The Girl in Saskatoon

by Sharon Butala

  I looked at the newspaper pictures uncomprehendingly, filled with something deeper than mere astonishment. Alex, that quiet, pretty, small Ukrainian girl from high school, and before that, from a pioneer farm on the edge of wilderness, had metamorphosed into a professional woman and a beauty queen, surprising enough in themselves, and now, she had been killed—suddenly, shockingly—killed. Murdered.

  Staring at her picture in horror, the people of Saskatoon must have seen in Alex’s glowing face their daughters, their sisters, their beloved ones. Perhaps, too, what they saw was themselves when they were just twenty-three, full of eagerness and excitement. No wonder citizens took her death so personally, no wonder pity rose from that deepest well of unnamed desire and love, of true humanity unsullied by the baseness of scurrilous rumours. No wonder none of us has ever been able to forget.

  Chapter Seven

  Spring

  Friday, May 18, 1962, the first day of the Victoria Day long weekend, and the warmest day so far since the previous summer, reaching nearly 26 degrees Celsius. The whole city was giddy with it, those from warmer climates not able to conceive of the pleasure northerners feel when spring finally comes: the loosening of muscles held tight against the onslaught of winter, the lifting of the heart at the thought of the long, heat-delirious months ahead; ice gone from the river, bulky winter clothes put away, replaced with short-sleeved blouses and cool, full cotton skirts, so light against the legs after the heavy wool ones of winter, and sheepskin-lined, clumsy leather boots kicked off for the airy freedom of sandals.

  The arrival of spring changes the timbre of an entire city. As dusk comes, everyone is outside, sitting on front steps, or walking down the sidewalks at a leisurely pace, smiling at anyone who passes by, children racing their bikes or tricycles, shrieking with sheer joy at the feel of the balmy spring air, young men in cars cruising street after street, windows rolled down, arms resting on the frame, circling and circling, looking for girls, and girls out in twos and threes, strolling the sidewalks gritty with the residue of melted snowbanks, swinging their skirts, and bending and moving their lithe torsos as if they can barely restrain themselves from breaking into dance, and full of hope for the company of boys. Beyond the sheer animal delight of the children, or the world-weary, contented pleasure of their elders, all things are alert now, the very air infused with the promise of adventure, romance, love.

  And Alex, who turned twenty-three barely a month before, stuck in the city, having to work, the graveyard shift at that. All the delicious spring weekend would happen while she was locked in the hospital or sound asleep in the basement apartment she shared with three other young nurses. She had wanted to go to her sister Marie’s “camp” at Emma Lake, and she had had other offers from young men, but had to refuse them all. Out now, on the half-pretext half-necessity of buying stamps and mailing two newly written letters at the drugstore less than a block away, she completes her errand but is reluctant to simply turn again and go home. She is eager to catch the couple of hours of spring left to her before she has to change into her stiff nursing uniform and her ugly white duty shoes, and hurry the seven blocks down 7th Avenue to Saskatoon City Hospital.

  No one had seen her leave the apartment—Alice across the street looking for another apartment, Pauline working the evening shift at the hospital, Doreen out with friends—but Alex had mentioned to Doreen at least that she would go out to mail her letters, and maybe for a short stroll. Alice had even wondered if maybe she was meeting someone, because Alex had borrowed a blouse of hers to wear—odd if you were only going for a stroll before you had to go to work. But Alex must have thought the multicoloured blouse looked good with her bright green pants and her dark green cardigan. Doreen said that Alex was in the apartment sitting under the hair dryer when she returned briefly at about 8:30, while Alice said that when she came back downstairs from visiting their landlady at about 8:40, Alex was gone. The third roommate, Pauline, was working the evening shift, had been gone since three in the afternoon, and didn’t return to the apartment until about midnight.

  The pharmacy apprentice in the drugstore at the corner of 7th Avenue and 33rd Street, where Alex bought the stamps, remembered seeing her at 8:00 or 8:30. He said he remembered partly because of the “unusual and striking green outfit” she’d been wearing, and the joke—“pun,” he said—they’d shared, but the store was full of customers and he didn’t notice if she was alone or not. Nor did he ever tell the coroner’s jury what the pun was. In any case, he also said that “she seemed to be in a happy mood,” a state hardly unusual for Alex.

