The man who murdered nurse Alexandra Wiwcharuk in 1962 might be alive right now.
Maybe he’s reading this story.
If he’s still breathing, still moving, he can visit his victim at Saskatoon’s Woodlawn Cemetery — walk right up to the snowy patch where she’s buried near the cemetery border, visible from busy Warman Road.
That man would be in his dotage now, clinging to a secret. He and Wiwcharuk are the central figures in one of Saskatoon’s most notorious cold cases, with tendrils reaching to Johnny Cash, to a carnival crown, to a slow-burn search for a body.
Perhaps police have interviewed the murderer. Family members might already know his name. They have a short list of suspects, people they talk about when they’re together.
This is what they know about the man: He murdered Wiwcharuk when she was 23 years old. He sexually assaulted her, broke her skull, buried her alive in a thicket along Saskatoon’s riverbank. She died, officially, of suffocation. Her windpipe was clogged with sand and dirt, and her face battered.
It was 13 days before a little boy saw her hand sticking out of the ground, ending a prolonged police hunt.
Wiwcharuk, who was Yorkton’s 1960 Kinette Skating Carnival Queen and a Saskatchewan Wheat Queen competitor that same year, had skin under her fingernails, indicating that she put up a fight. She would have bloodied the attacker.
Some of Wiwcharuk’s family members are putting up their own fight. They continue to work on the case. One, niece Lynn Gratrix, got her private detective’s licence specifically to aid the investigation.
“I don’t think we’ll ever give up,” Gratrix says from her Edmonton home. “The police know that, too. If we get into our 70s or 80s or whatever, we’re going to still be knocking on that door.”
“What I’m counting on is someone’s going to confess on their deathbed,” says Gratrix’s sister Patty Storie, a Dallas resident who since 1988 has worked with close relations to unravel this maddening, endlessly tragic case.
“Some people, if they believe there’s a Heaven and a Hell — which I do believe — they’re going to confess to somebody on their deathbed. It’s up to that somebody to come forward and say, ‘Hey, I may have some information.’ At this point, that’s what I’m actually counting on. The police, after 62 years … how far have they gotten?”
The Globe and Mail called the pursuing women ‘Gumshoe Nieces’ way back in 2008, while writing about four stubborn family members in particular — Gratrix, Storie, Lorain Phillips, Bonnie Parker. And there’s more. Sixteen winters have come and gone since then, and Wiwcharuk’s kin still chase a killer. The pursuit is prodded by old memories of an aunt they can’t surrender.
Storie has a final memory of what she did the last time she saw her Aunt Alexandra alive in 1962: Clung to her neck, threw a fit, pounded on a window as the car pulled away. She was little then, and didn’t want Wiwcharuk to leave. Surrender was hard, then and now.
If not for the brutality on the riverbank that night, Wiwcharuk could have been 85 this year, looking back on a long life. There would be no need for the writing of this story.
Her mother lived to 93, and her father to 89, so she possessed a longevity gene that was never allowed to activate.
Sixty-two years, stolen.
“I haven’t come across a more vicious crime in my 25-year career,” Saskatoon police chief Jim Kettles said after viewing Wiwcharuk’s partially-nude and decomposed body at the thicket on May 31, 1962. “It is one of the most heinous and sadistic offences in Saskatoon for a long time.”
And now the girl is a cold case, in the popular vernacular, though police call it a historical homicide because they don’t yet believe the trail has gone completely cold.
This is not something a promising young woman aspires to as she steps into adult life. This is not a future she envisions, lifeless under a tombstone, body forever confined to a tiny patch of dirt and grass, ice and snow, while a family seeks her killer. The file dates back to May 18, 1962, the day she was murdered.
The “cold” in “cold case” is a hard word, and used often when people talk about Wiwcharuk. It’s blunt. It punctuates decades of mazes, misdirections, frustrations and unresolved grief.
The killer walked away from Wiwcharuk that night on the riverbank, and went on with whatever life he had, for however long he lived it.
City police still have the files. Banker boxes and plastic totes, each bearing Wiwcharuk’s name, line shelves in an historical homicide storage room at police headquarters. They still welcome tips and leads, things they can add to the evidence assortment in that room and on their hard drives.
