ANNOUNCER: This program is rated 14+, and contains
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[Hobbs] At about 9:35 p.m.,
we received a radio call.
A child was believed to have been abducted.
It ended badly.
[Chapman] This person, this phantom,
has come and taken a child
and done something horrific to them,
and we don't know who they are.
You would have some very good leads.
This guy is a good suspect.
He lived in the neighborhood. They knew the family.
We got his DNA.
That was submitted to the forensic science people.
They had criminal records
of sexual assault and kidnapping.
[Luxford] And the results, when it come back,
there was no match.
[Chapman] We eliminated
at least 50 to 60 people by DNA.
It was dead end after dead end after dead end.
They never forgot. That was the thing.
They never forgot that little girl.
[intense music playing]
Welcome to Crime Beat. I'm Antony Robart.
Tonight, it was a community known for its unlocked doors
and kids playing in the streets until all hours.
But the calm of one warm spring evening
in 1971 is shattered
with the feared abduction of a six-year-old girl,
an unprecedented event that forever changed the city.
Here now is "A Million Dead Ends".
[heartfelt music playing]
[Hobbs] Windsor, Ontario is a,
at that time, a city of about 200,000 people.
It's a border city because
it sits right on the Detroit River.
It's a working-class city.
The automotive industry at the time was very large.
[Chapman] We're the Motor City of Canada.
We had the Big Three here for many years.
There's a lot of factories
that support what the Big Three do.
And because of the amount of employment
that the Big Three were offering,
it was a big immigration point in the city.
So you get this influx of people
from all sorts of different backgrounds
working blue-collar jobs,
coming to Canada to make a better life for themselves.
It was not unlike a lot of other places
in-- in the country.
But where we're located made it a dead end in Ontario,
so it was a transient type of city, you know?
And things filtered in, but to filter out,
they had to go back the same way.
It's not a city that they stopped in
on the way somewhere else.
It was a quiet town, you know,
very little action going on, you know.
I think-- back then, I think our murder rate
was, like, one or two a year, if that.
Low crime, you know.
Very nice, peaceful city.
[Hobbs] May the 14th, 1971.
We were working the afternoon shift
in the Drouillard Road area.
Drouillard Road, it's kind of east-central Windsor.
It's coming up now, but it was always kind of a--
kind of a rough and tumble neighbourhood,
back-- even back then, known as Ford City.
This area that I worked
it's-- at the time was called Number 8 District.
It still looks the same as it ever did.
There were a lot of hotels, bars.
This used to be one here.
The type of calls that we would get down here,
bar fights, drinking complaints,
assaults, car accidents.
It was kind of the run-of-the-mill.
In May of 1971,
my partner and I were working in a patrol car
in the Drouillard Road area.
It wasn't a really busy evening.
At about 9:35 p.m.,
we received a radio call
to attend an address on Drouillard Road
where a child was believed to have been abducted.
I had only been on the police force for five years,
so for the number of calls that I had taken,
it was-- it was an unusual call.
We were a little bit away,
a few minutes getting down here.
1290 was a little house
on the right-hand side down here.
That is no longer there,
but it was just right here at this corner.
[indicator clicking]
When we got to the address,
we went to the-- went to the door.
We were met by the mother,
who was-- who was frantic.
Mrs. Topic, first name was Paula,
explained that her daughter,
who was six years old,
and her brother, who was eight,
were playing in the backyard
when they were approached by a strange man.
The stranger...
offered the little girl $8
if she would walk with him down Drouillard Road a little bit,
and he gave her brother a dime...
and the little girl left with the man.
The brother went right into the house.
He went straight into the house
and told his mother what had happened.
Paula's there with her friend,
and he explains that he sees them
walking towards Seminole Road on Drouillard Road.
I'm not sure how quickly he went into the house
at the time to relay that information,
and then that's when Paula and her friend
go looking for Ljubica.
[Hobbs] She was described as six years of age,
approximately four feet tall, blonde hair,
wearing a pink blouse...
and green and yellow slacks.
The mother was visibly upset,
so we-- we knew that we had to treat this very gently,
but we also knew that it was quite serious,
we had to get something going.
Real quickly, we checked the house,
made sure that the little girl wasn't there,
hadn't come back.
She wasn't there.
