Tonight on Dateline, I say goodbye to her outside her house. I walked across the street. I was lost in my sor.

Emergency.

Emergency.

Please come as soon as possible.

Aaron had been stabbed multiple times.

Anthony was seeing Aaron.

He's the prime suspect at that point. After him, it's basically everybody.

She'd thrown a party. Suddenly all these people showed up.

People that weren't invited.

No.

The investigation just keeps ballooning. But it's not really leading us anywhere.

Years of waiting.

It was like this person was a ghost.

All of a sudden, the police were, we've got another case.

There was much more of a fight with Susan.

I was convinced there's going to be a connection between these two victims.

This is technology that is cutting edge.

We're down to one family, five brothers.

It was very eye opening. How remote we can get up there.

That'S cornered, they become the most dangerous.

I said, you don't need helicopters. You don't need tactical teams.

You say to them, what, I'll do it.

Yeah, I'll get them.

An ice cold case takes investigators to the frozen north to catch a killer. I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline. Here's Josh Mankiewicz with evil. Walk through the door.

This much we know. It doesn't matter where you live. It doesn't matter if you're well to do or barely making it. Whether you're cozied up in a nice part of town, starting over someplace simple, or holed up in a far off place, evil can come through any door. On one awful night a long time ago, it found its way here.

Yorkville is one of the top neighborhoods in Toronto. There's high end hotels, high end boutiques, high end restaurants, bars.

Steve Smith is a homicide detective with the Toronto Police Service. He doesn't get a lot of calls to this part of town.

It's where people with money gravitate to when the film festival comes to Toronto. Most of the stars stay in that area.

Not a lot of violent crime there.

Not a lot of violent crime.

Not now and not then.

Emergency.

Emergency.

Please.

Please come as soon as possible.

It was just a few days before Christmas 1983 when this lux neighborhood became an epicenter of police activity. News cameras and fear because of what happened to 22 year old Aaron Gilmore.

What's the problem?

Someone connects to a tonight.

Okay, stay in the line with me.

Hurry up, please. The caller was Aaron's boyfriend, Anthony Monk. When police arrived at the scene, they knew right away it was anything but suicide.

They find out that she was bound and gagged. She had been stabbed multiple times in the front, up in her upper Torso, as well as in the back. And it was believed right away that she was most likely sexually assaulted.

Andrew Doyle is also a homicide detective in Toronto, Canada's biggest city.

There was a significant fight before she died.

There was definitely a fight before she died, unfortunately, is one that she couldn't win.

Detectives Smith and Doyle weren't the original detectives, but they know the case well, beginning with the forensic sweep of the.

Crime scene, obviously they would collect any and all specimens, hair, fingerprints, blood, you know, saliva, any other liquid that they could get.

You found blood in the apartment that wasn't hers?

Yes.

Because during stabbings, frequently, you're going to end up cutting yourself.

Absolutely. It happens all the time.

Back then, DNA analysis was years away. Investigators could still tell a lot by determining what blood types were at the scene.

You know, they did a lot of blood grouping, so they could. At the time, in 1983, they would eliminate people through blood grouping. So, obviously, looking back, it just wasn't that advanced.

But they collect it and you guys hang onto it.

Correct.

They held on to all of it. Once police realized the victim was Aaron Gilmore, they knew this would be a high pressure case. This was the kind of story the papers write about and the chief calls about.

Erin came from a well known family in the Toronto area. She had a pretty large family.

Aaron's family was wealthy and influential. She had enjoyed a privileged upbringing, good schools, world travel. Her mother, Anna, the woman with the dark hair, was a former model and dancer.

Her dad was pretty well known back then.

He was.

He was the first guy to market Fiji water.

That's correct.

From which I gather he made some money.

You'd be correct.

And in a matter of hours, that family was getting the call that changes families forever. Aaron's brother, Sean McCowen, was 13 at the time. He had been with Aaron just the day before.

I just remember waking up the morning of the 21st, and my mom was sitting on my bed, took a look around. There was a few people in the room. And my mom leaned over and said, you know, there's been an accident with Erin. And she then proceeded to tell me that, you know, Erin had been. Had been murdered the best that she could. And then I literally leaned over and put a hole through my wall.

You punched the wall?

Yeah. Yeah. I think the quote my mom used was that Aaron had been. Had been killed by, you know, a bad person. 13 years old. It's, you know, a couple days before Christmas, and you're trying to, you know, figure out what? You know, number one, how that happens to Aaron.

Police found no evidence of forced entry or robbery. They quickly developed theories as to how Aaron's killer got inside.

So if you see the rooftops behind us, they're all connected. So he could have got up on the rooftop anywhere on this row of houses and walked straight across until he saw somebody that was in there. Was it somebody that had been stalking her? Was it somebody that just happened to be in there doing a break and enter? Was it somebody that she knew?

They paid close attention to the boyfriend's version of events. Anthony Monk told police he was supposed to pick up Aaron at 09:00 p.m. For a date, but stopped at an ATM on the way over.

Now, Mister Monk was running a little bit late, and he didn't arrive there until 920. When he approached the door, he noticed that the door was a little bit open. Ajar. So knowing that he was going to be picking her up, he thought she may have left the door a little.

Bit open for him. So he's not sure exactly what's going on. Because usually her apartment is fairly neat, kept very well. So he's seeing that there's a bit of disarray.

By now, he's calling her name and not getting an answer.

Calling her name very loudly. Yeah, absolutely. Went back into the bedroom, noticed the duvet was completely covering the entire bed, but thought maybe she could be underneath there. So he went up to the bed, pulled the duvet down just to her shoulders, and found Aaron there, laying in the bed. And he noticed there was something around her neck. Something black, as he's described it. And there was blood everywhere. So he went back downstairs, got on the phone, called the operator, asked for an ambulance, asked for police.

It's the kind of event that cuts the timeline of your life in two. The part before and the part after. Aaron's brother Shawn would never be the same. He was still just a kid. But from that moment on, he would be driven by the question, who did this to his sister?

Sean was on a mission. Oh, yeah.

Like 40 years of waiting.

Police wanted the same answers.

He's getting away.

Just disappointment after disappointment.

Finding the killer would take detectives to the limits of their patients and to the ends of the earth.

No, he says, I did some really, really bad things. So I just shut up and listened.

I often wonder, did he try to put this out of his mind and forget about it? Or was he thinking about it every night when he went to bed? Were you just waiting for that knock on the door?

Five days before Christmas, someone had murdered 22 year old Erin Gilmore in her apartment in a fashionable section of Toronto. The story made headlines. Police felt the heat.

This was obviously a big deal in Toronto. I mean, every homicide, every murder is a big deal, but when it's a prominent family and a prominent young female that's murdered, it kind of stays in the forefront for longer. And I'm sure, I have no doubt that there was pressure as to we need to solve this.

Sean remembers vividly the visit from some serious man in trench coats, the two.

Original detectives on the case. I remember sitting in my mum's kitchen with them, and I think they were sort of on either side of me and taking statements or taking notes on what I was saying.

What did they ask you?

