Behind a strip mall on Paris Street in Sudbury, Ontario, a police dog found something in the snow that belonged to nobody.
A teal windbreaker, lightweight, unlined, the kind of jacket you put on in April. A short distance from it, a pair of white cotton garden gloves.
It was January 27th, 1998. And that is the hardest part of a northern Ontario winter.
Nobody wears a spring jacket in Sudbury in January unless they have a reason. The jacket did not belong to the woman lying inside the video store.
It did not belong to anyone who worked there. It had her blood on it and it had somebody else’s.
Her name was Renee Sweeney. She was 23 years old, a fourthyear student at Laurentian University, and she was about 4 months away from her degree.
What the police had by the end of that afternoon was more than most homicide investigators ever get.
They had his jacket, they had his gloves, they had a shoe print, they had a partial fingerprint, and they had a complete profile of his DNA because Renee had fought him [music] and she had taken his skin under her fingernails.
For the next 7,623 days, they had everything about the man who killed her except his name.
They would eventually take that DNA and use it to build a picture of his face.
And they would put that face on the evening news years before anyone knew who he was.
And that is not what caught him. This is the story of a case where the evidence was never the problem.
The evidence was excellent from the first hour. What was missing was a way to read it.
And when that finally arrived, it did not come from a national database or government laboratory.
It came from two people in Sudbury who kept family trees as a hobby. And it starts on a Tuesday morning with a young woman who was not supposed to be at work.
Police held this killer’s own DNA for 20 years and still could not name him.
If that gets under your skin, subscribe. Now, before the video store, there was a girl with a trombone.
Renee Sweeney grew up in Sudbury. She went to Low Ellen Park Secondary School and her younger sister Kim still has the photo albums Renee put together there carefully the way people did before fones.
They are full of band trips. Costa Rica, [music] San Francisco, groups of teenagers in the early ‘9s squinting into somebody’s disposable camera holding instrument cases.
Renee played trombone and she played it well enough to hold a seat in the Sudbury Symphony Orchestra.
At Laurentin, she was studying history and music. [music] She had a plan on the other side of it.
She was going to be a teacher. Kim was 3 years younger. They had fought as children the way sisters [music] do, and they had grown out of it.
“We were really close,” Kim said years later. “And we got closer as we got older.”
They went for supper. Renee would drop in at Kim’s work. Kim would drop in at Renee’s.
[snorts] Their father had died in 1990. Their mother, Carol, was living with multiple sclerosis.
Carol had remarried to a man named Bill Straken. And by 1998, the family was four people who leaned on each other.
Understand what Sudbury was in January 1998. A nickel city of roughly 90,000 people in the near north, 4 hours [music] from anywhere, built around mines and around the families of the men who worked them.
It was the kind of place where the strip mall was the ordinary geography of ordinary life.
[music] You did your banking there. You got a bagel there. You rented a movie there.
[music] And it was the kind of place in 1998 where a 23-year-old woman working a retail shift completely alone on a weekday morning [music] was so unremarkable that nobody anywhere thought about it twice.
That is not a detail about Renee. That is a detail about the ERRA. And it is the condition that made what happened possible.
The store was called Adults Only Video [music] and for 25 years that fact has been used to make her story into something to it was not.
Kim has always described it plainly. It was just a job. It fit around her class schedule and it paid her bills, which is the reason almost anybody works retail at 23.
Kim has also said something else about her sister that [music] is worth sitting with.
She was funny. She had a lot of friends. But she was quiet. She was not out drinking and partying.
She went to work and she went to school. And here is the part that is very hard to hear.
According to Kim, Renee was not scheduled to be there that day. She had traded her shift.
There was a symphony performance that coming Saturday evening, and she rearranged her week so she would be free for it.
That trade put her behind the counter on Tuesday, January 27th. The night before, the two sisters stayed on the telephone until midnight.
Kim has said ever since that she is glad about that phone call. That Tuesday morning, Renee is on camera making a bank deposit.
She spoke to a few people. She rang through a few transactions. She called her c-orker Fred Nurmi, who was working the company’s other location over on Lassal Boulevard three separate times.
On the first call, she complained that her hand was sore. She complained about the snowbanks on Paris Street, which were piled so high you could not see the traffic coming.
She called back a second time to [music] brag that she had made a sale already.
On the third call at around 11:00 in the morning, she cut the conversation short and hung up.
A customer had come in. That was the last ordinary moment of Renee Sweeny’s life.
And if it is sitting on your chest right now, hit the like button. It genuinely helps this case reach people who never heard her name.
Now, the clock. Police put the attacker’s entry into the store at 11:27 in the morning.