“If we could help solve this case, it would maybe give us some relief,” Gratrix says. “Maybe our hearts wouldn’t hurt as bad at certain times of the year.”
Johnny Cash sang to Wiwcharuk, personally, in his deep bass-baritone a year before her death. He’d begun writing a song, called ‘The Girl in Saskatoon,’ while travelling in a car with Johnny Horton one frigid Saskatchewan night a few years earlier, and he finished it in Nashville.
“I’m freezing, but I’m burning for the girl in Saskatoon,” Cash wrote.
A local radio station picked Wiwcharuk, before a 1961 concert, to be Johnny Cash’s Girl in Saskatoon. Years later, Cash made this claim to Ned Powers of The StarPhoenix: “Do you know that Joni Mitchell was the first runner-up in that contest?”
Wiwcharuk, the chosen one, went up on stage. Cash locked his eyes with hers, and sang about a wanderer seeking his way back to the girl he loves. It was his song, and on this night, it was their song.
My journey was forgotten
When I held her in my arms
My wanderlust was stifled
By possession of her charms
And even beneath the steeple
Where we couldn’t wait till June
I found eternal spring with the girl in Saskatoon.
The family has been told Cash never sang that song again after hearing about Wiwcharuk’s fate.
The StarPhoenix memorialized their encounter with a few lines in the concert review the next day. Shortly after that, Wiwcharuk was listed in a separate dispatch as one of 15 nursing-school graduates out of Yorkton.
Nearly a year later, she made the news again — a terse 46-word brief, with a single-word headline: ‘Missing.’ It was placed deep on Page 2, along with the weather report, a photo of Kinsmen scholarship winners, an ad for women who wished to make their hips smaller by trying a new, no-effort technique.
“Worried friends of Alexandra Wiwcharuk, 22, 1223 7th Ave., have asked police to help locate her,” they typed. “Miss Wiwcharuk, a nurse, was supposed to go on duty Friday night, but failed to do so and hasn’t been heard of since. Efforts to locate her have been fruitless.”
Two days later, the paper ran her photo. She smiled at the camera, nurse’s cap perched on the back of her head. A full-colour picture from that same photo session later adorned her tombstone.
“City police have exhausted all leads in their search for a 22-year-old nurse missing for nearly one week,” the story said, and things looked bad. But nobody knew just how bad until a man named Andrew Pschetter took his boys fishing on the riverbank 13 days after her disappearance. The lads wandered into a clump of trees 100 feet from the river, and 50 feet east of the intersection that connects 33rd Street to Spadina Crescent.
Pschetter’s six-year-old ran back; told his dad he’d found something unusual. Dad went to look, and saw a hand protruding from the soil.
That’s how they found Alexandra Wiwcharuk, the girl in Saskatoon.
She’d gone for a walk that evening, before her nursing shift, and after mailing two letters.
Author Sharon Butala went to high school with Wiwcharuk, and they’d spent time in the same drama club and choir. Her 2008 book about Wiwcharuk — titled The Girl In Saskatoon — included a description of her final known walk.
“Having arrived at the river,” Butala wrote, “she turned to her right, walked under the CPR bridge, crossed Spadina Crescent to the riverbank, then the narrow, sandy parking area, stepped over the low rope-and-post fence, walked down onto the centre of the concrete apron next to the weir, and sat down, bringing her knees up to her chin and hugging them with both arms.
“That was the last anyone saw of her alive. Except, of course, for her killer.”
Wiwcharuk’s right foot still had its shoe. The other shoe was found in a thicket. Lime green slacks covered part of a leg. Her blouse and brassiere were ripped down the middle, and a dark green cardigan was half on, half off.
Shortly before 8:30 p.m., she’d told her roommates that she was going to Mead’s Drug store to get stamps, to mail the letters, to go for a walk. She’d be back, she said— she needed to change for her 11:30 p.m. shift.
She purchased stamps between 8:30 and 8:45 p.m., and dropped the letters in a nearby mailbox. By 10 p.m., she was dead — so said the autopsy, based on the degree to which food in her stomach had been digested. That time between mailing and death is mostly unaccounted for.
One letter went to her sister in Fort William, Ont.; the other to an Edmonton friend. She wrote them while sitting under a hair dryer, and before eating a light meal with a roommate. Both recipients received her messages a few days later, while police searched for clues to the writer’s whereabouts.
