- 18 hours ago
75-year-old Teresa Santos was a bit feisty but regarded fondly by most. Originally from Portugal, she was a jokester who loved to bake for people and volunteered with the disadvantaged in her community. So during COVID, when it’s discovered that she’s been dead in her apartment for days, fellow residents are distraught. 48 hours later, that distress turns to fear when the autopsy reveals she’s been murdered in a horrifically violent way. Who would do such a thing – and more importantly – how did they gain access to her 8th floor apartment?
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00:00This program is rated 14 plus and contains scenes of violence and mature subject matter.
00:08Viewer discretion is advised.
00:12Teresa was a creature of habit and she would like to call her sister very regularly.
00:19I did call her the next day. She didn't answer the phone.
00:22And I called her again. She didn't answer the phone.
00:30As soon as you opened the door, Teresa was lying there on the floor.
00:33There was blood in the bathroom, blood beside the door, even though the body was located on the floor in the hallway.
00:41So just things that I couldn't explain.
00:44You look at it, it's just a bloody pillow.
00:46But it's not until you turn it around and you see a bloody footwear impression.
00:51One of the things we wanted to establish was do those bloody footprints from inside of the apartment travel outside of the apartment.
01:00As soon as I went the other way, right away, I started seeing footwear impressions to rest in blue.
01:07And all of a sudden, those impressions, they turn into bare feet.
01:12You can see the toes.
01:14We are all leaned over.
01:17Suddenly the door opens and illuminated in the bright sunlight background is a dark silhouette.
01:24Welcome to Crime Beat.
01:29I'm Antony Robart.
01:30Tonight, when an elderly woman is found dead in her apartment, her family assumes it's from natural causes.
01:37But the shocking results of the autopsy leave investigators wondering, was it an accident or something more sinister?
01:45Here now is Catherine MacDonald with Death Comes to the Door.
01:55It's August 11th in 2020.
02:01And the weather was really hot.
02:0514 Division received a phone call regarding a smell coming from an apartment.
02:09Officers attended apartment 801 on 24 Shaw Street.
02:19That's the address of the Terra Bella, a subsidized apartment building in Toronto's West End.
02:25The call concerned an elderly resident named Teresa Santos.
02:30It was 10 o'clock and the super called me saying that ambulance was called.
02:34The first first responders to arrive at this were fire and paramedics who had gone in prior to police getting there.
02:43They were able to gain access to Teresa's unit.
02:48The apartment was a small one-bedroom apartment with a living room and a kitchen as well.
02:54As soon as you opened the door, Teresa was lying there on the floor.
02:58There was a pillow on top of her face.
03:01The first people on scene would have checked for a pulse, would have checked to see if there was any signs of life.
03:09It was fairly evident that Teresa was beyond help at that point.
03:15I got here about 10.30 and when I arrived, I think a supervising duty officer was also arriving.
03:22And the first officer told them they found the body.
03:28The fact that Ms. Santos died, that was the shock of itself.
03:34And then at that moment, we went into the office and found out pertinent information about family members and so forth.
03:41Teresa was found in a state of high decomposition.
03:45It was very difficult just to see what had happened.
03:49At first glance, because of her age and some of the disarray in the apartment, the coroner was unsure if there was a suspicious death.
03:58However, determined that we would have an autopsy.
04:01As Teresa is taken to the coroner's office, the apartment is sealed and police inform the family.
04:08My mother's got a nest doorbell, so when it rings, it's connected to my phone.
04:18So at 1 a.m., the doorbell goes and my phone gives me a notification.
04:23And I wake up and I'm like, who's at my mom's house at 1 o'clock in the morning?
04:27So when I look at the phone, I see a man in uniform.
04:31And I ask my wife, call my mom and make sure she does not open the door until I confirm who's at the door.
04:37And I'm talking through the camera to this person standing outside.
04:40And I'm asking him for identification.
04:42Who are you?
04:42Why are you here?
04:44He asked me, is this Lucinda Oliveira's house?
04:47And I said, yeah.
04:48So he said, do you know or does she know a Teresa Santos?
04:53And I go, yeah, it's my mom's sister.
04:55What did the police tell you about what had happened?
05:00They said they found my sister dead in the apartment.
05:05And they couldn't give me any more news that time.
05:08They said they only find her dead.
05:11So I thought maybe she fell down and she couldn't get up and she will, because that could happen.
05:17Teresa was, after all, 75 years old, and she needed a walker to get around.
05:22The cause of death would not be known until the autopsy two days later.
05:27Prior to any autopsy, the bodies are CT scanned.
05:31And the pathologist at the time noticed unusual things in unusual places.
05:37They found broken vertebraes, broken ribs, dislodged teeth, broken pieces of mirror found in her stomach content, which obviously raised suspicion.
