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Ken Jessop laid his mother, Janet Jessop, to rest with his sister exactly 40 years after the nine-year-old boy disappeared from their home
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On the 40th anniversary of their separation, they finally got back together.
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On October 3, in the sunny Queensville cemetery, behind the farmhouse where nine-year-old Christine Jessop disappeared exactly four decades earlier, her mother, Janet, was reunited with her murdered daughter: her ashes were buried next to her daughter, just as she wanted.
“It was a beautiful service,” says his son, Ken. “I got my closure.”
Janet died in March at the age of 81, finally at peace knowing that her daughter's killer had been identified after she had waited so long. The discovery came in 2020, after the new scientific forensic geneology tool led Toronto Police Det. Sgt. Steve Smith and his cold case team for Calvin Hoover, a former friend and neighbor of the Jessop family who escaped justice by taking his life in 2015.
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The mystery that had consumed her for so long was finally solved. His son Ken successfully fought his demons and had just celebrated two years of sobriety. He believes she decided it was now safe to go.
And he knew that October 3rd was the right day to lay his mother to rest.
“It has been 40 years since Christine disappeared,” says Ken. “It seemed appropriate. It feels right. They are together again after 40 years.”
It was that day in 1984 that Janet took Ken to visit her father, Bob, in prison, where he was serving 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 as a dispatcher – and with children the same age, the families often socialized together. Merged was one of three people Janet told who were leaving Chrissie at home because she was too young to go with them to prison.
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Ken believes Hoover must have heard. Now her killer was armed with an opportunity – and the best bait he could think of: offering to take her to see her father.
“Yhe would go with him in a minute, even in a split second,” Janet told me in 2020.
Three months after she disappeared from her home in Queensville, Christine's body was discovered in a wooded area in Sunderland – around 50 kilometers away. She was raped and stabbed to death.
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Neighbor Guy Paul Morin was wrongly convicted of the murder and later exonerated due to the advent of DNA testing. Janet and Ken never gave up on finding her real killer – even as the years turned into decades.
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Then Smith called four years ago and asked if he could stop by. She thought it was for a friendly coffee and to keep her informed about the cold case investigation.
He appeared at her door with a wide smile and told her to sit down.
“Are you ready?he asked. “We know who it is.“
She remembered how the Hoovers would bring their kids to barbecues and all the kids would run to the cemetery behind their house to play while she and Heather talked and the husbands disappeared with their beers. The Hoovers searched for Chrissie; they went to her funeral.
Janete was stunned.
“UnfortunatelyIt took so long,” she told me soon after. “But we have an answer.”
Finally, she was relieved of the crushing weight of not knowing.
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At the private memorial service, her son spoke about how Janet fought until the end – for both of her children.
“I talked about her strength – it was the constant theme that day,” Ken said. “I also talked about how she never gave up on me. His life’s mission was to make sure I was okay.”
He remembered how she spent a week with him in Fort Erie and what a beautiful visit it was. The morning she came home was his two-year anniversary of sobriety and he can still feel her fragile arms hugging him tightly.
“She told me how proud she was of the man I had become,” Ken said. “Those were the last words she said to me.”
The only temptation to go back to drinking came a week later, when he received the call that his mother had died. But then he quickly dismissed the thought.
“She would kill me,” he laughed. “Somehow there would be lightning on a clear blue day.”
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