On the evening of November 24, 2022, Sean McCowan was out for a drink with friends in Toronto when his phone showed a call from "No Caller ID." He knew what that meant: Detective Sergeant Stephen Smith of the Toronto Police Service cold case unit was calling. "Sean, we got him," the detective said. McCowan's sister, Erin Gilmour, had been killed in her Yorkville apartment on December 20, 1983, when he was 13. For 39 years no one had been charged.
Earlier that day, Ontario Provincial Police officers had arrested a 61-year-old man in Moosonee, a small community near James Bay in northern Ontario. His name was Joseph George Sutherland. He had never been a suspect, had never been questioned, and had no criminal record. Toronto police charged him with two counts of first-degree murder: for Erin Gilmour, and for Susan Tice, a 45-year-old mother of four who had been killed in her home on Grace Street four months before Gilmour. In October 2023 Sutherland pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. In March 2024 he was sentenced to life in prison.
Most of what is publicly known about Sutherland's early life comes from a Gladue report, a background report that Canadian courts consider when sentencing Indigenous offenders. It was prepared by a caseworker from Aboriginal Legal Services in Toronto after eight interviews with Sutherland in jail following his guilty plea, and The Globe and Mail and other outlets reported its contents when it was filed in his sentencing in 2024.
According to that report, Sutherland was born on December 17, 1961, in Fort Albany, Ontario, a fly-in Cree community on James Bay. His father died when he was seven, and he was sent to St. Anne's Indian Residential School. "The nuns came and convinced my mom that they could raise me better than her," he told the interviewer. He spoke only Cree when he arrived and was made to speak English. He described a gym teacher who would call young students over and hold a hand over their mouth and nose until they blacked out, and he told the interviewer he now wondered whether that had affected his brain development. He also said he was sexually abused by a relative during his first summer home from the school. The Globe reported that he was at St. Anne's between the ages of about seven and 12. Justice Maureen Forestell, in sentencing him, accepted that he had suffered physical and sexual abuse there.
He left the school when he was 10 or 11, dropped out in Grade 8 and started drinking not long after. The report said severe alcoholism ran in the family. CTV News reported, from the judge's summary of the report, that his family moved to Toronto in his late teens and that he struggled there with substance abuse. By 1983 he was in his early 20s and living alone in a bachelor apartment in Toronto. He had no criminal record.
Susan Tice was 45 in the summer of 1983. She had married Fred Tice on May 27, 1961, and they had four children: three sons and a daughter, Christian. The family had moved several times as Fred took jobs in the investment industry, living in Montreal, Saint John and Toronto. Susan had worked as a nurse and later earned a master's degree in social work. She was building a family counseling practice in Toronto when Fred was transferred to Calgary, and the family moved west.
Her family and friends described her as the center of the household. She painted and played guitar. She took one son canoeing in the Yukon and another skiing, and drove the whole way from Toronto to Calgary with a third. She taught Christian, who was shy and nicknamed Mouse, to drive a standard transmission, and encouraged her to invite friends home. "We were one of those houses where everybody else's friends were always over," Christian Tice told CBC's The Fifth Estate in 2021. "And everyone called my mom Mrs. T or Ma." Her best friend, Anne Chisholm, whom she met in 1958 at Camp Wapomeo in Algonquin Provincial Park, remembered "a crooked tooth in the front and a beautiful smile."
Susan and Fred separated in 1983 and both returned to Toronto, to separate houses. Susan bought a house on Grace Street in the Bickford Park neighborhood and moved in about a month before she died. Christian, then 16, spent that summer at a camp in Alberta. In August her mother wrote to her about setting up the new house and about the pleasure of putting on clothes she had chilled in the freezer during the summer heat. To Christian she sounded ready for a new start. Chisholm had seen her the weekend before her death, and they had planned to meet again the following weekend.
According to the agreed statement of facts filed when Sutherland pleaded guilty, Susan Tice was alone in her home on the night of August 16, 1983, when he broke in. He attacked her in her bedroom and sexually assaulted her. She had defensive wounds on her hands and head, showing that she fought back, and she was stabbed 13 times. The Fifth Estate reported that a next-door neighbor later told police she had heard four female screams, a man's voice and a door opening at around 1:30 a.m., and someone walking between the two houses about 15 minutes later. She did not call police.
Susan was supposed to have dinner with her sister and brother-in-law in Brampton. When she did not arrive, her brother-in-law went to the house on August 17. He found mail piling up at the house. Her niece, Kirsty Spence, described the scene in court in 2024 as her father had found it: the back door ajar, and no answer when he called her name. He found Susan's body in an upstairs bedroom. At almost that moment, Christian felt an urge to call her mother from camp. Her uncle answered the phone, turned, saw the body, hung up and called the police.
