In a later interview, Roy Romanow pointed out to me that her name, Alexandra, in the Ukrainian-Cyrillic version which I had painstakingly, though awkwardly, copied into my notebook and shown him, was spelled differently than in the English version. I remember, also, being startled to find faded plastic flowers on her grave, as if I had expected that no one in the world but me remembered her. I assumed her family, about whom I then knew nothing, must have laid the flowers, but then, I wondered, dismissing it at once as a ridiculously romantic notion, whether perhaps her murderer had. (Later, it occurred to me to look in the phone book, where I found a number of people with her last name, some presumably her relatives.)
This was an old part of the cemetery, and all the graves had the same smooth covering of dark green, well-tended lawn. I felt little at her grave except a mild puzzlement that such a savage end could result in the same well cared-for grave as the ones around hers belonging to those who had died more mundanely of heart attacks, strokes, pneumonia, cancer, accidents, or even peacefully in their sleep. I lifted my head to watch the traffic droning rapidly down Warman Road beside the cemetery. Its presence seemed to say that dying, however you might do it, would never leak into the world beyond the grassy verge of the cemetery.
After that, my resolve firmed, I drove to the address where, when Alex vanished, she had been sharing a basement apartment with three other nurses. The small apartment block at the correct address looked too modern to me, and I concluded that the one she had lived in must have been torn down. When I realized this, I didn’t bother to get out of my car, but drove on to the drugstore nearby. At that time, it had been called Mead’s, and the newspaper reported that it had been her destination when she’d left her apartment in order to buy stamps and to mail two letters she’d been carrying. One of the people I’d phoned earlier had claimed to me that she’d been carrying a make-up kit (and how odd that was, if all you were going to do was sit on the riverbank and had to go to work right away, anyway), and someone else that her hair was in curlers. The truth was she carried two letters from home, possibly her wallet, and at Mead’s Drugstore she stamped and mailed the letters, and after that, it is thought, she carried only her wallet.
The drugstore had been modernized and had new owners and, again, I didn’t go in. Instead, I parked nearby, because I wanted to go to the site where her body had been found in its first shallow grave in the sand along the riverbank, beyond the weir and the CPR bridge, themselves only a mile and a half downstream from our old high school. I got out of my car and began to walk down the worn and cracked sidewalk, falling into a reverie. As I walked a feeling of such familiarity overcame me that it seemed, for one moment, as I gazed down at the cracks in the sidewalk and at the few straggling blades of grass growing in them, that somehow over the many years Saskatoon had been home to me, and during the more than thirty years I had lived elsewhere, I had become this sidewalk. I might live elsewhere, I might grow old, the city itself might change and expand and in parts be unrecognizable to me, but this old, crumbling, comfortable part of the city was inseparably a part of me—there was no Saskatoon without me—we were each other. And I thought, how could I ever want to return here when every step reminds me of my early life, of some part of my personal story, all the bad parts of it?
I lifted my eyes then and saw ahead of me, growing on the riverbank a few yards downstream from the weir, a cluster of elms, willows, and maples. I hadn’t brought the newspaper description of the grave’s location with me, that is, of how many yards it had been from the intersection, and from the weir, and how close to the CPR bridge, but I crossed the street, heading for the bluff of trees. I did not want to enter them, but I did, and standing among them, so close to the water below, whether I’d found the site of her murder and grave or not, I felt a shiver of horror, the first I had experienced since the moment, many years earlier, when I had first read of her death. And yet, it felt unreal to me, more of the kind a horror movie might induce, and I wondered at my own insensitivity.
I climbed back to the road, still uncertain as to whether I’d been to the right place, and went back to my car, where I sat a while, collecting my thoughts. It was only then that I was jolted by the realization that I had done all of this on the eighteenth day of May 2001, that is, on the thirty-ninth anniversary of her death. It felt to me that she had spoken to me from her grave, and was telling me that she was counting on me, that her soul still craved satisfaction, that I could not stop worrying until the police named her murderer.
