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An unsolved Toronto police cold case that was reopened three years ago and reexamined more recently during the Bruce McArthur investigation has now been solved.
Police said officers were called to a Cosburn Avenue apartment on Sept. 12, 1995 where they found the body of 47-year-old Dennis Joseph Colby.
A post-mortem examination revealed Colby died due to extreme head trauma, which investigators said was consistent with a beating.
The Cold Case Unit began a review of Colby’s death in 2016 and sent evidence to the Centre of Forensic Sciences for DNA analysis.
Amid the charges laid against Bruce McArthur in 2018, police said officers took another look at the case to see if there was any connection. It was later determined there were no links to McArthur or Projects Prism and Houston, previous police investigations into missing men killed by McArthur.
Detective Stacy Gallant with Toronto police confirmed the general profile applied to Colby’s case.
“He was a gay man living alone,” Gallant said. “The type of murder that it was, it was not a shooting, it was not a stabbing, it was something that would give us a thought to include it in the ones that Bruce McArthur may or may not have been involved in.”
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At some point during the review, the Centre of Forensic Sciences submitted an unknown DNA profile to the National DNA Data Bank. Officers said the profile matched with an offender who had a history of violent behaviour. The investigation revealed the man was staying with Colby at around the time he died.
Police said the offender also looked similar to an old sketch they had of the suspect during the original investigation.
Investigators said they found out the suspect died in 2015. If he was alive today, police said he would have been charged with the second-degree murder of Colby.Since the suspect died, charges won’t be laid in connection with the case and police said he won’t be identified.
Officers said Colby’s family has been informed of the developments.
“He (Colby’s brother) was very thankful that we kept on with the investigation. He was under the assumption that nothing more was being done on this case for years. So he was quite pleased and surprised that we do have what I would say is an end result to the case,” Gallant said.
With files from The Canadian Press.
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