Australian Kevin McBride was known for being fun-loving and outgoing, the life of the party. So, when the 47-year-old window dresser and antiques dealer is found stabbed to death in his Toronto apartment no one can believe it. As police track suspects across Canada and the US, the victim’s diary is found 400 km away. It’s missing the page from the day he was murdered, but it provides a name. The problem for investigators – that name belongs to someone who can’t be found.
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00:00He was a very fun-loving person, loved to be around people, loved to have a joke, enjoy
00:19life.
00:20I just remember he had such a lovely apartment with all his beautiful antique furniture.
00:28Kevin was found on May 17, 1982 in his apartment, obviously deceased.
00:35We knew that he had a business decorating store windows and he used to use his apartment
00:40to sell furniture items and art.
00:44There was some art and some of his personal effects that had gone missing.
00:48We learned that Mr. McBride kept a diary or a day book.
00:52The diary would have given us the schedule for Kevin up to when he was murdered.
00:57So this day book became interesting because we hadn't found it.
01:01Every lead leads us to more investigation.
01:03So they have a name, but that name is kind of a ghost.
01:07Welcome to Cry Beat, I'm Anthony Robart.
01:14It's Toronto in the 1980s and Kevin McBride is living his best life.
01:19The talented window dresser and entrepreneur had such a magnetic personality and wide circle
01:24of friends that when he is suddenly found dead, hundreds of people contact police offering
01:31to help.
01:32But despite the many leads, his death remained a mystery.
01:38Here now is the death of the window dresser.
01:44So it's May 1982.
01:46Kevin McBride was supposed to attend a dinner party with certain friends of his.
01:52He didn't show up that evening.
01:54They had called him multiple times, I mean, it's 1982, so we didn't have cell phones,
01:59you know, you don't have social media, it's not quite as easy to get a hold of people.
02:02So you'd call their landlines, you'd expect to call back, you'd leave messages for them,
02:07but nobody had seen nor talked to him.
02:10So they attended his residence, knocked on his door and didn't get an answer.
02:17So they called the police and asked for us to go by and check on him.
02:21When the first officers arrived, they directed the superintendent to open the door.
02:26When they entered the apartment, they located Mr. McBride.
02:31On May the 17th of 1982, my partner Steve Harris and I were working the 4 to 12 shift.
02:38And it was about 6.30 that I think Steve got paged to call the office and he came back
02:44from making the phone call and told me that there was an investigation that we needed to
02:48attend at 5600 Sheppard Avenue East, apartment 311.
02:55He also advised me that Staff Sergeant Strathdee and Staff Sergeant Jackson were also attending.
03:01As we arrived, Jackson and Strathdee were just about to enter the apartment.
03:05One thing I did notice was a foul smell coming from the apartment, a smell I unfortunately
03:11smelled a lot of times, there was already somebody dead in there.
03:16I was located in the living room, he was clothed, there was a large amount of blood on the rug,
03:24on the floor.
03:25The official cause of death was multiple stab wounds to the torso and exsanguination.
03:29So he basically was stabbed and he bled out.
03:32He'd been stabbed many, many times in the chest, in the legs, in the arms.
03:37He had defensive wounds on his hands and it looked like it had been a very violent affair.
03:43We got briefed by Strathdee and Jackson basics of what was going on.
03:49We didn't go far into the apartment at that time.
03:52Strathdee asked if we would go and interview some witnesses who had had a dinner appointment
03:58with Kevin McBride and to also check on the whereabouts of his car.
04:02We went down to the second level of the parking garage and the superintendent indicated the
04:07spot that belonged to Mr McBride, spot number 35.
04:10It was empty.
04:11There was no car there.
04:12I had a look around the spot and I noticed some oil drips in the spot which would indicate
04:18that the car had parked there at some point.
04:21It looked like it was fairly fresh.
04:23From witness interviews, his car was last seen on May 15th in the underground garage of
04:28his apartment.
04:29They had saw it there earlier in the morning.
04:32We believe he was probably killed and then the offender absconded with his vehicle later
04:37in that day.
04:38Unfortunately, not like today, we don't have video.
04:42There was a video from the underground parking lot to determine exactly who and when that
04:46car left the underground.
04:48We noticed some footprints in the dust to the left of where the car would have been and
04:52it's a walkway, I'm assuming, to go up the ramp.
04:55In our investigations, people a lot of times don't get rid of their shoes unless they're
05:00completely covered in blood.