05:48So we had a couple officers from our office attend to photograph the autopsy.
05:53And it wasn't until then that we located a knife down her throat.
05:57When I took that phone call, I couldn't, it was, I had to ask a couple times of what it was.
06:06And the detective explained it to me a couple of times.
06:10There is nothing to prepare you for someone to say that we have this deceased person and they have a knife that's not just lost in her throat, but it's pierced the base of their skull.
06:19Shocking is the only way to describe it.
06:21She had multiple facial fractures as well, but those were things that we were unable to see when we had originally seen Teresa.
06:31Her body was so decomposed that you could not even see the knife that was inside of her mouth.
06:37As shocking as it was, it didn't yet constitute murder.
06:41So a knife in the back of the throat, unfortunately, isn't enough because there are mental illness considerations, there are accidental considerations.
06:51There's a lot of things that could conceivably cause that.
06:54So the one factor, while a clear red flag was not enough to deem it a homicide, it just remained a suspicious death at that point.
07:02It seemed very likely, but there still is the potential that somebody was doing something misadventurous inside their apartment and had fallen on a knife and caused their death.
07:16We had also looked at the possibility of PICA, which is the ingestion of foreign undigestible objects into a person's body, but upon further investigation, there was no evidence that that had ever taken place.
07:36We really had to keep our mind open to all possibilities.
07:39Not knowing when Teresa was last seen or heard from, police canvassed for video and interviewed residents.
07:46They also took a closer look at seeing photos.
07:50And what we see are blood, decomposed food around the apartment, and we see a room that's in disarray.
08:01But we don't really have a good, clear picture about what had happened.
08:07So we asked the investigator from 14 Division to ensure that FIS goes over and takes some more comprehensive photos of the scene.
08:23As soon as I got there, I had several areas of concern, a couple of red flags that I didn't like.
08:29There was blood all over the walls, on the floor, blood on the ceiling.
08:33There was blood in the bathroom, blood beside the door, even though the body was located on the floor in the hallway.
08:40So just things that I couldn't explain.
08:43Broken chain, the front door.
08:46No one could answer me how that happened.
08:48When we went back and spoke to the landlord, he swears that he turned the key to the lock and the door opened because of that.
08:57But when we looked into the apartment later, we found that the sliding latch lock was actually disengaged from the door,
09:06had been completely shattered, and was on the floor in the blood and the bodily fluids that were on the ground.
09:13So someone had forced their way in.
09:15Yes.
09:17They'd also noticed a pillow on the couch, and the chair beside had someone else's belongings on it.
09:24We thought that there may have been another person living with Teresa.
09:29Family advised us that there was a young man who had been friends with Teresa, and had started showing up at family gatherings.
09:38He was also Portuguese, and they had met him a couple of times, but weren't really sure about his intentions with Teresa.
09:48A young man that they called a helper to Teresa.
09:54It was someone that she had met at one of the community centers, and he was significantly younger.
09:59I believe he was in his 20s or 30s, and Teresa was a retired woman.
10:05So the relationship was something we were interested in.
10:09We were also interested in why he wasn't around when he had been around so regularly before now.
10:16I pointed to my team to start looking at video at 24 Shaw, and seeing if we could determine when we last saw Teresa,
10:23as well as who she may have interacted with, and in particular looking to see if we could find this young man coming and going from the building.
10:31And then we get to the pillow.
10:34The pillow that had been covering Teresa's face when first responders found her.
10:39Not knowing her condition, they had flung it aside in hopes of helping her.
10:44The bloody pillow that was found on the floor, that to me was the most important piece of evidence.
10:49You look at it, it's just a bloody pillow, but it's not until you turn it around and you see a bloody footwear impression right in the middle of that pillow.
11:01At first I thought, did I step on it?
11:03Did my partner or maybe first responders step on it by accident?
11:07But it wasn't until I looked at it closely and I noticed the word Puma inverted in the middle of the impression.
11:13The footprint on the back of the pillow, the bloody footprints within the scene, likely there was a person living with Teresa that was unaccounted for.
11:30And we know that Teresa has a knife in her mouth.
11:34There really was no other explanation for her death than murder.
11:39Welcome back.
11:54When residents of the Terra Bella learn that 75-year-old Teresa Santos was murdered, grief turns to fear.
12:01The door was deadlocked from the inside, raising a chilling question.
12:06Did a stranger gain access to the building or is the killer someone who lives among them?
12:14We now return to Catherine MacDonald and death comes to the door.
12:23Teresa's death shook everyone who knew her.
12:26Some were nervous because they say Santos, who regularly hung out at this nearby senior's drop-in centre, had no enemies.
12:32It happened to her, it could happen to anyone.