  A busy young husband and father, driving to his home across the river after staying late at work to finish some paperwork, remembered seeing her after she’d mailed her letters and was walking along 33rd Street toward the river (on the south or railway embankment side where there was no sidewalk, only a narrow trail in the grass), with a tall, “well-built” man with “darkish” hair who, surprisingly for that time and place, was wearing a white shirt and a brown suit. Alex, her hands in the pockets of her green slacks (later, the man who saw her would describe them as “lime” green), was strolling along beside him, kicking her legs out in a casual, childlike, he thought “flirtatious” way. He remembered, too, when the man and Alex stopped for a moment about a half-block from Spadina Crescent, and stood facing each other, the dark tan on the man’s neck and on the backs of his hands as he gestured. Alex seemed to be smiling up at him in a playful way, but the tall man had his back to the driver of the car, so his face wasn’t visible.

  Benign as it appeared, the scene nevertheless made the young husband uneasy, although he was never able to say exactly why, so his impulse had been to drive around the block and pass them again just to make sure the girl was all right. But he was late and hurrying, his wife was waiting, and you couldn’t just drive around the block in any direction at that particular location—the high railway embankment on one side of 33rd Street allowed crossings only way back at Mead’s Drugstore, and the streets were laid out too awkwardly (with extra-long blocks) on the other side of 33rd to make a rapid transit around the block, and straight ahead was the river.

  But as he would later say, “Who would be wearing a suit there and then?” Eight-thirty or so in the evening of the beginning of the May long weekend, and by the river where people went for the pleasure of it, suggesting that the man had come from elsewhere, and was on his way elsewhere, possibly had stopped there just to meet Alex, or, on his way, had run into her. The young family man always said that his impression was that the brown-suited, tall man was trying to persuade Alex of something. But Alex was clearly not saying, No, go away, leave me alone; she was flirting, charmed by him and charming to him in her girlish way, and he could hardly have been a stranger to her. But no one, other than possibly the police, knows to this day who he was, or whether she saw him again that night.

  Whoever he was, whatever happened between them, Alex then walked on alone under the CPR bridge, on the short distance to where the apron of the dam began—actually a weir, but everyone called it casually “the dam”—where, with the CPR bridge to her left and the weir to her right, she stepped over the fence that consisted of a rope attached loosely to low posts, and walked carefully onto the concrete apron that ran from that barrier down to the water, and from the weir itself and fish ladder, to within about five hundred feet of the bridge. Partway down the apron she sat down, pulled her knees up to her chin, wrapped her arms around them, and sat quietly, by herself, looking out over the swift-flowing river. By then dusk had come, it was growing late, it was perhaps nine o’clock, and she had to be at the hospital for her 11:30 p.m. shift.

  She had positioned herself in a prominent place where she would easily be seen. Anyone seeing her there might have thought that she was waiting for someone and wanted to be sure that he (surely it was a he) would find her. And that she was so pretty a girl and alone must have appeared to others—men—whether it was meant that way or not, as an invitation to approa
ch her. In 1962 in Saskatoon, no one would think this a dangerous thing for a young woman to do. The weir was a public place, on the edge of a busy road, and should have provided enough security.

  Or perhaps Alex’s sitting there by herself, conscious of her own good looks, aware that everyone could see her, was a sign of a young woman with a certain self-regard, sure in the admiration of whoever might be looking her way, with the innocent disbelief of the well-loved, well-protected child that anything bad could ever happen to her. Or perhaps she sat there with no other motives at all except to feel the spring air on her body, to watch the soothing, yet mysterious passage of the river, with the moonlight beginning to shine on it, and young and restless with spring, maybe she was imagining another life, led elsewhere.

  And so she sat there, alone, gazing out over the swiftly flowing green water.

