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 the 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.
But in the end the lab had concluded, carefully,
All scalp and pubic hairs removed from the clothing…as well as the scalp and pubic hairs removed from the concrete block…are similar in morphological features to the scalp and pubic hairs [taken from Alex’s remains, that were definitely hers]…and could have originated from the same respective source, or any other source subscribing to similar morphological features.
Which means, what? That they could have been Alex’s as they looked rather like hers, but that they could have been somebody else’s too.
Aside from the hair swatch, the host of Death of a Beauty Queen, Linden McIntyre, tells the viewer that the nail scrapings from Alex’s hands contained “skin she ripped from the body of her attacker.” The 1962 RCMP lab report doesn’t mention skin, but it does record that the left-hand nail scrapings are “soil like material and 24 hairs,” the longest of which is 1 1/4′ in length, a scalp hair, and dark brown; the remainder were less than 1/4′ in length and light brown; and the nail scrapings from the right hand are “soil like material and three hairs,” one of which is pubic hair and is 2 1/4 inches long, but no colour is given. I’m guessing that the “soil like material” is the skin mentioned in the documentary, but the lab report, after describing the scrapings, doesn’t mention them again, other than to indicate that they’d been sent to the serology lab, which reported only that there was no blood on the hair. The “soil like material” vanishes from that record.
My only safe conclusion from all of the above material is that the police, even then, were carefully managing what information got out to the public, and it appears to me that the agent for the attorney general had some of this information and was co-operating in not revealing that the police had it. I am also told, reliably, that in Saskatchewan in 1962 the relationship between the attorney general’s agent and the police force in the person of the chief was a hazy one, which has since been more clearly defined. There was then, apparently, a lot of room for discretion as to what would be revealed and what would not to the coroner’s inquest, and to how closely the attorney general’s agent and the police chief worked in making such decisions.
I wondered why no witnesses to Alex’s movements that night, other than the three roommates, were called to testify at the inquest. By July 11, the day of the inquest, the young husband who had driven past Alex and the tall, “well-built” man had identified himself to the police and told his story, as had the two young boys who stood above and behind Alex at the weir, admiring her but afraid to talk to her. The police apparently soon located the boy who had been fishing at the weir and spoke to him as well. But none of them were called to testify. I thought that, in view of the pieces of evidence I was finding that weren’t revealed to the inquest, perhaps this was because those who decided who would be called wouldn’t call witnesses that would reveal information that—it had been decided—needed to be kept secret in order to catch the killer.
But it turns out that the decision as to who would be called as witnesses was made by the office of the attorney general. I asked this question of someone whose life is the law, and after answering me, he went on to remark, as a “by the way” that he thought I might find interesting, that at one time a common abuse at coroner’s inquests (in cases where homicide was the cause of death) had been the practice of having the strong suspects appear as witnesses. “The Supreme Court put a stop to that,” he told me, amused by the ploy. And I couldn’t help but think how, if you spent your life in courtrooms and reading law and talking about cases, you would soon learn detachment, you would soon learn to be wearily amused. At the time, I didn’t even make a note of this remark, but did so later, having been wondering since I first read of the inquest in an old newspaper clipping why the boys who had seen Alex at the riverside after she’d mailed her letters hadn’t been called as witnesses. Now I thought I knew: one or all of them were seen as suspects.
Besides the hair and the dog search and the witnesses and so on, the inquest heard that Alex had had at least one phone call at around 10 p.m., long after she had left the apartment. Alice had taken the call:
Q: Was this a boy friend—or a man friend?
A: Yes.
Q: And you couldn’t tell us who it was—but did you know him?
Q: And what was he phoning about?
A: He was trying to make a double date for the next evening to go somewhere.
The statement “And you couldn’t tell us who it was—” is puzzling, as it is apparent the witness did know who the caller was. It must have been decided ahead of time that she was not to say the caller’s name aloud. As no one asked what the man’s name was, I can only guess that everyone else present had agreed not to reveal it.
There is more to the story, but some of it seems trivial or irrelevant, and some of it is hard to find a place for in this narrative. For instance, in January 2004 when the fifth estate aired its documentary, one of those interviewed was a man who had been dating Alex at the time of her disappearance (and who, in 1964, became a Saskatoon police officer, from which work he is now retired). He tells the interviewer that he called Alex that fateful night to find out if he could drive her to work (from my memory of being young in Saskatoon then, this was probably a euphemism for what today would be called “a make-out session,” especially since it was only a twelve- or thirteen-minute walk from Alex’s apartment to work), but that she “had gone out to mail a letter,” indicating that someone had answered the phone—and suggesting now that there were possibly two phone calls from men, not just the one mentioned at the inquest.