05:01They usually try to keep their shoes.
05:03So sometimes those footprints really help.
05:07I also picked up a cigarette butt.
05:10It was a filter but it burned down so far that you couldn't see the make of it.
05:15So I packaged that in case it was relevant.
05:19You never know when you're looking at a scene what's going to be important.
05:22And then we left the garage.
05:24Steve and I drove over to 42 Division.
05:27And Steve went to speak to the people who were waiting for the dinner party.
05:33And I got on the phone with Straff D and we had some discussion about identifying what
05:40car he owned.
05:41I contacted the CPIC operator.
05:44CPIC is the national database of all police information.
05:49It has all the police records and all the vehicle records or links to other databases with records.
05:56So through that operator, she was able to tell me that he had leased a 1979 black Oldsmobile 98.
06:08ORA 329 was the license number.
06:11So I put out a provincial alert looking for that car.
06:14And I put the information that it was wanted in regards to homicide.
06:19After that, Steve and I went back to the scene.
06:22So we then had a more sort of thorough look around the scene.
06:26They were still fingerprinting and taking photographs.
06:29I noticed that it was like well furnished.
06:32It was nice furniture.
06:34It was well done.
06:35It looked nice.
06:36It was a two bedroom apartment.
06:38It had a TV room.
06:41It had a small dinette area, kitchen.
06:45And then a fairly large living room.
06:48And there was a white Chesterfield facing the windows and he was found beside that Chesterfield.
06:54There was some white carpet in the dinette area.
06:59And then a dark green carpet in the rest of the apartment.
07:02There was a blood stain where the body had lain.
07:05And there was blood spatters in different places.
07:11Nothing was turned over.
07:12There were a few plastic or some kind of artificial material ferns on the ground in the blood staining.
07:19So obviously Mr. McBride had fallen and taken them with him when he fell to the floor.
07:26I think it was Dick that pointed out the glass dinette table.
07:30There was a Windex bottle and some rags there.
07:32So it obviously looked like somebody had cleaned up something from the glass table.
07:37Back in the 80s, everyone, even criminals knew that their fingerprints could be searched.
07:43So there could have been a possibility that the individual that did this murder at the time knew about that type of evidence and tried to clean up after himself.
07:54We took a cloth from the top of the fridge.
07:58Again, it could have been used to clean up.
08:00Who knows what it was for, but we thought we needed to take it.
08:03We took samples of where the rug was stained.
08:07We took samples from, even from a rubber plant that had some kind of fluid on it.
08:12We don't know what it was.
08:14We took, I think, about 20 or 30 samples of different places that needed to be examined within the scene that would hopefully give us some evidence as to what happened there.
08:24We were running on the theory that he'd been robbed.
08:29We weren't exactly sure of what, but I think at some point we discovered that a credit card was missing.
08:36When they looked around, there was some art and some of his personal effects that had gone missing.
08:41They weren't really sure what it was.
08:43It was just kind of empty spaces, but they believed that some of the art was taken and some of his personal papers were taken,
08:49maybe, you know, so they could get into his bank accounts, those sort of things.
08:54Back in 1982, it wasn't as easy as going on your phone and, you know, opening up your bank account.
09:00You actually physically had to go to a bank to take money out.
09:03So they would have needed the papers in order to try to access his money.
09:08Also found out he didn't carry a wallet.
09:10He used to carry his cash in a money clip, usually 30 or 40 bucks.
09:14And he kept his driver's license in one of those little plastic folders, which he kept in his pocket.
09:22But his checkbook and other papers, he kept them in his car.
09:26And if ever he had to write a check for some reason, he'd have to go out of his car to get his checkbook.
09:31He was known for that.
09:33So the belief is that the offenders, upon killing Mr. Brinkbride, found his keys, took his vehicle and fled.
09:42So if you're able to find the vehicle, you're most likely able to find the offender, if they're still driving it.
09:49May the 20th, so we're three days later now, we learned that Mr. McBride kept a diary or a day book.
09:57And it was described as a dark black page per day.
10:01And he would never go anywhere without it.
10:03It would always be in his possession, whether it was social or business.
10:08And he wrote down everything in this day book of who he was talking to, who he met, jobs he did, etc.
10:14And a lot of people mentioned this book.
10:17So this day book became interesting because we hadn't found it.
10:20They were able to find old versions of his diary, but his current diary was missing.
