Sean McCowan carries the burden on his wrist.
The number of days — 14,219 — etched in silver on a bracelet. A constant reminder of the agonizing, 39-year wait between the December 1983 murder of his sister, Erin Gilmour, and the 2022 arrest of the man who killed her.
“Joy isn’t the right word. It’s just relief,” McCowan said, remembering the “we got him” call from a Toronto police detective. “I’m a lighter person as a result because I’ve got the answers.”
Cracking cold case killings, sometimes decades after the fact, has always been a difficult task for police. But the challenge has recently become much steeper. That’s because of new limits on their best tool — genetic genealogy, which uses tiny snippets of DNA to track down killers via distant family relations.
The U.S.-based website Ancestry.com is the world’s largest repository of public genealogical records, pulling together birth, death, marriage, immigration and other documents from across the globe. And it has become a go-to-source for police forces seeking to map out family trees.
Police cold case units say catching killers just got tougher after Ancestry.com restricted access to its vast genealogical database. For The National, Jonathon Gatehouse explains how that pool of genetic information helped bring a murderer to justice 40 years later, and what losing access means for catching others.
A ban on police
But a recent update and clarification to the company’s terms of service now explicitly bans law enforcement from accessing the paid-subscription site without first obtaining a court order, making detectives’ research process harder.
“It’s basically like a Google search for genealogy … a one-stop shop to get the information that we needed,” said Acting Det. Sgt. Steve Smith, head of the Toronto Police Service cold case unit, which does genetic genealogy research for 17 forces across Ontario as well as working its own files.
“We can still find the open source data. It’s just that it will take us 10, 12, 15 searches instead of one. So it’s going to expand the time it takes us to solve these cases.”
According to a recent New York Times tally, genetic genealogy has helped solve more than 1,400 cold cases since it was first used to identify California’s Golden State Killer in 2018. But it’s often a painstaking process — even with access to Ancestry’s data.
Take the case of Erin Gilmour. The 22-year-old Torontonian was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in her Yorkville apartment a few days before Christmas 1983.
Investigative leads petered out, and it wasn’t until 17 years later that police were able to use DNA from the scene to link the crime to another murder — the August 1983 assault and stabbing of Susan Tice, 45, in her apartment in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. Tests proved the same man carried out both killings, but there was no match in law enforcement databases and his identity remained unknown.
Progress finally came in late 2019, when Toronto police submitted the DNA samples to a lab in Texas for advanced, new tests.
Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNIP) analysis provides far more detail than the standard short tandem repeat (STR) tests for 22 DNA markers, mapping genes for things like hair colour, eye colour and most importantly, ancestry.
Toronto police took those results and uploaded them to GEDMatch and FamilyTreeDNA, two websites where people willingly share their DNA profiles, in hopes of finding some sort of family relation to the killer.
Mapping a killer’s family tree
What came back was a partial DNA match, eventually established to be a third cousin of the as-then-still-unknown suspect. Making that link wasn’t easy, however, with police having to unravel a web of almost 8,000 people through genealogical research, primarily on Ancestry.com. It took almost two years to get to the suspect’s great-grandparents and another year until they were ready to make an arrest.
Joseph George Sutherland pleaded guilty in October 2023 to two counts of second-degree murder in the 1983 killings of Gilmour and Tice. He was sentenced to life in prison in March 2024.
Ancestry.com has a bank of more than 28 million DNA profiles, but they have always been inaccessible to police without a warrant.
Smith said he doesn’t understand the reasoning behind the new restrictions on genealogical data, nor do other cold case officers across North America with whom he has discussed the changes. He has tried to reach out to company representatives. He has yet to receive a response.
“Every public library can purchase all the information that’s on Ancestry,” said Smith. “So it’s out there in the community. Every single person in the world has access to this, except police officers.”
CBC News asked Ancestry.com about the company’s concerns over police access. A spokesperson declined an interview request, pointing instead to a recent blog post. It says Ancestry respects “the important work that law enforcement does to keep communities safe,” but that the company has a responsibility to make sure the site “is used for what it was created for: family history research.”
Privacy concerns
The rapid emergence and spread of genetic genealogy has raised concerns about its potential for infringement on the rights of people who may only be distantly related to a criminal.
In June 2025, Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner issued a report recommending 12 “guardrails” for police use of the investigative tool.
Yann Joly, a bioethicist who heads McGill University’s centre of genomics and policy in Montreal, said the lack of police transparency surrounding genetic genealogy should be of concern to the public.
“I don’t think anybody is saying: ‘You know, don’t do it. Stop.’ We’re just saying we have to look at the practice. Look at how we can do it safely: minimize the errors, minimize the privacy intrusion,” said Joly.
“Genetic genealogy can be used to track down serious criminals, but it can also be used for immigration purposes, for example, or to prevent terrorism or for plenty of other identification purposes. So it’s a bit of a slippery slope here that we have to be careful about.”
Some police forces are already taking such concerns into account when tackling cold cases. Cmdr. Mélanie Dupont, the head of Montreal police’s major crime unit, said Quebec’s more stringent privacy laws have always put Ancestry’s data out of reach.
“We are very strict. We use FamilyTreeDNA and GEDMatch because you have to check a box to agree to share your data within a criminal investigation,” she said. “If you don’t agree to that we don’t use it.”
Dupont said the restrictions have made Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal cold case investigations more time-consuming, but argues that they have also made her squad more creative.
“We find a way,” she said. “We have to respect the law.”
To victims’ families, however, the arguments for striking a new balance between progress and privacy aren’t as obvious.
Sean McCowan said he can’t understand why Ancestry feels the need to make such a change.
“I think it’s terrible,” he said. “A corporation is going to not allow access to the police to get these results that can bring relief and some sort of resolution for people who have been waiting so very long for answers.
“It’s a pretty hard pill to swallow.”
- Jonathon Gatehouse can be contacted via email at [email protected], or reached via the CBC’s digitally encrypted Securedrop system at https://www.cbc.ca/securedrop/
