Top 10 Creepiest Canadian Mysteries that Were Finally SOLVED
It took years, but these creepy Canadian cold cases were finally solved. Welcome to WatchMojo and today, we’re looking at chilling mysteries, located in or involving citizens of Canada, that are generally considered to be solved.
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00:00 We have now some closure and that was very, very important to get.
00:05 Welcome to WatchMojo and today we're looking at chilling mysteries
00:09 located in or involving citizens of Canada that are generally considered to be solved.
00:14 But the breakthrough came last year using DNA testing and genealogy.
00:19 The Toronto homicides.
00:23 Between 2010 and 2017, eight men with ties to Church and Wellesley,
00:28 Toronto's LGBTQIA+ village, were killed by an unknown assailant.
00:32 Fear spread across the queer community, with many believing a serial killer was to blame.
00:37 Years after, rumors started swirling that a serial killer was stalking the gay village.
00:42 Ultimately, those fears were confirmed.
00:45 The resulting investigation was the most extensive ever undertaken by the Toronto Police Service.
00:51 It spawned two special task forces and involved a number of entities,
00:55 including the TPS, Ontario Provincial Police, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
01:00 Police set up a task force, Project Houston, to find any links between the missing men.
01:05 They find none, but MacArthur is hiding in plain sight.
01:11 Eventually, police connected several victims to landscaper Bruce MacArthur,
01:15 a man with a violent past who spent time in Church and Wellesley
01:18 and knew how to exploit an already vulnerable community.
01:22 It took over five years, but MacArthur was finally apprehended in 2018
01:26 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
01:28 In what came down to a symbolic decision,
01:31 the judge ordered MacArthur serve his sentences concurrently, or all at once.
01:36 If he's still alive, MacArthur will be 91 when he can apply for parole in 25 years.
01:42 The Disappearance of Terror and Erebus
01:45 This one's a different sort of mystery from the others on the list, but nonetheless harrowing.
01:50 It was 1845, and British Royal Navy officer John Franklin was tasked with exploring the
01:55 Northwest Passage in modern-day Nunavut.
01:57 He and his crew left the UK aboard two ships, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus.
02:02 "The crew feels ready to embark. They set out for the Northwest Passage in high spirits."
02:08 But after three long years of silence,
02:10 a rescue party was sent to find the missing expedition.
02:13 It was presumed that the ships were lost and everybody had died.
02:17 Throughout the subsequent century, we've since learned that the ships got stuck in pack ice.
02:21 "An Inuit historian and teacher named Louis Kamukak
02:25 shares specific stories passed down by his ancestors with the Canadian government,
02:29 providing the missing pieces to the 170-year-old puzzle."
02:34 Modern studies that began in the 1980s also uncovered that everyone died of a variety of
02:39 issues, including a lack of nutritious food, hypothermia, and disease.
02:44 What's more, some crew members highly likely engaged in cannibalism as a last resort.
02:49 Meanwhile, the sunken Erebus was found by Parks Canada in 2014,
02:54 and Terror was spotted two years later.
02:56 "Inside his cabin, a work desk dominates the center of the room,
02:59 with sealed drawers that almost certainly contain essential information about the Franklin expedition."
03:05 Nadine Machizkinek
03:07 Back in January of 2015, the body of Nadine Machizkinek was found laying at the bottom
03:12 of a laundry chute inside Regina's Delta Motel.
03:15 "The jury heard the 911 call to EMS from hotel staff, who had clearly and wrongly
03:22 assumed Machizkinek stumbled into the basement laundry room and did not fall down the chute."
03:28 Machizkinek was still alive and rushed to the hospital,
03:30 but she unfortunately died of her extensive injuries.
03:34 However, a number of mysteries surrounded the death.
03:37 For example, some wondered how she fit inside such a small opening,
03:41 and others questioned the involvement of two men who can be seen with Machizkinek on security footage.
03:45 "I could understand why they would have went with accidental, because it's easier,
03:49 it's an easy investigation to say, 'Oh, we found somebody laying on the floor with a pill bottle
03:53 beside them. Case closed.' It's so much easier to rule out an accident than to actually dig
03:59 hard and do investigative work."
