The Girl in Saskatoon

by Sharon Butala

  But I imagine that for her parents and brothers and sisters, Alex was just that dear little girl they had lost. I come from a family of five children, and if my youngest sister, who as a baby, a toddler, a child was the most beloved of all of us, had met the death Alex met at barely twenty-three, I know it would have altered our family forever, and scarred each of us individually. It is not a place I like to go, even if only in my imagination. But I think that from the moment of the news of her death, everything any of us ever did, or thought, or dreamt of, would be coloured by the knowledge of our beloved’s hideous end, that we would see in our minds, all of us, unwillingly, helplessly, over and over again, that scene we hadn’t been present for (and all the more endlessly terrible because we did not see it)—the blows, the blood, the screams—until we had to pull our imaginations away, to save ourselves. That we would be, every one of us, in some way wounded, although with a wound no one else could see, and that our view of the world in which we all find ourselves would be irreparably and forever altered.

  Evil would enter our world view, if it was not already there. And the bitter understanding that evil is implacable and without pity, without compassion. That there is no answer to it, no adequate response to it. There is belief in goodness, there is prayer, but no matter how high the mountain of goodness, or of prayer, evil remains.

  And so some family members I spoke to were still angry; they were deeply, profoundly angry, at her death, at the police for not catching the killer; perhaps they were angry at the world in a more general way. Others, I think, must have been permanently saddened. That is, I had a sense of that shock and unhappiness having transmuted itself from that immediate raging grief—of a sort we all know, and know cannot be lived with, that must change—into a deep, diffuse sorrow that remained and would remain until death.

  Others could not let the investigation go, could not let go of the need to find the killer .Yet, I saw this as just another way of begging the world, or the universe, or God, or the good angels, either to return Alex to them, or, failing that, to explain why she had had to die so brutally, when she was so young, and without any of them with her to hold her and pray for and with her as she died. So that she might have gone surrounded by love, and not by evil.

  All of this happened forty-four years ago as I write this, and most of Alex’s immediate family have grown old; both Alexander Wiwcharuk, Alex’s father, and her mother, Anna, have died. Those who were children and living in Saskatoon then were probably not a part of the family events the night that Alex’s body was found, or would have been too young to have clear memory of them. So when I asked for certain details, carefully, gently, and found what I thought were contradictions in sequence or in details, I did not pursue them. How could they possibly matter now? Add to this the fact that the family was in the middle of a terrible trauma and trying to assimilate it during the time I was asking questions about, and it is no wonder that I am not sure of the sequence of events for them that night.

  Marie says that she heard about the finding of her sister’s body on the radio at about ten o’clock in the evening—the police received the phone call about the discovery at 9:05 p.m.—and she immediately called the police to have it confirmed. I asked her—this was over the phone some weeks after our meeting—who had told her parents. She thought for a moment. “I guess I did,” she said in her forceful way, with what sounded like surprise in her tone, as if, not having thought about this for a very long time, she had just remembered. She and her husband, Robert, must have gone to her parents’ home a few miles south of Saskatoon to tell them. (Although, she also told me that she was so distraught that a nurse who was a friend came and sat with her for hours, until she was calmer. Yet, distraught or not, I can’t imagine Marie, the eldest daughter, not insisting on being with her parents, her mother in particular, at the moment of their receiving this news.)

  Alex’s mother, when she was told, screamed and then fainted. By this time, according to Marie, Anna Wiwcharuk had had intimations that her daughter had died. As she lay sleepless in bed one night during that interminable thirteenday wait for news, she told her family that she had felt something heavy fall across her feet.

