Kenneth Smith was named in December 2025 as the man police believe killed three women in Ontario over 15 years: Christine Prince in 1982, Claire Samson in 1983 and Gracelyn Greenidge in 1997. He had died in Windsor in 2019, at 72, and was never charged with any of the killings. The Toronto Police Service and the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) announced the identification at a joint news conference in Toronto on December 11, 2025, eight days after the Centre of Forensic Sciences, Ontario's crime laboratory, made the final DNA comparison.
Police said the three women did not know one another and had no link to Smith that investigators could find. The killings differed in the way they were carried out, and the only thread between them was the DNA collected at each scene. Smith was known to police. He had a violent record that included sexually based offences, according to the head of the Toronto police cold case unit, and he had served prison terms before and between the killings. His convictions all came before the national DNA data bank came into force in 2000, so his profile was never on file to be compared with the evidence.
Because he died before he was named, no court has heard the evidence against him. The three deaths are attributed to him by police. Deputy Chief Robert Johnson of the Toronto Police Service said that if Smith were alive, Toronto police would arrest him for the deaths of Christine Prince and Gracelyn Greenidge, and the OPP would arrest him for the death of Claire Samson.
Smith was born in 1946 in South Porcupine, a community in northern Ontario that is now part of the city of Timmins, according to The Globe and Mail. Other reports, quoting police, gave his birthplace as Porcupine, Ontario. He moved with his family to the Toronto area as a young man.
Police told The Globe and Mail that he lived at 16 or 17 addresses across the Toronto region over the years, from York Region north of the city to Peel Region in the west, including several Toronto neighbourhoods. He did administrative work for a security company and worked at several mattress and furniture stores, most of which have since closed. Investigators believed he may have worked as a salesman but did not know whether he also made deliveries. Police said he lived and worked across Toronto through the whole period of the three killings.
By the end of his life, The Globe and Mail reported, he was estranged from nearly all of his family, including a former wife and his children.
In 1976, at age 30, Smith pleaded guilty to kidnapping a 14-year-old girl the year before, with other charges, according to an archived 1976 news report that The Globe and Mail located. Police did not mention the case at the December 2025 news conference, but Toronto police later confirmed to the newspaper that the man in the 1976 report was the same Kenneth Smith. He served a prison sentence for that offense and was paroled in York Region in 1981.
The newspaper reported that under present rules, a conviction like that one would require a DNA sample for the national data bank. The data bank did not come into force until 2000, and the sex offender registry was set up in 2004, years after his convictions.
In 1985 Smith was convicted of weapons offences in York Region and sentenced to two years in custody. In 1987, after his release, he was convicted of weapons offences in Toronto and sentenced to seven years. In both cases, charges of sexual offences were withdrawn as part of a plea agreement, The Globe and Mail reported. He was released in 1994.
According to The Associated Press, police said he had been jailed at least once before the first two killings and at least twice before the third. Detective Sergeant Steve Smith, who leads the Toronto police cold case unit, told The Globe and Mail that Kenneth Smith's criminal record "trails off" from the early 1980s into the early 1990s. Investigators were especially interested in the period from his release in 1994 to the killing of Gracelyn Greenidge in the summer of 1997.
Christine Prince was 25 and came from Wales. She had arrived in Canada in 1981 and was working in Toronto as a nanny for a family. Her former employer told The Globe and Mail that she was nurturing, talented and dedicated, and that her death still devastates the family.
She had been to a movie and then for coffee with a friend, and she was last seen shortly after 1:10 a.m. on June 21, riding a streetcar toward her home, according to the Toronto Police Service. She was expected to get off the streetcar and walk the rest of the way.
Her body was found in Scarborough, Toronto, at about 7:15 a.m. on June 22, 1982, according to the Toronto police case file. Police said she died by drowning. One broadcaster's account of the December 2025 news conference said she was found on the morning of June 21 and had been beaten to death; the police case file and most other reports give June 22 and a drowning.
Her case was investigated by the Toronto Police Service and remained open for more than four decades. DNA evidence was collected, but no suspect was identified.
Claire Samson was 23. Police said she had recently moved back in with her parents. Her family, quoted by the OPP, described her as caring and loving. At the December 2025 news conference, OPP Chief Superintendent Karen Gonneau said that Samson's family remembered her as a beautiful soul and as someone devoted to her family. OPP investigators met her relatives in the week before the announcement to tell them the news.