If he had been as young as fifteen in 1962—about as young as we can conceive of a murderer being, although of course there are child murderers—in 2001 he would have been only fifty-four years old. Or he might have been in his sixties. He could have been living an ordinary life. I might even have known him or had friends who would have known him.
I started my car again and began the long, five-hour drive home, my heart feeling too large for my chest. I was deeply touched at that revelation of place I had experienced, satisfied that I had accomplished so much, even following in Alex’s footsteps on the evening of her death, and disturbed and uneasy at my belated recognition of Alex’s murderer as a real human being—and one who was probably still alive.
I believed then that murder was always out of madness, no matter what the courts said, or what people believed. I couldn’t conceive of murder done out of perfect sanity. Even now, all these years later, I find myself pondering whether there really is such a thing as a cold-blooded killer. Why couldn’t a murderer or murderess kill in the sanest moment of his or her life? After all, we recognize meanness in a person—somebody who is mean enough, we say, to snatch candy from a baby, to take what he wants without concern for the person he robs; is it the same kind of person who tortures? And why couldn’t that meanness apply also to murder? Isn’t meanness just a continuum? When I met the two policemen, I hadn’t yet given any serious thought to the mind of a murderer, beyond my unexamined notion that murder itself was madness. That murder was always evil I took as a given, but how madness and evil were related, or if they were, was a question I had always found easier not to think about.
The police officers had suggested I try talking to the Saskatoon Police Service, and that seemed like a reasonable idea to me. They thought reading the autopsy report would be a good starting point as well, and to do that, I’d need to ask the police, or else the coroner’s office.
I thought that enough time had passed since Alex’s death that the police might be willing to talk about the evidence they had gathered, something about their suspects at the time, and maybe about the way the trail of clues had gone dead on them. I thought that they might see my interest as an opportunity, a conduit, to try one more time to find Alex’s killer through my reminding people about the murder, I thought that somebody’s memory just might be jogged about some vital detail so far missed, or that maybe somebody knew something, had known something since 1962, and would feel guilty enough, as a result of whatever I decided to write, to at last tell the authorities—and that would lead to the killer’s capture.
I thought, too, on that day that had turned out to be the thirty-ninth anniversary of her death, that a goodly part of the continuing memory of Alex and her unspeakable end came out of not knowing exactly what had happened to her, and imagining how bad it must have been.
I remember clearly my initial reaction to the news of the finding of her body. When I opened the newspaper, the story occupied a whole page, maybe more, and there were black-and-white photos, and a big headline, CORPSE POUND IN SHALLOW GRAVE IDENTIFIED AS MISSING NURSE; and below that, CLOTHING WAS THAT WORN BY MISSING NURSE, ROOMMATES TELL CORONER’S JURY. One photo was of three men, one in uniform, the other two wearing overcoats and fedoras and identified as Sergeant Major Tom Hession, Detective Inspector Giles Lee, and Police Chief Jim Kettles. It seemed to be night, and they were standing at the edge of a copse of trees much taller than they were, and staring down into an area at the foot of the trees that is b
lack in the photo.
The second picture was of Alex’s mother and father, her father looking at a large, framed photo he holds, I assume of Alex, while Alex’s mother, sitting beside him, had closed her eyes. Both of them were solemn, her father revealing maybe a touch of anger in the set of his strong jaw, and her mother seeming, if anything, to be praying—praying perhaps for this moment to end. Her body seemed relaxed, as if she had always known it would come to this. Her hands were in her lap, her right hand seemingly picking at her left, which was lifted so that the palm half-faced the camera. Her hands seemed large, and strong. The last photo was of Alex as she smiled, over her shoulder at the camera, wearing her nurse’s uniform and cap. This may have been the one that thirty-nine years later I would see sealed in full colour on her white marble headstone.