Erin Gilmour was 22. She was the daughter of David Gilmour, a businessman who with Peter Munk had started the stereo maker Clairtone Sound, a South Pacific hotel chain and the mining company Barrick Gold, and who later founded Fiji Water. Her parents had separated, and she lived mostly with her mother, Anna McCowan, a ballet-trained dancer who opened a dance school in 1983. Anna had two sons, Sean and Kaelin, with her second husband, and when that marriage ended she took all three children to live in Greece for a few years. The Globe and Mail described a family that took in people who seemed a bit lost; one of Erin's closest friends was a boarding-school student whose parents would not let her come home on weekends, and who was welcomed into theirs.
Erin had asked her father if she could spend 1983 teaching in Fiji, where the family often vacationed on Wakaya, the island he owned. He told her to finish her education first. Instead she took an apartment on Hazelton Avenue in Yorkville, above the clothing store where she worked. CBC reported that she was a store manager at Robins Knits, a high-end boutique, and she was trying to break into fashion design. She sketched and took photographs with her Nikon. That winter she threw a surprise party for a friend with pink as the theme. She encouraged Sean through a hard first year at Upper Canada College and bought Kaelin a green Swiss Army knife that he kept. "She had a magnetic personality," Sean McCowan said in 2022, and "was always full of life and looking for her next adventure."
Sean, 13, and Kaelin, 11, slept over at her apartment on December 19, 1983. The next day she took Sean Christmas shopping and drove Kaelin home in her Jeep.
On December 20, Erin finished her shift at about 9 p.m. According to the agreed statement of facts, she intended to go up to her apartment only briefly before going out for the evening with a friend. The friend was Anthony Munk, Peter Munk's son, who was to pick her up; CBC described him as her boyfriend. He stopped at a bank to withdraw cash and arrived about 20 minutes late. The door to her apartment was slightly open. He went upstairs, called her name and found her body under a comforter on her bed. She had been bound and gagged. He tried to revive her and could not.
The agreed statement says Sutherland broke into the apartment while she was alone, bound her hands and mouth, sexually assaulted her and stabbed her twice in the chest. CTV News reported that she was also strangled. There was no evidence that either woman knew the other, or that either knew Sutherland.
David Gilmour was at his home in the Bahamas when Anna called to tell him. He wrote in his memoir that he collapsed to the floor and that for a period afterward he did not care whether he lived or died. Sean McCowan later told reporters that when his mother woke him that morning with the news, he punched a hole in his bedroom wall.
The two killings were investigated separately, by different teams, using the forensic tools of 1983: fingerprints, hair and fiber analysis and blood grouping, according to the agreed statement of facts. Six detectives were first assigned to Susan Tice's case. Her estranged husband was treated as a suspect at first and later cleared. "I know my dad was the prime suspect but he was cleared," Christian Tice said in 2021.
The Gilmour case drew heavy press attention because of her family and the wealthy neighborhood where she died. Gary Ellis, then a 25-year-old patrol officer on the downtown Yonge Street beat, was pulled in to help and bought his first suit for the assignment. Detectives interviewed hundreds of people, took blood samples from many potential suspects and worked outward from Erin's friends and party guests to people who had never met her. Ellis told The Globe and Mail that several times he was sure they had the right man, only to see him ruled out. After about six months he went back to patrol. A year later he still lingered on Hazelton Avenue on his beat, watching passersby.
In 2021 Detective Sergeant Smith told The Fifth Estate that, before the DNA results, "even though they were about four or five months apart, very similar MO, there was nothing to say that these cases were linked." He also said investigators had once considered whether the comforter pulled over Erin's body meant her killer knew her, a reading sometimes given to that kind of act. The man eventually convicted was a stranger to her.
Canada's National DNA Data Bank, run by the RCMP, opened in 2000. Toronto police have said that DNA linked the two killings in 2000, showing that one man was responsible for both. Gary Ellis, by then head of the homicide squad, told The Globe and Mail he learned of the match in 2003 when he asked the cold case unit about Erin's file. A Toronto police statement reproduced by the DNA company Othram gives the year as 2007. All agree on what the match showed and what it did not: the profile from the two scenes belonged to the same man, and it matched no one in the national data bank.
"I think the DNA link with Susan Tice was a real eye-opener because all of a sudden you had two victims from the same guy," Sean McCowan told Global News in 2016. Christian Tice said she was disappointed police had not connected the cases sooner: both women lived alone, not far apart, and had recently moved into their homes.