“She was a real smart little girl,” her brother-in-law Bob Moss told a reporter. “She went through her nursing training with flying colours. She didn’t have an enemy.”
Pearl Cherneske, Wiwcharuk’s sister — and the mother of Storie, Gratrix and Phillips — later told a StarPhoenix reporter about the time between disappearance and discovery.
“You’d look in every car window that went by, or be waiting for her to pop up at any time,” she said. “I cried for two weeks and couldn’t eat.”
Storie remembers Alexandra’s mother going every day to the home of her eldest daughter, and saying in broken English: “You go look for Alexandra. I stay here to babysit. You go, go now.”
Police wondered if maybe she’d gone somewhere without telling anybody. Family members insisted, sometimes loudly, that she was not the type of girl to do that.
It had been a pleasant day before she died. Sunny, a few cloudy periods, light breeze. The high temperature was 21 C. Sunset was at 8:55 p.m., so it would have been twilight when she died, and when the killer buried her in a shallow grave east of 33rd St. and north of the CPR bridge, on the west side of the river — a “stone’s throw,” as The StarPhoenix put it, from houses lining pretty Spadina Crescent.
People living in nearby homes say they heard nothing — no screams, no yells.
City police plunged into the investigation, knocking on doors up and down the riverbank. According to reports at the time, they questioned and eliminated 52 suspects in the first two months; RCMP officers in Saskatchewan and Alberta questioned 100 more.
The case dominated coffee row. It gripped a city. Many women were afraid to go out alone, and mental alarm bells went off when two females were reported missing in separate incidents the week of the funeral. Both were quickly found, safe.
Tips and leads poured in.
“I remember getting a call at 5 a.m.,” then-officer Hugh Fraser told The StarPhoenix years later. “Some guy wandered in off the street and confessed to murdering her.
“But I just had to ask the guy a couple or three questions — he was a nut.”
At Wiwcharuk’s funeral on June 4, detectives scanned the crowd, looking for suspects. A few men were pulled aside and asked why they were there. All gave satisfactory answers. That same day, two suspects were interviewed at the police station.
“We have bits and fragments, but no real leads,” said Chief Kettles, who attended the funeral in his uniform and drove in the 13-car procession. “There are still a few more people to check out and we’re trying to locate them.”
A spillover crowd attended the service, many standing outside Saskatoon Funeral Home because there was no more seating. Inside, they sang Greek Orthodox prayers. The coffin was closed.
Later that month, Wiwcharuk’s sister-in-law Ann Wiwcharuk was attacked by a razor-wielding assailant outside her Moose Jaw home. He grabbed her around the neck after she returned to her house at 11 p.m., and slashed her left arm before running away. Police said it was unrelated to the case.
Four years after the murder, and despite numerous leads and tips, police were no closer to finding Wiwcharuk’s killer.
“After all the police work gone into the case, confidence is still expressed that the murderer will be found,” The StarPhoenix reported hopefully on July 13, 1966. “Chief Kettles figures the only way the crime will go unsolved is if the man is dead and has taken his story to the grave. If he is still alive, Chief Kettles maintains, the killer’s conscience will give him away.
“A slipped word, an indiscreet action may find him out at any time.”
If there has been a slipped word or an indiscreet action, it’s gone unnoticed, vanished into nothing. And now there is no longer an active police pursuit for the man, whoever he might be and wherever he might be — above ground or below, breeze still blowing on his cheeks, or sealed up and silent, down in a coffin.
* * * * *
Alexandra Wiwcharuk’s death was not the dignified sort that ends with a tidy obituary, mourned by a circle of family, friends, co-workers.
This one was public and grotesque, as evidenced by the sixth paragraph of this very story — a brutal description that has been repeated in media reports over, and over, and over through the decades. The killer did not give Alexandra Wiwcharuk a chance at a quiet death.
“The face of the girl had been battered and was decomposed beyond recognition,” reported The StarPhoenix the night she was found. “Indications were that the girl met her death by blows to the head, possibly from a concrete slab found on her chest. She had been savagely attacked, police said.”