  The boy who was fishing at the weir noticed her but, concentrating on his fishing, paid her no further attention, although he did say afterwards that there had been somebody else sitting on the concrete, too, but off to Alex’s left, closer to the bridge. Besides that shadowy figure, above and behind her, standing at the rope-and-post barrier, were two fifteen-year-old boys. They were watching her, the bolder one urging the other to go down with him and talk to Alex, the shyer of them resisting, terrified at the very thought of having a conversation with such a pretty woman, an “older” woman at that. To put off the encounter, he persuaded his friend to go back to Mead’s, buy a snack, and then come back and talk to her, praying all the while that she would be gone when they returned. When they came back a half-hour or so later at the most, as he had hoped, she wasn’t there. And as for the boy fishing at the weir, he left during the time the other two boys were back at Mead’s, and he said that when he had packed up and left, night had fallen, the moon had risen, and Alex was gone.

  Here, the hollow blackness, the gap in the narrative appears.

  Here, Alex went to meet her death, or more likely, by the time the boy fishing at the weir had gone home, and the two fifteen-year-olds had returned from the drugstore, she was already dead. All of them went home, went quietly to their beds and dreamt or did not dream of the pretty, small woman at the weir, sitting on the concrete apron with her knees drawn up and her arms embracing them, gazing out over the moonlit river. The entire small city, exhausted by spring’s heady onslaught, at last drifted off to sleep. Sometime after ten but before midnight, a group of male university students who had been drinking beer stopped their car on the north side of the bridge and went below it to relieve themselves, but saw and heard nothing, and were soon gone. No one living in any of the houses across the road from the weir area heard so much as a single unusual sound, certainly not a woman’s screams.

  Night fell, Alex was dead, the river flowed on, silver skimming its swift, flat darkness; its whispering murmur a heartbeat away from language, it flowed on by, as it had for ten thousand years, past her shallow grave in the sand, in a copse of trees on the north side of the railway bridge.

  By midnight, her roommate Alice said, the hospital had called twice to ask where Alex was, a girl who was absolutely responsible about showing up for work, and precisely on time. Morning came without Alex’s return, and Alice said, “I knew one hundred per cent that there was something really bad wrong,” and another roommate, Pauline, the one who had been working until midnight, called the police. Someone, at some point, told her family, probably to see if they might know where she was, so the family was alerted to Alex’s unheard-of failure to come home or to appear at work.

  The family went out looking for her because the police would not, policy being that technically she was not yet a missing person, their belief being that she had probably gone off with a boyfriend and would show up within the next day or two. How terribly callous an attitude that seemed to her family and her friends, as it always seems to frightened, distraught families when a loved one fails to do as expected and/or goes missing. And all the while—although no one yet knew it—the clues that might have caught her killer were eroding, decaying, blowing away, beginning to dissolve in light rain.

  When she did not come home, over the course of the next few days the police took two initiatives we know of. The first was on Wednesday, May 23, when they brought in a police dog to search the riverbank, that is, a dog belonging to a Saskatoon police officer that had been trained with the advice of an RCMP dog-handler but that was not an officially trained “police dog,” and which found, a half-mile north of her grave, a discarded tissue the police believed had been Alex’s, but nothing else. The second was ten days after she vanished, on Monday, May 28, when officers went by boat twenty-six miles downstream in search of her body or other evidence, and also found nothing.

  It would be thirteen days before Alex was finally, officially, discovered by some children playing along the riverbank. They had found her a few days earlier, but when they told their father about the human hand they’d seen sticking out of the sand, he had paid no attention to them, occupied with his fishing, either not hearing what they said or disbelieving them. The second time the children told him, several days later, when they were again playing along the riverbank while he fished, he went with them to look, and seeing that they were right, he took the children home and, at last, called the police. It was just after 9 p.m. on May 31.

  From that moment, the gap in the open, transparent life that had been Alex’s began to narrow. Where she had been that day, what she had done, to whom she had said what, was slowly, bit by bit, over the next days and weeks, painstakingly reconstructed, and those who had seen her that night after she had left her home—at least, those of whom we know—reported, one by one, to the police and were questioned and sent away.