Police were called at 11:35. What happened inside that store happened inside 8 minutes. He attacked her near the front counter.
Then he walked to the south washroom to clean himself up because he thought she was dead.
She was not. Renee got herself around behind the counter to the telephone. He came back out.
The cause of death stated once and clinically is this. She was stabbed 27 times.
Four of those wounds to the neck and she bled to death on the floor of the store.
For 20 years, police publicly described the number as at least 30. The pathologist who examined her put it at 27.
That is the last this script will say about her injuries. She was found by two women.
Carol Gosselin worked at the country bagel in the same plaza and knew Renee as a regular customer.
She went into the store calling her name and got no answer. Dr. Christa Jonas came in behind her.
Gosselin went back out to her car for a first aid kit and returned and tried to put pressure on the wounds.
There was nothing either of them could do. A young couple pushing open that same door a few moments earlier had been brushed by a man running out past them [music] fast, carrying something blue.
He did not speak. He did not look at either of them. Then the inventory, and this is where the case becomes strange because of how much of him was left behind.
There was a bloody fingerprint on the top of the cash tray. There was a second latent print underneath the cash tray.
There was a running shoe print in the south washroom, a brooks, invisible to the eye until a chemical called luccom lite green brought up blood that nobody could see.
There was skin under her fingernails. $178.25 was missing from the cash box. Magazines and merchandise were gone from the shelves, and a police dog tracked out the back across the snow into a wooded strip a short distance from the plaza ground that today is a hospital parking lot.
That is where the dog found the teal jacket and the white cotton gloves lying with it.
Her blood was on that jacket. So was his. Sergeant David Tofoley, who would carry this case for a decade, put it about as directly as a police officer can.
Renee fought him, he said, and fought him hard. She had scratched him more than once.
He had been covered headtofoot except for his face and his neck, which meant that for days afterward, somewhere [music] in Sudbury, there was a man walking around with marks on his face that other people could see.
Nobody called. This should have been finished in a week. Instead, it became the largest investigation [music] in Sudbury’s history.
And it starts with an innocent man in handcuffs. [music] Subscribe now. February 1998. 2 weeks after the murder, Sudbury Regional Police arrested a 31-year-old man named John Federley and charged him with first-degree murder.
They had two things. A witness had picked his photograph out of a lineup and an officer had identified a fingerprint [music] from the crime scene as his.
The fingerprint was not his. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police compared it and said so.
On February 12th, 1998, John Federly walked out of custody with an apology from the police service that had arrested him.
He had nothing whatsoever to do with the death of Renee [music] Sweeney. 25 years later in open court, that was all confirmed under oath.
The officer who made the identification testified that his mistake led to the [music] wrongful arrest.
A forensics officer testified that he had falsified a duty note recording that identification and that this was the reason he was moved off the case.
So, the investigation restarted essentially from [music] nothing in the second month with a community that had already watched police [music] arrest the wrong man on television.
And then it ran and ran and ran. More than 2,000 tips came in over the following two decades.
1,600 people were ruled out by DNA or by other means. By December of 1999, hundreds of Sudbury men had voluntarily given samples, reported at the time as the largest collection of DNA for a single police investigation in Canadian history.
The paper filled 60 banker boxes and then 100. When Sergeant Robert Weston took the file over in October 2013, he inherited all of it and 15 years of reading to do [music] before he could even begin.
The Renee Sweeney homicide, Weston later told a jury, is the largest criminal investigation ever undertaken by Sudbury police.
And underneath all of that activity was one quiet, automatic process. Every 30 days, that DNA profile went back into Canada’s National DNA datab bank to be checked again.
Here is what that datab bank actually is because almost everyone misunderstands it. [music] It came into force on June 30th, 2000, [music] and it has two halves.
One half holds DNA recovered from crime scenes. The other half holds DNA taken from people who have been convicted of designated offenses.
The system finds killers by matching the first half against the second half. Rene’s killer was in the first half from the beginning.
By September 2018, the second half contained more than 375,000 people. He was not one of them.
The data bank grew every single year and he was not in it. The list of eliminated men grew every single year and he was not on it.
The tip line rang for 20 years [music] and nobody, not once, said his name.
By 2015, the silence was strange enough that outside experts were remarking on it. Michael Artfield, a criminologist at Western University, pointed out that violent people generally keep being violent until somebody catches them and that a man who did this and never surfaced again was a genuine anomaly.
I have to wonder, he said, whether the system is working as it should. The system was working exactly as designed.
That was the problem. Now, pay attention to this next part because it explains everything that came after.
