In a house in Galf, Ontario, a woman goes to bed at night with a baseball bat within reach of her hand.
She has done it for most of her adult life.
She runs a commercial painting business.
She’s in her 50s now, and the bat is there because of something that happened in another city 39 years ago in a house she walked out of and never [music] went back to.
Her name is Christian Ty.
In August of 1983, when she was 16 years old and away at a summer camp in Alberta, her mother was murdered inside her own home in Toronto.
For 39 years, nobody could tell her who did it.
4 months later, in a different neighborhood on the other side of the same city, an 11-year-old boy spent the night at his big sister’s apartment.
They watched movies.
One of them was Psycho.
And at some point that night, the boy decided his sister ought to have something in the apartment to protect herself with.
His name was [music] Kalin Macauen.
His sister was Aaron Gilmore.
She was killed the following evening.
Two households that did not know each other existed, 4 km apart.
The same instinct [music] arriving in both of them for reasons neither could have explained.
Susan Ty and Aaron Gilmore never met.
They had no friends in common, no workplace in common, no connection of [music] any kind except a city and a year.
The same man killed both of them.
And that man was never a suspect.
He was never interviewed.
His name did not appear anywhere in either file, not once across four decades of investigation.
This is not the story of a man who outwitted the police.
It is the story of a man who was invisible to the way policing worked in 1983 and of the 39 years it took to build something that could finally see him.
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Now, before either of these women was a case file, [music] they were people.
And one of them had just started her life over for the second time.
Toronto in 1983 was a city where a murder investigation was still fundamentally a conversation.
Detectives worked outward from the victim.
They talked to husbands, boyfriends, neighbors, co-workers, and anyone who had recently had a legitimate reason to be inside the house.
There was no DNA testing available to Canadian police.
There was no national datab bank of offenders.
There were no cameras on residential streets.
Biological evidence could be collected and stored, and it was.
But in 1983, the best it could do was narrow a suspect to a blood type shared by millions of people.
It could not produce a name.
It could only rule someone out.
Susan Ty was 45 years old.
She had trained and worked as a nurse, then gone back to school and earned a master’s degree in social work.
And she was building a family counseling practice.
She had four children.
Her career had always come second to her husband Fred’s.
And the family had moved for his work to Montreal, to St.
John, to Toronto, and then to Calgary, where she had to start her practice over from nothing.
She was by every account from inside the family, the center of it.
She painted.
She played guitar.
She built a separate relationship with each of her children out of whatever that particular child needed.
She took one son canoeing in the Yukon.
She took another skiing.
She drove the entire way from Toronto to Calgary with a third.
Her only daughter, Christian, was shy enough that the family nickname was mouse.
And Susan spent years quietly pushing her outward, signing her up for camps, encouraging her to invite the neighborhood kids over, taking her out to lunch just to talk.
She taught Christian to drive a manual transmission, and stayed calm every time the car stalled in the middle of an intersection.
In 1983, Susan and Fred separated.
She came back to Toronto and moved into a house on Grey Street in Bickford Park alone at 45, starting again.
That August, with Christian away at camp, she wrote her daughter a letter about setting the new place up and about the small relief of putting her clothes in the freezer [music] to survive the heat.
Christian read it as the letter of a woman who was optimistic, who had decided the next part was going to be better.
A few days later, Susan did not show up for a dinner she was expected at.
Aaron Gilmore was 22.
She lived in a small apartment on Hazelton Avenue in Yorkville, directly above the clothing shop where she worked in a neighborhood that was shedding the last of its bohemian reputation and turning into galleries and restaurants.
She wanted to design clothes.
She had asked her father whether she could spend a year in Fiji, where the family often traveled teaching.
He told her to finish her education first.
Her father was David Gilmore, who had co-founded the mining company Bareric Gold with his business partner Peter Monk.
Her mother was Anna Macauan Johnson, trained in ballet, who opened a dance school in 1983 and ran it for decades.
Aaron had two younger half-bros, Sha and Kalin.
And when their mother’s second marriage ended, [music] Anna took all three children to live in Greece for a few years.
She was the kind of person other people organized themselves around.
That winter, she threw a surprise party at her apartment and made the theme pink, and her friends turned up in every shade of it they owned.
She sketched.
She took photographs with a Nikon.
When Shawn was struggling to fit in during his first year at Upper Canada College, she brought him to her apartment and talked him into staying.
She bought Kalin a green Swiss Army knife that he kept.
There had been one strange episode the year before.
The family had received threatening phone calls at Anna’s house.
Shawn had gone out on a bike ride.
