Lori Marilyn Pinkus was a 21-year-old White woman who had moved from Ottawa to Toronto only months before her life ended violently on September 8, 1991. In Toronto, she was living in the city’s west end and working in the sex trade around the Bloor Street West and Lansdowne Avenue area. During the early morning hours that Sunday, Pinkus was last seen leaving a local bar after having a drink with friends.
What happened after she walked away from the bar has never been fully established publicly.
At approximately 9:55 that morning, the caretaker of Brockton High School at 90 Croatia Street discovered Pinkus outside the school, in its parking lot. She was partially nude and had suffered a violent assault. Investigators determined that she had been strangled and left for dead. Emergency personnel attempted life-saving measures after police were called, but they were unable to revive her, and she was pronounced dead at the scene.
Pinkus had grown up in Ottawa as the youngest of nine children. Before moving to Toronto, she had survived another serious act of violence. In 1990, she suffered stab wounds to the chest during an incident at her Ottawa apartment, and two men were charged with attempted murder in connection with that attack. The prosecution did not proceed after Pinkus failed to appear for court proceedings. Publicly available information has not established that the earlier stabbing was connected to her later murder in Toronto, and the men involved in that case have not been identified by police as responsible for her homicide.
Toronto homicide investigators conducted an extensive forensic examination after Pinkus was killed and pursued numerous people who might have had information about her final hours. According to police, many persons of interest were developed during the original investigation, but they were ultimately eliminated. No individual was charged, and the case remained unsolved as the years passed.
A major development came decades later when advances in forensic testing allowed investigators to reexamine evidence collected in 1991. Toronto Police announced that they had obtained a male DNA profile they believe belongs to Pinkus's killer. Investigators said the profile gave them biological evidence linking an unidentified man to the murder, but they still needed to determine whose DNA it was. Police characterized the situation as having the killer's DNA without having a name to attach to it.
Despite that forensic breakthrough, the available DNA has not publicly led to an identification, arrest, charge, trial, or conviction. More recent reporting in September 2026 continued to describe Pinkus's homicide as unsolved, with Toronto Police still not knowing the name of the man believed responsible. The original persons of interest had been eliminated, and authorities had not publicly identified a current suspect.
More than three decades after Pinkus was found outside Brockton High School, her murder therefore remains an open Toronto cold case. Investigators continue to possess what could be a crucial piece of evidence—the DNA profile believed to belong to her attacker—but, according to the most recent publicly available information, no matching individual has been publicly identified and no arrest has been made in her killing.