  The sister closest to Alex in age, Ann, wrote to me that in the days following the news, Alex’s mother would read the newspaper account aloud of how “Alexandra’s head was bashed in and [she was] buried alive.” She would cry as she read it, until Ann would beg her, “Mama, don’t read any more today.” Every day family members would take her to her daughter’s grave at the cemetery where she would cry inconsolably until the family would have to take her home. Night after night, Ann reports, Anna could not sleep for crying, until finally, one night as she lay awake in her bed, Alexandra appeared at its foot. Smiling down at her mother, she said, tenderly, “Mama, don’t cry any more. I’m okay now, Mama, don’t cry any more.” It was only after that that her mother was able to stop her steady weeping. A strong woman, she did not die until thirty years after her daughter, and a few years after the death of her husband. Perhaps she was waiting for the capture of Alex’s killer; perhaps she was waiting for justice.

  I wonder, too, if she did not sometimes think of her beloved Alex’s life being bracketed by two startling and wonderful visions: Alex as a newborn, yet an angel hovering above her mother’s bed, and Alex in her death, coming from the other side—from heaven, I’m sure Anna thought—to comfort her heartbroken mother.

  Pearl, on hearing the news, is said to have wept inconsolably “for a month,” and in her grief, unable to eat, lost fifteen pounds. Alex’s brothers, understandably, felt that if they could only find the killer they would like to wreak justice on him themselves. Ann, by this time, had small children and lived in Ontario. She was too upset to attend the funeral by herself, and had to wait until her husband could get time off work so that he could go with her to her parents’ home in Saskatoon. She wrote to me, “I cannot put into words the pain and suffering, the hours of crying, the missing of her and thinking and hurting, thinking how she must have suffered. It was as if the world should have stopped turning and life should have stopped. How could people get up and go to work when this terrible tragedy had happened?”

  As the days after Alex’s death passed, the funeral came and went without bringing much relief, and as the police questioned them, and they the police, trying to get any news at all about the progress of the investigation, the family had much opportunity to go over their last visits with Alex, their memories of their final conversations, their sense of how Alex had been feeling and thinking about her life. I imagine them gathering at their parents’ home, sitting around the kitchen table, or perhaps in the living room, seated on the sofa or straight-backed kitchen chairs, quietly, staring into space, then someone interrupting the heavy silence to speak softly, She said to me…or I just remembered that…or, But if she said she was going to, then why…And other family members chiming in to agree or disagree, or to elaborate.

  Marie would have told them that this long weekend in May Alex really wanted to go to Marie’s camp at Emma Lake, and was disappointed because she had to work. Ann would have told them that she had had what she felt was an odd communication from Alex. In a letter to Ann—this was probably one of the letters Alex had mailed the night of her disappearance—Alex wrote that she felt uneasy, restless, and was thinking about moving somewhere else. Then she had ended the letter, saying that she would write more next time. Ann would have told them, as she wrote to me all these many years later, that she felt that something was telling Alex to leave the city, that Alex had had a premonition that she was in danger.

  Did they have theories of their own? Did they weave scenarios? Did it always come back to that moment when Alex lay bleeding, battered, dying in the dirt of the riverbank? And then, one of the sisters, beginning to sob quietly, and Alexander Wiwcharuk rising abruptly, pushing back his chair noisily, walking fast across the floor to the door, maybe Anna calling his name, going outside, letting the door bang shut, str
iding across the yard, disappearing around a corner or an outbuilding where he would give full vent to his helpless rage, his grief. And inside, again, the thick, baffled, and pain-filled silence falling.

  Alexandra’s mother would tell the family that the last time she saw Alex, Alex had come to visit them. She had been dressed up because her boyfriend would come later to pick her up for a date. He arrived as planned, and Alexander and Anna walked with them out to the car. I imagine the family listening intently as Anna went on, speaking in Ukrainian, gesturing—or perhaps not—her hands folded and still on her lap as she talked. As Alex’s boyfriend opened the car door for her, her mother asked her, “When will I see you again?” Alex smiled, then, with a laugh—I can see her, pretty as a picture, secure in her knowledge of her mother’s love for her, tossing her head, her dark eyes sparkling—replied teasingly, “Well, maybe never.” But Anna Wiwcharuk would tell the family that she felt a cold shiver go through her at this. As she looked at the man standing there, holding open the car door for Alex, she thought suddenly that dressed all in dark clothing as he was, he looked like an attendant who stands by a hearse.