10:25So that was part of the paperwork that was taken with them.
10:29Now, did the offender know that Mr. McBride kept everything in his diary?
10:33And he was taking that because maybe his name was written in there?
10:37Or was it just something that he thought this may be useful to him later?
10:41We don't really know.
10:42But regardless, he took the diary that would have given us the schedule for Kevin for that week up to when he was murdered.
10:49Welcome back.
11:03After failing to show up to a dinner party, Kevin McBride was discovered stabbed to death in his apartment.
11:09There were no signs of struggle, but some of his belongings were missing, including a day timer, in which he was known to write all of his activities.
11:17We now return to death of the window dresser.
11:25Kevin was found on May 17th, 1982.
11:28He had been there for a few days.
11:30They believe the last time he was seen was about May 15th.
11:34So it was a good two days that Kevin was deceased in his apartment.
11:38There was a towel covered in blood.
11:40There was also tissues covered in blood.
11:43Cigarette butts that were smoked at the scene.
11:45There were some beer bottles.
11:49There was a number of fingerprints, but we had nothing on file for any of the people.
11:54You can use the victim's blood type to say that there may have been a different blood type in there, but that's really as far as you could have went in 1982.
12:03At that time, there really isn't much to say who was in the apartment with our deceased.
12:09Obviously, we've got a murder victim who's been stabbed more than once.
12:15He lived alone in that apartment, as far as we knew at that time.
12:19His car was missing.
12:21We don't know if anything else was missing from the apartment.
12:24We don't know if the apartment had been robbed or if the car was just used to get away.
12:30We knew that he had a business decorating store windows and he used to use his apartment to sell furniture items and art.
12:38We knew his name.
12:40We had the information from the witnesses that he was from Australia, but he had lived in Canada a long time.
12:46Everybody loved him.
12:48He was a very fun-loving person, loved to be around people, loved to have a joke, enjoy life.
12:56He loved doing photography as a hobby.
12:59He was a window dresser, so he was very good at that, very talented with his art.
13:05Always dressed immaculately.
13:08You never really seen him in casual clothes.
13:11I remember an auntie telling me my mum was in hospital and he went in to visit her
13:17and they thought it was a doctor coming in because of how he was dressed so well.
13:21I do remember him walking me up to the bus stop to school one morning and one of my friends that was with me said,
13:30Oh, your uncle looks so rich because of the way he was dressed.
13:36Kev was born in a town called Currumburra in Victoria on the 29th of January, 1935.
13:45Unfortunately, his mother got blood poisoning through delivery.
13:50She later passed away when Kev was only six days old.
13:55There was three other siblings.
13:58You know, back then it was very hard for my grandfather being a single dad with four kids.
14:05He was a coal miner and all the family were separated up into friends and family
14:11so that they could look after them so my grandad could still work.
14:16Eventually, my grandfather got remarried and all the family got back together again.
14:21Later on, two other siblings come along.
14:24They were all very close-knit family.
14:27So, very close.
14:29Kev's first job was at a butter factory.
14:34He used to have to ride his push bike to the factory and I looked it up before.
14:39It was a 27-kilometre ride each way.
14:42And then, apparently, once a week he was allowed to bring home a bottle of fresh cream for the family.
14:48So, they'd always look forward to having cream on their dessert that night.
14:53And then, he shifted down to Melbourne where he started working for David Jones,
14:59which was, you know, a department store and he started doing the window dressing.
15:05And then, later on, he shifted up to Queensland to a town called Townsville and continued that.
15:13And then, they sent him to Canada to do a course.
15:17And he fell in love with Canada and that's where he stayed.
15:21He just loved it over there. He loved the life.
15:24But he travelled a lot. He was always out travelling and seen a lot of the world.
15:29I went to visit Kevin in Canada in 1980.
15:34And I was 20 years of age at that time.
15:38Kevin has another niece and we were travelling.
15:43And while we were in England, we decided to travel over to Canada
15:47because it wasn't that far to go at the time.
15:51He had such a lovely apartment with all his beautiful antique furniture.
15:56We were both quite fascinated by that.
16:00He spent most of his time taking us into, like, the city of Toronto.
16:06We went away for a week and up to Niagara Falls with him.
16:10Because it was snowing at the time, he took us out into sort of the forest on...
16:15I don't know what they're called, skadoos?
16:17Yes, he took us out there for the day.