12:36Everybody just described Teresa as a friendly woman.
12:40Some younger residents viewed her as a kind lady who often offered a smile and some nice words to them.
12:46Sometimes she wouldn't be afraid to speak her mind about some things if people were acting up,
12:51but everybody thought that she was a nice old woman that was part of the community there.
12:56Teresa was a happy person.
12:58I've never seen her upset, she was always laughing and having a good time whenever we had parties.
13:06It was very giving.
13:07Her jokes, I love her jokes.
13:09I love it.
13:11I love her calling me and saying,
13:13Oh, Cindy, you know what?
13:14Don't go in the water to the garden because I already did when it was raining.
13:19I said, Okay, thank you, Teresa, for letting me know.
13:22Yeah, she called me for that kind of stuff.
13:25There was no day that we don't have something to say, or mean to her or her to me, either way.
13:31I miss her a lot.
13:33How long would you talk on the phone every day?
13:36Oh, when she started talking, we can have an hour or more in the pa-pa-pa-pa-pa.
13:41Sometimes things that passed, you know, from the past, from when we were kids.
13:45One of 12 children, Teresa was born in Portugal in 1944, just months before the end of World War II.
13:55We grew up in the farmhouse.
13:57We had all kind of animals there, and we were farmers until we came to Canada.
14:03I came to Canada in 1969.
14:05She came maybe 89, around there.
14:08She was there for over 30 years.
14:10She was a janitor.
14:11That was a job.
14:12Until she fell down, she hurt herself when she was around 60 years old.
14:17She couldn't walk.
14:19She needed a cane.
14:20She needed a walker.
14:20It never stopped her from getting around.
14:22Never stopped her from going to Christopher House, which is like a 30-minute bus ride or a walk from her apartment.
14:31She did a lot for the community center.
14:33She was a volunteer.
14:34She would help, like, if you don't know how to do crochet or knitting or whatever, she will help you to learn to do.
14:44And she did a lot of stuff for the center itself to help out with the community.
14:48They liked her there.
14:49She was very happy there.
14:50Teresa was also a wife and mother.
14:55She has four children.
14:56One passed away when it was three and something.
15:00And she had three girls, three beautiful girls.
15:03They were all immigrants here.
15:04But the rest of the family didn't like it in Canada.
15:08Over time, her daughters and husband all returned to Portugal.
15:11She stays behind by herself.
15:14So she was alone, so I decided her to be in the apartment building would be safer for her than live in the house by herself.
15:26And I did a mistake.
15:28The last time I spoke to her was on August the 8th.
15:32It was a Saturday.
15:34And I was supposed to go to church.
15:36And she called me, and I see that she's calling me.
15:39So I called her back.
15:40I said, Teresa, how are you doing?
15:42So I'm fine.
15:44And we were shut for a bet.
15:45And good night.
15:47No, I did call her the next day.
15:49She didn't answer the phone.
15:51And I called her again.
15:52She didn't answer the phone.
15:53So I said, maybe she went to a friend's house.
15:56Because sometimes she's coming to a friend's house for a weekend.
15:59She's supposed to be home on Monday.
16:01I called again.
16:02No answer.
16:02So I said, maybe she's met with me for a reason that I don't know.
16:06I thought to myself.
16:07Not that we hadn't discussed or been met with each other or anything.
16:11But I called two friends of mine.
16:14I said, would you please call her for me and see if she answers you?
16:18No, Teresa doesn't answer the phone.
16:20I said, oh, I'm kind of worried.
16:22And then I thought, well, if she doesn't answer the phone,
16:24then tomorrow I have the superintendent come open the door and find out what's going on.
16:27But before it comes, somebody knocked my door at one in the morning.
16:34Who was that?
16:35He pulled his self as her.
16:36He comes in to my, here, to the living room, telling me that I'm going to bring you news about Teresa.
16:50And so we find her dead on her apartment.
16:54And I kind of didn't know what to say, so I started to panic, crying.
17:07Why my sister?
17:08Why this?
17:09Why?
17:10What happened?
17:11What happened to my sister?
17:14We don't know yet, but we find her dead on the floor.
17:17At that point, everybody in the family was just under the impression that it was a natural cause.
17:23It was, my aunt just fell or hurt herself, and that's how she passed away.
17:30A few days later, Joe receives an unsettling call from the medical examiner.
17:35She asked me, do you know if anybody had any issues or grudges against Teresa?
17:42I didn't know how to answer that, so I said no.
17:45My aunt was a happy person, and she got along with everybody.
17:49And I asked the examiner, I go, like, why would you ask me?
17:52Why would you ask me if someone had something against my aunt?
17:56And that's when she said she found the knife lodged in her throat.
