At about 1:00 in the morning on May 15th, 1971, a police officer was checking backyards with a flashlight in Windsor, Ontario [music] behind a house at 1690 Hickory Avenue near a garage and not far from the gate to a back alley.
The light found a 6-year-old girl.
Investigators collected what lay in the dirt around her.
One item did not belong to a six-year-old.
It was an adult’s front tooth, a man’s incizer, apparently snapped off at the gum line.
Police kept that tooth a secret.
Not for a week, not for a year.
For almost 44 years, the public did not know it existed.
It was a detail meant to help catch her killer.
For decades, it caught no one.
The girl’s name was Luba Topek.
A little before 9:00 the evening before, she had walked away from outside her own home on Drewiard Road, holding the hand of a man she did not know, while her 8-year-old brother watched her go.
Over the years, more than 500 people would be looked at as persons of interest.
The case would be reopened six times and passed through the hands of eight police chiefs.
The man who took her was never on the list.
In the spring of 1971, he lived in the 1800 block of the very same road, less than 2 km away.
It would take 48 years, 6 months, and 25 days to learn who he was.
It would take 51 years, 8 months, and 25 days before the police would say his name out loud.
This is the story of Lubika Topek, the neighbor nobody looked at and a name a city had to fight to hear.
And it begins with a family that crossed an ocean to live on that road.
Welcome to Cold Case Redemption, where we tell these stories carefully and all the way through.
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Now to understand where Lubika lived, you have to understand what Dular Road was built for.
Windsor sits directly across the river from Detroit.
And in 1904, a local businessman named Gordon McGregor, president of the Walkerville Wagon Works, went into partnership with Henry Ford.
He began assembling automobiles inside a converted wagon factory.
That was the [music] beginning of the Ford Motor Company of Canada and the farmland around it became a [music] town.
They called it Ford City.
It was a company town in the literal sense.
Ford’s big plant sat at the corner of Riverside Drive [music] and Dreward Road.
And at one point, it employed 14,000 people.
Dreward Road was the [music] town’s main street, named for Francois Drewar, an early settler whose private path across his farm had become the road itself.
In 1929, the town became part of a new city of East Windsor.
And in 1935, it was absorbed [music] into Windsor itself.
In 1945, Ford’s Windsor workers struck for 99 days.
Ford City was also where newcomers landed.
The Ford jobs had drawn families from across Europe for decades, and the neighborhoods churches showed it.
Russian, Romanian, and Serbian congregations raised buildings with the onion-shaped domes of Eastern Europe.
The Serbian church of St.
Dmitri went up in 1945.
By the end of the 1920s, some 16,000 people lived in Ford City, and it had six schools of its own.
Then the company left.
In [music] 1953, Ford left Windsor for Oakville near Toronto, and by 1960, the big Riverside Drive plant had closed, leaving thousands of people out of work.
Only the engine and casting [music] plants remained.
The engine plant opened in 1923 [music] kept building engines and one of them, the Ford Windsor V8 is named after the city.
But a town built around one employer had watched most of that employer walk away.
This was the Ford city the Topic family arrived in about 5 years before 1971.
They had come from Yugoslavia.
By the spring of 1971, they lived [music] at 1290 DUR Road on the main street itself, across from a restaurant.
[music] Next door, a 17-year-old named Jer Smith lived with her father.
[music] She knew the topics.
Her mother was Paula.
According to an interview Paula gave the Windsor Star decades later, her husband Luca was working afternoons at the time.
Their son Michael was 8.
[music] Their daughter Lubika was six and in kindergarten.
A class photograph from [music] that school year, 1970 into 1971, still survives.
That is most of what the public record holds about her.
She was a child and children leave few documents.
But the record does preserve her last evening in close [music] detail because her mother remembered it in her own words like it was yesterday.
Friday, May 14th, 1971.
[music] Paula remembered about 10 children playing together in a parking lot near the house around dusk.