The mother couldn't tell us anything
about the person that walked away with the daughter,
because she didn't see him.
So everything that we did get came from the boy.
Although, because of his age,
it was difficult to really get a lot,
but the person was described as a male, white,
early 20s, tall and slim, wearing dark clothing.
When we left the house, I-- I said to my partner,
I said, "You know, if we don't--
if we don't find this little girl in an hour,
we have a big problem."
We got a hold of our radio dispatcher,
and gave a description of the child
and the man that was with her,
and had more cars sent to the area
to start looking for her.
[suspenseful music playing]
The night she went missing,
it was like the largest manhunt in Windsor history.
Like, hundreds of people, volunteers, police,
scoured the streets together,
looking in alleys and streets and parks.
[Chapman] Looking back in time,
you need some historical context.
So 1971,
we still had call boxes in the city of Windsor.
So communications to police from dispatch
were drastically different.
So they get to the Topic residence
around nine o'clock.
Sometime prior to that, Michael,
Ljubica's older brother, had come in and said
that somebody had offered him a dime
and promised to pay Ljubica some money to come do a job.
There's a separation there.
How much of a delay before police response
gets into the area, right?
And it's no fault of-- of anybody's.
It's 1971.
Child abduction wasn't a thing.
So Paula's first thing that she does with her friend
is she takes a walk down to Seminole Street,
which is about a half kilometer away,
and then comes back and then calls the police.
[Hobbs] We attended the residence at 9:35,
so the call would have been
just a few minutes earlier than that.
The little girl was last seen at approximately nine o'clock.
By 9:50,
we had a description of both the little girl
and the abductor that we put out on the radio.
And then you have the whole dispatch procedure
where it's not instantaneous to your computer in your car.
It's a more tedious process,
and then officers start to get to the area.
It floods in fast. A lot of officers do.
Even citizens start to come in and help,
what they called house-to-house checks.
We're looking for this girl. We're trying to find her.
[Hobbs] We went up and down alleys, streets,
right in that immediate area, looking for this duo.
We had lots of eyes on the road.
There would have been at least five district cars,
units from the downtown precinct,
and we also had detective cars.
There was a lot of people there.
At midnight, one of the lieutenants
arranged a proper grid search,
and my partner and I ended up being sent
to the Essex Terminal Railroad,
and it was open for people to walk down that way,
so it was quite common to see people taking shortcuts
going down the tracks.
A lot of the people involved were fathers,
and there was an urgency for us to try and find her.
♪
Welcome back.
On May 14, 1971,
little Ljubica Topic is out playing
with her brother and some friends
when a stranger lures her away just after 9:00 p.m.
A massive search begins.
Hundreds of police and citizens scour the streets.
Eventually, they find her, four hours later.
We now return to "A Million Dead Ends".
[sombre music playing]
[Chapman] So at one o'clock in the morning,
Saturday, May 15th,
Tom Fortier is looking through the alleys
in the 1600 block of Hickory,
and he shines his light into the rear yard of 1690,
and I remember what he described to me.
Tom said he shined the light in,
and he saw what he thought was a large doll
lying on the ground.
And unfortunately, that large doll was Ljubica.
♪
He was taken aback.
You-- you think it's a doll, and then as you get closer,
you-- you realize that no, this is not a doll.
This is the six-year-old girl that we've been looking for,
and she's been very badly injured,
severely beaten,
like a very high level of violence and aggression.
It was evident on scene
that this was a sexually motivated crime.
She was sexually assaulted.
Part of her clothes were removed,
and ultimately the cause of death
was asphyxiation.
The distance that she was from where she was taken
was about one kilometer,
and the time from when it was called into the police
to the time that she was located was four hours.
[engine humming]
[Hobbs] At 1:20 a.m., on the 15th,
we were picked up at the railroad tracks
and taken to a location on Hickory Road
and learned that the little girl had been found deceased
in the backyard off of the alley.
It was dark.
Lighting in the area where she was found
wasn't the best.
The streets have got lights, but the alleys don't.
There were a lot of officers there,
a lot of plainclothes detectives were there,
and there was a cameraman there.
There was an ident unit there.
[McMillan] When looking at the crime scene photographs,
a lot of them were blurry,
and the old policeman told me
that the forensic officer that took the pictures
had a huge family, had 12 kids,
and he was so affected by the scene
that his hands were shaking.
