Diane Dobson, a 36-year-old Indigenous woman from Saugeen First Nation and a mother of three, vanished on Valentine’s Day in 1995. On the evening of February 14, she was last seen in west Windsor, with police placing her near the intersection of Prince Road and Myrtle Street at about 5:45 p.m. Other accounts indicate she had been planning to visit her children in Kingsville. By the following day, the trip had ended in tragedy.
Her body was discovered in a ditch in the Brighton Beach area of Windsor, near the 4700 block of Water Street.
Dobson had been violently beaten. Investigators determined that she died from numerous blunt-force injuries to the head. The condition of the scene quickly convinced detectives that the ditch where she was found was not where the fatal assault had taken place. There was only a small amount of blood where her body had been left, and she was not wearing shoes. Investigators also recovered plant material from one of her hands that was associated with a species not native to Ontario and described as a houseplant variety. Those clues led police to believe she had been killed somewhere else, likely inside a building, before her body was transported to Brighton Beach and discarded.
The investigation examined people in Dobson’s life, but it did not produce an arrest. Police later confirmed that her live-in boyfriend was in Toronto when she disappeared and that his absence from Windsor had been verified; he did not return until after her body had been found. Published accounts of the investigation also state that both the boyfriend and Dobson’s former husband were cleared. Police never publicly identified either man as the person responsible for the killing. More recent reporting on the case has indicated that investigators believe there may have been two people involved in the homicide, although neither has been publicly identified.
Dobson’s life before the killing had included difficult periods, but accounts from those who remembered her described someone who had been trying to move forward. She had worked as a taxi driver, had begun reconnecting with her First Nations roots, and was attending St. Clair College with hopes of entering nursing. Her death later became one of the cases remembered locally during Sisters in Spirit events honoring missing and murdered Indigenous women. For years her grave was unmarked before friends and family were able to arrange a more formal memorial.
Three decades after the killing, Windsor police returned to the evidence with renewed attention. In 2025, the Major Crimes Unit’s Cold Case Review Team began reexamining historical reports, witness statements, autopsy material and physical evidence. Investigators said some DNA evidence existed, but earlier testing had not produced enough information to generate a usable profile. Advances in forensic technology prompted police to resubmit evidence for more sophisticated DNA analysis in the hope that a profile could eventually be compared with law-enforcement databases. The official review concluded that the case still contained investigative avenues that could potentially identify and lead to the arrest of the person or people responsible.
In March 2025, the Windsor Police Service Board approved a reward of up to $20,000 for information capable of helping identify and bring to justice whoever killed Dobson. Investigators also appealed directly to people who had been reluctant to cooperate in 1995, saying that fear of retaliation may have prevented some witnesses from telling police everything they knew at the time. Detectives encouraged even people who had previously been interviewed to speak with the Cold Case Review Unit again, believing that changed circumstances and modern forensic methods could finally provide the missing pieces.
As of the most recent publicly available information in 2026, no one has been arrested, charged, tried or convicted in Dobson’s killing. Her sister, Laura Fournier, has continued publicly calling for answers, while investigators maintain that someone still knows what happened. More than three decades after Dobson was taken from the streets of west Windsor and killed elsewhere before being left at Brighton Beach, the homicide remains an active and unsolved cold case.