On September 1, 1983, she was last seen in Toronto getting into a beige vehicle driven by an older white man, according to the Toronto Police Service. Her body was found in Oro-Medonte Township, about 120 kilometres north of Toronto. Police said she had been shot. The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Police Service give September 2, 1983, as the date she was found; The Canadian Press and The Associated Press reported September 1.
Oro-Medonte falls under OPP jurisdiction, so the case belonged to the provincial police. In 2001 the OPP set up Project Millennium, a review of 17 unsolved homicides to see whether modern forensic methods could move them forward, and Samson's case was among them, The Globe and Mail reported.
Gracelyn Greenidge was 41. She had moved to Toronto from Barbados hoping to become a registered nurse, and she worked as a nursing assistant at a seniors' residence. When Toronto police appealed for help in her case in 2018, Detective Sergeant Stacy Gallant said her colleagues remembered her as caring and compassionate. "Always smiling. Always very joyous and always very helpful," he said. "She led an exemplary life and was respected by all who knew her."
She was last seen leaving work at about 11:30 p.m. on Monday, July 28, 1997. The next day she did not arrive for her shift. Police were called at about 6:30 p.m. on July 29, 1997, and found her dead in North York, Toronto.
Accounts of how she died differ. In 2018 Toronto police said she died of blunt force trauma, and The Canadian Press and The Associated Press repeated that in December 2025. The Toronto police homicide case page, a CP24 report of the 2025 news conference and the genetic testing company Othram all said she had been stabbed.
Investigators developed a DNA profile from the scene and compared it with the national DNA data bank. In 2018 police said they had used it to rule out men who knew her. That January the Toronto Police Service offered a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction. "You may have the key to this case and not even realize it," Gallant said at the time.
A niece of Gracelyn Greenidge wrote on Facebook after the December 2025 announcement that the news brought mixed emotions and lingering questions. "Either way there is no true justice for our family," she wrote, as quoted by The Globe and Mail.
For decades the three deaths were treated as separate cases handled by two police services. That changed in 2016, when the Centre of Forensic Sciences linked DNA profiles from the Prince and Samson cases through the national DNA data bank. The two profiles came from the same unknown man. The Toronto Police Service and the OPP began a joint investigation.
In 2017 the Centre found another match: the same profile was tied to the death of Gracelyn Greenidge, according to The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Police Service. Police told The Globe and Mail that the DNA from the Greenidge case was a "super complex mixture" that took a long time to separate. Detective Sergeant Steve Smith said the condition of the samples and the technology available at the time limited how far investigators could take the case. He also said the three killings had no obvious connection and differed in how they were carried out.
The match told police that one man was responsible for all three deaths, but not who he was. He had never been required to give a DNA sample, so the data bank held nothing to compare.
In 2022 the two police services began working with Othram, a forensic laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas, that uses genetic genealogy. Othram said the evidence from the Greenidge case was a complex mixture unsuited to an ordinary genealogy search, and that it used genome sequencing to build a profile suited to a search of that kind. The results went to the Toronto police genetic genealogy team, which developed leads for investigators.
In 2025, The Globe and Mail reported, the profile was uploaded to FamilyTreeDNA, a genealogy database based in Texas, which turned up relatives who led investigators to Smith. Police said they identified close relatives of the offender in 2025, and that the Centre of Forensic Sciences then used that information for a final comparison. On December 3, 2025, the Centre identified Kenneth Smith as the offender in all three killings. Police informed the families before the public announcement.
Genetic genealogy works by having a crime-scene DNA sample sequenced and searched against a consumer DNA database. The search can find relatives ranging from siblings to distant cousins, and genealogists then build family trees to narrow the field. The method came to wide public notice in 2018, when it was used in California to identify the Golden State Killer, The Globe and Mail noted.
The joint news conference took place at Toronto police headquarters on December 11, 2025. Deputy Chief Robert Johnson, OPP Chief Superintendent Karen Gonneau and Detective Sergeant Steve Smith spoke.
Johnson said Smith's death meant he would never face a court of law, and he acknowledged the families who had waited so long. "For Christine's family and for the families of Claire and Gracelyn, the wait for answers has been extraordinarily long," he said. He thanked current and former investigators, forensic staff and the OPP, and said, "These women were never forgotten."