The phone rang.
Aaron answered and a man told her he had hit her brother with his car.
It was not true.
Nothing came of it.
It went nowhere and it connected to nothing.
And it is worth knowing only because it is the single moment in either woman’s life when the outside world reached in and touched them before December.
Two women 4 km apart in the same year in the same city.
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Now to the four months that connected them.
Susan Ty was expected for dinner at her sister and brother-in-law’s home in Bmpton.
She never arrived.
Her brother-in-law grew concerned, went to the house on Grace Street, and found mail piling up.
He went inside.
He called her name.
There was no answer.
He found her in an upstairs bedroom.
The telephone rang while he was standing there.
It was Christian calling from camp in Alberta on an urge she could not explain.
A man answered and hung up before she could speak.
She would learn later that it was her uncle and that he had hung up because of what he had just turned around and seen.
The date was August 17th, 1983.
Susan Ty had been living in Toronto for roughly a month.
She had been sexually assaulted.
She died of stab wounds, 13 of them, and she had defensive injuries to her hands and head, which is the clinical way of recording that she fought.
Six detectives were assigned.
Her husband was looked at immediately, which is standard, and he was ruled out, and then the lead simply stopped arriving.
4 months later on December 20th, Aaron Gilmore finished her shift in the shop below her apartment at around 9:00 in the evening.
Her friend Anthony Monk, the son of her father’s business partner, was picking her up.
He stopped at a bank machine first to withdraw cash and got to Hazelton Avenue roughly 20 minutes later.
The door leading up to her apartment was slightly open.
He went up.
He called her name.
He could not find her.
And then he noticed a shape under the duvet on her bed.
She had been sexually assaulted.
Her hands and mouth had been bound.
She died of stab wounds to the chest.
The night before on December 19th, Shawn and Kalin Macauan had slept over at that apartment.
They had stayed up watching movies, including Psycho.
Kalin was 11.
Somewhere in that evening, he formed the idea that his sister should have a weapon in the place.
In the morning, Shawn went Christmas shopping and Aaron drove Kalin home to their mother’s house.
And that was the last time either of them saw her.
What the killer left behind in both homes was biological evidence.
It was collected.
It was preserved.
And for the next 17 years, it was in practical terms worth nothing at all.
Because the technology to turn it into a name did not exist and would not exist for a generation.
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In the weeks after the funeral, Christian Ty led herself into the [music] house on Grey Street and walked through its rooms, trying to work out what had happened, and left only when the light went.
She had come back from Alberta, furious with everyone who kept telling her to let them know if there was anything they could do because she knew there was nothing anyone could do.
Her father did not have a bed for her at his place.
She asked to be sent back to camp and spent one more week of that summer hiking in the Canonoski’s [music] range.
She went away to university at 19 and never moved back.
She and her brothers stopped speaking for years.
As she put it later, some families are pulled closer by something like this.
And hers was not.
Start with the men who were looked at and cleared because they matter.
Anthony Monk, the friend who found her, was investigated.
Bank machine records placed him in another part of the city at the relevant time, and he was eliminated.
Susan’s aranged husband was investigated and eliminated.
Beyond them, detectives interviewed hundreds of people and collected blood samples from a long list of men, and every single one of those men was ruled out.
One of the officers pulled into the Gilmore investigation was a 25-year-old constable named Gary Ellis, who normally walked a beat on Yong Street.
He had to go and buy a suit for the assignment because he had never owned one.
His job was to interview everyone who had attended Aaron’s party.
As the weeks went on, the circle of people being interviewed widened from friends to relatives to acquaintances until Ellis was talking to people who had never met her at all.
After about 6 months, he was sent back to foot patrol.
A year later, he was still walking Hazelton Avenue, looking at the faces of people going past, hoping something would occur to him.
Nothing did.
And here is the failure.
And it is not a failure of effort.
[music] The entire investigative model of 1983 rested on a premise that is true almost all of the time.
Murder is intimate.
The person who killed you is somebody you knew or somebody who had a reason to be near you.
So you work outward from the victim through her relationships and her routines and the trades people who had been in her home.
And eventually [music] you arrive at a name.
The man who killed both of these women was not a boyfriend.
He was not a neighbor who had been inside the house.
He was not a repairman who had fixed a window and remembered the layout.
He had no relationship to either of them of any [music] kind.
He was a stranger with no criminal record.
And a stranger with no criminal record is not [music] a needle in a haystack.
He is not in the haststack.
The method could not find him because the method was not designed to look where he was.
