Edmonton police lay charges in 41-year-old sexual assault case

41 years after the crime, a man has been charged with raping a teenager in northeast Edmonton.

On July 9, 1981, police said a 15-year-old girl was walking home across a school field in northeast Edmonton when she was sexually assaulted. The man, who was not known to the girl, walked away and wasn’t identified at the time.

For decades, the case remained cold, and in 2018 it was handed to the Historical Crimes Unit at EPS.

A DNA profile for the man was created from physical evidence found at the scene. No matching profile was found in the National DNA Data Bank at the time.

Last year, police pursued investigative genetic genealogy, which is when DNA is compared against samples from publicly available genealogy databases such as GEDMatch and FamilyTreeDNA. This technique was used to catch the Golden State Killer in 2018 and the killer of nine-year-old Toronto girl Christine Jessop in 2020.

Police used the genealogy to construct a family lineage, and combined with other evidence, identified Guy Greffard, 65, as the suspect. In May 2022, the RCMP Lab confirmed that DNA obtained from Greffard matched the DNA on evidence from the scene.

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The Kelvington, Sask., man who was in his mid-twenties at the time of the assault has been charged with rape and acts of gross indecency, as defined in the 1981 Canadian Criminal Code.

Since 2018, EPS has used investigative genetic genealogy in five cases, but this is the first case to result in charges.