18:00And it was so deep that they couldn't see the knife when they brought her body in.
18:06Like, that's crazy.
18:09Like, how?
18:12How can somebody do that?
18:16Thoughts turned to Teresa's young companion.
18:19The first thing that came to my mind was him.
18:22But then my sister told me two weeks prior to that, that he had gone to Madeira.
18:27We looked into airline bookings and were of the belief that Jose had left the country.
18:37We weren't sure when he had last seen Teresa or when he was coming back at that point.
18:46And we had not been able to get in contact with him at all, despite having phone numbers and emails for him.
18:55So they begin combing through video.
18:58We have our team of officers are just sitting down, picking a camera and watching time frames, looking for Teresa, and then looking for the young man that was her helper, as well as being live to anything that seems strange.
19:11Also, we wanted to start interviewing people from that apartment building, because you never know who has some small piece of information that is so incredibly helpful.
19:20Teresa was a creature of habit, and she would like to call her sister very regularly.
19:27Later, we spoke to Teresa's sister, who said she had spoken to her on the phone at about 4.30.
19:33And Teresa was going to go pick up the mail, and then she was going to come back to her apartment and have dinner.
19:39And that's exactly what we saw on the video.
19:42Teresa was last seen around 5 o'clock on the 8th.
19:46We have her going down in the elevator to the lobby of the building.
19:51But she goes and gets the mail, and then she returns at approximately 5.15, back up to the 8th floor.
20:01When Teresa leaves the elevator, the last time that we see her, less than a minute later, the elevator opens and no one gets on.
20:10The only way for an elevator door to open on the 8th floor is that somebody engaged the button.
20:17That means that somebody was outside of there, pushed the button to get on, at a very close proximity and time to when Teresa was entering her apartment.
20:40Welcome back.
20:44Teresa Santos died when a knife pierced her brain stem.
20:48The only clues pointing to the killer are three bloody footprints.
20:53As investigators wait for a warrant to continue searching her apartment, they discover prints elsewhere and are surprised where they lead.
21:02We now return to Catherine MacDonald, and death comes to the door.
21:11Yeah, there's a lot of it.
21:12Because we knew that there was these footprints, there was a lot of blood in the crime scene, we spoke with our FIS officers and asked if they could look for physical evidence outside the apartment.
21:21So in that hallway.
21:22One of the things we wanted to establish was, do those bloody footprints from inside of the apartment, travel outside of the apartment?
21:33We want to know where the offender went after he committed the murder.
21:39On the 8th floor, as soon as you open the elevators, it's all tiles, leading up to the deceased apartment.
21:46The rest of the hallway is all carpeted.
21:48So I decided I'm going to use a chemical known as Bluestar Luminol, which reacts to the hemoglobin of the blood.
22:02So there's blood that's invisible.
22:04Once you spray it with Bluestar Luminol, it will react.
22:07It will give you like a bluish, a fluorescent bluish in color for a few seconds before it goes away.
22:148th floor.
22:15So I get there, excited to use this chemical, and as soon as the elevator doors open, what I see is the wet floor sign, and I smell lemons, which was lovely.
22:29But, you know, clean floor, but I was disappointed because all my evidence has just been wiped.
22:35However, you know, I still had the carpeted hallways to examine, so I was really hoping I would find something.
22:44But it's important to know that I'm looking at it with regular lighting.
22:47I don't see anything.
22:49There's, it's just a regular carpet.
22:51And you're talking about, this is maybe several days, maybe a week after she had died.
22:59And people living on the floor, children, families, they're walking in and out, and you don't see anything.
23:06But for Bluestar Luminol to work, it's got to be complete darkness.
23:09And unfortunately, there was no one switch to turn off the lights on the 8th floor.
23:14They spent hours unscrewing every bulb and blacking out every window.
23:20And then...
23:21I remember checking the east hallway first.
23:25For whatever reason, I decided to just go one way, and I didn't get any reaction.
23:30And I was disappointed.
23:31Like, is this thing working?
23:33Is it not?
23:34But I decided to, okay, well, I'm not going to continue because I'm not getting any reaction.
23:39And I started going the other way.
23:40As soon as I went the other way, right away, I started seeing footwear impressions, fluorescent blue.
23:51And I was so excited.
23:53Same pattern with the word Puma, inverted in the middle of the impression.
23:57I remember telling my partner, go grab your camera, go grab your tripod.
24:01We're going to be here for a long time.
24:03They followed the prints down the hallway and around two corners.
24:07It was clear footwear impressions, consistent with someone walking, alternating between left and right.
24:15And all of a sudden, those impressions, they turned into bare feet.
24:19You could see the toes.
24:22But it stopped right in front of apartment 809.
24:26But I continued.
24:27I didn't stop there.
