| Welcome to Porchlight International for the Missing & Unidentified. We hope you enjoy your visit. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| SKF060700; Saskatoon, Sask (Sutherland) 07-2006 | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Aug 25 2008, 11:09 PM (324 Views) | |
| monkalup | Aug 25 2008, 11:09 PM Post #1 |
|
The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
|
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/stor...70324?hub=WFive The Oldest Cold Case Updated Sat. Mar. 24 2007 6:49 PM ET Hannah James, W-FIVE Associate Producer On a cold prairie night a woman is murdered, stuffed in a wooden barrel and thrown down a well. When she's discovered almost a century later, Saskatoon police set out to solve an old crime with new technology. Last July, Cal Schroyen of JBA Petroleum was on a work site excavating some old fuel tanks under a convenience store parking lot in the Sutherland area of Saskatoon. Suddenly a black object rolled out. "It seemed a little unusual so we picked it up and had a look at it and it turned out to be a human skull," recalls Schroyen. From there, Saskatoon police take over, with Sgt. Russ Friesen at the helm, pulling out the yellow tape, closing the excavation site, and declaring it a crime scene. "I'm a homicide investigator. I have to view that as a potential homicide until I can prove otherwise," says Friesen. After three days of meticulous digging, investigators pull out the complete remains of a woman and other important clues. There are pieces of a barrel, broken bottles and fragments of women's clothing -- artifacts from a bygone era. A man's clothing -- an old-style vest and trousers -- are rolled in a ball next to the corpse. Ernest Walker, forensic archeologist at the University of Saskatchewan and special constable with the RCMP sets to work analysing the remains. Miraculously, the woman's body is well-preserved. The gasoline and water mixture found in the well reacted with the woman's fatty tissues creating a waxy substance -- or adipocere -- encasing her body. Walker finds hair, parts of her intestines and faecal matter. Remarkably Walker also extracted mitochondrial DNA, which investigators hope to match to a living descendent of the woman. And from all that evidence Walker determines the remains are that of a healthy Caucasian woman, 25 to 35 years of age and a metre-and-a-half tall. The dating of the crime comes mostly from available clothing fragments. Working next to Walker in a makeshift City morgue, Carole Wakabayashi, a clothing and textile historian sets to work determining the fabric and style of clothing. She uses a number of burning and chemical techniques to determine the clothing's fiber content. She determines the women's fitted jacket, high collared blouse and long skirt are from somewhere between 1910 and 1920. There's also the issue of an 18 karat gold chain, broken and missing its pendant. Gold of this quality would have been a rarity in the Prairies a century ago, and likely came from Europe or Eastern Canada. As the clothing analysis reveals probable dating for the murder, Jeff O'Brien, archivist, pores over City records and creates geographical context for the abandoned well. O'Brien's records reveal Sutherland a town that sprouted up in the early 1900s around the Canadian Pacific Railway yards. The tiny town was a hub of transient types - railway workers and sales people. O'Brien determines the well was located right next to the Sutherland Hotel. Joan Champ, a prairie history buff and curator at the Saskatoon's Western Development Museum says hotels of that time would have been hubs where railway workers would have come to drink and gamble, many of them away from home and their wives. Once Saskatoon police develop a victim profile, they hold a press conference at the Western Development Museum in Saskatoon. Local media cover the story and the phone call comes in from people looking for missing relatives -- a missing mother, a missing grandmother, or a missing great aunt. The calls are from across Canada and as far away as France. The callers are families looking for closure and wanting to put an end to quiet family rumours about where their missing relative had gone. Friesen gathers mitochondrial DNA samples from women, hoping to make a match with the remains in the well. One hopeful and genealogy buff, Peggy Franko, is hoping the woman is her long-lost grandmother. She says if her DNA matches that of the woman, she vows to give her grandmother a proper burial, next to her mother. W-FIVE reporter Victor Malarek follows the investigation, showing how modern tools can be used to solve old crimes. Based on stories from historians and some of the DNA candidates, W-FIVE illustrates though historic recreations the possible scenarios behind this heinous crime, giving a sense of who the 'lady in the well' could have been and how she met her end. Friesen comments on the likelihood of each scenario. Was she a local prostitute in this rough and tumble railroad town? Or, was she an employee at the neighbouring hotel, killed by a man at the hotel? Was the crime a domestic one, an immigrant wife wanting to escape the bleak prairie life? Or perhaps a botched operation performed by the Sutherland's local and infamous abortionist? Saskatoon police eagerly await a facial reconstruction, created by one of the RCMP's recreation artists. They're hoping that when the woman's face is revealed, someone will recognize her from an old family photo or a childhood memory. "We're going to work it, take it down every road that we can and just work it until we can't do anything more on it," said Friesen. I'm positive that we are going to be able to solve this case."
