 Not really.

Speaker 17 Nobody that drew any sort of...

Speaker 17 attention.

Speaker 58 At that point, police were just collecting every bit of information they could.

Speaker 20 Maybe the funeral would pay off, and maybe not.

Speaker 50 There was one person who certainly required more scrutiny.

Speaker 37 Aaron's boyfriend, Anthony Monk.

Speaker 50 Police listened carefully to his 911 call.

Speaker 9 And the first thing he said was that he thought she'd committed suicide. That's correct.

Speaker 32 And then what? Put herself back in bed and covered herself up?

Speaker 16 You know, I think, and according to Mr. Monk and his statement that he gave the police at the time, I don't think he knew what else to think.

Speaker 16 He didn't have any reason to think of anything else, I guess,

Speaker 90 in his mind.

Speaker 37 Police wanted to know if Anthony Monk was just a young man in shock or a young man with something to hide.

Speaker 17 You want to follow him. You want to see what he's doing in his life.
See if he's got another girlfriend. See if, you know, if his squeaky clean life isn't quite as squeaky clean as we thought it was.

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Speaker 49 Just two days after burying 22-year-old Erin Gilmore,

Speaker 88 her family faced the first of many Christmases without her.

Speaker 19 It was hard to believe you could even have a Christmas after what had happened.

Speaker 19 But everybody tried to be supportive.

Speaker 93 What was Christmas like that year?

Speaker 22 Yeah, no, Christmas that year was extremely difficult.

Speaker 9 Mom tried to sort of make sure that everything was as normal as it could be, but there was no possible way it could be.

Speaker 22 And you're trying to sort of go through the motions, and we would have our regular routines and traditions that we'd gone through. And

Speaker 9 there's a bunch of gifts from Erin under the tree that she had put there before she had

Speaker 9 been taken. So

Speaker 22 I took mine back to my room, which had been Erin's room previously.

Speaker 18 I had moved into it after she moved out.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 52 yeah, I opened them.

Speaker 77 It was a rare moment of solitude for Sean in those chaotic first few days.

Speaker 56 Cousin Kristen took on the task of cleaning up Erin's apartment.

Speaker 19 I didn't want anybody else. It was desecrating Erin's space.
I wanted to be the one.

Speaker 86 What was it like being in that apartment afterward?

Speaker 66 I can't imagine how terrible that must have been.

Speaker 19 It was, and yet I felt close to her. It was another way of being close to her.
It didn't freak me out that way. What freaked me out was how she died.

Speaker 19 That's what freaked me out, just trying to imagine that

Speaker 19 and wishing I could have been there. I mean, I still have dreams of wishing I could have been there to have helped.

Speaker 38 As family members did what they could to nurse their grief, detectives took a closer look at Erin's boyfriend, Anthony Monk.

Speaker 17 Their fathers were business partners.

Speaker 17 They interacted socially. They'd known each other forever.

Speaker 52 Were you aware they were going out?

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 66 So everybody was. That was no secret.
Yeah.

Speaker 72 They'd known each other for much longer than they'd just been dating.

Speaker 9 Yes, the family had been friends for a long time. They had been friends.
They'd been childhood friends, and eventually it evolved into a romantic relationship.

Speaker 66 Nobody had any problem with that.

Speaker 8 No, not at all.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 16 Anthony Monk was seeing Aaron Gilmore, and they had a prearranged date at DeGlot for dinner at around 9 p.m. that night.

Speaker 54 Which put Anthony Monk at the scene of the crime right about the time it happened.

Speaker 16 If you have a case like this and you have a boyfriend, domestic violence is something that we take very seriously. And

Speaker 16 it happens daily in this city, unfortunately, and probably around a lot of major cities.

Speaker 66 Because he's the boyfriend, he's the person who found the body.

Speaker 16 He's the person that, you know,

Speaker 16 would be heavily scrutinized for sure about his actions, his where, his why, his what, his how, all of that.

Speaker 90 And he was.

Speaker 16 He very much was.

Speaker 32 Mr.

Speaker 66 Monk's word was not taken as gospel.

Speaker 16 He was heavily investigated.

Speaker 61 This was 1983.

Speaker 71 Digital police work was still science fiction.

Speaker 84 The investigation into Anthony Monk had to be done the analog way.

Speaker 17 I mean, we're spoiled today with the investigative aids that we have. We have video, we have electronic tracking, we have cell phone tracking.

Speaker 17 When you don't have those types of tools, you have to go back to traditional policing means. So you have to do surveillance and you have to

Speaker 17 find out their lifestyle, who they're talking to, who they're meeting with.

Speaker 68 What do you think you're going to find by following him around?

Speaker 1 You never know.

Speaker 17 You just kind of go with the flow and see what...

Speaker 11 what comes up.

Speaker 17 You never know if he's going to talk to somebody, if he's going to tell somebody. So you want to follow him.
You want to see what he's doing in his life. See if he's got another girlfriend.

Speaker 17 See if he's, you know,

Speaker 17 if his squeaky clean life isn't quite as squeaky clean as we thought it was.

Speaker 99 Anything in his background that makes you sit up and take notice?

Speaker 80 Nothing.

Speaker 17 Nothing at all in his background.

Speaker 72 No criminal record, no trouble with the law.

Speaker 78 No.

Speaker 37 That wasn't enough to clear Anthony Monk.

Speaker 43 It also wasn't enough.

Speaker 71 to arrest him.

Speaker 17 He's definitely the prime suspect at that point.

Speaker 17 then, after him, it's basically everybody in Toronto or that was in Toronto that night.

Speaker 50 That's a lot of potential suspects.

Speaker 67 And narrowing down the list would take detectives from Erin's inner circle all the way to her father's business dealings,

Speaker 101 including one deal with a controversial head of state

Speaker 23 half a world away.

Speaker 17 He would have upset a lot of people.

Speaker 66 And they'd take it out on his daughter?

Speaker 64 As they searched for Erin Gilmore's killer, Toronto police took a hard look at her short life, places she went, people she met, parties she attended, and one she threw at her own place.

Speaker 50 just weeks before her murder.

Speaker 81 That one, a pink-themed birthday party for a friend, drew particular interest.

Speaker 19 Somehow, word had gone out, I don't know how, and nor did Erin, but suddenly all these people showed up in her apartment.

Speaker 21 People that weren't invited.

Speaker 19 No, and they were spilling one, and they were, you know, basically trashed the place. So we had to, you know, have everything cleaned and whatever.
And Erin was totally distraught, of course.

Speaker 19 You know, this was this beautiful little place, their little nest, and then all these strangers. So that was way more the connection that I thought at that point.

Speaker 21 You thought somebody who had shown up uninvited maybe later came back?

Speaker 19 Exactly. That's what I was thinking.

Speaker 88 Detective Doyle says everyone at that party also crashed the list of potential suspects.

Speaker 16 All of those people were very thoroughly looked at. The majority of them were very willing to assist in this investigation.

Speaker 62 So you've got a lot of information coming in.

Speaker 16 A lot of information.

Speaker 52 All of which has to be followed up.

Speaker 16 Absolutely every bit of it.

Speaker 65 The investigators went even further back to Aaron's 21st birthday party the year before.

Speaker 85 She had big party at the Four Seasons turning 21.

Speaker 33 She did.

Speaker 81 That sounds like it was quite a party.

Speaker 17 It would have been a who's who of the social network of the

Speaker 17 upper echelon of Toronto.

Speaker 66 You have to speak to everybody on that guest list?

Speaker 52 We have to try.

Speaker 17 So you can see how exponentially the list grows of people that we have to talk to.

Speaker 50 What about sexual offenders who live in the area?

Speaker 17 That was a big theory. So they would find out any sexual offenders in the area and they would look into all of those

Speaker 17 persons as well.

Speaker 72 Everybody who had a criminal record for a sexual offense who lived, what, within a mile or two of there, was probably interviewed.

Speaker 11 Absolutely.

Speaker 75 The investigation expanded beyond Canada's borders as the business empire of Aaron's wealthy father came under police scrutiny.

Speaker 17 So all of Aaron's father's business dealings have to be looked at at the time to see if there is anybody

Speaker 17 that may have

Speaker 52 lost

Speaker 17 large sums of money and maybe been desperate enough to try to exact revenge on her father by by killing Aaron.

Speaker 20 One of those deals involved building a resort near the Great Pyramids in Egypt.