24:28I continued all the way to the end of the hallway where they have an exit to a stairwell.
24:32But there was no reaction whatsoever.
24:35The last reaction I got was in front of 809.
24:41Hello.
24:42I remember telling homicide investigators this information.
24:45Hey, Pete.
24:45And they're like, did you just say 809?
24:48Excellent.
24:49Okay, yeah, we can come down there.
24:50I was excited because this unit had come to my attention because the Detective Constable Gilligan had been reviewing video all day.
24:58And a man kept showing up.
25:00His behavior was off.
25:02His mannerisms, they were just strange.
25:03And they drew his attention frequently.
25:06So Detective Constable Gilligan took it upon himself to try to figure out who this man was.
25:11And it was at that point that we determined that he resided at Unit 809 in the building.
25:16He didn't understand what significance, if any, that person had had.
25:20But he'd shown up on video significantly.
25:24I said, that's great.
25:24Keep an eye.
25:25But at this point, you know, we had a different direction of person of interest because we had this young man that was a helper to Teresa that we were still trying to determine what his role was.
25:37The homicide team goes back to the apartment to see the bloody trail for themselves.
25:43I can still remember that I was the third one back.
25:45And at the head of us was Detective Jendi.
25:48And all I could see was a black hallway.
25:51I could hear him spray.
25:53And then footprints began to appear.
25:57It was incredible.
25:59And the footprints were incredibly detailed.
26:02And every time he sprayed, a purple footprint lit up.
26:06And it was like a ghost was walking down the hallway, traveling all the way down the hall until just before apartment 809.
26:14Suddenly, there was bare footprints.
26:15It was like someone had taken off their shoes and their bloody feet were suddenly there.
26:23And all you hear at that point is my spray bottle.
26:26Chh, chh, chh.
26:28You can hear some TV inside the unit.
26:31We're standing there.
26:33We are all leaned over.
26:35It is much like the Scooby-Doo gang investigating something out of the mystery machine.
26:40And then all of a sudden, the TV sound goes off.
26:44And all you hear is my spray bottle.
26:46Chh, chh.
26:49Suddenly, the door opens to apartment 809.
26:53And illuminated in the bright sunlight background is a dark silhouette.
26:58This man steps up, topless, full of tattoos.
27:04His hair is just wild.
27:06It took me by surprise, I'll be honest with you.
27:08I was not expecting that door to open.
27:10That person inside the door was Damien Allred.
27:13He was like, what are you doing here?
27:16We introduced ourselves.
27:17We're the police.
27:18We're just investigating the murder.
27:19It was eerie.
27:21Eerie and awkward.
27:23Because at that point, I was trying not to give up what we were doing, why we were there,
27:28and give any indication of this big discovery that we had.
27:32I asked him if he had seen anything.
27:34And he had not, didn't have much to offer, as far as an answer.
27:37And that was then.
27:39It was a brief, it was a brief encounter.
27:41Jason and I had already identified Damien Allred in a video.
27:47Peter Jendi had now identified Damien Allred due to the proximity of the bloody footprints.
27:54In our heads, it was all coming together at the same time.
27:59Damien was known to be a more aggressive individual within the building.
28:02He had accosted a number of people on elevators.
28:07He had asked some of them to pray with him,
28:11made some comments about voodoo and witchcraft going on within the building.
28:16We had a couple of ladies in the building who had had really negative experiences.
28:21One of the ladies had been accosted in the elevator,
28:23and he had yelled after her as she had walked down the hallway,
28:26and it had scared her quite a bit.
28:28Not being a nice person doesn't make you a murderer,
28:30but when that door opened, it opened to another suspect.
28:33And we had to figure out what we were going to do.
28:35As police took a closer look at Damien Allred's possible involvement in Teresa Santos' death,
28:50they were still trying to find her young companion, Jose.
28:53I last had him on video, I believe it was about two weeks prior,
28:57coming and going with shopping bags and really fulfilling that helper role
29:03that he had been described as providing.
29:06With the assistance of our border agencies,
29:08we determined that it had been the two weeks before that he had left
29:12and had arrived back home in Portugal,
29:14so he was not in the country at the time that Teresa had passed.
29:17That left Damien, who was seen on camera numerous times around the Terrabella,
29:23the day Teresa died.
29:25He was going up and down from the 8th floor,
29:28starting at about 8 o'clock in the morning, carrying garbage bags.
29:32And he was walking to and from the garbage bin.
29:38When he went up in the elevator closer to 4 o'clock,
29:43his hair was tied up in a ponytail,
29:46he was wearing a t-shirt,
29:48he was wearing shorts,
29:49he was wearing slides,
29:51and he just appeared to be going about his daily activity.
29:55His footwear stood out.