Well, we had been there the night before, so they wanted to sort of, you know, was anything unusual and, you know, was anything strange happening? How was Erin acting?

It seemed Aaron was happy, looking forward to her evening and the holidays ahead.

She was just starting out in life. She had a lot of friends, was very social. She had a lot of things going for her, and her future was endless. She could have done anything that she had wanted.

Erin would come into a room and the whole atmosphere would change because she was just this beautiful, dynamic woman who everybody wanted to be friends with.

What was she up to at that point in her life?

She'd gone to university, she'd graduated. She had recently traveled to Australia and had returned back to Toronto.

She was working at a clothing store, and she was living above that clothing store.

Her dad had rented her that apartment, correct?

She loved it.

Erin's cousin, Kristen Basso.

And she was working right downstairs at Robin's. Knits in her, you know, during her part time, whatever. She loved it.

What could be better?

Exactly.

No commute.

Her parents were divorced, but the Klan remained close. Her mother had remarried and had two boys, including Shawn.

My mom was busy starting up a ballet school in a business, and Aaron would sort of fill the gaps a lot of the time. She had an old grade jeep YJ that she used to drive us around everywhere. And it was, you know, adventure time, effectively. It was great.

One of those adventures was a sleepover at Erin's the night before she was killed.

We went over and had dinner and crawled in her bed, watched a movie, and then we all sort of crashed out relatively early.

Kristen saw Aaron walking with her brothers earlier that day.

The two little boys were hanging off her because they just adored her. They just would hang off her. And as I watched her, I thought, you look, you're so beautiful and you're so fragile. I hope nothing awful ever happens. Everyone loved her. Yeah.

Vanessa Vansittart, another of Erin's cousins.

Just a really nice, caring, sweet person.

For the people who loved her. Aaron's loss was overwhelming. All the money and care in the world hadn't kept her safe.

This is a hole that we never will be able to sort of fill in or fix, basically.

Aaron's father, David, could not be consoled. Maybe because he had encouraged his daughter to live in that apartment.

David practically committed suicide. He literally was on the verge of it because he was taking drugs just to try and keep himself right. Oh, yeah, he did. Sending her back here.

What did this do to Aaron's mom?

Oh, it tore her apart. Totally tore her apart. Well, it's a horror movie. That is your life.

It never goes away.

Never goes away.

The notoriety of the murder put a family's private grief on public display.

Well, the funeral felt like a mafia funeral. Just from the point of view of all the press that were there photographing and the police photographing everybody, you know, going in and out.

800 people packed the church.

Everybody looked ghost like. There was just such a feeling of silence. And the choir was the only thing that had any kind of feeling of humanity in it. It was just broken hearts everywhere.

And I remember the end. My mom asked us to go up to Aaron's coffin and go and touch it and say goodbye. And that was. That's a hard one.

You did that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did that.

That's 13 year old Shawn in the red coat, walking behind his sister's casket. Her funeral.

A lot of people there?

Oh, yeah.

Your guys among them?

Correct.

What are you looking for at the funeral?

Is there anybody that's not invited that shows up to the funeral? And then also who doesn't show up for the funeral?

You never know.

Anybody not fit in?

Not really. Nobody that drew any sort of attention at that point.

Police were just collecting every bit of information they could. Maybe the funeral would pay off and maybe not. There was one person who certainly required more scrutiny. Aaron's boyfriend, Anthony Monk. Police listened carefully to his 911 call.

What's called someone committed suicide.

And the first thing he said was that he thought she'd committed suicide.

That's correct.

And then what? Put herself back in bed and covered herself up?

You know, I think. And according to Mister Monk in his statement that he gave the police, police at the time, I don't think he knew what else to think. He didn't have any reason to think of anything else? I guess, in his mind.

Police wanted to know if Anthony Monk was just a young man in shock or a young man with something to hide.

You want to follow him. You want to see what he's doing in his life, see if he's got another girlfriend. See if, you know, if his squeaky clean life isn't quite as squeaky clean as we thought it was.

Just two days after burying 22 year old Erin Gilmore, her family faced the first of many Christmases without her.

It was hard to believe you could even have Christmas after what had happened. But everybody tried to be supportive.

What was Christmas like that year?

Yeah. No, Christmas that year was extremely difficult. Mom tried to sort of make sure that everything was as normal as it could be, but there was no possible way it could be. And you're trying to sort of go through the motions. And we would have our regular routines and traditions that we'd gone through. And there's a bunch of gifts from Erin under the tree that she had put there before she had, you know, been taken. So I took mine back to my room, which had been Aaron's room previously. I had moved into it after she moved out. And, yeah, I opened them.

It was a rare moment of solitude for Shawn in those chaotic first few days. Cousin Kristen took on the task of cleaning up Aaron's apartment.

I didn't want anybody else that was desecrating Aaron's space. I wanted to be the one.

What was it like being in that apartment afterward? I can't imagine how terrible that must have been.

It was. And yet I felt close to her. It was another way of being close to her. It didn't freak me out that way. What freaked me out was how she died. That's what freaked me out. Just trying to imagine that and wishing I could have been there. I mean, I still have dreams of wishing I could have been there, to have helped.

As family members did what they could to nurse their grief, detectives took a closer look at Aaron's boyfriend, Anthony Monk.

Their fathers were business partners. They interacted socially. They'd known each other forever.

Were you aware they were going out?

Yes.

So everybody was. That was no secret.

Yeah.

They'd known each other for much longer than they'd just been dating.

Yes. The family had been friends for a long time. They had been friends. They'd been childhood friends. And eventually it evolved into a romantic relationship.

Nobody had any problem with that?

No, not at all.

So Anthony Monk was seeing Aaron Gilmore, and they had a prearranged date at de Goat for dinner at around 09:00.

P.M. That night, which put Anthony Monk at the scene of the crime right about the time it happened.

If you have a case like this and you have a boyfriend, domestic violence is something that we take very seriously. And it happens daily in this city, unfortunately, and probably around a lot of.

Major cities, because he's the boyfriend. He's the person who found the body.

He's the person that, you know, would be heavily scrutinized for sure about his actions, his where, his why, his what, his how, all of that.

And he was very much was. Mister Monk's word was not taken as gospel.

He was heavily investigated.

This was 1983. Digital police work was still science fiction. The investigation into Anthony Monk had to be done the analog way.

I mean, we're spoiled today with the investigative aids that we have. We have video, we have electronic tracking, we have cell phone tracking. When you don't have those types of tools, you have to go back to traditional policing means. So you have to do surveillance, and you have to. You have to find out their lifestyle, who they're talking to, who they're meeting with.

What do you think you're gonna find.

By following them around?

You never know. You just kind of go with the flow and see what comes up. You never know if he's gonna talk to somebody, if he's gonna tell somebody. So you wanna follow him. You wanna see what he's doing in his life, see if he's got another girlfriend, see if he's, you know, if his squeaky clean life isn't quite as squeaky clean as we thought it was.

Anything in his background that makes you sit up and take notice?

Nothing. Nothing at all in his background.

No criminal record, no trouble with the law?