And as this man billed as Alex’s boyfriend—who may have been only one of several dating her—had left the city the next morning to spend the weekend with friends (unless Alex had to work the next night too, and so he had decided to go to Waskesiu), he wasn’t the one who phoned about double dating the next night. He says, in the taped 2004 interview, that he “hadn’t been in Waskesiu very long before the RCMP came by to talk to me, to see if Alex was with me and whether I knew anything more about where she might be.” But the Wiwcharuk family didn’t think the police were looking for Alex yet, as she had been gone only overnight, and the reporter for the Star Phoenix says on the same tape that “the police weren’t bothering with that file at all.” Although considerable allowance has to be made for the vagaries of memory after forty-some years, it seems to me that police were already playing their cards very close to their chests, maybe too close, because they were doing a lot of work behind the scenes and telling no one about it—work which, to this day, remains a carefully kept secret.
The investigation took an unusual turn when sixteen-year-old Billy McGaffin, who’d been fishing alone on the apron of the dam the night of the murder (or I would think he was alone until late in 2006 when I would find out differently), in an effort to ferret out more precise memories, was hypnotized at the request of the police by Saskatoon doctor Lewis Brand. Retired officer Hugh Fraser, according to the 1992 newspaper account, says that he was skeptical about such a technique, but when the boy gave a thorough description of Alex, especially of the shoes Alex had been wearing when he saw her at around 9:30 p.m., he lost his skepticism. That particular detail—the colour and type of shoe—he said, had been withheld from the media.
The boy also said that Alex had left the riverbank shortly after 10 p.m., and that there had been “another person, alone, sitting on the apron at the north end.”This newspaper account says that the tape of the hypnosis session by then had disappeared from the file, but that at the time of the writing, fourteen years ago, the transcript of the tape was still on file. There was no tape when the CBC’s the fifth estate did their documentary in 2004, and they used actors reading from the transcript.
Under hypnosis, the youth described two cars he had seen parked along Spadina Crescent at the apron, at roughly the same time. One of these was an older model, two-tone “Fordtype” car with three teenage boys in it. The documentary goes on to say that “another witness reported seeing a similar car later that night parked across from where the body was found two weeks later.” The second car the hypnotic subject saw was a red sports car with one man in it. The two boys—or rather, the one of them, as I made no attempt to contact the friend who had been with him that night—who had been too shy to talk to Alex say they did not see either car, either time they were at the weir.
According to the CBC’s documentary, Dr. Brand asked the boy who was hypnotized whether he saw anyone else there, and he responded that there was the older car with the three boys in it. According to the transcript, Dr. Brand asked no more questions about the older car, but instead inquired whether the boy had seen any other vehicles there. The boy responded about the red sports car, and Dr. Brand, oddly, did not return to the first car. But the RCMP lab report states clearly that the contents of the front seat and the back seat of a 1950 Dodge were examined for evidence, not those of a red sports car. Whether the 1950 Dodge was or was not the older, two-tone “Ford-type” car, or some other car entirely, I don’t know. Once again, of course, we might be dealing with an incomplete transcript, a precaution possibly taken so that the information the police were most concerned with as significant did not fall into the hands of the public.
In February 2006, I was allowed to read Hugh Fraser’s “Investigation Report” dated June 1, 1962. It was written at 4:40 a.m., and in it he says that after midnight he, along with Dr. Slobodian (Alex’s doctor) and Father Bodnarchuk, went to notify Alex’s parents. He also records that Alex’s brotherin-law told the police that a man who worked at the hospital and who drove a red convertible had kept trying to take Alex out, and that when she refused, he would follow her. As well, her brother-in-law named a man with a red car who tried to go out with her, but Fraser writes that it is not known if these were the same man. Thus, the “red car” lead was clearly among the very first.
The police then pursued the driver of the red car, and with little effort found it. (The CBC tells me that there were only two cars of that type in Saskatoon at that time.) Today, my old girlfriends say to me in astonishment with regard to the driver of that car, “Don’t you remember him? He was always giving us rides, but nobody would go out with him. We told him that. He knew we’d never be anything more than friends.” Since discussing this with these friends I dredged up a very old memory of perhaps in grade twelve being offered a ride by him, and, having heard about him from my girlfriends, turning him down. He didn’t persist, not even seeming surprised at my refusal. I also have a vague memory of hesitating for a split second as I gazed at his gorgeous little car. But relatives of mine knew him, and while everyone else who knew him insists he was harmless, my relatives were wary of him—although they also say that he never did anything they knew of to validate their wariness.
The man who owned the red car was Ukrainian, but he went by an Anglicized version of his name. His misfortune was to have picked a surname that happened also to be that of a prominent Saskatoon-area family whose members included a lawyer and a judge. Today, people think that because of that surname he was confused by the public with the prominent family. In the absence of a killer being found, a few people decided he was the guilty man and that the police hadn’t named him because the high status of his family protected him. It seems to me that if the police didn’t suspect him, they would have done well to let the public know. On the other hand, maybe they deliberately fostered that rumour or simply failed to correct it, to divert the public’s interest in the true investigation, which was, by then, going in a different direction.
