Ottawa police say advances in DNA technology helped them find, arrest and charge a suspect in a 1996 stabbing death on the Portage Bridge.
At a news conference Monday, Deputy Chief Trish Ferguson said 73-year-old Lawrence Diehl, who was living in Vancouver, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder last week for the death of Christopher Smith.
The victim was crossing the Portage Bridge between Ottawa and Gatineau, Que., early on April 12, 1996, with a cousin when he got into an altercation and was stabbed, police said. Smith was later pronounced dead at a Gatineau hospital.
Ferguson said advances in genetic genealogy, or building potential family trees using DNA, helped lead investigators to the breakthrough. She declined to share more details.
While this is the first time Ottawa police say they have found relatives using the technology, it’s also been used to help identify Jewell Parchman Langford as the “Nation River Lady” and Gerald Durocher as the “Ontonabee River Man.”
Ottawa police thanked police in Toronto and Vancouver and the RCMP.
They’re also asking the public for any additional information about what Diehl was doing in Ottawa around that time, saying only that he was there for work.
Ottawa police said they’re regularly reviewing more than 60 unsolved homicides. In 2012, they put up a $50,000 reward for information related to his death.
Ottawa police, then known as the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police Service, investigate a stabbing on the Portage Bridge in 1996. (Ottawa Police Service)