There is one more significant detail. She was found with a concrete slab resting on her chest below her chin. It was described as weighing “approximately thirteen pounds,” and was ten inches by nine inches by three inches deep. The sergeant reporting on the investigation to the coroner’s jury went on to say, “It was a broken piece of concrete with some yellow paint on one side which would indicate it came from a broken sidewalk,” but he testified also that there was no blood found on it, indicating that it wasn’t the object that had fractured her skull.
As nearly as I can tell, aside from the inquest stenographer, those presiding over events were all men: the six jurors, the coroner himself, and the agent representing the attorney general. The only time women appeared was when each of Alex’s three roommates briefly testified. It is possible that one of Alex’s brothers was present, but the family doesn’t remember for sure, and the transcript doesn’t say who might have attended the inquest; and if that brother did, he was the only family member there. And who exactly was representing Alex’s interests and the family’s interests? Presumably, that would be the agent for the attorney general, or the coroner himself. But, as “Jane Doe” concluded (she was the woman raped in Toronto twenty-four years later when the police did not warn about a rapist—she sued them and won), once the legal system goes into action, the victim can lose all importance.
Alex’s funeral was held the afternoon of June 4. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, where eventually both her parents would be interred, as would both my parents and one of my sisters, as would the doctor who had done her autopsy, the coroner, Dr. Whitemarsh, and a number of other people involved in the investigation. I considered going to her funeral but, in the end, decided I hadn’t been close enough to her to justify asking for time off work.
I must have read the newspaper report of the inquest, but I have no memory of that at all, and I can hardly believe, in retrospect, that I didn’t scream or cry or faint when I read that she had been buried alive. How “unconscious,” as the Jungians say, I was in those days. Anything I didn’t want to know, I simply didn’t see. I had constructed a thick barrier between words and their meanings, and it would be quite a few years before I would teach myself that I had to tear that barrier down and allow myself to feel, no matter how painful, how horrible or sad—how very difficult it is to know the world as it really is. Feeling is a first leap toward wisdom. And it is the bane of an old person’s existence to have to remember how unaware, how foolish, how cruel one was in one’s youth.
In the weeks immediately after the discovery of Alex’s body, the city waited breathlessly, stewing in rumour, suspicion, and fear, anxious for word from the police that they had caught Alex’s killer. We all wanted then, and want now, to know the facts about her death; we have always wanted answers, wanted to dispel what feels like a mystery surrounding the simple fact of her murder. I tell the reader all these details, such as they are—I am sure they are incomplete—because only the broad outline of Alex’s death has been revealed to the public in all these years, the coroner’s report not having been released until the forty-fourth year after her murder. Rumours boil in the absence of facts; bad things happen because no one knows the truth. A police force loses the confidence of the citizens for whom it works, and then becomes insular, simmering in its own anger at the public’s lack of confidence and disparagement of the force’s abilities, despite the often tremendous efforts it makes. The police force grows surly, and the distance between it and the citizens widens, slowly, over years, becomes nearly unbridgeable.
When I came on the scene publicly in the late nineties, and in the next couple of years discovered that I could not expect help from the police beyond a brief recounting of a few of the bare facts, most of which I already knew, I turned to newspaper accounts, and to people who did know something. I was surprised by the stiff resistance I met from many of the police officers, old or new. The refusal of the police, even those who were retired, to assist me at all, struck me as merely proprietorial—the information was theirs and they would decide who would see it—rather than the result of any investigative necessity that the information continue to be kept secret (or, for that matter, because, as so many people told me they believed then, or would come to believe, that the police knew the identity of the killer or killers but had protected him or them). Alex’s unsolved case has never been closed, and so refusal of information even after forty-four years makes some kind of legal sense, but I discovered that the Saskatoon police had also refused information to the lawyers of David Milgaard, who was already convicted of murder and had served many years in prison (for, it turned out, a crime he hadn’t committed). Even with the case closed they still refused information to his mother’s lawyer. It’s worth noting that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms didn’t come into effect until April 17, 1982, and the Freedom of Information Act on July 1, 1983. Whether these would have made a difference, I don’t know, but I hope that they would have.
If I was intimidated enough by 2003 to call in a national investigative television program, back in 1962 at least one member of the Wiwcharuk family was intimidated himself. A brother from Moose Jaw came to Saskatoon perhaps once a month with his wife and children, and would stay with his parents on their acreage south of Saskatoon. He told me that every time he was in town he would contact the police to ask how the investigation was going. On one occasion, as he was taking a shortcut east from the acreage to go onto the highway back to Moose Jaw, a car appeared to be waiting for him, and started to follow him. He likes to tell how he was driving a Mercury with a 390 horsepower motor—the biggest motor available in a car of that type then, and that had no shortage of power—so that as the car raced up to his back bumper with its headlights on high beam, making him extremely uneasy, rather than stopping he stepped on the gas. The track was narrow, and the car behind him speeded up too and seemed to be trying to get past him, and this Alex’s brother was determined not to let happen. Then the car bumped his rear bumper. Frightened, he sped up even more—he says he was going nearly 110 miles per hour, with the car trying to catch him.