No, that wasn't enough to clear Anthony Monk. It also wasn't enough to arrest him.

He's definitely the prime suspect at that point. And then after him, it's basically everybody in Toronto. Or that was in Toronto that night.

That's a lot of potential suspects. And narrowing down the list would take detectives from Erin's inner circle all the way to her father's business dealings, including one deal with a controversial head of state half a world away.

He would have upset a lot of.

People, and they'd take it out on his daughter.

As they searched for Aaron Gilmore's killer, Toronto police took a hard look at her short life. Places she went, people she met, parties she attended, and one she threw at her own place just weeks before her murder. That one, a pink themed birthday party for a friend drew particular interest.

Somehow word had gone out. I don't know how, and nor did Erin. But suddenly all these people showed up in her apartment.

People that weren't invited.

No. And they were spilling one, and they were, you know, basically trashed the place. So we had to, you know, have everything cleaned and whatever. And Erin was totally distraught, of course. You know, this was this beautiful little place or little nest and then all these strangers. So that was way more the connection that I thought at that point.

You thought somebody who had shown up uninvited, maybe later, came back.

Exactly. That's what I was thinking.

Detective Doyle says everyone at that party also crashed the list of potential suspects.

All of those people were very thoroughly looked at. The majority of them were very willing to assume in this investigation.

So you've got a lot of information coming in.

A lot of information, all of which has to be followed up, abs, every bit of it.

The investigators went even further back to Erin's 21st birthday party the year before.

She'll be party at the four Seasons turning 21.

She did.

That sounds like it was quite a party.

It would have been a who's who of the social network of the upper echelon of Toronto.

You have to speak to everybody on that guest list.

We have to try. So you can see how exponentially the list grows of people that we have to talk to.

What about sexual offenders who live in the area?

That was a big theory. So they would find out any sexual offenders in the area and they would look into all of those persons as well.

Everybody who had a criminal record for a sexual offense who lived, what, within a mile or two of there was probably interviewed?

Absolutely.

The investigation expanded beyond Canada's borders as the business empire of Aaron's wealthy father came under police scrutiny.

So all of Aaron's father's business dealings have to be looked at at the time to see if there is anybody that may have lost large sums of money and maybe been desperate enough to try to exact revenge on her father by killing Aaron.

One of those deals involved building a resort near the great pyramids in Egypt. Aaron's father, that's him on the left, met with egyptian president Anwar Sadat about those plans multiple times in the mid to late seventies.

Sadat was for that?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, he just thought this would be a terrific idea.

Aaron's cousin Kristen remembers that not everyone in Egypt agreed.

There were some protests about those developments. Some people didn't like it.

Oh, yes, absolutely.

She says Aaron's dad caught wind of a plot to kill him because of his involvement in the project. David Gilmore took that seriously. The deal fell through in 1978. President Sadat was assassinated. In 1981, Aaron was killed two years later.

And we had to look into this because he would have upset a lot of people if he was going to build a resort by the pyramids and.

They'D take it out on his daughter.

Well, it's a wild theory, but we have nothing else, so we have to look into everything.

The investigation grew. Dozens of detectives chased hundreds of leads and interviewed more than 700 people, generating box loads of notes and files. Except as the first anniversary of erin's murder approached around Christmas 1984, they seemed no closer to finding her killer.

Because as many witness interviews as you're doing and as. As much as you're collecting and all the forensics, it's not really pointing at any one person at all.

No, it's not. And I think that was a frustrating thing for the investigators, is they wanted to solve this so badly, but we just had absolutely no traction.

Mostly what police knew is who it wasn't. It wasn't one of those party guests or a known sex offender in the area. It wasn't connected to political unrest in Egypt, and it wasn't their one time prime suspect. He was cleared.

How does Anthony Monk finally get off police radar?

Well, eventually we're able to get the receipts of his transaction at the bank.

Those receipts were time stamped. Anthony was at the bank at 912 pm. He called 911 at 927.

Anthony Monk's bank alibi holds up.

Yeah, his time frame holds up. We're able to prove that he, when he arrived, was only a couple minutes before he actually made his 911 call. We've done enough interviews with him. We've basically looked into his entire life to make sure that there wasn't anything that we were missing. And we just don't believe that it was Anthony.

More years passed. Any picture of Aaron's killer remained elusive. This guy's a ghost.

He was a ghost.

He stayed a phantom for 17 years until a revolution in crime solving offered Toronto police their first real break.

The police were all of a sudden, okay, hey, this is crazy. We've got another case.

Aaron's killer may have been a ghost, but like all ghosts, this one had a past. Aaron Gilmore's murder had been a huge story in Toronto, an urgent priority for police, and it was going nowhere. The case had gone cold. It stayed that way for years.

The reality had sort of set in that, you know, this was probably not going to go anywhere. It was going to go unresolved could.

You live with that? I mean, you were living with that?

Yeah, I was living with it. I won't tell you that. It was, you know, that I wanted to live with it. You always wanted to get to the bottom of it.

By 2017, years after Aaron's murder, police had developed a DNA profile of her killer. And then they discovered something else.

You know, the police were all of a sudden. Okay, hey, this is crazy. We've got another case.

A second victim. Actually, a first victim. Susan Tice had been found raped and stabbed to death inside her home following a ferocious struggle. It happened only four months before Aaron Gilmore was killed. And just 2 miles away. DNA from the Susan tice crime scene showed she and Aaron were killed by the same man. The DNA didn't say who it was. Even so, this was huge.

It's one offender sexually assaulted and murdered both Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore.

And that is just a huge leap forward, even without any other evidence.

Absolutely.

Cause now you're looking at what those two victims might have in common.

That's right.

Well, the crimes had a lot in common. The victims did not. Susan didn't come from money or a prominent family. At 45, she was a generation older than Aaron.

Susan Tice was the mother of four children. She was a therapist.

Susan's son Ben was 20 years old at the time.

As we got to a certain age, she decided she wanted to go back to school. So she did two master's degrees. She was mother, wife, confident, best friend, advocate.

She sounds like sort of part mom and part best friend.

All of that and more, you know, she traveled with a guitar, and she was always sort of singing Helen, ready, hear me roar. I am woman.

She used to belt that out during.

Dinner prep when she felt that need.

In the summer of 1983, Ben Tice was 2000 miles from home, working at the historic chateau Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies. He called his mom one day just to check in. That call didn't go well.

We had a horrible conversation. About what? I don't remember. Unfortunately, I ended it and I hung up. I called her back the next day.

No answer.

I left a very long winded message on her answering machine.

Susan didn't return Ben's message or anyone else's. And when she was a no show for a family dinner, her brother in law drove to check on her brother in law.

Went to the front door. Front door was. Was locked. Rang the doorbell, called out Susan's name. Did not get any response. Went around to the back of the.

House from the alley behind the house. It was obvious something was wrong.

Back door was open. Walked inside the back of the house. There was some music playing in the home. Softly he went upstairs, hauling out Susan's name, and ultimately went into her bedroom.