Speaker 20 Aaron's father, that's him on the left, met with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat about those plans multiple times in the mid to late 70s.

Speaker 31 Sadat was for for that.

Speaker 21 He liked it.

Speaker 19 Oh, absolutely. I mean, he just thought this would be a terrific idea.

Speaker 35 Aaron's cousin Kristen remembers that not everyone in Egypt agreed.

Speaker 81 There were some protests about those developments.

Speaker 19 Some people didn't like it. Oh, yes, absolutely.

Speaker 82 She says Aaron's dad caught wind of a plot to kill him because of his involvement in the project.

Speaker 65 David Gilmore took that seriously.

Speaker 35 The deal fell through in 1978.

Speaker 48 President Sadat was assassinated in 1981.

Speaker 20 Aaron was killed two years later.

Speaker 17 And we had to look into this because

Speaker 17 he would have upset a lot of people if he was going to build a resort

Speaker 22 by the pyramids.

Speaker 21 And they'd take it out on his daughter?

Speaker 31 Well, it's a wild theory,

Speaker 31 but

Speaker 17 we have nothing else, so we have to look into everything.

Speaker 54 The investigation grew.

Speaker 67 Dozens of detectives chased hundreds of leads and interviewed more than 700 people, generating boxloads of notes and files.

Speaker 60 Except, as the first anniversary of Erin's murder approached around Christmas 1984, they seemed no closer to finding her killer.

Speaker 4 Because as many witness interviews as you're doing and as much as you're collecting and all the forensics, It's not really pointing at any one person at all.

Speaker 17 No, it's not. And I think that was a frustrating thing for the investigators is they wanted to solve this so badly, but we just had absolutely no traction.

Speaker 43 Mostly what police knew is who it wasn't.

Speaker 77 It wasn't one of those party guests or a known sex offender in the area.

Speaker 54 It wasn't connected to political unrest in Egypt.

Speaker 57 And it wasn't their one-time prime suspect.

Speaker 77 He was cleared.

Speaker 86 How does Anthony Monk finally get off police radar?

Speaker 17 Well, eventually, we're able to get the receipts of his transaction at the bank.

Speaker 60 Those receipts were time stamped.

Speaker 61 Anthony was at the bank at 9:12 p.m.

Speaker 32 He called 911 at 9.27.

Speaker 99 Anthony Monk's bank alibi holds up.

Speaker 17 Yeah, his timeframe holds up. We're able to prove that he, when he arrived, was

Speaker 17 only a couple minutes before he actually made his 911 call. We've done enough interviews with him.

Speaker 17 We've basically looked into his entire life to make sure that there wasn't anything that we were missing. And we just don't believe that it was Anthony.

Speaker 20 More years passed.

Speaker 64 Any picture of Aaron's killer remained elusive.

Speaker 101 This guy's a ghost.

Speaker 16 He was a ghost.

Speaker 35 He stayed a phantom for 17 years until a revolution in crime solving offered Toronto police their first real break.

Speaker 9 The police were all of a sudden, okay, hey, this is crazy.

Speaker 18 We've got another case.

Speaker 67 Aaron's killer may have been a ghost, but like all ghosts, this one had a past.

Speaker 39 Aaron Gilmore's murder had been a huge story in Toronto, an urgent priority for police.

Speaker 36 And it was going nowhere.

Speaker 41 The case had gone cold.

Speaker 58 It stayed that way for years.

Speaker 9 The reality had sort of set in that, you know, this was probably not going to go anywhere. It was going to go unresolved.

Speaker 52 Could you live with that?

Speaker 66 I mean, you were living with that.

Speaker 63 Yeah, I was living with it.

Speaker 9 I won't tell you that it was, you know, know,

Speaker 14 that I wanted to live with it.

Speaker 9 You always wanted to get to the bottom of it.

Speaker 48 By 2000, 17 years after Erin's murder, police had developed a DNA profile of her killer.

Speaker 77 And then they discovered something else.

Speaker 9 You know, the police were all of a sudden, okay, hey, this is crazy.

Speaker 18 We've got another case.

Speaker 88 A second victim.

Speaker 20 Actually, a first victim.

Speaker 60 Susan Tice had been found raped and stabbed to death death inside her home following a ferocious struggle.

Speaker 45 It happened only four months before Erin Gilmore was killed and just two miles away.

Speaker 81 DNA from the Susan Tice crime scene showed she and Aaron were killed by the same man.

Speaker 48 The DNA didn't say who it was.

Speaker 47 Even so, this was huge.

Speaker 17 It's one offender sexually assaulted and murdered both Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore.

Speaker 85 And that is just a huge leap forward, even without any other evidence.

Speaker 14 Absolutely.

Speaker 66 Because now you're looking at what those two victims might have in common.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 39 Well, the crimes had a lot in common.

Speaker 67 The victims did not.

Speaker 39 Susan didn't come from money or a prominent family.

Speaker 43 At 45, she was a generation older than Aaron.

Speaker 16 Susan Tice was the mother of four children. She was a

Speaker 13 therapist.

Speaker 58 Susan's son Ben was 20 years old at the time.

Speaker 102 As we got to a certain age, she decided that she wanted to go back to school. So she did two master's degrees.
She was mother, wife, confident, best friend,

Speaker 2 advocate.

Speaker 72 She sounds like sort of part mom and part best friend.

Speaker 23 All of that.

Speaker 93 And more.

Speaker 102 You know, she traveled with the guitar and she was always sort of singing, Helen Ready, Hear Me Roar, I Am Woman.

Speaker 9 She used to belt that out during dinner prep when she felt that need.

Speaker 57 In the summer of 1983, Ben Tice was 2,000 miles from home working at the historic Chateau Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies.

Speaker 71 He called his mom one day just to check in.

Speaker 34 That call didn't go well.

Speaker 73 We had a horrible conversation.

Speaker 8 about what I don't remember.

Speaker 102 Unfortunately, I ended it and I hung up.

Speaker 1 I called her back the next day.

Speaker 102 No answer.

Speaker 3 I left a very long-winded message on her answering machine.

Speaker 46 Susan didn't return Ben's message or anyone else's.

Speaker 48 And when she was a no-show for a family dinner, her brother-in-law drove to check on her.

Speaker 16 Brother-in-law went to the front door.

Speaker 11 Front door was locked.

Speaker 16 Rang the doorbell.

Speaker 16 Called out Susan's name. Did not get any response.
Went around to the back of the house.

Speaker 50 From the alley behind the house, it was obvious something was wrong.

Speaker 32 Back door was open.

Speaker 16 Walked inside the back of the house. There was some music playing in the home, softly.
He went upstairs, hauling out Susan's name, and ultimately went into her bedroom.

Speaker 54 It was a brutal, bloody scene.

Speaker 39 Susan had been stabbed multiple times and drawers were pulled out, but it appeared nothing was actually stolen.

Speaker 16 Susan herself was on the ground beside the bed, but her feet were still up on the bed. She was covered with a blanket, the majority of her body, but her feet were showing.

Speaker 50 No eyewitnesses.

Speaker 43 A neighbor heard something.

Speaker 16 There was a scream 1:30 in the morning.

Speaker 98 And that's Sunday into Monday.

Speaker 16 Sunday into Monday. So I think that's your timeline for when the actual incident occurred.

Speaker 35 Her final moments must have been terrifying.

Speaker 70 Susan Tice was in a fight for her life, and she lost.

Speaker 79 A long-time friend of my father's had called.

Speaker 102 I just remember hearing that she had been murdered.

Speaker 102 I remember picking myself up off the floor with the phone in my hand,

Speaker 8 being

Speaker 52 breathless.

Speaker 54 Susan and her husband had recently split, and he became an obvious early suspect.

Speaker 70 Even their son Ben wondered.

Speaker 79 Did I have a suspicion about my father?

Speaker 14 Yeah, of course you do. I think that's only natural.

Speaker 66 And she was in the middle of a divorce.

Speaker 102 She was in the middle of divorce. She was a strong woman doing her thing.

Speaker 102 You know, my father wasn't happy with it. She was flexing her independence, her womanhood.

Speaker 22 You can't stifle a forest fire.

Speaker 102 She was just a force.

Speaker 16 When people separate and you have a murder quickly thereafter, obviously it makes sense to look at the other party.