29:57Forensic officers had determined the Puma prints at the crime scene
30:00were made by a pair of slides.
30:02The RCMP has a database of footwear impressions that they keep.
30:06So one of the detectives over at Forensics
30:09was able to narrow down some models for us.
30:12One of those models was what looked to be what he was wearing in the video.
30:15Those Puma slides become significant
30:19because after we last see Teresa,
30:21we never again see him in those shoes.
30:24Teresa had gotten off the elevator at 5.15.
30:27Then the other elevator door opened and no one got on.
30:31At 5.33, just 18 minutes later,
30:36Damien gets on looking markedly different than he had all day.
30:40He was dishevelled.
30:41His hair was no longer tied back.
30:43He wasn't wearing a shirt and he is no longer wearing shoes.
30:48He was sweating and he was sort of pacing within the elevator.
30:55And that really caught our attention.
30:59At times, to me, it looked like he had a wild look about him.
31:03How he would look around,
31:05looking at people coming and going from the elevator down in the foyer
31:08that he would cross paths with.
31:09The next time we see him reappear is approximately 20 minutes later.
31:15He's changed his clothes and he looks more in a state of composure.
31:20And that became the building blocks of our case.
31:24But there still wasn't those pieces of evidence
31:26to move us towards laying a charge.
31:28Until an interview with another resident provided an opportunity.
31:32He told me a story about how Damien had held him within the elevator,
31:38had threatened him,
31:39and was forcing him to pray with him before he was allowed to leave.
31:43This made the male very scared.
31:46And he wanted Damien charged.
31:49On August 16th, they arrested Damien on the charge of threatening.
31:54And at the same time, executed a search warrant at his apartment.
31:58We presented Damien's wife with the search warrant for the apartment.
32:05She knew Teresa had died,
32:06but she was very adamant that her husband had not been involved in that death.
32:13That he was a gentle and kind man.
32:16We weren't sure what we were going to find inside there.
32:19We were wondering if Damien had tracked blood into the apartment.
32:24If the clothes that he had used during the murder were inside the apartment.
32:27But when we walked in, we were quite surprised to find
32:31the apartment barely had anything in it.
32:34It was during COVID, so there was heightened concern for germs from everywhere,
32:39not just within this case.
32:42And it appeared that Damien had been using that
32:46to rid his apartment of everything.
32:49And there was a lot of Damien's clothes,
32:52but not clothes for many of the other people.
32:55We found clothing that could have been the same clothing that Damien wore,
33:02but we did not find the puma slides at all.
33:06That day, I was back and forth, back and forth.
33:08The next day, Detective Hillier interviewed him
33:12with regards to Teresa's murder.
33:14I learned that he'd been living in the building for, I believe he said,
33:16three years with his wife.
33:18He had two stepchildren and he had a young baby, I would say.
33:20He had come from Antigua, where he had lived for some time.
33:25He didn't know Teresa except to see her, didn't know her by name.
33:28And that he often would call the front desk,
33:30concerned about her welfare because of some of the smells coming from the unit.
33:34He had some derogatory names to call her, which I'd prefer not to speak about.
33:41But it was clear that Damien was annoyed by Teresa.
33:46During the interview, Detective Hillier asked about the slides.
33:50In the lead up to that, he had expressed only having a couple pairs of shoes.
33:55I was able to produce some still images we had from the video
33:59showing him in a pair of flip-flops in, what did he say?
34:05They're in a bucket.
34:06They have a bucket of shoes that the family has.
34:08They might be his wife's.
34:10But then when I said, could these be your wife's shoes?
34:12Could those be your wife's footprints?
34:14He was quick to say no and began to tell me
34:17that I would find those shoes at his apartment.
34:20I explained to him that we had conducted a search warrant at his apartment
34:23and that shocked him.
34:25He continued to say that these sandals would be there
34:27and we went back and forth quite a bit because I said,
34:30are they hidden there?
34:31We've searched your apartment.
34:32They're not there.
34:33And ultimately, he admitted to throwing them out.
34:41One of the craziest parts of the interview,
34:43he suddenly leans forward and shows me injuries.
34:47Look, cat scratches.
34:49Oh my gosh.
34:50I still remember it's on his left arm, on the back of his left arm.
34:53He had these scratch marks and he said that it was his cat.
34:57And he explained to me that his cat had been sick
35:00and that he had ended up drowning his cat
35:05in an effort to put it out of its misery
35:07because he couldn't afford to euthanize it properly
35:09and then showed me these injuries.
35:15The injuries on the back of his arm,
35:17there was these three scratch marks
35:20that, again, he characterized as from this cat.
35:23And you can see it's a cat.
35:25Yeah.
35:25It's a cat plot.
35:26Yeah.
