I suppose it is possible: if the boy had been sixteen at the time of this assault, he would have been only thirty-four when Alex was killed (seventy-eight today), and having demonstrated such a propensity for violence, and sexual violence, so young, he might well have gone on to murder. In fact, now that we know more about serial rapists and serial killers, he probably did. Because he was never identified, however, we may never know if he was also Alex’s attacker. Because he was described in the newspaper as “rather poorly dressed,” and riding a bike with rust on it—although he might well have stolen the bike—it seems unlikely he had an “important” father.
But such a conclusion by the members of that poor child’s family serves also to demonstrate what happens when the police fail and then don’t communicate sufficiently with the victim and the victim’s family about their failure. I say this because this story—that the killer was known but a member of an “important” family—also became a rumour when they failed to capture Alex’s killer. Whoever investigates this phenomenon—folklorists? sociologists? journalists?—could probably predict such a rumour as an outcome among the ordinary people of a place when vital information isn’t given to them. Or, maybe even when it is. To hear, We have failed, or We have so far failed, will never satisfy some people, who will jump to the next conclusion: that the police know, but are covering something up.
Why didn’t the Star Phoenix send up a hue and cry about the necessity of catching that boy? I suppose because in the forties we hadn’t yet entered the era of truly mass media where a half-dozen reporters—this was Saskatoon—weren’t there all vying with each other for the “scoop,” swarming police officers and demanding or begging for information, sticking cameras in the child’s parents’ faces or the child’s face, interviewing the neighbours, and family members, and writing thunderous editorials about the need to get tough on crime. There was no television news then, no television at all, the war was just ending, and people were focusing on that as the troops were beginning to come home. As well, the culture at that time was more inclined to accept authority than it is today. And so, as nearly as I could tell, within the month the story had disappeared from the newspaper, apparently never to be resurrected.
In the forties, the Saskatoon Police Service had only forty-plus officers to serve a city of between 43,000 and 46,000 people, virtually no modern equipment, and little training. I doubt today’s police service would have failed in such a task, but in 1945, given these facts about the police force, trying to find that rapist must have seemed a Herculean task. They failed partly because they had little experience with such a crime. Most of the time in such cases, the victim would have been fifteen or older, perhaps a grown woman, and women (or the parents of teenage girls) would have preferred secrecy to what they would have to endure if they insisted on reporting the assault to the police. Thus, few would have been reported. But this was a child, and a traumatized and bleeding one, and the crime such an appalling one that her rescuers must have felt they had no choice, as responsible citizens and because her parents weren’t there and couldn’t for the moment be found, but to take her to the police station.
Perhaps all those Scottish Protestant policemen felt disgusted; perhaps they felt that this wasn’t a case they cared to pursue, and that it would be better to send the girl home and not traumatize her further with their investigation; perhaps because the girl’s father was a serviceman not yet demobilized there was no one with enough moral authority to fight for her. I can’t help but think that because she was a child, and the event so terrible, and the times what they were, most people would think it better that she be taken home and told to forget it. In those days, there were a lot of things that women were told to go home and forget: the stillborn baby, the child given up for adoption or sent to an institution forever because it was not “normal,” the rape, the beating by her husband.
I heard from others, after the episode aired, for example, about a friend who had been a university student and out with a few friends the night Alex disappeared. They’d been drinking beer, it was before midnight, and they pulled over at the bridge, parked the car, and went down the riverbank, out of sight, to relieve themselves. I’d been told that they’d heard something and had been questioned by the police, but when I got in touch with one of them and asked him, he replied that, yes, they had stopped by the bridge that night, but that he and his friends had seen and heard nothing and, no, they had never been questioned by the police. They just got back in the car and drove away and that was that.
People suggested to me that I should get in touch with so-and-so because so-and-so knew something. Sometimes the person had died; sometimes he was as far away as New York City, and sometimes he couldn’t be found. None of these ever came to much. One story led me to spend a couple of afternoons at the library in Banff (I was there for a week at the Banff Centre for the Arts), reading microfilm of the Banff Crag and Canyon newspaper, where I could find no trace of the story I’d been told. Either the version I’d heard was too inaccurate to be recognizable in the newspaper accounts, or it had never happened at all, I thought, or it had happened all right, but not in or near Banff. Since the story involved death by misadventure, or a sort of unwilled suicide, and I found accounts of that sort of thing in the paper, although in the wrong time period, I felt sure that if it had happened as I’d been told, the paper would not have ignored it, and I should have been able to find it. And how I wished I had the time and the energy to do the same thing in Jasper, or Waterton Park, or even Waskesiu, until I found out what the true story was.