Patty Storie’s last meeting with her Aunt Alexandra, as mentioned earlier in this story, was something she always remembered, like it came out of a dream. The man who killed her was not yet her murderer. Alexandra was just a young woman, visiting family.
“I think I was three,” Storie relates. “This is the last time she was at our house in Yorkton. Alex was leaving in her vehicle, and I grabbed her around the neck. She always picked every one of us up and hugged us. Mom said they did everything they could to get me off her neck, and I wouldn’t let her go because she was my Fairy Angel — not an auntie, nothing like that. She was my Fairy Angel. Finally, Alex said, ‘I’ll drive her around the block a few times.’ She did, and I just would not let go.
“Mom said she had to pry me off, give me a swat on the ass. I ran to the picture window and stood on the back of the couch, crying and crying, banging on the window when she was leaving. Poor Alex was so upset about this, mom said. That’s my little story, and that’s what I remember. I never saw my Fairy Angel ever again. That stuck in my brain.
“Fifteen years ago, I said to mom, ‘I remember this crazy, stupid story. I don’t know if it’s true, but I remember this picture window, and I’m sitting there banging on the glass. I’m crying and crying my heart out. I don’t know what it is, mom, but I get this fairy in my head.’ She says ‘Oh my god.’ And then she told me the story.
“She said, ‘You must have known something, Patty, because you were not letting her go. There was no way. I had to pry you away, you screamed and hollered, I gave you a swat on the butt. Then you ran and banged on the window, and that was the end of it.’
“That silly little story, which isn’t silly, really, stuck in my head forever.”
A three-year-old girl clung to a neck, banged on a window, tried to keep her aunt close. And then Alexandra Wiwcharuk went to Saskatoon, sat on a riverbank, thinking, arms around her knees, and died.
“Grandma and grandpa had this place where we’d have a big bonfire — where we’d dance and have cookouts in their little hobby farm,” Storie says. “There’s 50-some cousins, and we’d all hang out, have big parties out there when everybody could get together on summertime weekends. And we’d always talk about ‘when we grow up, we’re going to find her killer.’ We did that all the time. Even then, me being six, seven eight, nine — the same thing, over and over. Us kids got together, and Alex was brought up.
“One of us would hear the adults talking about it, and then we’d start talking about it, too. But they always wanted it to be hush-hush. They never gave details. We didn’t find out details until later.”
* * * * *
Gratrix has a long-running vision, a little picture that cycles through her brain. It’s what first got her started working on the case, and what prompted her to get her private detective’s licence.
“It’s one of my things,” she says. “Just walking in that door and saying, ‘Mom, we did it.’ ”
Her mother Pearl Cherneske, Alexandra’s sister, is still alive, still waiting for closure.
“My mom just fell to pieces,” Gratrix says of the days after her aunt went missing. “And my grandmother … I can see her in the back of my mind — how she secluded herself, and how she read that Bible. She never put it down, it seemed. She’d do her little chores and everything else, and then she’d get to the Bible.
“So, how could I see this happen in my family and we don’t try to do something? I remember the day mom got that phone call. I’m just a little girl, and I didn’t see my mom come out of that bedroom for a long time. My dad was getting frustrated — he can’t do anything. What can he do? He’s got to go to work and support his family. My mom’s in a depression. A lot of things were awful at that time, just so awful for us young girls.
“When you’re little, you don’t understand it all. As soon as we got to be teenagers, we started talking about it. As soon as we got to be adults … let’s do something. And that’s what we did.”
Alexandra babysat the sisters sometimes, and Gratrix — who was six when she died — remembers certain things vividly: Her aunt’s “cute little laugh,” the records she’d play when the parents left and it was just her and the kids, the dancing they’d do.
“If anybody started an argument, she’d stop it right away — ‘No, this isn’t the time. Let’s have some fun.’ She was like that. She wasn’t the mean, strict babysitter,” Gratrix says.
She remembers sneaking out of bed after dark, peeking in at her aunt, seeing her reading nursing books with the music turned low.
And now it’s 2024, six decades later, and she still thinks about that aunt and her kindness and an awful night that changed everything.
A variety of theories have cropped up through the decades. A spurned suitor? Serial killer Clifford Olson, who was in the area at the time of the murder? A certain politician’s son? Men in a red car?
