The Murder

It is a crime that has haunted a city for almost 50 years.

On a warm, Spring evening in Saskatoon in 1962, Alexandra Wiwcharuk went for a walk along the bank of the South Saskatchewan River and then disappeared. Two weeks later, her body was found in a shallow grave. Exactly what happened to Alex Wiwcharuk that night is still not completely known and her killer remains unidentified and unpunished.
The crime was so brutal, so shocking that, to this day, local people can still recall where they were when they heard the news. Alex Wiwcharuk’s large, close-knit family was shattered.

The Wiwcharuk family had put their hopes and dreams into Alex’s future. In 1961 Alex, the only member of her family to be educated beyond high school, graduated from nursing school and began work at the City Hospital in Saskatoon. She was a pretty and vivacious young woman who that year was chosen “The Girl In Saskatoon” in a contest sponsored by a local radio station to promote a concert by country singer Johnny Cash. At the concert, Cash sang his song, “The Girl In Saskatoon” to Alex in front of an arena filled with fans.

The police investigation into Alex’s murder dragged on and eventually the case went cold. But, it stayed alive in the minds of the young woman’s friends and family. Sharon Butala, now one of Canada’s best-known writers, attended high school with Alex Wiwcharuk and continued to be haunted by her death. In 2003, she contacted the fifth estate and told Linden MacIntyre about Alex’s death and the lingering mystery of her murder. The result of that conversation was a fifth estate documentary, “Death of a Beauty Queen.” The murder case had also stayed alive in the minds of the Saskatoon police and “Death of a Beauty Queen” traced their attempts, at the time of the crime and more recently, to find Alex’s killer.

Now, in a new documentary, “The Girl In Saskatoon,” MacIntyre and a fifth estate team return to the city and the story, this time, to meet four women for whom Alex’s murder is intensely personal. Patty Storie, Lorain Phillips, Lynn Gratrix and Gwen Taralson. are all nieces of Alex Wiwcharuk. They were young girls at the time of their aunt’s death, but made a pledge to each other at that time that they would find, as one of them says, “Justice for Alex.”

Call it a quest, call it an obsession; these women want not only justice for their aunt, but also to close the book on a decades-old cold case and perhaps, finally, bring peace to a family and a community.