Luba and Michael among them.
Her husband was at work.
She was inside.
There was nothing unusual about any of it.
[music] In 1971, children in neighborhoods like Ford City played outside at dusk while their parents were a wall away.
And almost nobody thought twice about it.
There were no child abduction alerts, no cell phones, no security cameras on the storefronts.
If a child went missing, the system was a parent walking the length of the road and whoever they could flag down.
At around 8:00, Lubisa came running into the house out of breath from [music] playing and asked her mother if she could have a candy.
Paula said yes.
Then she told her daughter one more thing.
I said, “Don’t stay out too long.”
Luba took the candy and ran back outside [music] to the parking lot and the other kids.
Years later, Paula would say that was the last time she ever saw her.
If Paula’s last words to her daughter hit you the way they hit us, tap the like button.
It helps this story reach more people.
And Lubisha deserves to be heard.
Before we get to what happened next, know where it comes from.
The Windsor Police Services own account, the memory of an 8-year-old boy and his mother’s.
Somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00, a man who had been hanging around the restaurant across the street crossed over to the children.
According to police, he offered Lubika a small amount of money to walk down the street with him.
According to what Michael later told his mother, the offer was $8 to help with a job.
Then he turned to Michael.
He gave the boy a dime and sent him off to ride his bike in the other direction.
A dime.
That was the price of sending her brother the other way.
The last time Michael saw his sister, she was walking south on Dreward Road, holding the man’s hand.
By the police account, Michael went inside and told his mother.
By Paula’s own account, she called her children in a little later, and only Michael came.
Either way, the question was the same, and she asked him where his sister was.
Paula went out with a friend and walked the street looking for her all the way to Seol Street.
There was no sign of Lubika and no sign of the man.
When Paula saw a police car, she stopped it.
She told the officer that somebody had taken her little girl.
Within minutes, officers and neighbors were spreading through the streets, [music] yards, and back alleys of Ford City.
It became one of the largest manhunts in Windsor’s [music] history.
Jere Smith, the 17-year-old from next door, went out looking with her father.
What none of them could know was that the search was probably too late from the start.
Police would later conclude that Luba most likely died within about an hour of being led away.
At approximately 1:00 on the morning of Saturday, May 15th, about 4 hours after she disappeared, an officer checking backyards with a flashlight found her behind the house at 1690 Hickory Avenue near a garage, a short distance from the gate to a rear alleyway.
That alley no longer exists.
The spot was roughly a kilometer from her front door.
Around the time she was found, the police chief came to the Topic home.
He told Paula they had found her daughter.
She asked if she could see her.
He told her he was sorry.
Lubika was dead.
Even for experienced officers, this was something new.
Chapman, the detective who would one day close the file, later said police in Windsor had never before dealt with a crime of this kind.
Here is what investigators had.
They had the location, the timing, and an eyewitness.
Michael described a slender man with a thin face and blonde hair, perhaps close to 6 ft tall.
On May 25th, 1971, police released a sketch based on that description.
It turned up nothing.
They also had physical evidence gathered at a time when nobody yet knew how to read most of it.
Her small brown shoes scuffed soil samples and from the dirt where she was found, a tooth that did not belong to her.
It was an adult male’s front incizer which appeared to have been snapped off at the gum line.
If that tooth belonged to the man who took her, then somewhere in Windsor, a grown man had suddenly lost a front tooth.
And a missing front tooth is hard to hide from the people who see you everyday.
So, why didn’t the tooth solve the case?
Because investigators decided not to tell anyone it existed.
If you’re already asking how a man walks a child down a main street and simply disappears, subscribe to the channel because the answer was never far away.
It was just up the road.
Back in 1971, the likely reason for keeping the tooth quiet was not carelessness.
It was technique.
Investigators call it hold back evidence, a detail known only to the police and the person responsible.
In a case drawing hundreds of tips, a holdback detail works as a filter.
A tipster who knows it is worth a second look.