“We got this phone call from this lady from B.C.,” Gratrix recalls. “And she remembers getting up the night Alex was murdered, and there’s two young men in their backyard, taking their stuff off their bodies, throwing it in their barrel and burning it. I gave all this information to the police. What did those two boys do? They were older teenagers. There’s so many different stories, so many different things.”
The nieces are frustrated, retroactively, with early police work that failed to catch the killer before the case got cold.
Storie has a murderer’s-row list of “three people who are quite possible,” and adds that there’s a few others she thinks could have done it. Some are still alive. Gratrix has come to believe a red car spotted near the scene the night Wiwcharuk died could have held the killer — or killers.
Both women have heard about “very strange things” that happened with the early police investigation — files and evidence going home with officers, or sitting on station desks accessible to the public. Not everything stayed intact and in place.
“I think things went missing because it was so much in the open,” Gratrix says. “They should have everything secure. When you have a murder case or anything else, everything should be locked up. They didn’t, and that’s one of their biggest problems.
“It was just done so stupidly. I talked to a whole bunch of the many elderly guys that work there, even at the front desk, and they said her file could be laying on the front desk. Imagine! So any police officer in there could be reading stuff or bringing it out of the other room, wherever they had this stuff, and it wasn’t locked and secure. Anybody could be reading her file and making it disappear.
“We think nowadays that would never, never be allowed. But who knows how lax they were back then?”
It’s been reported that some evidence was stored in a room at the old City Hospital, then thrown out.
The nieces have talked to men and women by the hundreds, anybody in Wiwcharuk’s periphery. They’re not shy about approaching people, and have even traveled to do their interviews. Gratrix learned, while getting her investigator’s licence, several tricks to track people down. How to find folks deep under the radar.
She even talked to people close to Johnny Cash, just in case. That trail yielded nothing substantial.
“I’ve found people like you wouldn’t believe,” Gratrix says. “And they just say, ‘How did you find me?’ And you know what is really astonishing? There’s so many still alive from back then. The majority of them are police officers, or worked in the offices at that time, or worked for the police department, or even reporters, right? It’s not only the police that got all the information sent to them or the phone calls at that time and during the years. It’s the newspapers.
“My hardest part, at the beginning, was I went through every newspaper from when she first became the carnival queen. I went through Yorkton’s newspapers, Saskatoon newspapers, Regina newspapers, and found anybody that could have been charged at that time, even if it was just a misdemeanour or something related to a sexual assault or anything else. I tracked every one of them down. I gave every one of those names to the police. They were totally astonished that I did all that work. It took two or three years, but I got it, and a lot of these names were on their list.”
Gratrix is encouraged by advancements in technology that she thinks can help catch the killer. Biological matter from the crime scene, placed in random envelopes or boxes, had deteriorated enough where — even after the advent of DNA technology — pertinent information could not be obtained during attempts in 1992, 1995 and 2003.
But in 2004, a technological advancement allowed researchers to exhume Wiwcharuk’s body, send samples to an out-of-province lab for DNA extraction.
Family members have made their own contribution to the tech boom with a detailed website, justiceforalex.net
“You go through all your little stages,” Gratrix says. “We went through the frustration. So now it’s just determination. It’s like we always hit the wall, but then something else new comes up.”
Storie puts together a lengthy timeline for The StarPhoenix, things that happened before and after Wiwcharuk’s death — the three-year program at nursing school, beauty queen, up on stage with Cash. In 1962, Wiwcharuk reported seeing “a person or persons stealing medications from the dispensary at the hospital.”
Wiwcharuk told family members and a nursing friend that she’d been threatened, and was maybe being watched or followed. A couple weeks before she died, Wiwcharuk told a fellow nurse that — fearing for her safety — she’d gone to the doctor for antidepressants.
The timeline moves through the police investigation, suspicions and frustrations and advancements and milestones, a long list and a sad list.
The nieces found their voices after reading Butala’s book on Wiwcharuk. They wanted to set the record straight on some things, and to plead with the public to help them solve this case.
In 2008, they put up a billboard in Saskatoon, with a number to call and the words “Nurse Murdered” in large letters beside her picture. They got 60 calls in the first six days after the billboard went up.
“Someone out there knows what happened,” Storie told reporters then, and she still believes it today.
