ONTARIO 1998 Cold Case Solved After 25 Years — They Built His Face From DNA Before They Had His Name
Cold Case Reckoning
4,228 views
#ColdCaseSolved #ColdCase #DNA
On January 27th, 1998, 23-year-old Renée Sweeney was working an early shift alone at a video store in a strip mall on Paris Street in Sudbury, Ontario. She was a fourth-year Laurentian University student studying history and music, a trombone player with the Sudbury Symphony Orchestra, and roughly four months from graduating. According to her sister, she was not even scheduled to work that day. She had traded the shift so she would be free for a symphony performance that weekend.
Just after 11 a.m., a man walked in. Renée was attacked and killed. She fought him hard enough to take his skin under her fingernails.
What police recovered that afternoon was more than most homicide investigators ever get. A teal windbreaker and white cotton garden gloves, discarded in the snow behind the plaza and found by a police dog. A bloody fingerprint on the cash tray and a second print underneath it. A running shoe impression in the washroom, invisible until chemically developed. And a complete DNA profile of the killer.
They had everything about him except his name.
Two weeks later, police arrested the wrong man. John Fetterly was charged with first-degree murder on the strength of a misidentified fingerprint and released days later with an apology. He had nothing to do with her death, and twenty-five years later the officers involved confirmed the error under oath.
The case then became the largest criminal investigation in Sudbury's history. More than two thousand tips. Sixteen hundred people ruled out. Hundreds of local men voluntarily giving DNA. A hundred banker boxes of paper. And every thirty days, for eighteen years, the killer's profile was run against Canada's National DNA Data Bank.
It never hit. Because that database only holds people who have been convicted of something, and he never had been.
In January 2017, Greater Sudbury Police tried something almost nobody in Canada had tried. Using DNA from the scene, a Virginia laboratory called Parabon NanoLabs generated a composite image of the suspect's likely face: northern European ancestry, fair skin, blue or green eyes, freckles. Police released a picture of a man who had never been photographed. It produced 360 new tips and eliminated around 200 more people.
It did not find him.
What finally did was genetic genealogy. In September 2018, Parabon offered to run an ancestry analysis on the same sample free of charge. The result was not a name. It was two surnames: Secord and McAllister. Two unrelated families who shared a descendant somewhere.
So the lead investigator went and found the two people in northern Ontario who had spent years building those family trees as a hobby, laid their work side by side, and looked for the single point where the families intersected.
On December 11th, 2018, police arrested Robert Steven Wright, then 39, in the laboratory of the North Bay Regional Health Centre where he worked. He had been 18 years old and a student at a nearby high school on the morning Renée died. In March 2023, a jury found him guilty of second-degree murder.
This documentary covers the full story: who Renée Sweeney was, what happened inside that store on a Tuesday morning in January 1998, the wrongful arrest that derailed the first month of the investigation, why a national DNA database searched for eighteen years could never have found him, how forensic phenotyping put his face on television years before anyone knew his name, and how two amateur genealogists and a jacket in the snow finally closed a case that took twenty-five years.
🔔 Subscribe to Cold Case Reckoning for in-depth documentaries on Canadian cases that remained unsolved for years, and the investigations that finally uncovered the truth.
#ColdCase #Ontario #TrueCrime #ColdCaseSolved #DNA #ReneeSweeney #Sudbury #GeneticGenealogy #ForensicScience #Documentary #Justice #Canada #ColdCaseReckoning
📚 REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
Sudbury.com — A recap of the 20-year investigation and the court case
Village Media — Twenty years in limbo: Renée Sweeney's sister still waits for justice
CTV News — Trial hears details of how DNA led to the arrest
CTV News — Jury hears how crime scene DNA and fingerprints were linked to the suspect
CTV News — Man sentenced in Sudbury for the 1998 murder of Renée Sweeney
Sudbury.com — Year in review: Robert Steven Wright has his day in court
CBC News — Renée Sweeney murder: sentencing and victim impact statements
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ONTARIO 1998 Cold Case Solved After 25 Years — They Built His Face From DNA Before They Had His Name
Cold Case Reckoning
4,228 views
#ColdCaseSolved #ColdCase #DNA
On January 27th, 1998, 23-year-old Renée Sweeney was working an early shift alone at a video store in a strip mall on Paris Street in Sudbury, Ontario. She was a fourth-year Laurentian University student studying history and music, a trombone player with the Sudbury Symphony Orchestra, and roughly four months from graduating. According to her sister, she was not even scheduled to work that day. She had traded the shift so she would be free for a symphony performance that weekend.