16:20We had campfire out there.
16:23And we used to go out most nights to visit his friends,
16:27either at their apartments or we'd go out for dinner somewhere.
16:31We just had such a fantastic time.
16:34He really was really a great host.
16:37He made me feel like part of the family.
16:40I guess for us it was a little difficult saying goodbye
16:43because we didn't know, you know, when we'd see him again.
16:47Kev tried to come back roughly every four years to Australia to visit everybody.
16:54He was actually due to come back to Australia the following year after he was killed.
17:00He was due to come back in the March for his father's 80th birthday.
17:05We had a big celebration organised for that.
17:07So he didn't obviously get to make that.
17:11But we're all looking forward to that visit.
17:16I remember it was either very late at night or early hours in the morning,
17:21our doorbell ringing and it was my auntie and uncle.
17:25She come down to tell mum and my dad that he'd been killed.
17:30My grandfather had rang them and told them.
17:33The Interpol police had been around to them very late at night
17:38and told them what had happened.
17:40But saying that we didn't have a lot of information.
17:43We were just told he'd been murdered.
17:48I was very, you know, quite young.
17:50I didn't know a lot of the ins and outs,
17:51but I knew they said he'd been stabbed to death.
17:56Sharon rang me to tell me that what had happened to Kevin.
18:00It was shocking news to hear something like that had happened to him.
18:04It just was something I couldn't believe.
18:08My uncle, along with one of Kev's nephews,
18:13went over to help sort things out
18:15and they ended up bringing Kev's ashes back to Australia.
18:19I never had some terrible photos of, you know, the blood-stained rug
18:23and I remember my uncle showing me that photo
18:26and where they marked out with the body
18:28and that's sort of etched in my head now.
18:30I'll never forget that photo.
18:32It was just really hard.
18:33Back then you'd send a letter
18:35and you might not get a reply for months.
18:40So we just didn't know sort of what had happened,
18:43whether Kev knew this person, what the motive was.
18:47We knew someone had also stolen his car and his keys.
18:54On Friday, the 21st, we received information
18:57that some property belonging to Kevin McBride
19:00had been found by the Windsor Police Service in a garbage can.
19:03A lot of Mr. McBride's personal effects, his papers, his diary.
19:08And a blood-stained knife.
19:13This knife was a Kershaw knife, a Japanese-made knife
19:16and it was located in a sheath.
19:19This knife was about eight and a quarter inches long
19:23with a four-inch blade.
19:25There was blood detected on that knife.
19:27However, there was not enough material
19:30to proceed with the testing of the time.
19:34The interesting part about the diary was
19:36the pages from May 14th and 15th were both ripped out.
19:41But there was an indent on May 16th
19:44that was still left in the diary
19:46that provided a name that you could see
19:48had been written on the day previous.
19:50The name was Steve Mayer.
20:00Welcome back.
20:04Days after Kevin McBride is murdered,
20:06his daybook, abandoned car and other belongings
20:09are found 400 kilometres away.
20:12In his daybook, police discover a valuable clue
20:15about who he may have met the day he was killed.
20:20We now return to death of the window dresser.
20:24We had no idea who Steve Mayer was at that time.
20:29There were a lot of phone calls.
20:30A lot of people liked Kevin McBride.
20:32A lot of people knew him.
20:33A lot of business associates, a lot of friends.
20:35Nobody had mentioned as Steve Mayer.
20:38We found out from one of the calls that I received,
20:40and I think it was another anonymous call,
20:42that he had run an ad to rent out his apartment.
20:46The arrangement was to live in the apartment
20:48and share the rent, but also to be there when Kevin went away.
20:52Because there's no forced entry,
20:54that means maybe someone came to look at the apartment
20:57and then did rob him and stabbed him to death.
21:02Shortly after, we found that Mr. McBride's credit cards
21:06are being used in Detroit, Michigan.
21:08The offenders utilizing these cards to buy certain things,
21:12buy some jewellery, pay for hotels, those sort of things.
21:16Our officers actually have to attend down to Windsor and Detroit.
21:21The witnesses provide the information that sometimes
21:24there was one person utilizing the card,
21:26at other times there was two people involved in the transaction.
21:29Although one person was actually passing themself off as the deceased.
21:37There was one person, possibly two, traveling together.
21:40So I came in on the Sunday, and there was a couple of officers there
21:47who had been answering the phones and taking reports.
21:50And they had submitted a supplementary report.