* * * * *
It’s a cold December afternoon in Saskatoon as Wilf Popoff sips coffee at a restaurant near his home. Popoff is 83 years old, and a well-known former journalist in these parts.
He was a kid in 1962, younger than Wiwcharuk — just 20 when she went missing. He was also a full-time reporter at The StarPhoenix, employed there less than a year, and one of his routines was to head to the police station for checks at the various departments.
One May day, his route took him to the morality inspector — “A funny old guy, and I can’t remember his name,” Popoff says now between sips. “He said, ‘Oh, there’s nothing but missing persons again.’ And then, ‘There’s some nurse missing.’
“I don’t know why it bothered me … but it wasn’t the typical missing child that runs away from home and is really sleeping over at his friend’s place. This is something different. I decided on my own to pursue this.”
Popoff found and chatted with Wiwcharuk’s three roommates, who were “flabbergasted by her disappearance, because she was such a reliable and good woman.”
That encounter led him to believe there was something more to the disappearance than a youthful indiscretion. He took photographer Wilf Weber to her parents’ acreage south of town. They were mournful, he says — and they had no idea why this awful thing was happening.
“It’s becoming more and more mysterious, while the police are saying ‘just another missing person,’ ” he recalls.
On the night of May 31, the paper got tipped that a body had been found. Popoff went with fellow reporter Allan Sackman and photographer Munroe Murray to the thicket where remains had been discovered. Murray took a picture of police looking down into the makeshift grave.
Popoff asked Sackman to crouch beside the depression and point to where the body had been, and Murray snapped another one.
The family had not yet been informed.
After scouting around, Popoff went to the police station.
“Chief Kettles was quite alarmed by this happening in his city,” Popoff says. “And then the detectives are coming to me, saying, ‘How do we get to her parents?’ I don’t know what I did, whether I drew a map or explained to them where they could find the parents, but they buzzed off to tell them what they found. She wasn’t identified as such, but it was obvious, because it was right near where she lived.”
Popoff’s byline appeared under an all-caps headline the next day: “CORPSE FOUND IN SHALLOW GRAVE IDENTIFIED AS MISSING NURSE; VICTIM OF VICIOUS ATTACK
His story began: The partially nude and decomposed body of a young woman found Thursday night buried in a shallow grave on the riverbank near the CPR bridge was identified this morning as that of Alexandra Wiwcharuk, 23, of 1223 7th Ave., north. Police Chief Jim Kettles said she was the victim of a “heinous” assault.
His was the first byline to appear over a Wiwcharuk murder story, but not the last. The mystery has attracted widespread interest both in print and over the airwaves during the ensuing decades. CBC’s Fifth Estate made two documentaries about this strange story — “Death of a Beauty Queen” in 2003, and “The Girl in Saskatoon” in 2008.
This past February, Dateline NBC featured the tale as part of a cold-case spotlight.
The man who wrote that first story says he figured even at the time that this would not resolve itself quickly. It seemed too tangled; too inscrutable. The killer had a 13-day getaway window, and whatever he did, wherever he went, he did it well.
Popoff also had no idea that he would sit in a Saskatoon restaurant, 62 years later, talking to another reporter about a crime that had not yet been solved.
He notes that the type of person who commits an act like the one inflicted on Wiwcharuk is likely to have a short end to his life — perhaps brutishly short. Those guys, he says, don’t usually lead long lives.
“I was not optimistic (at the time),” he says. “It was hopeless, and I still think it is — most likely. What are you going to do with this? Unless there’s an old, old prisoner who has been convicted and is serving a life sentence. They sometimes confess.”
So even that first reporter, who has watched this frustration continue unabated for more than half a century, thinks there could be a glimmer of hope out there — a small glimmer, tiny and remote, the kind that keeps Wiwcharuk’s family members probing and calling.
* * * * *
Over at Saskatoon Police Service headquarters, the many details of Alexandra Wiwcharuk’s murder rest in plastic and cardboard boxes atop three shelves, each four feet across, in a room marked “Storage.” That same room holds many other boxes from many other historic cases, allowing investigators to pore over the work of their predecessors.
Much has changed since 1962: Technology is vastly different, and there’s a Canada-wide standard for how files are collected, investigated, categorized, kept in order. Computers now hold what used to be stashed in random boxes.