Speaker 90 And you did look at Aaron. Yeah, we sure did.

Speaker 21 He was under suspicion for a while.

Speaker 17 He was.

Speaker 53 You follow him around the same way you followed around Aaron's boyfriend?

Speaker 17 Absolutely. What else do you have to do at that time? It has to be boots on the street.

Speaker 1 Eventually, they were able to conclude that Mr.

Speaker 17 Tice was not responsible.

Speaker 49 Back in the 80s, detectives did notice striking similarities between Susan's and Aaron's murders.

Speaker 82 They found no hard evidence to connect them.

Speaker 17 They always believed that these two crimes were related. But again,

Speaker 17 in the 80s, there's no way to say that unequivocally.

Speaker 75 You don't have a print that matches both scenes.

Speaker 17 We don't have a print that matches both scenes.

Speaker 23 Or a witness at both scenes.

Speaker 17 Absolutely not.

Speaker 45 When detectives learned definitively this was all the work of one killer, it was a jolt of energy for the investigation.

Speaker 17 We now take those cases and lay them over top of each other to see if there's anyone or anything

Speaker 17 that may have had contact with both Susan and Aaron.

Speaker 72 Suddenly it's a whole new ballgame.

Speaker 52 Yes.

Speaker 103 A mochi moment from Tara, who writes, For years, all my doctor said was eat less and move more, which never worked.

Speaker 105 But you know what does?

Speaker 103 The simple eating tips from my nutritionist at Mochi.

Speaker 106 And after losing over 30 pounds, I can say you're not just another GLP1 source. You're a life source.

Speaker 103 Thanks, Tara. I'm Myra Amet, founder of Mochi Health.

Speaker 105 To find your Mochi moment, visit joinmochi.com.

Speaker 107 Mochi members have access to licensed physicians and nutritionists and are compensated for their stories. Results may vary.

Speaker 108 A BetterHelp ad.

Speaker 108 This November, BetterHelp is encouraging people to reach out, grab lunch with an old friend, call your parents, or even find support in therapy.

Speaker 108 BetterHelp makes it easy with its therapist match commitment and over 12 years of online therapy experience, matching members with qualified professionals.

Speaker 108 And just like that lunch with an old friend, once you do reach out, you'll wonder, why didn't I do this sooner? Start now at betterhelp.com for 10% off your first month.

Speaker 109 On the night before Halloween in 1975, 15-year-old Martha Moxley was murdered, but police failed to make an arrest.

Speaker 87 Until in 2000, her one-time neighbor, Michael Scakel, was arrested.

Speaker 79 He was also a cousin of the Kennedys. The Kennedy connection is the reason that most people know about this case.

Speaker 109 But the deeper I dug, the more I came to question everything I thought I knew.

Speaker 109 Find and follow Dead Certain: The Martha Moxley Murder on Pandora to listen to the latest episodes each week.

Speaker 61 Two murders had spawned nearly two decades of frustration until finally a promising lead.

Speaker 60 DNA showed the killer of Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore was the same man.

Speaker 22 And there was this hit that all of a sudden sort of pumped new air into the tires, for lack of a better word.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 17 it was a revelation. We now knew that this person had to be in Toronto for at least a four-month

Speaker 17 timeframe, which gives us a little more investigative ability to go back and look at offenders, sexual offenders.

Speaker 21 You find any other cases?

Speaker 17 No other cases.

Speaker 17 It didn't really help us in any way.

Speaker 67 And so the Tice and Gilmore cases remained tantalizingly unsolved, and they went cold once again.

Speaker 61 The mystery of the twin killings would stubbornly outlast generations of detectives.

Speaker 58 In 2015, more than 30 years into the investigation, Detective Sergeant Stacey Gallant took over as head of the police cold case unit and started something he called Project Never Give Up.

Speaker 25 I started looking at the files and we started doing some,

Speaker 25 I'll call it advertising.

Speaker 87 Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore did not know each other in life. Unfortunately, the two women are forever linked together in their deaths.
The same man is responsible for both of these murders.

Speaker 20 Callan's appeal was posted on the Toronto Police Service website.

Speaker 87 It is your duty to bring his name into this investigation so he can be held accountable.

Speaker 36 And people in Toronto did come forward.

Speaker 25 I did get one tip, a lead, that I pursued very actively. It was a very similar murder in that it was a sexual assault and a stabbing.

Speaker 77 That case was from 1985, two years after the Tice Gilmore murders.

Speaker 69 The victim was Nancy Eaton, like Erin, a young woman from a prominent family.

Speaker 65 The Eaton case was solved quickly.

Speaker 43 The killer declared not criminally responsible because of mental illness.

Speaker 61 He was institutionalized and later released.

Speaker 25 I found that we never had a DNA sample from this person.

Speaker 102 So.

Speaker 25 So I got in touch with the local police service in that area and requested they do a surveillance on him and obtain a covert DNA sample from him.

Speaker 77 They got got the sample and sent it in for testing.

Speaker 53 You feeling encouraged?

Speaker 10 Very.

Speaker 50 Six weeks later, the lab results were back.

Speaker 25 As soon as I saw the envelope and kind of started pulling out,

Speaker 11 it's not him.

Speaker 7 Gallant went back to the case files, 40 boxes filled with thousands of pieces of paper, looking for something else to connect the two cases.

Speaker 34 He came across a note handwritten by Susan Dice.

Speaker 25 It made mention of having to call a cleaning company or getting a carpet cleaned.

Speaker 13 Here we go. Here we go.

Speaker 25 That's looking interesting.

Speaker 51 Interesting because Gallant knew Erin Gilmore had hired cleaners after that wild party in her apartment a few weeks before her murder.

Speaker 50 Susan and Aaron did not live far apart.

Speaker 71 So

Speaker 60 could they have used the same company?

Speaker 21 That feels like the connection you're looking for.

Speaker 90 It does.

Speaker 25 I've started looking into it. I'm like, I'm encouraged now.
And

Speaker 25 I call a company.

Speaker 65 They knew nothing about a job at Susan's house from so long ago.

Speaker 50 No surprise there.

Speaker 69 However, incredibly, the man who answered Gallant's call said he was actually one of the workers who'd cleaned Aaron's apartment more than 30 years earlier.

Speaker 55 He provided the names of three others who'd helped on that job.

Speaker 86 And you check them all for a criminal record?

Speaker 78 Yes.

Speaker 25 And one person in particular came back with

Speaker 25 a history of violence against women.

Speaker 13 Here we go again. Here we go.

Speaker 25 Let's start tracking these people down.

Speaker 97 Gallant was able to get DNA samples from all four men.

Speaker 25 Send them all off to our Center of Forensic Science once again.

Speaker 63 But I got to wait.

Speaker 25 And it's again waiting and waiting.

Speaker 13 This case has been all about waiting, hadn't it?

Speaker 80 Yeah.

Speaker 25 And then eventually, about a month and a half later,

Speaker 25 Get the news again. Nothing.

Speaker 32 Okay, now what?

Speaker 8 I got

Speaker 25 there's nobody else on my list that I'm looking for now.

Speaker 58 So Gallant switched gears.

Speaker 74 Instead of using DNA to identify the killer, he began using it to eliminate potential suspects.

Speaker 35 For two of Toronto's most notorious murder cases, that was a lot of people to rule out.

Speaker 49 By now, Detectives Smith and Doyle had joined the team.

Speaker 34 They went to work.

Speaker 65 on that very long list of suspects.

Speaker 66 You can go back to anybody who was any kind of even faint suspect in either one of those two cases and ask for DNA. And that's what we did.

Speaker 86 And how many people are we talking about?

Speaker 17 Hundreds.

Speaker 35 It was an extraordinary effort. More than 30 years after the murders, police collected DNA samples from hundreds of people listed in the cold case files.

Speaker 90 And it's none of them?

Speaker 80 None of them.

Speaker 85 You still can't figure out who it was.

Speaker 66 You know who it wasn't, but not who it was.

Speaker 17 Yeah, we're probably further away from figuring out who it was because now all the people that we believed may have committed this

Speaker 14 did not.

Speaker 60 Whoever it was had committed two murders and then disappeared into the atmosphere like a hot breath on a freezing night.

Speaker 23 A lot of work had led nowhere.

Speaker 35 That's when something happened thousands of miles away.

Speaker 31 Breaking news tonight, a stunning arrest. Investigators say they have finally caught a notorious serial killer who has terrorized California for decades.