Toronto police announced a reward in November 2008 and released a video appeal in March 2016. That October, Global News profiled the case in its Cold Case Files series. Detective Sergeant Stacy Gallant of the homicide unit said, "to solve one of the cases means we solve both." The Gilmour family offered a $200,000 reward. "It's literally just a name," Sean McCowan said. He became the family's spokesperson over these years and spoke to reporters whenever they called.
Sean McCowan was watching a true crime program when he first heard about genetic genealogy, the method that led to the 2018 arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo in California. He called a Toronto detective he knew and asked whether it could be used for his sister. The force had never tried it.
Stephen Smith, who had joined the Toronto police in the late 1990s and worked in the drug squad and on bank robberies, transferred to the cold case unit in November 2017. In 2019 he attended a course on unsolved historical homicides at the Ontario Police College that included a lecture by investigators from the DeAngelo case, the first time the method was taught in Canada. That year Toronto police sent a DNA sample from one of the 1983 crime scenes to Othram Inc., a forensic laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas, along with evidence from the 1984 murder of nine-year-old Christine Jessop. Othram produced a genetic profile that could be compared with those in GEDmatch, a public genealogy database in which people choose to share their DNA results.
The first matches were poor: people whose DNA suggested they were fifth or sixth cousins of the killer. A small team, including a genealogist employed by the force, traced the matches' relatives, asked some of them to move results from consumer testing services to GEDmatch, and asked others to give DNA for the investigation. They built family trees covering eight families and more than 3,000 names. The families had roots in rural Canada, and the work was slow. Large families with siblings many years apart, and aunts and uncles younger than their nieces and nephews, made people look more or less closely related than they were. Meanwhile the Jessop case, using the same lab, led police in 2020 to identify Calvin Hoover, a family friend who had died in 2015.
By March 2021, when The Fifth Estate broadcast its documentary on the case, Smith said the team had narrowed the search to "basically two families," with perhaps 26 children "and then their children's children." He called the killings "absolute overkill." Detective Constable Andrew Doyle spoke directly to the unknown man: "I'd say turn yourself in." In October 2021 Smith told CTV News Toronto that he put the odds the suspect was still alive at 50/50, and that he came from a small town in Canada.
According to the agreed statement of facts, the genealogy produced a breakthrough in 2021: five Sutherland brothers. "A police investigation resulted in the elimination of four out of the five Sutherland brothers as the source of the crime scene DNA," the statement says. It does not say how. The remaining brother was Joseph.
Police obtained a DNA warrant to compare Sutherland's DNA with the semen recovered from both women. According to the agreed statement of facts, officers went to his home in Moosonee on November 23, 2022, and took a blood sample. Before the results came back, Sutherland contacted a friend, a retired Ontario Provincial Police officer, and told him he had killed two women while living in Toronto. The friend contacted police and arranged his arrest. OPP officers took him into custody on November 24, and Toronto officers brought him to Toronto the next day. Smith said there were "no issues whatsoever" during the arrest. Some police and Othram statements give the arrest date as Friday, November 25, the day he was brought to Toronto.
On Monday, November 28, Interim Police Chief James Ramer announced the charges, two counts of first-degree murder, at police headquarters, with Sean and Kaelin McCowan beside him. "As relieved as we are to announce this arrest, it will never bring back Erin or Susan," Ramer said. Smith called it "probably the most complex case that I've ever worked in my 25 years." "If we hadn't utilized this technology, we never would have came to his name," he said. Police released a photograph of Sutherland from the 1980s and said that because he had lived in several places in Ontario since 1983, they would look into "every possible connection to any possible case" in the province. A publication ban limited what could be said about him, and his first court date was set for December 9.
"It finally puts a name and a face to someone who for all of us had been a ghost," Sean McCowan said. Their mother, Anna, had died in 2020. "She would have been so relieved," he said. Christian Tice watched the news conference at home in Guelph, Ontario, where she runs a commercial painting business. One of her brothers had called her the day before to tell her a suspect had been found; it was the first time they had spoken in years.
After 1983, according to the material put before the court, Sutherland lived only a short time longer in Toronto before returning to the north. He quit drinking about a decade after he started. He went to school for information technology and went to work for the Bank of Montreal in 1995. He was laid off and later returned to the bank, where he worked until his arrest. He was married from 1995 to 2000 and had a son, who was 22 and living with him in Moosonee when he was arrested. His former wife said he was never violent with her. He had no criminal record before or after 1983. One of his brothers was killed in Moosonee in the late 1990s.