21:53A room clerk at the Selby Hotel down on Sherbourne Street
21:58called in to say that Steve Mayer was a regular there,
22:02and knew him well, and gave a description of him,
22:05and reported that he checked in on the 17th of May,
22:09but he had been thrown out for some kind of misdemeanor
22:13by another room clerk.
22:14The room clerk described him as a quick-tempered person.
22:21When they checked with the room clerk who made the note
22:23about throwing the person out,
22:25it turned out it was a Rod McKenzie that had been thrown out,
22:28not Steve Mayer.
22:29So they followed it up and checked further
22:32and found a photograph of Rod McKenzie in our files.
22:35He had a criminal record.
22:36And when they showed that picture to the room clerk,
22:38he identified Rod McKenzie as the person you know as Steve Mayer.
22:43So there was some suspicion there.
22:45Why is he registering under another name,
22:48and where is he now?
22:51So when I next spoke to Dix or Jackson down in Windsor,
22:55I gave them the description of Steve Mayer.
22:57They said that it's a similar description to the person
23:00who used the credit card of our deceased
23:03down in the Windsor area on the 16th of May.
23:05We also had a report from OPP inspector
23:10that the car had been seen westbound on the 401.
23:14So we had the car in the area as well.
23:17Police continue looking for the vehicle,
23:19but they also put out a composite photo
23:21of the person that they believe is utilizing the credit card.
23:26A brief description was provided.
23:29Press release was done requesting information,
23:31and nothing came forward.
23:33So in September of 1982, we actually find Mr. McBride's stolen vehicle in the US.
23:42Officers are able to seize the vehicle.
23:44The entire thing is fingerprinted, swabbed.
23:47We take everything that we possibly could out of the vehicle,
23:50hoping to find something forensically that can link us to the offender.
23:54When the car was located, there was a number of receipts that were located in the car that were made with Mr. McBride's credit cards.
24:03There was a fingerprint that was developed from one of the receipts that was checked through our databases back in 1982,
24:11and there was no identification made.
24:14Every lead leads us to more investigation.
24:17They have a name, but that name is kind of a ghost.
24:20He needs to be tracked down.
24:22Anybody that would have any association to him would be tracked down,
24:26try to track his movements.
24:27Back in 1982, they were just utilizing traditional police work,
24:31but unfortunately, at the time, we didn't get anywhere.
24:34The case goes cold.
24:38So I joined the cold case unit in 2015,
24:41and I was tasked with reviewing cold cases that were close contact homicides
24:48that may have had any sort of DNA evidence or fingerprint evidence that hadn't been fully explored yet.
24:55Typically a stabbing or a strangulation, something that requires the perpetrator to physically touch the victim.
25:05Kevin McBride had been stabbed over 25 times and had numerous defensive wounds as well.
25:12Whoever did this was extremely violent.
25:16So the first time I met with Detective Marsman and Detective Smithson,
25:20one of the first things I asked for was an updated exhibit list.
25:24The difference between technology then and now is such that items that people might not have even thought to submit in 1982,
25:34because there was no prospect of getting any useful information from,
25:38you may now be able to get useful information from with new technologies such as DNA.
25:43It was challenging. None of the boxes listed what was in these boxes. It's like a surprise.
25:53There's a broken table, large cut glass, crystal vase, cigarette butts, bloodstained clothing, the knife, the attache case, numerous documents, the old credit card statements.
26:05I believe I got about 60 or 70 items in total, including all the blood swabs and the autopsy samples.
26:12Back in 82, there had been a series of rags slash handkerchiefs and a towel that had been in unusual locations,
26:22and that in Mr. McBride's state would have been unusual for him to have been able to place them in that location.
26:30It was determined that the bloodstained rags, bloodstained paper towels, and the knife would be submitted to the Center of Forensic Science.
26:42A lot of times during knife type stabbings or woundings, the suspect will inadvertently cut themselves.
26:49It's a fight. Obviously, Kevin McBride wasn't just sitting there willingly being stabbed to death, probably was fighting for his life.
26:55In these attacks with a knife, the offender does usually cut themselves because of the force of actually pushing a knife into somebody's body.
27:04If you hit a bone of any sort, it drives the knife back into the thumb area of the person's hand.
27:12It appeared to me that the individual that did this homicide went into the kitchen and was attending to one of his injuries.
