Vancouver suspect in 1996 cold case homicide identified through DNA analysis

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.

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."

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.