The “son or sons of a prominent man or men” theory surfaced again and again in my question-asking. A CBC researcher was supposedly told by somebody that Dr. Brand (who hypnotized Billy McGaffin for the police) said to someone in a bar one night after the hypnosis session that this one would never be solved because the rape, beating, and killing had been done by not one son of one prominent man, but by—as far as I can remember—three sons of three prominent men. Dr. Brand, who had been forced to retire under a cloud some years later, died in 1994 and there is no proof he ever said this.
In the end, I concluded that there were two rumours: the “son of a prominent man” who drove the red car, and the “sons of prominent men” who, I guess, were driving a different car, quite likely the older-model “Ford-type” car. Beyond this, the rumours twisted and turned and mixed in with each other, and some parts were believed by some people, and other parts by other people, the only consistency being the “son(s) of prominent man/men”).
Looking back over all the many stories I’d heard, the theories, the rumours, and especially the twin beliefs that dogged Saskatoon—that the police didn’t know what they were doing and thus failed, and its opposite, that the police knew who had killed Alex but had their own, of course, devious reasons for not identifying him—I began to see that almost certainly neither was true. The police had investigated, as they had always said, thoroughly, and were continuing to do so, and although they had strong suspicions and evidence that seemed to back them, they did not know with certainty, any more than the public did, who had killed Alex.
One day in 2006 I realized that it had been twenty years since I had had that strange dream about my diary resting on the pedestal in the Ukrainian Hall which had, in the dream, become a museum; it had been ten years since I first began asking questions, since the first time I’d looked up the old reports in the Star Phoenix. I had files everywhere in my office, three or four notebooks, and a scattering of bits of paper with scribblings on them that mostly no longer made much sense to me. All the stories I’d heard, the rumours people told me, the newspaper reports, the documents I’d finally received, were running through my head—too many details to capture and hold steady, too many versions to isolate and separate, many of which I couldn’t reconcile from report to report, and the discrepancies which I couldn’t explain. I pitied the police who had ten times the material to deal with, and a “file” containing something like eleven hundred names.
In fact, I fell into a trap: I had allowed myself to be so seduced by the mystery of Alex’s death that my original intention, to answer some not-quite-defined question about what had happened that night, led me off into this minute examination of documents, into questioning people, into studying the CBC tape as if I were a private investigator hired to solve the murder—and every question I asked calling up a dozen more that I felt I had to try to answer to get the “complete” picture. And, of course, the truth was that sitting in my office five hours from Saskatoon, without access to all the available information, without the right to know who the suspects were, or what the evidence was, I could never “solve” the murder.
Still, I pondered what had been done to Alex. I tried to reconstruct the beating, rape, and murder, as police officer after police officer must have done:Which came first, the punch in the face that had destroyed her beauty, or the blow or blows to her skull? Was she conscious when she was raped? Or unconscious? Or had there been consensual intercourse first? I asked myself these questions over and over again, along with all the variations on the sequence of events that the reader can well imagine. I wondered: Was there only one attacker? Or two, or more? Did she get into a car or was she dragged into one? Or was no car involved at all? Did she know her attacker (or them), or was he (or them) a stranger? Fascinated, obsessed—these words, I finally admitted, did indeed apply to me.
One day, as for the umpteenth time over what was now years I went over my pieces of paper, I began to feel fatigue take hold of me. My mind had stopped functioning, refused to respond to my efforts to be rational, logical. I closed my eyes, pressed my fingers against them, and rested my elbows on each side of my laptop, feeling the ache in my back of which I’d just become aware. Such weariness, an immense fatigue, of a kind I had never before experienced. It was beyond the merely physical, beyond even a mental fatigue, reaching deep inside me, I think now, down into my soul.
The moment had come when the pettiness of the details, the viciousness, the ugliness of them began to seem not fascinating, not vital, not even interesting or disgusting, but in some odd, futile way—boring. They had become banal. And it was then that I saw what Hannah Arendt meant when, the year after Alex’s death, she pronounced this odd word about the Nazi horrors. Now I saw her meaning, and I saw that she was right; it might not be the whole truth, but it was correct as far as it went. By this, I mean that I grew weary of the details, their quality of eternal repetitiveness, that the killing of one human being by another, or the torture of one by another, is all too wearily commonplace, and the details all too similar.
The illogicality, the cruelty of that word banal to describe the evil of Alex’s death was absolutely clear to me, just as the aptness, the accuracy of it was now, too. But because I knew all too well that every detail of exactly how Alex died was not banal, mattered a great deal to the one who had suffered them, as it did to those who had truly loved her, I found that I could not reconcile these opposites—the one accepting the ineradicable presence of evil on earth, and the other demanding with perfect righteousness, Know exactly how I died; honour my death.