27:21That in itself was extremely important, that here's items that were separated from the living room in a different location within the apartment
27:32that potentially had the DNA of the suspect.
27:38Some of the other items that were located inside the apartment were cigarette butts.
27:43In today's world of forensics, cigarette butts contain valuable DNA.
27:49Once we got the results back, we found we had two different male DNA profiles.
27:55And one of them was on the paper towel sample and on the cigarette butts.
28:02So the next problem we have is that we had a comparison sample from Mr. McBride that had been collected in 1982.
28:12And unfortunately, after 30 plus years, it didn't provide us with an appropriate DNA profile for comparison.
28:22So we were left with this situation of we have two male DNA profiles, but we don't know which one may be from the perpetrator.
28:34So I go back to Detective Smithson and say, what else do we have that we could use as a comparison sample from this person?
28:43I located several items from the post-mortem.
28:49I submitted the pulled head hair sample and the pulled pubic hair sample and several items of clothing.
28:58Lo and behold, one of them had sufficient DNA, the pubic hair sample, to give us an appropriate comparison sample.
29:05So now we know that one of these profiles is from Mr. McBride, but now we also have this second profile that can't be sourced.
29:14It's put onto the National DNA Data Bank to see if it will match to any other crime scenes or potentially to a known offender.
29:23And unfortunately, we didn't get any hits or returns.
29:28One of the other samples that we accepted at the time was the knife that was found in the garbage can in Windsor.
29:34And at the time, there was blood detected on the blade, like right at the hilt of the knife.
29:39We swabbed that part of the blade where the blood was, and we also swabbed the handle,
29:45hoping that if somebody has handled this knife at some point, that they may have left some DNA behind.
29:51And when we got the results back, the sample from the blade of the knife matched that DNA profile from Mr. McBride.
29:57So, to us, this was the murder weapon.
30:01Unfortunately, we just don't have a link back to somebody other than Mr. McBride.
30:06Someone who's trying to clean up, to try to remove any evidence of them being there.
30:201982, obviously, the scene was fingerprinted.
30:23I was pursuing having the fingerprints checked again through all our Canadian databases.
30:29I recall there was a fingerprint on a vase, and it took some digging into the file.
30:33But it was located, and it was checked.
30:36The fingerprint that they recovered is still right there.
30:40There was no identification made.
30:42A fingerprint was located on one of the receipts located in his car.
30:46The print was checked through Canadian databases, and there was no identification made.
30:50It was then sent to the United States to check through their systems, and identification was made to Steve Meyer.
30:57So, I started conducting checks on Steve Meyer and learned that he had an extensive criminal history in the United States.
31:03It started off in 1978 from an arrest in Arizona, where him and an accomplice robbed a business.
31:10He was fingerprinted, and I obtained the report and learned that he listed his place of birth as Windsor, Ontario.
31:18Mr. Meyer has a criminal record in the U.S. on fraud charges, and he created many, many aliases.
31:25The aliases that he had used were actually real people.
31:29One of the aliases was tracked down by the Michigan State Police, and he was vice president of a food company.
31:36He didn't appear to be related to Canada or the type of person that would be involved in a murder.
31:42So, I requested the Michigan State Police conduct an interview, and request a copy of his fingerprints, and obtain a DNA sample.
31:50This person advised that he had to go to high school with Mr. Meyer, and that he had issues in the past with his name being used.
31:57He was ultimately cleared from the investigation.
31:59So, there was another alias, and that person did have a criminal record, and I traced him to Hawaii.
32:05Prior to that, I'd learned that this person was on the United States DNA data bank.
32:11So, then I requested RCFS to send a sample to their CODIS to compare the crime scene DNA sample to this person's sample, and he was excluded.
32:22After he was excluded, I asked the Hawaii police to interview him.
32:25As part of the interview, this person did acknowledge that he knew Steve Meyer, and he went to school with him, and he had also suffered in the past from having had his name used in the Commission of Crimes.
32:38There was another alias that Meyer used, and found that he was living in Canada, up in Gananaque.
32:45I met with that person, and he provided a copy of his fingerprints and a DNA sample, and he was ultimately cleared.
32:52I'm left with a DNA profile that is unidentified at the time, and that profile most certainly belongs to the person responsible for Mr. McBride's murder.
33:02The fingerprint located on the receipt in the car is attributable to a person, but I can't put that person in the crime scene.
33:09So, I can't say how Steve Meyer is related to the murder, but at the time, he's the only person of interest that I could develop.
