Besides this, I had been told by a former investigative reporter that he’d been told by the former police chief, Dave Scott, around 1995, that the police service had had a suspect all these years, and that with the new DNA technology, they had hopes of identifying Alex’s killer fairly soon. But this was now 2001, and no such person had been caught. During this period beginning in 2001 and through most of 2002, I was phoning, writing letters, and applying to the freedom of information commissioner, all more or less at the same time.
There were two more men still alive, former police officers, I was told, who had also had something to do with the investigation of Alex’s murder at the time it happened, and so I called each of them. Their responses, in one case after a couple of friendly phone conversations, and in the other, immediately, in response to my asking for an interview, were so deliberately rude, so abrupt, and so similar—Not interested! No! I won’t be here!—that I was stunned. Not even a polite explanation about why they didn’t want to talk to me? And why, after friendly, even excited conversations earlier with one of them, was I suddenly apparently afflicted with the plague? “Do you think somebody got to them?” an acquaintance asked, when I told about this baffling development more than forty years after the murder.
I began to think that if no one who knew facts would talk to me, it just might be because he had something to hide. But I was coming to know that nobody official would give me information because I was seen as a journalist, not as a citizen, or a friend of the murdered—as somebody who had no inherent right to information.
Knowing nothing about police procedures (except what I had seen on television and in movies or read in murder mysteries), or about the brotherhood of police officers, or about what I would begin to see as their arrogance, which smacked of a hard anger at the people they were hired to protect, not only at the criminals, I had never expected such absolute refusal. I hadn’t for a second believed that there would be anything for them to hide. I had entered the world of question-asking in complete innocence. It didn’t matter, in the end, if they returned my calls and treated me with cheery condescension, if they told me nothing that wasn’t already in the realm of public knowledge. It didn’t matter how charming they were, or how businesslike, if their main purpose was to make sure not one bit of information not already on the public record came to me.
When my application to see certain documents under the Freedom of Information Act came back refused, having already fully expected that, I barely read the formal justification, but the commissioner went to some lengths to try to help me, making it clear to the police that one of them had to talk to me. I didn’t bother to apply to the court to have the ruling rescinded, because I was sure I wouldn’t have a hope. My attempt to get hold of a copy of the autopsy report, via the office of the chief coroner, was equally futile. I was told, eventually, by a clerk, that all documents before 1970 had been destroyed in either a flood or a fire, I’ve forgotten which. (A few years later I would be given a copy and told it had come via the office of the chief coroner, that the chief coroner had decided to release it.)
But then I’d remind myself of something that in my frus-tration and anger I would keep forgetting: that it was never my intention to try to solve that forty-odd-year-old mystery. It was my intention only to write the definitive book about what had happened to Alex. When I was refused information, after I had shrugged off the humiliation, I just tried hard to think of another place where information might be found.
I also wrote a letter to the mayor at the time, who was Saskatoon’s former police chief and chair of the board of police commissioners, which I copied to the then provincial justice minister, asking not for information about the murder, but that the investigation be “reignited and vigorously pursued,” and telling them that I was most distressed about the failure to achieve justice for Alex. The murder and investigation was now either a “case,” or a “file.” Not the story of the horrifying act of violence that had killed a beautiful young woman just as her life was blossoming. Not the story of justice failed, justice not done. I kept thinking that it was only because all the people of whom I was asking questions were men that they could talk in that infuriating way about Alex’s death. But then I caught myself calling it a “case,” too.
I received a prompt reply saying my letter was being forwarded to the current chief of police, and only a week or so later, a letter came dated September 7, 2001, from a superintendent of police, saying, “This homicide is still open and active..,” and, “I assure you that homicide files remain open until they are successfully concluded.” I look back now and see that I hadn’t asked for information. What I had really wanted, I remember, was for the board of police commissioners to have a letter in hand with regard to the murder and investigation, which would then make it possible for board members to request to see the file, something I’d been told that they could not do otherwise. This would then take it out of the tight fists of the police. I have no idea whether the board ever saw my letter, although it was addressed to them as well as to the chair.
It had been nearly thirty years since I’d last lived in Saskatoon by the time I was butting my head against all those stone walls. The Saskatoon Alex and I had lived in had been a very different place. Not just smaller, but, in my mind, run then by a handful of men, real personalities: Tommy Lennon, the “singing fire chief,” James Kettles, the police chief, Sid Buckwold, the mayor and one of the smoothest and most charming men the city (at the very least) has ever seen. Tommy Lennon and Jim Kettles both had reputations as drinkers, and both had opinions, which they didn’t hesitate to voice at any opportunity. Jim Kettles gave public radio addresses at Christmas, just like the Queen, and in them he tended to thunder out all the ways in which the citizens of the city failed to meet his expectations. He held views no public figure could get away with voicing today.