So you can imagine what the scene looked like.
We drove back to the precinct. It was pretty quiet.
Being a young father at that time myself,
it-- it kind of struck home.
We felt that we had done everything we could.
We had got our own officers out as quick as we could,
but unfortunately...
it ended badly.
[road din]
[Chapman] Right now we're standing at the corner
of Drouillard Road and Franklin.
Drouillard runs this way,
and Franklin, if you look down that way,
you can see what's left of the-- the old Ford foundry,
which was one of the biggest employers
in the area in the 1970s.
The Topic family's house
was basically right in this area here.
I believe it was the second one in.
The scrapyard was around in the '70s.
It was Pazner Scrapyard, but it's expanded now,
and-- and their house was torn down some time ago.
There was an employee that worked
at the gate at the Ford foundry,
and he remembers
looking through the window of his office
and seeing somebody,
a male dressed in black,
crouched down across the street outside the cafe,
and he was looking towards where the kids were playing.
He was described around 20 or early 20s or so.
The next two, three, four days, a week,
we were-- we were all looking for a tall, slim guy
that wore dark clothing.
It seemed like everybody was tall, dark, white male
and wearing dark clothing.
The description was not odd, put it that way.
It was very close to a lot of people,
and so we were jumping on anything we could,
because we wanted to get this taken care of and solved.
We have had many calls come in this weekend,
and as a matter of fact, we have interviewed
as many as 38 people as of yesterday.
Any time that we came across anyone like that,
even kind of remotely looked like it might be,
we would talk to them, get their information,
and submit it to the investigating detectives.
That happened quite a bit over the next days and weeks...
but it seemed like it came to a dead end.
[McMillan] We'd written stories over time,
just updates, you know,
police still looking for the killer,
we want tips, you know, there's rewards.
I think very quickly, in like 1971,
there was, like, an $11,000 reward,
which was huge at the time, right?
[Chapman] Our best witness is Michael.
The information that he provided
is the information that seemed to be the genesis
of a suspect or person of interest profile.
In a very early composite, it was done by a person
I don't think had any forensic training
when it comes to creating composites,
but he sat down with Michael
and they drew up a simple sketch.
It didn't have a ton of detail to it.
A white male with a thin face,
there's suggestions of potentially light brown
to straw blonde hair,
but steps taken in the 1970s out of desperation,
like we need to find this person,
like they recognized the need to find this person.
You're trying to get a description
out of an eight-year-old boy who's your best witness,
presenting them lineups of people
who looks like the person.
And I feel bad for Michael because of
how much he was put through with this,
paraded through so many lineups.
Just please show us somebody
who looked like the person who-- who took your sister.
I can't imagine the amount of trauma
that poor boy went through
trying to identify the person responsible.
I can't imagine.
There was very limited other information.
We uncovered a report where there was a neighbour,
said she observed Ljubica
walking with an individual a few blocks away,
like, in between where she was abducted
and where she was found.
Not a whole lot of information was gleaned from that.
There were kids that were playing in the area,
but they never saw anybody actually walk off with her.
I think everybody figured that it was a stranger to town.
It was very unusual,
and it was shocking at the time.
It's something that not normally happens here.
[Chapman] When this happened in 1971,
it was a level of fear in this city
that people who grew up at that time still remember it.
Like, it was completely different.
Their lives changed. Everybody was on high alert.
Where this person, this phantom,
has come and taken a child
and done something horrific to them,
and we don't know who they are.
♪
Welcome back to Crime Beat.
The murder of six-year-old Ljubica Topic
devastated her family
and left Windsor residents shocked, enraged, and fearful.
Now, everyone wanted the culprit found, of course,
but 20 years later,
police were still searching for her killer.
We now return to "A Million Dead Ends".
[gentle music playing]
[Chapman] You can see, based on the amount of reports
that are coming in from 1971 to about 1973,
they put a lot of work into this case.
Forensics in the '70s was limited
to hair fiber analysis,
to footprints, to fingerprints.
Really the only tests available at that time
were for blood identification, semen identification,
and potential hair identification.
[Chapman] Obviously we have her clothing,
and there were things like sticks and bushes
that were actually seized from the area.