04:02 It was eventually ruled that the death was accidental,
04:04 and Machizkinek was found with a number of drugs in her system.
04:07 While the RCMP criticized the investigative work of the Regina Police Service,
04:11 the case was nevertheless closed with this otherwise simple answer.
04:15 "Mistakes were made, delays happened in two or three different instances,
04:20 but it wasn't because of the person. It was because of some process pieces on our end as a service."
04:27 Arrested 40 years later.
04:29 Back in 1983, Toronto women Susan Tice and Erin Gilmore were assaulted and killed by an unknown
04:35 assailant. "Both were killed in 1983 in their homes, just kilometers apart." While they lived
04:42 in close proximity, the victims did not know each other, and their deaths occurred months apart,
04:46 with Tice's in August and Gilmore's in December. The cases quickly went cold, although a breakthrough
04:52 came in 2000 when it was discovered that the same perp had killed both victims. "In 2000,
04:57 police announced DNA linked both women to the same killer. It took 22 more years to figure out
05:03 who that DNA belonged to." However, it wasn't until 2019 that a suspect was finally named
05:09 thanks to the work of investigative genetic genealogy. Using DNA and an extensive family
05:14 tree, investigators were able to nail Moosony man Joseph Sutherland as the killer. "Researchers
05:20 successfully identified an unknown suspect's great-grandparents. They hired genealogists
05:25 and worked their way through the family tree to then eventually obtain a sample from Sutherland
05:32 and then got the match and then made that arrest." He was arrested in 2022, nearly 40 years after the
05:37 murders occurred. Adrian McCall. A large majority of murders are committed by people close to the
05:43 deceased. According to the Bureau of Justice, 76% of female victims are killed by someone they know.
05:50 That included Adrian McCall. McCall's body was found in a ditch on February 17, 2002,
05:56 with evidence showing that she had been violently killed. "Adrian's body was discovered in a ditch
06:01 near Nanton. No clue how she got there, no clue who brought her." Unfortunately, the trail quickly
06:07 went cold and it remained as such for many years. But thanks to technological advancements, police
06:13 later identified McCall's then-boyfriend, Stéphane Perrin, as the killer. "And he has been the person
06:19 of interest in this case for the past 16 years. Superintendent Garrett Woolsey revealing today
06:26 that it is advances in DNA that has finally brought this case to the courts." Perrin was
06:32 arrested exactly 16 years after McCall's body was found, on February 17, 2018. He was sentenced to
06:39 life in prison in 2022. "I just remember my hand shaking and I put the phone down and
06:45 I just said they got him." The Windsor Hum. Annoying and persistent humming has been reported
06:52 all around the world. New Mexico's Taos Hum is a famous one, and Canada saw its own version with
06:57 the Windsor Hum. "It's like a very low, almost like a vibration. You think you hear it, but it
07:04 could be your mind playing tricks on you." Residents of the city complained of an irritating droning
07:08 noise, with some even reporting a low-frequency vibration that shook their houses. "It's one that
07:13 keeps them up at night and rattles their windows, and it's been loud enough to crack eggs."
07:18 Unfortunately, no one knew where it was coming from. That said, most people suspected Zug Island,
07:25 a beautifully named industrial area of Detroit. Sure enough, they were correct. U.S. Steel
07:31 operated on the island, and they shut down the blast furnaces in April of 2020. "And you can
07:36 hear it, you can hear this horrible noise. This is a restricted area defined by Homeland Security
07:42 Regulations." Once that happened, the hum suddenly stopped, and no complaints have been made since.