Speaker 60 That California suspect had no connection to Aaron or Susan. But very soon, he would have everything to do with the search to find their killer.

Speaker 10 And I just remember, oh god, that's it.

Speaker 11 It was like a lightning bolt.

Speaker 46 A lightning bolt that would take detectives on a long journey to the vast frozen Canadian north.

Speaker 9 It's not for the faint of heart.

Speaker 18 It's bush roads. You're going over frozen rivers and creeks and the road is treacherous.

Speaker 4 He says it gets worse, and I said, it can't get any worse.

Speaker 53 There is no rulebook for how to live with the murder of someone you love, especially when the killer is still unknown and...

Speaker 34 still at large.

Speaker 76 After Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore were murdered, and first years went by and then decades, their families coped in different ways.

Speaker 70 Susan's son, Ben Tice.

Speaker 102 I wanted to shield them sons, yeah.

Speaker 102 You know, I talked, they know and they've always known that their grandmother had died. I've done my best to tell stories to them in instances about her.

Speaker 73 Happy stories. Happy stories, yeah.

Speaker 33 Life stories.

Speaker 53 You don't want them to only remember her as a murder victim.

Speaker 93 No.

Speaker 2 That word, victim, we were all victims.

Speaker 102 Just by the circumstance and being placed in that situation, we were victims.

Speaker 14 And I really didn't like that.

Speaker 19 You have to believe that somehow it will be solved, but you just don't know. I just kept hoping somebody would come out of the bush who would just want to snitch or want to come clean.

Speaker 63 I know who it was. Yeah.

Speaker 19 And I think the biggest fear was that whoever did it might be dead.

Speaker 83 Then you're kind of,

Speaker 26 you know, at a dead end.

Speaker 65 No one wanted justice more than Aaron's brother Sean.

Speaker 22 I walk and think of her all the time.

Speaker 18 I will go by the house slash apartment and sort of, you know, sometimes stand outside. I talk to her.

Speaker 52 And what do you say?

Speaker 18 Hope that we're going to get you an answer and get some justice for you.

Speaker 83 Sean was on a mission.

Speaker 68 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 83 As much for Aaron

Speaker 83 and their mom and for himself, but he was a dog on a bone.

Speaker 9 I didn't want to be, you know, that guy that was, you know, calling and they'd see my number and be like, okay, you know, let it go to voicemail but at the same time you sort of are trying to

Speaker 14 just I wanted to be updated let them know that you're out there and you still want to know yeah yeah want the answers police wanted answers too and after three decades they still didn't have any he's getting away

Speaker 25 at this point there's uh no connection yet again it just disappointment after disappointment nope it's not him it's not him add the name to the list of who it isn't in 2018, an arrest in that California cold case changed the course of the Tice Gilmore investigation.

Speaker 31 Police arresting a man they believe is the so-called Golden State killer, responsible for a slew of murders and rapes in the 70s and 80s.

Speaker 60 The Golden State killer case was solved by something called Investigative Genetic Genealogy, IGG in cold case slang.

Speaker 56 At the time, a revolution in DNA analysis.

Speaker 38 Here's how it works.

Speaker 43 Unknown DNA from a crime scene is identified by matching it to relatives whose DNA was uploaded to public genealogy websites.

Speaker 25 It certainly piqued my interest and I started digging into how we could use it here in Canada.

Speaker 34 Detective Gallant partnered with Houston-based Othrum Labs, a leading innovator in DNA forensics.

Speaker 58 Dr.

Speaker 51 Kristen Middleman is one of Othrum's founders.

Speaker 43 You've figured out how to get more information from a smaller amount of DNA.

Speaker 26 Yes, and the case that we're talking about today is an example of why you would need more information.

Speaker 54 The DNA from the Tyson-Gilmore crime scenes had been all but used up from a lot of testing over the years.

Speaker 72 What you're doing is figuring out how to get that information from DNA that probably wouldn't have been available to be tested or wouldn't even have qualified for testing before.

Speaker 26 Yes, what we're doing here is give you a productive profile that can be uploaded to these genealogical databases and give you an answer.

Speaker 50 Authram has helped solve hundreds of cases and assisted on hundreds more.

Speaker 26 We like to build DNA profiles that are so comprehensive that you can actually point down to the family they belong to in a family tree.

Speaker 48 Toronto police decided to try out the new technology on another notorious cold case.

Speaker 97 the 1984 sexual assault and murder of nine-year-old Christine Jessop.

Speaker 86 Christine Jessup is a name that people in Canada know the way they know John Ben A.

Speaker 110 Ramsey in the United States.

Speaker 17 They do. It was one of the biggest unsolved child murders in Canada.

Speaker 75 And the DNA sample in that case was, what, small and degraded?

Speaker 26 Yes, because a lot of it had been used. It had done some other DNA testing.

Speaker 39 Despite that, Othrum was able to create a profile that led police to Christine's killer.

Speaker 112 On Friday, October 9th, 2020, we positively confirmed the identification of the person responsible for the DNA sample found on Christine's underwear.

Speaker 59 When Sean learned how Christine Jessup's murder was finally solved, he wondered why that same technology hadn't been applied to his sister's case.

Speaker 22 And I remember I gave Toronto Police a day and I phoned the next day and I was like, okay, what the hell is going on?

Speaker 98 By then, Stacey Gallant had retired and Detective Steve Smith was in charge of cold cases.

Speaker 17 Basically, when he called me, he asked, can we apply this to Aaron's case?

Speaker 63 And I was able to tell him, we already have.

Speaker 9 We put in Aaron's case and Jessup's case at the same time. Aaron's is going to take a little bit more time.

Speaker 22 And sort of that became a bit of a mantra for Toronto police and me.

Speaker 48 In the world of DNA, the Jessup case wasn't difficult.

Speaker 26 No,

Speaker 26 it was...

Speaker 94 ordinary.

Speaker 26 Ordinary for this type of technology.

Speaker 72 Not so, Aaron Gilmore.

Speaker 26 No.

Speaker 50 Othrum's other co-founder and Kristen's husband, Dr.

Speaker 77 David Middleman, showed us why.

Speaker 89 This is unknown suspect DNA from the Gilmore entice murders.

Speaker 87 This is correct.

Speaker 89 What are we looking at here for that suspect?

Speaker 79 There is a small European component and then a large Americas component. And this American component is characteristic with First Nations in Canada.

Speaker 74 In the U.S., they would identify as Native American.

Speaker 35 Dr. Middleman says that fact would make the search for the killer much more complicated.

Speaker 89 Not a lot of people from First Nation in Canada have sent their DNA into those sites, so there's not a huge sample to start with.

Speaker 79 It's not a huge sample, and the samples that are there are going to be very hard to uniquely place on a tree.

Speaker 65 Othram sent police the killer's profile.

Speaker 40 Then, when detectives got a look at it, they hit a big bump in the road.

Speaker 48 So, this is all one big family.

Speaker 27 It was all one big family.

Speaker 113 It's like trying to put a puzzle together, and you don't have a picture on the cover of the the box.

Speaker 103 A Mochi Moment from Tara, who writes, For years, all my doctor said was eat less and move more, which never worked.

Speaker 105 But you know what does?

Speaker 103 The simple eating tips from my nutritionist at Mochi.

Speaker 106 And after losing over 30 pounds, I can say you're not just another GLP1 source. You're a life source.

Speaker 103 Thanks, Tara. I'm Myra Amet, founder of Mochi Health.

Speaker 105 To find your Mochi Moment, visit joinmochi.com.

Speaker 107 Mochi members have access to licensed physicians and nutritionists and are compensated for their stories. Results may vary.

Speaker 108 A BetterHelp ad.

Speaker 108 This November, BetterHelp is encouraging people to reach out, grab lunch with an old friend, call your parents, or even find support in therapy.

Speaker 108 BetterHelp makes it easy with its therapist match commitment and over 12 years of online therapy experience, matching members with qualified professionals.

Speaker 108 And just like that lunch with an old friend, once you do reach out, you'll wonder, why didn't I do this sooner? Start now at betterhelp.com for 10% off your first month.

Speaker 100 I'm Julio Vaqueiro, anchor of Noticias Telemundo. You can watch Dayton, the hit true crime series on Telemundo.
And now, you can listen to Daidline as a podcast.

