Ottawa police use DNA from 1996 murder to identify Vancouver stabbing suspect

Former Ottawa police major crimes investigator Randy Wisker remembers making a “mad scramble” to get to a pay phone in the early morning hours of April 12, 1996, after a fatal stabbing on the Portage Bridge.

Emergency dispatchers had received a call for an ambulance to the bridge between Ottawa and Gatineau, Que., but the person who placed the call didn’t give a name.

Wisker said the phone booth was about 10 blocks from the police station, but when the arrived, the caller was nowhere to be found.

“It’s right out of a movie. You know, you get to the phone booth and there’s this handset just kind of swinging freely,” Wisker said. “As if somebody just left 10 seconds ago, you know?”

At the time, police believed the person who placed the call was responsible for the stabbing death of 22-year-old Christopher Smith.

Wisker, who now does contact investigative work in Ottawa for the Commissionaires and other agencies, said it was the only case he didn’t close as a lead investigator in all his years with the Ottawa Police.

“I had pretty good hope that eventually the DNA would get picked up on,” he said.

Police in Ottawa said Monday that they have now identified a suspect in the unsolved murder more than 28 years later.

Police said in a statement that Lawrence Diehl, 73, was taken into custody by Vancouver police on Dec. 10 and returned to Ottawa, where he faces a charge of second-degree murder in the death of Smith.

Ottawa homicide investigators said it’s the first time they’ve used “investigative genetic genealogy” to identify a suspect using genetic databases to track down “potential family lineages.”

Cold case investigators have been working on the case since 2020 with the RCMP and Toronto Police Service, and arrested Diehl with “significant assistance” from Vancouver police.

Ottawa Police Chief Eric Stubbs said they’ve spoken with the victim’s family, and investigators want to speak with people about Diehl’s time in Ottawa.

The Ottawa Citizen reported days after the stabbing that Smith was involved in a fight on the bridge with an unknown man, and the suspect was believed to have called 911 from a near by pay phone after the stabbing, where police found a “substantial amount of blood.”

Wisker said he was “pleasantly surprised” to hear that an arrest had been made in the case so many years later.

He said police do try to keep cold cases “alive” even when there’s not much to go on, “contrary” to what the public may believe about such investigative efforts.

“You just never know when something will come in, that’s the whole point,” he said.

Wisker said he was told of the arrest in the case only “very recently,” and that he was “extremely impressed with the effort that they put into that to bring it in.”

“It’s fantastic when you do get a DNA match, but in order to get to the point where you have a sample to provide the lab, it’s the work it takes to get it there,” he said. “It’s great to have that as a tool in your tool kit, but you still have to do an awful lot of work.”

Police departments across the country have turned to gene databases to solve crimes that are decades old by looking up family lineages that lead them to their suspects.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 16, 2024.

Darryl Greer, The Canadian Press