There is a second failure layered on top of it and it is [music] administrative.
For 17 years, these were two separate files investigated as two separate crimes 4 km and 4 months apart.
Nobody linked them because nothing existed that could.
That changed in 2000 when the RCMP established Canada’s National DNA data bank.
Toronto police say that is the year the two cases were connected and the finding was Yin Ambiguous.
The same man had been present at both scenes.
In 2003, Gary Ellis, by then the head of the homicide squad, asked the cold case unit out of simple curiosity what was happening with Aaron Gilmore’s file and was told it was the largest development in either case in two decades, and it produced nothing.
The datab bank could only match a crime scene profile against people who had been convicted of something.
This man had never been convicted of anything.
His profile was checked against the datab bank and there was no match.
It was checked again.
No match.
So the case went where these cases go.
Toronto police made a public appeal and announced a reward in 2008.
The Gilmore family put up $200,000 of their own money in 2013 for a name and nobody ever collected it.
[music] Investigators released a video appeal in 2016.
Anniversaries came around and reporters called and the families answered and nothing moved.
Now, pay attention to this next part because it explains everything [music] that happened afterward.
Joseph George Sutherland was born on December 17th, 1961 in Fort Albany, a flyin CRE community on James [music] Bay in Ontario’s far north.
His family moved to Toronto when he was a teenager.
In August of 1983, he was 21 years old and living alone in a bachelor apartment in the city.
He turned 22 [music] on December 17th, 1983.
Aaron Gilmore was killed 3 days later.
She was 22 as well.
Now, here is the part that kept him free, and it is not what you would guess.
He had no criminal record before those four months.
And he had no criminal record after them either, not one conviction, not one charge across the next 39 years.
At some point in his 20s, he stopped drinking.
He married.
He had a son.
He went back to school and studied information technology.
He started work at the Bank of Montreal in 1995, was laid off, went back to the bank, and was still employed there on the day he was arrested in 2022.
He moved north again, and settled in Musani, a town of about 1,500 people just south of James Bay.
The court would later hear that he thought about turning himself in more than once, particularly during periods of depression, and that each time he decided against it and tried to forget.
Think about the arithmetic of that for a second.
The only tool Canadian police had for turning that crime scene profile into a name was a datab bank of convicted offenders.
To be in that datab bank, you have to be convicted of something.
He never was again.
The single fact that made him look like a decent man to everyone who knew him is the same fact that kept him invisible for four decades.
And there is one more detail that seemed like nothing at the time.
Around 2011, one of his brothers was arrested for offenses that put that brother’s DNA profile into the National DNA datab bank.
The answer to both murders was now sitting inside a Canadian government database one degree of separation away in a file police were legally permitted to search.
Hold on to that because it comes back.
From this point on, you know something the detectives did not.
Shawn Macauen was 13 when his mother shook him awake and told him his sister had been killed and he punched a hole through his bedroom wall.
He grew up, went into the investment industry, had children of his own, and became the person in the family who talked to reporters.
Every time a journalist called about Aaron, Shawn picked up.
He would tell them who she was, what the family still did not know, and how long they had been waiting.
He also, by his own account, watched a great deal of television about crime, the kind where the case gets solved.
And a few years ago, he was watching a true crime program when he heard a phrase he had never encountered before, genetic genealogy.
The episode was about the 2018 arrest of the man known as the Golden State Killer, who had eluded American investigators since the 1970s.
Shawn had built up a list of police contacts over 30 years.
He phoned a Toronto detective he knew and asked whether this thing could be used on his sister’s case.
The answer at the time was that the Toronto Police Service had never tried it.
The man who would try it was Detective Sergeant Steven Smith.
He had joined the force around 25 years earlier, worked the drug squad, spent a stretch catching bank robbers, and transferred into the homicide cold case unit in 2017 because he was drawn to the idea of giving answers to families who had waited [music] decades.
In 2019, he attended a course at the Ontario Police College on unsolved historical homicides, which included a lecture on genetic genealogy delivered in part by investigators from the Golden State Killer case.
It was the first time the technique had been taught in Canada.
Toronto used it first on the 1984 murder of 9-year-old Christine Jessup.
In 2020, they identified the man responsible, a family friend.
He had died in 2015.
There would be no trial, no sentence, and no accounting.
Aaron and Shaun’s mother, Anna, died in 2020 without knowing.
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Now, here is how they actually did it.
A datab bank asks one question.
Is this profile the same person as someone we already have?
Genetic genealogy asks a different one.
Is this profile related to anyone in a database of ordinary members of the public who uploaded their DNA to find cousins and build family trees?