It was a brutal, bloody scene. Susan had been stabbed multiple times and drawers were pulled out. But it appeared nothing was actually stolen.

Susan herself was on the ground beside the bed, but her feet were still up on the bed. She was covered with a blanket, the majority of her body, but her feet were showing.

No eyewitnesses. A neighbor heard something.

There's a scream. 130 in the morning.

And that's Sunday into Monday.

A Sunday into Monday. So I think that's your timeline for when the actual incident occurred.

Her final moments must have been terrifying. Susan Tice was in a fight for her life.

And she lost a long time. Friend of my father's had called. I just remember hearing that she had been murdered. I remember picking myself up off the floor with the phone in my hand, being breathless.

Susan and her husband had recently split and he became an obvious early suspect. Even their son Ben wondered, did I.

Have a suspicion about my father? Yeah, of course you do. I think that's only natural.

And she was in the middle of a divorce.

She was in the middle of a divorce. She was a strong woman doing her thing, you know, my father wasn't happy with it. She was flexing her independence, her womanhood. You can't stifle a forest fire. She was just a force.

When people separate and you have a murder quickly thereafter, obviously it makes sense to look at the other party.

And you did look at Aaron.

And we sure did.

He was under suspicion for a while.

He was.

You follow him around the same way you followed around Aaron's boyfriend?

Absolutely. What else do you have to do at that time? It has to be boots on the street. Eventually they were able to conclude that Mister Tice was not responsible.

Back in the eighties, detectives did notice striking similarities between Susan's and Aaron's murders. They found no hard evidence to connect them.

They always believed that these two crimes were related. But again, in the eighties, there's no way to say that unequivocally.

You don't have a print that matches both scenes?

We don't have a print that matches.

Both scenes or a witness at both scenes?

Absolutely not.

When detectives learned definitively this was all the work of one killer, it was a jolt of energy for the investigation.

We now take those cases and lay them over top of each other to see if there's anyone or anything that may have had contact with both Susan and Aaron.

Suddenly it's a whole new ballgame.

Yes.

Two murders had spawned nearly two decades of frustration until finally a promising lead. DNA showed the killer of Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore was the same man.

And there was this hit that all of a sudden sort of pumped new air into the tires, for lack of a better word. And it was, it was, it was a revelation.

We now knew that this person had to be in Toronto for at least a four month timeframe, which gives us a little more investigative ability to go back and look at offenders, sexual offenders.

You find any other cases?

No other cases. It didn't really help us in any way.

And so the Tice and Gilmore cases remained tantalizingly unsolved, and they went cold. Once again, the mystery of the twin killings would stubbornly outlast generations of detectives. In 2015, more than 30 years into the investigation, Detective Sargent president Stacey Gallant took over as head of the police cold case unit and started something he called project never give up.

I started looking at the files and we started doing some, I'll call it advertising. Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore did not.

Know each other in life.

Unfortunately, the two women are forever linked together in their deaths. The same man is responsible for both of these murders.

Gallen's appeal was posted on the Toronto Police Service website.

It is your duty to bring his name into this investigation so he can be held accountable.

And people in Toronto did come forward.

I did get one tip, a lead that I pursued very actively. It was a very similar murder in that it was a sexual assault and a stabbing.

That case was from 1985, two years after the Tice Gilmore murders. The victim was Nancy Eaton. Like Aaron, a young woman from a prominent family. The Eaton case was solved quickly. The killer declared not criminally responsible because of mental illness. He was institutionalized and later released.

I found that we never had a DNA sample from this person.

So.

So I got in touch with the local police service in that area and requested they do surveillance on him and obtain a covert DNA sample from, from him.

They got the sample and sent it in for testing.

You feeling encouraged?

Very.

Six weeks later, the lab results were back.

As soon as I saw the envelope and kind of started pulling out, it's not him.

Gallant went back to the case files, 40 boxes filled with thousands of pieces of paper looking for something else to connect the two cases. He came across a note handwritten by Susan Dice.

It made mention of having to call a cleaning company or getting a carpet cleaned.

Here we go.

Here we go. That's looking interesting.

Interesting because Gallant knew Erin Gilmore had hired cleaners after that wild party in her apartment a few weeks before her murder. Susan and Erin did not live far apart. So could they have used the same company?

That feels like the connection you're looking for.

It does. I started looking into it. I'm like, I'm encouraged now, and I call the company.

They knew nothing about a job at Susan's house from so long ago. No surprise there. However. Incredibly, the man who answered Gallant's call said he was actually one of the workers who'd cleaned Aaron's apartment more than 30 years earlier. He provided the names of three others who'd helped on that job.

And you checked them all for a criminal record?

Yes. And one person in particular came back with a history of violence against the women.

Here we go again.

Here we go. Let's start tracking these people down.

Gallant was able to get DNA samples from all four men.

Send them all off to our center of forensic science once again and. But I gotta wait. And it's again waiting and waiting.

This case been all about waiting, hadn't it?

Yeah.

And then eventually, about a month and a half later, get the news again. Nothing. Okay, now, what I got, there's nobody else on my list that I'm looking for now.

So gallants switched gears. Instead of using DNA to identify the killer, he began using it to eliminate potential suspects for two of Toronto's most notorious murder cases. That was a lot of people to rule out. By now, detectives Smith and Doyle had joined the team. They went to work on that very long list of suspects.

You can go back to anybody who was any kind of even faint suspect in either one of those two cases and ask for DNA.

And that's what we did.

And how many people we talking about?

Hundreds.

It was an extraordinary effort. More than 30 years after the murders police collected DNA samples from hundreds of people listed in the cold case files.

And it's none of them.

None of them.

You still can't figure out who it was. You know who it wasn't, but not who it was.

Yeah, we're probably further away from figuring out who it was because now all the people that we believed may have committed this did not.

Whoever it was had committed two murders and then disappeared into the atmosphere like a hot breath on a freezing night. A lot of work had led nowhere. That's when something happened thousands of miles away.

Breaking news tonight.

A stunning arrest.

Investigators say they have finally caught a notorious a serial killer who has terrorized California for decades.

That California suspect had no connection to Aaron or Susan. But very soon, he would have everything to do with the search to find their killer.

And I just remember, oh, God, that's it. It was like a lightning bolt.

A lightning bolt that would take detectives on a long journey to the vast, frozen canadian, canadian north.

It's not for the faint of heart. It's bush roads. It's. You're going over frozen rivers and creeks and the road is treacherous.

He says, it gets worse. And I said, it can't get any worse.

There is no rulebook for how to live without the murder of someone you love, especially when the killer is still unknown and still at large. After Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore were murdered and first years went by and then decades, their families coped in different ways. Susan's son, Ben tice.

I wanted to shield them. Sons.

Yeah.

You know, I talked. They know, and they've always known that they're grandmother had died. I've done my best to tell stories to them in instances about her.

Happy stories. Happy stories?

Yeah, life stories.

You don't want them to only remember her as a murder victim.

No, that word victim. We were all victims just by the circumstance and being placed in that situation. We were victims. And I really didn't like that.

