The news caught retired Ottawa police investigator Randy Wisker by surprise.
It came via a courtesy call informing the former serious crimes detective sergeant about a break in an unsolved homicide he had worked on three decades earlier.
The victim, 22-year-old Christopher Smith, had been fatally stabbed in an altercation on the Portage Bridge between Ottawa and Gatineau in the early morning hours of April 12, 1996.
At the time, police said Smith was attacked by an unknown assailant while walking home across the bridge with his cousin after a night out.
All leads in the case had dried up long ago, as far as Wisker was aware.
But now, 29 years later, he was being told that modern DNA analysis used for the first time by the Ottawa Police Service had identified a suspect — 73-year-old Lawrence Diehl of Vancouver.
“You hear about cold cases that are solved through DNA going back a long period of time,” said Wisker, speaking from Ottawa. “So it was always in the back of my mind that there was the possibility that something could come up.”
Diehl was taken into custody by Vancouver police on Dec. 10 and charged with second-degree murder. He was transported to Ottawa and had a first court appearance on Dec. 14.
Suspect a former president of B.C. Soccer
The allegation against Diehl, a retired engineer and former president of B.C. Soccer, has not been tested in court.
According to Wisker, investigators believed an unidentified person who called 911 soon after Smith was stabbed was also his killer.
The call came from a payphone on Elgin Street in Ottawa, roughly one kilometre from the bridge. When Wisker arrived at the phone, he found blood and a dangling handset.
“We knew that from the caller and the presence of blood there that it was likely the person involved,” he said. “Because it was a 911 call, it was recorded at the police station. We played that recording in the media in the hope that perhaps, although it was short, somebody might recognize both the voice and the circumstance.”
Forensic DNA analysis leads to break in case
The case went cold until 2020, when Ottawa police reopened it with the hope that new investigative genetic genealogy techniques might provide a lead.
Suspect DNA gathered from the 1996 crime scene was sent to Texas-based Othram Inc., a company that does forensic genome sequencing. Othram works specifically with law enforcement agencies on cases of unidentified human remains and suspect identification.
“[The crime scene DNA] comes to us usually in these suspect cases in the form of a DNA extract — so just a vial of DNA they’ve already recovered,” said Michael Vogen, Othram director of case management, speaking generally.
“We look at hundreds of thousands of markers, sometimes upwards to a million markers of DNA. With that much data we are able to develop these profiles that can detect out to about a sixth cousin, sometimes even more distant.”
Initial lab work by Othram usually costs about $1,500 US, said Vogen.
In the Smith case, the suspect profile created by the company was uploaded to two public ancestry databases — GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, according to reporting from CBC Ottawa’s Kristy Nease. Those two sites allow law enforcement access to the DNA profiles of users who have specifically opted in.
From there, genetic genealogists with the Toronto Police Service cold case unit started the painstaking work of piecing together a giant puzzle, using the individuals identified as being related to the Smith homicide suspect to build out a family tree.
“It almost works like a tip,” said Ottawa Police Service Sgt. Chris O’Brien. “It helps focus your investigation into potential suspects or a potential suspect, as the case may be. And then once you have that, then we switch to more traditional old-fashioned police work.”
Generally, police will confirm their genetic genealogy research by obtaining a “cast-off” DNA sample from potential suspects to compare to the original. Cast-off DNA comes from the cells a person sheds and can be retrieved from items like a used coffee cup or cigarette butt.
In B.C., cast-off DNA was used to help identify Ibrahim Ali, the man convicted of first-degree murder in the high-profile case of a 13-year-old Burnaby girl killed in 2017, while genetic genealogy solved the cold case of Saanich couple Tanya Van Cuylenborg and Jay Cook, murdered in Washington state in 1987.
Ottawa police say they know Diehl was in Ottawa in 1996 for work-related reasons and are asking people who know more about his timeline and movements to contact them.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Diehl worked as a meteorologist at Environment Canada and in various engineering and management positions.
He is a longtime soccer volunteer who served as president of B.C. Soccer and director of Canada Soccer from 1998 to 2002. Diehl won the Canada Soccer Award of Merit in 2003, the same year he was named a B.C. Soccer life member, according to the B.C. Soccer Hall of Fame website.
B.C. Soccer said it was aware of Diehl’s arrest.
“We take these allegations seriously, and we are monitoring the situation as it unfolds. At this time, we are unable to provide any comments until the ongoing legal proceedings are settled,” said CEO Gabriel Assis.
Diehl’s next court appearance in Ottawa is scheduled for Jan. 8.