After some distance he changed his mind, deciding that the best move might be to let the car catch up so that he could see who was in it. He slowed, and the car pulled up parallel to him on his side. He says he saw the driver hand the passenger something, and the passenger began to roll down his window. He did not see the object, but believes to this day that it was a gun. He put his foot on the gas, expecting at any moment to hear shots, and with his car’s superior power, easily left the other car behind. (Or perhaps the driver of the other car felt he had accomplished his purpose and let Alex’s brother leave him behind.) Through his mirrors he could see the car behind him slow, make a U-turn, and go back to the city. He told me that he believes that no one but the family and the police knew he was in town.
Some years later, Alex’s niece told me, she took a job working in the office of the doctor who had looked after Alex before her death. She told me that during her period of employment, perhaps a bit more than a year, one morning she arrived at work and unlocked the office door to find there had been a break-in during the night. All the doctor’s many files were scattered everywhere, and when she looked, she told me, Alex’s (which she said she had never looked inside, although she wanted to, perhaps even planned to) was gone. Nothing other than the files had been disturbed.
The family had become extremely suspicious of the police, and believing that it would do no good, never reported the car chase. Marie tells me that during the few months after Alex’s death, when they asked for but received no information about the police investigation, the family discussed hiring a private detective, but that Mrs. Wiwcharuk said plaintively, “But the police are good, aren’t they?”And so in the end, they decided against it, something they seem to have regretted ever since.
The people of Saskatoon still feel that the story of Alex’s death is theirs—that is, that it belongs to the city as a whole, that it was a
public event and is a part of our history. Professional historians didn’t seem to think so, regarding it as too small, as inconsequential in the wide run of history, of the great sweep and movement of forces which have always been the subject of formal history. But in our provincial centennial year, 2005, Alex finally merited a line in a government-commissioned history book by Professor Bill Waiser of the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan: A New History.
That her death made the pages of that book was in itself an historic event, and further, a sign of how the concept of what constitutes history is changing. Alex’s murder had long been one of the events that defined the city of Saskatoon, and now Alex herself, that small, pretty Ukrainian girl, in a way no one ever would have predicted, had become—along with the explorers and the city founders, nearly all of them men—an historical figure. I cannot help but find it tragic and emblematic that a girl makes the history books not by her works, but by the combination of her beauty, and by getting herself raped and killed.
Chapter Eight
Evidence
As I pored over the original newspaper accounts, and the reprisals of the case in 1992, and then the documents of which I finally received copies, as well as viewing over and over again Death of a Beauty Queen, the documentary by CBC’s the fifth estate, and talking to people about their recollections, I came across small discrepancies or inexplicable breaks in the chain of information.
For instance, Alex was found with that concrete slab on her chest, and everyone, myself included, seems to have taken it for granted that the slab was the murder weapon, although it was stated clearly that there was no blood on it. (Even the term murder weapon is inaccurate, because the inquest jury concluded absolutely that Alex died of asphyxiation, not directly by the blows to the head.) Perhaps even the police, to this day, do not know what instrument broke her skull. Or perhaps they do. But if the slab wasn’t the weapon, one has to wonder what it was doing on her chest.
Then there was the dog search on Wednesday, May 23, a week before her body was officially found (“a tracking dog…came within 600 feet of the grave. Police…worked the dog south along the west side of the river…,” it said in the Star Phoenix, June 2, 1962). The exact route of the dog search isn’t given, and its fruitlessness was explained at the inquest by the fact that there had been a lot of rain just before it. But I searched out the official weather records from Environment Canada for that two weeks in May 1962, between when Alex disappeared and when her body was found, and they state that there had been only “1.6 millimetres” between May 18 and 23, and that the heavier rains didn’t occur until a week after, on the 29 and 30. (Not to mention that testimony at the inquest by a police officer made clear that this was not a formally trained police dog.) Although the officer assured the coroner that the dog could be trusted, people who should know doubt it.
The riverbank area where she was murdered and buried by her killer was in the process of being scraped by large machinery for some purpose. A full landscaping couldn’t have been the plan because even today it is still a wild-looking area. But newspaper photos of the time show that a wide swath of sloping riverbank between the edge of Spadina Crescent and the second, steeper drop to the river below had been completely denuded except for that one small, compact island of trees about fifty feet from the north side of the bridge in which Alex’s body was found. A small cabin-like structure on wheels on the copse’s western edge, belonging to the city’s construction crew, had been there, the inquest was told, for two weeks or so as the men worked on the riverbank.