He never left. He was not hiding. He was not on the run. And he was not a drifter passing through Sudbury on a Tuesday.
On the morning of January 27th, 1998, he was an 18-year-old student [music] at Lockerby Composite School, which is a walk from that plaza, and he was there that day writing an exam.
His name is Robert Steven Wright. He goes by Steven. He was born in Sudbury in July of 1979.
In January 1998, he was living at home with his parents, Robert and Wendy, and a brother.
And here is the loadbearing fact of this entire case. He was never convicted of a crime.
Not that year, not the next year, not in the 20 years that followed. No assaults, no break and enters, no driving offenses that would put a sample in a laboratory.
Nothing. A national datab bank built out of convicted offenders can only ever find you if you have been convicted of something.
The clean record [music] is what kept him invisible. Hold on to that because at the end of this story, a judge is going to weigh that same clean record in his favor.
[music] And he did not go far. He finished school. He built a life. By 2018, he was 39 years old and living in North Bay, about 2 hours up the highway from Sudbury.
And he was working in the laboratory at the North Bay Regional Health Center. From this point on, you know something that nobody in this story knows.
Every anniversary story, every press conference, [music] every month that profile came back clean and Kim Sweeney writing down license plates in the street.
All of it happens while the man they are looking for [music] is going to work in a hospital lab.
As Kim would put it, years later, standing outside a courthouse, [music] he was able to hide in plain sight for 20 years.
Kim Sweeney was 25 when her sister was killed, and the murder rearranged the rest of her life.
Because it looked random because a stranger had walked into a store in the middle of a weekday morning [music] and killed a woman for less than $200, Kim became convinced that she [music] was next.
She has said that she could not get from her car to her own mother’s front door without somebody walking her in.
Not for a year, not for a decade. [snorts] That fear did not lift until 2024, 26 years later.
She did more than wait. When she saw a man on the street who looked like the composite sketch police were circulating, she wrote down his license plate [music] and phoned it in.
She did that for 20 years. She was not the only one carrying it. Rene’s [music] friend, Catherine Valo, later told a court that for years afterward, whenever she met somebody new, she would find a way to work the conversation around until she learned where that person had been on January 27th, 1998, so she could rule them out.
That is what an unsolved murder does to a group of 23-year-olds. Then there is Carol.
Rene’s mother already had multiple sclerosis when her daughter was killed and her condition worsened [music] afterward.
A family friend named Kelly Irvine stood up at the sentencing hearing [music] and told the court something that should be stated once and left alone.
Carol and Bill were at home on January 27th, 1998, watching the news when they recognized Rene’s car in the parking lot on the [music] screen with police and paramedics and tracking dogs moving around it.
The day her daughter died was the last day Carol Sweeney walked. In February 2006, Carol released an album of music in her daughter’s memory.
Bill Straken died in 2013. Carol died in 2016. Neither of them ever knew. [music] The reward offered in 1998 was $25,000.
It sat in trust so long that by the 20th anniversary on interest alone, it had grown past $30,000.
Asked in January 2018 how she felt about 20 years, Kim answered with one word, horrible.
And then she said the only thing she had ever asked anyone for. [music] If somebody has information, just give it.
If Kim’s 20 years of license plates got to you, hit like. Now, the tool that would end this was already sitting in a file.
Nobody had used half of it yet. Two things had to change before this case could break, and they are separate, so take them one at a time.
The first is resolution. In 1998, a Canadian forensic laboratory analyzing a DDNA sample could resolve about four points on a profile.
Four. That is enough to say a sample is probably a man [music] and not much more, especially if the sample is small or mixed with somebody else’s.
By 2013, that number was 15. Nothing about the evidence changed in those 15 years.
The evidence sat in storage. What changed was the ability [music] to read it. In May 2013, a forensic scientist named Tara Brdsky, who manages the biology section at the Center for [music] Forensic Sciences in Sue St.
Marie, was asked to run a cold case review of the Sweeney file. That work carried into 2014.
And this is where the jacket comes back. The blood on the teal windbreaker [music] and on the white gloves was tested again.
It was Rene’s with a one in one quintilian chance of belonging to a random unrelated person.
But Brutzky also tested the parts of those items that were not stained with blood.
The inside of a jacket pocket, the inside of the gloves, the places where a garment picks up [music] the person wearing it.
Those tests found DNA from three different men, one coat, three men, and it would be four more years before anybody on Earth understood that what they were looking at was a father and his [music] two sons.
Debris from Rene’s fingernail clippings collected at the postmortem in 1998 and never analyzed, was analyzed.
Now, [music] the second thing that had to change was the idea of what you can do with a profile once you have one.
