by TONY BEST
Decades after a nurse was murdered in Toronto, cold case detectives and forensic scientists there now insist they know who killed the hard-working immigrant from Barbados.
The trouble is that Kenneth Smith, a 72-year-old white Canadian with a history of sexually assaulting women, died six years ago, said to be from lung cancer, after killing three women, the Bajan included, whose deaths had gone unsolved until now.
Smith cannot be brought to justice in a Canadian court for the murder of Gracelyn Greenidge, a 41-year-old professional who immigrated to Canada from Barbados in search of a better life, but lost it due to no fault of her own. And when criminal justice authorities in Ontario told the Bajan’s relatives and those of the other victims that they had finally cracked the troubling case, the family members reacted with appreciation for the demanding work of investigators.
“His [Smith’s] death means he will never be able to be held to account in a court of law and we recognise the impact that has on families who have waited so long for justice,” Robert Johnson, Deputy Police Chief of the Toronto Police, told a recent news conference in Canada’s best known and largest metropolitan centre which is home to tens of thousands of Bajan and other Caribbean immigrants.
They were relieved at the news that finally they knew who had killed their loved one, Johnson said. “The wait for answers has been extraordinarily long. It has been through sustained collaboration and advances in forensic science that we have arrived at this moment.
“These women were never forgotten, and it is because of the commitment of so many that we are able to give their loved ones the crucial answers,” he added.
Greenidge, who at the time of her death in 1997 was a nursing professional at a downtown health care facility for the elderly; 25-year-old Christine Prince, a nanny from Wales in England, and 23-year-old Claire Samson, a Canadian escort, were murdered in different areas of Ontario under circumstances that were never determined by investigators.
For instance, the Barbadian was found dead in her home from blunt force trauma to the body; Prince was last seen getting onto a streetcar in the area of St Claire Avenue West at Bathurst in the early hours of June 21, 1982; while Samson’s body was found in a river in Scarborough in 1983 after reportedly getting into a beige vehicle driven by an older white man. She was found shot to death.
In the Bajan’s case, investigators said she left her job and got home safely but when she did not turn up the next day, a co-worker went to the apartment and found her body.
What was particularly puzzling about Greenidge’s case was that she was known on the job as a diligent worker who was careful about allowing strangers into her apartment, and police could not figure out how Smith got in.
“We have never been sure how he got into Gracelyn’s apartment,” said Detective Sergeant Steve Smith of the Toronto Police Department.
The pieces in the three widely separate cases began to come together after cold case detectives turned to forensic experts and compared the results of DNA samples found at the various crime scenes and linked them to Smith.
“The only thing that linked them was the offender’s DNA,” said Karen Gonneau, Chief Superintendent of the Ontario Police. “There is no way she (Bajan) would have let him into the apartment. She was reluctant to let people she knew inside, let alone some random guy.”
Smith described the killings as “crimes of opportunity more than anything” and the crime sleuths were wondering if Smith had killed even more victims in Ontario than the three women.
“This investigation does not end here,” Gonneau said. “We know that there are unanswered questions, and we hope that anyone with information would come forward and help us complete the story.”
Yes, the officials said, the evidence indicated that Smith was a serial killer. What they did know was that he had a long rap sheet of sexual assaults of women and had actually spent time in prison on a number of occasions for those crimes. Born in Porcupine, Ontario, Smith had lived and worked in Toronto at the time of the deaths, and he was in fact “known” to the police.
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