Speaker 100 The stories of love and betrayal, of secrets revealed, of the men and women who stand between evil and justice.

Speaker 100 Every twist and turn can now be heard in Spanish, with new mysteries arriving every week. Just search Dateline en Español wherever you get your podcasts and start listening.

Speaker 69 Meet Detective James Atkinson, in-house genealogist for the Toronto Police Service.

Speaker 72 This is the new shoe leather.

Speaker 27 I tell my

Speaker 28 the teams that I work with at Homicide, I'm just the bird dog. I just point at the bird and after that it's their job.
I stay in my office.

Speaker 27 It's like trying to put a puzzle together.

Speaker 23 It really is.

Speaker 113 And the problem is, you don't have a picture on the cover of the box to guide you.

Speaker 27 It's like trying to put a puzzle together with all the pieces turned upside down.

Speaker 55 His job was to assemble a genetic puzzle of Susan and Aaron's killer, beginning with the killer's extended family.

Speaker 60 And extended is exactly the right word.

Speaker 65 Each of those little squares is a familial connection among the 100 people most closely related to the killer.

Speaker 89 Where's the suspect in this?

Speaker 27 He's in the background. And now it's up to me to try and figure out who is the person.

Speaker 62 What could you tell about the suspect from his DNA profile?

Speaker 28 I could tell that he was definitely from James Bay.

Speaker 95 James Bay is a remote area in northern Canada where thousands of years of near isolation have led to a mostly homogeneous gene pool.

Speaker 89 This happens when communities marry within themselves.

Speaker 73 That's right.

Speaker 28 Small islands, indigenous groups that are isolated.

Speaker 33 This is what you get.

Speaker 63 You get people that are related to each other many times over.

Speaker 48 So this is all one big family.

Speaker 27 It was all one big family.

Speaker 54 One big family that included many distant relatives still living near one another.

Speaker 114 Which makes identifying a particular suspect a lot harder.

Speaker 2 It made everybody, every male in town look good.

Speaker 40 Finding the proverbial needle in this genealogical haystack was going to take time.

Speaker 61 And also, more DNA samples.

Speaker 28 We just need to get more matches. So we started phoning people.

Speaker 27 I sent kits up there to people.

Speaker 8 I got the help of a couple of

Speaker 28 First Nations genealogists.

Speaker 50 Paula Ricker is one of those genealogists. Her knowledge of the local population proved invaluable.

Speaker 19 James would give me a name and I would do some some research and tell him, this is the person, this is the couple,

Speaker 19 these are the children. That type of information I would give him based on the records that I have.

Speaker 20 With Paula's help and an influx of new DNA samples to compare to the killer's profile, this mass of orange became more manageable.

Speaker 27 We got to 26.

Speaker 48 families.

Speaker 89 And you know it's one of them.

Speaker 27 And we knew that of these 26 couples, one of them was the suspect's grandparent.

Speaker 48 And they tell you they're down to 26 families,

Speaker 21 which is still a lot of people.

Speaker 72 It's also

Speaker 85 enormously reduced from the original suspect pool, which was pretty much everybody on Earth.

Speaker 52 Right.

Speaker 22 And you know that they're sort of getting really, really close.

Speaker 66 Were you thinking every day, like, maybe this is the day?

Speaker 59 Maybe this is it?

Speaker 9 Yeah, I was getting more and more optimistic for sure.

Speaker 22 And you're waiting, you know, for the call.

Speaker 17 You know, normally I wouldn't tell a family that because you don't want to create false hope.

Speaker 11 Right.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 17 But our relationship with Sean was so close, and he understood the amount of work that we had put in over the years. And Sean is somebody that

Speaker 17 wants that knowledge. And I had to keep telling him, it's just time.
We just need more time and we will get there.

Speaker 48 What'd you tell the Tice family?

Speaker 17 I didn't tell the Tice family too much because they didn't want to know at that point.

Speaker 21 They didn't want the procedural stuff.

Speaker 90 No.

Speaker 48 Atkinson and his team sifted through the lineage of those 26 families, looking for a close DNA match to the killer.

Speaker 54 Homicide detectives just stayed out of the way and let the DNA folks do their job.

Speaker 17 So our genealogists are working on on a daily basis.

Speaker 32 Building family trees.

Speaker 75 Building family trees.

Speaker 17 We don't give our genealogists the investigative files, so they work strictly off the DNA. So that when they provide us a name,

Speaker 17 that name's brought to us organically.

Speaker 45 And they have no idea whether whether that person has a criminal record or not that's right by the process of elimination we got down to one like for example one family it had taken atkinson and his team a year to prune the killer's family tree down to a single branch i got to five brothers and i went to my bosses the lead investigators say i've got it down to five brothers five brothers now From a list of suspects that once numbered in the thousands, they finally felt they were closing in on identifying Susan and Aaron's killer.

Speaker 66 Somebody has to go find those five brothers and get DNA from them.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 92 Well, that was easier said than done.

Speaker 116 As soon as we asked one of them for the DNA, the others would know it.

Speaker 114 He's going to call his brothers and say, guess what just happened?

Speaker 5 He might take off, right?

Speaker 76 As investigators closed in on their suspect, this man would suddenly hear a mind-blowing secret from

Speaker 88 a close friend.

Speaker 4 I said, listen, just stay put. Don't talk to nobody.
Don't answer the phone. Don't answer the door.
I'll be right back.

Speaker 55 Almost 40 years into the Tice Gilmore investigation, police had narrowed the suspect list to one family.

Speaker 27 One family, five brothers. That's when I do my bird dog and say, here you go.
Here's the five names.

Speaker 35 Five brothers, all with the last name, Sutherland.

Speaker 13 That's like the first really good news you've had in a long time.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 80 Yeah.

Speaker 18 It was just such a

Speaker 23 burst of hope. Like it was crazy.

Speaker 18 It was amazing.

Speaker 43 Sean had tracked every step of the investigation, waiting for news like this.

Speaker 101 Susan's son, Ben, had chosen not to be in the loop.

Speaker 21 Your attitude was sort of, when you get somewhere, I want to know.

Speaker 32 Until then, I'm good.

Speaker 102 Let me be really straight with you, Josh.

Speaker 80 I ran away.

Speaker 102 I retreated.

Speaker 52 It's awkward.

Speaker 102 How do you carry a conversation from,

Speaker 102 Hi, I'm Ben Tyson. Yes, my mom was murdered into a social conversation.

Speaker 14 People don't know how to react.

Speaker 102 So you just don't talk about it. You just don't talk about it.

Speaker 43 Detectives zeroed in on the five brothers.

Speaker 75 In all those boxes, in 40 years of files, there was no mention of anyone named Sutherland.

Speaker 17 It was always said that the name is always in the box.

Speaker 66 The name is always in the box.

Speaker 90 That's a saying here.

Speaker 66 Yes.

Speaker 21 When you solve it, it's going to be somebody that you had previously interviewed or heard about or showed up at the investigation in some way.

Speaker 22 Absolutely. Not here.

Speaker 52 Not here.

Speaker 21 You're tantalizingly close, and yet also so far.

Speaker 16 That's right, because you still have to get DNA from all of those brothers to trim that down to actually finding out who it is.

Speaker 45 And it would take a lot of detective work to get that done.

Speaker 17 They were all living in Toronto in and around the early 80s

Speaker 17 and then they had kind of spread out. throughout northern Ontario.

Speaker 34 The five brothers lived five very different lives.

Speaker 35 Some were model citizens and family men.

Speaker 45 Others were already familiar names to law enforcement.

Speaker 72 More than one had a police record.

Speaker 17 Yeah. Some for very minor offenses, some for more serious offenses.

Speaker 10 So

Speaker 17 we did our due diligence in

Speaker 17 trying to narrow down who was who.

Speaker 67 So who were they?

Speaker 17 We started with the person that we thought was, in our opinion, the most likely to have committed this offense.

Speaker 92 Because he was a registered sex offender.

Speaker 17 He may have been involved in some sexual offenses over the years, and he was deceased. But he was alive at the time of the two murders.
He was on the National DNA Data Bank,

Speaker 17 so we knew that immediately he was excluded.

Speaker 20 The second brother detectives looked at was a murder victim himself.

Speaker 32 killed during a drunken brawl.

Speaker 16 One of the brothers, unfortunately, got hit and stabbed with a bottle and that ended up taking his life.

