When Christine Jessop’s raped and murdered body was found in December 1984, I was just three months into my career as a journalist, working as a researcher for Southam News at the Queen’s Park legislature in Toronto.
Throughout the investigation of her death, the charging of her neighbour, Guy Paul Morin, and his first trial, I cut out every lurid news story on the criminal investigation and trial in six Ontario newspapers, and filed them in their designated files in my rows of clippings filing cabinets.
My job was to do what computers do so effortlessly now: to be able to draw up, at a moment’s notice, any tidbit of information our three reporters had read somewhere, or thought they had read. It meant reading all six papers inside out every day, and knowing where to put my fingers on any story.
It hit home with me because I was a weird-type guy; I collected stamps.
I read a lot about the case and the trial. I read about the evidence, Morin’s acquittal — and then, after I moved to Newfoundland in 1986, about his retrial and conviction, about how he was cleared by DNA evidence, about the sloppy and biased police work that led to him being charged in the first place.
What troubled me most?
The small thing that led him to being picked as a suspect in the first place.
Not physical evidence.
Two principal investigators led the case and focused on Morin quickly. The Kaufman inquiry into Morin’s conviction wrote they “met with Janet and Ken Jessop who mentioned that their neighbour, Guy Paul Morin, was a ‘weird-type guy’ and a clarinet player. This directed some suspicion towards Mr. Morin. In his notes for February 19, 1985, Inspector John Shephard referred to ‘suspect Morin,’ but at the inquiry he denied Mr. Morin was a suspect at that time. He said it was only ‘police jargon.’”
It hit home with me because I was a weird-type guy; I collected stamps. Played the viola, the violin’s oversized, deeper-voiced relative. I knew then — and know now — that I sometimes react strangely in social circumstances, and worse under pressure.
Is that, I thought, all it takes to be a suspect? In this case, it was certainly the starting point.
The police had already decided who was their main suspect — and at least one investigating officer unfailingly believed it, long after the real facts were in.
The investigators — one of whom was keeping two separate sets of notes — interviewed Morin and claimed he made suspicious comments. The Kaufman inquiry, though, found “(The) comments here were not ‘hard evidence’ of anything. Nothing was said even remotely to constitute an admission, or a demonstration of knowledge exclusive to the killer. The information in the officers’ possession did not justify any fixed view as to Morin’s guilt. However, (they) did ‘fix their sights’ on Guy Paul Morin — they, themselves, may not have appreciated the extent to which they did so. Subsequent interviews were unduly coloured by their premature, overly fixed views. This affected the quality of those interviews.”
Evidence, however tenuous, that might support Morin’s supposed guilt was amplified — evidence that could exonerate him was ignored or buried.
Why talk about this now? Well, last week, 36 years after the fact, the DNA that investigators found at the scene of Jessop’s murder was finally connected to the killer: Calvin Hoover, a family friend of the Jessops who committed suicide in 2015.
I know this seems almost flip, but I can’t help but wonder — if Guy Paul Morin had played something acceptable like electric bass instead of clarinet, if he had been more of an “average Joe,” would the real killer have been caught long ago?
What a colossal waste.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
