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Toronto Police Charge Moosonee Man in the 1983 Murders of Susan Tice and Erin Gilmour

DNA tied the two killings to one man in 2000, but no one knew who he was. Genetic genealogy led police to Joseph George Sutherland, 61, who had never been a suspect.

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Illustration: 1970s detectives' squad room with typewriters and rotary phones

For 39 years no one was charged in the killings of Susan Tice and Erin Gilmour, and for 22 of them Toronto police had known, from DNA, that the same man killed both. They did not know his name. On Monday, November 28, 2022, they announced it: Joseph George Sutherland, 61, of Moosonee, in northern Ontario, arrested the previous Thursday, November 24, and charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

"As relieved as we are to announce this arrest, it will never bring back Erin or Susan," Toronto Police Chief James Ramer told reporters.

Susan Tice, 45, was found stabbed to death in her Toronto home on August 17, 1983. She was a mother of four who held a master's degree in social work and worked with disadvantaged children, and she had moved to Toronto from Calgary only a month before. Four months later, on December 20, 1983, Erin Gilmour, 22, an aspiring fashion designer, was found dead in the bedroom of her home on Hazelton Avenue; police said she had just come home from work at Robins Knits. Both women had been sexually assaulted and stabbed, Ramer said. They did not know each other.

In 2000, DNA linked the two killings to one man, but there the case stopped. The break came through investigative genetic genealogy. "The only way that this was solved was the advances in science," said Det. Sgt. Steve Smith of the homicide and missing persons unit's cold case section. "We're able to use investigative genetic genealogy to narrow down a suspect family, and from there we were able to narrow down a suspect." Sutherland had never been a suspect or a person of interest, Smith said. "If we hadn't utilized this technology, we never would have came to his name."

Sutherland had been living in Toronto at the time of the killings, Smith said, and in several places around Ontario since. He was served with a DNA warrant and taken into custody in Moosonee by the Ontario Provincial Police, then picked up by Toronto officers. Police said they would look at every possible connection to other cases in the province. A publication ban covered further details, and his first court date was set for December 9.

"This is a day that I and we have been waiting almost an entire lifetime for," said Gilmour's brother, Sean McCowan. His sister, he said, "had her whole life ahead of her before she was killed five days before Christmas."

In November 2022 Sutherland had been charged, not convicted, and the details of the evidence were under a publication ban. The case against him had not yet been tested in court.

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