She had a tooth broken out,
and there was a thread with blood on it.
[Matte] Intimate items that came from the victim herself
that were collected at autopsy,
they were examined for the presence of semen,
and there were various hairs that were looked at
to determine what type of hair they were,
but not necessarily being able to source them.
You could identify that there may have been blood present,
but not who it might have come from.
There was a pubic hair present
on some of the items collected from the victim,
and that's what was used going forward
to be able to forensically assist the investigation.
This particular case underwent some of the early DNA testing
that took place in the mid to late '90s.
We were able to develop a DNA profile from that pubic hair,
and that's what was used going forward
to be able to compare individuals
and eliminate them as the source of that.
So we develop a profile in-- in the 1990s
of who we think is responsible for this crime,
and that's when Ken Luxford and Glenn Hardstone
dig back into this case.
When we went to visit Ljubica's mother,
she had a shrine on her mantel in her apartment
with her picture of her daughter
and candles and a cross,
and that's 20 years after the fact.
Just seeing the shrine and talking to her,
you could feel that...
she was hurting, very hurting.
She was concerned that we'd given up,
and I reassured her that we never give up.
We looked at all the evidence that we had,
and in the file there was already a suspect
that was being developed.
He looked like the compiles.
We spoke to his common-law wife at the time.
The family had thought he'd done it.
She had a grandmother who lived in the area
of the alley where the body was found,
so there was a connection with him being there.
Looking at his criminal records past,
we noticed that he was always involved
with younger girls, sexual assaults,
and the trail had gone from Windsor
to Toronto to Winnipeg.
In Winnipeg, apparently there was a sexual assault,
and he did time there,
and then after that he went to Vancouver,
where he eventually stabbed the girl
that he was living with,
and he was doing time in prison.
This guy is a good suspect,
and we just needed the DNA to match to prove it.
I went to Abbotsford, BC,
with a forensic officer,
and we got his DNA.
That was submitted to the forensic science people.
Then I come back, there was no match.
It's one of these many times in this case
where you're like, "We finally got this, right?"
Especially once DNA comes around
where you see, you have all these people,
but now you know you got that smoking gun.
If we get the DNA, we're going to get him.
That's probably the first time where it's like,
"This is-- this is-- we're going to get him,"
and it's not him.
So the case kind of goes back on the shelf at that point.
The lead is closed,
and it sits for a few years, until 2004,
when Kent McMillan picks it back up.
It was hard to sift through police reports
that were 40 years old,
and the evidence and tracking down people,
finding persons of interest that really fit the bill.
There was just so many tips.
Some retired detectives would call with one.
They would talk to a neighbour
or a friend or an acquaintance,
and somebody would mention something
during the course of conversation.
At odd times, the media would put out a story on Ljubica,
and then the phones would start ringing.
You go back into the old files and try to match them up.
[tense music playing]
In the statements that we reviewed,
the brother was told to play for a while
while the abductor took Ljubica away.
But he immediately went into the house,
informed his mother and aunt,
who immediately came out of the house,
headed southbound on Drouillard to Seminole Street,
which is the first main crossing there.
By that time, Ljubica was not in sight,
so we figured it made sense that
he cut west either through a house
or on Metcalfe Street to the first alley,
stayed in the alley,
then cut over to Hickory when he thought it was safe.
We're currently in the 1600 block of Hickory Road,
and behind me approximately
we had a witness sitting on his front porch.
Witnessed the suspect
dragging a young girl who was crying
southbound on the sidewalk.
He went in to grab a cold drink.
When he came out, he looked for them.
He looked north and south,
and when he looked south, they were already gone.
So we figured that the suspect took her
into the rear of the house where she was found.
The fact that the mother and the aunt
had walked all that way and had not seen Ljubica,
and surmising the whole time that the abductor and Ljubica
were paralleling them southbound at the same time
is the tragedy of the whole thing.
This was always a DNA case. That's all we had as evidence.
In 2004, we resubmitted
all the clothing from the victim
up to the Centre of Forensic Sciences.
You'll recall that we did have a DNA profile
from the pubic hair, late '90s, but it was one item.
By the time the mid-2000s came,
we had that same DNA profile in many locations
on the victim's clothing, where there was blood present.