You have to believe that somehow it will be solved, but you just don't know. I just kept hoping somebody would come out of the bush who would just want to snitch or want to come clean.

I know who it was.

Yeah. And I think the biggest fear was that whoever did it might be dead. Then you're kind of, you know, at a dead end.

No one wanted justice more than aaron's brother sean.

I walk and think of her all the time. I will go by the house apartment and sort of, you know, sometimes stand.

Outside, I talk to her and what do you say?

Hope that we're gonna get you an answer and get some justice for you.

Sean was on a mission. Oh, yeah. As much for aaron and their mom and himself. But he was a dog on a bone.

I didn't want to be, you know, that guy that was, you know, calling and they'd see my number and be like, okay, you know, let it go to voicemail. But at the same, you, time sort of are trying to just, I want it to be updated.

Let them know that you're out there. And you still want to know.

Yeah. Yeah. Want the answers.

Police wanted answers too. And after three decades, they still didn't have any.

He's getting away.

At this point, there's no connection yet again, it's just disappointment after disappointment. Nope, it's not him. It's not him. Add the name to the list of who it isn't.

In 2018, an arrest in that California cold case changed the course of the Tice Gilmore investigation.

Police arresting a man they believe is the so called Golden State killer, responsible for a slew of murders and rapes in the seventies and eighties.

The Golden State killer case was solved by something called investigative genetic genealogy. I gave, in cold case slang at the time, a revolution in DNA analysis. Here's how it works. Unknown DNA from a crime scene is identified by matching it to relatives whose DNA was uploaded to public genealogy websites.

It certainly piqued my interest, and I started digging into how we could use it here in Canada.

Detective Gallant partnered with Houston based on a leading innovator in DNA forensics. Doctor Kristen Mittleman is one of Othrem's founders.

You've figured out how to get more information from a smaller amount of DNA?

Yes. And the case that we're talking about today is an example of why you would need more information.

The DNA from the Tyson Gilmore crime scenes had been all but used up from a lot of testing over the years.

What you're doing is figuring out how to get that information from DNA that probably wouldn't have been available to be tested or wouldn't even have qualified for testing before.

Yes. What we're doing here is give you a productive profile that can be uploaded to these genealogical databases and give you an answer.

Othram has helped solve hundreds of cases and assisted on hundreds more.

We like to build DNA profiles that are so comprehensive that you can actually point down to the family they belong to in a family tree.

Toronto police decided to try out the new technology on another notorious cold case, the 1984 sexual assault and murder of nine year old Christine Jessop.

Christine Jessop is a name that people in Canada know the way they know JonBenet Ramsey. In the United States, they do.

It was one of the biggest unsolved child murders in Canada.

And the DNA sample in that case was what, small and degraded?

Yes, because a lot of it had been used. It had done some other DNA testing.

Despite that, Othrem was able to create a profile that led police to Christine's killer.

On Friday, October 9, 2020, we positively.

Confirmed the identification of the person responsible for the DNA sample found on Christine's underwear.

When Shawn learned how Christine Jessop's murder was finally solved, he wondered why that same technology hadn't been applied to his sister's case.

And I remember I gave Toronto police a day and I phoned the next day and I was like, okay, what the hell is going on?

By then, Stacey Gallen had retired, and Detective Steve Smith was in charge of cold cases.

Basically, when he called me, he asked, can we apply this to Aaron's case? And I was able to tell him, we already have.

We put in Aaron's case and Jessop's case at the same time. Aaron's is going to take a little bit more time. And sort of that became a bit of a mantra for Toronto police and me.

In the world of DNA, the Jessop case wasn't difficult.

No, it was ordinary. Ordinary for this type of technology.

Not so Aaron Gilmore.

No.

Authram's other co founder and Kristen's husband, Doctor David Mittelman, showed us why.

This is unknown suspect DNA from the Gilmore and tice murders.

That's correct.

What are we looking at here for that suspect? There is a small european component and then a large America's component. And this american component is characteristic with.

First nations in Canada.

In the US, they would identify as native american. Doctor Mittelman says that fact would make the search for the killer much more complicated.

Not a lot of people from First Nation in Canada have sent their DNA into those sites. So there's not a huge sample to start with.

It's not a huge sample. And the samples that are there are going to be very hard to uniquely place on a tree.

Othrem sent police the killer's profile. Then when detectives got a look at it, they hit a big bump in the road.

So this is all one big family?

It was all one big family. It's like trying to put a puzzle together and you don't have a picture on the COVID of the box.

Meet Detective James Atkinson, in house genealogist for the Toronto Police Service.

This is the new shoe leather.

I tell my teams that I work with at homicide, I'm just the bird dog. I just point at the bird. And after that, it's their job. I stay in my office. It's like trying to put a puzzle together.

It really is.

And the problem is you don't have a picture on the COVID of the box to guide you. It's like trying to put a puzzle together with all the pieces turned upside down.

His job was to assemble a genetic puzzle of Susan and Aaron's killer, beginning with the killer's extended family. And extended is exactly the right word. Each of those little squares is a familial connection. Among the 100 people most closely related to the killer.

Where's the suspect in this?

He's in the background, and now it's up to me to try and figure out who is the person.

What could you tell about the suspect from his DNA profile?

I could tell that he was definitely from James Bay.

James Bay is a remote area in northern Canada where thousands of years of near isolation have led to a mostly homogeneous gene pool.

This happens when communities marry within themselves.

That's right. Small islands, indigenous groups that are isolated. This is what you get. You get people that are related to each other many times over.

So this is all one big family?

It was all one big family.

One big family that included many distant relatives still living near one another, which.

Makes identifying a particular suspect a lot harder.

It made everybody, every male in town, look good.

Finding the proverbial needle in this genealogical haystack stack was going to take time and also more DNA samples.

We just need to get more matches. So we started phoning people. I sent kits up there to people. I got the help of a couple of First nations genealogists.

Paula Ricker is one of those genealogists. Her knowledge of the local population proved invaluable.

James would give me a name and I would do some research and tell him, this is the person, this is the couple, these are the children. That type of information I would give them based on the records that I have.

With Paula's help and an influx of new DNA samples to compare to the killer's profile, this mass of orange became more manageable.

We got to 26 families, and, you.

Know, it's one of them.

And we knew that of these 26 couples, one of them was the suspect's grandparent.

And they tell you they're down to 26 families, which is still a lot of people. It's also enormously reduced from the original suspect pool, which was pretty much everybody on earth.

Right. And you know that they're sort of getting really, really close.

Were you thinking every day, like, maybe this is the day, maybe this is it?

Yeah.

I was getting more and more optimistic, for sure. And you're waiting, you know, for the call.

You know, normally I wouldn't tell a family that because you don't want to create false hope. Right, right. But our relationship with Sean was so close, and he understood the amount of work that we had put in over the years. And Sean is somebody that wants that knowledge. And I had to keep telling him, it's just time. We just need more time, and we will get there.

What'd you tell the tice family?

I didn't tell the tice family too much because they didn't want to know at that point.

They didn't want the procedural stuff.

No.