In the summer of 2016, Weston was on holiday drinking coffee and read about an American case in which a laboratory had generated an image of a suspect’s face using nothing but DNA recovered from a scene.
He thought it was interesting. On January 23rd, 2017, Greater Sudbury police held a press conference and released what a Virginia company called Parabon Nano Labs had produced from the DNA of Renee Sweeny’s killer, a male of Northern European ancestry, fair skin, blue or green eyes, brown or blonde hair, a few freckles.
Eyeglasses were added on top, not from the DNA, but from what the eyewitnesses had said in 1998.
It was a photograph of a man who had never been photographed. It cost roughly $3,600 American dollars.
The chief was careful in public about what it could and could not do. You do not arrest a man from an image [music] like that.
You use it to sort a list. Before the composite went out, 1,800 people had been eliminated.
The composite generated 360 fresh tips and about 200 more eliminations. It did not find him.
Then in September 2018, Parabon came back with an offer that seemed small at the time.
Along with the face. They could run an ancestry analysis on the same sample and they would do it at no charge.
Sudbury police said yes. What came back was not [music] a name. It was two surnames, Cord and Mallister.
Two families with no relation to each other who nevertheless shared a descendant [music] somewhere down the line.
So Weston went looking for the intersection. And the way he found it is the reason this case is worth 35 minutes of your life.
He went [music] and met a woman who had spent years building out the Seord family tree.
Then he met the person who had done exactly the same thing for the Mallisters.
Two amateur genealogologists in northern Ontario working in binders and spreadsheets on evenings and weekends, tracing marriages and baptisms and headstones for the pleasure of it.
Each holding one half of a murder investigation [music] and neither of them knowing. Weston put the two trees side by side and looked for the single place where they touched.
They touched at a man named Robert Wright of Greater Sudbury who had two sons.
Police then collected discarded DNA from Wright’s mother, his father, and his brother. Items thrown away, which police are entitled to take.
The results came back and lined up against those three male profiles in the jacket.
She was the mother of two of them. She was not the mother of the third.
The third was the fathers. On December 11th, 2018, at 11:14 in the morning, officers walked into the North Bay Regional Health Center and arrested Robert Steven Wright, 39 years old, in the hospital laboratory where he worked.
Weston made the arrest himself. He said so from the witness box and then he pointed across the courtroom at the man in the burgundy collared shirt.
Jury selection began at the Sudbury courthouse on February 21st, 2023, 4 weeks after the 25th anniversary of the murder.
Justice Robbie D. Gordon presided. The crown was Robert Parsons [music] and Kevin Ludgate. The defense was Michael Lacy and Brian Bedelli.
The original charge of firstdegree murder had been [music] reduced to seconddegree in 2019. The trial ran 5 weeks.
Tara Brutzky gave the jury the numbers. The fingernail debris was linked to Wright with a probability greater than 1 in 1 trillion [music] that it belonged to a random unrelated person.
Cross-examined about the limits of her science, [music] she did not fight it for a second.
DNA cannot tell you how it got somewhere. It cannot tell you when. There are always limitations.
She said Ranata Jacques, a forensic biologist with the same center, gave the defense its best moment, [music] and it deserves to be stated fairly.
Direct physical contact was the most likely explanation for how Wright’s DNA got onto Rene’s fingernails.
But casual contact could not be excluded, and Jack was explicit that her findings said nothing about what kind of contact it was.
Some degree of force does not imply violence, she told [music] the court. She compared the pressure involved to holding a squirming baby while you change a [music] diaper because that was the defense.
Wright took the [music] stand and testified in his own defense and he admitted he had been in the store.
He said he had finished an exam at Lockerby and gone in. He said he found her already on the floor.
He said he shook her shoulder, put his ear to her mouth to listen for breathing, [music] the way he had learned in Boy Scouts, and felt for a pulse at her hand.
He said he believed she was dead, and he panicked and he ran. And that on the way home, he threw the jacket and the gloves into the bush because he understood how it would look.
“I ran because I was terrified,” he told the jury. “I was a stupid kid.”
“The worst decision of his life,” he said, was to [music] run. Lacy built a real case around that and it is worth taking seriously because this is a jurisdiction that had already misidentified a fingerprint and falsified a note in this very file.
There was blood on the deadbolt of the exit door and nobody ever swabbed it.
There was a soap dispenser [music] and a coffee cup in the washroom the killer had used to clean himself and neither was ever tested.
The shoe prints inside the bathroom did not match the ones outside. Drops of blood in the snow led away in the opposite direction [music] from the way Wright ran.