33:17Just looking into this, I did a deeper dive on his background, and I found out that he had some sisters, and I had Michigan State Police assist me in obtaining a discard sample from one of the sisters.
33:30That was tested, and there was no match. I still couldn't locate him.
33:36He just moves on to another identity, right? He's just going person to person to person.
33:41I couldn't find an address for him. There was no recent criminal arrests that provided me with that current address.
33:48How old would he be, 70s?
33:50He'd be close to that.
33:51Yeah.
33:52I had asked various law enforcement agencies in the United States to provide pictures of him, and due to the fact that a lot of these records were dated, I didn't, they weren't able to provide me any mug shots.
34:04I was chasing a ghost.
34:09In 2019, we start investigating genetic genealogy.
34:14So, in Ontario, we're lucky because we have the Centre for Forensic Sciences.
34:18They take our DNA from the crime scene, they develop the STR profiles.
34:22We take that STR profile, we send it down to a lab in the U.S.
34:27They create what's called SNPs, or single nucleotide polymorphisms.
34:32That's basically your genes between your genes.
34:35So, it shows how related we all are amongst each other.
34:39It allows us to upload to two databases.
34:42One is GEDmatch, one is Family Tree DNA.
34:45They're the only two that allow police involvement.
34:47And we get a match list sent back to our genealogist.
34:50So, it tells us how many people that are on these sites are actually related to our offender.
34:57The top matches were about 150 centimorgans, which is just a bit more distant than second cousin, usually.
35:04So, all the matches in orange, they match each other.
35:08Green, that's another tiny cluster.
35:11We did have two clusters of matches that we were able to find common ancestors for.
35:17But they were quite far back in the mid-1800s and the mid-1700s.
35:23The couple back here, they were from Wales.
35:27We try and build back down the trees and try and find where these clusters unite, usually in marriages or children.
35:35But for this one, we were just not finding any of those connections anywhere.
35:40We start to do what's called targeting.
35:42Looking for other people that may have done a DNA test with Ancestry, but haven't uploaded to those two sites that we're allowed to use.
35:50And ask them if they're willing, if they could upload to one of these sites so we can see if they're a match.
35:56So, we did get some port-overs. Porting over is basically just moving your DNA results from one site to another.
36:03And then, eventually, there was a lady who was in the 500 centimorgan range.
36:08So, that's about a first cousin once removed.
36:11And she was an ex-match.
36:14An ex-match immediately tells us that that match is on the maternal side of the suspect.
36:20This is big. And we know that the relation from this lady is on her father's side.
36:27So, we knew we had to look at her father's mother's side.
36:30Once removed means there's a generation difference.
36:33So, this lady's first cousin's child could be the suspect, or this lady's parent's first cousin could be the suspect.
36:44This lady was older. Her parents in that generation were long dead.
36:49So, we knew that we would probably be looking a generation below her.
36:54We narrowed it down to these two brothers who were in the right age range of our potential suspect.
37:02One of the brothers was easier to find.
37:05He was married, had some kids, seemed like a family man.
37:10And then the other brother, we had a real hard time finding anything about him.
37:15And we did find that he had been married at one point.
37:19And then while we were binding obituaries of family members, we saw that in his stepmother's obituary, the brother that we couldn't find much on was listed to be living in Canada.
37:32This is our first kind of Canada connection in the whole tree.
37:37They were all from the U.S. and no one had seemed to move up here.
37:41But now we've got this one brother who fits the DNA and he's living in Canada.
37:48That's interesting to us.
37:50He was living out west. He's been in Canada for a number of years.
37:54And over the past month before we received his name, he actually died.
38:01So, he's now deceased.
38:03And we have to collect either the deceased's DNA or DNA from the U.S. to match up against our crime scene.
38:13There's something called YSTR testing.
38:16So, if we were to get one brother and it was not the correct brother, we were able to YSTR test and make sure that it is still a close male relative of him, which would lead us directly to his brother.
38:30But we had to make a decision on which brother we were going to try to get the DNA from.
38:46Welcome back.
38:47Police believe Kevin McBride's killer is one of two brothers.
38:51But with one deceased and the other living in another country, they still have work to do to prove it.
38:57Here now is the conclusion of death of the window dresser.
39:07So, we looked into the Canadian brother.
39:09Unfortunately, he had been cremated so we didn't have the ability to dig his body up and extract DNA.
