On Friday May 14th, 1971, between 8:00pm and 9:00pm, Ljubica Topic, 6 years old, and her brother 8 years old, were playing outside of their family home at 1290 Drouillard Road, Windsor, Ontario.
Shortly before 9:00pm, a man who had been near the restaurant across the street approached the children. He offered Ljubica Topic a small sum of money to accompany him down the street. He then provided her brother with some change in order to distract him. Ljubica Topic was last seen walking south on Drouillard Road, holding the man’s hand.
Her brother alerted their mother. She and a friend went looking for Ljubica, walking all the way up to Seminole Street without finding her. Mrs. Topic returned home and contacted the police. The Police attended and a large scale search that included members of the community began to search for Ljubica.
At approximately 1:00 am on May 15th, 1971, four hours after she was led away by the man, the body of Ljubica Topic was located in the rear yard of 1690 Hickory, a short distance from the gate to the rear alleyway (the alleyway no longer exists today). Ljubica had been severely and violently beaten. A large scale investigation into her murder began.
Update:
In the past year, numerous tips were provided to the Police following a media release in April of 2015.
Police have been actively investigating the leads, and have cleared over 20 individuals.
Investigators have recently sought the services of Parabon NanoLabs (Parabon), a DNA technology company in Virginia that specializes in DNA phenotyping,the process of predicting physical appearance and ancestry from unidentified DNA evidence. Law Enforcement Agencies use the company’s Snapshot™ DNA Phenotyping Service (Snapshot) for narrowing suspect lists and generating leads in criminal investigations.
Snapshot predicts that a person of interest (POI) in the Ljubica Topic case has the following features:
- Fair skin or very fair skin with 89.2% confidence
- Brown or Hazel eyes with 97.0% confidence
- Brown or black hair with 96.6% confidence
- Zero or few freckling with 93% confidence
Snapshot predicts the POI’s ancestry is almost entirely European, primarily from the regions of North West Europe (North West European populations include: British, Dutch, Irish, North Eurpoean, Orcadian, Scottish, and United Kingdom population groups).
Using these predicted features, along with a prediction of the POI’s face shape, Snapshot produced a composite profile of what the suspect may have looked like at 25 years old, and of what the suspect may look like today at approximately 70 years old.
It is important to note that these composites are scientific approximations of the POI’s appearance based on his DNA, and are not likely to be exact replicas of his appearance. Environmental factors such as smoking, drinking, diet, body mass index, facial hair, and hairstyle cannot be predicted by DNA analysis and may cause further variation between the POI’s predicted and actual appearance.
Anyone with information is asked to contact Windsor Police Major Crime Branch at 519-255-6700 ext. 4830, Crime Stoppers anonymously at 519-258-8477 (TIPS), online at www.catchcrooks.com, or Submit a Tip on Facebook.