They ran a city that was growing so fast it must have been hard to keep tabs on everything that was going on. Between 1950 and into the eighties the city grew by about 20,000 people every five years. When Alex and I started high school it had a population of around 50,000 and when we finished, it was 56,000. By 1961, when I was still in university there, and Alex had returned to work at City Hospital, it had doubled in size to over 100,000, or a gain of more than 42,000 people. When we arrived in the city in the early fifties it didn’t have a single shopping mall or a freeway. When we graduated in 1958 there had been no school killings—no Columbine, no École Polytechnique, no Dawson College—no mass murders other than the Holocaust, a full understanding of which we were still trying to absorb, and no serial killers we knew of beyond Jack the Ripper in late-nineteenth-century London, England. We still believed in a righteous war against evil killers such as Hitler, and unquestioningly in the heroism of our soldiers. There was no Vietnam, no Desert Storm, no Afghanistan, and no Iraq (never mind Chechnya, Rwanda, the killing fields of Cambodia). No disappeared. No terrorists, no World Trade Center. No soldiers murdering their prisoners or torturing them, especially not Canadian soldiers. The innocence of the average young Canadian—other than for the incomprehensible but terrifying atomic bomb and the truly incomprehensible hydrogen bomb, and the deliberate murder of six million Jews—was otherwise pretty much intact. Even corruption in governing bodies was considered to be unusual and very limited; corruption belonged to gangs, to the mafia, to the criminal element in general. Everybody else, we thought, could be relied upon to be honest.
But I remember an incident that happened around 1960. One night I was out with the man who would become, a year later, my first husband. Another couple was with us, when one of the men suggested that we should go for a drink to a bootlegger’s establishment in downtown Saskatoon. It was nearing midnight on a beautifully warm and calm summer night. I remember that I was adamant that I would not go to such a place, that I would not go inside, that I wanted nothing to do with the idea. But we all got in the car and started driving across the city, and nobody backed me in my determination
not to go, so that I gave up my objections, gritted my teeth, and nervously resigned myself.
When we got to the house in question—it was on 2nd or 3rd Avenue at the north end—we parked the car a half-block or so away. (I seem to remember that the man whose idea it was had been told not to park in front of the house itself so as not to attract attention.) A large, middle-aged woman sat on the front steps, smoking, in the soft darkness, and across the street a young constable walked with a measured gait toward the north, not looking across the street to where we approached the front steps. The woman said, “Shh. He’s paid off, but if you make too much noise, he’ll have to do something.” By this time, steeped as I was in Hemingway, Faulkner, Nathaniel West, and dozens of other male American writers, I wasn’t exactly surprised. Nor did I entirely believe her, being by that time well acquainted with the self-aggrandizing impulse. She told us to come in by the back door, and so around we went, climbed a few steps, and entered the brightly lit kitchen.
We were the only patrons there. It was a small house with a half-storey above us, and the two rooms I would see were almost bare of furniture, and if shabby, very clean. A young woman stood at the kitchen counter, and she turned and told us to go into the next room, the living room, where we sat on a couple of worn and lumpy sofas. One of the men told her what we would like to drink, paid for it, and then joined us. A moment later the woman came in carrying our drinks on a tray. I remember only that she was young, probably about my age, had long dark hair, was not especially pretty, but neither was she plain, but that she wore a sleeveless blouse and the shortest black shorts I’d ever seen, that her long, shapely legs were bare and she wore black high heels. Naive as I was, I knew I was in no position to make a judgement about how she was dressed, much as it shocked me. I remember watching her through the doorway as she went about getting our drinks, and that she was humming to herself, even doing a few dance steps, and I wondered what she was happy about, never thinking that this was a performance designed to attract customers, and not only to buy drinks from her.
Did someone tell me she wasn’t really or only a waitress, but a prostitute? Or did I figure it out myself? What struck me most about her was that she was an attractive young woman, and why she would be a prostitute if she was attractive baffled me. One of the men said, surprised by my response, “If she weren’t attractive, nobody would go with her.” What? I must have thought. All the prostitutes I’d ever seen were on 20th Street, where long years of abuse, neglect, and alcohol had long since removed any traces of beauty, if there ever had been any. I’d equated ugly-and-worn-out with “prostitute,” and it took me a long time to accept that pretty, shapely women might choose that life. I hadn’t yet figured out, either, the world being what it is—what it was even then, although I had no idea of it—that many women who might have thought they chose to be prostitutes were in fact set up for it by the circumstances of their home lives, by the failure of institutions to protect children, by the downright evil of others.
Occasionally, also, I think of the gangly young policeman patrolling the sidewalk in the shadows across the street from us, and of the woman’s claim that he had been “paid off.” I wonder if it was true, and if so, was it strictly a deal between him and the woman, or did the corruption start higher up? And if it started higher up, then how wide was it? How far would the corruption extend in assisting criminal activities which tended, on the whole, to support men, and to disadvantage, to devastate women? I was realizing that the “amusing” events I knew about that had gone on in our city when I was young—the ones I’d seen myself, or the ones that “everybody” knew about—were not all that amusing and harmless after all, but were a part of what I was now beginning to think of as ordinary, everyday evil.
