Toronto police are providing an update at 2:45 p.m. ET. on the cold case of Christine Jessop. Watch that announcement live in this story.
Toronto police have identified the killer of nine-year-old Christine Jessop, who was abducted from her Greater Toronto Area home before being raped and killed in 1984.
Sources say Calvin Hoover, the Torontonian they now believe committed the crime, died by suicide.
At a news conference On Friday Oct 9, 2020, police identified through DNA analysis the person responsible for semen in Jessop’s underwear.
Hoover, who was 28-years-old at the time, was known to the Jessop family. He died in 2015, interim chief James Ramer told reporters.
Jessop’s body was found in a wooded area of Sunderland, Ont., about 56 kilometres from her rural Queensville, Ont., home on Dec. 31, 1984. She had been missing since Oct. 3 when she was last seen getting off a school bus.
Investigators say Jessop was stabbed to death.
Guy Paul Morin, the family’s neighbour, was wrongfully convicted of the girl’s killing before being cleared due to advancements in DNA technology. Ontario’s attorney general published a detailed report on the failings of Morin’s conviction.
Toronto police have been investigating the case ever since.
Reached at his home, Christine’s father, Bob Jessop, said he felt “sickened” by the news.
Police went to Guy Paul Morin’s home Thursday personally to deliver the news to him.
“They said, ‘we’ll brief but we just want to apologize to you about what happened to you over the years. We have found the person responsible for Chrstine Jessop’s murder,” said Morin from his home.
Police would not tell him if it was a person he knew.
“I can say that I’m happy that there’s closure for the Jessops’ peace of mind,” he said, adding he felt relief that his name can now be definitively cleared.
“It’s something I was always expecting…. The justice system failed me but science saved me.”