One who doesn’t may just be guessing.
Decades later, Constable Scott Chapman, who had inherited the file, explained that in some cases, there is information that’s held back on purpose.
The problem with a filter is that it only works if the right name eventually [music] passes through it, and the right name never did.
The public response had been enormous from the [music] start.
Police would later write that the nature of the crime and the age of the victim drew tips from across Canada and from [music] the United States.
They reopened the case six times.
They worked it under eight different police [music] chiefs.
They looked at more than 500 persons of interest [music] and every lead ended the same way.
Nothing.
Windsor police kept a $10,000 reward on the case, renewed every two years alongside rewards in three other historical homicides.
Then the science began to catch up with the evidence police had kept.
According to Chapman, investigators had DNA in the case from the 1990s on and had it analyzed periodically as methods improved.
In 2015, some of the material was tested for the first time.
Seven different sources of DNA turned out to come from the same person.
Seven from one man.
Police now had what they believed was the suspect’s genetic profile.
They compared it with Canada’s national DNA datab bank against convicted offenders and against unidentified profiles from other crime scenes.
No match.
Whoever he was, his DNA had never been entered into the system.
[music] So, in April of 2015, almost 44 years after the murder, Windsor police did what their predecessors had chosen not to do.
They told the public about the tooth.
They described an adult male’s front [music] insizer, apparently snapped off at the gum line, and they asked a very specific [music] question.
Did anyone remember a man who suddenly lost a [music] front tooth around the time of the murder or shortly after?
Chapman [music] asked people to reach back as far as their memories would go.
He would not [music] say whether police believed the man lost it in a struggle.
Calls came in.
Investigators followed them.
Within about a year, more than 20 people had been checked and cleared.
[music] None of them was the man.
In 2016, police tried something newer still.
Windsor police sent the DNA to Parabon Nanolabs, a Virginia company that does DNA phenotyping, predicting a person’s appearance from their genetic code.
For roughly $4 [music] to $5,000, Parabon produced a prediction.
The man’s ancestry was almost entirely European, mainly northwest European.
He was likely fair skinn skinned with brown or hazel eyes, brown or black hair, and few or no freckles.
Parabon put its confidence in the eye color prediction at 97%.
[music] It generated two faces, one at about 25 years old and one at about [music] 70.
Chapman noted that the new composite closely resembled the 1971 sketch based on Michael’s description.
A similar face shape with different colored hair.
He also warned that a DNA composite is [music] an estimate, not likely to be an exact replica.
So by 2016, investigators had a face, a genetic profile, and a tooth.
45 years on, what they still did not have was a name.
Now pay attention to this next part because it explains everything that came after.
The man who took Lubika topic was never hiding.
He was never on the run.
In May of 1971, he lived on Drar Road.
His name was Frank Arthur Hall.
He was 22 years old and he lived in the 1800 block of Dreward Road, less than 2 km from the Topic family’s home.
According to Chapman, he was a stranger to the family.
[music] A word on how we can say that.
Frank Hall was never arrested, never charged, and never tried for Lupa’s [music] murder.
He is named here because the Windsor Police Service officially identified him as the man responsible [music] based on DNA.
Evidence will come to shortly.
He was not unknown to police either.
Hall was known to officers in Windsor and in other [music] places, mostly for property crimes like theft.
Chapman said he had some arrests, but nothing that pointed toward a crime like this one.
None of it ever put him on the list.
More than 500 persons of interest.
Frank Hall was never one of them.
And here is a detail that seems small until you sit with it.
Decades later, police records were unclear about whether Hall’s home had even been canvased during the original investigation.
The file simply doesn’t say two households, one road.
The topics had crossed an ocean to build a life on Dreward Road, and their daughter’s entire world was a few blocks of it.
Frank Hall lived on those same blocks.
But where the Topic family stayed in Windsor and lived with what happened, Hall left.