It gives you that confidence
that you're dealing with the target profile,
that this might be the DNA profile
from the individual who might be responsible
for this particular event.
[McMillan] We had quite a few leads
that we had to work on.
One of the most suspicious but promising
was from a lady who lived in northern Ontario.
She had been sexually molested by her brother,
who now resided in Toronto.
He had a record
for sexual assault, kidnapping.
I received another phone call that stated
he was a resident on an address
in Assumption Street in Windsor,
maybe a 25-minute walk from Drouillard Road,
where Ljubica was living.
Eventually, he was excluded.
There was a family in town here, who...
the whole family of career criminals
involved in drugs, theft.
We received a tip that
the father of this clan
had molested this person when they were young...
but he had since passed away,
so we had to get familial DNA.
He was excluded.
Some people we just approached
and told them what we were investigating,
and they agreed to give us a blood sample.
Other times, I would have to use
search warrants to get the blood samples
from hospitals, clinics, dentist offices.
You would have some very good leads.
They lived in the neighbourhood.
They knew the family.
They had criminal records of sexual assault and kidnapping.
They had violent streaks.
But in the end, they were all excluded.
We excluded close to 30 people.
During the time of submitting blood samples,
I was advised by the Centre
that they were running out of comparative samples.
I arranged for a meeting up at the Centre,
and I begged that they go over it one more time.
And thank God they found
more samples of semen on the clothing,
and that they were suitable for comparison.
So it gave us more hope
that we were going to be able to solve this.
I moved here as a reporter in 2006,
and almost immediately, especially because I was doing
the crime beat a lot, people would,
you know, ask me, like,
"Oh, so you know about Ljubica,
or, "What do you know about Ljubica," right?
It was always this thing
that was in the ether of the city.
It really, like, bled into the fabric.
People still talk about it.
People who were kids remember not really understanding why,
but all of a sudden they couldn't go out to play,
or their parents were locking the doors at night.
They remember that very distinctly.
As I was writing it over the years,
I would get phone calls or e-mails or letters
about people who were like, "Oh, I remember that,
and I still think about it."
They didn't even know her,
but it was this horrific case that just stuck
in the collective consciousness of the city.
I landed an interview with Paula Topic,
Ljubica's mother, and it was the first time ever
in 40 years that she talked publicly about it.
That interview was heartbreaking.
It was clear that this incident
had just punched a hole in that family.
It cratered that family,
and she lived with it every day of her life.
She talked about still dreaming about her.
She had a photo,
and she would walk by and, like,
still speak to her little girl
that had died 44 years ago.
And it was like, for her, it had happened yesterday.
She not only thought about her daughter,
but she thought about the killer.
Obviously she wondered who this person was,
but she talked about just being sad all the time,
and she hoped that maybe the killer
was living with that as well.
You know, she said, like, "How could somebody do that
and then not weigh on them somehow?"
And at the same time,
the police, for the first time ever,
announced that they had found
this man's tooth at the scene of the crime.
First time in 44 years, they had made this announcement
hoping to, like, breathe life back into this case.
There were teeth found at the scene that would match
a male suspect between the ages of 16 and 20.
It's my opinion that at the scene,
when she was taken to the rear of 1690 Hickory,
that she fought, she fought quite violently.
And I know she had a pair of hard-soled shoes,
penny loafers on,
probably kicked him in the mouth,
which would result in losing the tooth.
And then he reciprocated
with some very violent actions towards her.
And just thinking of her...
those last moments, fighting for her life,
pretty bad.
[Chapman] When I picked up the case in 2014,
there was a rush to get this case done,
given the age, because the age of the case,
the person that we think is responsible was around 20.
Well, they're getting up there now, too,
and there's an increased chance
that this person is also now deceased.
We actually have over 700 persons of interest
for a variety of different reasons.
If you have 700 persons of interest,
how many do you really have?
You really-- you don't have any.
Like, you don't have any focus,
because there's so many different things
that you have to go through to eliminate.
When we tested the vaginal swab in 2015,
we located in evidence.
It had never been tested.
The seal was still intact from 1971.
Comes back to the exact same profile.
We put it onto databases.
I sent it to the United States,
and had it compared to American databases.
I sent it to Europe to have it compared there.