35:27Right?
35:28Yeah.
35:28You can relax because it's starting to open up a little bit
35:30so it doesn't go on.
35:31Oh, right.
35:31As he, you know, showed them to me and moved his arm,
35:35they began to weep, clearly showing that they were fresh.
35:38And I knew those were not from a cat.
35:42During the interview, I took it upon myself
35:45to phone Damien's wife and ask about the family cat.
35:48And Damien's wife advised me
35:51that the family cat had run away weeks prior
35:55and they hadn't seen it since.
35:57A 40-year-old man is facing second-degree murder charges
36:00in connection with the death of a 75-year-old woman in Toronto.
36:03Damien Allred was arrested and charged with second-degree murder.
36:07People who live here are shocked.
36:09That's good news.
36:10Are you serious?
36:11They've just charged someone by this name with second-degree murder.
36:14Oh, thank you, Jesus.
36:15Although the arrest was a win.
36:19It wasn't enough because we had to place him in the apartment.
36:24We had to link him concretely to that crime scene.
36:27And at this stage, it just wasn't there.
36:40Welcome back.
36:41Armed with an overwhelming case,
36:43police have charged Damien Allred
36:45with the murder of his neighbour, Teresa Santos.
36:48But they still need to find evidence
36:50that places him at the scene of the crime.
36:54We now return to Catherine MacDonald
36:57with a conclusion of Death Comes to the Door.
37:05Police had a trail of bloody footprints
37:07leading from Teresa's apartment to Damien's door,
37:10but no shoes to help prove he had made them.
37:13So the next thing we did was what we call a foot impression warrant.
37:17We took impressions of Mr. Allred's feet,
37:19and then we had to seek out an expert,
37:22and that was Detective Harris from the Peel Regional Police.
37:26The ridges, this is the friction ridge,
37:28it's like what you have in your hand.
37:30We don't keep databases like they do with fingerprints.
37:33So if we have friction ridges on a foot,
37:36there's no database we can put it into,
37:38and then it will give us some people's names
37:41that we can compare it to.
37:42It doesn't work like that.
37:44But if I had that,
37:45then I would be able to say
37:46that this did come from the same source.
37:49Without that,
37:50we're looking at the quality of the foot impression.
37:55Can I see all five toes?
37:56Can I see the ball of the foot?
37:59The top end of it,
38:01there's what's called the metatarsal ridge.
38:03The impression will leave like a line.
38:05It's where the ball of the foot is,
38:06and the shape of that is something that we compare.
38:09And then the heel,
38:10and then how much of the arch can we see?
38:12We then have to look at,
38:13well, how was the impression made?
38:15The impression could be left in blood.
38:17It could be in mud.
38:18It could water, snow, and salt.
38:23Many different ways that that impression
38:25could be left to the scene.
38:26Toronto Police sent Detective Harris
38:28Damien's prints
38:30and two images from the crime scene.
38:32The one impression was way better than the other.
38:35I could see the toes,
38:36part of that metatarsal ridge,
38:38the outline of the heel.
38:39I could also tell that it was on carpet.
38:43For the second impression,
38:44there were gaps in the toes.
38:46It looked like maybe just the outline of the toe.
38:48And the foot as well.
38:49The blood looked like
38:52it was extending away from the foot.
38:54And then it was just an empty space inside of that.
38:58That makes it tricky to do a comparison.
39:00But you outline everything that you see,
39:02and then you end up with this tracing.
39:04And once that is done,
39:06and you've documented everything that you can see,
39:09you do the same thing with your known impression.
39:11Once you have that,
39:12then you overlay both your unknown and your unknown,
39:16and you can start to see
39:17if there are any similarities between the two.
39:20The impression which was of better quality
39:23from the crime scene was F6,
39:26which was the right foot.
39:28And I take my tracing from the crime scene,
39:31and my conclusion was that there was a level of support
39:34that that impression came from a suspect
39:36that was provided by Toronto Police.
39:37Now, the other impression, F7,
39:41it appears to me that the blood may have been up
39:44around the sides of the foot.
39:45So what you now have is a kind of like the outer border
39:49of where the foot would have been.
39:51So when I looked at that,
39:53it perfectly aligned with the impression from the suspect.
39:57Shortly after, Toronto Police got more good news.
40:01Damien Allred's skin is found underneath Teresa's fingernails.
40:07I call that the nail in the coffin evidence.
40:11There is no way that Damien could explain
40:15Teresa having his DNA under her fingernails.
40:21On November 7th, 2022, the trial began.
40:25In the Crown's opening address,
40:27the jury was told that Santos had broken ribs,
40:29a fractured spine, a dislocated jaw,
40:32and injuries to her face.
40:34Damien Allred, who is now 42 years old,
40:36has pleaded not guilty.