Atkinson and his team sifted through the lineage of those 26 families, looking for a close DNA match to the killer. Homicide detectives just stayed out of the way and let the DNA folks do their job.

So our genealogists are working on a.

Daily basis building family trees.

Building family trees. We don't give our genealogists the investigative files, so they work strictly off the DNA so that when they provide us a name, that name's brought to us organically, and they have no idea whether.

That person has a criminal record or not.

That's right. By the process of elimination, we got.

Down to one, one family. It had taken Atkinson and his team a year to prune the killer's family tree down to a single branch.

I got to five brothers, and I went to my bosses. The lead investigators say, I've got it down to five brothers.

Five brothers. Now, from a list of suspects that once numbered in the thousands, they finally felt they were closing in on identifying Susan and Aaron's killer.

Somebody has to go find those five brothers and get DNA from them.

That's right.

Well, that was easier said than done.

As soon as we asked one of them for the DNA, the others would know it.

He's gonna call his brothers and say, guess what just happened?

He might take off.

Right?

As investigators closed in on their suspect, this man would suddenly hear a mind blowing secret from a close friend.

I said, listen, just stay put. Don't talk to nobody. Don't answer the phone, don't answer the door. I'll be right back.

Almost 40 years into the tice Gilmore investigation, police had narrowed the suspect list to one family.

One family, five brothers. That's when I do my bird dog and say, here you go. Here's the five names.

Five brothers, all with the last name Sutherland.

That's, like, the first really good news you've had in a long time.

Yeah. Yeah. It was just such a. Just a burst of hope. Like it was crazy. It was amazing.

Shawn had tracked every step of the investigation, waiting for news like this. Susan's son Ben had chosen not to be in the loop.

Your attitude was sort of, when you get somewhere, I want to know. Until then, I'm good.

Let me be really straight with you, Josh. I ran away. I retreated. It's awkward. How do you carry a conversation from, hi, I'm Ben Tyson. Yes, my mom was murdered into a social conversation. People don't know how to react.

So you just don't talk about it?

You just don't talk about it.

Detectives zeroed in on the five brothers in all those boxes. In 40 years of files, there was no mention of anyone named Sutherland.

It was always said that the name is always in the box.

The name is always in the box. That's a saying here.

Yes.

When you solve it, it's gonna be somebody that you had previously interviewed or heard about or showed up in the investigation in some way.

Absolutely.

Not here.

Not here.

You're tantalizingly close. And yet also so far.

That's right, because you still have to get DNA from all of those brothers to trim that down to actually finding out who it is.

And it would take a lot of detective work to get that done.

They were all living in Toronto in and around the early eighties, and then they had kind of spread out throughout northern Ontario.

The five brothers lived five very different lives. Some were model citizens and family men. Others were already familiar names to law enforcement.

More than one had a police record.

Yeah, some for very minor offenses, some for more serious offenses. So we did our due diligence in trying to narrow down who was who.

So who were they?

We started with the person that we thought was, in our opinion, the most likely to have committed this offense.

Because he was a registered sex offender.

He may have been involved in some sexual offenses over the years, and he was deceased, but he was alive at the time of the two murders. He was on the national DNA data bank, so we knew that immediately he was excluded.

The second brother detectives looked at was a murder victim himself, killed during a drunken brawl.

One of the brothers, unfortunately, got hit and stabbed with a bottle, and that ended up taking his life.

That was alcohol plus guys equals murder.

That's exactly what that was. It's a good way of saying it.

And his DNA was on file. And he's not your guy either.

He's not your guy. Not our guy.

Two brothers down, three to go. All then. Living in the far reaches of northern Ontario, getting samples would be a challenge for big city cops. So Smith went to Detective Inspector Sean Glassford of the Ontario Provincial Police.

We're used to working in the north and we know the communities, and that's what we can help them with.

Policing's a little different up here. It's maybe a little harder to do surveillance on somebody in some of these small towns.

Definitely in small towns it is.

And the last thing police wanted was anyone knowing what they were doing, especially those three brothers.

Why couldn't you in this case, just call these guys and say we need your DNA.

Well, you could, but it wouldn't be.

The best way to do it.

As soon as we asked one of.

Them for the DNA, the others would know it.

He's going to call his brothers and say, guess what just happened, right?

He might take off.

Right.

So this would be a covert operation. They started with a brother who worked in a mine and lived in a small, about an eight hour drive north of Toronto.

We would watch that brother and see where he went. If he dropped something or threw something away, we would obviously pick it up.

They followed him for days, but he either didn't litter or he was covering his tracks. They staked out his house.

We collected some garbage that he had put out at the end of the road. Within the garbage were two pop cans and a COVID mask that were collected and sent to Toronto and sent to the lab. DNA profile generated.

It was a very low tech operation to get to a high tech DNA test. The lab took five long months to report the results to Detective Smith and it's not him.

So now we've got two brothers in northern communities, very remote northern communities, two to go.

And when they looked at the two remaining brothers, the likely suspect seemed obvious.

One had some history of violence and the other was basically squeaky clean.

So you go after the first one?

That's right.

He lived in a tiny First nations town of 1200 on the shores of James Bay. This brother was actually a witness in another case Detective Glassford was working.

So you bring him in to talk about that and what, he takes a couple of sips out of a cup?

Yeah.

Just had a drink of water and left the cup behind.

When he left the cup, went to the lab.

You think he's the guy?

I thought absolutely he was the guy.

Wrong again.

For the fourth time we do the DNA testing. He's not our offender.

So you got one brother to go that you know of?

That we know of.

Unless there's another one out there somewhere that you don't know about or that isn't reflected in birth records.

Every investigative means we used led us to believe there was only five brothers. But if somebody was adopted as a child and there was no record of.

It, you wouldn't necessarily know?

We wouldn't necessarily know.

A decades long investigation was about to take detectives to another tiny, isolated town and to one man. And they still couldn't be sure if he was their man. The search for Susan's and Aaron's killer had taken police from a DNA lab in Texas to the frozen expanses of Canada. Years of scientific work now pointed to a speck of a town way up in northern Ontario. It's called Moosinee, about 600 miles north of Toronto, a five hour train ride from the nearest town. They call that train the Polar Bear Express.

Trainer plane is the only way in.

And out of Moosinee.

Don Crawford runs a taxi service in town.

The polar bear express brings in all.

Our freight, all our fuel, all the.

Locals, they have no choice but to take it. Flying in and out is just way too expensive.

Everybody's on that train.

Everybody including us.

On Dateline, we tell a lot of stories about small towns where everyone knows everyone. Well, welcome to Moosinee, Canada, population about 1300. Here, everyone does know everyone, which means if you're an investigator and you come into town looking to surveil someone or arrest them or get their DNA, you'll be an outsider, and everyone here will know your business, including quite possibly, the person you're here to find.

Toronto detective Stella Karas joined the investigation and knew she'd be walking on unfamiliar ground.

Oh, yeah, there's no sneaking around up there. Everybody knows who belongs there. And strangers are instantly recognized. Like you will stand out.