Hoping for a hit, and it never registered a hit anywhere.
So now we keep going for persons of interest.
You come across these people that look like
very interesting suspects, but they've been deceased.
It was dead end after dead end after dead end,
and some of them were so exciting,
like, "This has to be the right person."
I can tell you that we eliminated
at least 50 to 60 people by DNA.
So around 2016, we ended up sending
some of our raw DNA down to a lab in the States
to have it processed, to get some phenotyping.
It gives you probability predictors for things
like hair color, eye color, freckling.
You can potentially infer where their ancestral heritage
might have come from in the world,
things like that.
When we get the phenotyping back,
we learned that this person was very highly likely
to have just had, like, brown hair,
was likely to have little to no freckling,
and I think the heritage indicated more
towards Scotland and Northern Europe.
So what we did is we had a composite done up
from what the person may have looked like
in 1971 and another one, what they could look like now.
We actually released those to the public.
Does this trigger anybody?
No leads were ever developed,
and it just seems to be another dead end.
[newscaster] The Golden State Killer case
went unsolved for 43 years.
[Chapman] So in 2018, Golden State Killer
has just broken, and they've used
investigative genetic genealogy.
There are a variety of different
Ancestry-type databases in the United States
where you can upload your DNA
and you discover people who share DNA with you.
The way investigative genetic genealogy works
is you take the suspect's DNA
and you put it onto a public website,
and you get matches back, which means that those people
are genetically matched with the suspect.
And so if you build those people's family trees,
the suspect will be on their family trees.
It'll show how many centimorgans
the match shares with the suspect's DNA.
And the higher the centimorgans,
the closer the relationship.
And so you can estimate that
the person might be a second cousin to third cousin
or fourth cousin to third cousin once removed.
[Chapman] When that kit gets set up,
we do come back with four people
that shared some DNA.
There is more to varying degrees,
but you can see different levels of shared centimorgans
between these individuals
and the person who killed Ljubica.
So now we want to find out more about these people
and build family trees around their families.
[Dodich] If they're, let's say, a second cousin,
you have to build at least three generations up
and then come down three generations.
So there's a lot of people to look through.
We eventually came down to two suspects
that lived in Windsor,
two blocks from the scene,
approximately the right age,
and genetically looked like it would be
in the right level on the family tree chart.
[Chapman] One of them comes up
on our massive person of interest list from 1971,
so immediately the focus becomes,
"Let's get DNA from these guys."
And after two or three months, we were able to obtain
a sample from at least the one brother,
the one that his name was listed in the box.
And I thought, "We're done."
And when we get the CFS report back,
he is excluded.
It is not him.
In June of 2019,
I was fortunate to meet Steve Kramer,
who was with the FBI at the time,
and worked on the Golden State Killer case.
He facilitated getting our DNA profile onto Family Tree DNA.
We're the first Canadian law enforcement kit
that Family Tree DNA accepted.
And I remember I was actually out for a jog,
and my phone goes, it's the day or two
after we've uploaded it, and it's Steve Kramer.
He's already looked at our kit.
He says, "Hey, you've got a second cousin."
I'm in heaven. I mean, a second cousin?
It's like, "This is awesome."
And it turns out that
his grandmother's brother
was married to someone else in the tree.
So now we know it's a descendant of this couple.
[Chapman] They had a son and a daughter.
The daughter had one son
who lived in Windsor at the time,
still lives in Windsor, but based on lifestyle,
really didn't expect this person to be
the person responsible.
The son from that intersection had three boys.
So when you look at it, we have five people,
including the father of the three boys
that could have potentially committed this crime.
There are three of those individuals
that are living.
Two of them are deceased.
One of the three brothers actually had died
in the previous year or so,
while we were investigating this.
So I was fortunate because the focus we had
was two individuals.
One was this deceased brother,
and the other was his half-brother.
Based on what I was seeing with that half-brother
and some of his known police contacts,
and sort of the similarity of some of the acts
that he did compared to what we're seeing in this case,
I thought, "It's going to be this person," right?
Our surveillance team, working on this person
in another jurisdiction,
was able to get a sample from him,
and the comparison comes back, it's not him.
His DNA does not match.
He is not the person responsible.
So it's just wind out of the sails.