39:15But our investigators made inquiries and there actually was material from his autopsy.
39:21And so investigators managed to obtain tissue samples from this individual.
39:28Lo and behold, they had a lot of DNA and when a DNA profile was developed.
39:36They're able to tell us that, yes, the deceased person that we've identified is the same profile as found on the blood in the murder scene of Mr. McBride.
39:51It's not Mr. Meyer.
39:53It's somebody different.
39:56It's just the way things go sometimes.
39:58Sometimes you do an investigation and when you look back into the case boxes, the offender's name's there.
40:06Most recently, what we found is when we find the offender, we look back and that offender's never been on our radar.
40:15So, they have no association to the actual victim.
40:18There is no way to put this person together with our victim.
40:22It's as shocking to us as it is to everybody else, but that's the power of IGG.
40:29The offender's name is William Taylor.
40:31Well, Taylor didn't have a criminal record so he never had his fingerprints on file.
40:35He just lived in the U.S. for a little bit, lived out west for a number of years, had a family.
40:42We were able to put him in Toronto at certain points, but there was nothing that stands out, nothing that says,
40:49this guy should have been looked at or this guy was a continuous offender.
40:55This almost seems like a one-time deal.
40:59Whatever the reasons, it seems like he murdered somebody and then just kind of went off the radar.
41:05He didn't appear to commit any other offences.
41:09It turns out that Mr. Taylor actually lived in the building where Mr. McBride was killed.
41:14So, did it have something to do with something that happened in the building or did he believe that Mr. McBride had a lot of money or a lot of valuables?
41:23We don't really know.
41:26But something happened in that building that drew the attention of Mr. Taylor to Mr. McBride.
41:33And whatever that was, Mr. Taylor murdered him in cold blood, stabbed him 20, 25 times.
41:40It's just, it's not something that happens in the normal course of a day.
41:45So, we'll probably never know what that was about, but we do know that Mr. Taylor was our offender and it resulted in the death of Mr. McBride.
41:55When I finally got that call to say the police wanted to speak to me and then we found out he had been, the murderer had been found, but he passed away a few months prior.
42:10It was sort of good in one way, but he's taken his secret to the grave and was never punished for it.
42:16But you wonder was, like, did anybody else know what he did?
42:20I still believe there must have been more than him that knew about it.
42:25So, what do we think about Steve Meyer now?
42:28Well, there's no doubt in our mind that Steve Meyer played a part in this.
42:31He probably fenced the stolen property, but there's nothing to put him at the actual crime scene.
42:37Even though we believe that Mr. Meyer was involved and probably has information for us, with the offender being deceased, there is no criminal proceedings.
42:49A lot of mixed feelings. Of course, you're upset, you're, you know, it's all the unknowns.
42:54Like, why did it happen? And, you know, for such a nice person, what a brutal way to be killed.
43:00I think it was just more shock than anything that there's something like that could happen.
43:07He was always sort of the life of the party.
43:09He always walked in and had, he just had something about him when he walked into a room.
43:15So, people, I think, were drawn to Kevin because, as I said, he always was dressed nicely.
43:22He always spoke nicely. What you see in that smile with him is what he was like.
43:28You could see that in him.
43:30He was always friendly, always, you know, fun. We'd always have fun with him.
43:35He'd be out sort of, you know, playing with us and, you know, would always join in his chats.
43:41He used to bring over slides of all his travels and we used to love sitting there with the old projector
43:48and looking at all the slides and hearing his stories of, you know, places he'd been.
43:53And he always used to say to me, when you're older, you've got to come over.
43:57And I always said I would. So, as yet, I haven't got to Canada, but it's on our plans for soon.
44:04So, I'd like to see where he spent time as well.
44:09So, when my uncle and his nephew went over, they brought his ashes back to Australia
44:16and we took them up to the cemetery where his mother was.
44:21So, his mother's buried.
44:23And they put the ashes in with his mum because Kev was never married
44:28and never had children or anything.
44:30So, yeah, we thought that was the right thing to do.
44:33So, finally reunited with his mum after her only spending six days with him.
44:38Kevin McBride may not have had much time with his mother, but the years he got with the rest of his family was cherished by all.
44:50Though they will never see Kevin's killer brought to justice, they are grateful to Toronto Police for solving the case.
44:57Thank you for joining us tonight on Crime Beat. I'm Anthony Robart.
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