Speaker 66 That was alcohol plus guys equals murder.

Speaker 90 That's exactly what that was.

Speaker 15 It's a good way of saying it.

Speaker 66 And his DNA was on file and he's not your guy either.

Speaker 8 Not your guy. Not our guy.

Speaker 34 Two brothers down, three to go, all then living in the far reaches of northern Ontario.

Speaker 98 Getting samples would be a challenge for big city cops.

Speaker 88 So Smith went to Detective Inspector Sean Glassford of the Ontario Provincial

Speaker 115 We're used to working in the north, and we know the communities, and that's what we can help them with.

Speaker 49 Policing's a little different up here.

Speaker 114 It's maybe a little harder to do surveillance on somebody in some of these small towns.

Speaker 115 Definitely in small towns it is.

Speaker 56 And the last thing police wanted was anyone knowing what they were doing, especially those three brothers.

Speaker 114 Why couldn't you in this case just call these guys and say, we need your DNA?

Speaker 18 Well, you could, but it wouldn't be the best way to do it.

Speaker 116 As soon as we asked one of them for the DNA, the others would know it.

Speaker 114 He's going to call his brothers and say, guess what just happened? Right.

Speaker 5 He might take off.

Speaker 11 Right.

Speaker 71 So this would be a covert operation.

Speaker 50 They started with a brother who worked in a mine and lived in a small town about an eight-hour drive north of Toronto.

Speaker 116 We would watch that brother and see where he went.

Speaker 24 If he dropped something or threw something away, we would obviously pick it up.

Speaker 47 They followed him for days, but he either didn't litter or he was covering his tracks.

Speaker 60 They staked out his house.

Speaker 116 We collected some garbage that he had put out at the end of the road. Within the garbage were two pop cans and a COVID mask that were collected and sent to Toronto and sent to the lab.

Speaker 24 DNA profile generated.

Speaker 77 It was a very low-tech operation to get to a high-tech DNA test.

Speaker 35 The lab took five long months to report the results to Detective Smith.

Speaker 17 And it's not him. So now we've got two brothers in northern communities, very

Speaker 17 remote northern communities.

Speaker 38 Two to go.

Speaker 101 And when they looked at the two remaining brothers, the likely suspect seemed obvious.

Speaker 17 One had some history of violence. And the other was basically squeaky clean.

Speaker 85 So you go after the first one.

Speaker 17 That's right.

Speaker 43 He lived in a tiny First Nations town of 1,200 on the shores of James Bay.

Speaker 64 This brother was actually a witness in another case Detective Glassford was working.

Speaker 48 So you bring him in to talk about that and what?

Speaker 114 He takes a couple of sips out of a cup.

Speaker 116 Yeah, just had a drink of water and left the cup behind when he left.

Speaker 50 The cup went to the lab.

Speaker 4 You think he's the guy?

Speaker 17 I thought absolutely he was the guy.

Speaker 16 Wrong again.

Speaker 52 For the fourth time.

Speaker 17 We do the DNA testing. He's not our offender.

Speaker 85 So you got one brother to go

Speaker 21 that you know of.

Speaker 17 That we know of.

Speaker 72 Unless there's another one out there somewhere that you don't know about or that isn't reflected in birth records.

Speaker 17 Every investigative means we used led us to believe there was only five brothers.

Speaker 52 But

Speaker 17 if somebody was adopted as a child and there was no record of it, you wouldn't necessarily know.

Speaker 63 You wouldn't wouldn't necessarily know.

Speaker 60 A decades-long investigation was about to take detectives to another tiny, isolated town and to one man.

Speaker 36 And they still couldn't be sure if he was their man.

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Speaker 26 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 16 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 117 It's It's the rage bait.

Speaker 19 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 112 We got clear facts. Maybe we could calm down a little.

Speaker 62 NBC News brings you clear reporting. Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 57 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 62 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 61 The search for Susan's and Aaron's killer had taken police from a DNA lab in Texas to the frozen expanses of Canada.

Speaker 82 Years of scientific work now pointed to a speck of a town way up in northern Ontario.

Speaker 50 It's called Moussony, about 600 miles north of Toronto, a five-hour train ride from the nearest town.

Speaker 41 They call that train the Polar Bear Express.

Speaker 118 Train or a plane is the only way in and out of Mousson.

Speaker 62 Don Crawford runs a taxi service in town.

Speaker 118 Now, Polar Bear Express brings in all our freight, all our fuel, all the locals. They have no choice but to take it.
Flying in and out, it's just way too expensive.

Speaker 17 Everybody's on that train.

Speaker 71 Everybody, including us.

Speaker 114 On Dayline, we tell a lot of stories about small towns where everyone knows everyone.

Speaker 40 Well, welcome to Mousson, Canada.

Speaker 51 Population about 1,300.

Speaker 38 Here, everyone does know everyone, which means if you're an investigator and you come into town looking to surveil someone or arrest them or get their DNA, you'll be an outsider and everyone here will know your business, including quite possibly the person you're here to find.

Speaker 58 Toronto Detective Stella Karras joined the investigation.

Speaker 61 and knew she'd be walking on unfamiliar ground.

Speaker 111 Oh yeah, there's no sneaking around up there.

Speaker 29 Everybody knows who belongs there and strangers are instantly recognized. Like you will stand out.

Speaker 61 So Detective Karras wrote a warrant to take DNA from the final Sutherland brother.

Speaker 65 In late November 2022, Karis, Doyle, Smith and a forensic tech arrived in Moussanee with their gear for collecting a blood sample.

Speaker 29 It was very eye-opening just to see how remote we can get up there.

Speaker 16 For me being a city boy here, that's the definition of isolation up there.

Speaker 74 Police came here to Moussini to find the last and in many ways the most unlikely brother on their list. A 60-year-old IT guy named George Sutherland.

Speaker 48 Father, friend, solid citizen.

Speaker 35 Back in 1983, Sutherland was 21 and living in Toronto.

Speaker 77 Randy Cota is a retired provincial police officer who lived just down the street from Sutherland.

Speaker 4 In my policing world, you got to know everybody. You know, you knew every couple and you knew their dogs' names and their kids' names.

Speaker 67 And if you knew everybody, that means you knew George Sutherland.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, I knew George very well.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I first met him down at the store, you know, their only one store in town. And

Speaker 4 he was a hunting kind of guy, hunting-fishing kind of person. He was easygoing.

Speaker 4 So I struck up a conversation with him.

Speaker 66 And suddenly you've made a friend.

Speaker 4 Yeah, a great friend. Probably one of my best friends.

Speaker 61 At this point, they had been friends for more than 10 years.

Speaker 119 Oh, I've met him a few times.

Speaker 101 Randy's wife, Betty Sue.

Speaker 111 They just seemed really compatible with one another.

Speaker 119 They had the same interests, you know, with being out on the land and the hunting and that kind of thing. They just loved the river.

Speaker 26 It was just a really good friendship.

Speaker 48 Randy says most of their time together was spent outdoors, snowmobiling, hunting, trapping.

Speaker 92 George, he says, was a quiet guy.

Speaker 4 He wasn't one to really start up the conversation much. He was more,

Speaker 4 let's get things done. And if I need help, he'd come over and help me.
And

Speaker 4 we're just friends, right? It's a guy you could count on.

Speaker 35 Sutherland had lived in Moussini for years.

Speaker 34 Now divorced.

Speaker 35 He lived with his grown son and had a steady job.

Speaker 84 He was an IT guy.

Speaker 4 An IT guy, yeah. Found out he was working at one of our child and family services.

Speaker 20 Even though they were good friends, while Randy was still a cop, he did a check on George's background.

Speaker 52 You ran his name through the police computer. Absolutely.

Speaker 99 Because you want to know who you're inviting in.

Speaker 80 That's right.

Speaker 102 You never know who you're talking to, right?

Speaker 4 And anyway, he was cleaned, didn't even have much as a speeding ticket or a birking ticket.

Speaker 59 Toronto police learned the same thing.

Speaker 72 He's not in your files anywhere either.

Speaker 11 Not in our files.

Speaker 17 Never had any contact with police from what we could see.

Speaker 91 Detective Karis went to the provincial police office to set up for the DNA collection.

Speaker 34 Doyle and Smith, along with two armed local officers, headed to Sutherland's house.

Speaker 75 He doesn't know you're coming.

