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 in the Rouge River in Scarborough, later that day by some accounts and the next day by others. She had been sexually assaulted, struck on the head, and drowned.
Claire Samson, twenty-three, was last seen early on September 1, 1983, near Jarvis and Gerrard streets in Toronto. Her body was found on private land off the 20/21 Sideroad in Oro-Medonte Township, north of the city, the next day. She had been shot twice.
Gracelyn Greenidge, forty-one, came from Barbados and worked as a nursing assistant. When she failed to turn up for her shift on July 29, 1997, a coworker went to her apartment on Driftwood Avenue in Toronto and found her dead of blunt force trauma.
Fifteen years separate the first from the last, and the police said 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.
DNA had been collected at each scene, but no suspect was found at the time. In 2016 the national DNA data bank matched the profiles from the Prince and Samson cases to each other and to an unknown man, and Toronto Police and the OPP opened a joint investigation. In 2017 the Centre of Forensic Sciences found that the same man had killed Gracelyn Greenidge. Progress stalled on the condition of the samples and the technology of the time. The investigators turned to Othram, a forensic genetic genealogy company in Texas, and identified close relatives of the man; reports date that step to 2022 and to 2025. On December 3, 2025, the Centre of Forensic Sciences made the final comparison. The families were told, and the announcement came on December 11 at a joint news conference.
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 national DNA data bank and the sex offender registry, so his profile was never on any list to be matched against. In the phrase used in the Canadian reporting, he was off the radar biologically while being perfectly well known otherwise.
Toronto Police said that were he alive they would charge him with the murders of Prince and Greenidge, and the OPP would arrest him for Samson's. They said he meets the criteria to be called a serial killer and that there may be victims never identified, and asked for information about where he had been over the years so that unsolved cases in those places could be checked. "While we are pleased to provide answers at last, nothing can erase the grief felt by the families and loved ones of Christine Prince, Claire Samson, and Gracelyn Greenidge," said Deputy Chief Robert Johnson. "Although the accused is deceased, the investigation does not end," said OPP Chief Superintendent Karen Gonneau.
The detective sergeant who announced the identification said the case had haunted their office. He 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 afterward that the announcement brought mixed emotions and lingering questions, and that either way there was no true justice for her family. No charge was ever laid, because he died six years before he was named.