  The details of what had happened to her can be cobbled together from newspaper reports, the autopsy report (done on June 1, 1962), and the transcript of the coroner’s inquest (held on July 11 at the Saskatoon Police Station, the purpose of which was only to determine the cause of death). She was nude from the waist down with her slacks and underwear pushed down around her right ankle and that shoe still on her foot, but with the other lying nearby, and her blouse and brassiere had been torn apart down the centre. She had been raped, although the word was not used in the immediate newspaper accounts, as if either the police suspected she had had consensual intercourse and then been murdered, or more likely because, in keeping with the social codes of the time concerning a young lady, not a prostitute, this was a word too impolite to appear in print. Or perhaps because the pathologist had found only a tiny tear as damage to her sexual organs, although he found “numerous human male spermatozoa” in the upper part of the vagina. In any case, her knees were still flexed and her legs spread when she was found, which was surely the best indication of all.

  She had sustained a punch in the face that had broken her nose and the sinuses behind it, pushed the nose into her face, and blackened her eye so that the right side of her face was unrecognizable with swelling and discolouration—“massive haemorrhage,” the pathologist wrote. One of her teeth lay loose in her mouth. Her roommates, Alice and Doreen, had to identify her remains by the clothes she’d been wearing.

  She had been hit on the head with an unidentified object—at least, unidentified to the public—it was not known how many times, perhaps only once, but so hard that her skull was fractured on the left side close to the centre, but nearer to the back of her skull—the parietal lobe—and all the skull’s natural joins had fractured, then fallen back into position, leaving thin red lines where the joins had been. The autopsy report is not clear on the question of whether the brain was damaged at the front of the skull or only at the back, which fact would help determine the manner in which her skull was fractured. This was in part because, in the two weeks after her death, “autolysis”(the destruction of the cells by enzymes produced by the cells themselves), and putrefaction had occurred and her brain was “semi-fluid.” The pathologist also told the coroner’s inquest that these natural pr
ocesses had “made the interpretation of many of the lesions very difficult.” But earlier in his testimony, in response to a question, “And was there any specific damage to the brain, Doctor?” he replied, “All I could recognize was the blood on the surface of the brain and this was in close association with the fractures of the skull.”

  The pathologist, Dr. Ed Andres, who in only five years would be dead himself at forty-three of a brain tumour, leaving a wife and three young daughters, and who performed the autopsy, would tell the coroner’s jury that to sustain that bad a skull fracture (or fractures), she would have had to fall ten or fifteen feet, so a blow or blows seemed more likely, but as there were many lacerations he could not tell if the instrument used had been, say, a hammer, and many blows with it, or something big and rough-edged (a concrete slab? a rock?) and one blow. In answer to a question, he said, yes, such a blow or blows would have knocked her unconscious.

  The killer then buried her. The doctor knew he had done so while she was still alive because he had found dirt and sand in her mouth and windpipe—“oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, trachea and upper esophagus.” She died, finally, he said, of asphyxiation, when she inhaled the sand and dirt of her grave. Dr. Andres’ widow told me several times, when I met her in 2005, that she would never forget how upset her husband had been over this single fact—and it was the final, official conclusion of the inquest that Alex had died, not from the blows, but from asphyxiation.

  The approximate time of death was determined by the contents of Alex’s stomach, the light supper she had eaten with her roommate, Alice, and a neighbour, around 7 p.m. and which “showed very little change due to digestion.” The length of time undigested food might remain in the stomach is normally about two hours, but can be as long as four.

  The inquest concluded:

  Alexandria Wiwcharuk, residing at 1223—7th Avenue North, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, died on May 18th, 1962 between the hours of 8:30 pm and 11:00 pm. Her body was found in a shallow grave about fifty feet north of the intersection of 33rd Street and Spadina Crescent on the river bank. The evidence shows she died as a result of asphyxia by the inhalation of earth and sand due to unconsciousness by blows to the head by some person or persons as yet unknown.