Speaker 17 He doesn't know we're coming.

Speaker 16 And we get to George's house and,

Speaker 16 you know, we contain the home front and back. Steve and I knock on the door.

Speaker 21 What's that like when he opens the door and you see him for the first time?

Speaker 17 It's a bit surreal because

Speaker 17 we know why we're there.

Speaker 17 Once we introduce ourselves, he knows why we're there. We have to be careful of what's going to happen.

Speaker 90 And lots of people up there have a gun in their house.

Speaker 17 Pretty much everybody, I would say.

Speaker 43 George Sutherland wasn't ready for battle.

Speaker 84 Instead, he invited them in.

Speaker 17 He's an older gentleman.

Speaker 17 Has glasses, looks fairly distinguished.

Speaker 53 Looks harmless.

Speaker 17 He does.

Speaker 22 And he was very polite when we were at the door.

Speaker 16 His son is also home. We explained to him who we are, why we're there.
We have a DNA warrant for him, and that we are going to be escorting him to the nearest OPP detachment to take his DNA.

Speaker 16 And he has to come with us in order to facilitate that.

Speaker 95 If they were right, They were face to face with the killer they'd chased for 40 years.

Speaker 50 And if they right, he knew it.

Speaker 16 The best word that I can use to describe his reaction is stoicism.

Speaker 18 Stoic.

Speaker 90 That's his reaction.

Speaker 66 He doesn't look like a guy who knew this day was coming.

Speaker 16 No,

Speaker 16 but his reaction is also not one that I would have expected. I guess to be fair, I didn't know exactly what I was expecting at that point.
Speaks to his son briefly, says, I gotta go with the police.

Speaker 49 He puts on his coat and out he goes.

Speaker 90 That's right.

Speaker 29 I get a text message from Steve.

Speaker 111 He's like, we got him. We're coming back.

Speaker 106 So we're like, holy smoke.

Speaker 111 So we're jumping up and we're like,

Speaker 111 we're trying to get everything ready last minute, setting up the camera. Anyway, we got it done.

Speaker 50 A few minutes later, they were all at the local provincial police station.

Speaker 77 That's George Sutherland in the orange shirt.

Speaker 13 How you doing, my man?

Speaker 8 What is it?

Speaker 64 They pricked his finger and took his blood.

Speaker 101 Does he say anything?

Speaker 16 Very little.

Speaker 11 Very, very little.

Speaker 16 He has an opportunity to call his lawyer.

Speaker 13 We'll give you privacy again when you're talking to either lawyer.

Speaker 120 And we're not going to talk about anything until you've talked to your lawyer, so just so you know, we want you to talk to your lawyer first before we have any discussions with you, okay?

Speaker 29 He was just very compliant, very quiet.

Speaker 66 And he's just, what, nodding, listening to you?

Speaker 29 He's just nodding. And then, you know, we asked, do you have any questions?

Speaker 111 Is there anything you want to ask of us?

Speaker 68 No.

Speaker 52 So, Julie recently asked the right thing to do on this.

Speaker 12 We were remaining silent.

Speaker 67 No results yet, of course.

Speaker 50 so also no cause to hold Sutherland.

Speaker 69 He went home.

Speaker 58 Detectives headed back to Toronto to wait for the DNA results.

Speaker 88 And to wonder, he was so cooperative.

Speaker 50 What if it's not him?

Speaker 34 Maybe they got something wrong.

Speaker 52 What's the plan B if the DNA comes back and it isn't George Sutherland?

Speaker 17 I didn't even want to think of it, but I mean, we would be right back into the investigation and we probably wouldn't be any closer than we were because we we'd be looking for again another ghost.

Speaker 65 George Sutherland was back home, a free man.

Speaker 54 Very soon, he did something that would send detectives rushing back to Moussani.

Speaker 4 And I said, Wow,

Speaker 4 you're telling me the truth, right?

Speaker 4 And his tears are coming down his face, and I just was in a state of shock.

Speaker 35 On November 23, 2022, Toronto police flew home from Moussini,

Speaker 69 wondering about the fate of their case.

Speaker 91 George Sutherland had returned to his house.

Speaker 60 The very next day, he reached out to someone he'd known for a decade, an ex-cop named Randy Cota.

Speaker 58 Randy was busy dealing with his own family concerns when George texted him.

Speaker 4 Our grandchildren were going out on the train

Speaker 4 and it was about shortly after four o'clock in the afternoon. The train leaves at five.

Speaker 4 So we

Speaker 4 I got a text message and said I need you over here. So I messaged him back and I said, hey, you know, our doctor was here at a stiff shoulder and my doctor was giving me a cortisone shot.

Speaker 35 Randy would soon be resetting his priorities.

Speaker 60 Because his pal George messaged again.

Speaker 13 He really wanted Randy to come over.

Speaker 50 So Randy told his wife he had to go see what George wanted.

Speaker 4 So I told Betty I got to get going and then

Speaker 4 she was on me about the train because we didn't want the kids to miss the train to go back out.

Speaker 13 Because you only got one car and you're going to go over to George's.

Speaker 52 That's right.

Speaker 60 Randy got in the truck and drove over.

Speaker 4 So he called me in.

Speaker 52 So I came in and we pulled a chair over.

Speaker 4 We were about this same distance as you and I. And

Speaker 4 he said,

Speaker 4 I've done some things I'm not very proud of.

Speaker 68 You're thinking, where is this going?

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, I said to him, I said, well, join the club. You know, we've all done things we're not very proud of.
And he says, well, he said,

Speaker 4 I did some breaking enters in Toronto.

Speaker 4 I said, okay. And I said, well, how long ago was this?

Speaker 4 And he says, 40 years ago.

Speaker 65 I said,

Speaker 4 why are you confessing this stuff to me? And he said, well,

Speaker 4 Toronto Police came and took my DNA.

Speaker 4 And I said,

Speaker 4 George, Toronto Police doesn't come into your DNA for breaking enter 40 years ago.

Speaker 4 Now it's the cop thing kicking in.

Speaker 4 And he says,

Speaker 4 no, he says, I did some really, really bad things.

Speaker 4 So I just shut up and listened. And he says, well, I was in a house and I was stealing jewelry and to pawn it.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I come out of the kitchen and

Speaker 59 This woman came out of her room.

Speaker 102 It was dark.

Speaker 4 I grabbed a knife and I held her at knife point, took took her into her room. I raped her, and then I stabbed her to death.

Speaker 4 And I just was in a state of shock. And

Speaker 66 just like that, he confesses.

Speaker 76 Yeah.

Speaker 4 But he says it gets worse. And I said, George,

Speaker 4 it can't get any worse. He says, yeah, about

Speaker 4 three, four months later, he said, I was in stealing jewelry, and the same thing happened. A woman confronted me, and I held her at knife point.
And

Speaker 4 she saw my face, so I

Speaker 4 stabbed her to death

Speaker 4 and I said wow

Speaker 4 I said you're you're telling me the truth right

Speaker 4 and his tears are coming down his face and

Speaker 4 he says yeah I'm very I'm not I'm very ashamed of what I've done and it's been a long time he says I don't know what I should do

Speaker 4 And my phone's buzzing like crazy because Betty wants the truck to get the kids to the train. I said, listen, just stay put, don't talk to nobody, don't answer the phone, don't answer the door.

Speaker 4 I'll be right back. I got to go get the kids in the train.
So I came back here and

Speaker 4 Betty met me at the steps wanting the keys to the truck.

Speaker 19 And Randy came home and he had this look on his face.

Speaker 26 It was like a look of despair.

Speaker 4 And I

Speaker 4 said, Holy, you're not going to believe what just happened.

Speaker 119 And so he told me that George had confessed to two murders. And at that point, it didn't really compute with me, I'll be honest with you.
It was just kind of like, I looked at him, oh, really?

Speaker 26 Like, oh, wow.

Speaker 62 You'd never have thought anything like that of George in a million years.

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 103 No, never.

Speaker 119 Like, he comes from an incredibly loving family, like really good people.

Speaker 99 You ever see anything in George that made you nervous or uncomfortable?

Speaker 68 No.

Speaker 99 You ever hear of him making anybody else uncomfortable?

Speaker 119 Never, never.

Speaker 88 After they got the kids to the train, it began to sink in.

Speaker 119 I said, Randy, I said, my concern is that he's going to hurt himself.

