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“It’s not viable for every investigation, but there’s certainly going to be opportunities.”

Edmonton police currently have 204 unsolved homicides on the books, which are the purview of Tebb’s historical crimes section.

The oldest file is from 1938, the most recent 2017.

Tebb was previously an investigator with the historical homicides unit, and was at times alone working cold cases. EPS has since beefed up the unit, creating a historical crimes section with historical homicides, cold case sex assaults and missing persons under the same umbrella.

The unit now has four cold case homicide investigators in addition to Tebb.

In 2018, the unit began a top to bottom review of their files. They picked out cases with unidentified DNA profiles that could be submitted to one of the consumer genetics websites.

Usually, when Edmonton police encounter a crime scene with genetic material from an unknown suspect, they collect a sample and send it to the RCMP lab, which performs what’s known as nuclear DNA analysis.

“Historically, when we develop a DNA profile, it’s compared against the national DNA data bank,” Tebb said. Absent a hit, it sits on the data bank as an unknown male or unknown female profile.

Typically, police would only get a hit if a judge had ordered that person’s DNA added to the data bank. “The national data bank doesn’t even allow us to look for relatives,” said Tebb. “It has to be a direct hit, it has to literally be that person.”