The deep scraping by a bulldozer, testified to by one of the investigating officers, which he offered as reason both for the failure of the dog’s search and for the lack of evidence at the site—saying that all tracks were destroyed—is contradicted by a wide-angle newspaper photo taken after Alex’s body was found. It clearly shows tire tracks on both sides of the copse, although from such a distance one can only guess whether those tracks might be those of a bulldozer, or of police cars, or of the ambulance that, presumably, would have gone down there to pick up poor Alex’s remains. I would eventually read in documents not released to the public that tire tracks were indeed found that night by the copse where her body was discovered. As well, I have some vague memory of a date of mine driving me down there late one night—although I’ve forgotten when that happened—showing that lots of people must have done that, and that such tracks weren’t necessarily connected to the killing.
Also in the RCMP lab report, done between the finding of Alex’s body and the inquest, is an analysis of “sweepings” from the front and back seat of “a 1950 Dodge,” and in the absence of any other material about these “sweepings,” I am guessing they could be related to the tire tracks near the copse. Or maybe they were from her boyfriend’s car, or the car of some other person who was seen as a suspect but never identified as such to the public.
That the police felt keenly their failure to catch the killer seems clear to me from a 1992 newspaper interview with a retired officer, since deceased, who had been an integral part of the 1962 investigation. The officer declared—as if to reassure us once again how hard the force had tried—that at the beginning, all of the 130 police officers were working double duty. But the detective sergeant at the 1962 inquest testified that during June, ten men had been on the case, and in July, four of them—that is, that many men on each shift worked around the clock. If the retired officer’s hyperbole shows anything, I think, it is only how the force’s inability to solve this one case would not go away, how even in 1992 it still worried and upset them, and how deep was their desire, still, to find Alex’s killer. Decent men, fathers, thinking perhaps of their own daughters, as well as how they had failed in their duty to the public, to Alex, and to her family.
Most striking of all, some forty-two years later, the police would indicate in the television documentary that among the gathered evidence there was “a bunch of dark reddish brown hair, thirty strands, approximately four to five inches in length.” (Specifically, what the officer said was, “They’ve got down here…”—“here” being on the list of evidence dated May 31, 1962, from which he was reading.) The viewers don’t see the hair, although it might have been in the brown business-size envelope with handwriting on it which can’t be read by the viewer, but family and friends know that Alex’s hair was black. I froze at this news, and the media certainly was excited by it, because with the new DNA technology, surely a profile of her killer could be obtained. But I was puzzled that there was no mention of this particular swatch of hair on any of the documents I saw from 1962.
And there seems to have been hair everywhere. The autopsy stated that much of it was missing from Alex’s scalp, but what remained was black. There were fifty-five “scalp hairs…ranging in colour from medium light brown to dark brown on her sweater,” and another “forty-four hairs scalp hairs [sic]…ranging in colour from light brown to dark brown” on her blouse, “seven medium brown scalp hairs” on her bra, “three scalp hairs and one pubic hair” on or in her slacks, “a tuft of approximately 100 scalp hairs ranging in colour from light brown to dark brown and ranging in length from 2” to 7”…inside the [right] shoe.” The lab also reported that “ten medium to dark brown scalp hairs and two dark brown pubic hairs were removed from the narrow edge on the piece of concrete,” the one that had been resting on her chest.
Sergeant Sam Holoboff, Identification Section, Saskatoon Police Service, when testifying at the coroner’s inquest, in response to being asked to read the “salient points” from the RCMP lab report, listed all these hair samples, but did not mention the approximately one hundred hairs found in her right shoe, from two to seven inches long and described as light brown to dark brown (not “dark reddish brown”). I was baffled, because surely these hairs were the most significant piece of evidence. Finally, I asked a criminal lawyer about the rules of evidence regarding the coroner’s inquest and was told that “there is nothing to say that the police have to give all t
he evidence to the coroner.” On the other hand, it is undeniable that what seems to be a discrepancy might only have been a matter of semantics. (What is “light” brown, or “reddish” brown, or “dark” brown? Maybe the labs then had a standard descriptive scale to which they matched items of evidence.)
Although the media said she had been “clutching” these hairs—contradicting the RCMP lab report which makes no mention at all of Alex being found holding hair, nor does the autopsy report mention such a thing, nor did the transcript from the inquest—the police, when they mentioned the hair publicly, never said specifically (that I am able to locate) that she had been “clutching” the thirty strands of dark reddish brown hair.
If the purpose of the coroner’s inquest is only to determine the cause of death, then such an omission seems less puzzling. And yet, why would it matter whether the public knew the police had a goodly sample of the probable-killer’s hair? I suppose because if the killer was still there in the city and read, in the newspaper report of the inquest proceedings, that the police could identify him by his hair, he would be gone from the city as fast as was humanly possible.
But in 1962 the only way to identify hair was by visual examination under the microscope for a comparison of “morphological” features. One of the girls who attended Tech with Alex and me, and who during high school had been my close friend, had become a laboratory technician and eventually the manager of a prestigious lab. I called to ask her for advice. She said, “Forget 1962.” No conclusions arrived at by way of hair identification in the 1962 RCMP lab report, used at the inquest, would necessarily hold today. “Now it’s all about DNA,” she told me.
The Girl in Saskatoon Page 16