I stared at the photos in disbelief and amazement; I may have read a few words, rapidly skimming the headline. I lifted my head and said to my husband (we would have been married less than a year then of the fourteen it would be before our divorce), my voice not much louder than a whisper: “I knew her; I knew her.” I remember that I let go of the newspaper, and it slid off my lap onto the floor. It was not that I disbelieved the newspaper report; it was only that I was having trouble absorbing it. Was this the same Alexandra Wiwcharuk I had known? I looked at the picture: Yes, it was the girl I had known, although now surprisingly pretty. I began, “But how—” before I gave up whatever I was trying to say. I suppose I meant, how could she get killed? Not specifically, was it by a gun or a knife, but How could such a thing happen? How could it happen to a girl just like me, to someone I knew? How could it happen here, in Saskatoon? Now?
And that was about it. I read the report carefully, and I probably read it one more time after that just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Then I put the paper away and headed out to do whatever it was I did in those days—I probably went to my summer job. I have some vague memory of that same night driving to the site, for whatever reason people do things like that—for the thrill of it, to try to make real what had happened, to be able to say that one had been there—but when we reached the end of 33rd Street and saw the several hundred people standing on the riverbank or parked in their cars staring out to where Alex had been killed, we grew embarrassed, faintly ashamed, and instead of stopping, drove on by. I think I phoned at least one and maybe two of the girls with whom we’d attended high school, but although one of them knew Alex had gone on to nursing school, neither of them knew any more than I did about her or her murder.
I remember debating about whether I should go to her funeral or not. I had been taught that you don’t go to funerals of people you don’t know well; that is in bad taste; worse, it is a violation of a family’s privacy. (Little did I know that one day I would live in a rural community where everybody went routinely to everybody’s funeral; it was expected, as well as a social occasion.) Also, I had a job which I needed badly—I’d decided to go back to university that fall for my fifth year and my husband would be returning too—and I didn’t dare risk losing it by asking for time off to attend a funeral for someone who was not an immediate family member. So I didn’t go, and I don’t remember ever regretting that I didn’t go.
Now, looking back after all these years, I can only wonder at the mildness of my reaction, or non-reaction, to the news of such a shocking death of someone so young, someone I had known. I think now that it was the same reaction as that of others: I was just so stunned by this unprecedented event—and I do mean unprecedented—that I couldn’t get a mental grip on it. I think that I was waiting, everybody was waiting, for the police to make the expected announcement: that they had caught her killer, that this was his name, this was why he had killed her, and exactly how, and that he would spend the rest of his life in prison. We were all waiting to hear that news, and expecting that when we did, we would be all right. We would gradually forget about it. But that news didn’t come when it was expected, and it didn’t come, and as I write this nearly forty-five years later, it still has not come.
But I think now that there was more to my lack of reaction, or to my stunned incomprehension, than I understood. Surely I was as frightened as were all the women who, forty years later, when I began asking questions, told me about their fears, about how they wouldn’t go out unless there was a group of them, how they would call young men they didn’t even know who lived in the apartment below them, or next door, to be their escorts if they had to run short errands in the same neighbourhood, how they padlocked their doors, or pushed furniture up against them, slept with butcher knives under their pillows or next to their beds, or couldn’t sleep at night at all, and so on.
Some people, of course, felt differently. When, in 2005, I called Bill Davenport, who attended high school with Alex and me—his picture had been one of those hanging on the wall in the room full of Tech memorabilia—and who has lived in Saskatoon most of his life, he told me the story of how he had been playing bridge in the campus student union building with some friends on the day the news was released that Alex’s body had been found. One of the men, who didn’t know her, had not heard of her until the moment he heard of her murder, remarked casually that Alex had to have been promiscuous, wild, and that—the implication was clear—she could only expect what had happened to her, that in a sense, she had had it coming.
