Content warning: This story contains details about the murder and sexual assault of a young child.
Until last Thursday, the identity of nine-year-old Christine Jessop’s rapist and murderer was unknown. For thirty-six years, her family was unable to find answers, after the exoneration of Guy Paul Morin removed the main suspect. The police and prosecution’s singular focus on Morin had devastating consequences not only for him and his family, but for the Jessops as well. Without much evidence, it seemed the police would be unable to find the true killer. This was perhaps best expressed by Commissioner Kaufman in the Report of the Kaufman Commission on Proceedings Involving Guy Paul Morin: “The criminal proceedings against Guy Paul Morin represent a tragedy not only for Mr. Morin and his family, but also for the community at large: the system failed him – a system for which we, the community, must bear responsibility. … The real killer has never been found. The trail grows colder with each passing year. For Christine Jessop’s family there is no closure.”
Fortunately, on October 15th, 2020, Toronto Police announced that they had, through a DNA sample and genetic genealogy, identified a potential suspect. Calvin Hoover, a friend of the Jessops, had flown completely under the radar of the police, but has now been publicly named as Christine’s murderer. Commissioner Kaufman’s grim prediction of lack of closure has, fortunately, been proven false. However, considering Hoover’s suicide in 2015, it’s unlikely that Jessop and her family will receive “justice”, in the sense of an offender being convicted and then sentenced. Due to the failure of the police and prosecution to consider other suspects, the real killer went unpunished.
So how did we get to this point?
Christine Jessop disappeared in October 1984, after leaving home to meet up with a friend in a nearby park. Her body was found a few months later, in December. Just three months after that, Guy Paul Morin was charged and arrested for her murder, after Janet Jessop, Christine’s mother, commented about the “weird-type guy” who lived next door. Morin was acquitted at his first trial, but the Crown appealed. At his second trial, however, he was unfortunately convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Morin would spend eighteen months in prison before DNA evidence exonerated him.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from this case is that, to our detriment, the justice system focuses more on convictions than getting the truth. The police ignored strong evidence that indicated that Morin would have no time to murder Christine and instead relied on weak evidence of jailhouse informants and hair sample comparisons that confirmed their beliefs about the case. Despite Hoover being close to the family and one of the only people who knew Christine would be alone after school, the police failed to investigate him out of a belief that they had found the killer already.
Morin was one of the fortunate who has been exonerated due to DNA evidence and the eventual identification of a killer. Others might not be so lucky, especially those who don’t have access to the resources and knowledge needed to fight their wrongful convictions. Most importantly, the burden should not be on them to fight their convictions after the fact, but on the state, the party with more power, to act responsibly.
As Professor Bhavendeep Sodhi, Director of the Innocence Project at Osgoode, said, “Wrongful convictions are an unfortunate reality of the Canadian criminal justice system. As the Christine Jessop case has demonstrated, when our courts get it wrong, no one wins. The individual who is wrongly convicted continues to bear the mark of Cain and the victim’s family must live knowing that their loved one’s killer could still be out there. It is the hope of organizations like the Project, that through acknowledgement and exposure of past wrongful convictions, we can strive to get it right in the future.”
The fallout of a wrongful conviction is immense. Despite his exoneration, Morin lived with the suspicion that he murdered a young girl for thirty-six years. Christine Jessop’s family lived with the knowledge that they didn’t have answers as to who killed their daughter for thirty-six years. Hoover’s family now has to live with the knowledge that he likely killed a young girl. Several families suffered as a result of blind pursuit of a conviction, not of justice.