I ended up contacting the rest home
that the other brother, who was in Alberta,
and we determined that
there was still a medical sample.
I wrote a warrant to obtain that sample.
It was obtained and brought back here
to Windsor from Alberta.
[Matte] In late 2019,
we received a lung tissue sample
that was in a paraffin-embedded block,
which we can sometimes work with and get DNA from,
and that's what was submitted to us.
[Chapman] I have a great relationship
with the CFS biologist
who worked on this case with me.
One thing I know about Melinda is she gets there fairly early.
I think she gets there about six o'clock in the morning.
She leaves early in the afternoon.
So if I send her an e-mail late in the afternoon,
she's not going to get it, but at 06:01 the next day,
I'm going to have a response.
After I collect myself, after seeing that
the one half-brother is not responsible for it,
I said, "I'm going to send her an e-mail and just say,
'Hey, just following up on that other sample,
the tissue sample.
We haven't heard back yet.'"
And I get a bounce-back reply
from her e-mail saying she's out of office.
Will return on Monday.
Welcome back to Crime Beat.
After nearly five decades, 700 suspects
and countless dead ends,
police think they've found Ljubica's killer.
But will the DNA results prove them right this time?
Here now is the conclusion of "A Million Dead Ends."
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[Matte] That particular morning,
it was December 9th, it was a Monday,
so I came in as I usually do.
You grab everything out of your mailbox.
And I realized,
"Oh, the results are back from this case.
This is great. Let's take a look."
We've had a number of comparison samples
that were submitted to us over the years.
This particular one was unique in that it was a biopsy sample.
Often we'll typically get reference samples
from people who are living,
so it may be a blood sample or a buccal sample,
but to get a lung tissue sample is not typical.
It's a bit unusual,
and so it sort of piques your interest.
I look at these papers, and my breath got taken away.
You look at them,
and you think, "Oh, my God."
And because I'm an early bird,
there's nobody else around,
and I'm the only one that knows.
And then I have the email from Scott
sitting in my inbox, and I can't tell him.
I worked an afternoon shift at Major Crime that night.
I got home.
By the time I got up in the morning,
it's eleven o'clock.
So I checked my email,
and I have nothing from her.
That's really unusual, because she's really good
at getting back to you.
We always have to get everything checked
to make sure that it is sound
and that I'm releasing reliable results.
Being able to finally email him back and say,
"Can I call you?"
With no answer to his question,
just, "Can I call you?"
That's when your heart starts racing.
I still remember I'm sitting on my couch,
12:30, phone rings, it's Melinda.
And I remember her saying, "Are you sitting down?"
And she says, "Yeah, this is a match."
All those profiles you've been generating
since the mid-'90s, and they're the same.
This matches.
A wave of emotion hits me.
I've been working this for five years.
Kent McMillan, eight years.
Luxford and Hardstone put a couple years on this.
All these guys, dating back to 1971,
who have carried this case on,
and for the first time in 48 years,
you've identified the person,
which is what you wanted,
but now it's all these extra steps, like,
okay, we've got to let the family know.
And you pull up in front of the house,
and you know the family's all waiting in there,
and you're like, "Oh, my God."
Paula absolutely understood what I was telling her.
It's not happiness because it's still
the death of Ljubica, but the fact that
there's finally some resolution,
there's a relief...
in that family that it was not somebody that they knew.
Over the past 48 years, we've continued to search
for answers in this case.
As of Monday, December 9th,
2019, that search is now over.
It was a very emotional press conference.
You know, the detectives that had worked on it,
even the last few years, there was ones there that were,
right from the beginning,
there wasn't a dry eye in the house.
You could tell those officers, it meant a lot to them.
And several of them said, like,
"This is the defining moment of my career."
We got a lot of letters saying, like...
"I've always wondered.
Thank God they finally found out who did this.
I'm just glad this person's not still out there.
I knew Ljubica when I was in kindergarten.
You know, I visited her grave over the years,
and I just always wondered,
and I'm just so glad this was finally solved."
So at that press conference,
the police said they have solved the case.
"We know exactly who it was.
This man moved somewhere out west
after the crime, and that's it."
It irked me.
So they made this big show about,
after all this time, finally solving this case.
We know who it was, closure for the family,
closure for the community.
Except there wasn't closure...
because they refused to say who it was.