Detective Sergeant Smith said the cases could not have been solved without investigative genetic genealogy, and that the families were elated when police told them. "They may not know the why unfortunately, because he is deceased," he told reporters, but the families now knew who was responsible. In a video posted by Toronto police, he said, "This case had haunted our office."
Police said they believed the killings were crimes of opportunity. Detective Sergeant Smith said that based on the evidence police then had, "it is possible that there may be additional victims who have never been identified." Police asked anyone who knew Smith, or who could help investigators map where he lived and worked over the years, to come forward. "Even details that may seem small could help us," the detective sergeant said.
Gonneau said that although Smith was dead, the investigation was not over. "We know that there are unanswered questions," she said, and she urged anyone with information to contact police. Police said they would retest evidence from other unsolved cases to see whether any could be linked to him.
Detective Sergeant Smith said investigative genetic genealogy had helped solve 68 cold cases in Ontario and more than 80 across Canada. He said the Centre of Forensic Sciences had a backlog of 64 cases and needed more capacity. "If we can expand their ability to test our cold cases, we'll be able to make these connections much quicker," he said. Othram described the identification as the 21st publicly announced Ontario case solved with its technology.
Smith moved to Windsor around 2013, when he was in his late 60s. Police did not know why he moved there, The Globe and Mail reported, and he did not appear to be working. He later entered a cancer hospice in Windsor and died there in 2019, aged 72. Police said he had never been investigated for any of the three killings.
Because Smith died before he was identified, no court has tested the evidence, and the three deaths remain attributed to him by police rather than proven at trial. Police have said there may be other victims. The gap in his criminal record between the early 1980s and the early 1990s, and the years between his release in 1994 and the summer of 1997, are the periods investigators said they most wanted to understand.
Michael Arntfield, a criminologist at Western University, told The Globe and Mail that police would likely cross-reference unsolved cases and missing persons from the years when Smith was not in custody, and that Smith had narrowly missed the early reach of the DNA data bank.
Reports of the three cases also differ on several details. Christine Prince's death has been described both as a drowning and as a beating, and the date she was found has been given as June 21 and June 22, 1982. Claire Samson's body has been reported found on September 1 and on September 2, 1983. Gracelyn Greenidge's death has been described both as blunt force trauma and as a stabbing. Spellings also vary: some reports gave Samson's name as Sampson, and Othram spelled Greenidge's first name Gracelynn. Toronto police spell it Gracelyn.
1946: Kenneth Smith is born in South Porcupine, Ontario (The Globe and Mail).
1975: The kidnapping offense against a 14-year-old girl to which he later pleads guilty.
1976: He pleads guilty to kidnapping, with other charges, and goes to prison.
1981: He is paroled in York Region. Christine Prince arrives in Canada from Wales.
June 21, 1982: Christine Prince, 25, is last seen on a Toronto streetcar.
June 22, 1982: Her body is found in Scarborough.
September 1, 1983: Claire Samson, 23, is last seen in Toronto.
September 2, 1983: Her body is found in Oro-Medonte Township (some reports give September 1).
1985: Smith is convicted of weapons offences in York Region and sentenced to two years.
1987: He is convicted of weapons offences in Toronto and sentenced to seven years.
1994: He is released from prison.
July 28, 1997: Gracelyn Greenidge, 41, is last seen leaving work.
July 29, 1997: She is found dead in North York, Toronto.
2000: The national DNA data bank comes into force.
2001: The OPP's Project Millennium review includes the Samson case.
2004: The sex offender registry is established.
About 2013: Smith moves to Windsor.
2016: The Centre of Forensic Sciences links the Prince and Samson DNA profiles; Toronto police and the OPP begin a joint investigation.
2017: The same profile is linked to the Greenidge case.
January 2, 2018: Toronto police offer a reward of up to $50,000 in the Greenidge case.
2019: Smith dies in a Windsor hospice, aged 72.
2022: Police begin working with Othram on genetic genealogy.
2025: Investigators identify close relatives of the offender through a genealogy database.
December 3, 2025: The Centre of Forensic Sciences identifies Kenneth Smith as the offender in all three killings.
December 11, 2025: Toronto police and the OPP announce the identification and ask for information about other possible victims.