Man with Winnipeg ties identified as homicide victim in 1997 cold case, but Florida police still seek answers

Cold case detectives in Florida say a homicide victim found floating near a beach in the Sunshine State more than two decades ago was a Canadian man with ties to Winnipeg, a discovery made thanks to DNA technology, and police hope the information leads to answers about who killed him.

Sarah Scalia, a detective with the Flagler County Sheriff's Office's cold case unit, says two local boat company employees were on a test drive on Sept. 10, 1997, when they noticed an alligator swimming in a section of the Intracoastal Waterway near Flagler Beach in northeastern Florida.

Then they saw something else drifting atop the water.

"They got a little closer, and saw that it was a body, and they notified law enforcement," Scalia told CBC News on Friday.

The man had no identification and investigators believe he had been killed about a week prior, but police weren't able to identify him until earlier this year.

The sheriff's office released Robert Bruce McPhail's identity for the first time in a Thursday news release, saying the 58-year-old was bound, shot and stabbed multiple times before he was dumped in the water.

"Obviously, somebody wanted him dead, and they didn't want him found," said Scalia.

"Lucky for us, we live in Florida, where there's alligators everywhere, and perhaps if it wasn't for that alligator and those two employees … we would never have found him."

Detectives scoured the surrounding areas for clues about the man's identity for more than two decades, before employing technology they had never used before, said Scalia. They sent the man's bones to Othram, a forensic genetic genealogy company, in 2021.

"They were able to get some common ancestors and matches, and so they would build the tree upwards to find out how these matches are related," she said, before they built the tree back downwards, ruling out people who did not fit McPhail's profile.

"He remained unidentified for [almost] 26 years, until we were able to figure out that he was Robert Bruce McPhail from Canada," Scalia said.

The Texas-based company also helped identify a suspect in the murder of Christine Jessop, 9, an Ontario girl who was abducted in 1984, as well as the 1983 killings of Susan Tice and Erin Gilmour in Toronto.

WATCH | DNA technology identifies homicide victim 25 years later:

McPhail was an only child, and his parents both died in the 1970s, a spokesperson from the sheriff's office said. Family did not report the 58-year-old as missing, and distant relatives did not know he had been murdered after losing touch with him when he moved to Florida in the mid-1990s.