On the 40th anniversary of their separation, they were back together at last.
On Oct. 3, in the sun-drenched Queensville cemetery behind the farmhouse where nine-year-old Christine Jessop went missing exactly four decades before, her mother Janet was reunited with her slain daughter: her ashes buried beside her little girl, just as she’d wanted.
“It was a beautiful service,” says her son, Ken. “I had my closure.”
Janet died in March at the age of 81, finally at peace with the knowledge that her daughter’s killer had been identified after she’d waited for so long. The breakthrough came in 2020 after the new scientific tool of forensic geneology led Toronto Police Det.-Sgt. Steve Smith and his cold case team to Calvin Hoover, a former friend and neighbour of the Jessop family who eluded justice by taking his life in 2015.
The mystery that had eaten away at her for so long was finally solved. Her son Ken had successfully battled his demons and had just celebrated two years of sobriety. He believes that she decided it was now safe to go.
And he knew Oct. 3 was the right day to lay his mom to rest.
“It was 40 years since the date of Christine’s disappearance,” Ken says. “It felt fitting. It just feels right. They’re back together after 40 years to the day.”
It was on that day in 1984 that Janet had taken Ken to visit his father Bob in prison, where he was doing time for fraud.
Heather Hoover and her husband had worked with Christine’s father at Eastern Independent Telecom – he was a cable installer, she worked dispatch – and with kids the same age, the families had often socialized together. Heather was one of only three people Janet told that she was leaving Chrissie at home because she was too young to go with them to the jail.
Ken believes Hoover must have overheard. Now her killer was armed with opportunity – and the the best lure he could imagine: offering to take her to see her dad.
“She’d go with him in a minute, a split second even,” Janet had told me in 2020.
Three months after she vanished from their Queensville home, Christine’s body was discovered in a wooded area in Sunderland – about 50 kilometres away. She had been raped and stabbed to death.
Neighbour Guy Paul Morin was wrongly convicted of the murder and later exonerated by the advent of DNA testing. Janet and Ken never gave up hoping of finding her true killer – even as years turned into decades.
Then Smith called four years ago and asked if he could come by. She thought it was for a friendly coffee and to keep her in the loop of his cold case investigation.
He showed up at her door with a wide grin and told her to sit down.
“Are you ready?” he asked. “We know who it is.“
She recalled how the Hoovers would bring their kids over for barbecues and all the children would run out in the cemetery behind their house to play while she and Heather would chat and the husbands would disappear with their beers. The Hoovers searched for Chrissie; they went to her funeral.
Janet was stunned.
“Unfortunately, it took this long,” she told me soon after. “But we’ve got an answer.”
At long last, she was relieved of the crushing weight of not knowing.
At the private graveside service, her son spoke of how Janet fought to the end – for both her children.
“I talked about her strength – it was the ongoing theme that day,” Ken said. “I also talked about how she never gave up on me. It was her life’s mission to make sure I was okay.”
He recalled how she’d come to spend a week with him in Fort Erie and what a beautiful visit it was. The morning she left for home was his two-year sober anniversary and he can still feel her frail arms hugging him tight.
“She told me how proud she was of the man I’d become,” Ken said. “Those were the last words she said to me.”
The only temptation to return to drinking came a week later when he got the call that his mom had died. But then he quickly dismissed the thought.
“She’d kill me,” he laughed. “Somehow, there’d be a lightening bolt on a clear blue day.”