How ex-genealogy hobbyists are helping to catch killers

Police unit using new techniques to crack cold cases

- WENDY GILLIS

From left, Det.-Const. James Atkinson, Lauren Robilliard and Susan Page are three genetic genealogists who have been hired by the Toronto Police Service to help with investigations into homicides, sexual assaults and unidentified human remains.

On a sunny day in 2021, Susan Page placed three stones on the grave of a woman she’d never met.

The 70-year-old grandmother had for 30 years made a hobby of solving family mysteries — sifting through century-old marriage licences and birth certificates, sorting tangles of distant relatives into neat family trees in the late-night glow of her computer.

Now, the hobby had become a job. And for the better part of a year, Page and a team of unlikely investigators inside Toronto police had obsessed over finding the man who killed Susan Tice, the 45-year-old victim of one of the city’s most notorious unsolved murders.

On that August day at Tice’s graveside in Leith, Ont., Page placed one stone for each genealogist working the case.

“I just wanted to tell her that we’re going to get him,” she said.

A new breed of detective, Page is employed by Toronto police as a genetic genealogist, doing the unconventional probes that are now regularly cracking cold cases.

She is one of five assigned to the cold case unit, all former hobbyists helping solve historical homicides, sexual assaults and cases of unidentified human remains across Ontario.

Most have no policing experience. Yet their behind-the-scenes success is challenging stereotypes, taking crime-solving beyond the realm of suit-wearing, hardened homicide cops to include researchers — four women and a man, aged 25 to 70 — with specialized skills that were not long ago dismissed as pseudo-science.