Sharon Butala: The Girl in Saskatoon

[bibliogramma]

The Girl in Saskatoon, Sharon Butala's examination of the life and death of murder victim Alexandra Wiwcharuk, was of interest to me not just because of my fascination with certain elements of crime, violence and the human psyche, but because I, like the author, remember the girl from Saskatoon. Unlike the author, I never met her, but I lived in Saskatoon, a girl of seven years or so, in the aftermath of her death, and even as a child, I knew there was something about this death, mostly talked about in whispers around me, that was important, and unsettling. I had only just moved to Saskatoon, so I have not even a child's reminiscences of what life had been like before Alexandra Wiwcharuk was found dead by the river, but to this day, when there's a reference to her in lists of famous unsolved Canadian murders, or whatever, my breath still catches a bit and I feel something tense up inside. And sometimes I do wonder if it is my vague memories of this death that set me on the path to wondering about other such deaths and the people who deal in them - both the killers and the crime-solvers.

Butala as well talks, in her introduction, about the effect of Alexandra Wiwcharuk's death on her and on the people of Saskatoon - and of the effect that researching that death had on her understanding of why this death is so memorable to those even lightly touched by it.

Forty-four years [after Wiwcharuk's death], at a social gathering in the same city, a well-known writer who had moved to Saskatoon only two years after Alex’s death said to me, “Do you know that Saskatoon people have never forgotten that murder. They all remember it, and they still talk about it.” I did know that, but the way he said it struck a chord deep inside me, plangent, heart-stopping, and catching me by surprise, as if this were news that I was hearing for the first time. His remark had been unprompted, and it was made with such conviction, expressing, at the same time, his surprise; his voice was even tinged with something that might have been awe. I knew that sound well, that mix of surprise, dismay, chagrin, bafflement, and wonder, but in the long years—a good ten by then—of my quest to understand Alex’s murder and the city’s continuing memory of it, and in my dogged gathering of myriad details, I had nearly forgotten. But he is right: it is extraordinary that her death is still remembered.

....When I began to wonder, as a writer, what her true story was, I meant by that only what exactly had happened the night she was killed, who the suspects were, and why no one was ever caught. I thought, if I thought at all, that if I knew those things, it would be enough. But as the years passed and I began to find answers to those questions, the more answers I found, the more inadequate they seemed; the more I discovered, the less I felt I knew. At last I began to see that, interesting as those answers might sometimes be, they failed to satisfy me because they were the answers to the wrong questions.

After some ten years of thinking, talking to people, asking questions, and reading old newspaper reports and whatever documents I could lay my hands on, I had finally come to see that the question that had to be the trenchant one, the real one, almost the only one, encompassing as it does all the other questions from Who did it? to What really happened that night? and Which of the many rumours about that night, about her killer or killers, are true? to How could such evil happen in our decent, small city? was this: Why this constancy of memory? And further: What purpose is served by it? In a world where horrific deaths on a vast scale — three thousand in a moment in New York City, thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq — in a world of suicide bombers, whose purpose, whose need, is it that we should never forget one pretty young woman’s death in Saskatoon? In the end, I began to see that the real question was less about the specifics of her murder and of the investigation, and more about why I needed so badly to know, why no factual answers satisfied me, why I, too, could not forget.

In looking for answers to those questions, Butala looks at the influences surrounding both Wiwcharuk's early life and her own - and those of many people living in and around Saskatoon at the time. The immigrant experience and Ukrainian heritage in Wiwcharuk's family. Growing up in a rural area, barely one step removed from pioneer conditions - if that. A childhood lived against the background of the Second World War. The experience of Otherness, of being at the bottom of the social ladder, shared by the Ukranian Wiwcharuk and the half-French, Roman Catholic Sharon LeBlanc. The veneration of the Virgin Mary common to both Orthodox and Catholic traditions. Butala also evokes the innocence of the times in which Wiwcharuk lived and died.

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.

Another important element of the times, and the responses to Wiwcharuk's death, was the emphasis on the purity and innocence of unmarried women and the silence on matters of sex and conception. It was a time when "Girls were kept children, their sexuality under the tightest of control, for as long as parents and the rest of society could possibly manage." To go beyond the strict limits placed on a young woman's sexuality was to risk loss of reputation, and the social death of becoming an unwed mother. And yet, because no such limits were enforced upon young men, staying "respectable" was an ongoing struggle.

In the fifties sexual choices were limited: don’t have intercourse or any kind of sexual relations; have intercourse but practise coitus interruptus; or settle for long, sweaty, frustrating, back-seat “petting” sessions. Most of us, in fifties Saskatoon, stuck to the latter. And that meant that some of us were raped. We call it “date rape” now, but in the fifties it didn’t have a name, and it was commonplace—not perhaps, actual rape, although it is likely that there were many more rapes than were ever reported—but certainly it was the rare one of us who had never been on a date where we had to fight physically to keep our virginity. Getting thrown out of a boy’s car, having to walk home, or going home bruised and crying, but with virginity intact—these things happened a lot.

In such an environment - one where murder was virtually unknown, where all the sexuality and crime and corruption was kept hidden, driven underneath social conventions and sequestered in the parts of town where no one decent would be seen, or admit to it, anyway - it was hardly a surprise that some would respond to Wiwcharuk's death by blaming the victim. Rumours circulated that she wasn't the innocent she appeared to be.