Just after 11 a.m., a man walked in. Renée was attacked and killed. She fought him hard enough to take his skin under her fingernails.
What police recovered that afternoon was more than most homicide investigators ever get. A teal windbreaker and white cotton garden gloves, discarded in the snow behind the plaza and found by a police dog. A bloody fingerprint on the cash tray and a second print underneath it. A running shoe impression in the washroom, invisible until chemically developed. And a complete DNA profile of the killer.
They had everything about him except his name.
Two weeks later, police arrested the wrong man. John Fetterly was charged with first-degree murder on the strength of a misidentified fingerprint and released days later with an apology. He had nothing to do with her death, and twenty-five years later the officers involved confirmed the error under oath.
The case then became the largest criminal investigation in Sudbury's history. More than two thousand tips. Sixteen hundred people ruled out. Hundreds of local men voluntarily giving DNA. A hundred banker boxes of paper. And every thirty days, for eighteen years, the killer's profile was run against Canada's National DNA Data Bank.
It never hit. Because that database only holds people who have been convicted of something, and he never had been.
In January 2017, Greater Sudbury Police tried something almost nobody in Canada had tried. Using DNA from the scene, a Virginia laboratory called Parabon NanoLabs generated a composite image of the suspect's likely face: northern European ancestry, fair skin, blue or green eyes, freckles. Police released a picture of a man who had never been photographed. It produced 360 new tips and eliminated around 200 more people.
It did not find him.
What finally did was genetic genealogy. In September 2018, Parabon offered to run an ancestry analysis on the same sample free of charge. The result was not a name. It was two surnames: Secord and McAllister. Two unrelated families who shared a descendant somewhere.
So the lead investigator went and found the two people in northern Ontario who had spent years building those family trees as a hobby, laid their work side by side, and looked for the single point where the families intersected.
On December 11th, 2018, police arrested Robert Steven Wright, then 39, in the laboratory of the North Bay Regional Health Centre where he worked. He had been 18 years old and a student at a nearby high school on the morning Renée died. In March 2023, a jury found him guilty of second-degree murder.
This documentary covers the full story: who Renée Sweeney was, what happened inside that store on a Tuesday morning in January 1998, the wrongful arrest that derailed the first month of the investigation, why a national DNA database searched for eighteen years could never have found him, how forensic phenotyping put his face on television years before anyone knew his name, and how two amateur genealogists and a jacket in the snow finally closed a case that took twenty-five years.
🔔 Subscribe to Cold Case Reckoning for in-depth documentaries on Canadian cases that remained unsolved for years, and the investigations that finally uncovered the truth.
#ColdCase #Ontario #TrueCrime #ColdCaseSolved #DNA #ReneeSweeney #Sudbury #GeneticGenealogy #ForensicScience #Documentary #Justice #Canada #ColdCaseReckoning
📚 REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
Sudbury.com — A recap of the 20-year investigation and the court case
Village Media — Twenty years in limbo: Renée Sweeney's sister still waits for justice
CTV News — Trial hears details of how DNA led to the arrest
CTV News — Jury hears how crime scene DNA and fingerprints were linked to the suspect
CTV News — Man sentenced in Sudbury for the 1998 murder of Renée Sweeney
Sudbury.com — Year in review: Robert Steven Wright has his day in court
CBC News — Renée Sweeney murder: sentencing and victim impact statements