JOCELYNE LLOYD: Terrible outcome for Byron Carr case

Prince Edward Island was shocked this week by news related to the province’s most notorious cold case. The man who was arrested in the 1988 murder of Byron Carr was free to go because crucial evidence against him was missing.

The case has haunted P.E.I. residents for almost 40 years since the popular English teacher was found stabbed and strangled in his Charlottetown home on a November weekend. The horror of the discovery was heightened by a message left on the wall: “I will kill again.”

Carr was 36 years old and “a very well liked, sociable person,” according to Brad MacConnell in an interview with The Guardian in 2007. MacConnell was a Charlottetown police constable at the time and was leading a renewed investigation into the murder.

Forensic investigations and DNA technology had recently developed in Canada and evidence collected from the crime scene contained what police believed were the genetic markers of the killer.

“We have a DNA profile gen­er­ated from ev­i­dence at the crime scene — one DNA profile,” MacCon­nell, who is now Charlottetown CAO, said at the time. “We be­lieve that that DNA profile be­longs to the killer of By­ron Carr.”

MacConnell was police chief when he called a news conference in January 2024 to report the DNA evidence had finally led police to a suspect.

MacConnell told reporters the investigation involved the use of genetic genealogy and that police were assembling a timeline.

In the months following, election and plea hearings were held and a trial was due to begin in November of this year. The man in custody, who goes by the names Todd Joseph Gallant and Todd Joseph Irving, pleaded not guilty.

The public interest in seeing this case make it to trial was high. Of course it had the potential to see justice served in a rare, decades old P.E.I. cold case. It also would be the first time the Island saw genetic genealogy come into play in solving a murder.

This technology led to the conviction in 2020 of the so-called Golden State Killer in California. The FBI and local police agencies and prosecutors there matched DNA from crime scenes to genetic profiles uploaded to genealogy websites like FamilyTreeDNA.

It’s a controversial method for catching a killer. People who upload their cheek swabs to these websites are doing so to trace their roots and find living relatives around the world. Perhaps they’re looking for birth parents. I’d hazard few click “agree to the terms and conditions” in the expectation they’re leading to the arrest of their second cousin.

The lawfulness of this collection method never got a hearing in the Golden State Killer case. Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. pleaded guilty in June 2020 to murdering 13 people and raping 50 women across California in the 1970s and ’80s.

Charlottetown investigators were no doubt hoping for a similar outcome here.

Except we now know the Crown was building its case against Gallant in the months after his arrest while under the false impression key pieces of physical evidence from the crime scene were still in the possession of Charlottetown police.

According to a statement released Tuesday by the Crown Attorneys’ Office, its lawyers only learned on Aug. 12 that a “substantial portion” of the physical evidence they were relying on could not be located.

“In this case, the loss of crucial evidence, together with the issues identified concerning the remaining evidence, means that there is no longer a reasonable likelihood of conviction and that the prosecution can no longer proceed,” the statement said.

“This is a deeply disappointing outcome for our office and for the Crown attorneys who have worked diligently over the past several years to bring this matter to trial,” the statement said.

Deep disappointment is only one of several emotions I imagine are being felt by the Crown, the police, Carr’s family and the Island community at large.

Public trust has been shaken by this news. People are angry that the investigating officers in 1988 didn’t catalogue and keep the physical evidence at the time.

Was that not common practice for law enforcement back then? Was it because murders were so rare here there wasn’t a practice to follow? Or were some of those officers less invested in being as meticulous as they might have been if the victim were not gay? Too many years have passed to answer those questions satisfactorily.

What we do deserve answers to, however, is why the case was allowed to progress for two years before the Crown had the full picture of the evidence it had to bring to trial, and can we have faith in today’s police procedures so that nothing like this happens again.

Jocelyne Lloyd is deputy editor of The Guardian. She lives in Charlottetown.