|
|
Lauran "If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only. | |
![]() |
|
| monkalup | Aug 25 2008, 11:11 PM Post #2 |
|
The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
|
DNA derails lead in mystery body case Janet French, The StarPhoenix Published: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 Saskatoon police and at least two families are disappointed to discover DNA tests show they haven't yet identified the woman left in a Sutherland well about 90 years ago. Dumped down a well injured, or dead, a combination of water and gasoline preserved the woman's body enough to allow researchers to recover some of her hair. DNA from that hair was compared to the DNA of three people who believed they could be related to the woman. Saskatoon police said Tuesday all three tests came back negative for any match. Regina resident Jo Ann Manton suspected the woman could have been her great-grandmother, Harriet (Dyson) Calvert. Police tested the DNA of her aunt, Peggy Franko, who lives in Calgary, Manton said, but there was no match. Manton said she felt relieved when she heard the news last Thursday. "The assumption is that the woman in the well was murdered," she said. "And, it was family violence. It was 100 years ago, so you put two and two together and you think, OK, her husband murdered her. So, it was a relief to us, really, that it wasn't her." Saskatoon police embarked on the decades-old murder mystery last June when an excavation crew digging up old gas tanks in front of a convenience store on 108th Street and Central Avenue made an unexpected discovery -- a blackened skull in an old wooden well. The site was cordoned off, and police and forensic experts spent three days digging out clues. Clothes she was wearing and bottle fragments found in the same well indicate the woman was likely put down there between 1920 and 1924. Her jewelry and clothes indicate she was middle class, or wealthier, police have previously revealed. With the help of University of Saskatchewan forensic archeologist Ernie Walker, police also say the remains are of a healthy Caucasian woman who was 5-foot-1 and 25 to 35 years old when she died. May Saunders, a senior from Surrey, B.C., had also wondered if the unidentified woman might be her grandmother. In the early 1900s, her grandmother was taking the train from Ontario to Saskatoon on her way back from selling her farm in Eastern Canada, Saunders said. After she got off the train in Saskatoon, she vanished. "I'm totally convinced that she was murdered," Saunders said. Police took a DNA sample from Saunders' daughter, but there was no match. "I would truly have liked if it had been her, because then she would have a proper burial," Saunders said. Police spokesperson Alyson Edwards said she isn't sure where the third person tested for a genetic connection to the well victim lives. All three candidate families were Canadian, she said. Police had received more than a dozen tips from people suspecting they may be related to the woman in the well. Interviews with some of those people allowed police to rule many of them out, because their details didn't match evidence obtained from the well. Police chose the three most likely candidates for genetic tests, she said. "It's disappointing for everyone," Edwards said of the negative results. "It's disappointing for the families, (and) it's disappointing for our investigators, because they're hearing a story and thinking, 'Gee, that matches up with what might have happened here. This is a really good candidate. I'm hopeful about this.' " http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix...55-0d589c281eea
|
|
Lauran "If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only. | |
![]() |
|
| monkalup | Aug 25 2008, 11:11 PM Post #3 |
|
The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
|
http://z13.invisionfree.com/PorchlightCana...topic=1804&st=0 |
|
Lauran "If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only. | |
![]() |
|
![]() Join the millions that use us for their forum communities. Create your own forum today. Learn More · Register Now |
|
| « Previous Topic · Unidentified Females 2006 · Next Topic » |





![]](http://z6.ifrm.com/static/1/pip_r.png)




2:27 PM Jul 11