I read in the Star Phoenix that two weeks after Alex’s body was found, a thirty-five-year-old electrician named Steve Kozaruk was found unconscious, from a combination of drugs and alcohol, in a Saskatoon hotel room in which also lay the body of an Aboriginal woman, Rose Whitehead, who had been strangled with a towel. Kozaruk went to prison for this crime, and, as might be expected, police were suspicious that he might also have been responsible for Alex’s murder. But such a connection was never proven, and I don’t recall seeing any suggestion in the newspaper at the time that this might be the case. Aside from Kozaruk, and the potential or real suspects mentioned by the fifth estate, of whom I’d previously known nothing, the community (and probably also the police) suspected several other identified and—eventually—incarcerated killers. Their names were Clifford Olson, David Threinen, Colin Thatcher, and Larry Fisher, all of them still alive today—three in prison, and one currently back at home on parole after having served his very long sentence. All of these four had gone to prison for crimes committed from seven to more than twenty years after Alex’s death.
Alex died in the spring of 1962. Larry Fisher, the true killer in 1969 of Saskatoon nursing assistant Gail Miller (for whose rape and death David Milgaard was wrongly convicted and served twenty-three years in prison), would have been only about twelve years old and seems not to have been living in Saskatoon when Alex was killed. David Threinen, the abductor and killer of four Saskatoon children, was apprehended in 1975, having committed his crimes within the previous year or so. Speculation was that as Alex was small enough to be mistaken for a child, perhaps Threinen had been her killer. He would have been fourteen in 1962, and one of the phone calls I received from strangers concerned a story of a rape that the caller, who had known Threinen when they were both boys, alleged that he had committed in 1964.
Finally, in 1982 the most hateful of this hateful lot (if such comparisons can even be made), Clifford Olson, went to prison for the abduction and murder of eleven British Columbia children between the ages of nine and eighteen, murders which took place between November 1980 and his capture in August 1981. One source (The Memory Box: One Hundred Years of Policing in Saskatoon, 1903—2003) says that Olson was already in prison in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, a small city north of Saskatoon, when Alex was killed in 1962, and so couldn’t have done it, while another, earlier report (the Star Phoenix, in 1992) stated that he was released a month before
her death and told prison officials he was going to Saskatoon. Although I still wonder about this, I have made no move to discover which story is correct. I leave that to the police, and am confident they know whether Olson was available or not, and perhaps have even questioned him about Alex’s death, despite that long gap between her death and the deaths of the eleven children and young people for which he went to jail, and where he will remain for the rest of his life. Apparently, as is the case with most serial killers, he has bragged about many other murders he committed, but produced no proof of them.
A number of the people who phoned or spoke to me in person said that they had always believed that Colin Thatcher, who was convicted in 1984 of the murder of his former wife, also killed Alex. When I asked about this of people who had been involved in some way in Thatcher’s trial, they assured me that when Thatcher was being tried for his wife’s death, the police had followed this rumour and had concluded that it simply wasn’t possible for him to have killed Alex. As for the “had always believed” part of the story that a few people insisted to me was the case, I think it unlikely. As far as I know, there was no reason at all why anybody in 1962 would have suspected Colin Thatcher, twenty-four years old at the time, and son of the leader of the opposition, soon to be provincial premier, as he had done nothing the public would have known about, other than being the son of “an important man,” or “an important politician” (a story on which I will elaborate later), to cause anyone to suspect him then. I think that it was not until he was convicted twenty-two years later of a killing that surpassed even Alex’s in sheer viciousness that people looked backward to Alex’s death and tried to draw a link.
Eventually, I came to the decision that it was time to stop this fruitless trailing after rumours. There was no way I could ever solve the case; that had never been my purpose, as I kept reminding myself, and pursuing every one of these leads took a lot of time, time I could better use in writing my book. I began to have sympathy for the police, imagining how many of these “leads” they had chased down over the years, most likely to no avail. I began to see why they sometimes seemed uninterested or even a little bored or disgruntled when some citizen came in, breathless with excitement, to share “information. ” Or else, and I tried not to think this, I was circling the truth the whole time and just couldn’t see it because I was missing some key piece to it all.
I also heard stories about Alex’s body, awful stories, including that the tendons in her ankles had been cut to stop her from running, that there had been other mutilations, that there had been a certain man’s ring found with her body, and so on. Some had told me that she carried a makeup kit, and others that her hair was in curlers. But as neither I nor the fifth estate had been allowed to see the autopsy report (nor had her family ever seen it—they weren’t allowed to see it until 2005 or early 2006, forty-three or -four years after her death, when the office of the chief coroner finally released it, and I saw it too), no one knew what was true and what was rumour, or lies, or myth-making. But when I did see the autopsy report, there were metallic objects in or on the back of her skull which were identified as probably bobby pins, and when the fifth estate’s documentary showed the scene of all the material in Alex’s file spread out over a laboratory table, a lipstick and a compact were there. If she had carried them to the weir, it seems that she indeed had had plans that night to meet someone before she went on to work. On the other hand, the television dramatization showed her making up her face in her own home before she left that night, and then walking away and leaving those items there, on her dressing table. Maybe the police had these items not because they were found at the crime scene but only to collect DNA from them.
When I had nearly completed the second version of this book, the one you are reading now, I began to realize that differences on the documentary tape from other versions of what had happened were not necessarily mistakes by the filmmakers, or a dramatizing of the facts for the sake of a good show, but were moments when the CBC producers knew more than I did, and despite talking with me fairly often as they did their research, they had not told me everything they knew, but had shown these things, without comment, in the documentary. When I finally realized that, I felt a moment of near-despair.