The Crown told the court that Sutherland said in a pre-sentence report that he had thought about turning himself in at different points, especially when he was depressed, but decided not to and tried to forget what he had done. "He tried to live the life of a 'good human,' quit drinking and got into good education to better himself," prosecutor Michael Cantlon said, summarizing the report.
Sutherland was held at the Toronto South Detention Centre. On Thursday, October 5, 2023, in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, he pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, a lesser offense than the first-degree murder charges. Under the agreed statement of facts he admitted breaking into both women's homes, sexually assaulting them and stabbing them to death. Because he pleaded guilty, there was no trial and no witnesses testified.
Second-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence in Canada; the only question for the judge was how long he must serve before he could apply for parole, a period that must be set between 10 and 25 years. "We were happy to have reached this conclusion," Sean McCowan told The Globe and Mail. "This wouldn't have been possible five or 10 years ago." The sentencing, first set for December 14, 2023, was heard on March 4, 2024.
Nine family members gave victim impact statements on March 4. Sutherland sat in the prisoner's box with his head down. "You had almost forty years to come forward and take responsibility for what you did," Sean McCowan told him. "You ripped a hole in all of our lives that could never be fixed or filled in." He said he still had Erin's Christmas presents from 1983, and that after the arrest a friend had given him a bracelet stamped with 14,219, the number of days between her killing and the arrest. Kaelin McCowan said losing his sister had left "huge gaps" in his childhood memories. "He got to live his life," he said. "I had a sister, and she didn't get to do any of those things."
Ben Tice, Susan's eldest son, asked why. "Why would (you) take the life of my mother and Ms. Gilmour? What right did you have?" He told Sutherland: "You murdered and assaulted two wonderful women and went on to live your life. Your free life is done." Christian Tice told the court she still slept with her windows locked and a baseball bat beside the bed.
Cantlon asked for parole ineligibility of 20 to 22 years. Sutherland was "a stranger to both Susan Tice and Erin Gilmour," he said, and the women "were alone at the time, in their own homes, living their own independent lives." He said that Sutherland was remorseful but could not explain why he had done it. "He protected himself by blocking it out. He does not remember committing the murders," Cantlon said, describing what Sutherland had said.
Defense lawyer Anthony De Marco asked for 18 years. He pointed to Sutherland's age, his lack of any record before or after the killings, his confession soon after arrest, his guilty plea and 40 years of good character. He described the residential school as "an evil place" and the system as genocide. "We are not the type of society that wants to throw away the key," he said. Of Christian Tice's fear of an unknown attacker, he said: "There is no boogeyman out there. He is a human being who has to be dealt with proportionally."
Sutherland spoke. "I am sorry for taking your loved ones away," he said. "I am remorseful for what I've done. I am still trying to understand where I went wrong." He described spirit quests he said he made before his arrest to ask the women's forgiveness. "Although I didn't know their names when I entered the spirit world, they knew me," he said. He said Susan Tice's spirit was "warm and kind" and forgave him, and that Erin Gilmour's spirit was "young and angry" and did not. "I hope you have it in your heart to forgive me," he said.
In the Gladue report, he said he had no memory of the first killing and only a vague memory of the second. "My mind erased it because my mind broke," he told the interviewer.
On March 22, 2024, Justice Forestell sentenced Sutherland to life in prison with no eligibility for parole for 21 years. "The two murders that Mr. Sutherland committed were profoundly serious," she said. "They were killed in their homes, which should have been places of sanctuary." Given "the vulnerability of the victims, the violation of the homes and their bodies and the brutal nature of their killings," she said, "both murders fall close to first-degree murder."
She weighed the guilty plea, the apology, the absence of any other offenses and the Gladue report, which she said described a life shaped by colonialism. She gave "little weight to the expression of remorse." She rejected his account of his memory, pointing to the spirit quests and to the fact that he had understood why police wanted his DNA. "While I accept what Mr. Sutherland told the author of the report, that he had tried to forget what he'd done, I do not accept he does not remember the first and only vaguely remembers the second homicide," she said. She also ordered a DNA sample and a lifetime weapons ban. With credit for time in custody since November 2022, CTV News reported, he will be eligible to apply for parole in 2043, when he will be about 81.
"You want to see a number of 100 but at the same time, 21 years is a pretty decent outcome," Sean McCowan said outside court. "I think my mom would be thrilled to see someone finally facing a life in prison." Christian Tice called it "a really long road." "There's no closure, there's no justice, it's something that stays with you and we're just happy they got the guy," she said. She added that she was glad he had expressed remorse, whether or not it was genuine.