The knife was never found. [music] The stolen merchandise was never found. And if Wright had emptied that cash box, Lacy argued, his prince [music] should have been on the metal springs that hold the money down, not on the side of the tray, which is precisely where a man steadying himself over a body would put his hand.
There was, Lacy said, not a single iote of evidence that Steven Wright had ever known Renee Sweeney.
What the defense [music] could not explain was the tray itself. Sergeant Jeff Matt of the Ontario Provincial Police examined both impressions, the bloody one on top and the latent one underneath, and match both to right.
A second examiner working independently in Reno, Nevada, reached [music] the same conclusion. Justice Gordon told the jury plainly that no one saw who killed Renee Sweeney [music] and that the Crown’s case was circumstantial and that their job was to decide whether guilt was the only rational inference available.
On March 29th, 2023, after a little more than 24 hours of deliberation, the jury came back guilty of seconddegree murder unanimous.
Sentencing came on June 29th. [music] Seconddegree murder carries an automatic life sentence in Canada.
And the only question was parole eligibility, which can run from 10 years to 25.
The defense [music] asked for 10. The crown asked for 18. The juror’s own recommendations range from 20 to 25 with the largest group at 25.
Justice Gordon said it at 12. He weighed the viciousness of an attack on a woman working alone in a shop against the fact that Wright had lived a law-abiding life with no other contact with [music] the justice system.
And he said the sentence could not be built on emotion or on vengeance. He also said that her defensive wounds [music] made it clear she had fought for a life that should not have been taken from her [music] and that Renee Sweeney was a gifted young woman who had a lot to offer the world.
Kim [music] Sweeney stood at the front of that courtroom and did the arithmetic out loud.
There were 7,623 days of personal torment, she said. Of fear every day of waking up from sleepless nights.
Then she turned and looked directly at the man in the prisoner’s box. I still don’t know why he did it, she said, [music] but I know who killed Renee.
Wright read a statement of his own. He said he empathized with the family’s anger and sorrow but was not responsible for [music] it.
I did not kill Renee Sweeney, he said. That is the truth and always will be.
Now, the complications, and there are two, and leaving them out would be dishonest. The first belongs to the family.
Partway through the trial, the court lost most of a day to what the judge called an improper attempt to communicate with the jury.
Early that morning, a truck had been parked in front of the door jurors use to enter the Sudbury courthouse.
[snorts] In the back window was a decal reading guilty AF. It belonged to the Sweeney family.
Lacy called it no different from handing each juror an envelope telling them how to vote.
The judge warned the family, “It is now part of a record that appeal judges will read.”
Which brings us to the second. Lacy said on the courthouse steps that he did not believe Wright had received a fair trial in Sudbury and that the crown’s closing had invited the jury into legal error.
A notice of appeal was filed. As of the most recent public reporting, that appeal has not been decided.
In July 2025, Wright, held at Joyceville Institution near Kingston, was refused bail while he waits for it.
Separately, in December 2023, North Bay police charged him with offenses alleged to have taken place in 2015 and 2016.
He pleaded not guilty, and in September 2025, the crown withdrew all of those charges.
They form no part of what he stands convicted of and they should not be counted against him.
The assumption at the start of this was that Renee Sweeny’s case went cold because there was nothing to work with.
It was the opposite. The evidence was so good that it made everyone patient. 20 years of monthly database checks, of tip lines and anniversary appeals, of one detective handing a 100 boxes to the [music] next.
All of it resting on a belief the lead investigator said out loud in January 2018.
At the end of the day, Weston told a reporter, “It’s going to be the DNA datab bank that’s going to allow us to catch them.”
It was not. What caught him was two people who liked family history, keeping careful records about the dead in their spare time, and a detective patient enough to lay their two hobbies side by side and find the one place the families [music] touched.
And the jacket, he threw it into the trees because getting rid of it was how you disappear.
That jacket is what named [music] him, not the face they built out of it, because the face went on television and eliminated 200 men and never found [music] him.
It was the three men inside the coat. The final order at his sentencing was that a sample of his DNA be taken and entered into the National DNA data bank.
25 years late, Renee Sweeney was 23 years old. She played the trombone well enough for the [music] symphony.
She was studying history and music and she was 4 months from her degree and she was going to teach.
She was not supposed to be working that day. The night before she talked to her sister on the phone until half midnight.
Her name is Renee Sweeney and she deserves to be remembered for who [music] she was, not just for how her story ended.
If you sat through all of this, subscribe and share it with someone. Kim Sweeney spent 20 years asking strangers to say her sister’s name out loud.
That is the whole ask. Thank you for [music] watching.