So Detective Karras wrote a warrant to take DNA from the final Sutherland brother. In late November 2022, Doyle Smith and a forensic tech arrived in Moosinee with their gear for collecting a blood sample.

It was very eye opening just to see how remote we can get up there.

For me, being a city boy here, that's the definition of isolation up there.

Police came here to Mussuni to find the last and in many ways, the most unlikely brother on their list. A 60 year old it guy named George Sutherland. Father, friend, solid citizen. Back in 1983, Sutherland was 21 and living in Toronto. Randy Cotta is a retired provincial police officer who lived just down the street from Sutherland.

In my policing world, you got to know everybody. You know, you knew every couple, and you knew their dogs names and their kids names.

If you knew everybody, that means you knew George Sutherland.

Yeah. Yeah, I knew George very well. Yeah, I first met him down at the store, down at their only one store in town. And he was a hunting kind of guy, hunting, fishing kind of person. He was easy going. So I struck up a conversation with him.

And suddenly you've made a friend.

Yeah, great friend. Probably one of my best friends at this point.

They had been friends for more than ten years.

Oh, I've met him a few times.

Randy's wife, Betty sue.

They just seemed really compatible with one another. They had the same interests, you know, with being out on the land and the hunting and that kind of thing. They just loved the river. It was just a really good friendship.

Randy says most of their time together was spent outdoors. Wars, snowmobiling, hunting, trapping. George, he says, was a quiet guy.

He wasn't one to really start up the conversation much. He was more, let's get things done. And if I need help, he'd come over and help me. And just friends, right? A guy you could count on.

Sutherland had lived in Moosinee for years. Now divorced, he lived with his grown son and had a steady gym.

He was an it guy.

An it guy? Yeah. Found out that he was working at one of our child and family services.

Even though they were good friends. While Randy was still a cop, he did a check on George's background.

You ran his name through the police computer?

Absolutely.

Because you want to know who you're inviting in.

That's right. You never know who you're talking to. Right. And anyway, he was clean. Didn't even much as a speeding ticket or a parking ticket.

Toronto police learned the same thing.

He's not in your files anywhere either.

Not in our files. Never had any contact with police from what we could see.

Detective Karras went to the provincial police office to set up for the DNA collection. Doyle and Smith, along with two armed local officers, headed to Sutherland's house.

He doesn't know you're coming?

He doesn't know we're coming.

And we get to George's house and, you know, we contain the home front and back. Steve and I knock on the door.

What's that like when he opens the door and you see him for the first time?

It's a bit surreal because we know why we're there. Once we introduce ourselves, he knows why we're there. We have to be careful of what's going to happen.

Lots of people up there have a gun in their house.

Pretty much everybody.

I would say George Sutherland wasn't ready for battle. Instead, he invited the man.

He's an older gentleman, has glasses, looks fairly distinguished, looks harmless. He does. And he was very polite when we were at the door.

His son is also home. We explained to him who we are, why we're there. We have a DNA warrant for him and that we are going to be escorting him to the nearest opp detachment to take his DNA. And he has to come with us in order to facilitate that.

If they were right, they were face to face with the killer they'd chased for 40 years. And if they were right, he knew it.

The best word that I can use to describe his reaction is stoicism. Stoic. That's his reaction.

He doesn't look like a guy who knew this day was coming.

No, but his reaction is also not one that I would have expected. I guess, to be fair, I didn't know exactly what I was expecting at that point. Speaks to his son briefly. Says, I gotta go with the police.

He puts on his coat, and out he goes.

That's right.

I get a text message from Steve. He's like, we got him. We're coming back. So we're like, holy smokes. So we're jumping up and we're like. We're trying to get everything ready last minute, setting up the camera. Anyway, we got it done.

A few minutes later, they were all at the local provincial police station. That's George Sutherland in the orange shirt.

How you doing, my man?

All right.

They pricked his finger and took his blood.

Did you say anything?

Very little. Very, very little. He has an opportunity to call his lawyer.

We'll give you privacy again when you're.

Talking to him, and we're not going.

To talk about anything until you talk to your lawyer. So just, you know, why don't you.

Talk to your lawyer first before we.

Have any discussions with you, okay?

He was just very compliant, very quiet.

And he's just, what? Nodding, listening to you?

He's just nodding. And then, you know, we asked, do you have any questions? Is there anything you want to ask of us? No.

So, based on the last advice that.

We give, no results yet, of course. So also no cause to hold Sutherland, he went home. Detectives headed back to Toronto to wait for the DNA results and to wonder. He was so cooperative. What if it's not him? Maybe they got something wrong.

What's the plan B? If the DNA comes back and it isn't George Sutherland?

I didn't even want to think of it. But, I mean, we would be right back into the investigation, and we probably wouldn't be any closer than we were, because we'd be looking for, again, another ghost.

George Sutherland was back home, a free man. Very soon, he did something that would send detectives rushing back to Mooseni.

And I said, wow, you're telling me the truth, right? And his tears are coming down his face. I just was in a state of shock.

On November 23, 2022, Toronto police flew home from Mussinee, wondering about the fate of their case. George Sutherland had returned to his house the very next day. He reached out to someone he'd known for a decade an ex cop named Randy Cotta. Randy was busy dealing with his own family concerns when George texted him our.

Grandchildren were going out on the train. And it was about shortly after 04:00 in the afternoon. The train leaves at five. So we. I got a text message and said, I need you over here. So I messaged him back and I said, hey, you know, our doctor was here at his stiff shoulder and my doctor was giving me a cortisone shot.

Randy would soon be resetting his priorities because his pal George messaged again. He really wanted Randy to come over. So Randy told his wife he had to go see what George wanted.

So I told Betty I got to get going. And then she was on me about the train. Cause we didn't want the kids to miss the train to go back out.

Cause you only got one car and you're gonna go over to Georgia's.

That's right.

Randy got in the truck and drove over.

So he called me in. So I came in and we pulled a chair over and we were about the same distance as you and I. And he said, I've done some things I'm not very proud of.

You're thinking, where is this going?

Yeah, well, I said to him, I said, well, join the club. You know, we've all done things we're not very proud of. He says, well, he said, I did some break and enters in Toronto. I said, okay. And I said, well, how long ago was this? And he says, 40 years ago. I said, why are you confessing this stuff to me? And he said, well, Toronto police came and took my DNA. And I said, george, Toronto police doesn't come into your DNA for breaking enter 40 years ago. Now it's the cop thing kicking in. And he says, no. He says, I did some really, really bad things. So I just shut up and listened. He says, well, I was in a house and I was stealing jewelry and upon it. And I come out of the kitchen and this woman came out of her room, it was dark, and grabbed a knife and I held her at knife point, took her into her room, I raped her and then I stabbed her to death. And I just was in a state of shock.

And just like that, he confesses, yeah.