Staff sergeant Corey Lenius says more than 50 suspects have been excluded through DNA, and their reports are in those boxes. They’ve taken more than 600 statements since 1962 — potential witnesses, suspects, family members, co-workers, friends.
One youth, who had been fishing near the train bridge the night Wiwcharuk died, was hypnotized by Dr. Lewis Brand and questioned about what he’d seen — an interview that yielded some useful information, but nothing that broke things open.
The tape of that hypnosis has gone missing, but an 11-page transcript sits in one of Wiwcharuk’s boxes.
Cold-case officers come and go, Lenius says, and it takes a long time to get fully acquainted with a case this complex.
“When there’s a fresh murder, there’s adrenaline, there’s immediate interest, and everyone’s involved,” Lenius says. “We’re spending hours and hours and days and days in the building, focusing on that homicide that has just occurred. It’s fresh in everyone’s mind, and everyone’s determined to solve it and bring justice to the family and to the victim.
“When you have a historical, that’s a slower pace. You’re coming into it; you’re now just reading the file. You’re reading officers’ notes from the past. You’re reading dated statements. So it has a different feel to it. It’s a slow roll into those historical (cases), whereas a fresh homicide is immediate. It’s in your mind, and it’s go time.”
Lenius notes that police have solved two historic murders in the last few years, so it happens. It’s why those boxes are still important. Still worth the shelf space, even though this is now the oldest such case in the room.
“We don’t give up on these files,” he said. “There’s still family members that are hurting and grieving, and we want to bring justice for them. We’re kind of the last voice for the victim, and so we keep them in our minds, and we keep working on these files until we do have a conclusion.
“It is disheartening when the evidence goes cold and the witnesses are passing away or don’t have the memory they used to. And that makes things tough, and that’s when we again start to rely on DNA. Hopefully the breakthroughs and advancements in science will help us solve these.”
* * * * *
And so here’s where we’re at in January of 2025: Alexandra Wiwcharuk is still officially dead, and her killer is still officially unknown, and certain people in her circle have not given up the fight.
The nieces have brought younger family members into their investigative circle, injecting a dash of youthfulness into an old story.
When media outlets come calling, they talk. Every story since 1962 has had the same theme, that of a killer uncaught, and a circle that needs to be completed.
Family members hope somebody reading this story, or a report from the past, might find an old memory, something they saw or heard, the key to the case.
“If anybody out there remembers their aunt or their uncle or their grandparents speaking about this, or even any odd things that were happening, reach out,” Gratrix pleads. “I remember things my grandmother did. I remember certain things that were said, or how somebody down my block was out of sorts from something that happened. That’s how we got most of our information.
“If anybody can recall anything, some of the stories, please — contact the police. This is not ever going to go away with us girls. So if it’s helpful, before everybody’s gone … information could still be very important.
“We appreciate and we thank everybody for helping us along the way. We still are not fully saying goodbye. Put that in (the story). We’re just not fully ready to say goodbye to this. It’s still on the back of our minds, and always will be. I don’t know what else to say, but we’re just very grateful for everybody that’s helped us.”
So they poke around, ask questions, keep in touch with police, and wait.
“If he murdered a young 23-year-old girl, he needs to pay for it one way or another,” Storie says. “Jail time isn’t going to do anything. I get it — I’m not that cruel — but his name needs to be out there. This man killed somebody. If he did something so terrible, but went on to lead a very good life and had family … no. His family needs to know that your dad did this. Your husband did this. Your uncle did this.
“It’s not fair for him to have a clean slate, going onto Heaven or Hell, wherever he’s going. That’s not fair. She was exposed every which way. And he should be exposed. Should he go to maximum security? Absolutely not. I think once he found out he was exposed he’d probably die anyway, and I wouldn’t care — God forgive me for saying that.
“It’s made us angry, the entire family. Why isn’t this solved? Come on, people. Come on, police.”
The killer is somewhere — dead or alive, lying under a tombstone or filling up an urn, walking down the street or reading this final paragraph. He’s the answer to a question that’s turned cold, and a question that’s never changed in the 62 years people have been asking it:
Who is Alexandra Wiwcharuk’s murderer? Where is he?