The search for a killer

Police using DNA to try and solve decades-old crime
Darren Bernhardt, TheStarPhoenix.com
Published: Friday, April 04, 2008

"The girl sits, clasping her knees with her arms, gazing out over the river, unaware that she is about to die."
-from The Girl in Saskatoon, by Sharon Butala



Alexandra Wiwcharuk was a carnival queen, a nurse, a woman serenaded by Johnny Cash and the victim of Saskatoon's most notorious unsolved murder.


She would have turned 69 this month. Instead, next month will mark 46 years since her partially nude body was found in a shallow riverbank grave near Spadina Crescent and 33rd Street. She was raped, beaten and buried alive.

A boy scrounging around the scrub discovered her hand exposed above the earth. Her skull was broken in two places, her face bludgeoned beyond recognition, her windpipe clogged by sand and dirt.

The passage of time has done nothing to quell public interest in the indelible mystery, the incomplete chronicle of Wiwcharuk's life.

"It's become folklore," said Sgt. Phil Farion of the Saskatoon Police Service's historical case section.

Now the story is getting some new narrative from Farion, award-winning author Sharon Butala and even the victim herself. Advancements in forensic science have enabled Wiwcharuk to provide clues as to the identity of her killer, nearly a half-century later.

Her body was exhumed in 2004 and samples taken from remaining tissue sent to the RCMP crime lab in Regina. The search for a DNA profile on the body foreign to Wiwcharuk was unsuccessful then, but last year a high-tech lab in Thunder Bay, Ont., found it. Molecular World detected the genetic code by testing for strains exclusive to males.

"It's an ideal process if you're dealing with a sexual assault," said Farion.

Police are now in the process of matching the profile against 13 "persons of interest" identified over the years, said Farion.

"If we get a match, we've got our guy," he added. "It's stuff right out of a storybook."

In the 1990s, police hoped to test evidence saved from the crime scene but poor methods of storage failed to preserve the vital biological materials. Other samples kept at the old City Hospital were destroyed when the building was demolished.

Butala, who grew up in Saskatoon and knew Wiwcharuk, has written The Girl in Saskatoon: A Meditation on Friendship, Memory and Murder. To be launched Tuesday, the book examines the slaying in the context of the time and place it happened. It's a snapshot of society and its mores and of a naive community's maturation.

"There's a hell of a lot of evil in this world and it wins out much of the time," said Butala in a recent interview. "That's not what we're told by our teachers and parents and churches: That sweetness and light will bring justice. It bloody well does not."

As the original investigation began to dry up, people started to blame the police for being incompetent and botching it up. Butala's own research has convinced her otherwise.

"Everything I look at tells me they pursued it with confidence, intelligence and vigour. But they also hid that from the public for whatever reason. When you do that, you lose trust," she said.

Police questioned and eliminated 52 possible suspects within the first two months while RCMP in Saskatchewan and Alberta questioned another 100. It was the most intensive police investigation in the city's history, yet by 1970 the case had gone cold.

Eventually, rumours began, Butala notes in the book, which provides insights from autopsy and coroner's reports, interviews with those close to Wiwcharuk and those last to see her alive.

Wiwcharuk's life went from orbit to Earth in the span of two years. A beauty queen in 1960, she began working at City Hospital in 1961. That same year she was named The Girl In Saskatoon as part of a promotion for a concert by Johnny Cash, who had a song of the same name. Cash brought Wiwcharuk onstage and sang to her before a packed house.

On May 18, 1962, around 8 p.m., Wiwcharuk went for a walk to mail some letters. Around 9:30 p.m., a group of boys fishing at the weir saw her sitting on the riverbank. Nobody, other than her killer, saw her after that. Her body was found May 31.

During her research, Butala became infuriated with some of the attitudes of the time. Because Wiwcharuk was single and dating at age 23, rather than married, she was viewed by some as a wanton woman. Her virginity became a factor in the police investigation.

"People who didn't even know Alex assumed she must have brought it on herself," Butala said. "Nobody deserves that, regardless of how they lived. Alex was exquisitely pretty and beauty attracts unwanted attention, no matter what she said or did."

A couple of suspect names have swirled in the rumour winds. Serial killer Clifford Olson just so happened to be in Saskatchewan in 1962, but he was inside the penitentiary at Prince Albert, "so he was ruled out," said Farion.

Larry Fisher, convicted in 1999 of killing 20-year-old nursing aide Gail Miller in 1969, hasn't been ruled out, though. Like Wiwcharuk, Miller was working at City Hospital, was raped, killed and her body abandoned partially nude.

"He would have only been 12 years old in 1962," Farion said. "I'm not saying age prohibits him from being a suspect but no, his DNA has not been tested for this case."

The process of profiling suspects is time consuming, Farion said. It can take up to 30 days to test a sample - if the police even get one. If a suspect won't volunteer a swab, the police must apply to a judge for a warrant. Five people have been eliminated as Wiwcharuk's murderer and Farion is awaiting consent from a suspect in British Columbia.

"We continue to peck away at it, hopefully getting closer every time," he said.

So far the warrant application hasn't been necessary. People have been more than willing to clear their name, said Farion.