But the one woman playing cards with them, who also did not know Alex, flared up in anger. “What right have you to say such a thing about a girl who has been raped, battered, and murdered? How do you know that? You don’t know it; you don’t know her. She isn’t guilty of anything. She was murdered.”
By this time it was early in 1962, and what was unusual about this exchange was not that the male student had dismissed Alex’s death by blaming it on her but that the woman student had immediately defended her, hadn’t let the man get away with his blithely scurrilous assumption about a woman he had never so much as met. In the fifties, we might have disagreed with him, but I doubt we would have challenged him—not about a woman we didn’t even know. Maybe, in our innocence, we would even have drawn the same conclusion, thinking, if you obeyed all the rules, did what you were told, were very careful, nothing like that would ever happen to you.
Bill told them that he had known her, had attended the same high school for four years.
“What was she like?” they asked.
“She was quiet,” Bill said, in his calm, low-key way. “She was a nice girl. Attractive. Anything but promiscuous—at least, not in high school.” He couldn’t believe that she had changed that much in a few short years; he didn’t believe that she had had anything but a terrible misfortune.
As if simple fear resulting from what had happened weren’t enough, there were pranksters out there, or maybe sadists, doing their best to frighten the already frightened. A girl who’d been in my class at St. Mary’s in 1953-54 and whose picture I still have of the two of us and a third girl standing on 20th Street, wearing our Girl Guide uniforms and smiling and squinting into the sun, told me via another one of our gang of girls that in May 1962 she had been working at an office in Saskatoon. “We didn’t have a switchboard in those days. And some guy with a creepy voice phoned and said that I’d better be quiet or I might get it next, or something like that.” She wasn’t the only one to receive such a phone call, which added to the general level of fear among the city’s young women. In contrast, I remember feeling that it all had nothing to do with me, that it had happened in some other universe, that it was an event so out of line with normal existence that it was a fluke. That there was nothing to be afraid of.
I wasn’t yet twenty-two, nobody I loved had died, I hadn’t experienced any real catastrophes. My heart was unscarred. I didn’t even think that I should shed a tear for propriety’s sake. I thought, instead, fiercely, that to do so would be hypocritical. I had already developed the thick wall between the real world, the world of the heart, and the world of the mind, a capacity that universities teach the young. Or a
t least, which they taught them then. I had, as it is said, a lot to learn.
The existence of serial killers hadn’t yet become a part of the lore of what it is to be a North American. We had little idea of somebody routinely hanging out in shopping malls looking for prey, or following a lone woman in a car to her destination, or waiting in bars until another victim came along. If we thought, in our sudden paranoia, that if Alex’s killer killed once he might kill again, we thought so more as a result of watching movies and reading murder mysteries than any sense of there being men who enjoy killing again and again and again until finally they are caught. If we were afraid, it was not out of a strong sense of the evil of which humans are capable, demonstrated throughout history; it was more an atavistic fear, the fear that even modern women seem to have of the physical power of men.
The suggestion from the two retired police officers that the police would be willing to talk to me about Alex’s murder came as no surprise to me; without thinking about it for a moment, I simply assumed they would. I took it for granted that the police were as upset as the public over the failure of their predecessors (who were all retired or dead) to catch her killer, and just as sure that once they saw that my interest was altruistic, that within limits (such as never naming a suspect or giving me whatever details crime novels say the police withhold in order to identify the killer), they would be willing to talk to me about their investigation. I was pretty naive the day I made my first phone call to the police service. Actually, I made several calls, and the officer in question always returned my call, but in each case would tell me nothing that wasn’t already in the public arena. Talking to the officers seemed, to me, to be utterly futile. By the time the then new police chief, Russell Sabo, phoned one Sunday afternoon with the name of yet another officer I should call, I didn’t bother. But there was still the coroner’s report which might be had through the coroner’s office, or so I thought, and there was the board of police commissioners and—why not?—the Freedom of Information Act to apply to.
The Girl in Saskatoon Page 7