40:38Three weeks later, on November 25th,
40:41a jury convicted him of second-degree murder.
40:45A man who brutally beat his elderly neighbour to death
40:48in 2020 has been sentenced to life in prison
40:51with no chance of parole for 17 years.
40:54What would you say to Damien Allred
40:56about what he did to your sister?
40:57I would say to him that he was a monster,
41:00and I would ask him,
41:01why did he do it?
41:02She couldn't defend herself.
41:05She was a poor, handicapped lady,
41:08which has no defence.
41:11And why did he attack her and kill her?
41:15When I saw a picture of this man, I'm like,
41:18he was a building compared to her.
41:22He was a tower over her.
41:23Like, she had, there was nothing she could have done.
41:26And the brutality of it, like, it was,
41:29it was horrible to read.
41:31I, like, I sit sometimes and I wonder,
41:35like, I can only imagine how much she suffered.
41:38The detective told me that it lasted 15 minutes,
41:43and she believes even less.
41:44And sometimes I think a minute is a long time.
41:49So that must have been an eternity for my aunt.
41:53For a long time I was afraid to leave.
41:56I was afraid of my own shadow
41:57because I always like to have someone to watch me over.
42:02Even now, after all this, I am in the kitchen.
42:06I look at the window and look like someone always watched me.
42:09It's not true, but it's my imagination.
42:12While she was alive, Teresa was Lucinda's best friend.
42:17She had been always.
42:19I have other sisters there,
42:21but she was the only one that we talk every day, all the time.
42:25We were always ready to each other for anything we need.
42:30She couldn't do much, but she did a lot.
42:33She doesn't want to be worried.
42:36Teresa, why didn't you tell me about this or that?
42:38Oh, you have enough for you.
42:40I don't have to worry you.
42:42Part of what haunts the family is that in 2020,
42:45Teresa was contemplating leaving Canada.
42:48That year, my cousin was here.
42:51So my aunt's daughters, Teresa's daughters from Portugal,
42:53they came to visit.
42:55And they were asking her to move back to Portugal
42:58to come live there.
43:00And my aunt told everybody that she wanted one more year
43:04and she would have packed up and gone home.
43:07So the following year,
43:08she would have been at home with her family and her grandkids.
43:11Years later, there are still remnants of the police tape
43:15on the door of apartment 801.
43:18It's just a subtle reminder,
43:20not of the tragedy, but really of her.
43:23She always liked to laugh under her breath and chuckle,
43:25not out loud, but just chuckle in her body,
43:28just reverberate with laughter.
43:30And I can see that today.
43:32I can see her still doing that.
43:33I can see her personality was of someone
43:36who was always not struggling,
43:38but always fighting just to keep living.
43:41Nothing came easy for her in life.
43:43And so that was built into her nature to be a fighter.
43:46And I appreciated that part of her personality.
43:49She loves living.
43:50She loves life.
43:51She was crippled, I know.
43:53Her body itself was strong.
43:55Like, I think she was,
43:57she can live for years to come.
44:00It was nice to see that the people took up that collection
44:04and that there was a somber tone.
44:07Because in the end,
44:08even though I didn't speak to Ms. Santos,
44:10you knew Ms. Santos lived in a building.
44:12She was a neighbor.
44:13And I think that's what people felt.
44:14They lost a neighbor.
44:16A quiet neighbor didn't bother anyone.
44:19Today's residents still remember Teresa.
44:25Frank even went to her gravesite in Portugal,
44:28where she was buried.
44:29It was comforting to see where she was resting.
44:32I never got to say goodbye to her.
44:34I'm not sure if it was a goodbye,
44:35but it was a visit.
44:41The original charge against Damien Allred
44:44for threatening another Terrabella resident
44:46was stayed in light of his murder conviction.
44:50In September 2025,
44:52he filed an appeal seeking a new trial
44:55or a reduction of his parole ineligibility.
44:58As of this airing,
44:59no decision had been reached.
45:01Thank you for watching Crime Beat.
45:06I'm Anthony Robart.
45:07Want more episodes of Crime Beat?
45:11Listen to the Crime Beat podcast
45:12now for free on Apple Podcasts,
45:15Spotify,
45:16or wherever you find your favorite podcast.
45:19And for past episodes of Crime Beat,
45:21go to the Global TV app,
45:23visit globaltv.com,
45:25or check out our Crime Beat YouTube page.
45:31Crime Beat.
45:32Thanks for sharing,
45:34us today.
45:36Aquí too.
45:42I like this one.
45:48This one.
45:50You are in a decision for rare history.
45:52This one is actually easier in order.
45:55And for you to release,
45:56take you drive?
45:57Then you are a little bit harder.
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