They claimed it was a privacy issue,
because this man had died.
And they wouldn't even tell us when he had died.
Their argument was, since he's dead,
they cannot officially charge him.
And since they can't charge him,
they can't release his name,
because it would violate his right to privacy.
Their claim was that a dead person has a right
to privacy 30 years after their death.
First of all, they had released names of dead suspects
in the past, as have many other police forces.
So it just didn't hold water for me.
So we did several stories. We talked to experts.
We wrote columns saying, "This doesn't make any sense."
It's a general consensus, I think,
that you can't libel a dead person.
So that was one issue we had.
The other one was, it's only right
that after all this time,
the community should have closure too.
And the third issue we had was,
what other crimes out there could this help with?
There might be a cold case out west where he moved.
There might have been some in Windsor.
We don't know.
There's no way to know unless you put it out there.
So we didn't let it go.
The next step was a Freedom of Information request.
We asked for the identity of the killer,
his age at the time.
Did he know the family?
Where he lived in proximity to the family.
And where did he go out west when he moved?
And are you aware of any other crimes
that he might have done?
Denied.
Police wouldn't give it to us.
We appealed. Denied again.
So we appealed it to the Privacy Commission.
And that began more than a three-year process
of us fighting with them to get it.
And then late one night, I was sitting at home,
and I got an email
from the Windsor Police Privacy people saying,
"After a correspondence
from the Privacy Commission and after a new look at this
from new police management, here it is."
So I found out that the killer's name
was Frank Arthur Hall.
He was 22, an unemployed laborer at the time, I believe.
And he lived just down the street from this family.
I think they lived in the 1200 block
of Drouillard Road and he was in the 1800 block.
[Chapman] He was from Windsor.
He had some minor criminal contacts
with Windsor Police Service before and some afterwards.
Nothing of significant eye-catching nature
that you would look at this person and say,
"Oh, wow, look at that."
I found his contact card, and I could see that
in May of 1971, his address changed
to 1817 Drouillard Road,
which is six blocks from the induction point
and about two blocks from where she was murdered.
He did end up migrating out west,
and he lived in Edmonton for the remainder of his days.
He raised children after that.
Actually, that was the next chapter in this case,
because a few years later we decided
we were going to release the name.
We had to let his daughters know.
I've got to go out and tell them
some pretty horrific news about their father.
And I've never seen two people absorb
that type of news as well as these two did.
Yeah, very impressed with them.
[Trevor] The Windsor Police did say that it was
two parts, new management having another look at it,
and the Windsor Star fighting for it for so long,
that they finally decided to release it.
It was nice to at least acknowledge that
it was related somehow to this battle we went through.
[reporter] When you finally hear that
the case has been solved
and you hear the name, what did you think?
I never heard the name before.
That name was not in the box.
When I received the word that they had found him,
it was a real satisfying day.
Probably the crowning moment of my career
to actually get to that point.
And I think it's a crowning moment
for this police service
to be able to preserve that evidence
and just pursue this
until it was finally finished after almost 50 years.
From day one, with the officers on the scene,
with the forensic officers
and all the officers all along, it's like,
this is the culmination of everybody's hard work.
And why did we do this?
For the family.
Worth every second I put in.
[Chapman] You know, you have this picture
of this young girl walking away,
holding hands with this monster
who was about to take her life,
and her brother kind of watching,
not really understanding what was happening.
I think that was one of the things
that really struck a chord with people was that
that kind of thing never happened in Windsor before.
But now it happened, and like, it could happen to anybody.
That could happen to my kid,
or that could happen to your kid.
And so that was a scary thought for a lot of people.
It made them more concerned about their neighbour.
Like, we look out for our neighbour
a little more, maybe.
They never forgot. That was the thing.
They never forgot that little girl.
And that made me feel good,
because she shouldn't have been forgotten.
[Antony] Though Ljubica's family declined
to speak with us on camera for this episode,
they did tell us about
the shadow they lived under following her death.
With Frank Hall dead, they will never know why.
But they are immensely grateful
to the Windsor Police Service for never giving up.
In solving Ljubica's murder,
they received the Linda Shaw Memorial Award for cold cases.
I'm Antony Robart.
Thank you for joining us tonight on Crime Beat.
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