From cold to closed: Advances in DNA analysis helped solve cold cases in 2025
Global News
In a Quebec courtroom last October, Sylvie Desjardins delivered a message to her daughter's killer that was 30 years in the making.
In a Quebec courtroom last October, Sylvie Desjardins delivered a message to her daughter’s killer that was 30 years in the making.
“You thought you were taking a life, but in truth, you only added weight to your own existence,” she told killer Réal Courtemanche.
“You will carry this silence, this emptiness, this gaze you extinguished until your last breath.”
For decades, the murder of 10-year-old Marie-Chantale Desjardins north of Montreal had haunted investigators and her family. Her battered body was found in 1994, with her bicycle leaning against a nearby tree, four days after she had headed home from a friend’s house.
The case came to a close this year with Courtemanche’s second-degree murder conviction. It was one of several high-profile Quebec murders that have been recently solved thanks to advances in DNA analysis, techniques that are raising hopes of solving not only more cold cases, but also active cases, says the head of the province’s DNA forensic lab.
While police are coy about the exact strategies used to identify killers, the judge in the Desjardins case said, “scientific advances and major breakthroughs in the field of forensic biology” made it possible to identify Courtemanche’s DNA from crime scene evidence.
Diane Séguin, who heads the DNA section of the provincial crime lab — Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale — says her team analyzes some 50 cold cases per year, and has helped police solve between eight and 10 in the last year or two.
She says case resolutions have come from better DNA extraction techniques and from genetic genealogy — the comparison of DNA from crime scenes to public DNA databanks composed of profiles uploaded by members of the public researching their family roots.
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