Millions of people have done that voluntarily.
If the crime scene profile matches a stranger as a fourth cousin, you do not have your man, but you have a branch of a family tree.
And from there, it is not biology anymore.
It is genealogy, records, obituaries, and old-fashioned door-nocking.
In 2019, Toronto police sent crime scene evidence from these files to Oram, a laboratory in Texas, which built a far more detailed genetic pro profile than a standard uh forensic one, measuring the tiny inherited variations that let a researcher estimate how closely two people are related.
The results came back and they were discouraging.
The closest matches were people who looked like fifth and sixth cousins of the killer.
That is a very long way from a name.
A small team, including an in-house genealogologist, began working backwards.
They asked people who had already tested with commercial services [music] whether they would share their results.
They asked others to test from scratch as part of a historical homicide investigation.
Out of those distant matches, [music] they built a map of eight families containing more than 3,000 names.
The trail led north, and northern family trees fought [music] back.
Families were large.
Siblings were born many years apart.
Aunts and uncles were younger than their nieces and nephews, and the software’s estimates kept collapsing, so that two people who look like first cousins turned out to be fourth cousins.
What broke that open was not a machine.
Jackie Hookim Wit is from Atawwapiscat, roughly 200 km north of Mousone.
When her phone displayed a call from a police homicide unit during the pandemic, her first thought was that it was a scam.
Once she understood what was being asked, she volunteered.
By her own estimate, she spent around 150 hours building out a CRE family tree using the kind of community knowledge no database contains.
She had known the man in question in the 1980s.
As she put it to APN news, it’s a small town.
You notice new people coming in.
She remembered a quiet young man in heavy work boots at the bowling alley.
The only place to go, feeding the jukebox, playing the same song again and again.
Bet Davis Eyes.
By the spring of 2021, the police had it down to one family and one generation, five brothers.
One of them was the killer.
Then it took nearly two more years because they had to eliminate four men without alerting the fifth.
Two of the brothers had died.
One had been convicted of criminal offenses, so his DNA was already on file, [music] and he was cleared.
The other had been murdered, which meant his genetic material had been entered into a database that holds the profiles of victims, and he was cleared, too.
A conviction and a homicide years earlier had [music] done the work.
For the third brother, an Ontario provincial police surveillance team followed him until he left a trash bag at the curb.
Inside it, according to the sworn warrant application, were two pop cans and a face mask commonly worn during the COVID pandemic.
Cleared.
The fourth brother was brought in for an interview about an unrelated matter and offered a cup of water.
The discarded plastic cup cleared him.
That left one.
In February of 2022, undercover officers drove north [music] on the winter ice roads to gather something discarded from the last brother and came back with nothing because his house sat on its own with no building anywhere near it to work from.
So on November 22nd, 2022, Detective Stella Caris of the Cold Case Unit swore a 160page application for a warrant compelling the last brother to give a blood sample.
It was granted.
On November 23rd, officers flew to Musen and took [music] the sample.
Within hours and before any result existed, Joseph George Sutherland picked up a telephone, called a friend who was a retired police officer, and confessed to killing two women in Toronto in 1983.
His friend called the police.
He was arrested the following day, November 24th, 2022, and flown to Toronto to be charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
That evening, Shawn Macauan was out having a drink when his phone rang with no caller ID, which is how Detective Sergeant Smith’s calls always appeared.
Smith said four words.
Shawn, we got him.
Shawn does not remember the rest of the conversation.
When Toronto police announced the arrest days later, Chief James Rmmer said the obvious thing that still needed saying, that it will never bring Aaron or Susan back.
On October 5th, 2023, Sutherland pleaded guilty in Ontario Superior Court not to first-degree murder, but to two counts of secondderee murder.
The distinction matters less than it sounds.
Both carry an automatic life sentence.
The difference is that with seconddegree murder, the judge decides when the offender may first apply for parole [music] anywhere between 10 and 25 years.
The sentencing hearing was on March 4th, 2024, and the courtroom was full.
Crown Attorney Michael Canlon told the court that Southerntherland had been a stranger to both women and asked for parole ineligibility of 20 to 22 years.
Defense council Anthony Demarco asked for 18.
Then the family spoke.
Ben Ty, Susan’s oldest son, told Sutherland that he had gone on to live his life and that his free life was now over.
Kalin Macauan, the 11-year-old from the sleepover, now a man in his 50s, laid it out plainly.
He got to live his life.
He got to raise children.
Aaron did not.
