Montreal Cold Case Solved After 17 Years- DNA Links Jacques Bolduc to Murder of Catherine Daviau
Share
26-year-old Catherine Daviau lived alone at her apartment on 5165 5th Avenue, near Masson Street, in the Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie borough, Montreal, Canada.
On December 11, 2008, she talked with a friend on the phone as she drove home from work via Highway 40 eastbound.
The traffic was heavy that day, so it took longer than usual.
For the last several years, Catherine had been working at a company on the West Island of Montreal.
Her neighbours witnessed her go inside, and nothing was out of the ordinary until around 7:07pm, when neighbours saw smoke coming from her residence, and quickly called the emergency services.
Firefighters broke down the door, which was locked with no sign of forced entry, and entered the apartment, where they found Catherine's bound, naked, and injured body on her bed.
In a later interview, Catherine’s sister would say that Catherine would have gotten home at around 6pm that day. That left just a one hour window in which the killer acted.
Since the firefighters had arrived so quickly and dealt with the blaze, police were able to recover evidence from the scene and preserve it for investigation.
Although they had no leads as to who her killer could be at the time, his actions showed premeditation.
The killer had planned the murder, and had likely set the blaze to dispose of the evidence, as he used a nearby bottle of perfume from Catherine's room to get the fire started.
He had also left behind a pack of Player's filter cigarettes.
Police ran the DNA samples lifted from the crime scene into a database, but nothing came back.
Whoever the killer was, seemed to know Katherines schedule and the apartment she lived in. He had managed to get in and out of the apartment unnoticed, in the small timeframe he had to commit the crimes.
Police initially withheld the manner of death, however as the reports became available to the public, it was revealed that she had been stabbed over and over again in the chest and throat.
On September 17, 2025, The Major Crimes Section of the Montreal Police Service (SPVM) announced that the murder had finally been solved.
It has been seventeen years since Dupont's brutal slaying, but with the help of preserved DNA from the crime scene and genetic genealogy, the suspect has been identified.
Police named Jacques Bolduc in the murder. Bolduc, who was serving time in Archambault Institution, a federal prison, for two robberies and attempted murders, died of natural causes in 2021.
His laundry list of crime stretched as far back as 1979, where he shot a taxi driver in the back of the head. The man survived.
La Press reported that in 1981 he hijacked a corrections truck, and in 1987 he took several people, including a child, hostage.
He raped and murdered Dupont in 2008, and shot and robbed a man in 2017. That same night, he shot a cashier in the face.
Bolduc’s DNA was taken in 2020 and he was given an indefinite prison term.
By the following year he was dead, and the DNA never made it into the system. Bolduc was never a suspect, and likely would not have been on the police radar, had it not been for genetic genealogy.
Investigation revealed, that several days before the murder, Daviau had advertised a vehicle for sale online, and Bolduc had replied to the classified ad.
Daviau had put her phone number on the advert, and Bolduc called, telling her he would come to take a look at it on the 10th. He never showed.
Now knowing her address, he waited for her the following day and murdered her.
Although Bolduc was a violent repeat offender with a lot of convictions to his name, he was not found on any databases. Media outlets report that in 2008; Bolduc was living in a halfway house in the area. He was supposed to return to his lodgings there on the night of the murder, but failed to do so. Two dates later he was arrested on unrelated charges and having violated his parole, it was revoked.
The SPVM thanked the Forensic Sciences and Legal Medicine Laboratory (LSJML) of the Ministry of Public Security (MSP) for their support in solving the murder.
Commander Mélanie Dupont, head of the Major Crimes Section, said:
“Over the years, several investigative strategies have been deployed and hundreds of pieces of information have been processed in order to solve the murder of Ms. Catherine Daviau. We never gave up, and genetic genealogy finally allowed us to definitively identify the perpetrator of this horrific crime. We thank our partners at the LSJML in resolving this long-term investigation. Our thoughts are with the victim's loved ones, and we hope that today's announcement can bring them some peace of mind in their grieving process.”