Before Christmas 2002, I had given up efforts on my own part to find out information about Alex’s murder and the investigation and I had called the CBC investigative television program the fifth estate. To my surprise, one of the hosts, Linden McIntyre, returned my call and indicated interest in doing a program. Then, in January 2003, our phone rang around two in the morning, causing me to leap out of bed and groggily answer the first of several calls from someone I would come to know as a renegade. He was a retired police officer, one younger than I was, who had once been a homicide officer, and who called to give me some information or else to offer me advice on where to find more, or just to chat in a private way about what he knew about Alex’s murder and its investigation. The upshot was that I heard things I would never, ever have heard otherwise. When I spoke on the phone to Linden McIntyre himself, as nearly as I can tell, it was those unsolicited and faintly sinister phone calls that persuaded the fifth estate to take on Alex’s story.
In February, after having made arrangements to go to Calgary to spend two weeks studying French, my husband and I set out together, leaving our house locked and empty. He would drive me, stay a night or two, return home, and then come back to pick me up near the end of my course. As soon as he returned home, he called to let me know he had arrived, and that was when I began to realize that our phone had been tapped. It was just a clunky, obvious, voice-activated tap, otherwise I would never have known about it, but it was a tap nonetheless. Of that, I was sure.
At about the same time, just before Christmas 2002, an ex-convict (he said he had done fourteen of sixteen years in prison in maximum security jails, that is, fourteen years of “hard time”) called me to tell me he had just moved into isolated, remote little (not to mention pretty much crime-free) Eastend, Saskatchewan, the village nearest our home. This was more than surprising: Why not a city where he could lose himself and where there would be jobs? And how had he even heard of Eastend? He said that he had heard of me, although I was never clear how, and that he wanted me to write a book about his life. But when I did meet with him (our spouses were also present), he told me that he didn’t read, although his wife did, and apparently, he hadn’t finished school. I was even more baffled as to how he would have heard of me, as I am fairly sure that obscure Western writers living in backwaters are not a common subject of conversation in maximum security prisons.
Events were moving more than a little too fast for me. Up to the moment I decided I wanted to write a book about Alex’s life and death and began asking questions, I had led the safest, most secure and ordinary life possible, so suddenly I was something beyond surprised, and just a little frightened. But I was stirred, too, as if I had just wakened from a long dream into a bright, fast-moving, risky world, and I was disoriented, hardly knew which way to turn. It amazed me how quickly a life could move from safe into dangerous waters; just like that, unintentionally, by accident. And I could see that backing off, forgetting the whole idea of the book, was an option that would return me to a safe shore, and I have never been brave, never been a boat-rocker by nature, so why did I not just walk away? Actually, I thought I had when I called in the fifth estate.
And I was remembering how, when we were young in the fifties, and despite the prostitution, the famous bootlegger, the famous bookie, we knew that Saskatoon was a safe little city. It was a safe city in a safer world—at least a safer North America. There had been only about ten murders in the city between its inception in 1883 and 1961, with many years between each of them, and those murders were mostly readily solved, if not obvious. (There were four in the fifties.) If Saskatoon was safe, so was the province, at a rate of something like 1.4 murders per 100,000 people (in a province of under a million population) and this into 1962, the year of Alex’s death. Murder statistics before the early sixties are unreliable, and often not gathered in any comprehensive way, but nationwide, when Alex and I were still in high school, the figure was about one murder per 100,000 people. By 1962, with our population at eighteen million, the rate had jumped to 1.47, reflecting the large changes in Canadian society, but still a number that placed Canada in the lower levels of homicides in the world, and despite all the shouting about “getting tough on crime,” it has stayed low ever since.
So pretty, bright Alex, by this time a hard-working professional woman, was killed one night absolutely out of the blue, and as the people of the city cast about for a reason for this, many concluded that Alex was not what she had appeared to be, that she must have been a slut or a tease, or otherwise to blame. There is a strain of ugliness in all this that did and does us no credit as a society: that we couldn’t simply conclude that it was a random act of violence, that she had the misfortune to be in a place at a time that made her the victim, and that the only appropriate reaction was horror, pity, and grief. Instead, the assumption was that, as we used to say, she got what was coming to her.
The era had a lot to do with this. In the forties, during the war, women had gained a kind of valour. If they were not among the many who joined the services and went overseas, they were back home working at men’s jobs, taking on men’s responsibilities with the family, managing the household with severe shortages and ration books, and doing what was called “war work.” Even the movies reflected this strength, flexibility, and steadfastness in forties heroines who had character and personal power, as well as jobs and sometimes even careers, and managed things with self-assurance, competence, and flair.
But once the men came home and the fifties hit, with the booming economy that didn’t need women’s work, and the move out to suburbia even for working class people, women lost their freedoms and were reduced to roles of strenuous propriety (signalled often by the ubiquitous white Peter Pan collar and white gloves).
The Girl in Saskatoon Page 8