Kenneth Leslie Smith came from South Porcupine, a community outside Timmins in northern Ontario, and lived and worked in Toronto during the years of the killings. He died in Windsor in 2019, aged seventy-two, without ever having been investigated for any of them.
Christine Prince, twenty-five, was a nanny from Wales. She was last seen in the early hours of June 21, 1982, getting onto a streetcar at St Clair Avenue West and Bathurst Street. Her body was found later that morning in the Rouge River in Scarborough. She had been sexually assaulted, struck on the head, and drowned.
Claire Samson, twenty-three, was found on private land in Oro-Medonte Township, north of Toronto, on September 1, 1983, shot twice.
Gracelyn Greenidge, forty-one, died of blunt force trauma in her own Toronto apartment on July 29, 1997.
Fifteen years separate the first from the last, and the police description of them is the part worth holding onto: there was nothing connecting the three women to each other, and nothing connecting any of them to Smith. They were crimes of opportunity. As the Ontario Provincial Police put it, the only thing that linked them was the offender's DNA.
That link took a long time to find and then a long time to name. In 2016 the national DNA data bank matched the Prince and Samson cases to each other. In 2017 the Greenidge case joined them. In 2022 the investigators went to Othram, a forensic genetic genealogy company in Texas, and three years after that they had identified close relatives of the man whose DNA it was. On December 3, 2025 the Centre of Forensic Sciences made the final comparison. The families were told, and the announcement came on December 11.
The reason he was never caught is worth stating precisely, because it is not a story of incompetence. He was known to police and had a violent record, including a guilty plea in 1976 to the kidnap and rape of a fourteen-year-old girl in Barrie the previous year. He was in prison at least once before the first two murders and twice more before the third. But his convictions all predated the creation of the national DNA data bank and the sex offender registry, so his biological profile was never on any list to be matched against. He was, in the phrase used in the Canadian reporting, off the radar biologically while being perfectly well known otherwise.
Toronto Police said Smith meets the criteria to be called a serial killer, and that they believe there may be further victims never identified. They asked for information about where he had been over the years so that other unsolved cases in those places could be checked. The Ontario Provincial Police said that although the man is dead the investigation does not end.
The count here is three murders attributed by two police forces and no charge ever laid, because he died six years before he was named. The detective sergeant who announced it said the case had haunted their office. He also said, on the same day, that the Centre of Forensic Sciences needs its capabilities expanded, and gave its current backlog as sixty-four cases. A niece of Gracelyn Greenidge wrote afterwards that the announcement brought mixed emotions and lingering questions, and that either way there was no true justice for her family.