  But Anna Wiwcharuk would also tell her family that Alex had told her that she had caught a nurse stealing drugs, that Alex had reported this to the hospital authorities, and that the nurse had threatened her for doing so, saying something to the effect that Alex would pay for having reported her. Then she, or perhaps a brother or a sister, would tell them all how at Orthodox Easter, Alex had gone to church with her parents, and after the service, as they stood on the church steps, Alex gazed around and said, suddenly, “I feel that someone is following me.” They would all recall, shaking their heads, numb with the certainty of their failure, that later that day they had taken her back to her apartment, and none of them had looked any further into her remark.

  And, the family discovered, Alex had left a diary. It was written in a code, Marie explained to me, and she had tried and tried to read it, but couldn’t. When the police heard of its existence, a young police officer Marie described to me only as “a family friend” came over and “begged” to be allowed to see it. Marie said she didn’t want to give it to him, but eventually she did. A week or so later, he returned it to her, telling her that it had taken the force a week to break the code. Sitting in my office in the Frenchman Valley, in the rural silence, as we talked on the phone, I longed to ask Marie, “What did the diary say?” but I could not bring myself to do it. I suppose now that I thought Marie—if she knew—would at some point tell me about its contents, that I shouldn’t pressure her to tell me. But she went on to say that its very existence distressed her so much, as did the fact that against her better judgement she had let the police read it, that she burned it.

  Later, she would mention in passing that in the diary, Alex hadn’t named anyone. “There were no names,” she said, her voice heavy. “Just…‘the handsome one’, or ‘the tall one,’ and so on.” Such emotion was in her voice, although I couldn’t quite decipher it. “They tell me I shouldn’t have burned it,” she went on, I thought with a touch of anger, or perhaps a certain ruefulness. It seemed to me that more than anything it was because, in her deep love for her sister, it so offended her that anyone not of the family would read, indeed would pore over words—no matter how meaningless, how innocent—her sister had meant for no one else’s eyes. It might have seemed just another way that Alex would be stolen from them, the closeness of their family, their shared lives and memories, and once again violated.

  Alex had just turned twenty-three; by the time I was twenty-one I was married, by my twenty-third year I was pregnant, as was true of many of the girls with whom we’d both gone to high school, some of whom by then had two or three children. With jobs—those of us who had jobs, as I did—and husbands, and children to care for, we had no time for diaries, much less time to devise and write one in code, even if such had been our inclination. I am sure that for all of us, diaries were a thing of our early teens, and I wonder why a woman of her age would still be keeping a diary: Was it because she had a secret, or secrets? Because she had no one she felt she could trust with her secrets? And were her secrets only her dreams of a better, more glamorous, more exciting life? Or were they about her private, intimate life—sexual history, for example—and she did not want anyone to know the details?

  How well I remember, at nineteen, at two o’clock in the morning after a date, sitting in my good dress on the top step of the stairs, on either side of which were the bedrooms where my sisters were sleeping, hugging my knees, trying to accept that the first man I’d ever loved had told me that he was leaving and would not be taking me with him; not able to cry, nor to sleep, absorbed in the dull pain filling my chest, and wondering how I would ever be happy again. Feeling, too, shame, wondering how I would tell my sisters and my parents that I’d been abandoned by the man they knew I loved. If I’d had a journal I might have written in it about what had happened, and how I felt, but I had no journal then. I doubt that Alex ever sat alone in the middle of the night, trying to absorb the fact that the man she loved had left her forever. What man would leave an Alex? And if that kind of love had touched Alex, why was she not married? But, whatever was in the diary, apparently the police did not see a need to keep the original.