But he says, it gets worse. And I said, george, it can't get any worse. He says, yeah, about three, four months later he said, I was in stealing jewelry. And same thing happened. A woman confronted me and, and I held her at knife point and she saw my face. So I stabbed her to death. And I said, wow. I said, you're telling me the truth, right? And his tears are coming down his face. And he says, yeah, I'm very. I'm very ashamed of what I've done. And it's been a long time. He says, I don't know what I should do. And my phone's buzzing like crazy. Cause Betty wants the truck to get the kids to the train. I said, listen, just stay put. Don't talk to nobody. Don't answer the phone, don't answer the door. I'll be right back. I gotta go get the kids in the train. So I came back here and Betty met me at the steps, wanting the keys to the truck.

And Randy came home and he had this look on his face. It was like a look of despair.

And I said, holy. You're not going to believe what just happened.

And so he told me that George had confessed to two murders. And at that point, it didn't really compute with me, I'll be honest with you. It was just kind of like, I looked at him. Oh, really? Like, oh, wow.

You'd never have thought of anything like that of George in a million years.

No, never. Like, he comes from incredibly loving family, like really good people.

You ever see anything in George that made you nervous or uncomfortable?

No.

You ever hear of him making anybody else uncomfortable?

Never. Never.

After they got the kids to the train, it began to sink in.

I said, Randy, I said, my concern is that he's going to hurt himself.

She looked at me and she says, you know, he's going to kill himself.

Randy Cotta did not hesitate. He called his old boss at the provincial police. And soon, Inspector Sean Glassford's phone rang.

So when I got that phone call, we decided we needed to arrest George Sutherland as fast as possible. He's now confessed to killing two women. He has firearms, emotions are high. There are people that he lives with. It needed to be done. And talking with Toronto police, we came up with a plan.

Then when they talked with Randy, the plan changed.

And I said, you don't need helicopters, you don't need tactical teams. I can get them. I'll talk to them.

Yeah, but would it work? Detective Steve Smith was at his daughter's hockey game when he learned the killer of Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore might finally, finally be brought to justice.

I got a call from the provincial police that stated that George Sutherland had admitted to the two murders to an ex provincial police officer in Mussinee. And at that point, we were going to have to arrest him.

Back up in Mussuni that ex provincial police officer was George Sutherland's longtime buddy Randy Cotta, and he had some thoughts about how to arrest his friend George.

And I said, you don't need helicopters. You don't need tactical teams.

You say to him, what, I'll do it.

I said, you know, I can get him. I'll talk to him. Yeah, I'll get him to turn himself in.

Randy headed back to George's house with a team of police officers parked nearby, but just out of sight.

So you knock on the door again.

Mm hmm.

He answers it.

Yeah, upstairs and sat down on the same two chairs. And I said, george, I gotta talk. And I said, there's two families here that have gone through hell, and you've had 40 good years. And I said, it's time to do the right thing, man. It's time to give that family, those families, you know, their time. He says, what do you want to do? I says, you didn't turn yourself in. You're going to do it tonight. He says, tonight? And I said, yeah, right now. And he looked at me for about two, 3 seconds, and he says, okay. So I walked him out to the end of the road, just wave like, that's the cruiser. And he turned their lights on and headlights on, and two police officers get out of the car, and they handcuffed him to the front, and they walked him. I said, george, you're going to be okay, man. He says, thanks. Got in the cruiser, and I haven't seen him since.

He didn't get hurt, and no police officers got hurt. But you felt terrible, didn't you?

It's really weird feeling. It's really the height of a betrayal, you know?

You feel betrayed.

Very. You almost look like a fool. You feel like a fool. Like, how in the world did you not see this? You know, you a cop.

You got a murderer right under your nose.

Right under my nose in my house. It's a tough one. Do what you gotta do.

You say, you do what you gotta do, like, it's nothing, but.

It's not nothing, but there's a line. There is nothing to do but to just do what's right. And I feel for those families, one.

Of the highlights of my career, being able to tell the families that after 40 years, we knew who killed their loved ones.

Aaron's brother Sean was watching a football game when Detective Smith called.

And Steve sort of said, do you have a minute to talk? I said, yeah, sure, absolutely. And all he said was, we got him. You know, I'm standing in the middle of Yonge street, which is one of the busiest streets here in Toronto. And I just broke down in tears, like, screaming tears, alternating back and forth. And just like 40 years of waiting.

Susan Tice's son bent, got a similar call.

I just went into question mode. How? Why? Who?

What are you feeling? Relief? Happiness. Feels like the news of the arrest kind of changed something in you.

It did.

It.

It had been a really long time. You can't complete the story and the tragic sadness of her death without bringing this individual to justice.

Joseph George Sutherland, 61 years of age, of mussinee, has been charged under the 1983 criminal code with two, two counts of first degree murder for the deaths of Aaron Gilmore and Susan Tice.

George Sutherland had already confessed. The DNA test confirmed it.

He's basically the only person in the world that could have left that DNA at the scene.

It was justice. It was also justice delayed.

There is another way of looking at.

This, which is the.

The winner in this is George Sutherland. Because he got away with murder for 40 years. He lived his life. He got married. He had a son. He did what he wanted for 40 years.

Right? He lived a life free.

He beat the system.

He beat the system for quite some time. He did. And, you know, these poor women, they didn't get to live their lives.

On the other hand, the rest of.

His life's gonna be awful. So there is that.

There is that.

George Sutherland pleaded guilty to two counts of second degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 21 years, when he'll be 82. He declined our request for an interview, and he wouldn't talk to police either.

How he came across Susan Tice and Aaron Gilmore, we're maybe never going to know.

Right now. It's still a mystery to us.

Other victims. Right now, you don't know of any. But who knows?

We're still looking, and we'll continue to look. We'll never, never completely close this case. If there is anybody else, we will find it.

After four decades without her, Ben Tice remembers a canoe trip he took with his mom.

She buy all the boys wine in a box, and we would be paddling, and my mom would sit in the middle. And the classic sort of saying of the trip was, paddle, paddle, sip, sip, click. And she took some amazing photos.

When you go back and read her journals, what do you say?

Hmm?

I mean, you're older now than she was when she wrote them.

Yes. To read it is my way of keeping her life, her legacy, her essence, alive.

Aaron Gilmore's father lived long enough to see his daughter's killer arrested in 2022. Her mom, Anna, died two years before.

You know, there's still anger. I mean, you know, you can't just put all that away and just say, well, it's 40 years ago. It's all good now.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, it's an excellent result, don't get me wrong, but, you know. Exactly.

But doesn't bring her back.

Doesn't bring her back. And it doesn't change what was lost.

Yeah.

This is the photo that I took of Erin the year before she was killed on this beach. She loved to come here with her brothers. I always think of her when I come here. I think of her every single day. She was special.

I think about her kids, playing with my kids. I think about who she would have married. I think about what she would have been doing. I think about celebrations, anniversaries. But then I also think about, you know, she was, you know, my big sister who would bring a level of joy to everything. And I, I missed that.

Sean still talks to her and what do you say?

We got him. You know what I mean? It's definitely been happier conversations lately, so. Yeah. That's all for this edition of Dateline. And check out our talking Dateline podcast. Josh Mankiewicz and Andrea Canning will go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, available Wednesday in the Dateline feed. Wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you again Sunday at ten, nine central. I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.