Toronto cold case killer sentenced to life in prison for 1980s murders

The man who murdered two Toronto women in the 1980s, and was free for almost four decades, has been sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 21 years.

Joseph George Sutherland sat quietly in a Toronto courtroom as his sentence was handed down by Justice Maureen Forestell on Friday afternoon.

The judge told the court that “given the vulnerability of the victims, the violation of the homes and their bodies and the brutal nature of their killings, both murders fall close to first-degree murder.”

She pointed out that the two deaths Sutherland pled guilty to were neither quick nor painless.

In August 1983, Sutherland broke into the home of 45-year-old Susan Tice on Grace Street in Toronto. She was sexually assaulted and stabbed 13 times.

Four months later, he broke into Erin Gilmour’s Hazelton Avenue apartment. She was bound and gagged, sexually assaulted and stabbed to death.

For decades, the two murders went unsolved.

In 2000, DNA analysis suggested to police that the two women had been murdered by the same suspect. After that breakthrough, the families of the two women continued to wait for more than another two decades before they were given a name.

Sutherland was identified through genetic genealogy as a person of interest in 2021. The next year, he was arrested in Moosonee, Ont., after police went to his home with a search warrant for his DNA.

“The pain of the losses was magnified for both families by the uncertainty that the perpetrator of the murder had never been found,” the judge said Friday.

Sutherland, 62, pleaded guilty in October 2023 to two counts of second-degree murder.

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