Speaker 4 She looked at me and she says, you know, he's going to kill himself.

Speaker 43 Randy Cota did not hesitate.

Speaker 50 He called his old boss at the provincial police. And soon, Inspector Sean Glassford's phone rang.

Speaker 18 So when I got that phone call, we decided we needed to arrest George Sutherland as fast fast as possible.

Speaker 9 He's now confessed to killing two women. He has firearms.

Speaker 115 Emotions are high.

Speaker 18 There are people that he lives with. It needed to be done.

Speaker 116 And

Speaker 9 talking with Toronto police, we came up with a plan.

Speaker 58 Then when they talked with Randy, the plan changed.

Speaker 4 And I said, you don't need helicopters. You don't need tactical teams.
I can get them.

Speaker 11 I'll talk to them.

Speaker 58 Yeah.

Speaker 44 But would it work?

Speaker 57 Detective Steve Smith was at his daughter's hockey game when he learned the killer of Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore might finally, finally.

Speaker 77 Be brought to justice.

Speaker 17 I got a call from the provincial police

Speaker 17 that stated that George Sutherland had admitted to the two murders to an ex-provincial police officer in Moussini.

Speaker 17 And at that point, we were going to have to arrest him.

Speaker 48 Back up in Moussini, that ex-provincial police officer was George Sutherland's longtime buddy, Randy Cota.

Speaker 65 And he had some thoughts about how to arrest his friend George.

Speaker 4 And I said, you don't need helicopters. You don't need tactical teams.

Speaker 30 You say to him, what? I'll do it.

Speaker 4 I said, you know, I can get him.

Speaker 11 I'll talk to him. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I'll get him to turn himself in.

Speaker 60 Randy headed back to George's house with a team of police officers parked nearby,

Speaker 101 but just out of sight.

Speaker 85 So you knock on the door again.

Speaker 34 He answers it. Yeah.

Speaker 4 We went upstairs and sat down in the same two chairs and I said,

Speaker 34 George,

Speaker 4 I got to talk. And I said, there's two families here that have gone through hell.

Speaker 4 And you've had 40 good years.

Speaker 4 And I said, it's time to do the right thing, man.

Speaker 4 It's time to give those families,

Speaker 4 you know, their time.

Speaker 4 And he says, what do you want to do? I says,

Speaker 4 you didn't turn yourself in. You're going to do it tonight.
He says, tonight? and i said yeah right now and he looked at me for about

Speaker 4 two three seconds and he says

Speaker 8 okay

Speaker 4 so i um walked him out to the end of the road and just waved like that's the cruiser and he turned their lights on and headlights on and

Speaker 4 two police officers get out of the car and so handcuffed him to the front and they walked him uh i said george you're gonna be okay man he says thanks and

Speaker 4 got in the cruiser and i haven't seen him since he didn't get hurt and no police officers got hurt.

Speaker 93 But you felt terrible, didn't you?

Speaker 4 It's a really weird feeling.

Speaker 4 It's really the height of

Speaker 4 a betrayal, you know.

Speaker 92 You feel betrayed.

Speaker 4 Very.

Speaker 4 You almost look like a fool. You feel like a fool.
Like, how in the world did you not see this, you know?

Speaker 110 You a cop.

Speaker 110 You got a murderer right under your nose.

Speaker 4 Right under my nose.

Speaker 4 In my house. It's a tough one.
But

Speaker 4 do what you got to do.

Speaker 66 You say you do what you got to do like it's nothing, but it's not nothing.

Speaker 4 But there's a line. There is nothing to do but to just do what's right.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I feel for those families.

Speaker 17 One of the highlights of my career, being able to tell the families that after 40 years, we knew who killed their loved ones.

Speaker 50 Aaron's brother Sean was watching a football game when Detective Smith called.

Speaker 18 And Steve sort of said, Do you have a minute to talk? I said, Yeah, sure, absolutely.

Speaker 9 And all he said was, We got him.

Speaker 18 You know, I'm standing in the middle of Young Street, which is one of the busiest streets here in Toronto, and I just broke down in tears.

Speaker 22 It's like screaming, tears

Speaker 22 alternating back and forth, and

Speaker 31 just

Speaker 16 like 40 years of

Speaker 9 waiting.

Speaker 48 Susan Tice's son, Ben, got a similar call.

Speaker 102 I just went into question mode. How, why, who.

Speaker 61 What are you feeling?

Speaker 8 Relief, happiness?

Speaker 62 Feels like the news of the arrest kind of changed something in you.

Speaker 92 It did.

Speaker 3 It had been a really long time.

Speaker 102 You can't complete the story and the tragic sadness of her death without

Speaker 102 bringing this individual

Speaker 73 to justice.

Speaker 117 Joseph George Sutherland, 61 years of age of Moussini, has been charged under the 1983 Criminal Code with two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Erin Gilmore and Susan Tice.

Speaker 50 George Sutherland had already confessed.

Speaker 84 The DNA test confirmed it.

Speaker 17 He's basically the only only person in the world that could have left that DNA at the scene.

Speaker 58 It was justice.

Speaker 68 It was also justice delayed.

Speaker 20 There is another way of looking at this, which is the winner in this is George Sutherland, because he got away with murder for 40 years.

Speaker 89 He lived his life.

Speaker 66 He got married, had a son.

Speaker 110 He did what he wanted for 40 years.

Speaker 29 Right.

Speaker 111 He lived a life free.

Speaker 107 He beat the system.

Speaker 29 He beat the system for quite some time. He did.

Speaker 29 And, you know, these poor women, they didn't get to live their lives.

Speaker 114 On the other hand, the rest of his life is going to be awful.

Speaker 92 So there is that.

Speaker 29 There is that.

Speaker 43 George Sutherland pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 21 years when he'll be 82.

Speaker 43 He declined our request for an interview, and he wouldn't talk to police either.

Speaker 32 How he came across Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore, we're maybe never going to know.

Speaker 17 Right now, it's still a mystery to us.

Speaker 72 Other victims?

Speaker 32 Right now, you don't know of any, but who knows?

Speaker 17 We're still looking, and we'll continue to look. We'll never, never completely close this case.
If there is anybody else, we will find it.

Speaker 48 After four decades without her, Ben Tice remembers a canoe trip he took with his mom.

Speaker 102 She'd buy all the wine in a box and we would be paddling. And my mom would sit in the middle and the classic sort of saying of the trip was, paddle, paddle, sip, sip, click.

Speaker 4 And she took some amazing photos.

Speaker 32 When you go back and read her journals, what do you say?

Speaker 78 Hmm.

Speaker 66 I mean, you're older now than she was when she wrote them.

Speaker 102 Yes. To read it is

Speaker 14 my way of keeping her

Speaker 102 life, her legacy, her essence alive.

Speaker 35 Erin Gilmore's father lived long enough to see his daughter's killer arrested in 2022.

Speaker 58 Her mom, Anna, died two years before.

Speaker 83 You know, there's still anger. I mean, you know, you can't just put all that away and just say, well, it's 40 years ago.

Speaker 83 It's all good now.

Speaker 83 No.

Speaker 83 I mean,

Speaker 83 it's an excellent result, don't get me wrong.

Speaker 78 But, you know. Exactly.

Speaker 90 But it doesn't bring her back.

Speaker 83 It doesn't bring her back, and it doesn't change what was lost.

Speaker 19 This is the photo that I took of Erin the year before she was killed on this beach. She loved to come here with her brothers.
I always think of her when I come here. I think of her every single day.

Speaker 19 She was special.

Speaker 33 You know, I think about her kids playing with my kids.

Speaker 9 I think about who she would have married. I think about what she would have been doing.

Speaker 9 I think about celebrations, anniversaries.

Speaker 9 But then I also think about, you know, she was, you know, my big sister who would bring a level of joy to everything. And

Speaker 63 I miss that.

Speaker 50 Sean still talks to her.

Speaker 52 What do you say?

Speaker 22 We got him. You know what I mean?

Speaker 80 It's definitely been

Speaker 9 happier conversations lately. So, yeah.

Speaker 31 That's all for this edition of Dateline. And check out our Talking Dateline podcasts.

Speaker 31 Josh Mankiewicz and Andrea Canning will go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, available Wednesday in the Dateline feed wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you again Sunday at 10 9 Central.

Speaker 31 I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News. Good night.

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