Toronto detectives have used new genetic investigative techniques to identify a suspect in the cold cases of two women who were killed in the city’s downtown nearly 40 years ago.

Joseph George Sutherland, 61, was arrested on Friday in the Northern Ontario community of Moosonee. Police say he has since been brought south to face charges in Toronto, where he lived in the early 1980s. He is accused of two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the two stabbing killings from 1983.

That August, the first victim, 45-year-old Susan Tice, was found dead in her home just months after moving to Toronto from Calgary. Then, that December, 22-year-old Erin Gilmour, whose father was Barrick Gold co-founder David Gilmour, was found dead in her Yorkville apartment above the clothing store where she worked. Both women had been sexually assaulted.

In 2003, Toronto Police announced they had canvassed hundreds of suspects. The new DNA techniques of the time, they said, had helped them conclude that the cases shared a common suspect. Yet the killer’s identity remained a mystery, because the genetic information could not be matched to anyone whose DNA had been entered into police databases.