Through the 1970s, he spent time both in Windsor and in the western provinces, and eventually he settled in the West for good in Edmonton.
He lived there until his death.
In February of 2019, Frank Arthur Hall died in Edmonton of natural causes.
He was 70 years old.
The Parabon composite had imagined him at 70.
Police later released two photographs of him.
In the younger one, he has dark hair and a tattoo on his arm.
In the older one, his hair is white and he is posing in a kitchen.
The DNA had predicted brown or black hair.
An 8-year-old boy at dusk had remembered blonde.
Think about that for a second.
He lived for nearly 48 more years after that night.
[music] He missed being identified by roughly 10 months.
When his name finally became public, Jere Smith, the teenager from next door who searched that night with her father, told CBC News, “I’m so surprised to find out that this guy just lived in the 1800 block.”
She said she had never noticed him, neither, as far as the record shows, had anyone else.
That is how completely he blended in.
While Frank Hall was growing old in Alberta, Paula Topic was growing old in Windsor.
In 2015, she spoke publicly about the case for the first time in 44 years.
She was 79.
She spent most of her days alone in a [music] modest, neatly kept house on Howard Avenue.
Lubita’s picture sat in the dining room, and Paula told the Windsor Star that every time she passed it, she told her daughter she missed her.
She said that when she went to sleep, she heard Lubik’s voice calling her.
And when she opened her eyes, her daughter wasn’t there.
She told the reporter that anyone who could do this to a child would carry it in his heart for good, and she hoped the man who did it had been as tormented as she was.
She had watched the case reopen six times.
She believed somebody out there knew.
And she said the only thing that mattered now was learning who had done it before she died.
If they found him, she said, she could die the next day and be happy.
44 years, six reopenings, one photograph in the dining room.
The case had a second keeper.
Scott Chapman took over the topic file in the fall of 2014 as a constable in the Windsor police major crimes branch.
He was the one who released the tooth.
He was the one who sent the DNA to Virginia.
And when he unveiled the Parabon faces in 2016, he told the Windsor Star he did not see it as a desperation step.
Every cold case in the city deserved attention, he said, whenever new technology came along.
In 2015, he had said he wanted to take every possible step to resolve it for the family, for the city, and for everyone who had ever worked on it.
He would work the file for roughly 5 years, rising through the ranks as he did.
To the officers of Windsor, it had become the one case that everyone had handled with caution [music] and everyone wanted to close.
And then in April of 2018, something happened in California that changed what was possible in cases exactly like this one.
If Paula’s 44 years of waiting are sitting heavy with you right now, hit the like button.
It genuinely helps.
And what comes next is [music] the part where the waiting finally starts to end.
Now, here is what happened in California and why it mattered in Windsor.
For decades, police DNA databases worked like a lock that opens for only one key.
You could run a crime scene profile against a national bank, but it would only find the offender if his own DNA was already in it.
If it had never been collected, the system could not see him.
That was the wall Windsor had hit in 2015.
Investigative genetic genealogy goes around that wall.
Ordinary people take consumer DNA tests to find relatives, and many upload their results to genealogy databases.
Everyone shares stretches of DNA with their cousins, even distant ones, and the amount they share roughly shows how closely they’re related.
So if investigators upload a crime scene profile, they may not find the killer, but they can find his relatives.
From those relatives, genealogologists build a family tree back through the generations to shared ancestors, then forward again, branch by branch, until it narrows to a handful of people.
The 2016 composite had predicted what the man looked like.
Genealogy could predict who his relatives [music] were.
In April of 2018, that method identified the Golden State Killer in California, and police across North America took notice.
[music] At the time, GED Match, the site at the center of it, held about 929,000 profiles, but the rules were shifting under everyone’s feet.
The two databases police [music] could use were GED Match and Family Tree DNA.
Family Tree DNA held more than a million profiles, most of them open to law enforcement unless a user opted out.
On May 19th, 2019, GED Match went the other way.
It switched every kit on the site [music] to opted out of police matching.