07:48 The Babes in the Wood. It was January 14, 1953, when two bodies were found in Vancouver's Stanley
07:54 Park. The corpses were laid in a pre-arranged manner and found with a hatchet, leading
07:59 investigators to conclude that they were murdered. "A weapon found near their bodies, which were
08:04 hidden under a woman's coat." Unfortunately, that was all we knew for a long, long time. It was
08:11 initially believed that one of the victims was female, but a DNA test done in 1998 proved that
08:16 both were male. "Originally, police believed the victims were a boy and a girl, until the late
08:21 90s when Detective Brian Honeybourn brought the remains to Dr. David Sweet at UBC." Not only that,
08:27 they were brothers. However, we wouldn't get an official ID until 2022. Using genetic genealogy,
08:34 the brothers were found to be Derek and David Dalton, who were respectively born in 1940 and
08:39 1941. Their killer remains unknown, but getting an ID 70 years after the fact is certainly worth
08:46 celebrating. "Vancouver police admit they may never learn why Derek and David were killed,
08:51 or who killed them, but they vow to keep trying." The Nation River Lady. For many years,
08:57 Jewel Lankford was known simply as the Nation River Lady. Her remains were dumped from a bridge
09:02 in Castleman, Ontario, and deposited into the Nation River, where they were found in May of 1975.
09:08 The 48-year-old Tennessee woman went missing in 1975, soon after moving to Montreal. Police
09:14 investigated, but the case went cold. "Lankford was a tourist from Tennessee, and she was declared
09:20 missing after failing to return home. Her status remained unchanged for four decades, until a major
09:26 break in the case occurred in 2019. It was then that investigators exhumed her remains and gave
09:32 them a new round of DNA tests." "I was contacted by the local FBI here, and they asked me if I
09:38 would be willing to give DNA. They had a body that they thought might be our missing aunt.
09:45 We were told that it was a match." Once again using forensic genealogy, they were able to
09:50 officially link them to Lankford, making this the first Canadian case in which remains were
09:56 identified using the advanced method. "And the DNA sample was linked with others through a
10:03 genealogy and family tree analysis. Work was done to meet with the relatives, the surviving relatives
10:10 of Ms. Lankford, and obtain a number of DNA samples." The real killer of Christine Jessop.
10:16 Queensville, Ontario's Christine Jessop was kidnapped and killed back in 1984. The nine-year-old
10:21 went missing in October, and her remains were found over 30 miles away in December. "By the 30th
10:27 anniversary of Christine's death, hope of finding the killer was fading." Her neighbor, Guy-Paul
10:33 Morin, was initially suspected and eventually convicted of her death in 1992. Morin remained
10:39 in prison for over two years until DNA evidence officially exonerated him in January of 1995.
10:45 "She said her brother's eventual acquittal didn't provide enough closure for many, but now
10:50 there is no doubt." Morin's release prompted the publication of the Kaufman Report, which resulted
10:56 in a major overhaul of Canadian policing methods. Luckily, the real killer was identified in 2020,
11:02 once again using genetic genealogy. He was 28-year-old Calvin Hoover, a family friend of
11:08 the Jessops who initially helped search for the missing girl. Unfortunately, justice could not be
11:13 served as Hoover died in 2015. "If he were alive today, the Toronto Police Service would arrest
11:20 Calvin Hoover." "The 28-year-old was a neighbor and friend of the Jessop family." Before we continue,
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11:38 Sharon Pryor Hailing from Montreal, Sharon Pryor left her
11:44 home to meet some friends for pizza. She never returned. Three days later, her body was found
11:49 in the woods. "Life has not been easy for us since then, but Sharon has given us strength
11:56 for the past 48 years and especially today." This case occurred back in 1975, and it remained
12:03 unsolved for nearly 50 years. A man's shirt was used to bound Pryor, and from this, investigators
12:09 took a DNA sample. Using the modern magic of genetic genealogy, investigators traced this DNA
12:15 to a man named Franklin Romine. "For police who worked to solve the case, they say there was a
12:20 real sense of excitement when they started to realize they had actually identified the killer."
12:25 Unfortunately, Romine had long been dead, having passed away in 1982. His remains were exhumed in
12:32 2023 and matched with the DNA found at the crime scene. "They say new investigative techniques led
12:38 them to Romine, an American who died seven years after the murder." After 48 years, the killer
12:45 of Sharon Pryor was finally identified. What do you make of these answers to these mysteries?
12:51 Let us know in the comments below. "Something I'll never forget.
12:53 Been waiting, been waiting, and we've all been waiting 39 years for that call."
12:58 [Music]