  My first thought on hearing that Marie had burned it was one of profound regret. My regret is more that we lost a document that might have told us—me, and our mutual friends—much more about what was going on in Alex’s mind and heart, and for that, there could never be a replacement. It is hard not to think of Anne Frank’s priceless, touching diary that gave the world a record of the person she was, that made her appalling death all the more heartbreaking and tragic; for countless future generations, she could stand in for all the other many girls we know nothing about but who died in the same brutal way. Who knows but Alex’s diary might one day have done the same for young women of another time and place, another life.

  Sometime after the reading of the diary, Marie tells me that a police officer meeting with some of the family made a remark to the effect that perhaps they had not known Alex as well as they thought they did. I was taken aback, as I’m sure the family had been, although Marie did not elaborate. I wondered what he could have meant by that cryptic statement.

  Suddenly I understood. Of course the police—they were all men after all—had to have worked from the point of view that Alex was not an innocent, virginal girl, but that she had, or might have, slept with a number of men. It would have been (as it was for the public) the first thing they considered: Had she brought on her own death by being too available to men, by being “easy”? And its corollary, a product of the time, yes, but a point of view that still exists (for example, among many examples, the failure of the Vancouver Police to pay much attention to the missing women, many of whom worked in the sex trade, who were murdered on the pig farm outside Vancouver), that a sexually active, unmarried woman is a woman who has lost her value, who need not be respected. That her family need not be respected because they were blind to the “probability” that Alex was not “pure.”

  I had wondered myself about her virginity, and I thought I had detected a clear but also failed attempt by the doctor who had performed the autopsy to determine if she’d been a virgin, one of the serious questions the police would have wanted answered. Having failed to determine this, they would have begun hunting out the men who knew her, and interviewing them to find out, among other things, whether she had slept with them or not.

  The question was, as the writer of her story, and supposing (but not knowing) it to be true, in what way would it change my attitude? I thought hard for a moment: Not at all. As it should not have changed the point of view of the police. It was irrelevant, except in the pinpointing of men who would have had the motive and the opportunity to be her killer. Further, even if it were true, she did not “deserve” to be murdered.

  So the Wiwcharuk family, in the atmosphere of heightened tension of that summe
r in Saskatchewan (the medicare crisis was underway, and the doctors’ three-week strike), in its unrelenting dry heat, and while the investigation went on in secrecy around them, continued questioning the police, and at home in their shared sorrow, their long, pained discussions, their sometimes weeping, and sometimes rage, their bafflement and desperation, struggled to come to terms with Alex’s death, and its inexplicable viciousness. Every day, each of them woke, wondering, Is today the day the police will catch her killer? Or perhaps, before they were even fully awake, thinking of her, they half-expected to open their eyes and find her standing in the room with them, or to hear her cheerful laugh just outside the bedroom door. And when they did not, when the reality of her death slowly sank into them one more time, I am sure that they started each day in a heavy sadness.

  All of this might have been mitigated had the extensive police investigation not been, in the end, fruitless. To be able to see the killer, to know his name, to hear his whining, lying reasons—or lack of them—for doing what he had done. To be able to spit on him and curse him and revile him until all such need to do so had worn away, or the final futility of such actions had been made irrefutably clear. Then to see him put in prison forever would have helped them all immeasurably to come to terms with Alex’s loss. It would not have brought her back, and no explanation from the killer would ever suffice, and no punishment ever be enough, but his capture, his public naming, the shared revulsion of the public, would have helped them find, as people like to say, peace. Or if not peace, perhaps (as I am more inclined to think) resignation, perhaps even acceptance of the inscrutability of fate.

  In August 2004 the police exhumed Alex’s remains. I know this because I had developed the habit of stopping by her grave whenever I was in town. This time, I had taken a bouquet of roses, a deep red that reminded me of her beauty queen bouquets, and the one she carried in the picture of her graduation from nursing, although not as dark a shade. This colour because somehow it reminded me of her, and of her youth and her beauty at her death. This time I brought flowers because I wanted her to know that I would be honourable, that I understood that the only right I had to her story would come from being faithful to it, from remembering who she had been, from never defiling her memory by dwelling on the prurient or the merely scandalous.