Before I’d begun even the first version of this book I had written a polite letter to the senior producer asking if I might have access to the program’s files to aid my research, pointing out, among other things (such as that the CBC is a publicly funded operation), that without me, they’d have had no documentary. At first I received no reply, and I never did receive a reply from him in writing, not even by e-mail, but another staff member told me that he had said, simply, “No!” and that was that. When I complained, one of the other employees said that she would help me, but when I asked her, months later, for the answer to one question, she said that the material containing the answer was in the archives, but that she would have it brought up and would get back to me. I’m still waiting.
It would take me a long time to realize that in the segment in the television episode where police officers opened Alex’s “file” (actually a large number of plastic-wrapped items spread out over a long table, as well as a mountain of paperwork filed in neat brown- or red-covered ring binders) and let the camera pan over them, there was only one item that—as far as I knew—hadn’t previously been revealed to the public. That is, that the police, while appearing to be completely open, had carefully controlled the information, no one would even know that they had done so.
After the fifth estate’s episode was aired, and after the initial excitement died down a little, I kept working on my book and following leads, and so did the program’s researchers. They were planning to do a follow-up program during the summer, when they hoped to have enough new information to point in the direction of Alex’s killer, and these investigative journalists and researchers were, and are, not used to failure. I was every bit as hopeful as the other viewers of the program. With all the contacts I was receiving, and with what I had learned from the fifth estate, I was at last getting a look at what was known about the night Alex was murdered. It was fascinating, I was glad to have the information for the sake of my book, and for the sake of my own unsatisfied curiosity, but I was sure that none of it was details that the police wouldn’t have—and thus, none of it would solve the crime.
Often, as I wandered across the hayfields, or across the prairie, alone, thinking about all of this, I would feel, hovering on the edge of my awareness, a sense of some great idea about life, that all of this—the people, the stories, the motives—was surely adding up to something, but that something wasn’t who the killer was. I would see that glimmer of brightness again, that flash of colour and light and movement that was full of meaning, that was the piece of wisdom, or the key at last to all wisdom, that I had been searching for since I was a child. Try as I might, I could not bring it into focus.
Still, more than forty years after Alex’s death, everybody I talked to, from law professors to strangers on the street, had a story to tell about what they knew, what they thought, what they remembered, what they suspected—had always suspected—and I was finding all of this material to be a mixture of facts and memories, rumours, theories, and sometimes, fantasy. It was so full of the humanity of the city—all those faces, those voices, those stories and ideas; the fact that people remembered and wanted to know, still wanted to know, as if to know would make it possible for them at last, in some way far bigger than the story itself, to rest easy—that I felt myself gasping for air, as it were, grasping for a string to pull me through all of this marvellous chaos, this beautiful richness that was life. Life along the South Saskatchewan River, in the city of Saskatoon, and the province of Saskatchewan.
Alex, dying too young, had invented nothing, done no courageous deeds, created no great works, and yet by the documentary of the fifth estate had become, more than forty years after her death, a national figure. I wondered if the girl who had come to me as a gho
st, by all of this (for soon there would be my book, and surely, after that, a movie about her), still wanted the very fame that she had dreamt of attaining one day through her beauty and, perhaps—it suddenly occurred to me—her talent as an actress. It had all been stolen from her that night, all that glorious, exciting future, and she was determined, even from the other side of the grave, to have it anyway.
I knew myself to have developed into a singularly determined woman, this because I had never felt that I had any other choice in life if I was not to wind up desperately poor and living in some hopeless backwater. But I had never thought of Alex as also being a determined woman as well. I had seen her as a pretty, ambitionless young drifter, content to take life as it came, because until her death, life had been easy for her: first, as the youngest, most adored child, and then, as the prettiest girl in town, with everyone seeking her company. Now I was beginning to think that she had been as determined as I was, although she was set on a different future than the one I meant to have. And I marvelled at this idea too.
Chapter Six
Beauty
Although nobody I asked recalled Alex ever saying so, her friends seemed to think that wanting to be a stewardess might, indeed, have been her motive in applying for nursing school. Otherwise, it’s hard for me to understand now why somebody like her, a girl eager for life and freedom, would have chosen to do nurses’ training. Nursing students had to live in dormitories, and follow strict curfews and rules of conduct; nurses’ training was a little like joining the army, so rigid was the hospital hierarchy, with doctors at the top of the medical staff, and student nurses and orderlies at the bottom, and a parallel structure in the non-medical with managers and staff at the top, and below them, ward clerks, kitchen and laundry staff, and cleaners. The nursing program was designed to keep the trainees children, not only through the requirement of living in a dorm and being in by ten on weekdays and eleven on weekends, but through the uniforms themselves, which signalled rank, and which also were designed to disguise the blossoming bodies of these young women, and which even hinted, sternly, of the nunnery.
The Girl in Saskatoon Page 12