By November of that year, about 185,000 users had chosen to opt back [music] in.
In that shifting landscape during 2019, a new lead finally put a name on investigators radar.
Windsor police worked with Parabon Nano Labs, the Virginia company behind the composite faces [music] and its chief genetic genealogologist CC Moore.
They uploaded the unknown profile to GE [music] Match and Family Tree DNA and found people who shared some of his DNA.
According to Moore, the key match was a distant cousin.
Investigators built the trees back and then forward, following wherever the shared DNA led.
Then they got authorization to collect samples from a small group of people to rule them out one by one.
Chapman later said it was one of the very first Canadian cases to identify an offender this [music] way.
It was harder here than in the United States.
Moore has explained that Canadian privacy laws are stricter [music] and far fewer Canadians have their DNA in the public databases.
Moore stresses that genealogy produces only a lead, a hypothesis.
Police still have to confirm it with their own testing.
And here the case took one last strange turn.
The man the trees pointed to could not be asked for a sample.
Frank Hall had died in February, but police were able to use a previously collected tissue sample of his and compare it with the evidence from 1971.
On Monday, December 9th, 2019, the results came back.
Hall’s DNA match separate sources of DNA from the crime scene.
[music] That same Monday, before the results arrived, Windsor police had doubled the reward in the case to $20,000.
Chapman said later, “The reward played no part.”
Chapman delivered the news to the Topic family himself.
He later described it as perhaps the most meaningful moment of his career.
4 days later on Friday, December 13th, Chief [music] Pam Mizuno and Chapman faced reporters.
Chapman struggled to keep his emotions in check.
For 48 and 1/2 years, he said they hadn’t known who did this, and now they did.
Mizuno said the day belonged to the victim, a little girl who’d had her whole life ahead of her.
Then she read aloud a letter from the Topic family.
One line in it held the whole story.
We never gave up hope and you never gave up.
But there was no arrest.
There would be no charge and no courtroom.
[music] And when reporters Amma asked the obvious question, who was he?
The police would not say.
At first, [music] police wouldn’t even say when he had died, only that it had been recent.
[music] The documents they released that day explained the decision in one line.
The man was not being named, they wrote, because he will never have his day in court to answer to the charges.
Before going any further, that position deserves a fair hearing because it was not frivolous.
Ordinarily, a suspect’s name becomes public when he is charged, and the charge is then tested in court.
Frank Hall would never be charged.
There would be no defense lawyer, no judge weighing the DNA, and no jury.
In January of 2020, Windsor police put it plainly.
He had never been arrested, charged, or convicted of this crime, and he was dead.
Under Ontario’s municipal privacy law, they argued the dead keep privacy rights for 30 years after death.
[music] naming him would be an unjustified invasion of that privacy and since he was dead he posed no threat to public safety.
There was another consideration.
Chapman later explained that in 2019 there was so little precedent for a case solved this way that it wasn’t clear police could legally name the man at all.
And there was a family in Edmonton, relatives who had done nothing wrong, whose name was about to be tied to one of the most horrific crimes in Windsor’s history.
A name once released cannot be taken back.
Those are real points, but there was a strong argument on the other side and people kept making it.
Michael Artfield, [music] a criminology professor at Western University in London, Ontario, argued that the public had a genuine interest in knowing.
[snorts] He pointed out that people who commit crimes like this one are in most cases involved in other crimes, too, though not necessarily other killings.
A name could help link him to victims and cases nobody had connected yet.
He also questioned why it had taken such lengths for the information to come out and the press did not let it go.
CBC News filed a Freedom of Information request for the name in 2020.
It was denied.
CBC filed again in December of 2022.
Denied again [music] with one refusal headed to appeal.
The Windsor Star filed its own request too.
Then the leadership changed.
Chief Mazuno left in the spring of 2022 and Jason Belair became acting chief.
At the end of November, he was named permanent chief effective December 1st, 2022.