Sutherland is convicted on both counts. As of the March 22, 2024 sentencing reports, he was serving a life sentence with parole eligibility in 2043, and no appeal had been reported. A search in October 2026 found no report of an appeal or of any new charge, but no official court or correctional record was checked. Toronto police said in 2022 that they would examine possible links to other unsolved cases in Ontario; no other case had been publicly linked to him in the sources found.
The case became one of the early Canadian examples of investigative genetic genealogy leading to a conviction. In October 2023 Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, Patricia Kosseim, said the technique had brought "long-needed resolution for the families of victims" but that police must be transparent about using it "and be held accountable for decisions and actions that may affect the privacy rights of law-abiding citizens." Canadian law bars police from using the RCMP's National DNA Data Bank to search for relatives of an unknown offender, which is why investigators turned to private and public genealogy databases.
Smith used the case to argue for more resources and wider DNA collection. In 2021 he said he was frustrated that Canada does not collect DNA on arrest. In 2022 he said 43 of Toronto's roughly 700 cold cases had DNA thought to belong to the offender, and that a three-year provincial grant allowed police to put 15 Toronto cases and 15 from the rest of Ontario through genetic genealogy each year. In 2023 he said many smaller police services lack cold case units, and that Toronto keeps evidence from unsolved cases "for 100 years minimum."
For the families, the conviction answered who, not why. Christian Tice told The Globe and Mail in 2022 that her family had been close before her mother's death and "blew apart" afterward. Kaelin McCowan, who had moved to New Zealand, was in Toronto by chance in November 2022, sorting through a storage unit of his late mother's belongings that included Erin's bed and a box of her glassware.
Motive: no motive has been established. The Crown said Sutherland could not explain it, and he said he did not remember. The judge did not accept his claim to have forgotten the crimes.
Memory: Sutherland's statements that he remembers nothing of the first killing and little of the second come from the Gladue report and his own statements in court. Justice Forestell rejected them.
Other crimes: police said in 2022 they would look for other cases. No other offense has been attributed to him in any source found, and he had no criminal record.
Dates and details on which sources differ: the year of the DNA link (2000 in most police statements and news reports; 2003 as the year Gary Ellis learned of it; 2007 in a police statement reproduced by Othram); the start of genetic genealogy (Othram engaged in 2019; the agreed statement of facts dates the breakthrough on the Sutherland family to 2021); the arrest date (November 24 per the agreed statement and most reports; November 25 in some police material); and the Crown's position (20 to 22 years in most reports; 22 years in one). Anthony Munk is described as Erin Gilmour's boyfriend by CBC and as her friend by the agreed statement of facts and The Globe and Mail.
The comforter: the 2021 suggestion that covering Erin Gilmour's body might mean her killer knew her was a theory investigators discussed before he was identified. The agreed statement of facts says there was no known connection between Sutherland and either woman.
December 17, 1961: Joseph George Sutherland born in Fort Albany, Ontario.
About 1969 to 1973: attends St. Anne's Indian Residential School.
July 1983: Susan Tice moves from Calgary into a house on Grace Street, Toronto.
August 16-17, 1983: Sutherland breaks in, sexually assaults and stabs Susan Tice, 45. Her brother-in-law finds her body on August 17.
December 20, 1983: Erin Gilmour, 22, is killed in her Hazelton Avenue apartment; Anthony Munk finds her about 20 minutes after she left work.
2000: National DNA Data Bank opens; DNA links the two killings to one unknown man (dates of 2003 and 2007 also appear in sources).
November 2008: Toronto police announce a reward.
March 2016: police release a video appeal; October 2016, Global News Cold Case Files report and $200,000 family reward.
November 2017: Det. Sgt. Stephen Smith joins the cold case unit.
2019: Toronto police send crime scene DNA to Othram for genetic genealogy.
2020: Anna McCowan, Erin's mother, dies.
March 18, 2021: The Fifth Estate reports the search has narrowed to two families.
2021: genealogy identifies five Sutherland brothers; four are eliminated.
November 23, 2022: officers take a DNA sample from Sutherland in Moosonee; he confesses to a friend, a retired OPP officer.
November 24, 2022: OPP arrest him in Moosonee; he is brought to Toronto the next day.
November 28, 2022: Toronto police announce two first-degree murder charges.
October 5, 2023: pleads guilty to two counts of second-degree murder.
March 4, 2024: sentencing hearing; victim impact statements; Sutherland apologizes.
March 22, 2024: sentenced to life with no parole eligibility for 21 years.
2043: earliest parole eligibility. No appeal reported as of the March 22, 2024 sentencing reports.