Shan Macauen asked how you put into words something you have been thinking about for 40 years and then told Sutherland, “I have nothing but hatred for you.”
And Christian Ty told the court what 39 years without an answer [music] had actually done.
Trust she could not rebuild relationships.
It damaged.
A baseball bat beside her bed.
A monster with no face out there somewhere indefinitely.
Demarco doing his job answered her directly.
His client, he said, was not that.
There’s no boogeyman out there.
He was a human being who had to be dealt with proportionally.
And the defense case deserves to be stated fairly because it was not frivolous.
No record before.
No record for 39 years after.
A confession given before the test results [music] came back.
A guilty plea that spared both families a trial.
A man in his 60s who had quit drinking, worked at the same bank for decades, and raised a son.
Sutherland spoke as well.
He apologized to the families for taking their loved ones.
He said he had experienced grief and sleepless nights and was still trying to understand what had gone wrong.
He told the court that he had sought forgiveness through a spirit quest, and that in it he had found Susan Ty’s spirit warm, and that she forgave him, and that he had found Aaron Gilmore’s spirit young and angry, and that she did not.
On March 22nd, 2024, [music] Justice Marine Forestell delivered the sentence.
Life imprisonment with no eligibility to apply for parole for 21 years running from the date of his arrest.
She listed the mitigating factors honestly.
First offender, guilty plea, apology, a pro-social life for four decades.
And then she said they were not enough because of what he had done.
She found that both killings sat close to first-degree murder and that they were killed in their homes, which should have been places of sanctuary.
As she put it, two such murders demand an exemplary sentence.
He has no guarantee of parole at 21 years or ever.
There is a complication in this case that a tidier version would leave out, and it belongs here.
The defense filed what Canadian courts call a gladu report which judges are required to consider for indigenous offenders.
It said Southerntherland’s father died when he was seven and that he was then sent to St.
Anne’s residential school at Fort Albany.
He spoke only cre when he arrived and was made to speak only English.
He described a staff member who choked students until they blacked out.
He said he was sexually abused by a relative during a summer back home.
He told the report’s author that he remembers almost nothing about the murders and that my mind erased it.
None of that is in dispute as a description of St.
An’s.
It is one of the most heavily documented residential schools in Canada.
Survivors testified about it before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Fort Albany and former staff have faced criminal charges and the Supreme Court decision that requires courts to weigh that history came with an explicit limit built into it.
For the gravest crimes, indigenous offenders are not to receive more leeway than [music] anyone else.
Justice Forestell weighed both halves of that and arrived at the highest range.
Anyway, the second complication is the one Toronto police keep raising.
Canadian law does not permit familial searching of the National DNA data bank, which would let police ask whether an unknown killer is the sibling or parent or child of someone already convicted.
Detective Sergeant Smith has been blunt about what that cost here.
If familial searching was available in 2011, we would have identified the family.
That is the brother’s arrest coming back 11 years earlier in a government database legally.
Parliament considered changing it.
In December, a Senate committee voted to strip those clauses out on the argument that familial searching would fall hardest on communities already over represented in the [music] system, including indigenous ones.
The Native Women’s Association of Canada had told senators the opposite, that these tools could help find the uncaught killers of indigenous women.
Both of those things can be true and in this case both of them are because the family the technique found was cre.
Meanwhile, the profile that identified him has been run against other unsolved files to see what else it answers.
Here is what the answer turned out to be after 39 years.
The figure two families had been afraid of since 1983 was not a shadow and was not hunting anyone.
He was a man with a bank job and a pension and a son who lived in a small town where people knew him, who quit drinking and got a diploma and went to work for 27 years and who considered walking into a police station and then went to bed instead.
That is the whole of it.
There is nothing more to understand.
And that is exactly what the families were left holding.
The bat can go back in the cupboard now.
It should never have been needed.
And it was needed for 39 years.
[music] And the reason it was needed is that nothing existed that could find an ordinary man who did something monstrous once and then stopped.
So let the last thing be the two people this was about.
Susan Ty was 45.
She was a nurse who went back to school and became a social worker.
She had four children and she built something separate with each one of them.
She painted, she played guitar, and she was starting her practice over for the second time in a house she had just moved into.
The last letter her daughter had from her was cheerful.
Aaron Gilmore was 22.
She worked in a shop on Hazelton Avenue and lived above it.
She wanted to design clothes.
She had asked to spend a year teaching in Fiji and been told to finish school first.
She threw a party that winter and made everybody wear pink.
Their names are Susan Ty and Aaron Gilmore, and they deserve to be remembered for who they were, not just how their stories ended.
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