Why has it become very difficult for the police to solve the cold murder cases?
Sean McCowan takes the load on his wrist.
Number of days – 14,219 – imprinted in silver on a bracelet. A constant reminder of the 39 years of painful wait between the murder of his sister Erin Gilmour in December 1983 and the arrest of the man who murdered her in 2022.
McCowan recalled the “We’ve got him” call from a Toronto police detective, saying, “Happiness isn’t the right word. It’s just relief.” “I’m a lighter person as a result because I’ve found the answers.”
Solving cold cases of murders that occur sometimes decades apart has always been a difficult task for the police. But recently the challenge has become much more serious. This is because of the new limitations on them Best The tool – genetic genealogy, which uses small fragments of DNA to trace killers through distant family connections.
US based website Ancestry.com The world’s largest repository of public genealogical records, collecting birth, death, marriage, immigration, and other documents from around the world. And it has become a resource for police forces trying to trace family trees.
Police cold case units say catching killers has become even more difficult after Ancestry.com restricted access to its vast genealogy database. For The National, Jonathan Gatehouse explains how that pool of genetic information helped bring one killer to justice 40 years later, and what losing access means to catching others.
ban on police
But recent updates and clarifications to the company’s terms of service now explicitly prohibit law enforcement from accessing the paid-subscription site without obtaining a court order, making the detectives’ research process harder.
“It’s basically like a Google search for genealogy…a one-stop shop to get the information we need,” said Acting Det. Sergeant Steve Smith heads the Toronto Police Service Cold Case Unit, which conducts genetic genealogy research as well as its own files for 17 forces across Ontario.
“We can still find open source data. It’s just that it will take us 10, 12, 15 searches instead of one. So the time it takes us to solve these cases will increase.”
according to Recent New York Times tallyGenetic genealogy has helped solve more than 1,400 cold cases since it was first used to identify California’s Golden State Killer in 2018. But this is often a laborious process – even with access to Ancestry’s data.
Take the case of Erin Gilmer. A 22-year-old Torontonian was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in her Yorkville apartment a few days before Christmas 1983.
The investigation ran thin on leads, and it was not until 17 years later that police were able to use DNA from the scene to link the crime to another murder – the attack and stabbing of 45-year-old Susan Tice in her apartment in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood in August 1983. Tests proved that the same man committed both murders, but there was no match in law enforcement databases and his identity remained unknown.
Progress finally came in late 2019, when Toronto police submitted DNA samples to a lab in Texas for advanced, new tests.
Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNIP) analysis provides far more detail than standard short tandem repeat (STR) tests for 22 DNA markers, mapping genes to things like hair color, eye color, and most importantly, ancestry.
Toronto police took those results and uploaded them to GEDMatch and FamilyTreeDNA, two websites where people voluntarily share their DNA profiles, in hopes of finding some kind of familial connection to the killer.
Mapping the killer’s family tree
What came back was a partial DNA match, ultimately establishing him as a third cousin of the then-unknown suspect. However, making this link was not easy, as police had to untangle a network of approximately 8,000 people through genealogical research, primarily on Ancestry.com. It took almost two years to reach the suspect’s great-grandparents and another year before they were ready to make an arrest.
Joseph George Sutherland pleaded guilty In October 2023, two counts of second-degree murder were charged in the 1983 killings of Gilmer and Tice. He Was sentenced to life imprisonment In March 2024.
Ancestry.com has a bank of more than 28 million DNA profiles, but they have not always been accessible to police without a warrant.
Smith said he doesn’t understand the logic behind the new restrictions on genealogy data, nor do other North American cold case officers with whom he has discussed the changes. He has tried to reach the company representatives. They have not received any response yet.
“Every public library can purchase all the information there is on genealogy,” Smith said. “So it exists in the community. Every single person in the world has access to it except police officers.”
CBC News asked Ancestry.com about the company’s concerns over police overreach. A spokesperson declined an interview request, pointing instead to A recent blog post. It says Ancestry respects “the important work that law enforcement does to keep communities safe,” but the company has a responsibility to ensure that the site is “used for the purpose for which it was created: family history research.”
Privacy concerns
The rapid emergence and spread of genetic genealogy has raised concerns about the potential for violations of the rights of people who may be only distantly related to an offender.
In June 2025, Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner releases a report Recommending 12 “guardrails” for police use of investigative equipment.
Bioethicist Yann Joly, head of the Center for Genomics and Policy at McGill University in Montreal, said the lack of police transparency around genetic genealogy should be of concern to the public.
“I don’t think anyone is saying: ‘You know what, don’t do this. Stop.’ We are just saying that we have to look at the practice. Look at how we can do this safely: reduce errors, reduce privacy intrusions,” Jolie said.
“Genetic genealogy can be used to track serious criminals, but it can also be used for immigration purposes, for example, or to prevent terrorism or for many other identification purposes. So there is a bit of a slippery slope here that we have to be careful about.”
Some police forces are already taking such concerns into account when dealing with cold cases. Cmdr. Melanie Dupont, head of Montreal police’s major crimes unit, said Quebec’s more stringent privacy laws have always kept Ancestry’s data inaccessible.
“We are very strict. We use FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch because you have to check a box to agree to share your data during a criminal investigation,” he said. “If you don’t agree with it we won’t use it.”
DuPont said sanctions have been imposed Service de police de la ville de montreal Cold case investigations take more time, but he argues they’ve also made his squad more creative.
“We’ve found a way,” she said. “We have to respect the law.”
However, for victims’ families, the arguments for striking a new balance between progress and privacy are not as clear.
Sean McCowan said he couldn’t understand why Ancestry felt the need to make such a change.
“I think it’s terrible,” he said. “A corporation will not allow police access to obtain these results that could bring relief and some form of resolution to those who have been waiting for answers for a long time.
“It’s a very hard pill to swallow.”
- Jonathan Gatehouse can be contacted via email at jonathon.gatehouse@cbc.ca, or through CBC’s digitally encrypted SecureDrop system at. https://www.cbc.ca/securedrop/
