MANDEL: At peace at last, Christine Jessop’s mom has died

Article content

Janet Jessop found peace at last.

Article content

And so she passed away last month, her son believes, because she felt it was finally safe to join her slain daughter: The endless hunt for Christine’s killer was over. And her surviving child Kenneth had just celebrated two years of sobriety.

Article content

“She’s with Christine, which is a relief for me,” says Ken Jessop over the phone from his home in Fort Erie.

Jessop was 81.

For so long I’ve known her as the brave, lovely mother who would never give up hope that some day, she would find out who brutally raped and stabbed her little girl and left her to rot in the woods 50 km from home. This October will mark 40 years since her nine-year-old, buck-toothed child disappeared from their home in quiet Queensville; Christine would have been home alone for barely half an hour.

Article content

Article content

Just enough time for a killer to pounce.

Through the desperate search that followed, the horrifying discovery of her remains three months later, the ensuing hunt for her killer, two trials and the ultimate exoneration of their innocent neighbour Guy Paul Morin — Jessop anxiously waited for justice for her Chrissie.

In 2019, we met near Lake Ontario — Jessop was far frailer than I remembered from our interviews in the past but still as feisty as ever. It was the 35th anniversary of her daughter’s murder and she and Ken wanted to talk about their frustration that not enough was being done to solve the cold case.

“I think about her every day,” Jessop told me that sunny autumn day.

“He took a lot away: Over the years, there could have been graduations, a wedding, children. You think about what she would have been doing. You just miss her, that’s all. She was robbed. We were robbed.”

Article content

The following year, for the first time in decades, mother and son went together to visit Christine’s grave in the cemetery behind the farmhouse where they once lived. Ken remembers how different it felt, how the heaviness in his heart was somehow lighter.

Just two weeks later, he discovered why.

“Are you ready?” Det. Steve Smith had asked his mother with a wide grin. “We know who it is.”

Thanks to the new tool of forensic genealogy, Toronto Police had finally identified Christine’s killer — former family friend Calvin Hoover. He and his wife Heather had worked with Christine’s father at Eastern Independent Telecom and the families had often socialized together.

Heather was one of only three people she’d told that October day in 1984 that she was taking Ken to see his father in jail where he was serving time for fraud but Chrissie was staying behind because she was too young. Hoover must have found out.

Article content

“If he’d even mentioned that he could take her to see her dad, she’d go with him in a minute, a split second even,” Jessop told me in 2020.

But after all the pain Hoover caused, the cowardly child killer evaded justice by taking his own life in 2015.

It all came as a seismic shock.

“We’d almost reached the point of thinking we’d never know,” says Ken, 53. “In the last few years of her life, mom got the answer she never thought she’d get and I’m so grateful for that.”

His initial relief soon turned to a cauldron of anger and a strange sense of emptiness — he’d been consumed for so long by the mystery — and in the midst of COVID, there was no way to get help. So he turned to alcohol.

RECOMMENDED VIDEO

“I filled up the void with drinking and stupidity and hit bottom,” he says, “and my mother was there to pick me up again.”

Article content

He spent the first month of detox on his mom’s couch and jokes that so much togetherness got him to his AA meetings — “I had to get out of the house. I went to 35 meetings in 28 days.”

Ken left the bar business and on a whim, began wood laser engraving, which has become his vocation and salvation.

In March, his mother came to celebrate his two years of sobriety.

“Her last words to me were how proud she was of what I’m doing and of the man I’ve become,” he said.

Jessop went home and a week later, slipped away peacefully in her sleep.

“I think she finally truly felt that she didn’t have to worry about me being self-destructive anymore and went home to Christine,” he said.

Rest in peace, Janet.

[email protected]

Article content