His new leadership team re-examined the decision about Frank Hall and overturned it.
Chapman acknowledged that the landscape had shifted since 2019 as genetic genealogy became mainstream.
Before the name went public, Chapman, by then a staff sergeant, flew to Edmonton to tell Hall’s relatives in person.
He said they were shocked but showed strength.
On the evening of Wednesday, February 8th, 2023, Windsor police released the name Frank Arthur Hall.
Chief Belair said the service was committed to operating with full transparency.
Police spokesperson Constable Bianca Jackson credited the Windsor Stars request as one factor along with the new leadership and described the reversal as the result of an internal discussion.
Let that timeline sit for a [music] moment.
The murder May 14th, 1971.
The identification December 9th, 2019.
The name February 8th 2023.
51 years, 8 months, and 25 [music] days.
Valerie Potter, who lived in the neighborhood when Lubisa was killed, [music] still remembered the search.
By 2023, she lived in AASO, Michigan.
She told CBC she had never thought it fair to keep the name hidden, and she was glad the family had some resolution.
Then she said, “I thought this day was never going to come.”
Now, the honest part.
Everything above rests on a determination by the Windsor Police Service, not a court verdict.
That distinction matters.
The DNA was never challenged by a defense expert or weighed by a jury.
The public has never been told exactly what the seven sources of DNA were.
And the tooth.
The detail at the center of this case for 44 years has never been publicly confirmed as Frank Halls.
What survives that caveat is substantial.
Police said Hall’s DNA matched separate sources from [music] the scene and that given the nature of that DNA and where it was found, they [music] were certain he was responsible.
A police determination is not a conviction.
It is also not a guess.
The Windsor Police Major Crimes Unit received the Ontario Homicide Investigators Association’s 2022 Linda Shaw Memorial Award for the case.
The award honors a Western University student murdered in April of 1990 whose killing was solved 15 years later, also through DNA.
Chapman kept returning to the people this touched.
Whatever Frank Hall did, he said, was no reflection on the relatives he left behind, who had been victimized by the news as well.
Investigators did not believe Hall was responsible for other crimes in the Windsor area, but other police agencies had known about him since 2019 and could look at him for crimes in their own jurisdictions.
And Chapman hoped that releasing the name might bring new tips in other investigations, but the deepest aftermath [music] of this case was never in a police file.
In 2019, Chapman said he had spoken to people who remembered what it did to them as children.
After Lubisa was killed, they weren’t allowed out of the house.
Their parents wondered whether the man was still out there.
For 48 and 1/2 years, nobody could tell them.
For almost 44 years, police [music] kept a tooth secret.
It was supposed to be the thing that caught him.
Somewhere out there, the thinking went, was a stranger missing a front tooth, and sooner or later, someone would remember him.
But the man they were looking for was not a stranger to that street at all.
He lived up the road.
And the tooth, the piece of evidence they guarded for decades, never gave them his name.
A distant cousin’s family tree did.
The tooth was a question about a stranger.
The answer was a neighbor.
So set the tooth aside.
Set aside the DNA, the databases, the privacy law, and the name.
Go back to the parking lot on Drewiard Road around dusk on a Friday in May.
Lubesa Topic was 6 years old.
Her family had crossed an ocean to make a life in Ford City.
She was in kindergarten.
She never made it to first grade.
Her big brother, Michael, was 8.
She wore small brown shoes scuffed.
On the last evening of her life, she ran inside out of breath and asked her mother for a candy.
Her mother said yes and told her not to stay out too long.
She took the candy and ran back out to the other kids.
44 years later, Paula still spoke to her photograph every time she walked past it, telling her daughter she missed her.
Her name is Lubika Topic, and she deserves to be remembered for who she was, not just how her story ended.
If Lubita’s story stays with you tonight, subscribe and share this video with someone who will remember her name.
This is Cold Case Redemption.
Thank you for staying with her all the way to the end.