There hadn’t been a murder in Saskatoon through our entire childhoods, and it is no wonder that we felt safe, and no wonder that when pretty, smart, decent Alex met her brutal death, the city was stunned, shocked, and beyond horrified. Finding no handy culprit, it turned to Alex as the cause of her own death—she had to have been responsible, because otherwise there would be a lot more deaths in the city, and of pretty young women. And that turned into the rumours of promiscuity, of involvement in drug crime, of “pregnancy without benefit of husband,” of affairs with married men, and of whatever other disreputable behaviour might lead to somebody wanting to kill you. In the minds of many people, unable to believe that a murderer was loose in our city, it had to have been her fault. I suppose it could even be said that if she had brought her murder on herself by her bad behaviour, then it could not be our fault—“our” being the citizens of our city.

In Butala's narrative, Wiwcharuk becomes more than just a young Ukrainian girl, she becomes a symbol of all the constrictions and contradictions that young women of her time, place and background faced, that Butala herself faced, the fetish of innocence and the frustrations of youth and intelligence subordinated to the socially constructed role of femininity. In her last clear memory of Wiwcharuk from their years at the same high school - a technical school intended for the children of the working class, and not for those expected to go on to university - Butala projects all the emotions that would, a few years later, fuel the Women's Liberation Movement.

I sensed that she, too, felt the constriction of our lives: You must get an education, and Nice girls don’t do that, and Do as you’re told, when we had naturally such an abundance, a veritable torrent of life-desiring energy raging through us, at sixteen, at seventeen, at eighteen. We were kept children far too long in those days, girls especially. I think that was the source of our boredom, that and a simmering but buried rage at the absurdity of our position, which we did not recognize intellectually, so well-governed were we, but which dragged at us well below the surface calm of our lives. We yearned for what we thought was freedom, although instead of true freedom, we yearned for love, for a husband, for our very own family, because that was all most of us knew; it was what our culture taught us.

Wiwcharuk is always referred to, in media reports on the murder, as both nurse and "beauty queen." Wiwcharuk had attended nursing school in Yorkton after graduating from high school. In 1961, she moved to Saskatoon and began work at Saskatoon City Hospital. While living in Yorkton, she had won two local beauty contests; her beauty queen career culminated in being chosen the winner of a radio-sponsored contest promoting an appearance in Saskatoon by the singer Johnny Cash - a concert during which he gave Wiwcharuk roses and sang to her the song "The Girl in Saskatoon."

In her book, Butala explores both the realities and the social meanings of both images. In the 1950s, nurses were starched and virginal, handmaidens to the doctor-priests, an image of purity dealing with the corruption of the body, with disease and wounds and bodily fluids and death. Beauty queens of the tine, too, were images of purity, but also of desire, albeit the respectful, honourable desire a man should feel toward the blushing maiden on the threshold of marriage and motherhood.

It seems to me that the very omnipresence of beauty queens and beauty competitions was a response to the prevailing cultural notions about women and their place in society. At some level, I think that this was a genuine effort to show proper reverence for the best in womanhood, an honouring of the idea of female purity, and a natural outgrowth of an age that, the rest of the time, did not much cherish the humanity and individuality of women. But the subtext was always pointing to the perfect “Moms” of television with their hair so well coiffed it looked shellacked, the chaste perfection of their attire, their unflappable calm, their wise love for their husbands and children, and especially, their complete willingness to sacrifice their own lives for them. Implicit in the “Miss Perfect Womanhood” of beauty competitions was the expectation of the marriage and children that would follow...

For Wiwcharuk, there would be nothing to follow. The young nurse in her first job, the pretty girl who was presented to a music legend as "the girl from Saskatoon," was assaulted and killed on the banks of the Saskatchewan River sometime on the evening of Friday May 18, 1962. Her partially buried body was discovered on the night of May 31. Butala relates the known events of Wiwcharuk's last hours and the crime itself with journalistic dispassion.

However, her discussion of the investigation that followed when Wiwcharuk's death finally became known, and the way the police have handled the case throughout the years is raises questions about the long silence of the police who worked the case on many issues related to Wiwcharuk's death and on the lack of information made available to the public. Gaps and discrepancies resulted in rumours early on, which still circulate today, about police cover-ups.

In the end, the book seems to stop without really finishing, a conscious act because, as Butala finally acknowledges:

I had wanted only to tell Alex’s story, her whole story, accurately, once and for all. Now I saw, too, that that was, and had always been, a hopeless task. The story had grown, year after year, it had rippled out farther and farther from Saskatoon, engaging more and more people, even into the next generation of women... until the beginning and the end and the various middles were hopelessly confused, hopelessly complex, hopelessly compromised. If I felt desperate now, it was because, among other things, I saw at last that there truly is no straight line through this story, a neat beginning, a comprehensible middle, a tidy, satisfying end. I saw that the story was not even the one I had thought it was, not the one I had been trying so hard for so long to tell. The story was, instead, about story.

Somebody, a man, battered, raped, and murdered a beautiful young woman and buried her alive in a shallow grave on the riverbank in Saskatoon, in 1962. Catch the murderer or never catch him, this story of evil keeps on touching people, devastating them. I see now that this story, simply, has no end.